Gateway

  Louise Forehand stopped in while we were talking about them. “Heard your voices,” she said, craning over to kiss me. “Too bad about your trip.”

  “Breaks of the game.”

  “Well, welcome home, anyway. I didn’t do any better than you, I’m afraid. Dumb little star, no planets that we could find, can’t think why in the world the Heechee had a course setting for it.” She smiled, and stroked the muscles at the back of my neck fondly. “Can I give you a welcome-home party tonight? Or are you and Klara-?”

  “I’d love it if you did,” I said, and she didn’t pursue the question of Klara. No doubt the rumor had already got around; the Gateway tom-toms beat day and night. She left after a few minutes. “Nice lady,” I said to Shicky, looking after her. “Nice family. Was she looking a little worried?”

  “I fear so, Robinette, yes. Her daughter Lois is on plus time. They have had much sorrow in that family.”

  I looked at him. He said, “No, not Willa or the father; they are out, but not overdue. There was a son.”

  “I know. Henry, I think. They called him Hat.”

  “He died just before they came here. And now Lois.” He inclined his head, then flapped politely over and picked up the empty tea flask on a downstroke of his wing. “I must go to work now, Rob.”

  “How’s the ivy planting?”

  He said ruefully, “I no longer have that position, I’m afraid. Emma did not consider me executive material.”

  “Oh? What are you doing?”

  “I keep Gateway esthetically attractive,” he said. “I think you would call it ’garbage collector.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Gateway was kind of a trashy place; because of the low gravity, any scrap of paper or bit of featherweight plastic that was thrown away was likely to float anywhere inside the asteroid. You couldn’t sweep the floor. The first stroke set everything flying. I had seen the garbage men chasing scraps of newsprint and fluffs of cigarette ash with little hand-pumped vacuum cleaners, and I had even thought about becoming one if I had to. But I didn’t like Shicky doing it.

  He was following what I was thinking about him without difficulty. “It’s all right, Rob. Really, I enjoy the work. But- please; if you do need a crewman, think of me.”

  I took my bonus and paid up my per capita for three weeks in advance. I bought a few items I needed — new clothes, and some music tapes to get the sound of Mozart and Palestrina out of my ears. That left me about two hundred dollars in money.

  Two hundred dollars was a lot like nothing at all. It meant twenty drinks at the Blue Hell, or one chip at the blackjack table, or maybe half a dozen decent meals outside the prospectors’ commissary.

  So I had three choices. I could get another job and stall indefinitely. Or I could ship out within the three weeks. Or I could give up and go home. None of the choices was attractive. But, provided I didn’t spend any money on anything much, I didn’t have to decide for, oh, a long time — as long as twenty days. I resolved to give up smoking and boughten meals; that way I could budget myself to a maximum spending of nine dollars a day, so that my per capita and my cash would run out at the same time.

  I called Klara. She looked and sounded guarded but friendly on the P-phone, so I spoke guardedly and amiably to her. I didn’t mention the party, and she didn’t mention wanting to see me that night, so we left it at that: nowhere. That was all right with me. I didn’t need Klara. At the party that night I met a new girl around called Doreen MacKenzie. She wasn’t a girl, really; she was at least a dozen years older than I was, and she had been out five times. What was exciting about her was that she had really hit it once. She’d taken one and a half mil back to Atlanta, spent the whole wad trying to buy herself a career as a PV singer — material writer, manager, publicity team, advertising, demo tapes, the works — and when it hadn’t worked she had come back to Gateway to try again. The other thing was she was very, very pretty.

  But after two days of getting to know Doreen I was back on the P-phone to Klara. She said, “Come on down,” and she sounded anxious; and I was there in ten minutes, and we were in bed in fifteen. The trouble with getting to know Doreen was that I had got to know her. She was nice, and a hell of a racing pilot, but she wasn’t Klara Moynlin.

  When we were lying in the hammock together, sweaty and relaxed and spent, Klara yawned, ruffled my hair, pulled back her head and stared at me. “Oh, shit,” she said drowsily, “I think this is what they call being in love.”

  I was gallant. “It’s what makes the world go around. No, not ’it.’ You are.”

  She shook her head regretfully. “Sometimes I can’t stand you,” she said. “Sagittarians never make it with Geminis. I’m a fire sign and you- well, Geminis can’t help being confused.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep going on about that crap,” I said.

  She didn’t take offense. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  I slid over the edge of the hammock and stood up, needing to talk without touching for a moment. “Dear Klara,” I said, “look, I can’t let you keep me because you’ll be bitchy about it, sooner or later — or if you aren’t, I’ll be expecting you to, and so I’ll be bitchy to you. And I just don’t have the money. You want to eat outside the commissary, you do it by yourself. And I won’t take your cigarettes, your liquor, or your chips at the casino. So if you want to get something to eat go ahead, and I’ll meet you later. Maybe we could go for a walk.”

  She sighed. “Geminis never know how to handle money,” she told me, “but they can be awfully nice in bed.”

  We put our clothes on and went out and got something to eat, all right, but in the Corporation commissary, where you stand in line, carry a tray, and eat standing up. The food isn’t bad, if you don’t think too much about what substrates they grow it on. The price is right. It doesn’t cost anything. They promise that if you eat all your meals in the commissary you will have one hundred plus percent of all the established dietary needs. You will, too, only you have to eat all of everything to be sure of that. Single-cell protein and vegetable protein come out incomplete when considered independently, so it’s not enough to eat the soybean jelly or the bacterial pudding alone. You have to eat them both.

  The other thing about Corporation meals is that they produce a hell of a lot of methane, which produces a hell of a lot of what all ex-Gateway types remember as the Gateway fug.

  We drifted down toward the lower levels afterward, not talking much. I suppose we were both wondering where we were going. I don’t mean just at that moment. “Feel like exploring?” Klara asked.

  I took her hand as we strolled along, considering. That sort of thing was fun. Some of the old ivy-choked tunnels that no one used were interesting, and beyond them were the bare, dusty places that no one had troubled even to plant ivy in. Usually there was plenty of light from the ancient walls themselves, still glowing with that bluish Heechee-metal sheen. Sometimes — not lately, but no more than six or seven years ago — people had actually found Heechee artifacts in them, and you never knew when you might stumble on something worth a bonus.

  The Gateway Anglican

  The Rev. Theo Durleigh, Chaplain

  Parish Communion 10:30 Sundays

  Evensong by Arrangement

  Eric Manley, who ceased to be my warden on 1 December, has left an indelible mark on Gateway All Saints’ and we owe him an incalculable debt for placing his multicompetence at our disposal. Born in Elatree, Herts., 51 years ago,he graduated as an LL.B. from the University of London and then read for the bar. Subsequently he was employed for some years in Perth at the natural gas works. If we are saddened for ourselves that he is leaving us, it is tempered with joy that he has now achieved his heart’s desire and will return to his beloved Hertfordshire, where he expects to devote his retirement years to civic affairs, transcendental meditation, and the study of plainsong. A new warden will be elected the first Sunday we attain a quorum of nine parishioners.

  But I couldn’t keep up w
ith her pace, and after a few moments she asked if I wanted to go back. Nothing is fun when you don’t have a choice. “Why not?” I said, but a few minutes later, when I saw where we were, I said, “Let’s go to the museum for a while.”

  “Oh, right,” she said, suddenly interested. “Did you know they’ve fixed up the surround room? Metchnikov was telling me about it. They opened it while we were out.”

  So we changed course, dropped two levels and came out next to the museum. The surround room was a nearly spherical chamber just beyond it. It was big, ten meters or more across, and in order to use it we had to strap on wings like Shicky’s, hanging on a rack outside the entrance. Neither Klara nor I had ever used them before, but it wasn’t hard. On Gateway you weigh so little to begin with that flying would be the easiest and best way to get around, if there were any places inside the asteroid big enough to fly in.

  So we dropped through the hatch into the sphere, and were in the middle of a whole universe. The chamber was walled with hexagonal panels, each one of them projected from some source we could not see, probably digital with liquid-crystal screens.

  “How pretty!” Klara cried.

  All around us there was a sort of globarama of what the scouting ships had found. Stars, nebulae, planets, satellites. Sometimes each plate showed its own independent thing so that there were, what was it, something like a hundred and twenty-eight separate scenes. Then, flick, all of them changed; flick again, and they began to cycle, some of them holding their same scene, some of them changing to something new. Flick again, and one whole hemisphere lit up with a mosaic view of the M-31 galaxy as seen from God-knew-where.

  “Hey,” I said, really excited, “this is great!” And it was. It was like being on all the trips any prospector had ever taken, without the drudgery and the trouble and the constant fear.

  There was no one there but us, and I couldn’t understand why. It was so pretty. You would think there would be a long line of people waiting to get in. One side began to run through a series of pictures of Heechee artifacts, as discovered by prospectors: prayer fans of all colors, wall-lining machines, the insides of Heechee ships, some tunnels-Klara cried out that they were places she had been, back home on Venus, but I don’t know how she could tell. Then the pattern went back to photographs from space. Some of them wcre familiar. I could recognize the Pleadies in one quick six- or eight-panel shot, which vanished and was replaced by a view of Gateway Two from outside, two of the bright young stars of the cluster shining in reflection off its sides. I saw something that might have been the Horsehead Nebula, and a doughnutshaped puff of gas and dust that was either the Ring Nebula in Lyra or what an exploring team had found a few orbits before and called the French Cruller, in the skies of a planet where Heechee digs had been detected, but not reached, under a frozen sea.

  We hung there for half an hour or so, until it began to look as though we were seeing the same things again, and then we fluttered up to the hatch, hung up the wings, and sat down for a cigarette break in a wide place in the tunnel outside the museum.

  Two women I recognized vaguely as Corporation maintenance crews came by, carrying rolled-up strap-on wings. “Hi, Klara,” one of them greeted her. “Been inside?”

  Klara nodded. “It was beautiful,” she said.

  “Enjoy it while you can,” said the other one. “Next week it’ll cost you a hundred dollars. We’re putting in a P-phone taped lecture system tomorrow, and they’ll have the grand opening before the next tourists show up.”

  “It’s worth it,” Klara said, but then she looked at me.

  I became aware that, in spite of everything, I was smoking one of her cigarettes. At five dollars a pack I couldn’t afford very much of that, but I made up my mind to buy at least one pack out of that day’s allowance, and to make sure she took as many from me as I took from her.

  “Want to walk some more?” she asked.

  “Maybe a little later,” I said. I was wondering how many men and women had died to take the pretty pictures we had been watching, because I was facing one more time the fact that sooner or later I would have to submit myself again to the lethal lottery of the Heechee ships, or give up. I wondered if the new information Metchnikov had given me was going to make a real difference. Everyone was talking about it now; the Corporation had scheduled an all-phone announcement for the next day.

  “That reminds me,” I said. “Did you say you’d seen Metchnikov?”

  “I wondered when you’d ask me about that,” she said. “Sure. He called and told me he’d shown the color-coding stuff to you. So?”

  I stubbed out the cigarette. “I think everybody in Gateway’s going to be fighting for the good launches, that’s what I think.”

  “But maybe Dane knows something. He’s been working with the Corporation.”

  “I don’t doubt he does.” I stretched and leaned back, rocking against the low gravity, considering. “He’s not that nice a guy, Klara. Maybe he’d tell us if there’s something good coming up, you know, that he knows something special about. But he’ll want something for it.”

  Klara grinned. “He’d tell me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, he calls me once in a while. Wants a date.”

  “Oh, shit, Klara.” I was feeling pretty irritated by then. Not just at Klara, and not just about Dane. About money. About the fact that if I wanted to go back into the surround room next week it would cost me half my credit balance. About the dark, shadowed image looming up ahead in time, and not very far ahead, when I would once again have to make up my mind to do what I was scared silly to do again. “I wouldn’t trust that son of a bitch as far as—”

  “Oh, relax, Rob. He’s not such a bad guy,” she said, lighting another cigarette and leaving the pack where I could reach it if I wanted it. “Sexually, he might be kind of interesting. That raw, rough, rude Taurean thing — anyway, you’ve got as much to offer him as I do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She looked honestly surprised. “I thought you knew he swings both ways.”

  “He’s never given me any indication—” But I stopped, remembering how close he liked to get when he was talking to me, and how uncomfortable I was with him inside my bodyspace.

  “Maybe you’re not his type,” she grinned. Only it wasn’t a kindly grin. A couple of Chinese crewmen, coming out of the museum, looked at us with interest, and then politely looked away.

  “Let’s get out of here, Klara.”

  So we went to the Blue Hell, and of course I insisted on paying my share of the drinks. Forty-eight dollars down the tube in one hour. And it wasn’t all that much fun. We wound up in her place and fell into bed, although the drinks had given me a headache that was still there when we finished. And the time was slipping by.

  There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it.

  Hacking around Gateway with Klara, I began to suspect that I was one of those people. I knew Klara was. She had never sustained a relationship with a man for more than a few months in her life; she told me so herself. Already I was pretty close to a record with her. And already it was making her edgy.

  In some ways Klara was a lot more adult and responsible than I ever would be. The way she got to Gateway in the first place, for instance. She didn’t win a lottery to pay her fare. She earned it and saved it, painfully, over a period of years. She was a fully qualified airbody driver with a guide’s license and an engineering degree. She had lived like a fish-farmer while earning an income that would have entitled her to a three-room flat in the Heechee warrens on Venus, vacations on Earth, and Major Medical. She knew more than I did about the growing of food on hydrocarbon substrates, in spite of all my years in Wyoming. (She had invested in a food factory on Venus, and for all h
er life she had never put a dollar into anything she didn’t fully understand.) When we were out together, she was the senior member of the crew. It was she Metchnikov wanted as a shipmate — if he wanted anybody — not me. She had been my teacher!

  And yet between the two of us she was as inept and unforgiving as ever I had been with Sylvia, or with Deena, Janice, Liz, Ester, or any of the other two-week romances that had all ended badly in all the years after Sylvia. It was, she said, because she was Sagitarius and I was a Gemini. Sagittarians were prophets. Sagittarians loved freedom. Us poor Geminis were just terribly mixed up and indecisive. “It’s no wonder,” she told me gravely one morning, eating breakfast in her room (I accepted no more than a couple of sips of coffee), “that you can’t make your mind up to go out again. It isn’t just physical cowardice, dear Robinette. Part of your twin nature wants to triumph. Part wants to fail. I wonder which side you will allow to win?”

  I gave her an ambiguous answer. I said, “Honey, go screw yourself.” And she laughed, and we got through that day. She had scored her point.

  The Corporation made its expected announcement, and there was an immense flurry of conferring and planning and exchanging guesses and interpretations among all of us. It was an exciting time. Out of the master computer’s files the Corporation pulled twenty launches with low danger factors and high profit expectancies. They were subscribed, equipped, and launched within a week.

  And I wasn’t on any of them, and neither was Klara; and we tried not to discuss why.

  Surprisingly, Dane Metchnikov didn’t go out on any of them. He knew something, or said he did. Or didn’t say he didn’t when I asked him, just looked at me in that glowering, contemptuous way and didn’t answer. Even Shicky almost went out. He lost out in the last hour before launch to the Finnish boy who had never been able to find anyone to talk to; there were four Saudis who wanted to stay together, and settled for the Finnish kid to fill out a Five. Louise Forehand didn’t go out, either, because she was waiting for some member of her family to come back, so as to preserve some sort of continuity. You could eat in the Corporation commissary now without waiting in line, and there were empty rooms all up and down my tunnel. And one night Klara said to me, “Rob, I think I’m going to go to a shrink.”