The Gateway Trip

  They realized early that Ethel’s Place was a kind of astronomical observatory.

  What the observatory had been put there to observe was obvious at once. Ethel’s Place was in orbit at a distance of about a thousand AU (which is to say, about five light-days) from a rather spectacular pair of astronomical objects. Binary stars weren’t particularly interesting. This pair was unique. One of them was a fairly standard kind of star, though a rarish one—a hot, pulsating, supergiant specimen of the young and violent class called type F. That by itself would have been worth a little bonus money—if they had had any way of reporting it—but its companion was a lot stranger. The type-F star had a tilted ring of hot gas around it, suggesting that it was still in the process of reaching its final stage of starhood. The companion was all gas, and not very hot gas, at that—an immense, nearly transparent disk of the stuff.

  The more they looked at it, the stranger it got. Stars were supposed to be spheres. They weren’t supposed to be disks. The disk-shaped companion was hard to observe anyway, even with Heechee optics. Visually, it looked like nothing more than a faint scarlet stain on the sky. It was too cool to radiate much. The Heechee instruments couldn’t tell them its temperature, because the Heechee had not been thoughtful enough to provide conversion tables into Celsius or Kelvin or even Fahrenheit scales. Klock’s own best estimate was that it ran to maybe five hundred K—far cooler than the surface of Venus, for instance; cooler even than a log burning in a fireplace on Earth.

  The best time to see it, they discovered, was when it was eclipsing the type-F companion star. Because the orbit of Ethel’s Place was retrograde with respect to the disk, such eclipses happened more often than they would have if their artifact had somehow been stationary in the sky. They still did not happen very often. Ethel Klock had observed one eclipse alone, shortly after she landed. By the time of the next eclipse she had the Canadians and Horran to share the sight with, but that was more than twenty years later.

  The story of Ethel’s Place did finally have a happy ending for its captives—well, fairly happy. Ultimately human beings did learn how to make Heechee ships go where they wanted them to go. Shortly thereafter an exploring party in better command of its ship found the five castaways, and they were rescued at last.

  It was a little late. By then Ethel Klock was in her seventy-eighth year, and even Horran was nearly fifty. They didn’t even get their science bonuses, either. The Gateway Corporation had long since stopped issuing them, because the Gateway Corporation no longer existed.

  They would have been out of luck anyway, they found, because even if they’d gotten back early they would not have collected much in the way of financial rewards. That binary-star system was unfortunately not a new discovery. Indeed, it turned out to be a system that had been very familiar to astronomers on Earth, because of those very puzzling characteristics. The name of the star was Epsilon Aurigae, and its mysteries were no secret. They had been unlocked by human astronomers with conventional instruments when the binary’s cool orbiting disk had passed between Earth and its type-F primary in the eclipse of the year A.D. 2000.

  It was more than fifty years between the time the first Gateway prospector landed on one of those “collection traps” and the time the last of them was discovered. As many as eight separate missions might converge on one of them. When they did, they couldn’t return. Most had food factories, either built in or supplied with shipments of food by automatic spacecraft from an independent factory nearby, so the castaways didn’t starve, nor did they lack for water or air. A few did not have these amenities—not in working condition anymore, at least. In those cases all that was found were the abandoned Heechee ships and a few desiccated corpses.

  Heecheeologists grew to believe that these “collection traps” served some purpose—maybe several purposes, though they could not be really sure what any of them were. None were accessible to planet dwellers; there were no tunnels on inhabited planets, nor were there any treasures where they could be reached without the use of spacecraft.

  It seemed to be a sort of intelligence test posed by these vanished aliens. It was almost as though the Heechee, when they went to wherever they had gone, had deliberately left clues to themselves. But even the clues were hard to find. No intelligent race could find one until it had first mastered at least primitive interplanetary travel on its own.

  And the greatest prizes were even more thoroughly concealed.

  As a matter of record, it wasn’t exactly a Gateway prospector who made the first round-trip expedition to the Food Factory. Pat Bover’s was only one way. The expedition that made it possible for the Heechee carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen (or “CHON”) food to do something to help out hunger on Earth arrived there in an Earthly chemical rocket, spiraling out into the outer reaches of the solar system.

  And they did more than that, because it was through the Food Factory that the second big discovery came along. It was called Heechee Heaven. It was the largest Heechee-made artifact ever discovered, more than half a mile long, twice the size of an ocean liner. It was shaped like a spindle (a familiar Heechee design), and it was not uninhabited. It held the descendants of the breeding group of australopithecines the Heechee had captured on Earth’s surface, half a million years before; it held one living human, the son of a pair of prospectors who had reached Heechee Heaven in their Gateway ship—and been trapped there. And it contained the stored minds (poorly stored, but the machines that did the job had never been designed for human beings; humans had not yet evolved when those machines were built) of more than twenty Gateway prospectors who had come there on one-way trips.

  All that was wonderful…

  It was more than wonderful, though. For the first time, Heechee technology was not only on hand but accessible. At last some of it could be understood…and copied…and even improved! Those treasures were not just satisfying scratches for the scientists’ itch of curiosity, or wealth for a few lucky discoverers. They meant a better life for everyone.

  And Heechee Heaven was not simply a space station. It was a ship. A vast one. A ship big enough to transport human colonists in quantities sizable enough to begin to make a dent in human misery—3,800 emigrants at a time, anywhere they chose to go—and keep on doing it, once a month, indefinitely.

  And the colonization of the galaxy by the human race was possible at last.

  PART EIGHT

  LOOKING

  FOR

  COMPANY

  The biggest “science” bonus the Gateway Corporation ever offered its prospectors wasn’t really scientific. It was emotional. It proved that even the Gateway Corporation had some human feelings. The bonus was waiting there for any explorer who discovered a living, breathing Heechee, and it wasn’t tiny. It came to fifty million dollars.

  That was the kind of bonus any desperate Gateway explorer could dream about, but hardly any of them ever expected to claim it. Maybe the corporate masters didn’t expect ever to pay it out, either. They all well knew that every sign of the Heechee anyone had ever found was hundreds of thousands of years old. They also suspected, very likely, that there might not be much chance that anyone who did discover a live Heechee would be allowed to come back and tell the human world what he had found.

  But there were other bonuses in that same emotional area. They were lesser but still very worthwhile. The biggest one was the standing ten-million-dollar offer for the discovery of any intelligent race of aliens. After a while, that was made a little easier. You could earn it by finding any living aliens at all who showed the faintest signs of smarts. You could even earn money for dead ones. There was a flat million posted for the discoverer of the first non-Heechee artifact found, and half a million or so for the discovery of any one of a variety of “signatures”—that is to say, of such unmistakable signs of intelligence as a clearly coded radio transmission, or the detection of synthetic gases in some planetary atmosphere somewhere.

  It stood to reason, Gateway prospectors told each other
as they bought each other drinks in Gateway’s Blue Hell, that it was just about certain that somebody would find some of that kind of stuff somewhere, sometime. They had to. Everyone knew that there ought to be other intelligent races around. The Heechee couldn’t possibly be the only other intelligent beings in the universe. Could they?

  That wasn’t a new idea. As far back as the middle twentieth century scientists had been listening for signals from other civilizations in space and trying to calculate the probability of ever hearing one. A fellow named Stephen Dole had calculated that there ought to be some 63,000,000 life-sustaining planets in the galaxy; later scientists, on tougher assumptions, cut the expected number down much lower—but hardly any of them were willing to put it at zero. Almost everybody agreed there ought to be some—and, in fact, Gateway prospectors did keep turning up planets where things did live. And if there was life of any kind, it seemed a reasonable bet that sooner or later some of that life would evolve toward intelligence…

  But where were they?

  Ultimately a couple of lucky breaks did begin to turn up a few such interesting discoveries, though they were very sparse and slow in coming.

  The first definite signs of an alien intelligence (not counting the Heechee themselves, of course) were detected by a three-person crew from Pasadena, California, Earth. They came out of faster-than-light drive in orbit around a promising-looking sun (it was identified as a G-4, pretty close to Earth’s own primary in type and suitability), and discovered quickly that there was a good-sized planet right in the middle of the habitability zone.

  The trouble was, the planet was a mess. Most of one hemisphere was a patchwork of bare rock plains, punctuated with volcanoes, and the thing was hot. It didn’t have much in the way of oceans. It didn’t even have anything like as much of an atmosphere as its mass and constitution would have predicted.

  However, what it did have was a dam. A big one.

  The dam was on the less ruined side of the planet. Even so, it was not at all in good shape. It wasn’t a very high-tech dam, for that matter—half a kilometer of rock piled across a valley. It had once been a river valley, no doubt, but there was nothing left of the river at all. There wasn’t much left of the dam, for that matter. But what there was could not have been natural. Someone had piled those rocks in that place for a definite purpose.

  Martin Scranton and his two sisters tried to land on the planet. They made a landing, all right, but the heat sensors in their lander began to squawk warnings as soon as they touched down; the surface even around the dam was hotter than the boiling point of water. They did, they thought, see traces of what might have been other stone structures on a few mountaintops, but nothing in recognizable shape.

  Back on the Gateway asteroid, the scientists decided that that planet had had some bad luck—bad enough to be struck by some wandering body, probably something the size of Callisto; the impact had boiled off the seas, buried much of the planet under molten rock, driven the atmosphere into space—and, oh, yes, certainly, killed every organic thing that had ever inhabited it.

  So Scranton hadn’t found intelligent life. He did claim that he had at least found a place where intelligent life had once been. The Gateway Corporation couldn’t call it a success, in terms of the discovery bonus offered. But still…

  They took a long time to think it over, then paid half the bonus for a good try.

  The first living nonhuman intelligent race the human explorers found didn’t count. They weren’t all that non-human, and they weren’t all that intelligent, either. (For that matter, they weren’t even discovered by a Gateway ship; the people who found them were moping around the extremes of Earth’s own solar system in a primitive Earth-designed rocket ship.) What these particular “aliens” were were the remote descendants of a tribe of Earthly australopithecines, and the place they were found was on the big Heechee ship (or artifact), orbiting out in Sol’s Oort cloud of comets, called “Heechee Heaven.”

  Of course, as we have seen, those old australopithecines hadn’t gotten there by themselves. The Heechee had taken them away for breeding stock, in that long-ago visit to prehuman Earth. Then they had left them to the care of machine nursemaids—for half a million years and more.

  The second race of aliens was better. It took a long time before they were found, but they were clearly the real thing at last. They were definitely intelligent—they proved it by traveling through interstellar space on their own! But they were a bit of a disappointment, all the same. They certainly weren’t much fun to talk to.

  They weren’t exactly found by a Gateway prospector, either—the whole Gateway Corporation was pretty nearly history by the time these folks got discovered. It still existed, of course. But Gateway no longer was where the action was, for by then human beings had learned to copy a lot of Heechee technology and were venturing into new areas of the galaxy on their own.

  At that point, one interstellar ship, on what had become a fairly routine cruise, detected an unfamiliar vessel. It turned out to be a photon-sail ship, slowly chugging along between stars on a voyage of centuries.

  That certainly was not Heechee technology! Nor was it human, not even australopithecine: the long-awaited truly alien race had at last been located!

  But actually they had been discovered quite a while earlier, it turned out—by the Heechee themselves, in fact. The sailboat people were the descendants of what the Heechee had called the “Slow Swimmers” and human beings came to know as the “Sluggards.” They were definitely alien, and definitely not Heechee, and definitely intelligent.

  That was all they had to recommend them, though. The Sluggards were sludge dwellers. They lived in wandering arcologies in a semifrozen mush of methane and other gases, and, although they had really and truly managed to launch those photon-sail spaceships, they didn’t have many other attractive qualities. The worst thing was that they were terribly slow. Their metabolisms ran at the pace of free-radical reactions in the icy slush they lived in, and so did their thoughts, and their speech.

  It took a long time before any human beings were able to establish any sort of useful communication with the snail pace Sluggards…and by then, as it turned out, it didn’t really matter.

  MISSION STINKPOT

  The four people on this mission spent a lot of time, and a lot of money, in court. What they were doing there was trying to win a suit against the Gateway Corporation for that ten-million-dollar bonus. They thought they had a pretty good case.

  They didn’t have a very good planet, though. Certainly it wasn’t an attractive one. It was small and it was hot; its sun was a red dwarf, only a quarter of an AU away. And the planet really stank. That was what gave it its name.

  The planet was also largely covered with water—not sparkling tropical seas but a sluggish ocean that bubbled methane into an atmosphere that was already mostly methane. You couldn’t breathe the stuff. You wouldn’t have wanted to if you could, because of the stink, and there was absolutely nothing of interest anywhere on the planet’s few dry-land surfaces.

  That wasn’t good news for the people in the ship, but it wasn’t absolutely crushing, either. As it happened, they had made some unusual preparations before they left Gateway, and thus they were equipped for more than the casual touchdown-and-lookaround of your average Gateway crew.

  They were a family, and they came from Singapore. They were Jimmy Oh Kip Fwa, his wife Daisy Mek Tan Dah, and their two young daughters, Jenny Oh Sing Dut and Rosemary Oh Ting Lu. The Oh family was very old in Singapore. They had once been very rich, with a family fortune that had been made out of underwater mining. When Malaysia took the island over and expropriated all its industries the Ohs stopped being rich, but they had wisely socked away enough in Switzerland and Jakarta to finance their fares to Gateway, with enough left over to bring along some extra equipment. It was gear for underwater exploration. As Jimmy Oh told his family, “The Ohs made a lot of money out of sea bottoms once. Maybe we can do it again.”


  Taking all that stuff with them meant that they could only fit four people in their Five, but then they didn’t much want anyone else along anyway. And when they saw what sort of planet they had reached through the luck of the draw, Madame Mek was blessedly silent—at last—and their daughter Jenny said, “Jesus, Pop, you’re not so dumb after all.”

  Even the Ohs hadn’t brought along the kind of deep-sea diving gear and instrumentation that would let them make a systematic survey of Stinkpot’s sea bottom. There was just too much sea bottom to explore, and too little time. What they had was half a dozen instrumented neutral-buoyancy balls. They dropped them into the global ocean at half a dozen randomly chosen points.

  Then they went back to their orbiting ship and waited for transmissions.

  As the buoys returned to the surface, the Ohs interrogated each one in turn about what it had found. That was disappointing. Of Heechee metal, the instruments had detected none at all. Of the kind of transuranic or other radioactive elements that might, just possibly, be worth mining and shipping back to Earth, also nothing.

  But the instruments had picked up some electrical potentials that didn’t seem to have any identifiable source. They were regular, in a pleasingly irregular kind of way. They made nice, rounded waves on a CRT, and when Jenny Oh, who had majored in cetacean ethology in school, slowed the signals down and played them through a sound synthesizer, they sounded…alive.

  Were the signals language? If so, of what sort of living thing?

  That was when the lawsuits started.

  The Oh family said that language definitely proved the existence of intelligent life. The Corporation’s lawyers said chirps and squeals weren’t language, even if they did happen to be electromagnetic instead of acoustical. (Actually the signals did sound more like cricket chirps or bird calls than any articulate tongue.) The Ohs said how could crickets communicate by electrical impulses unless they were smart enough to build something like radio sets? The Corporation’s lawyers said there wasn’t any radio involved, just electric fields, and maybe the creatures had current-producing organs like an electric eel. The Ohs said, aha, then you admit you owe us at least the alien-life-discovery bonus, so pay it up right away. The Corporation’s lawyers said, first show us your specimens. Or photographs. Or anything to prove these alien life forms are real.