Frederik Pohl - Heechee 1- Gateway

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GATEWAY by Frederik Pohl
1
My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male. My analyst (whom I call
Sigfrid von Shrink, although that isn't his name; he hasn't got a name, being a machine) has a lot
of electronic fun with this fact:
"Why do you care if some people think it's a girl's name, Rob?"
"I don't."
"Then why do you keep bringing it up?"
He annoys me when he keeps bringing up what I keep bringing up. I look at the ceiling with
its hanging mobiles and pinatas, then I look out the window. It isn't really a window. It's a
moving holopic of surf coming in on Kaena Point; Sigfrid's programming is pretty eclectic. After a
while I say, "I can't help what my parents called me. I tried spelling it R-O-B-I-N-E-T, but then
everybody pronounces it wrong."
"You could change it to something else, you know."
"If I changed it," I say, and I am sure I am right in this, "you would just tell me I was
going to obsessive lengths to defend my inner dichotomies."
"What I would tell you," Sigfrid says, in his heavy mechanical attempt at humor, "is that,
please, you shouldn't use technical psychoanalytic terms. I'd appreciate it if you would just say
what you feel."
"What I feel," I say, for the thousandth time, "is happy. I got no problems. Why wouldn't
I feel happy?"
We play these word games a lot, and I don't like them. I think there's something wrong
with his program. He says, "You tell me, Robbie. Why don't you feel happy?"
I don't say anything to that. He persists. "I think you're worried."
"Shit, Sigfrid," I say, feeling a little disgust, "you always say that. I'm not worried
about anything."
He tries wheedling. "There's nothing wrong with saying how you feel."
I look out the window again, angry because I can feel myself trembling and I don't know
why. "You're a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?"
He says something or other, but I am not listening. I am wondering why I waste my time
coming here. If there was anybody ever who had every reason to be happy, I have to be him. I'm
rich. I'm pretty good-looking. I am not too old, and anyway, I have Full Medical so I can be just
about any age I want to be for the next fifty years or so. I live in New York City under the Big
Bubble, where you can't afford to live unless you're really well fixed, and maybe some kind of
celebrity besides. I have a summer apartment that overlooks the Tappan Sea and the Palisades Dam.
And the girls go crazy over my three Out bangles. You don't see too many prospectors anywhere on
Earth, not even in New York. They're all wild to have me tell them what it's really like out
around the Orion Nebula or the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. (I've never been to either place, of
course. The one really interesting place I've been to I don't like to talk about.)
"Or," says Sigirid, having waited the appropriate number of microseconds for a response to
whatever it was he said last, "if you really are happy, why do you come here for help?"
I hate it when he asks me the same questions I ask myself. I don't answer. I squirm around
until I get comfortable again on the plastic foam mat, because I can tell that it's going to be a
long, lousy session. If I knew why I needed help, why would I need help?
----------------------------------------
I think you're worried.
Shit, Sigfrid, you always say that. I'm not worried about anything.
Why don't you tell me about it. There's nothing wrong with saying how you feel.
----------------------------------------
"You're a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?"
"Rob, you aren't very responsive today," Sigfrid says through the little loudspeaker at
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the head of the mat. Sometimes he uses a very lifelike dummy, sitting in an armchair, tapping a
pencil and smiling quirkily at me from time to time. But I've told him that that makes me nervous.
"Why don't you just tell me what you're thinking?"
"I'm not thinking about anything, particularly."
"Let your mind roam. Say whatever comes into it, Rob."
"I'm remembering--" I say, and stop.
"Remembering what, Rob?"
"Gateway?"
"That sounds more like a question than a statement."
"Maybe it is. I can't help that. That's what I'm remembering: Gateway."
I have every reason to remember Gateway. That's how I got the money and the bangles, and
other things. I think back to the day I left Gateway. That was, let's see, Day 31 of Orbit 22,
which means, counting back, just about sixteen years and a couple of months since I left there. I
was thirty minutes out of the hospital and couldn't wait to collect my pay, catch my ship, and
blow.
Sigfrid says politely, "Please say what you're thinking out loud, Robbie."
"I'm thinking about Shikitei Bakin," I say.
"Yes, you've mentioned him. I remember. What about him?" I don't answer. Old, legless
Shicky Bakin had the room next to mine, but I don't want to discuss it with Sigfrid. I wriggle
around on my circular mat, thinking about Shicky and trying to cry.
"You seem upset, Rob."
I don't answer to that, either. Shicky was almost the only person I said good-bye to on
Gateway. That was funny. There was a big difference in our status. I was a prospector, and Shicky
was a garbageman. They paid him enough money to cover his life-support tax because he did odd
jobs, and even on Gateway they have to have somebody to clean up the garbage. But sooner or later
he would be too old and too sick to be any more use at all. Then, if he was lucky, they would push
him out into space and he would die. If he wasn't lucky, they'd probably send him back to a
planet. He would die there, too, before very long; but first he would have the experience of
living for a few weeks or so as a helpless cripple.
Anyway, he was my neighbor. Every morning he would get up and painstakingly vacuum every
square inch around his cell. It would be dirty, because there was so much trash floating around
Gateway all the time, despite the attempts to clean it up. When he had it perfectly clean, even
around the roots of the little shrublets he planted and shaped, he would take a handful of
pebbles, bottle caps, bits of torn paper -- the same trash he'd just vacuumed up, half the time --
and painstakingly arrange it on the place he had just cleaned. Funny! I never could see the
difference, but Klara said ... Klara said she could.
"Rob, what were you thinking about just then?" Sigfrid asks.
I roll up into a fetal ball and mumble something.
"I couldn't understand what you just said, Robbie."
I don't say anything. I wonder what became of Shicky. I suppose he died. Suddenly I feel
very sad about Shicky dying, such a very long way from Nagoya, and I wish again that I could cry.
But I can't. I squirm and wriggle. I flail against the foam mat until the restraining straps
squeak. Nothing helps. The pain and shame won't come out. I feel rather pleased with myself that I
am trying so hard to let the feelings out, but I have to admit I am not being successful, and the
dreary interview goes on.
Sigfrid says, "Rob, you're taking a long time to answer. Do you think you're holding
something back?"
I say virtuously, "What kind of a question is that? If I am, how would I know?" I pause to
survey the inside of my brain, looking in all the corners for padlocks that I can open for
Sigfrid. I don't see any. I say judiciously, "I don't think that's it, exactly. I don't feel as if
I were blocking. It's more as if there were so many things I wanted to say that I couldn't decide
which."
"Take any one, Rob. Say the first thing that comes into your mind."
Now, that's dumb, it seems to me. How do I know which is the first thing, when they're all
boiling around in there together? My father? My mother? Sylvia? Klara? Poor Shicky, trying to
balance himself in flight without any legs, flapping around like a barn swallow chasing bugs as he
scoops the cobwebby scraps out of Gateway's air?
I reach down into my mind for places where I know it hurts, because it has hurt there
before. The way I felt when I was seven years old, parading up and down the Rock Park walk in
front of the other kids, begging for someone to pay attention to me? The way it was when we were
out of realspace and knew that we were trapped, with the ghost star coming up out of nothingness
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below us like the smile of a Cheshire cat? Oh, I have a hundred memories like those, and they all
hurt. That is, they can. They are pain. They are clearly labeled PAINFUL in the index to my
memory. I know where to find them, and I know what it feels like to let them surface.
But they will not hurt unless I let them out.
"I'm waiting, Rob," Sigfrid says.
"I'm thinking," I say. As I lie there it comes to my mind that I'll be late for my guitar
lesson. That reminds me of something, and I look at the fingers of my left hand, checking to see
that the fingernails have not grown too long, wishing the calluses were harder and thicker. I have
not learned to play the guitar very well, but most people are not that critical and it gives me
pleasure. Only you have to keep practicing and remembering. Let's see, I think, how do you make
that transition from the D-maj to the C-7th again?
"Rob," Sigfrid says, "this has not been a very productive session. There are only about
ten or fifteen minutes left. Why don't you just say the first thing that comes into your mind. . .
now."
I reject the first thing and say the second. "The first thing that comes into my mind is
the way my mother was crying when my father was killed."
"I don't think that was actually the first thing, Rob. Let me make a guess. Was the first
thing something about Klara?"
My chest fills, tingling. My breath catches. All of a sudden there's Klara rising up
before me, sixteen years earlier and not yet an hour older. . . . I say, "As a matter of fact,
Sigfrid, I think what I want to talk about is my mother." I allow myself a polite, deprecatory
chuckle.
Sigfrid doesn't ever sigh in resignation, but he can be silent in a way that sounds about
the same.
"You see," I go on, carefully outlining all the relevant issues, "she wanted to get
married again after my father died. Not right away. I don't mean that she was glad about his
death, or anything like that. No, she loved him, all right. But still, I see now, she was a
healthy young woman -- well, fairly young. Let's see, I suppose she was about thirty-three. And if
it hadn't been for me I'm sure she would have remarried. I have feelings of guilt about that. I
kept her from doing it. I went to her and said, 'Ma, you don't need another man. I'll be the man
in the family. I'll take care of you.' Only I couldn't, of course. I was only about five years
old."
"I think you were nine, Robbie."
"Was I? Let me think. Gee, Sigfrid, I guess you're right--" And then I try to swallow a
big drop of spit that has somehow instantly formed in my throat and I gag and cough.
"Say it, Rob!" Sigfrid says insistently. "What do you want to say?"
"God damn you, Sigfrid!"
"Go ahead, Rob. Say it."
"Say what? Christ, Sigfrid! You're driving me right up the wall! This shit isn't doing
either one of us any good!"
"Say what's bothering you, Rob, please."
"Shut your flicking tin mouth!" All that carefully covered pain is pushing its way out and
I can't stand it, can't deal with it.
"I suggest, Rob, that you try--"
I surge against the straps, kicking chunks out of the foam matting, roaring, "Shut up,
you! I don't want to hear. I can't cope with this, don't you understand me? I can't! Can't cope,
can't cope!"
Sigfrid waits patiently for me to stop weeping, which happens rather suddenly. And then,
before he can say anything, I say wearily, "Oh, hell, Sigfrid, this whole thing isn't getting us
anywhere. I think we should call it off. There must be other people who need your services more
than I do."
"As to that, Rob," he says, "I am quite competent to meet all the demands on my time."
I am drying my tears on the paper towels he has left beside the mat and don't answer.
"There is still excess capacity, in fact," he goes on. "But you must be the judge of
whether we continue with these sessions or not."
"Have you got anything to drink in the recovery room?" I ask him.
"Not in the sense you mean, no. There is what I am told is a very pleasant bar on the top
floor of this building."
"Well," I say, "I just wonder what I'm doing here."
And, fifteen minutes later, having confirmed my appointment for the next week, I am
drinking a cup of tea in Sigfrid's recovery cubicle. I listen to hear if his next patient has
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started screaming yet, but I can't hear anything.
So I wash my face, adjust my scarf, and slick down the little cowlick in my hair. I go up
to the bar for a quick one. The headwaiter, who is human, knows me, and gives me a seat looking
south toward the Lower Bay rim of the bubble. He looks toward a tall, copper-skinned girl with
green eyes sitting by herself, but I shake my head. I drink one short drink, admire the legs on
the copper-skinned girl and, thinking mostly about where I am going to go for dinner, keep my
appointment for my guitar lesson.
2
All my life I wanted to be a prospector, as far back as I can remember. I couldn't have
been more than six when my father and mother took me to a fair in Cheyenne. Hot dogs and popped
soya, colored-paper hydrogen balloons, a circus with dogs and horses, wheels of fortune, games,
rides. And there was a pressure tent with opaque sides, a dollar to get in, and inside somebody
had arranged a display of imports from the Heechee tunnels on Venus. Prayer fans and fire pearls,
real Heechee-metal mirrors that you could buy for twenty-five dollars apiece. Pa said they weren't
real, but to me they were real. We couldn't afford twenty-five dollars apiece, though. And when
you came right down to it, I didn't really need a mirror. Freckled face, buck teeth, hair I
brushed straight back and tied. They had just found Gateway. I heard my father talking about it
going home that night in the airbus, when I guess they thought I was asleep, and the wistful
hunger in his voice kept me awake.
If it hadn't been for my mother and me he might have found a way to go. But he never got
the chance. He was dead a year later. All I inherited from him was his job, as soon as I was big
enough to hold it.
----------------------------------------
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----------------------------------------
I don't know if you've ever worked in the food mines, but you've probably heard about
them. There isn't any great joy there. I started, half-time and half-pay, at twelve. By the time I
was sixteen I had my father's rating: charge driller -- good pay, hard work.
But what can you do with the pay? It isn't enough for Full Medical. It isn't enough even
to get you out of the mines, only enough to be a sort of local success story. You work six hours
on and ten hours off. Eight hours' sleep and you're on again, with your clothes stinking of shale
all the time. You can't smoke, except in sealed rooms. The oil fog settles everywhere. The girls
are as smelly and slick and frazzled as you are.
So we all did the same things, we worked and chased each other's women and played the
lottery. And we drank a lot, the cheap, powerful liquor that was made not ten miles away.
Sometimes it was labeled Scotch and sometimes vodka or bourbon, but it all came off the same slime-
still columns. I was no different from any of the others . . . except that, one time, I won the
lottery. And that was my ticket out.
Before that happened I just lived.
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My mother was a miner, too. After my father was killed in the shaft fire she brought me
up, with the help of the company creche. We got along all right until I had my psychotic episode.
I was twenty-six at the time. I had some trouble with my girl, and then for a while I just
couldn't get out of bed in the morning. So they put me away. I was out of circulation for most of
a year, and when they let me out of the shrink tank my mother had died.
Face it: that was my fault. I don't mean I planned it, I mean she would have lived if she
hadn't had me to worry about. There wasn't enough money to pay the medical expenses for both of
us. I needed psychotherapy. She needed a new lung. She didn't get it, so she died.
I hated living on in the same apartment after she was dead, but it was either that or go
into bachelor quarters. I didn't like the idea of living in such close proximity to a lot of men.
Of course I could have gotten married. I didn't -- Sylvia, the girl I'd had the trouble with, was
long gone by that time -- but it wasn't because I had anything against the idea of marriage. Maybe
you might think I did, considering my psychiatric history, and also considering that I'd lived
with my mother as long as she was alive. But it isn't true. I liked girls very much. I would have
been very happy to marry one and raise a child.
But not in the mines.
I didn't want to leave a son of mine the way my father had left me.
Charge drilling is bitchy hard work. Now they use steam torches with Heechee heating coils
and the shale just politely splits away, like carving cubes of wax. But then we drilled and
blasted. You'd go down into the shaft on the high-speed drop at the start of your shift. The shaft
wall was slimy and stinking ten inches from your shoulder, moving at sixty kilometers an hour
relative to you; I've seen miners with a few drinks in them stagger and stretch out a hand to
support themselves and pull back a stump. Then you pile out of the bucket and slip and stumble on
the duckboards for a kilometer or more till you come to the working face. You drill your shaft.
You set your charges. Then you back out into a cul-de-sac while they blast, hoping you figured it
right and the whole reeking, oily mass doesn't come down on you. (If you're buried alive you can
live up to a week in the loose shale. People have. When they don't get rescued until after the
third day they're usually never any good for anything anymore.) Then, if everything has gone all
right, you dodge the handling loaders as they come creeping in on their tracks, on your way to the
next face.
The masks, they say, take out most of the hydrocarbons and the rock dust. They don't take
out the stink. I'm not sure they take out all the hydrocarbons, either. My mother is not the only
miner I knew who needed a new lung -- nor the only one who couldn't pay for one, either.
And then, when your shift is over, where is there to go?
You go to a bar. You go to a dorm-room with a girl. You go to a rec-room to play cards.
You watch TV.
You don't go outdoors very much. There's no reason. There are a couple of little parks,
carefully tended, planted, replanted; Rock Park even has hedges and a lawn. I bet you never saw a
lawn that had to be washed, scrubbed (with detergent!), and air-dried every week, or it would die.
So we mostly leave the parks to the kids.
Apart from the parks, there is only the surface of Wyoming, and as far as you can see it
looks like the surface of the Moon. Nothing green anywhere. Nothing alive. No birds, no squirrels,
no pets. A few sludgy, squidgy creeks that for some reason are always bright ochre-red under the
oil. They tell us that we're lucky at that, because our part of Wyoming was shaft-mined. In
Colorado, where they strip-mined, things were even worse.
I always found that hard to believe, and still do, but I've never gone to look.
And apart from everything else, there's the smell and sight and sound of the work. The
sunsets orangey-brown through the haze. The constant smell. All day and all night there's the roar
of the extractor furnaces, heating and grinding the marlstone to get the kerogen out of it, and
the rumble of the long-line conveyors, dragging the spent shale away to pile it somewhere.
See, you have to heat the rock to extract the oil. When you heat it it expands, like
popcorn. So there's no place to put it. You can't squeeze it back into the shaft you've taken it
out of; there's too much of it. If you dig out a mountain of shale and extract the oil, the popped
shale that's left is enough to make two mountains. So that's what you do. You build new mountains.
And the runoff heat from the extractors warms the culture sheds, and the oil grows its
slime as it trickles through the shed, and the slime-skimmers scoop it off and dry it and press it
and we eat it, or some of it, for breakfast the next morning.
Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And all people thought
to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and burn it up.
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All the TV shows have morale-builder commercials telling us how important our work is, how
the whole world depends on us for food. It's all true. They don't have to keep reminding us. If we
didn't do what we do there would be hunger in Texas and kwashiorkor among the babies in Oregon. We
all know that. We contribute five trillion calories a day to the world's diet, half the protein
ration for about a fifth of the global population. It all comes out of the yeasts and bacteria we
grow off the Wyoming shale oil, along with parts of Utah and Colorado. The world needs that food.
But so far it has cost us most of Wyoming, half of Appalachia, a big chunk of the Athabasca tar
sands region. . . and what are we going to do with all those people when the last drop of
hydrocarbon is converted to yeast?
It's not my problem, but I still think of it.
It stopped being my problem when I won the lottery, the day after Christmas, the year I
turned twenty-six.
The prize was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Enough to live like a king for a
year. Enough to marry and keep a family on, provided we both worked and didn't live too high.
Or enough for a one-way ticket to Gateway.
I took the lottery ticket down to the travel office and turned it in for passage. They
were glad to see me; they didn't do much of a business there, especially in that kind of
commodity. I had about ten thousand dollars left over in change, give or take a little. I didn't
count it. I bought drinks for my whole shift as far as it would go. With the fifty people in my
shift, and all the friends and casual drop-ins who leeched on to the party, it went about
twentyfour hours.
Then I staggered through a Wyoming blizzard back to the travel office. Five months later,
I was circling in toward the asteroid, staring out the portholes at the Brazilian cruiser that was
challenging us, on my way to being a prospector at last.
3
Sigfrid never closes off a subject. He never says, "Well, Rob, I guess we've talked enough
about that." But sometimes when I've been lying there on the mat for a long time, not responding
much, making jokes or humming through my nose, after a while he'll say:
"I think we might go back to a different area, Rob. There was something you said some time
ago that we might follow up. Can you remember that time, the last time you--"
"The last time I talked to Klara, right?"
"Yes, Rob."
"Sigfrid, I always know what you're going to say."
"Doesn't matter if you do, Rob. What about it? Do you want to talk about how you felt that
time?"
"Why not?" I clean the nail of my right middle finger by drawing it between my two lower
front teeth. I inspect it and say, "I realize that was an important time. Maybe it was the worst
moment of my life, about. Even worse than when Sylvia ditched me, or when I found out my mother
died."
"Are you saying you'd rather talk about one of those things, Rob?"
"Not at all. You say talk about Klara, we'll talk about Klara."
And I settle myself on the foam mat and think for a while. I've been very interested in
transcendental insight, and sometimes when I set a problem to my mind and just start saying my
mantra over and over I come out of it with the problem solved: Sell the fish-farm stock in Baja
and buy plumbing supplies on the commodities exchange. That was one, and it really paid out. Or:
Take Rachel to Merida for waterskling on the Bay of Campeche. That got her into my bed the first
time, when I'd tried everything else.
And then Sigfrid says, "You're not responding, Rob."
"I'm thinking about what you said."
"Please don't think about it, Rob. Just talk. Tell me what you're feeling about Klara
right now."
I try to think it out honestly. Sigfrid won't let me get into TI for it, so I look inside
my mind for suppressed feelings.
"Well, not much," I say. Not much on the surface, anyway.
"Do you remember the feeling at the time, Rob?"
"Of course I do."
"Try to feel what you felt then, Rob."
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"All right." Obediently I reconstruct the situation in my mind. There I am, talking to
Klara on the radio. Dane is shouting something in the lander. We're all frightened out of our
wits. Down underneath us the blue mist is opening up, and I see the dim skeletal star for the
first time. The Three-ship -- no, it was a Five. . Anyway, it stinks of vomit and perspiration. My
body aches.
I can remember it exactly, although I would be lying if I said I was letting myself feel
it.
I say lightly, half chuckling, "Sigfrid, there's an intensity of pain and guilt and misery
there that I just can't handle." Sometimes I try that with him, saying a kind of painful truth in
the tone you might use to ask the waiter at a cocktail party to bring you another rum punch. I do
that when I want to divert his attack. I don't think it works. Sigfrid has a lot of Heechee
circuits in him. He's a lot better than the machines at the Institute were, when I had my episode.
He continuously monitors all my physical parameters: skin conductivity and pulse and beta-wave
activity and so on. He gets readings from the restraining straps that hold me on the mat, to show
how violently I fling myself around. He meters the volume of my voice and spectrum-scans the print
for overtones. And he also understands what the words mean. Sigfrid is extremely smart,
considering how stupid he is.
It is very hard, sometimes, to fool him. I get to the end of a session absolutely limp,
with the feeling that if I had stayed with him for one more minute I would have found myself
falling right down into that pain and it would have destroyed me.
Or cured me. Perhaps they are the same thing.
----------------------------------------
I don't know why I keep coming back to you, Sigfrid.
I remind you, Robby, you've already used up three stomachs and, let me see, nearly five
meters of intestine.
Ulcers, cancer.
Something appears to be eating away at you, Rob.
----------------------------------------
4
So there was Gateway, getting bigger and bigger in the ports of the ship up from Earth:
An asteroid. Or perhaps the nucleus of a comet. About ten kilometers through, the longest
way. Pear-shaped. On the outside it looks like a lumpy charred blob with glints of blue. On the
inside it's the gateway to the universe.
Sheri Loffat leaned against my shoulder, with the rest of our bunch of would-be
prospectors clustered behind us, staring. "Jesus, Rob. Look at the cruisers!"
"They find anything wrong," said somebody behind us, "and they blow us out of space."
"They won't find anything wrong," said Sheri, but she ended her remark with a question
mark. Those cruisers looked mean, circling jealously around the asteroid, watching to see that
whoever comes in isn't going to steal the secrets that are worth more than anyone could ever pay.
We hung to the porthole braces to rubberneck at them. Foolishness, that was. We could have
been killed. There wasn't really much likelihood that our ship's matching orbit with Gateway or
the Brazilian cruiser would take much delta-V, but there only had to be one quick course
correction to spatter us. And there was always the other possibility, that our ship would rotate a
quarterturn or so and we'd suddenly find ourselves staring into the naked, nearby sun. That meant
blindness for always, that close. But we wanted to see.
The Brazilian cruiser didn't bother to lock on. We saw flashes back and forth, and knew
that they were checking our manifests by laser. That was normal. I said the cruisers were watching
for thieves, but actually they were more to watch each other than to worry about anybody else.
Including us. The Russians were suspicious of the Chinese, the Chinese were suspicious of the
Russians, the Brazilians were suspicious of the Venusians. They were all suspicious of the
Americans.
So the other four cruisers were surely watching the Brazilians more closely than they were
watching us. But we all knew that if our coded navicerts had not matched the patterns their five
separate consulates at the departure port on Earth had filed, the next step would not have been an
argument. It would have been a torpedo.
It's funny. I could imagine that torpedo. I could imagine the cold-eyed warrior who would
aim and launch it, and how our ship would blossom into a flare of orange light and we would all
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become dissociated atoms in orbit. . . . Only the torpedoman on that ship, I'm pretty sure, was at
that time an armorer's mate named Francy Hereira. We got to be pretty good buddies later on. He
wasn't what you'd really call a cold-eyed killer. I cried in his arms all the day after I got back
from that last trip, in my hospital room, when he was supposed to be searching me for contraband.
And Francy cried with me.
The cruiser moved away and we all surged gently out, then pulled ourselves back to the
window with the grips, as our ship began to close in on Gateway.
"Looks like a case of smallpox," said somebody in the group.
It did; and some of the pockmarks were open. Those were the berths for ships that were out
on mission. Some of them would stay open forever, because the ships wouldn't be coming back. But
most of the pocks were covered with bulges that looked like mushroom caps.
Those caps were the ships themselves, what Gateway was all about.
The ships weren't easy to see. Neither was Gateway itself. It had a low albedo to begin
with, and it wasn't very big: as I say, about ten kilometers on the long axis, half that through
its equator of rotation. But it could have been detected. After that first tunnel rat led them to
it, astronomers began asking each other why it hadn't been spotted a century earlier. Now that
they know where to look, they find it. It sometimes gets as bright as seventeenth magnitude, as
seen from Earth. That's easy. You would have thought it would have been picked up in a routine
mapping program.
The thing is, there weren't that many routine mapping programs in that direction, and it
seems Gateway wasn't where they were looking when they looked.
Stellar astronomy usually pointed away from the sun. Solar astronomy usually stayed in the
plane of the ecliptic -- and Gateway has a right-angle orbit. So it fell through the cracks.
The piezophone clucked and said, "Docking in five minutes. Return to your bunks. Fasten
webbing."
We were almost there.
Sheri Loffat reached out and held my hand through the webbing. I squeezed back. We had
never been to bed together, never met until she turned up in the bunk next to mine on the ship,
but the vibrations were practically sexual. As though we were about to make it in the biggest,
best way there ever could be; but it wasn't sex, it was Gateway.
When men began to poke around the surface of Venus they found the Heechee diggings.
They didn't find any Heechees. Whoever the Heechees were, whenever they had been on Venus,
they were gone. Not even a body was left in a burial pit to exhume and cut apart. All there was,
was the tunnels, the caverns, the few piddling little artifacts, the technological wonders that
human beings puzzled over and tried to reconstruct.
Then somebody found a Heechee map of the solar system. Jupiter was there with its moons,
and Mars, and the outer planets, and the Earth-Moon pair. And Venus, which was marked in black on
the shining blue surface of the Heechee-metal map. And Mercury, and one other thing, the only
other thing marked in black besides Venus: an orbital body that came inside the perihelion of
----------------------------------------
(Transcript of Q. & A., Professor Hegramet's lecture.)
Q. What did the Heechee look like?
Professor Hegramet: Nobody knows. We've never found anything resembling a photograph, or a
drawing, except for two or three maps. Or a book.
Q. Didn't they have some system of storing knowledge, like writing?
Professor Hegramet: Well, of course they must have. But what it is, I don't know. I have a
suspicion . . . well, it's only a guess.
Q. What?
Professor Hegramet: Well, think about our own storage methods and how they would have been
received in pretechnological times. If we'd given, say, Euclid a book, he could have figured out
what it was, even if he couldn't understand what it was saying. But what if we'd given him a tape
cassette? He wouldn't have known what to do with it. I have a suspicion, no, a conviction, that we
have some Heechee "books" we just don't recognize. A bar of Heechee metal. Maybe that Q-spiral in
the ships, the function of which we don't know at all. This isn't a new idea. They've all been
tested for magnetic codes, for microgrooves, for chemical patterns-- nothing has shown up. But we
may not have the instrument we need to detect the messages.
Q. There's something about the Heechee that I just don't understand. Why did they leave
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all these tunnels and places? Where did they go?
Professor Hegramet: Young lady, it beats the piss out of me.
----------------------------------------
Mercury and outside the orbit of Venus, tipped ninety degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic so
that it never came very close to either. A body which had never been identified by terrestrial
astronomers. Conjecture: an asteroid, or a comet -- the difference was only semantic -- which the
Heechees had cared about specially for some reason.
Probably sooner or later a telescopic probe would have followed up that clue, but it
wasn't necessary. Then The Famous Sylvester Macklen -- who wasn't up to that point the famous
anything, just another tunnel rat on Venus -- found a Heechee ship and got himself to Gateway, and
died there. But he managed to let people know where he was by cleverly blowing up his ship. So a
NASA probe was diverted from the chromosphere of the sun, and Gateway was reached and opened up by
man.
Inside were the stars.
Inside, to be less poetic and more literal, were nearly a thousand smallish spacecraft,
shaped something like fat mushrooms. They came in several shapes and sizes. The littlest ones were
button-topped, like the mushrooms they grow in the Wyoming tunnels after they've dug all the shale
out, and you buy in the supermarket. The bigger ones were pointy, like morels. Inside the caps of
the mushrooms were living quarters and a power source that no one understood. The stems were
chemical rocket ships, kind of like the old Moon Landers of the first space programs.
No one had ever figured out how the caps were driven, or how to direct them.
That was one of the things that made us all nervous: the fact that we were going to take
our chances with something nobody understood. You literally had no control, once you started out
in a Heechee ship. Their courses were built into their guidance system, in a way that nobody had
figured out; you could pick one course, but once picked that was it -- and you didn't know where
it was going to take you when you picked it, any more than you know what's in your box of Cracker-
Joy until you open it.
But they worked. They still worked, after what they say is maybe half a million years.
The first guy who had the guts to get into one and try to start it up succeeded. It lifted
out of its crater on the surface of the asteroid. It turned fuzzy and bright, and was gone.
And three months later, it was back, with a starved, staring astronaut inside, aglow with
triumph. He had been to another star! He had orbited a great gray planet with swirling yellow
clouds, had managed to reverse the controls -- and had been brought back to the very same
pockmark, by the built-in guidance controls.
So they sent out another ship, this time one of the big, pointy morel-shaped ones, with a
crew of four and plenty of rations and instrumentation. They were gone only about fifty days. In
that time they had not just reached another solar system, they had actually used the lander to go
down to the surface of a planet. There wasn't anything living there . . . but there had been.
They found the remnants. Not a lot. A few beat-up pieces of trash, on a corner of a
mountaintop that had missed the general destruction that had hit the planet. Out of the
radioactive dust they had picked up a brick, a ceramic bolt, a half-melted thing that looked as
though it had once been a chromium flute.
Then the star rush began . . . and we were part of it.
5
Sigfrid is a pretty smart machine, but sometimes I can't figure out what's wrong with him.
He's always asking me to tell him my dreams. Then sometimes I come in all aglow with some dream
I'm positive he's going to love, a big-red-apple-for-the-teacher kind of dream, full of penis
symbols and fetishism and guilt hang-ups, and he disappoints me. He takes off on some crazy track
that has nothing at all to do with it. I tell him the whole thing, and then he sits and clicks and
whirs and buzzes for a while -- he doesn't really, but I fantasize that while I'm waiting -- and
then he says:
"Let's go back to something different, Rob. I'm interested in some of the things you've
said about the woman, Gelle-Klara Moynlin."
I say, "Sigfrid, you're off on a wild-goose chase again."
"I don't think so, Rob."
"But that dream! My God, don't you see how important it is? What about the mother figure
in it?"
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"What about letting me do my job, Rob?"
"Do I have a choice?" I say, feeling sulky.
"You always have a choice, Rob, but I would like very much to quote to you something you
said a while ago." And he stops, and I hear my own voice coming out of somewhere in his tapes. I
am saying:
"Sigfrid, there's an intensity of pain and guilt and misery there that I just can't
handle."
He waits for me to say something.
After a moment I do. "That's a nice recording," I acknowledge, "but I'd rather talk about
the way my mother fixation comes out in my dream."
"I think it would be more productive to explore this other matter, Rob. It is possible
they're related."
"Really?" I am all warmed up to discuss this theoretical possibility in a detached and
philosophical way, but he beats me to the punch:
"The last conversation you had with Klara, Rob. Please tell me what you feel about it."
"I've told you." I am not enjoying this at all, it is such a waste of time, and I make
sure he knows it by the tone of my voice and the tenseness of my body against the restraining
straps. "It was even worse than with my mother."
"I know you'd rather switch to talking about your mother, Rob, but please don't, right
now. Tell me about that time with Klara. What are you feeling about it at this minute?"
I try to think it out honestly. After all, I can do that much. I don't actually have to
say it. But all I can find to say is, "Not much."
After a little wait he says, "Is that all, 'not much'?"
"That's it. Not much." Not much on the surface, anyway. I do remember how I was feeling at
the time. I open up that memory, very cautiously, to see what it was like. Going down into that
blue mist. Seeing the dim ghost star for the first time. Talking to Klara on the radio, while Dane
is whispering in my ear. . . . I close it up again.
"It all hurts, a lot, Sigfrid," I say conversationally. Sometimes I try to fool him by
saying emotionally loaded things in the tone you might use to order a cup of coffee, but I don't
think it works. Sigfrid listens to volume and overtones, but he also listens to breathing and
pauses, as well as the sense of the words. He is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is.
6
Five permanent-party noncoms, one from each of the cruisers, patted us down, checked our
IDs and turned us over to a Corporation screening clerk. Sheri giggled when the Russian's pat hit
a sensitive spot and whispered, "What do they think we're smuggling in, Rob?"
I shushed her. The Corporation woman had taken our landing cards from the Chinese Spec/3
in charge of the detail and was calling out our names. There were eight of us altogether. "Welcome
aboard," she said. "Each one of you fish will get a proctor assigned to you. He'll help you get
straightened out with a place to live, answer your questions, let you know where to report for the
medical and your classes. Also, he'll give you a copy of the contract to sign. You've each had
eleven hundred and fifty dollars deducted from your cash on deposit with the ship that brought you
here; that's your life-support tax for the first ten days. The rest you can draw on any time by
writing a P-check. Your proctor will show you how. Linscott!"
The middle-aged black man from Baja California raised his hand. "Your proctor is Shota
Tarasvili. Broadhead!"
"Here I am."
"Dane Metchnikov," said the Corporation clerk.
I started to look around, but the person who had to be Dane Metchnikov was already coming
toward me. He took my arm very firmly, started to lead me away and then said, "Hi."
I held back. "I'd like to say good-bye to my friend--"
"You're all in the same area," he grunted. "Come on."
So within two hours of arriving on Gateway I had a room, a proctor, and a contract. I
signed the articles of agreement right away. I didn't even read them. Metchnikov looked surprised.
"Don't you want to know what they say?"
"Not right this minute." I mean, what was the advantage? If I hadn't liked what they said,
I might have changed my mind, and what other options did I have, really? Being a prospector is
pretty scary. I hate the idea of being killed. I hate the idea of dying at all, ever; not being
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file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20\Gateway.txtGATEWAYbyFrederikPohl1MynameisRobinetteBroadhead,inspiteofwhichIammale.My\analyst(whomIcallSigfridvonShrink,althoughthatisn'thisname;hehasn'tgotaname,\beingamachine)hasalotofelectronicfunwiththisfact:"Whydoyoucareifs...

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