Gateway

by Frederik Pohl

  And if you get hurt while you’re out… well, that’s tough. Terminal Hospital is about as well equipped as any anywhere. But you have to get there for it to do you any good. You can be months in transit. If you get hurt at the other end of your trip — and that’s where it usually happens — there’s not much that can be done for you until you get back to Gateway. By then it can be too late to make you whole, and likely enough too late to keep you alive.

  There’s no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way. The rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage.

  The return trip is free… but to what?

  I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel, and ran into a man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn’t speak English, but he pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the up-cable, ascended one level, crossed to another dropshaft, and tried again.

  The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. “You can’t come through here,” he said.

  “I just want to see the ships.”

  “Sure. You can’t. You’ve got to have a blue badge,” he said, tapping his own. “That’s Corporation specialist, flight crew or maintenance.”

  “I am flight crew.”

  He grinned. “You’re a new fish off the Earth transport, aren’t you? Friend, you’ll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not before. Go on back up.”

  I said reasonably, “You understand how I feel, don’t you? I just want to get a look.”

  “You can’t, till you’ve finished your course, except they’ll bring you down here for part of it. After that, you’ll see more than you want.”

  I argued a little more, but he had too many arguments on his side. But as I reached for the up-cable the tunnel seemed to lurch and a blast of sound hit my ears. For a minute I thought the asteroid was blowing up. I stared at the guard, who shrugged, in a not unfriendly way. “I only said you couldn’t see them,” he said. “I didn’t say you couldn’t hear them.”

  I bit back the “wow” or “Holy God!” that I really wanted to say, and said, “Where do you suppose that one’s going?”

  “Come back in six months. Maybe we’ll know by then.”

  Well, there was nothing in that to feel elated about. All the same, I felt elated. After all those years in the food mines, here I was, not only on Gateway, but right there when some of those intrepid prospectors set out on a trip that would bring them fame and incredible fortune! Never mind the odds. This was really living on the top line.

  So I wasn’t paying much attention to what I was doing, and as a result I got lost again on the way back. I reached Level Babe ten minutes late.

  Dane Metchnikov was striding down the tunnel away from my room. He didn’t appear to recognize me. I think he might have passed me if I hadn’t put out my arm.

  “Huh,” he grunted. “You’re late.”

  “I was down on Level Tanya, trying to get a look at the ships.”

  “Huh. You can’t go down there unless you have a blue badge or a bangle.”

  Well, I had found that out already, hadn’t I? So I tagged along after him, without wasting energy on attempts at further conversation.

  Metchnikov was a pale man, except for the marvelously ornate curled whisker that followed the line of his jaw. It seemed to be waxed, so that each separate curl stood out with a life of its own. “Waxed” was wrong. It had something in it besides hair, but whatever it was wasn’t stiff. The whole thing moved as he moved, and when he talked or smiled the muscles moored to the jawbone made the beard ripple and flow. He finally did smile, after we got to the Blue Hell. He bought the first drink, explaining carefully that that was the custom, but that the custom only called for one. I bought the second. The smile came when, out of turn, I also bought the third.

  WHAT IS GATEWAY?

  Gateway is an artifact created by the so-called Heechee. It appears to have been formed around an asteroid, or the core of an atypical comet. The time of this event is not known, but it almost surely precedes the rise of human civilization.

  Inside Gateway the environment resembles Earth, except that there is relatively little gravity. (There is actually none, but centrifugal force derived from Gateway’s rotation gives a similar effect.) If you have come from Earth you will notice some difficulty in breathing for the first few days because of the low atmospheric pressure. However, the partial pressure of oxygen is identical with the 2000-meter elevation at Earth and is fully adequate for all persons in normal health.

  Over the noise in the Blue Hell talk wasn’t easy, but I told him about hearing a launch. “Right,” he said, lifting his glass. “Hope they have a good trip.” He wore six blue-glowing Heechee metal bracelets, hardly thicker than wire. They tinkled faintly as he swallowed half the drink.

  “Are they what I think they are?” I asked. “One for every trip out?”

  He drank the other half of the drink. “That’s right. Now I’m going to dance,” he said. My eyes followed his back as he lunged toward a woman in a luminous pink sari. He wasn’t much of a talker, that was sure.

  On the other hand, at that noise level you couldn’t talk much anyhow. You couldn’t really dance much, either. The Blue Hell was up in the center of Gateway, part of the spindle-shaped cave. Rotational G was so low that we didn’t weigh more than two or three pounds; if anyone had tried to waltz or polka he would have gone flying. So they did those no-touching junior-high-school sort of dances that appear to be designed so fourteen-year-old boys won’t have to look up at too sharp an angle to the fourteen-year-old girls they’re dancing with. You pretty much kept your feet in place, and your head and arms and shoulders and hips went where they wanted to. Me, I like to touch. But you can’t have everything. I like to dance, anyway.

  I saw Sheri, way across the room, with an older woman I took to be her proctor, and danced one with her. “How do you like it so far?” I shouted over the tapes. She nodded and shouted something back, I couldn’t say what. I danced with an immense black woman who wore two blue bracelets, then with Sheri again, then with a girl Dane Metchnikov dropped on me, apparently because he wanted to be rid of her, then with a tall, strong-faced woman with the blackest, thickest eyebrows I had ever seen under a female hairdo. (She wore it pulled back in two pigtails that floated around behind her as she moved.) She wore a couple of bracelets, too. And between dances I drank.

  They had tables that were meant for parties of eight or ten, but there weren’t any parties of eight or ten. People sat where they wanted to, and took each other’s seats without worrying about whether the owner was coming back. For a while there were half a dozen crewmen in Brazilian Navy dress whites sitting with me, talking to each other in Portuguese. A man with one golden earring joined me for a while, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying, either. (I did, pretty well, understand what he meant.)

  There was that trouble all the time I was in Gateway. There always is. Gateway sounds like an international conference when the translation equipment has broken down. There’s a sort of lingua franca you hear a lot, pieces of a dozen different languages thrown together, like, “Ecoutez, gospodin, tu es verreckt.” I danced twice with one of the Brazilians, a skinny, dark little girl with a hawk nose but sweet brown eyes, and tried to say a few simple words. Maybe she understood me. One of the men she was with, though, spoke fine English, introduced himself and the others all around. I didn’t catch any of the names but his, Francesco Hereira. He bought me a drink, and let me buy one for the crowd, and then I realized I’d seen him before: He was one of the detail that searched us on the way in.

  While we were commenting on that, Dane leaned over me and grunted in my ear, “I’m going to gamble. So long, unless you really want to come.”

  It wasn’t the warmest invitation I’d ever had, but the noise in the Blue Hell was getting heavy. I tagged after him and discovered a full-scale casino just next to the Blue Hell, with blackjack tables, poker, a slow-mo
tion roulette with a big, dense ball, craps with dice that took forever to stop, even a roped-off section for baccarat. Metchnikov headed for the blackjack tables and drummed his fingers on the back of a player’s chair, waiting for an opening. Around then he noticed I had come with him.

  “Oh.” He looked around the room. “What do you like to play?”

  “I’ve played it all,” I said, slurring the words a little. Bragging a little, too. “Maybe a little baccarat.”

  He looked at me first with respect, then amusement. “Fifty’s the minimum bet.”

  I had five or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged.

  “That’s fifty thousand,” he said.

  I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip stack was running out, “You can get down for ten dollars at roulette. Hundred minimum for most of the others. Oh, there’s a ten-dollar slot machine around somewhere, I think.” He dived for the open chair and that was the last I saw of him.

  I watched for a moment and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was at the same table, busy studying her cards. She didn’t look up.

  I could see I wasn’t going to be able to afford much gambling here. At that point I realized I couldn’t really afford all the drinks I’d been buying, either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me realize just how many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized was that I had to get back to my room, pretty fast.

  SYLVESTER MACKLEN:

  FATHER OF GATEWAY

  Gateway was discovered by Sylvester Macklen, a tunnel explorer on Venus, who found an operable Heechee spacecraft in a dig. He succeeded in getting it to the surface and bringing it to Gateway, where it now rests In Dock 5-33. Tragically, Macklen was not able to return and, although he succeeded in signaling his presence by exploding the fuel tank of the lander of his ship, he was dead before Investigators reached Gateway.

  Macklen was a courageous and resourceful man, and the plaque at Dock 5-33 commemorates his unique service to humanity. Services are held at appropriate times by representatives of the various faiths.

  Chapter 7

  I am on the mat, and I am not very comfortable. Physically, I mean. I have had an operation not long ago and probably the stitches aren’t yet absorbed.

  Sigfrid says, “We were talking about your job, Rob.”

  That’s dull enough. But safe enough. I say, “I hated my job. Who wouldn’t hate the food mines?”

  “But you kept it, Rob. You never even tried to get on anywhere else. You could have switched to sea-farming, maybe. And you dropped out of school.”

  “You’re saying I stuck myself in a rut?”

  “I’m not saying anything, Rob. I’m asking you what you feel.”

  “Well. I guess in a sense I did do that. I thought about making some kind of a change. I thought about it a lot,” I say, remembering how it was in those bright early days with Sylvia. I remember sitting with her in the cockpit of a parked sailplane on a January night — we had no other place to go — and talking about the future. What we would do. How we would beat the odds. There’s nothing there for Sigfrid, as far as I can see. I’ve told Sigfrid all about Sylvia, who married a stockholder in the long run. But we’d broken up long before that. “I suppose,” I say, pulling myself up short and trying to get my money’s worth out of this session, “that I had a kind of death wish.”

  “I prefer that you don’t use psychiatric terms, Rob.”

  “Well, you understand what I mean. I knew time was going by. The longer I stayed in the mines the harder it would be to get out. But nothing else looked any better. And there were compensations. My girlfriend, Sylvia. My mother, while she was alive. Friends. Even some fun things. Sailplaning. It is great over the hills, and when you’re up high enough Wyoming doesn’t look so bad and you can hardly smell the oil.”

  “You mentioned your girlfriend, Sylvia. Did you get along with her?”

  I hesitated, rubbing at my belly. I have almost half a meter of new intestine in there now. They cost fearfully, those things, and sometimes you get the feeling the previous owner wants them back. You wonder who he was. Or she. How he died. Or did he die? Could he still be alive, so poor that he sells off parts of himself, the way I’ve heard of pretty girls doing with a well-shaped breast or ear?

  “Did you make friends with girls easily, Rob?”

  “I do now, all right.”

  “Not now, Rob. I think you said you didn’t make friends easily as a child.”

  “Does anyone?”

  “If I understand that question, Robbie, you are asking if anyone remembers childhood as a perfectly happy and easy experience, and of course the answer is ’no.’ But some people seem to carry the effects of it over into their lives more than others.”

  “Yeah. I guess, thinking back, that I was a little afraid of my peer group — sorry about that, Sigfrid! I mean the other kids. They all seemed to know each other. They had things to say to each other all the time. Secrets. Shared experiences. Interests. I was a loner.”

  “You were an only child, Robbie?”

  “You know I was. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Both my parents worked. And they didn’t like me playing near the mines. Dangerous. Well, it really was dangerous for kids. You can get hurt around those machines, or even if there’s a slide in the tailings or an outgassing. I stayed at home a lot, watching shows, playing cassettes. Eating. I was a fat kid, Sigfrid. I loved all the starchy, sugary stuff with all the calories. They spoiled me, buying me more food than I needed.”

  I still like to be spoiled. Now I get a higher class of diet, not as fattening, about a thousand times as expensive. I’ve had real caviar. Often. It gets flown in from the aquarium at Galveston. I have real champagne, and butter… “I remember lying in bed,” I say, “I guess I was very small, maybe about three. I had a teddytalker. I took it to bed with me, and it told me little stories, and I stuck pencils into it and tried to pull its ears off. I loved that thing, Sigfrid.”

  I stop, and Sigfrid picks up immediately. “Why are you crying, Robbie?”

  “I don’t know!” I bawl, tears running down my face, and I look at my watch, the skipping green numerals rippling through the tears. “Oh,” I say, very conversationally, and sit up, the tears still rolling down my face but the fountain turned off, “I’ve really got to go now, Sigfrid. I’ve got a date. Her name’s Tania. Beautiful girl. The Houston Symphony. She loves Mendelssohn and roses, and I want to see if I can pick up some of those dark-blue hybrids that will go with her eyes.”

  “Rob, we’ve got nearly ten minutes left.”

  “I’ll make it up another time.” I know he can’t do that, so I add quickly, “May I use your bathroom? I need to.”

  “Are you going to excrete your feelings, Rob?”

  “Oh, don’t be smart. I know what you’re saying. I know this looks like a typical displacement mechanism—”

  “Rob.”

  “-all right, I mean, it looks like I’m copping out. But I honestly do have to go. To the bathroom, I mean. And to the florist’s, too. Tani is pretty special. She’s a fine person. I’m not talking about sex, but that’s great, too. She can g- She can—”

  “Rob? What are you trying to say?”

  I take a breath and manage to say: “She’s great at oral sex, Sigfrid.”

  “Rob?”

  I recognize that tone. Sigfrid’s repertory of vocal modes is quite large, but parts of it I have learned to identify. He thinks he is on the track of something.

  “What?”

  “Rob, what do you call it when a woman gives you oral sex?”

  “Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, what kind of dumb game is this one?”

  “What do you call it, Rob?”

  “Ah! You know as well as I do.”

  “Please tell me what you call it, Rob.”

  “They say, like, ’She eats me.’”

  “What other expression, Rob?”

  “Lots of them! ’Giving head,’ that’s one.
I guess I’ve heard a thousand terms for it.”

  “What other, Rob?”

  I have been building up to rage and pain and it suddenly boils over. “Don’t play these fucking games with me, Sigfrid!” My gut aches, and I am afraid I am going to mess my pants; it is lIke being a baby again. “Jesus, Sigfrid! When I was a little kid I used to talk to my teddy. Now I’m forty-five and I’m still talking to a stupid machine as if it was alive!”

  “But there is another term, isn’t there, Rob?”

  “There are thousands of them! Which one do you want?”

  “I want the expression you were going to use and didn’t, Rob. Please try to say it. That term means something special to you, so that you can’t say the words without trouble.”

  I crumple over onto the mat, and now I’m really crying.

  “Please say it, Rob. What’s the term?”

  “Damn you, Sigfrid! Going down! That’s it. Going down, going down, going down!”

  Chapter 8

  “Good morning,” said somebody, speaking right into the middle of a dream about getting stuck in a sort of quicksand in the middle of the Orion Nebula. “I have brought you some tea.”

  I opened an eye. I looked over the edge of the hammock into a nearby pair of coalsack-black eyes set into a sand-colored face. I was fully dressed and hung over; something smelled very bad, and I realized it was me.