Gateway

by Frederik Pohl

  I jumped. It was a surprise. Worse than that, a betrayal. Klara knew about my early psychotic episode and what I thought of psychotherapists.

  I withheld the first dozen things I thought of to say to her — tactical: “I’m glad; it’s about time”; hypocritical: “I’m glad, and please tell me how I can help”; strategic: “I’m glad, and maybe I ought to go, too, if I could afford it.” I refrained from the only truthful response, which would have been: “I interpret this move on your part as a condemnation of me for bending your head.” I didn’t say anything at all, and after a moment she went on:

  “I need help, Rob. I’m confused.”

  That touched me, and I reached out for her hand. She just let it lay limp in mine, not squeezing back and not pulling away. She said: “My psychology professor used to say that was the first step -no, the second step. The first step when you have a problem is to know you have it. Well, I’ve known that for some time. The second step is to make a decision: Do you want to keep the problem, or do you want to do something about it? I’ve decided to do something about it.”

  “Where will you go?” I asked, carefully noncommittal.

  “I don’t know. The groups don’t seem to do much. There’s a shrink machine available on the Corporation master computer. That would be the cheapest way.”

  “Cheap is cheap,” I said. “I spent two years with the shrink machines when I was younger, after I- I was kind of messed up.”

  “And since then you’ve been operating for twenty years,” she said reasonably. “I’d settle for that. For now, anyway.”

  I patted her hand. “Any step you take is a good step,” I said kindly. “I’ve had the feeling all along that you and I could get along better if you could clear some of that old birthright crap out of your mind. We all do it, I guess, but I’d rather have you angry at me on my own than because I’m acting as a surrogate for your father or something.”

  She rolled over and looked at me. Even in the pale Heecheemetal glow I could see surprise on her face. “What are you talking about?”

  “Why, your problem, Klara. I know it took a lot of courage for you to admit to yourself that you needed help.”

  “Well, Rob,” she said, “it did, only you don’t seem to know what the problem is. Getting along with you isn’t the problem. You may be the problem. I just don’t know. What I’m worried about is stalling. Being unable to make decisions. Putting it off so long before I went out again — and, no offense, picking a Gemini like you to go out with.”

  “I hate it when you give me that astrology crap!”

  “You do have a mixed-up personality, Rob, you know you do. And I seem to lean on that. I don’t want to live that way.”

  We were both wide awake again by then, and there seemed to be two ways for things to go. We could get into a but-you-said-you-loved-me, but-I-can’t-stand-this scene, probably ending with either more sex or a wide-open split; or we could do something to take our minds off it. Klara’s thoughts were clearly moving in the same direction as mine, because she slid out of the hammock and began pulling on clothes. “Let’s go up to the casino,” she said brightly. “I feel lucky tonight.”

  There werent any ships in, and no tourists. There weren’t all that many prospectors, either, with so many shiploads going out in the past few weeks. Half the tables at the cisino were closed down, with the green cloth hoods over them. Klara found a seat at the blackjack table, signed for a stack of hundred-dollar markers, and the dealer let me sit next to her without playing. “I told you this was my lucky night,” she said when, after ten minutes, she was more than two thousand dollars ahead of the house.

  “You’re doing fine,” I encouraged her, but actually it wasn’t that much fun for me. I got up and roamed around a little bit. Dane Metchnikov was cautiously feeding five-dollar coins into the slots, but he didn’t seem to want to talk to me. Nobody was playing baccarat. I told Klara I was going to get a cup of coffee at the Blue Hell (five dollars, but in slow times like this they would keep filling the cup for nothing). She flashed me a quarter-proffle smile without ever taking her eyes off the cards.

  In the Blue Hell Louise Forehand was sipping a rocket-fuel-and-water… well, it wasn’t really rocket fuel, just old-fashioned white whisky made out of whatever happened to be growing well that week in the hydroponics tanks. She looked up with a welcoming smile, and I sat down next to her.

  She had, it suddenly occurred to me, a rather lonely time of it. No reason she had to. She was — well, I don’t know exactly what there was about her, but she seemed like the only nonthreatening, nonreproachful, nondemanding person on Gateway. Everybody else either wanted something I didn’t want to give, or refused to take what I was offering. Louise was something else. She was at least a dozen years older than I, and really very good-looking. Like me, she wore only the Corporation standard clothes, short coveralls in a choice of three unattractive colors. But she had remade them for herself, converting the jumpsuit into a two-piece outfit with tight shorts, bare midriff, and a loose, open sort of top. I discovered that she was watching me take inventory, and I suddenly felt embarrassed. “You’re looking good,” I said.

  “Thanks, Rob. All original equipment, too,” she bragged, and smiled. “I never could afford anything else.”

  “You don’t need anything you haven’t had all along,” I told her sincerely, and she changed the subject.

  “There’s a ship coming in,” she said. “Been a long time out, they say.”

  MISSION REPORT

  Vessel A3-7, Voyage 022D55. Crew S.Rigney, E. Tsien, M. Sindler.

  Transit time 18 days 0 hours. Position vicinity Xi Pegasi A.

  Summary. “We emerged in close orbit of a small planet approximately 9 A.U. from primary. The planet is ice-covered, but we detected Heechee radiation from a spot near the equator. Rigney and Mary Sindler landed nearby and with some difficulty — the location was mountainous — reached an ice-free warm area within which was a metallic dome. Inside the dome were a number of Heechee artifacts, including two empty landers, home equipment of unknown use, and a heating coil. We succeeded in transporting most of the smaller items to the vessel. It proved impossible to stop the heating coil entirely, but we reduced it to a low level of operation and stored it in the lander for the return. Even so, Mary and Tsien were seriously dehydrated and in coma when we landed.”

  Corporation evaluation: Heating coil analyzed and rebuilt. Award of $3,000,000 made to crew against royalties. Other artifacts not as yet analyzed. Award of $25,000 per kilo mass, total $675,000, made against future exploitation if any.

  Well, I knew what that meant to her, and that explained why she was sitting around in the Blue Hell instead of being asleep at that hour. I knew she was worried about her daughter, but she wasn’t letting it paralyze her.

  She had a very good attitude about prospecting, too. She was afraid of going out, which was sensible. But she didn’t let that keep her from going, which I admired a lot. She was still waiting for some other member of her family to return before she signed on again, as they had agreed, so that whoever did come back would always find family waiting.

  She told me a little more about their background. They had lived, as far as you could call it living, in the tourist traps of the Spindle on Venus, surviving on what they could eke out, mostly from the cruise ships. There was a lot of money there, but there was also a lot of competition. The Forehands had at one time, I discovered, worked up a nightclub act: singing, dancing, comedy routines. I gathered that they were not bad, at least by Venus standards. But the few tourists that were around most of the year had so many other birds of prey battling for a scrap of their flesh that there just wasn’t enough to nurture them all. Sess and the son (the one who had died) had tried guiding, with an old airbody they had managed to buy wrecked and rebuild. No big money there. The girls had worked at all kinds of jobs. I was pretty sure that Louise, at least, had been a hooker for a while, but that hadn’t paid enough to matter, either, for the
same sorts of reasons as everything else. They were nearly at the end of their rope when they managed to get to Gateway.

  It wasn’t the first time for them. They’d fought hard to get off Earth in the first place, when Earth got so bad for them that Venus had seemed a less hopeless alternative. They had more courage, and more willingness to pull up stakes and go, than any other people I’d ever met.

  “How did you pay for all this travel?” I asked.

  “Well,” said Louise, finishing her drink and looking at her watch, “going to Venus we traveled the cheapest way there is. High-mass load. Two hundred and twenty other immigrants, sleeping in shoulder clamps, lining up for two-minute appointments in the toilets, eating compressed dry rations and drinking recycled water. It was a hell of a way to spend forty thousand dollars apiece. Fortunately, the kids weren’t born yet, except Hat, and he was small enough to go for quarter-fare.”

  “Hat’s your son? What—”

  “He died,” she said.

  I waited, but when she spoke again what she said was: “They should have a radio report from that incoming ship by now.”

  “It would have been on the P-phone.”

  She nodded, and for a moment looked worried. The Corporation always makes routine reports on incoming contacts. If they don’t have a contact-well, dead prospectors don’t check in on radio. So I took her mind off her troubles by telling her about Kiara’s decision to see a shrink. She listened and then put hand over mine and said: “Don’t get sore, Rob. Did you ever think of seeing a shrink yourself?”

  “I don’t have the money, Louise.”

  “Not even for a group? There’s a primal-scream bunch on L Darling. You can hear them sometimes. And there’ve been ads everything — TA, Est, patterning. Of course, a lot of them may have shipped out.”

  But her attention wasn’t on me. From where we were sitting we could see the entrance to the casino, where one of the croup was talking interestedly to a crewman from the Chinese cruiser. Louise was staring that way.

  “Something’s going on,” I said. I would have added, “Let’s look,” but Louise was out of the chair and heading for the casino before me.

  Play had stopped. Everybody was clustered around the blackjack table, where, I noticed, Dane Metchnikov was now sitting next to Klara in the seat I had vacated, with a couple of twentyfive-dollar chips in front of him. And in the middle of them was Shicky Bakin, perched on a dealer’s stool, talking. “No,” he was saying as I came up, “I do not know the names. But it’s a Five.”

  “And they’re all still alive?” somebody asked.

  “As far as I know. Hello, Rob. Louise.” He nodded politely to us both. “I see you’ve heard?”

  “Not really,” Louise said, reaching out unconsciously to take my hand. “Just that a ship is in. But you don’t know the names?”

  Dane Metchnikov craned his head around to glare at us. “Names,” he growled. “Who cares? It’s none of us, that’s what’s important. And it’s a big one.” He stood up. Even at that moment I noticed the measure of his anger: he forgot to pick up his chips from the blackjack table. “I’m going down there,” he announced. “I want to see what a once-in-a-lifetime score looks like.”

  The cruiser crews had closed off the area, but one of the guards was Francy Hereira. There were a hundred people around the dropshaft, and only Hereira and two girls from the American cruiser to keep them back. Metchnikov plunged through to the lip of the shaft, peering down, before one of the girls chased him away. We saw him talking to another five-bracelet prospector. Meanwhile we could hear snatches of gossip:

  “… almost dead. They ran out of water.”

  “Nah! Just exhausted. They’ll be all right…”

  “… ten-million-dollar bonus if it’s a nickel, and then the royalties!”

  Klara took Louise’s elbow and pulled her toward the front. I followed in the space they opened. “Does anybody know whose ship it was?” she demanded.

  Hereira smiled wearily at her, nodded at me, and said: “Not yet, Klara. They’re searching them now. I think they’re going to be all right, though.”

  Somebody behind me called out, ’What did they find?”

  “Artifacts. New ones, that’s all I know.”

  “But it was a Five?” Klara asked.

  Hereira nodded, then peered down the shaft. “All right,” he said, “now, please back up, friends. They’re bringing some of them up now.”

  We all moved microscopically back, but it didn’t matter; they weren’t getting off at our level, anyway. The first one up the cable was a Corporation bigwig whose name I didn’t remember, then a Chinese guard, then someone in a Terminal Hospital robe with a medic on the same grip of the cable, holding him to make sure he didn’t fall. I knew the face but not the name; I had seen him at one of the farewell parties, maybe at several of them, a small, elderly black man who had been out two or three times without scoring. His eyes were open and clear enough, but he looked infinitely fatigued. He looked without astonishment at the crowd around the shaft, and then was out of sight.

  I looked away and saw that Louise was weeping quietly, her eyes closed. Klara had an arm around her. In the movement of the crowd I managed to get next to Kiara and look a question at her. “It’s a Five,” she said softly. “Her daughter was in a Three.’

  I knew Louise had heard that, so I patted her and said: “I’m sorry, Louise,” and then a space opened at the lip of the shaft and I peered down.

  I caught a quick glimpse of what ten or twenty million do looked like. It was a stack of hexagonal boxes made out of Heechee metal, not more than half a meter across and less than a meter tall. Then Francy Hereira was coaxing, “Come on, Rob, get back will you?” And I stepped away from the shaft while another Inspector in a hospital robe came up. She didn’t see me as she went past; in fact her eyes were closed. But I saw her. It was Sheri.

  Chapter 21

  “I feel pretty foolish, Sigfrid,” I say.

  “Is there some way I can make you feel more comfortable?”

  “You can drop dead.” He has done his whole room over in nursery-school motifs, for Christ’s sake. And the worst part is Sigfrid himself. He is trying me out with a surrogate mother this time. He is on the mat with me, a big stuffed doll, the size of a human being, warm, soft, made out of something like a bath towel stuffed with foam. It feels good, but- “I guess I don’t want you to treat me like a baby,” I say, my voice muffled because I’m pressing my face against the toweling.

  “Just relax, Robbie. It’s all right.”

  “In a pig’s ass it is.”

  He pauses, and then reminds me: “You were going to tell me about your dream.”

  “Yech.”

  “I’m sorry, Robbie?”

  “I mean I don’t really want to talk about it. Sigfrid,” I say quickly, lifting my mouth away from the toweling, “I might as well do what you want. It was about Sylvia, kind of.”

  “Kind of, Robbie?”

  “Well, she didn’t look like herself, exactly. More like — I don’t know, someone older, I think. I haven’t thought of Sylvia in years really. We were both kids…”

  “Please go on, Robbie,” he says after a moment.

  I put my arms around him, looking up contentedly enough at the wall of circus-poster animals and clowns. It is not in the least like any bedroom I occupied as a child, but Sigfrid knows enough about me already, there is no reason for me to tell him that.

  “The dream, Robbie?”

  “I dreamed we were working in the mines. It wasn’t actually food mines. It was, physically, I would say more like the inside of a Five — one of the Gateway ships, you know? Sylvia was in a kind of a tunnel that went off it.”

  “The tunnel went off?”

  “Now, don’t rush me into some kind of symbolism, Sigfrid. I know about vaginal images and all that. When I say ’went off,’ I mean that the tunnel started in the place where I was and led direction away from it.” I hesitate, then tell
him the hard part: “Then her tunnel caved in. Sylvia was trapped.”

  I sit up. “What’s wrong with that,” I explain, “is that it really couldn’t happen. You only tunnel in order to plant charge to loosen up the shale. All the real mining is scoop-shovel stuff. Sylvia’s job would never have put her in that position.”

  “I don’t think it matters if it could really have happened, Robbie.”

  “I suppose not. Well, there was Sylvia, trapped inside the collapsed tunnel. I could see the heap of shale stirring. It wasn’t real shale. It was fluffy stuff, more like scrap paper. She had a shovel and she was digging her way out. I thought she was going to be all right. She was digging a good escape hole for herself. I waited her to come out… only she didn’t come out.”

  Sigfrid, in his incarnation as a teddy-bear, lies warm and snuggly in my arms. It is good to feel him there. Of course, he isn’t in there. He isn’t really anywhere, except maybe in the central stores in Washington Heights, where the big machines are kept. All I have is his remote-access terminal in a bunny suit.

  “Is there anything else, Robbie?”

  “Not really. Not part of the dream, anyway. But — well, have a feeling. I feel as though I kicked Klara in the head to keep her from coming out. As though I was afraid the rest of the tunnel was going to fall on me.”

  Out in the holes where the Heechee hid,

  Out in the caves of the stars,

  Sliding the tunnels they slashed and slid,

  Healing the Heechee-hacked scars,

  We’re coming through!

  Little lost Heechee, we’re looking for you.