The Gateway Trip h-5

by Pohl Frederik

  To deal with that problem, the Gateway Corporation started a program of paying science bonuses to the explorers who came back with great pictures and instrument readings but nothing commercial to sell.

  That was virtuous of the Gateway Corporation, to pay off for pure, noncommercial knowledge. It was also a good way of coaxing more hungry humans into those scary and often deadly little ships.

  By the time the Gateway Corporation had been in operation for two full years more than one hundred trips had set out, and sixty-two of them had returned, more or less safely. (Not counting the odd prospector who arrived dead, dying, or scared out of his wits.)

  The ships had visited at least forty different stars-all kinds of

  stars: baby blue-white giants, immense and short-lived, like Regulus and Spica and Altair; yellow normal-sequence stars like Procyon A and their dwarf counterparts, like Procyon B; staid G-type stars like the Sun, and their giant yellow relatives, like Capella. The red giants, of the types of Aldebran and Arcturus, and their supergiant counterparts, like Betelgeuse and Antares . . . and their tiny red-dwarf relatives, like Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359.

  The astronomers were thrilled. Every trip's harvest triumphantly supported much of what they thought they had known about the birth and death of stars-and demanded quick revisions of much else that they thought they had known, but hadn't. The masters of the Corporation were less delighted. It was all very well to expand the horizons of astronomical science, but the pictures of the twentieth white dwarf looked pretty much like the pictures of

  the first. The hungry billions of Earth could not be fed on astronomical photographs. They already had a number of astronomical observatories in orbit. They weren't pleased to see their once-in-alifetime treasure trove turned into just one more of them.

  But even the Corporation had to be pleased at some of the things the prospectors brought back.

  MISSION PULSAR

  The first big science bonus was paid to a man named Chou Yengbo, and he might not have earned it if he hadn't happened to

  have taken a few elementary science courses before he discovered that even a college degree couldn't get you a decent job, those days, in Shensi Province.

  When Chou's ship came out of the faster-than-light drive, Chou had no trouble figuring out which objects the Heechee had set the controls for.

  Actually there were three objects in view. They were weird. The first was wholly unlike anything Chou had ever seen before, even in the holograms of his astronomy course. It wasn't quite like anything any other human being had e'er seen before, either, except in imagination. The object was an irregular, cone-shaped splash of light, and even on the viewscreen its colors hurt his eyes.

  What the thing looked like was a searchlight beam fanning out through patches of mist. When Chou looked more carefully, magnifying the image, he saw that there was another beam like it, sketchier and fainter and fanning out in the opposite direction. And between the two points of the cones formed by those beams, the third object was something almost too tiny to see.

  When he put the magnification up to max, he saw that that something was a puny-looking, unhealthily colored little star.

  It was much too small to be a normal star. That limited the possibilities; even so, it took Chou some time to realize that he was in the presence of a pulsar.

  Then those Astronomy 101 lessons came back to him. It was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, back in the middle of the twentieth century, who had calculated the genesis of neutron stars. His model was simple. A large star, Chandrasekhar said, uses up its hydrogen fuel and then collapses. It throws off most of the outer sections of itself as a supernova. What is left falls in toward the star's center, at almost the speed of light, compressing most of the star's mass into a volume smaller than a planet-smaller, in fact, than some mountains. This particular sort of collapse can only happen to big stars, Chandrasekhar calculated. They had to be 1.4 times as massive as Earth's Sun, at least, and so that number was called Chandrasekhar's Limit.

  After that supernova explosion and collapse has happened, the object that remains-star heavy, asteroid sized-is a "neutron star." It has been crushed together so violently by its own immense gravitation that the electrons of its atoms are driven into its protons, creating the chargeless particles called neutrons. Its substance is so dense that a cubic inch of it weighs two million tons or so; it is like compressing the hugest of Earth's old supertankers into something the size of a coin. Things do not leave a neutron star easily; with that immense, concentrated mass pulling things down to its surface, escape velocity becomes something like 120,000 miles a second. More than that: its rotational energy has been "compressed," too. The blue-white giant star that used to turn on its axis once a week is now a superheavy asteroid-sized thing that whirls around many times a second.

  Chou knew there were observations that he had to make-magnetic, X-ray, infrared, and many others. The magnetometer readings were the most important. Neutron stars have superfluid cores and so, as they rotate, they generate intense magnetic fields-just like the Earth. Not really just like the Earth, though, because the neutro1 star's magnetic field, too, is compressed. It is one trillion times stronger than the Earth's. And as it spins it generates radiation. The radiation can't simply flow out from all parts of the star at once-the lines of magnetic force confine it. It can only escape at the neutron star's north and south magnetic poles.

  The magnetic poles of any object aren't necessarily in the same place as its poles of rotation. (The Earth's north magnetic pole is hundreds of miles away from the point where the meridians of longitude meet.) So all the neutron star's radiated energy pours out in a beam, around and around, pointing a little, or sometimes a lot, away from its true rotational poles.

  So that was the explanation of the thing Chou was seeing. The cones were the two polar beams from the star that lay between them, north and south, fanning out from its poles. Of course, Chou couldn't see the beams themselves. What he saw were the places

  where they illuminated tenuous clouds of gas and dust as they spread out.

  The important thing to Chou was that no Earthly astronomer had ever seen them that way. The only way anyone on Earth ever could see the beam from a neutron star was by the chance of being somewhere along the rim of the conical shape the beams described as they rotated. And then what they saw was a high-speed flicker, so fast and regular that the first observer to spot one thought it was the signal from an alien intelligence. They called the signal an "LGM" (for Little Green Men) until they figured out what was causing that sort of stellar behavior.

  Then they called the things "pulsars."

  Chou got a four-hundred-thousand-dollar science bonus for what he had discovered. He wasn't greedy. He took it and returned to Earth, where he found a new career lecturing to women's clubs and college audiences on what it was like to be a Heechee prospector. He was a great success, because he was one of the first of the breed to return to Earth. alive.

  Later returnees were less fortunate. For instance, there was-MISSION HALO

  In some ways Mission Halo was the saddest and most beautiful of all. The mission had been written off as lost, but that turned out to be wrong. The ship wasn't lost. Only its crew was.

  The ship was an unarmored Three. When it came back its arrival was a surprise to everyone. The ship had been gone over three years. It was a certainty that nobody could have survived so long a trip. In fact, no one had. When the hatch crews on Gateway got the ports open, recoiling from the stench inside, they discovered that Jan Mariekiewicz, Rolph Stret, and Lech Szelikowjtz had left a record of their experiences. It was read with compassion by the other prospectors, and with rejoicing by astronomers.

  "When we reached two hundred days without turnaround," Stret had written in his diary, "we knew we were out of luck. We drew straws. I won. Maybe I should say I lost, but, anyway, Jan and Lech took their little suicide pills, and I put their bodies in the freezer.

  "Turnaround came finally at 27
1 days. I knew for sure that I wasn't going to make it either, not even with only me alive in the ship. So I've tried rigging everything on automatic. I hope it works. If the ship gets back, please pass on our messages."

  As it happened, the messages the crew left never got delivered. There was no one to deliver them to. The messages were all ddressed to other Gateway prospectors who had been part of the same shipment up from Central Europe, and that batch wasn't one of the lucky ones. Every one of them had been lost in their own ships.

  But the pictures the ship brought back belonged to the whole world.

  Stret's jury-rigging had worked. The ship had stopped at its destination. The instruments had thoroughly mapped everything in sight. Then the ship's return had been triggered automatically, while Stret's corpse lay bloating under the controls.

  The record showed that their ship had been outside the Milky Way galaxy entirely.

  It brought back the first pictures ever seen of our galaxy from outside. It showed a couple of fairly nearby stars and one great, distant globular cluster-the stars and clusters of the spherical halo that surrounds our galaxy-but most of all it showed our Milky Way galaxy itself, from core to farthest spiral wisp, with its great, familiar octopus arms: the Perseus arm, the Cygnus arm, the Sagittarius-Carina arm (with our own little Orion arm, the small spur that held the Earth, nearby), as well as the large, distant arm that Earthly astronomers had never seen before. They called it simply "Far Arm" at first, but then it was renamed the StretMariekiewicz-Szelikowitz arm to honor the dead discoverers. And in the center of it all was the great bellying octopus-body mass of core stars, laced with gas and dust clouds, showing the beginnings of the new growing spiral structures that might in another hundred million years become new arms themselves.

  They also showed the effects of a structure more interesting still, but not in enough detail to be recognized just then-not until some other events had taught human beings what to look for in the core. All the same, they were beautiful pictures.

  Since no one returned from Mission Halo alive, there wasn't even a science bonus due, but the Gateway Corporation voted a special exception to the rules. Five million dollars was voted for the heirs of Mariekiewicz, Szelikowitz, and Stret.

  It was a generous gesture but, as it turned out, a very inexpensive one. The award went unclaimed. Like so many Gateway prospectors, the three who had manned the ship had no families that

  anyone could find, and so the Gateway Corporation's bursar quietly, and philosophically, returned the cash to the Corporation's general funds.

  The first, best, and brightest hope of any exploration crew was to find a really nice planet with really nice treasures on it. Ultimately some of them did, of course, but it took a while. For a good many orbits after the systematic exploration program began the crews went out and came back with nothing but pictures and hard-luck stories-when they came back at all.

  But some of the things they had seen were wonderful. Volya Shadchuk took a One into the heart of a planetary nebula, green-tinged with the radiation from oxygen atoms, and collected fifty thousand dollars. Bill Merrian saw a recurring nova system, red giant's gases being sucked onto a white dwarf; luckily not enough matter had accreted while he was there to blow off in a noval explosion, but he got the fifty thousand and ten percent more for "danger bonus." And then there were the Grantlands.

  There were five of the Grantlands-two brothers, their wives, and the eldest son of one of the couples. They reached a globular cluster-ten thousand old stars, mostly red, mostly sliding toward the sunset at the lower right side of the Hertzspung-Russell diagram as they aged. The cluster was in the galactic halo and, of course, the trip was a long one. None of them survived. The trip took 314 days, and all of them were alive at the time of arrival (but existing on scant rations). They took their pictures. The last of them, the young second wife of one of the brothers, died thirty-three days into the return trip; but the pictures they had taken survived.

  The three Schoen sisters were no luckier. They didn't come back at all, either. Again, their ship did, but thoroughly racked and scorched, and of course their bodies inside were barely recognizable.

  But they, too, had taken a few pictures before they died. They had been in a reflection nebula-after analysis it was determined that

  it was the Great Nebula in Orion, actually visible to the naked eye from Earth. (American Indians called it "the smoking star.") The Schoen sisters must have known they were in trouble as soon as they came out of drive, because they weren't really in space anymore. Oh, it was close to a vacuum-as people on Earth measure a vacuum-but there were as many as three hundred atoms to the cubic centimeter, hundreds of times as many as there should hav~ been in interstellar space.

  Still, they looked around, and they started their cameras-just barely. They didn't have much time.

  There are four bright young stars in the Orion Nebula, the so-called Trapezium; it is in such nebulae that gas clouds fall together and are born as stars. Astronomers conjectured that the Heechee knew this, and the reason the ship had been set to go there was that Heechee astronomers had been interested in studying the conditions that lead to star formation.

  But the Heechee had set that program half a million years before.

  A lot had happened in those half million years. There was now a fifth body, an "almost" star, in the Orion Nebula, formed after the Heechee had taken their last look at the area. The new body was called the Becklin-Neugebauer object; it was in its early

  hydrogen-burning stage, less than a hundred thousand years old. And it seemed that the Schoen sisters had the bad luck to come almost inside it.

  MISSION NAKED BLACK HOLE

  The crew was William Sakyetsu, Marianna Morse, Hal M'Buna, Richard Smith, and Irma Malatesta. All of them had been Out before-Malatesta had done it five times-but luck hadn't favored any of their ventures. None of them had yet made a big enough score to pay their Gateway bills.

  So for their mission they were careful to choose an armored Five with a record of success. The previous crew in that ship had earned a "nova" science bonus in it, managing to come close enough to a recurring nova to get some good pictures, though not so close that they didn't live through the experience. They had collected a total of seven and a half million dollars in bonus money and had gone back to Earth, rejoicing. But before they left they gave their ship a name. They called it Victory.

  When Sakyetsu and the others in his crew got to their destination they looked for the planet-or the star, or the Heechee artifact, or the object of any interesting sort-that might have been its target.

  They were disappointed. There wasn't anything like that to be found anywhere around. There were stars in sight, sure. But the nearest of them was nearly eight light-years away. By all indications they had landed themselves in one of the most boringly empty regions of interstellar space in the galaxy. They could not find even a nearby gas cloud.

  They didn't give up. They were experienced prospectors. They spent a week checking out every possibility. First, they made sure they hadn't missed a nearby star: with interferometry they could measure the apparent diameter of some of the brighter stars; by spectral analysis they could determine their types; combining the two gave them an estimate of distance.

  Their first impression had been right. It was a pretty empty patch of sky they had landed in.

  There was, to be sure, one really spectacular object in view-the word Marianna used was "glorious"-a globular cluster, with thousands of bright stars interweaving their orbits in a volume a few hundred light-years across. It was certainly spectacular. It dominated the sky. It was much nearer to them than any such object had ever been to a human eye before. But it was still at least a thousand light-years away.

  A globular cluster is an inspiring sight. It was a long way from Sakyetsu and his ship Victory, but by the standards of Earthly astronomers that was nothing at all. Globular clusters live on the outer fringe of the galaxy. There aren't any in the crowded spir
al-arm regions like the neighborhood of Earth. There are almost none less than twenty thousand light-years from Earth, and here was one a twentieth as far-and thus, by the law of inverse squares, four hundred times as bright. It was not an unusually large specimen, as globular clusters go; the big ones run upward of a million stars, and this one was nowhere near that. It was big enough to be exciting to look at, all the same.

  But it was neither big enough nor near enough for Victory's instruments to reveal any more than Earth's own orbiting observatories, with their far more powerful mirrors and optical systems, had seen long ago.

  So there was very little chance that the instruments on Victory could earn them any kind of decent bonus. Still, those instruments were all they had. So the crew doggedly put them to work. They photographed the cluster in red light, blue light, ultraviolet light, and several bands of the infrared. They measured its radio flux in a thousand frequencies, and its gamma rays and X-rays. And then, one sleeping period, while only H~tl M'Buna was awake at the instruments, he saw the thing that made the trip worthwhile.

  His shout woke everybody up. "Something's eating the cluster!"

  Marianna Morse was the first to get to the screens with him, but the whole crew flocked to see. The fuzzy circle of the cluster wasn't a circle anymore. An arc had been taken out of its lower rim. It looked like a cookie a child had bitten into.

  But it wasn't a bite.

  As they watched, they could see the differences. The stars of the cluster weren't disappearing. They were just, slowly, moving out of the way of-something.