The Gateway Trip h-5

by Pohl Frederik

The name of the man who took that first trip into the unknown was Lieutenant Senior Grade Ernest T. Kaplan. He was a marine officer from the U.S. Space Navy cruiser Roanoke. Kaplan wasn't a scientist. He was so far from being a scientist that he had been given strict orders not to touch anything, but anything, on the Gateway asteroid. The only reason he was on the asteroid in the first place was that he had been ordered there as a guard, to keep anyone else from touching anything while the scientists who came hurrying up from Earth tried to figure out just what the devil they had here.

  But Kaplan had a mind full of itchy curiosity, and what's more, he had access to the parked ships. And one day, for lack of anything better to do, he sat down in the one ship that happened to have been equipped with food lockers and air and water tanks, just in

  case anyone got the locks closed and was trapped inside. Kaplan thought for a while about old Sylvester Macklin. Just for the fun of it, he practiced opening and closing the locks a few times. Then he played with the knurled wheels for a while, watching the changing colors.

  Then he squeezed the funny-looking little thing at the base.

  That was what later, more expert pilots would call "the launch teat," and as soon as he squeezed it Lieutenant Senior Grade Kaplan became the second human being to fly a Heechee ship. He was gone.

  Ninety-seven days later he was back at the Gateway asteroid.

  It was a miracle that he'd managed to return; it was even a bigger miracle that he was still alive. The supplies in the ship had been meant to last for a few days, not for months. For drinking water he had been reduced to catching the condensation from his own sweat and emanations as it beaded the lander port. For the last five weeks he hadn't eaten anything at all. He was scrawny and filthy and half out of his mind

  But he had been there. His ship had orbited a planet far out from a small, reddish star; a planet that had so little light that it seemed only grayish, with swirling yellow clouds-a little the way Jupiter or Saturn or Uranus might have appeared, if their orbits had been as far from the Sun as the twilit Pluto.

  The first reaction of the United States government was to courtmartial him. He certainly deserved it. He even expected it.

  But before the court was convened the news services carried the word that the Brazilian parliament, carried away at the thought of sharing in the exploration of the galaxy, had voted Kaplan a million-dollar cash bonus. Then the Soviets not only made him an honorary citizen but invited him to Moscow to receive the Order of Lenin. The dam had burst. Every talk show on every television network in the world was begging him to be a guest.

  You couldn't courtmartial a hero.

  So the American president jumped Lieutenant Kaplan to full colonel and then to general, in the same orders that grounded Colonel (or General) Kaplan forever. Then the president called all the spacefaring nations together to decide just how to handle this situation.

  The result was the Gateway Corporation.

  Colonel Kaplan, like everyone before him, had failed to make one vital discovery, and that was that each one of the Heechee ships was actually two ships. Part One was the interstellar vessel that traveled faster than light to a programmed destination. Part Two was the smaller, simpler landing craft that nestled into the base of the ship itself.

  The interstellar ships themselves, with their unreproducible faster-than-light drives, were totally beyond the understanding of human scientists. It was a long time before any Earth person knew how they worked. Those who tried too hard to find out generally died because their drive engines blew up. The landers were much simpler. Basically, they were ordinary rockets. True, the guidance system was Heechee, but fortunately for the Gateway prospectors the controls turned out to be even simpler to operate than the faster-than-light vessels. The prospectors could use the lander successfully, even if they didn't know exactly how it worked, just as any average seventeen-year-old can learn to drive a car without any comprehension of the geometry of steering linkages or gear chains.

  So when any Gateway prospector came out of FTL drive and found himself in the vicinity of an interesting-looking planet, he could use the lander for the purpose for which it was designed: to go down to the surface of the planet and see what it had to offer.

  That was what Gateway was all about.

  The planets were where you had to go, because they were the most likely places to look for the kind of precious thing the prospector could bring back and turn in to make his fortune-and, naturally, to add to the Corporation's.

  It was easy to describe the kind of planets they were looking for. They were looking for another Earth. Or something enough like Earth, anyway, to support some form of organic life, because inorganic processes hardly ever produced anything worth the carrying space it took to bring it home.

  The most disappointing planets were the closest. When the Heechee came to Earth's solar system they gave it a good looking-over, and some of the ships on the Gateway asteroid reflected that. They still had stored navigation codes for places so near that human be-

  ings could have visited them on their own-if they wanted to. Some of them in fact had already been reached by the crude human rockets-places like Venus, the Moon, Mars's south polar ice cap. Some were hardly worth the trouble, like Saturn's moon, Dione.

  The prospectors were after bigger game than that. They wanted planets no man or woman had ever seen. They found a bewildering array of them.

  The planets they reached in the Magic Mystery Bus Rides came in all shapes and sizes. There were two basic types. There were the orbiting rocks (like Earth; solid and landable-on), and then there were the would-be stars (like Jupiter; the gas giants, that were just a bit too small to start nuclear fusion in their cores and turn themselves into suns). No Gateway prospector ever landed on a gas giant, of course. They had nothing solid enough to land on. (That was a pity, for a few of them were interesting anyway .. . but that's another story.)

  It was the orbiting rocks that were prospected as vigorously as a few thousand scared, hurried human beings could explore them. There were plenty of the solid planets. Most of them had no apparent life at all, unfortunately. They were too far from their sun, so they were eternally frozen, or they were too close, so they were as scorched as the planet Mercury. Many of them had too little atmosphere (or none at all), like Mars (or the Moon). Some of them had satellites of their own, like the Earth's Moon. Some of the target objects were satellites, but big ones, big enough to retain atmospheres and to land on.

  There were something over two hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, and a hellish lot of them possessed planets of one kind or another. Even the Heechee ships weren't programmed to set a course for all the possible planets to explore. There were hardly course settings for one planet in a hundred thousand, in fact. Still, that left plenty for the Gateway prospectors to visit-many more of them than a few thousand men and women could reach in the course of a few dozen years.

  So the first discovery the Gateway prospectors made was that there were plenty of planets to choose from. Human astronomers were glad to know that, because they'd always wondered, and the Corporation didn't even have to pay a discovery bonus to find it out: all they had to do was add up the findings of the returning explorers. It developed that binary stars didn't ordinarily have planets. Solitary stars, on the other hand, generally did. Astronomers thought the reason for that probably had something to do with conserving rotational velocity. When two stars condensed together out of a single gas cloud they seemed to take care of each other's excess rotational energy. Bachelor stars apparently had to dissipate it on smaller satellites.

  Hardly any of the planets were really Earth-like, though.

  There were a lot of tests for that sort of thing that could be applied from a considerable distance. Temperature sensing, for one. Organic life didn't seem to develop except where water could exist in its liquid phase, which was to say in the narrow, 100-degree band between about 270 and 370 Kelvin. At lower temperatures the stuff was useless ice. At hi
gher ones water wasn't usually there at afl, because the heat vaporized it and the sunlight-from whatever sun was nearby-split the hydrogen out of the water molecule and it was lost into space.

  That meant that each star had a quite narrow area of possible planetary orbits that might be worth investigating. As planets didn't care whether or not they were going to be hospitable to life when they were condensing out of the interstellar gases, most of them took orbits inside that life zone, or in the cold spaces outside it.

  Most alien life, like most Earthly life, was based on the chemistry of the carbon atoms. Carbon was the best of all possible elements for forming useful long-chain compounds, and happily it is so frequently found that it is the fourth most common element in the universe. Most alien life had something like DNA, too. That

  wasn't for any panspermian reason, but simply because systems like DNA provided a cheap and efficient way for organisms to replicate themselves.

  So most living things followed certain basic guidelines. That was probably because they all started in pretty much the same way, since there is a timetable to the development of life. The first step is just chemistry: inorganic chemicals get forced to react with each other, under the spur of some sort of externally supplied energy-usually the light from their nearby star. Then crude, single-celled little things appear. These are only factories whose raw materials are the other inorganic chemicals in the soup that surrounds them. They, too, use the energy of sunlight (or whatever) to process the inorganic chemicals into more of themselves, and that's about all they do for a living. Since they are photosynthetic, you might call them plants.

  Then these primitive "plants" themselves turn out to be pretty rich sources of assimilable chemicals. Since they've gone to the trouble of concentrating the more appetizing inorganic compounds into a preprocessed form, it is only a question of time until some of them learn a new diet. These new ones don't eat the raw materials of the environment. They eat their own weaker, more primitive cousins. Call this new batch of creatures "animals." The first animals aren't usually much. They consist of a mouth at one end, an anus at the other, and some sort of processing system in between. That's all they are. But then, that's all they need to be to feast on their neighbors.

  Then things get more complicated.

  Evolution begins to happen. The fittest survive, pretty much the way Charles Darwin figured it out as he fondled his captive finches on board the Beagle. The plants go on making appetizing chemicals for the animals to feast on, and the animals go on feasting on the plants and on each other-but some plants accidentally develop traits that give their predators trouble, and so those plants survive; and some animals learn tricks to get around those defenses. Later generations of animals develop senses to locate their prey more

  efficiently, and musculatures to catch it, and ultimately complex behavioral systems (like the web of a spider or the stalking of a great cat) that make their predation more and more successful. (Then, of course, the plants, or the herbivores, or the less successful predators begin to develop defense mechanisms of their own: the poisons in a shrub's leaf, the quills of a porcupine, the fleet legs of a gazelle.) The competition never stops getting more intense, and more sophisticated on all parts-until, finally, some of the creatures become "intelligent." But they take a lot longer to evolve . . . and it took the Gateway prospectors a lot longer to find any of them, too.

  In the myriad worlds that the Heechee had explored-and to which the human Gateway prospectors followed them hundreds of thousands of years later-all those basics of the evolution of life were played out a thousand times, with a thousand variations. The variations were sometimes quite surprising. For instance, Earthly plants have one conspicuous trait in common: they don't move. But there wasn't any reason why that trait had to be universal, and in fact it wasn't. The Gateway prospectors foux~d bushes that rolled from place to place, setting roots down to one side and pulling them up on the other, like slow-motion tumble-weeds as they sought the richest soils and the best access to groundwater and the surest sunlight. Then, too, Earthly animals don't normally bother with photosynthesis. But in the seas of other worlds there were things like jellyfish that floated to the surface by day to generate their own hydrocarbons from the sun and the air, and then sank down to feast on algal things at night. Earthly corals stay in one place. Prospectors found some unearthly ones-or, at least, some unearthly things that looked more or less like corals-that flew apart into their component little animals when the coast was clear, to eat and mate, and then returned to form collective rockhard fortresses when the prowling marine predators approached.

  Most of these things were useless to any prospector whose big interest was in making a fortune. A few were not. There was one

  good feature to finding an organism that was worth something, and that was that it was an easy import. You didn't have to bring tons of material back to Gateway. All you had to do was bring enough of some plant or animal back to breed others back on Earth, since living things were glad to reproduce themselves for you anywhere.

  The zoos of Earth began to expand, and so did Earth's aquaria, and its pet stores. Every fashionable family was sure to own its exotic windowbox of alien ferns, or its furry little pet from the planet of some other star.

  Before the Gateway prospectors could make an honest buck in the pet trade, though, they had to find the living things in the first place. That wasn't easy. Even when life was apparently possible, sometimes it was there, and sometimes it was not. The way to check for that was to look for chemical signatures in the atmosphere. (Oh, yes, the hopefully life-bearing planet had to possess an atmosphere, too, but that wasn't a serious constraint. Most planets in the habitable zone did.) If the atmosphere turned out to contain reactive gases that hadn't reacted-say, if it held free oxygen, with reducing substances like carbon or iron somewhere availably around-then it

  stood to reason that something must be continually replenishing those gases. That something was probably, in some sense, alive.

  (Later on the prospectors found there were exceptions to these simple rules ... but not many.)

  The very first planet that turned out to have living things on it was a solid ten when studied from orbit. Almost everything was there: blue skies, blue seas, fleecy white clouds and plenty of oxygen-meaning some antientropic (i.e., living) thing to keep it that way.

  Prospectors Anatol and Sherba Mirsky and their partner, Leonie Tilden, slapped each other's backs in exultation as they prepared to land. It was their first mission-and they'd hit the jackpot right away.

  Naturally they celebrated. They opened the one bottle of wine they'd brought along. Ceremonially they made a recording announcing their discovery, punctuating it with the pop of the wine cork. They called the planet New Earth.

  Everything was going their way. They even thought it likely that they could figure out just where they were in the galaxy (a kind of knowledge usually hidden from the early Gateway prospectors, because there weren't any road signs on the way). But they had spotted the Magellanic Clouds in one direction and the Andromeda Nebula in another, and in still a third direction there was a tight, bright cluster that they were nearly sure was the Pleiades.

  The celebration was a bit premature. It had not occurred to them that one interesting color was missing in their view of New Earth from space, and that color was green.

  When Sherba Mirsky and Leonie Tilden went down to the surface of New Earth in the lander, what they landed on was bare rock. Nothing grew there. Nothing moved. Nothing flew in the sky. There were no flowering plants. There were no plants at all, at their elevation; there wasn't any soil for them to grow in. Soil hadn't reached those parts of the world yet.

  It was only one more disappointment to find that there wasn't much oxygen in its air, either-enough for a qualitative determination from orbit, yes, but nowhere near enough to breathe. For, although there certainly was life on New Earth, there just wasn't much of it yet. Most of what there was lived in the coastal shall
ows, with a few hardy adventurers just making a start in colonizing the shores-simple prokaryotic and eukaryotic denizens of the sludgy seas, with a few scraggly, mossy things that had struggled out onto the littoral.

  The trouble with New Earth was that it was a lot too new. It would take a billion years or so to get really interesting-or to pay Tilden, the Mirskys, and the Gateway Corporation back for the trouble of looking it over.

  Although it was planets that offered profits, planets were also the places where it was easiest to get killed. As long as a Gateway prospector stayed inside his ship he was well protected against most of the dangers of star wandering. It was when he landed that he exposed himself to unknown environments ... and often very hostile ones.

  For example, there was-MISSION PRETTY POISON

  A fifty-year-old Venezuelan named Juan Mendoza Santamaria was the first Gateway prospector to discover a really nice-looking planet. It had taken him forty-three days to get there, all alone in a One. That was well within his margins. He was not likely to run out of air, food, or water. What he worried about running out of was money. Mendoza had spent the last of his credits on a farewell party before he left the asteroid. If he came back empty-handed to Gateway his future was bleak. So he crossed himself and whispered a prayer of gratitude as he stepped out of his lander onto the alien soil.

  He was grateful, but he wasn't stupid. Therefore he was also cautious. Mendoza knew very well that if anything went wrong he

  was in serious trouble. There was no one within many light-years who could help him-in fact, there wasn't anybody, anywhere, who even knew where he was. So he wore his space suit at all times on the surface of the planet, and that turned out to be very fortunate for Juan Mendoza.

  The planet didn't look threatening at all. The plants were an odd shade of orange, the distant trees (or were they simply very tall grasses?) looked harmless, and there were no obviously threatening large animals. On the other hand, there wasn't much to be seen that looked immediately profitable, either. There weren't any signs of civilization-no great abandoned cities, no friendly alien intelligences to welcome him, no Heechee artifacts lying about waiting to be picked up. There wasn't even any kind of metallic structure, natural or otherwise, on the surface large enough to be detected by his lander's sensors as he came down. But, Mendoza reassured himself, the fact that there was any kind of life ought to be worth at least a science bonus. He identified both "plant" and "animal" life-