The Gateway Trip h-5

by Pohl Frederik

  at least some of the things moved, and some of them were firmly rooted in the soil.

  He took some samples of the plants, though they weren't impressive. He trekked painfully over to the "trees" and found that they were soft-bodied, like mushrooms. There weren't any large ferns or true grasses; but there was a kind of fuzzy moss that covered most of the soil, and there were things that moved on it. None of the moving things were very big. The largest life form Mendoza encountered was an "arthropod" about the size of his palm. The little beasts moved about in little herds, feeding on smaller beetly and buggy things, and they were covered with a dense "fur" of glassy white spicules, which made them look like herds of tiny sheep. Mendoza felt almost guilty as he trapped a few of the pretty little creatures, killed them, and put them, with samples of the smaller creatures they preyed on, in the sterile containers that would go back to Gateway.

  There wasn't anything else worth transporting. What the planet had that was really worthwhile was beauty. It had a lot of that.

  It was quite near-Mendoza estimated thirty or forty light-years-a bright, active gas cloud that he thought might be the Orion Nebula. (It wasn't, but like the one in Orion it was a nursery for bright young stars.) Mendoza happened to land in the right season of the year to appreciate it best, for as the planet's sun set on one horizon the nebula rose on the other. It came to fill the entire night sky, like a luminous, sea-green tapestry laced with diamonds, edged in glowing royal maroon. The "diamonds"-the brightest stars within the nebula-were orders of magnitude brighter even than Venus or Jupiter as seen from Earth, nearly as bright as Earth's full Moon. But they were point sources, not disks like the Moon, and they were almost painful to look upon.

  It was the beauty that struck Mendoza. He was not an articulate man. When he got back and filed his report he referred to the planet as "a pretty place," and so it was logged in the Gateway atlases as "Pretty Place."

  Mendoza got what he was after: a two-million-dollar science bonus for finding the planet at all, and the promise of a royalty share on whatever subsequent missions might discover on Pretty Place. That could have turned out to be really serious money. According to Gateway rules, if the planet was colonizable Mendoza would be collecting money from it for the rest of his life.

  Almost at once two other missions, both Fives, copied his settings and made the same trip.

  That was when they changed the name to Pretty Poison.

  The follow-up parties were not as cautious as Mendoza. They didn't keep their space suits on. They didn't have the natural protections that had been developed by Pretty Poison's own fauna, either. The local life had evolved to meet a real challenge; those furry silicon spikes were not for ornament. They were armor.

  It was a pity Mendoza hadn't completed his radiation checks, because those bright young stars in the nebula were not radiating visible light alone. They were powerful sources of ionizing radiation and hard ultraviolets. Four of the ten explorers came down with critical sunburn before they began to show signs of something worse. All of them, by the time they got back to Gateway, required total blood replacement, and two of them died anyway.

  It was a good thing that Mendoza was a prudent man. He hadn't spent his two million in wild carouse, expecting the vast royalties that might come as his percentage of all that colonizing his planet would bring about. The planet could not be inhabited by human beings. The royalties never came.

  MISSION BURNOUT

  Of the nearly thousand Heechee vessels found on Gateway, only a few dozen were armored, and most of those were Fives. An armored Three was a rarity, and when the crew of Felicia Monsanto, Greg Running Wolf, and Daniel Pursy set out in one they knew

  there was a certain element of danger; its course setting might take them to some really nasty place.

  But when they came out of FTL and looked around they had a moment of total rapture. The star they were near was quite sunlike, a G-2 the same size as Earth's Sol; they were orbiting a planet within the livable zone from the star, and their detectors showed Heechee metal in large quantities!

  The biggest concentration was not on the planet. It was an asteroid in an out-of-ecliptic orbit-a lot like Gateway-and it had to be another of those abandoned parking garages for Heechee ships! When they approached it they saw that the guess was correct

  But they also saw that the asteroid was empty. There were no ships. There were no artifacts at all. It was riddled with tunnels, just like Gateway, but the tunnels were vacant. Worse than that, the whole asteroid seemed in very bad shape, as though it were far older, and had had a far harder life, than Gateway itself.

  That puzzle cleared itself up when, with the last of their resources, two of the crew ventured down to the planet itself.

  It had been a living planet once. It had life now, in fact, but in scant numbers and only in its seas-algae and sea-bottom invertebrates, nothing more. Somehow or other the planet had been seared and ravaged ... and the culprit was in view.

  Six and a half light-years away from that system they discovered a neutron star. Like most neutron stars, it was a pulsar, but as their ship was nowhere near its axis of radiation they could hardly detect its jets. But it was a radio source, and their instruments showed that it was there, the remnant of a supernova.

  The rest of the story the experts on Gateway filled in for them when they returned. That solar system had been visited by the Heechee, but it was in a bad neighborhood. After the Heechee left-probably knowing what was about to happen-the supernova exploded. The planet had been baked. Its gases had been driven off, and most of its seas boiled away. As the hellish heat died away a thin new atmosphere was cooked out of the planet's crust, and the

  remaining water vapor had come down in incredible torrents of rain, scouring away mountain valleys, burying plains in silt, leaving nothing... and all of that had happened hundreds of thousands of years before.

  Monsanto, Running Wolf, and Pursy got a science bonus for their mission-a small one, a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to be divided among the three of them.

  By Gateway standards, that wasn't serious money. It was enough to pay their bills on Gateway for a few extra weeks. It was not nearly enough to retire on. All three of them shipped out again as soon as they found another berth, and from their next voyage none of them ever returned.

  Probably the Gateway prospectors should have taken it for granted that hospitable, Earth-like planets were bound to be a lot rarer than malignant ones. Their own solar system made that much clear. Anyway, all those years of listening to Project Ozma radio signals should have taught them that much.

  What they found out was that there was a myriad different kinds of hostile environments. There was Eta Carina Seven; it was the right size, it had air, it even had water-when it wasn't frozen, anyway. But Eta Carina Seven had a highly eccentric orbit. It was pretty well iced over, though still on its way to its frigid aphelion, and there were terrible storms. One lander never came back at all. Three of the others were damaged, or lost at least one crew member.

  Mendoza was not the only one to find a planet that looked nice but turned out to be poison. One pleasing-looking planet was well vegetated, but the vegetation was all toxicodendrons. They were far worse than Earth's poison ivy. The slightest touch meant blisters, agonizing itching pain, and anaphylactic shock. On the first mission to it everyone who landed on its surface died of allergic reactions, and only the crew member who stayed with the ship in orbit was able to get back to Gateway.

  But once in a while-oh, very seldom-there was a good one.

  The happiest of all, in the first decade of Gateway's operation, was the mission of Margaret Brisch, usually called "Peggy."

  Peggy Brisch went out in a One. She found what was really another Earth. In fact, in some ways it was nicer than Earth ever was. Not only were there no toxicodendrons to kill anyone who touched, or any nearby star with lethal radiation, there were not even any large, dangerous animals.

  There was only one thing wro
ng with Peggy's Planet. It would have been an ideal place to take Earth's overflow population, if only it hadn't been located a good nineteen hundred light-years away.

  There was no way to get to it except on a Heechee ship. And the largest Heechee ship carried only five people.

  The colonization of Peggy's Planet would have to wait.

  First and last, the Gateway prospectors found more than two hundred planets with significant life. It drove the taxonomists happily crazy. Generations of doctoral candidates had dissertation material that could not fail to win their degrees, and hard work simply to find names for the thirty or forty million new species the prospectors found for them.

  They didn't have that many names to spare, of course. The best they could do was assign classification numbers and note the descriptions. There was no hope of establishing genera or even families, although all the descriptions were fed into the databanks and a lot of computer time went into trying to discover relationships. The best descriptions were generic; DNA, or something like it, was pretty nearly universal. The next best were morphological. Most living things on Earth share such common architectural features as the rod (indispensable for limbs and bones in general) and the cylinder (internal organs, torsos, and so on), because they provide the most strength and carrying capacity you can get for the money. For the same reasons, so did most of the galaxy's bestiary. Not always,

  though. Arcangelo Pelieri's crew found a mute world, full of soft-bodied things that had never developed bones or chitin, soundless as earthworms or jellyfish. Opal Cudwallader reached a planet where, the scientists deduced, repeated extinctions had kept knocking off land animals as they developed. Its principal creature, like Earthly pinnipeds and cetaceans, was a former land-dweller returned to the sea, and nearly everything else was related. It was as though Darwin's finches had colonized an entire planet.

  And so on and so on, until the explorers began to think they had found every possible variation on water-based, oxygen-breathing life.

  Perhaps they almost had.

  But then they found the Sluggards-the same race the Heechee had known as the Slow Swimmers-and took another look at the hitherto unimagined possible flora and fauna of the gas giants.

  So they had been wrong in their basic assumption that life required the chemistry of a solid planet to evolve. That was a shock to their scientists . . . but not nearly the shock that came a bit later, when they discovered that life didn't require chemistry at all.

  Planets were nice, and pictures of stars were nice, but what everyone really wanted were some more samples of Heechee technology. There wasn't any doubt that there was some of the stuff waiting to be found-somewhere. The ships proved that. The little morsels picked up in the tunnels of Venus had proved it even earlier. But they just whetted the human appetite for more of these wonders.

  Fourteen months after the program officially started, a mission got lucky.

  Their ship was what was generally called a Five, but the system had not yet begun to operate in a standardized way. This time only four volunteers went along. They were officially chosen by the four Earth powers that had established the Gateway Corporation (the Martians took an interest later), and so they were an American, a Chinese, a Soviet, and a Brazilian. They had learned from the experience of Colonel Kaplan and others who had gone before. They brought along enough food, water, and oxygen to last them for six months; they were taking no chances this time.

  As it happened, they didn't need all those provisions. Their ship

  brought them back in forty-nine days, and they didn't come back empty-handed.

  Their destination had turned out to be an orbit around a planet about the size of the Earth. They had managed to make the lander work, and three of them had actually used it to set foot on the surface of the planet.

  For the first time in human history, men walked on the surface of a heavenly body that was not part of the Sun's entourage.

  First impressions were a bit disappointing. The four-power party discovered quickly enough that the planet had had some bad times. Its surface was seared, as though by great heat, and parts of it made their radiation detectors squeal. They knew they could not stay there long. But a mile or less from the lander, down a barren slope from the mountaintop mesa where they had landed, they found some rock and metal formations that looked artificial, and poking around them they dug up three items they thought worth bringing home. One was a flat tile with a triangular design still visible on its

  glazed surface. The second was a ceramic object about the size of a cigar, with thread markings-a bolt? The third was a yard-long metal cylinder, made of chromium and pierced with a couple of holes; it could have been a musical instrument, or part of a machine-even a Hilsch tube.

  Whatever they were, they were artifacts.

  When the four-power crew proudly displayed their trophies back on the Gateway asteroid, they created an immense stir. None of the three looked like a major technological breakthrough. Nevertheless, if such things could be found, then there were certainly others-and no doubt things that would be of a lot more practical value.

  That was when the interstellar gold rush began in earnest.

  It was a long time before anyone got that lucky again. Overall, the statistics on missions out of the Gateway asteroid showed that four out of five trips came back with nothing to show but some pictures and instrument readings. Fifteen percent never came back at all. It was only one ship out of twenty that brought back any tangible piece of Heechee technology, and most of those things were

  only curiosities-but the very few that were more than curiosities were treasures beyond price.

  They were few and far between, to be sure. The exploration of Venus had shown that was probable, for in all the hundreds of miles of Heech~e tunnels under the surface of the planet Venus no more than a dozen gadgets had been found.

  To be sure, some of those meant big profits for those who learned to copy them. The anisokinetic punch was a marvel. Hammer it on one end, and the force of the blow came out at the side. What was even more marvelous was that scientists managed to figure out how it worked, and its principle had applications in every area of construction, manufacture, and even home repair. The fire-pearls were a mystery. So were the so-called prayer fans.

  Then, of course, humans reached the Gateway asteroid, and that fleet of ships was the biggest treasure trove of all. But all there was on the asteroid were the ships themselves. The ships were empty of anything but their operating gear. The whole asteroid was empty, almost surgically clean . . . as though the Heechee had deliberately left the ships but removed everything else that could be of value.

  Over a period of twenty years and more the Gateway explorers went out to seek whatever could be found. They came back with pictures and stories, and kinds of living things and minerals; but of Heechee artifacts they found very few.

  That was why so many Gateway prospectors died poor-or just died.

  MISSION TOOLBOX

  Some also died rich, without knowing they had become rich. That was the case in one of the biggest finds. Unfortunately, it did three of its five discoverers little good, because they did not survive the trip.

  The mission started with three Austrians, two brothers and an uncle, using the last of an inheritance to pay their way to Gateway. They were determined to ship out only in an armored ship. As the only such vessel available was a Five, at the last minute they recruited a South American, Manuel de los Fintas, and an American, Sheri Loffat, to go with them.

  They reached a planet; they landed on the planet; they found nothing much there. But their instruments showed Heechee metal somewhere around, and they tracked it down.

  It was a lander. It had been abandoned there, heaven knew when. But it was not empty.

  The biggest thing they found in the lander was a stack of Heechee metal hexagonal boxes, not more than half a meter across and less than half that tall, weight twenty-three kilograms. They were

  tools. Some of th
e items were familiar, and useless as far as anyone had been able to tell: almost a dozen little prayer fans of the kind that littered so many Heechee tunnels and artifacts. But there were also things like screwdrivers but with flexible shafts; things like socket wrenches but made out of some soft material; things that resembled electrical test probes but turned out to be spare parts for other Heechee machines.

  It was a grand success. They wound up millionaires-or, at least, the survivors did.

  That find was lying right on the surface of the planet. But before long the Gateway prospectors learned that planet surfaces were not the most likely places to look for examples of Heechee treasures. Under the surface was much, much richer.

  One thing was clear early on about the vanished Heechee: they liked tunnels. The Heechee tunnels that honeycombed parts of the planet Venus weren't unique. As explorations retraced the old interstellar trails they found examples of them everywhere the Heechee had gone. The inside of the Gateway asteroid was a maze of tunnels; so were the "other Gateways" that turned up as the explorations progressed. Nearly every planet the Heechee had left any