it." "I've told you." I am not enjoying this at all, it is such a waste of time, and I make sure he knows it by the tone of my voice and the tenseness of my body against the restraining straps. "It was even worse than with my mother." "I know you'd rather switch to talking about your mother, Rob, but please don't, right now. Tell me about that time with Klara. What are you feeling about it at this minute?" I try to think it out honestly. After all, I can do that much. I don't actually have to say it. But all I can find to say is, "Not much." After a little wait he says, "Is that all, 'not much'?" "That's it. Not much." Not much on the surface, anyway. I do remember how I was feeling at the time. I open up that memory, very cautiously, to see what it was like. Going down into that blue mist. Seeing the dim ghost star for the first time. Talking to Klara on the radio, while Dane is whispering in my ear.... I close it up again. "It all hurts, a lot, Sigfrid," I say conversationally. Sometimes I try to fool him by saying emotionally loaded things in the tone you might use to order a cup of coffee, but I don't think it works. Sigfrid listens to volume and overtones, but he also listens to breathing and pauses, as well as the sense of the words. He is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is. Chapter 6 Five permanent-party noncoms, one from each of the cruisers, patted us down, checked our IDs and turned us over to a Corporation screening clerk. Sheri giggled when the Russian's pat hit a sensitive spot and whispered, "What do they think we're smuggling in, Rob?" I shushed her. The Corporation woman had taken our landing cards from the Chinese Spec/3 in charge of the detail and was calling out our names. There were eight of us altogether. "Welcome aboard," she said. "Each one of you fish will get a proctor assigned to you. He'll help you get straightened out with a place to live, answer your questions, let you know where to report for the medical and your classes. Also, he'll give you a copy of the contract to sign. You've each had eleven hundred and fifty dollars deducted from your cash on deposit with the ship that brought you here; that's your life-support tax for the first ten days. The rest you can draw on any time by writing a P-check. Your proctor will show you how. Linscott!" The middle-aged black man from Baja California raised his hand. "Your proctor is Shota Tarasvili. Broadhead!" "Here I am." "Dane Metchnikov," said the Corporation clerk. I started to look around, but the person who had to be Dane Metchnikov was already coming toward me. He took my arm very firmly, started to lead me away and then said, "Hi." I held back. "I'd like to say good-bye to my friend-" "You're all in the same area," he grunted. "Come on." So within two hours of arriving on Gateway I had a room, a proctor, and a contract. I signed the articles of agreement right away. I didn't even read them. Metchnikov looked surprised. "Don't you want to know what they say?" "Not right this minute." I mean, what was the advantage? If I hadn't liked what they said, I might have changed my mind, and what other options did I have, really? Being a prospector is pretty scary. I hate the idea of being killed. I hate the idea of dying at all, ever; not being alive anymore, having everything stop, knowing that all those other people would go on living and having sex and joy without me being there to share it. But I didn't hate it as much as I hated the idea of going back to the food mines. Metchnikov hung himself by his collar to a hook on the wall of my room, to be out of the way while I put away my belongings. He was a squat, pale man, not very talkative. He didn't seem to be a very likable person, but at least he didn't laugh at me because I was a clumsy new fish. Gateway is about as close to zero-G as you get. I had never experienced low-gravity before; you don't get much of it in Wyoming, so I kept misjudging. When I said something, Metchnikov said, "You'll get used to it. Have you got a toke?" "Afraid not." He sighed, looking a little like somebody's Buddha hung up on the wall, with his legs pulled up. He looked at his time dial and said, "I'll take you out for a drink later. It's a custom. Only it's not very interesting until about twenty-two hundred. The Blue Hell'll be full of people then, and I'll introduce you around. See what you can find. What are you, straight, gay, what?" "I'm pretty straight." "Whatever. You're on your own about that, though. I'll introduce you to whoever I know, but then you're on your own. You better get used to that right away. Have you got your map?" "Map?" | MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT | 1, being of sound mind, hereby assign all | rights in and to any discoveries, artifacts, | objects, and things of value of any description I | may find during or as a result of exploration | involving any craft furnished me or information | given me by the Gateway Authority irrevocably to | said Gateway Authority. | 2. Gateway Authority may, in its own sole | direction, elect to sell, lease or otherwise | dispose of any artifact, object or other thing of | value arising from my activities under this | contract. If it does so, it agrees to assign to me | 50% (fifty percent) of all revenues arising from | such sale, lease, or disposal, up to the costs of | the exploration trip itself (including my own | costs in coming to Gateway and my subsequent costs | of living while there), and 10% (ten percent) of | all subsequent revenues once the aforesaid costs | have been repaid. I accept this assignment as | payment in full for any obligations arising to me | from the Gateway Authority of whatever kind, and | specifically undertake not to lay any claim for | additional payment for any reason at any time. | 3. I irrevocably grant to Gateway Authority | the full power and authority to make decisions of | all kinds relating to the exploitation, sale, or | lease of rights in any such discoveries, including | the right, at Gateway Authority's sole discretion, | to pool my discoveries or other things of value | arising under this contract with those of others | for purpose of exploitation, lease, or sale, in | which case my share shall be whatever proportion | of such earnings Gateway Authority may deem | proper; and I further grant to Gateway Authority | the right to refrain from exploiting any or all | such discoveries or things of value in any way, at | its own sole discretion. | 4. I release Gateway Authority from any and | all claims by me or on my behalf arising from any | injury, accident, or loss of any kind to me in | connection with my activities under this contract. | 5. In the event of any disagreement arising | from this Memorandum of Agreement, I agree that | the terms shall be interpreted according to the | laws and precedents of Gateway itself, and that no | laws or precedents of any other jurisdiction shall | be considered relevant in any degree. "Oh, hell, man! It's in that packet of stuff they gave you." I opened the lockers at random until I found where I had put the envelope. Inside it were my copy of the articles of agreement, a booklet entitled Welcome to Gateway, my room assignment, my health questionnaire that I would have to fill out before 0800 the next morning... and a folded sheet that, opened up, looked like a wiring diagram with names on it. "That's it. Can you locate where you are? Remember your room number: Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel Eight, Room Fifty-one. Write it down." "It's already written here, Dane, on my room assignment." "Well, don't lose it." Dane reached behind his neck and unhooked himself, let himself fall gently to the floor. "So why don't you look around by yourself for a while. I'll meet you here. Anything else you need to know right now?" I thought, while he looked impatient. "Well-mind if I ask you a question about you, Dane? Have you been out yet?" "Six trips. All right, I'll see you at twenty-two hundred." Then he pushed the flexible door open, slipped out into the jungly green of the corridor and was gone. I let myself flop-so gently, so slowly-into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe. I don't know if I can make you feel it, how the universe looked to me from Gateway: like being young with Full Medical. Like a menu in the best restaurant in the world, when somebody else is going to pick up the check. Like a girl you've just met who likes you. Like an unopened gift. The things that hit you first on Gateway are the tininess of the tunnels, feeling tinier even than they are because they're lined with windowboxy things of plants; the vertigo from the low gravity, and the stink. You get Gateway a little bit at a time. There's no way of seeing it all in one glance; it is nothing but a maze of tunnels in the rock. I'm not even sure they've all been explored yet. Certainly there are miles of them that nobody ever goes into, or not very often. That's the way the Heechees were. They grabbed the asteroid, plated it over with wall metal, drove tunnels into it, filled them with whatever sort of possessions they had-most were empty by the time we got there, just as everything that ever belonged to the Heechees is, all over the universe. And then they left it, for whatever reason they left. The closest thing to a central point in Gateway is Heecheetown. That's a spindle-shaped cave near the geometric center of the asteroid. They say that when the Heechees built Gateway they lived there. We lived there too, at first, or close to it, all of us new peopie off Earth. (And elsewhere. A ship from Venus had come in just before ours.) That's where the company housing is. Later on, if we got rich on a prospecting trip, we could move out farther toward the surface, where there was a little more gravity and less noise. And above all, less smell. A couple thousand people had breathed the air I was breathing, one time or another, voided the water I drank and exuded their smells into the atmosphere. The people didn't stay around very long, most of them. But the smells were still there. I didn't care about the smell. I didn't care about any of it. Gateway was my big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a couple of kids, and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made me cocky about my chances of winning another. It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough, too. There wasn't much luxury around. For your $238,575 what you get is transportation to Gateway, ten days' worth of food, lodging, and air, a cram course in ship handling, and an invitation to sign up on the next ship out. Or any ship you like. They don't make you take any particular ship, or for that matter any ship at all. The Corporation doesn't make any profit on any of that. All the prices are fixed at about cost. That doesn't mean they were cheap, and it certainly doesn't mean that what you got was good. The food was just about what I had been digging, and eating, all my life. The lodging was about the size of a large steamer trunk, one chair, a bunch of lockers, a fold-down table, and a hammock that you could stretch across it, corner to corner, when you wanted to sleep. My next-door neighbors were a family from Venus. I caught a glimpse through the part-opened door. Imagine! Four of them sleeping in one of those cubicles! It looked like two to a hammock, with two hammocks crisscrossed across the room. On the other side was Sheri's room. I scratched at her door, but she didn't answer. The door wasn't locked. Nobody locks his door much on Gateway, because there's nothing much worth stealing among other reasons. Sheri wasn't there. The clothes she had been wearing on the ship were thrown all over. I guessed that she had gone out exploring, and wished I had been a little earlier. I would have liked someone to explore with. I leaned against the ivy growing out of one wall of the tunnel and pulled out my map. It did give me some idea of what to look for. There were things marked "Central Park" and "Lake Superior." What were they? I wondered about "Gateway Museum," which sounded interesting, and "Terminal Hospital," which sounded pretty bad-I found out later that "terminal" meant as in end of the line, on your return trip from wherever you went to. The Corporation must have known that it had another sound to it, too; but the Corporation never went to much trouble to spare a prospector's feelings. What I really wanted was to see a ship! As soon as that thought percolated out of my mind I realized that I wanted it a lot. I puzzled over how to get to the outer skin, where the ship docks were located of course. Holding onto a railing with one hand, I tried to keep the map open with the other. It didn't take me long to locate myself. I was at a five-way intersection which seemed to be the one marked "East Star Babe G" on the map. One of the five tunnels out of it led to a dropshaft, but I couldn't tell which. I tried one at random, wound up in a dead end, and on the way back scratched on a door for directions. It opened. "Excuse me-" I said... and stopped. The man who opened the door seemed as tall as I, but was not. His eyes were on a level with my own. But he stopped at the waist. He had no legs. He said something, but I didn't understand it; it wasn't in English. It wouldn't have mattered. My attention was taken up with him. He wore gauzy bright fabric strapped from wrists to waist, and he fluttered the wings gently to stay in the air. It wasn't hard, in Gateway's low-G. But it was surprising to see. I said, "I'm sorry. I just wanted to know how to get to Level Tanya." I was trying not to stare, but I wasn't succeeding. He smiled, white teeth in an unlined, old face. He had jet eyes under a crest of short white hair. He pushed past me out into the corridor and said in excellent English, "Certainly. Take the first turning on your right. Go to the next star, and take the second turning on your left. It'll be marked." He indicated with his chin the direction toward the star. | WELCOME TO GATEWAY! | | Congratulations! | | You are one of a very few people each year who | may become a limited partner in Gateway | Enterprises, Inc. Your first obligation is to sign | the enclosed Memorandum of Agreement. You need not | do this at once. You are encouraged to study the | agreement and to seek legal advice, if available. | | However, until you sign you will not be | eligible to occupy Corporation housing, dine at | the Corporation commissary or participate in the | Corporation instruction courses. | | Accommodations are available at the Gateway | Hotel and Restaurant for those who are here as | visitors, or who do not at present wish to sign | the Memorandum of Agreement. | KEEPING GATEWAY GOING | | In order to meet the costs of maintaining | Gateway, all persons are required to pay a daily | per-capita assessment for air, temperature | control, administration, and other services. | If you are a guest, this cost is included in | your hotel bill. | Rates for other persons are posted. The tax | may be prepaid up to one year in advance if | desired. Failure to pay the daily per-capita tax | will result in immediate expulsion from Gateway. | Note: Availability of a ship to receive | expelled persons cannot be guaranteed. I thanked him and left him floating behind me. I wanted to turn back, but it didn't seem good manners. It was strange. It hadn't occurred to me that there would be any cripples on Gateway. That's how naive I was then. Having seen him, I knew Gateway in a way I had not known it from the statistics. The statistics are clear enough, and we all studied them, all of us who came up as prospectors, and all of that vastly larger number who only wished they could. About eighty percent of flights from Gateway come up empty. About fifteen percent don't come back at all. So one person in twenty, on the average, comes back from a prospecting trip with something that Gateway-that mankind in general-can make a profit on. Most of even those are lucky if they collect enough to pay their costs for getting here in the first place. 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 ornatecurled 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-motion 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." Maybe maturity is wanting what you want, instead of what somebody else tells you you should want. Maybe, Sigfrid, dear old tin god, but what it feels like is mature is dead. 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. "My name," said the person with the tea, "is Shikitei Baldu. Please drink this tea. It will help rehydrate your tissues." I looked a little further and saw that he ended at the waist; he was the legless man with the strap-on wings whom I had seen in the tunnel the day before. "Uh," I said, and tried a little harder and got as far as, "Good morning." The Orion Nebula was fading back into the dream, and so was the sensation of having to push through rapidly solidifying gas clouds. The bad smell remained. The room smelled excessively foul, even by Gateway standards, and I realized I had thrown up on the floor. I was only millimeters from doing it again. Bakin, slowly stroking the air with his wings, dexterously dropped a stoppered flask next to me on the hammock at the end of one stroke. Then he propelled himself to the top of my chest of drawers, sat there, and said: | WHO OWNS GATEWAY? | | Gateway is unique In the history of humanity, | and it was quickly realized that it was too | valuable a resource to be given to any one group | of persons, or any one government. Therefore | Gateway Enterprises, Inc., was formed. | Gateway Enterprises (usually referred to as | "the Corporation") is a multinational corporation | whose general partners are the governments of the | United States of America, the Soviet Union, the | United States of Brazil, the Venusian | Confederation, and New People's Asia, and whose | limited partners are all those persons who, like | yourself, have signed the attached Memorandum of | Agreement. "I believe you have a medical examination this morning at oh eight hundred hours." "Do I?" I managed to get the cap off the tea and took a sip. It was very hot, sugarless, and almost tasteless, but it did seem to tip the scales inside my gut in the direction opposite to throwing up again. "Yes. I think so. It's customary. And in addition, your P-phone has rung several times." I went back to, "Uh?" "I presume it was your proctor caffing you to remind you. It is now seven-fifteen, Mr:" "Broadhead," I said thickly, and then more carefully: "My name is Rob Broadhead." "Yes. I took the liberty of making sure you were awake. Please enjoy your tea, Mr. Broadhead. Enjoy your stay on Gateway." He nodded, fell forward off the chest, swooped toward the door, handed himself through it, and was gone. With my head thudding at every change of attitude I got myself out of the hammock, trying to avoid the nastier spots on the floor, and somehow succeeded in getting reasonably clean. I thought of depilating, but I had about twelve days on a beard and decided to let it go for a while; it no longer looked unshaven, exactly, and I just didn't have the strength. When I wobbled into the medical examining room I was only about five minutes late. The others in my group were all ahead of me, so I had to wait and go last. They extracted three kinds of blood from me, fingertip, inside of the elbow, and lobe of the ear, I was sure they would all run ninety proof. But it didn't matter. The medical was only a formality. If you could survive the trip up to Gateway by spacecraft in the first place; you could survive a trip in a Heechee ship. Unless something went wrong. In which case you probably couldn't survive anyway, no matter how healthy you were. I had time for a quick cup of coffee off a cart that someone was tending next to a dropshaft (private enterprise on Gateway? I hadn't known that existed), and then I got to the first session of the class right on the tick. We met in a big room on Level Dog, long and narrow and low-ceilinged. The seats were arranged two on each side with a center aisle, sort of like a schoolroom in a converted bus. Sheri came in late, looking fresh and cheerful, and slipped in beside me; our whole group was there, all seven of us who had come up from Earth together, the family of four from Venus and a couple others I knew to be new fish like me. "You don't look too bad," Sheri whispered as the instructor pondered over some papers on his desk. | SHOWER PROCEDURE | | This shower will automatically deliver two | 45-second sprays. Soap between sprays. | You are entitled to 1 use of the shower in | each 3-day period. | Additional showers may be charged against your | credit balance at the rate of 45 seconds-$5 "Does the hangover show?" "Actually not. But I assume it's there. I heard you coming in last night. In fact," she added thoughtfully, "the whole tunnel heard you." I winced. I could still smell myself, but most of it was apparently inside me. None of the others seemed to be edging away, not even Sheri. The instructor stood up and studied us thoughtfully for a while. "Oh, well," he said, and looked back at his papers. Then he shook his head. "I won't take attendance," he said. "I teach the course in how to run a Heechee ship." I noticed he had a batch of bracelets; I couldn't count them, but there were at least half a doz