en. I wondered briefly about these people I kept seeing who had been out a lot of times and still weren't rich. "This is only one of the three courses you get. After this you get survival in unfamiliar environments, and then how to recognize what's valuable. But this one is in ship-handling, and the way we're going to start learning it is by doing it. All of you come with me." So we all got up and gaggled after him, out of the room, down a tunnel, onto the down-cable of a dropshaft and past the guards-maybe the same ones who had chased me away the night before. This time they just nodded to the instructor and watched us go past. We wound up in a long, wide, low-ceilinged passage with about a dozen squared-off and stained metal cylinders sticking up out of the floor. They looked like charred tree stumps, and it was a moment before I realized what they were. I gulped. "They're ships," I whispered to Sheri, louder than I intended. A couple of people looked at me curiously. One of them, I noticed, was a girl I had danced with the night before, the one with the dense black eyebrows. She nodded to me and smiled; I saw the bangles on her arm, and wondered what she was doing there-and how she had done at the gambling tables. The instructor gathered us around him, and said, "As someone just said, these are Heechee ships. The lander part. This is the piece you go down to a planet in, if you're lucky enough to find a planet. They don't look very big, but five people can fit into each of those garbage cans you see. Not comfortably, exactly. But they can. Generally speaking, of course, you'll always leave one person in the main ship, so there'll be at most four in the lander." He led us past the nearest of them, and we all satisfied the impulse to touch, scratch, or pat it. Then he began to lecture: "There were nine hundred and twenty-four of these ships docked at Gateway when it was first explored. About two hundred, so far, have proved nonoperational. Mostly we don't know why; they just don't work. Three hundred and four have actually been sent out on at least one trip. Thirty-three of those are here now, and available for prospecting trips. The others haven't been tried yet." He hiked himself up on the stumpy cylinder and sat there while he went on: "One thing you have to decide is whether you want to take one of the thirty-three tested ones or one of the ones that has never been flown. By human beings, I mean. There you just pay your money and take your choice. It's a gamble either way. A high proportion of the trips that didn't come back were in first flights, so there's obviously some risk there. Well, that figures, doesn't it? After all, nobody has done any maintenance on them for God knows how long, since the Heechee put them there. "On the other hand, there's a risk in the ones that have been out and back safely, too. There's no such thing as perpetual motion. We think some of the no-returns have been because the ships ran out of fuel. Trouble is, we don't know what the fuel is, or how much there is, or how to tell when a ship is about to run out." He patted the stump. "This, and all the others you see here, were designed for five Heechees in the crews. As far as we can tell. But we send them out with three human beings. It seems the Heechee were more tolerant of each other's company in confined spaces than people are. There are bigger and smaller ships, but the no-return rate on them has been very bad the last couple of orbits. It's probably just a string of bad luck, but... Anyway, I personally would stick with a Three. You people, you do what you want. "So you come to your second choice, which is who you go with. Keep your eyes open. Look for companions-What?" Sheri had been semaphoring her hand until she got his attention. "You said 'very bad,'" she said. "How bad is that?" The instructor said patiently, "In the last fiscal orbit about three out of ten Fives came back. Those are the biggest ships. In several cases the crews were dead when we got them open, even so." "Yeah," said Sheri, "that's very bad." "No, that's not bad at all, compared to the one-man ships. Two orbits ago we went a whole orbit and only two Ones came back at all. That's bad." "Why is that?" asked the father of the tunnel-rat family. Their name was Forehand. The instructor looked at him for a moment. "If you ever find out," he said, "be sure and tell somebody. Now. As far as selecting a crew is concerned, you're better off if you can get somebody who's already been out. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. Prospectors who strike it rich generally quit; the ones that are still hungry may not want to break up their teams. So a lot of you fish are going to have to go out with other virgins. Umm." He looked around thoughtfully. "Well, let's get our feet wet. Sort yourselves out into groups of three-don't worry about who's in your group, this isn't where you pick your partners-and climb into one of those open landers. Don't touch anything. They're supposed to be in deactive mode, but I have to tell you they don't always stay deactive. Just go in, climb down to the control cabin and wait for an instructor to join you." That was the first I'd heard that there were other instructors. I looked around, trying to work out which were teachers and which were fish, while he said, "Are there any questions?" Sheri again. "Yeah. What's your name?" "Did I forget that again? I'm Jimmy Chou. Pleased to meet you all. Now let's go." Now I know a lot more than my instructor did, including what happened to him half an orbit later-poor old Jimmy Chou, he went out before I did, and came back while I was on my second trip, very dead. Flare burns, they say his eyes were boiled out of his bead. But at that time he knew it all, and it was all very strange and wonderful to me. So we crawled into the funny elliptical hatch that let you slip between the thrusters and down into the landing capsule, and then down a peg-ladder one step further into the main vehicle itself. We looked around, three Ali Babas staring at the treasure cave. We heard a scratching above us, and a head poked in. It had shaggy eyebrows and pretty eyes, and it belonged to the girl I had been dancing with the night before. "Having fun?" she inquired. We were clinging together as far from anything that looked movable as we could get, and I doubt we really looked at ease. "Never mind," she said, "just look around. Get familiar with it. You'll see a lot of it. That vertical line of wheels with the little spokes sticking out of them? That's the target selector. That's the most important thing not to touch for now-maybe ever. That golden spiral thing over next to you there, the blond girl? Anybody want to guess what that's for?" You-there-blond-girl, who was one of the Forehand daughters, shrank away from it and shook her head. I shook mine, but Sheri hazarded, "Could it be a hatrack?" Teacher squinted at it thoughtfully. "Hmm. No, I don't think so, but I keep hoping one of you fish will know the answer. None of us here do. It gets hot sometimes in flight; nobody knows why. The toilet's in there. You're going to have a lot of fun with that. But it does work, after you learn how. You can sling your hammocks and sleep there-or anywhere you want to, actually. That corner, and that recess are pretty dead space. If you're in a crew that wants some privacy, you can screen them off. A little bit, anyway." Sheri said, "Don't any of you people like to tell your names?" Teacher grinned. "I'm Gelle-Klara Moynlin. You want to know the rest about me? I've been out twice and didn't score, and I'm killing time until the right trip comes along. So I work as assistant instructor." "How do you know which is the right trip?" asked the Forehand girl. "Bright fellow, you. Good question. That's another of those questions that I like to hear you ask, because it shows you're thinking, but if there's an answer I don't know what it is. Let's see. You already know this ship is a Three. It's done six round trips already, but it's a reasonable bet that it's got enough reserve fuel for a couple more. I'd rather take it than a One. That's for long-shot gamblers." "Mr. Chou said that," said the Forehand girl, "but my father says he's been all through the records since Orbit One, and the Ones aren't that bad." | WHAT DOES THE CORPORATION DO? | | The purpose of the Corporation is to exploit | the spacecraft left by the Heechee, and to trade | in, develop, or otherwise utilize all artifacts, | goods, raw materials, or other things of value | discovered by means of these vessels. | The Corporation encourages commercial | development of Heechee technology, and grants | leases on a royalty basis for this purpose. | Its revenues are used to pay appropriate | shares to limited partners, Such as you, who have | been instrumental in discovering new things of | value; to pay the costs of maintaining Gateway | itself over and above the per-capita tax | contribution; to pay to each of the general | partners an annual sum sufficient to cover the | cost of maintaining surveillance by means of the | space cruisers you will have observed in orbit | nearby; to create and maintain an adequate reserve | for contingencies; and to use the balance of its | income to subsidize research and development on | the objects of value themselves. | In the fiscal year ending February 30 last, | the total revenues of the Corporation exceeded 3. | 7 x 10^12 dollars U. S. "Your father can have mine," said Gelle-Klara Moynlin. "It's not just statistics. Ones are lonesome. Anyway, one person can't really handle everything if you hit lucky, you need shipmates, one in orbit-most of us keep one man in the ship, feels safer that way; at least somebody might get help if things go rancid. So two of you go down in the lander to look around. Of course, if you do hit lucky you have to split it three ways. If you hit anything big, there's plenty to go around. And if you don't hit, one-third of nothing is no less than all of it." "Wouldn't it be even better in a Five, then?" I asked. Klara looked at me and half-winked; I hadn't thought she remembered dancing the night before. "Maybe, maybe not. The thing about Fives is that they have almost unlimited target acceptance." "Please talk English," Sheri coaxed. "Fives will accept a lot of destinations that Threes and Ones won't. I think it's because some of those destinations are dangerous. The worst ship I ever saw come back was a Five. All scarred and seared and bent; nobody knows how it made it back at all. Nobody knows where it had been, either, but I heard somebody say it might've actually been in the photosphere of a star. The crew couldn't tell us. They were dead. "Of course," she went on meditatively, "an armored Three has almost as much target acceptance as a Five, but you take your chances any way you swing. Now let's get with it, shall we? You-" she pointed at Sheri, "sit down over there." The Forehand girl and I crawled around the mix of human and Heechee furnishings to make room. There wasn't much. If you cleared everything out of a Three you'd have a room about four meters by three by three, but of course if you cleared everything out it wouldn't go. Sheri sat down in front of the column of spoked wheels, wriggling her bottom to try to get a fit. "What kind of behinds did the Heechee have?" she complained. Teacher said, "Another good question, same no-good answer. If you find out, tell us. The Corporation puts that webbing in the seat. It isn't original equipment. Okay. Now, that thing you're looking at is the target selector. Put your hand on one of the wheels. Any one. Just don't touch any other. Now move it." She peered down anxiously as Sheri touched the bottom wheel, then thrust with her fingers, then laid the heel of her hand on it, braced herself against the V-shaped arms of the seat, and shoved. Finally it moved, and the lights along the row of wheels began to flicker. "Wow," said Sheri, "they must've been pretty strong!" We took turns trying with that one wheel-Klara wouldn't let us touch any other that day-and when it came my turn I was surprised to find that it took about as much muscle as I could bring to bear to make it move. It didn't feel rusted stuck; it felt as though it were meant to be hard to turn. And, when you think how much trouble you can get into if you turn a setting by accident in the middle of a flight, it probably was. Of course, now I know more about that, too, than my teacher did then. Not that I'm so smart, but it has taken, and is still taking, a lot of people a hell of a long time to figure out what goes on just in setting up a target on the course director. What it is is a vertical row of number generators. The lights that show up display numbers; that's not easy to see, because they don't look like numbers. They aren't positional, or decimal. (Apparently the Heechee expressed numbers as sums of primes and exponents, but all that's way over my head.) Only the check pilots and the course programmers working for the Corporation really have to be able to read the numbers, and they don't do it directly, only with a computing translator. The first five digits appear to express the position of the target in space, reading from bottom to top. (Dane Metchnikov says the prime ordering isn't from bottom to top but from front to back, which says something or other about the Heechee. They were three-D oriented, like primitive man, instead of two-D oriented, like us.) You would think that three numbers would be enough to describe any position anywhere in the universe, wouldn't you? I mean, if you make a threedimensional representation of the Galaxy you can express any point in it by means of a number for each of the three dimensions. But it took the Heechee five. Does that mean there were five dimensions that were perceptible to the Heechee? Metchnikov says not.... Anyway. Once you get a lock on the first five numbers, the other seven can be turned to quite arbitrary settings and you'll still go when you squeeze the action teat. | GATEWAY'S SHIPS | | The vessels available on Gateway are capable | of interstellar flight at speeds greater than the | velocity of light. The means of propulsion is not | understood (see pilot manual). There is also a | fairly conventional rocket propulsion system, | using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for | attitude control, and for propulsion of the | landing craft which is docked into each | interstellar vessel. | There are three major classifications, | designated as Class 1, Class 3, and Class 5, | according to the number of persons they can carry. | Some of the vessels are of particularly heavy | construction and are designated "armored." Most of | the armored class are Fives. | Each vessel is programmed to navigate itself | automatically to a number of destinations. Return | is automatic, and is quite reliable in practice. | Your course in ship-handling will adequately | prepare you for all the necessary tasks in | piloting your vessel safely; however, see pilot | manual for safety regulations. What you usually do-or what the course programmers the Corporation keeps on the payroll to do this sort of thing for you usually do-is pick four numbers at random. Then you cycle the fifth digit until you get a kind of warning pink glow. Sometimes it's faint, sometimes it's bright. If you stop there and press the flat oval part under the teat, the other numbers begin to creep around, just a couple of millimeters one way or another, and the pink glow gets brighter. When they stop it's shocking pink and shockingly bright. Metchnikov says that's an automatic fine-tuning device. The machine allows for human error-sorry, I mean for Heechee error-so when you get close to a real, valid target setting it makes the final adjustments for you automatically. Probably he's right. (Of course, learning every step of this cost a lot of time and money, and most of it cost some lives. It's dangerous being a prospector. But for the first few out, it was more like suicidal.) Sometimes you can cycle all the way through your fifth digit and get nothing at all. So what you do is, you swear. Then you reset one of the other four and go again. It only takes a few seconds to cycle, but check pilots have run up a hundred hours of new settings before they got good color. Of course, by the time I went out, the check pilots and the course programmers had worked out a couple hundred possible settings that had been logged as good color but not as yet used-as well as all the settings that had been used, and aren't worth going back to. Or that the crews didn't come back from. But all that I didn't know at the time, and when I sat down in that modified Heechee seat it was all new, new, new. And I don't know if I can make you understand what it felt like. I mean, there I was, in a seat where Heechee had sat half a million years ago. The thing in front of me was a target selector. The ship could go anywhere. Anywhere! If I selected the right target I could find myself around Sirius, Procyon, maybe even the Magellanic Clouds! Teacher got tired of hanging head-down and wriggled through, squeezing in behind me. "Your turn, Broadhead," she said, resting a hand on my shoulder and what felt like her breasts on my back. I was reluctant to touch. I asked, "Isn't there any way of telling where you're going to wind up?" | Classifieds. | | HOW DO you know you're not a Unitarian? | Gateway Fellowship now forming. 87-539. | | BILITIS WANTED for Sappho and Lesbia, joint | trips till we make it, then happily ever after in | Northern Ireland. Permanent trimarriage only. | 87-033 or 87-034. | | STORE YOUR effects. Save rent, avoid | Corporation seizure while out. Fee includes | disposal instructions if nonreturn. 88-125. "Probably," she said, "providing you're a Heechee with pilot training." "Not even like one color means you're going farther from here than some other color?" "Not that anybody here has figured out. Of course, they keep trying. There's a whole team that spends its time programming returned mission reports against the settings they went out with. So far they've come up empty. Now let's get on with it, Broadhead. Put your whole hand on that first wheel, the one the others have used. Shove it. It'll take more muscle than you think." It did. In fact, I was almost afraid to push it hard enough to make it work. She leaned over and put her hand on mine, and I realized that that nice musk-oil smell that had been in my nostrils for the last little while was hers. It wasn't just musk, either; her pheromones were snuggling nicely into my chemoreceptors. It made a very nice change from the rest of the Gateway stink. But all the same, I didn't get even a show of color, although I tried for five minutes before she waved me away and gave Sheri another shot in my place. When I got back to my room somebody had cleaned it up. I wondered gratefully who that had been, but I was too tired to wonder very long. Until you get used to it, low gravity can be exhausting; you find yourself overusing all your muscles because you have to relearn a whole pattern of economies. I slung my hammock and was just dozing off when I heard a scratching at the lattice of my door and Sheri's voice: "Rob?" "What?" "Are you asleep?" Obviously I wasn't, but I interpreted the question the way she had intended it. "No. I've been lying here thinking." "So was I.... Rob?" "Yeah?" "Would you like me to come into your hammock?" I made an effort to wake myself up enough to consider the question on its merits. "I really want to," she said. "All right. Sure. I mean, glad to have you." She slipped into my room, and I slid over in the hammock, which swung slowly as she crawled into it. She was wearing a knitted T-shirt and underpants, and she felt warm and soft against me when we rolled gently together in the hollow of the hammock. "It doesn't have to be sex, stud," she said. "I'm easy either way." "Let's see what develops. Are you scared?" Her breath was the sweetest-smelling thing about her; I could feel it on my cheek. "A lot more than I thought I would be." "Why?" "Rob-" she squirmed herself comfortable and then twisted her neck to look at me over her shoulder, "you know, you say kind of asshole things sometimes?" "Sorry." "Well, I mean it. I mean, look what we're doing. We're going to get into a ship that we don't know if it's going to get where it's supposed to go, and we don't even know where it's supposed to go. We go faster than light, nobody knows how. We don't know how long we'll be gone, even if we knew where we were going. So we could be traveling the rest of our lives and die before we got there, even if we didn't run into something that would kill us in two seconds. Right? Right. So how come you ask me why I'm scared?" "Just making conversation." I curled up along her back and cupped a breast, not aggressively but because it felt good. "And not only that. We don't know anything about the people who built these things. How do we know this isn't all a practical joke on their part? Maybe their way of luring fresh meat into Heechee heaven?" "We don't," I agreed. "Roll over this way." "And the ship they showed us this morning doesn't hardly look like I thought it was going to be, at all," she said, doing as I told her and putting a hand on the back of my neck. There was a sharp whistle from somewhere, I couldn't tell where. "What's that?" "I don't know." It came again, sounding both out in the tunnel and, louder, inside my room. "Oh, it's the phone." What I was hearing was my own piezophone and the ones on either side of me, all ringing at once. The whistle stopped and there was a voice: "This is Jim Chou. All you fish who want to see what a ship looks like when it comes back after a bad trip, come to Docking Station Four. They're bringing it in now." I could hear a murmuring from the Forehands' room next door, and I could feel Sheri's heart pounding. "We'd better go," I said. "I know. But I don't think I want to-much." The ship had made it back to Gateway, but not quite all the way. One of the orbiting cruisers had detected it and closed in on it. Now a tug was bringing it in to the Corporation's own docks, where usually only the rockets from the planets latched in. There was a hatch big enough to hold even a Five. This was a Three, what there was left of it. "Oh, sweet Jesus," Sheri whispered. "Rob, what do you suppose happened to them?" "To the people? They died." There was not really any doubt of that. The ship was a wreck. The lander stem was gone, just the interstellar vehicle itself, the mushroom cap, was still there, and that was bent out of shape, split open, seared by heat. Split open! Heechee metal, that doesn't even soften under an electric arc! But we hadn't seen the worst of it. We never did see the worst of it, we only heard about it. One man was still inside the ship. All over the inside of the ship. He had been literally spattered around the control room, and his remains had been baked onto the walls. By what? Heat and acceleration, no doubt. Perhaps he had found himself skipping into the upper reaches of a sun, or in tight orbit around a neutron star. The differential in gravity might have shredded ship and crew like that. But we never knew. The other two persons in the crew were not there at all. Not that it was easy to tell; but the census of the organs revealed only one jaw, one pelvis, one spine-though in many short pieces. Perhaps the other two had been in the lander? "Move it, fish!" Sheri caught my arm and pulled me out of the way. Five uniformed crewmen from the cruisers came through, in American and Brazilian blue, Russian beige, Venusian work white and Chinese all-purpose black-and-brown. The American and the Venusian were female; the faces were all different, but the expressions were all the same mixture of discipline and distaste. "Let's go." Sheri tugged me away. She didn't want to watch the crewmen poke through the remnants, and neither did I. The whole class, Jimmy Chou, Klara and the other teachers and all, began to straggle back to our rooms. Not quite quick enough. We had been looking through the ports into the lock; when the patrol from the cruisers opened it, we got a whiff of the air inside. I don't know how to describe it. A little bit like overripe garbage being cooked to swill to pigs. Even in the rank air of Gateway, that was hard to take. Teacher dropped off at her own level-down pretty low, in the high-rent district around Easy Level. When she looked up after me as I said goodnight I observed for the first time that she was crying. Sheri and I said goodnight to the Forehands at their door, and I turned to her, but she was ahead of me. "I think I'll sleep this one out," she said. "Sorry, Rob, but, you know, I just don't feel like it anymore." | SAFETY RULES FOR GATEWAY SHIPS | | The mechanism for interstellar travel is known | to be contained in the diamond-shaped box which is | located under the center keel of 3-man and 5-man | ships, and in the sanitary facilities of the 1-man | ships. | No one has successfully opened one of those | containers. Each attempt has resulted in explosion | of approximately 1-kiloton force. A major research | project is attempting to penetrate this box | without destroying it, and if you as a limited | partner have any information or suggestions in | this connection you should contact a Corporation | officer at once. | However, under no circumstances attempt to | open the box yourself. Tampering with it in any | way, or docking a vessel on which the box has been | tampered with, is strictly forbidden. The penalty | is forfeiture of all rights and immediate | expulsion from Gateway. | The course-directing equipment also poses a | potential danger. Under no circumstances should | you attempt to change the setting once you have | begun your flight. no vessel in which this has | been done has ever returned. Chapter 9 I don't know why I keep going back to Sigfrid von Shrink. My appointment with him is always on a Wednesday afternoon, and he doesn't like it if I drink or dope before then. So it blows the whole day. I pay a lot for those days. You don't know what it costs to live the way I live. My apartment over Washington Square is eighteen thousand dollars a month. My residence taxes to live under the Big Bubble come to another three thousand plus. (It doesn't cost that much to stay on Gateway!) I've got some pretty hefty charge accounts for furs, wine, lingerie, jewelry, flowers. Sigfrid says I try to buy love. All right, I do. What's wrong with that? I can afford it. And that's not mentioning what Full Medical costs me. Sigfrid, though, comes free. I'm covered by the Full Medical for psychiatric therapy, any variety I like; I could have group grope or internal massage for the same price, namely nothing. I kid him about that sometimes. "Even considering that you're just a bag of rusty bolts," I say, "you're not much good. But your price is right." He asks, "Does that make you feel that you yourself are more valuable, if you say that I'm not?" "Not particularly." "Then why do you insist on reminding yourself that I'm a machine? Or that I don't cost anything? Or that I cannot transcend my programming?" "I guess you just piss me off, Sigfrid." I know that won't satisfy him, so I explain it. "You ruined my morning. This friend, S. Ya. Lavorovna, stayed over last night. She's something." So I tell Sigfrid a little bit about what S. Ya. is like, including what she is like walking away from me in stretch pants with that long dirtygold hair hanging down to her waist. "She sounds very nice," Sigfrid comments. "Bet your bolts. Only thing is, she wakes up slow in the morning. Just when she was getting lively again I had to leave my summer place, up over Tappan Sea, and come down here." "Do you love her, Rob?" The answer is no, so I want him to think it's yes. I say, "No." "I think that's an honest answer, Rob," he says, approvingly, and disappointingly. "Is that why you're angry with me?" "Oh, I don't know. Just in a bad mood, I guess." "Can you think of any reasons why?" He waits me out, so after a while I say, "Well, I took a licking at roulette last night." "More than you can afford?" "Christ! No." But it's annoying, all the same. There are other things, too. It's getting toward that chilly time of year. My place over Tappan Sea isn't under the Bubble, so sitting out on the porch with S. Ya. for brunch wasn't such a good idea. I don't want to mention this to Sigfrid. He would say something wholly rational like, well, why didn't I have my lunch served indoors? And I would just have to tell him all over again that when I was a kid it was my dream to own a summer place over Tappan Sea and have brunch on the porch, looking out over it. They'd just dammed the Hudson then, when I was about maybe twelve. I used to dream a lot about Making It Big and living in the style of The Rich Folks. Well, he's heard all that. Sigfrid clears his throat. "Thank you, Rob," he says, to let me know that the hour is over. "Will I see you next week?" "Don't you always?" I say, smiling. "How the time flies. Actually I wanted to leave a little early today." "Did you, Rob?" "I have another date with S. Ya.," I explain. "She's coming back up to the summer place with me tonight. Frankly, what she's going to do is better therapy than what you do." He says, "Is that all you want out of a relationship, Robbie?" "You mean, just sex?" The answer in this case is no, but I don't want him to know just what it is I do want out of my relationship with S. Ya. Lavorovna. I say, "She's a little different from most of my girlfriends, Sigfrid. She has about as much clout as I do, for one thing. Has a damn good job. I admire her." Well, I don't, particularly. Or rather, I don't care much about whether I admire her or not. S. Ya. has one trait that impresses me even more than possessing the sweetest rear view that God ever laid on a human female. Her damn good job is in information handling. She went to the Akademogorsk University, she was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Machine Intelligence, and she teaches graduate students in the AI department at NYU. She knows more about Sigfrid than Sigfrid knows about himself, and that suggests interesting possibilities to me. Chapter 10 Along about my fifth day on Gateway I got up early and splurged, breakfast out in the Heecheetown Arms, surrounded by tourists, bloody-eyed gamblers from the casino across the spindle, and liberty sailors from the cruisers. It felt luxurious, and cost luxurious, too. It was worth it because of the tourists. I could feel their eyes on me. I knew they were talking about me, particularly a smooth-faced but old African type, Dahomeyan or Ghanaian, I think, with his very young, very plump, very jeweled wife. Or whatever. As far as they could tell, I was a swashbuckling hero. True, I didn't have any bangles on my arm, but some of the veterans didn't wear them, either. I basked. I considered ordering real eggs and bacon, but that was a little more than even my euphoria would let me go for, so I settled for orange juice (it turned out to be real, to my surprise) and a brioche and several cups of black Danish coffee. All I was really missing was a pretty girl across the armboard of the chair. There were two nice-looking women who seemed to be the liberty crew from the Chinese cruiser, neither of them unwilling to exchange a few radio messages by the glance of the eyes, but I decided to keep them as open prospects for some future date and paid my check (that was painful enough) and left for class. | Classifieds. | | GOURMET COOKERY to order. Szechuan, | California, Cantonese. Specialty party munches. | The Wongs, ph 83-242. | | LECTURE & PV careers are waiting for | multi-bracelet retirees! Sign up now for course | public speaking, holoview preparation, PR | management. Inspect authenticated letters | graduates earning $3000/wk up. 86-521. | | WELCOME TO Gateway! Make contacts quickly our | unique service. 200 names, preferences on file. | Introductions $5O. 88-963. On the way down I caught up with the Forehands. The man, whose name seemed to be Sess, dropped off the down-cable and waited to wish me a polite good morning. "We didn't see you at breakfast," his wife mentioned, so I told them where I had been. The younger daughter, Lois, looked faintly envious. Her mother caught the expression and patted her. "Don't worry, hon. We'll eat there before we go back to Venus." To me: "We have to watch our pennies right now. But when we hit, we've got some pretty big plans for spending the profits." "Don't we all," I said, but something was turning over in my head. "Are you really going to go back to Venus?" "Certainly," they all said, in one way or another, and acted surprised at the question. Which surprised me. I hadn't realized that tunnel rats could manage to think of that molten stinkpot as home. Sess Forehand must have read my expression, too. They were a reserved family, but they didn't miss much. He grinned and said: "It's our home, after all. So is Gateway, in a way." That was astonishing. "Actually, we're related to the first man to find Gateway, Sylvester Macklen. You've heard of him?" "How could I not?" "He was a sort of a cousin. I guess you know the whole story?" I started to say I did, but he obviously was proud of his cousin, and I couldn't blame him, and so I heard a slightly different version of the familiar legend: "He was in one of the South Pole tunnels, and found a ship. God knows how he got it to the surface, but he did, and he got in and evidently squeezed the go-teat, and it went where it was programmed-here." "Doesn't the Corporation pay a royalty?" I asked. "I mean, if they're going to pay for discoveries, what discovery would be more worth paying for?" "Not to us, anyway," said Louise Forehand, somewhat somberly; money was a hard subject with the Forehands. "Of course, Sylvester didn't set out to find Gateway. As you know from what we've been hearing in class, the ships have automatic return. Wherever you go, you just squeeze the go-teat and you come straight back here. Only that didn't help Sylvester, because he was here. It was the return leg of a round trip with about a zillion-year stopover." "He was smart and strong." Sess took up the story. "You have to be to explore. So he didn't panic. But by the time anybody came out here to investigate he was out of life support. He could have lived a little longer. He could have used the lox and H-two from the lander tanks for air and water. I used to wonder why he didn't." | LAUNCH AVAILABILITIES | | 30-107. | FIVE. Three vacancies, Englishspeaking. Terry | Yakamora (ph 83-675) or Jay Parduk (83-004). | | 30-108. | THREE. Armored. One vacancy, English or | French. BONUS TRIP. Dorlean Sugrue (P-phone | 88-108). | | 30-109. | ONE. Check trip. Good safety record. See | Launch Captain. | | 30-110. | ONE. Armored. BONUS TRIP. See Launch Captain. | | 30-111. | THREE. Open enlistment. See Launch Captain. | | 30-112. | THREE. Probable short trip. Open enlistment. | Minimum guarantee. See Launch Captain. | | 30-113. | ONE. Four vacancies via Gateway Two. | Transportation in reliable Five. Tikki Trumbull | (ph 87-869). "Because he would have starved anyway," Louise cut in, defending her relative. "I think so. Anyway, they found his body, with his notes in his hand. He had cut his throat." They were nice people, but I had heard all this, and they were making me late for class. Of course, class wasn't all that exciting just at that point. We were up to Hammock Slinging (Basic) and Toilet Flushing (Advanced). You may wonder why they didn't spend more time actually teaching us how to fly the ships. That's simple. The things flew themselves, as the Forehands, and everybody else, had been telling me. Even the landers were no sweat to operate, although they did require a hand on the controls. Once you were in the lander all you had to do was compare a three-D sort of holographic representation of the immediate area of space with where you wanted to go, and maneuver a point of light in the tank to the point you wanted to reach. The lander went there. It calculated its own trajectories and corrected its own deviations. It took a little muscular coordination to get the hang of twisting that point of light to where you wanted it to go, but it was a forgiving system. Between the sessions of flushing practice and hammock drill we talked about what we were going to do when we graduated. The launch schedules were kept up to date and displayed on the PV monitor in our class whenever anyone pushed the button. Some of them had names attached to them, and one or two of the names I recognized. Tikki Trumbull was a girl I had danced with and sat next to in the mess hall once or twice. She was an out-pilot, and as she needed crew I thought of joining her. But the wiseheads told me that out-missions were a waste of time. I should tell you what an out-pilot is. He's the guy who ferries fresh crews to Gateway Two. There are about a dozen Fives that do that as a regular run. They take four people out (which would be what Tikki wanted people for), and then the pilot comes back alone, or with returning prospectors-if any-and what they've found. Usually there's somebody. The team who found Gateway Two are the ones we all dreamed about. They made it. Man, did they make it! Gateway Two was another Gateway, nothing more or less, except that it happened to orbit around a star other than our own. There was not much more in the way of treasure on Gateway Two than there was on our own Gateway; the Heechee had swept everything pretty clean, except for the ships themselves. And there weren't nearly as many ships there, only about a hundred and fifty, compared to almost a thousand on our old original solar Gateway. But a hundred and fifty ships are worth finding all by themselves. Not to mention the fact that they accept some destinations that our local Gateway's ships don't appear to. The ride out to Gateway Two seems to be about four hundred light-years and takes a hundred and nine days each way. Two's principal star is a bright blue B-type. They think it is Alcyone in the Pleiades, but there is some doubt. Well, actually that's not Gateway Two's real star. It doesn't