om a previously unknown
Heechee  warren,  on  a  planet around an F-2 star in the end of the Orion
spiral  arm.  They  had  split a million dollars three ways, and had taken
their share back to Mungbere. The Forehands...
   Louise  Forehand  stopped  in  while we were talking about them. "Heard
your  voices,"  she  said,  craning  over  to kiss me. "Too bad about your
trip."
   "Breaks of the game."
   "Well,  welcome  home,  anyway.  I  didn't  do any better than you, I'm
afraid.  Dumb  little star, no planets that we could find, can't think why
in  the  world  the  Heechee had a course setting for it." She smiled, and
stroked  the  muscles  at  the  back  of my neck fondly. "Can I give you a
welcome-home party tonight? Or are you and Klara-?"
   "I'd love it if you did," I said, and she didn't pursue the question of
Klara.  no  doubt  the  rumor had already got around; the Gateway tom-toms
beat  day  and night. She left after a few minutes. "Nice lady," I said to
Shicky,  looking  after  her.  "Nice  family.  Was  she  looking  a little
worried?"
   "I  fear  so,  Robinette,  yes. Her daughter Lois is on plus time. They
have had much sorrow in that family."
   I  looked  at him. He said, "No, not Willa or the father; they are out,
but not overdue. There was a son."
   "I know. Henry, I think. They called him Hat."
   "He  died  just  before  they came here. And now Lois." He inclined his
head,  then  flapped  politely over and picked up the empty tea flask on a
downstroke of his wing. "I must go to work now, Rob."
   "How's the ivy planting?"
   He said ruefully, "I no longer have that position, I'm afraid. Emma did
not consider me executive material."
   "Oh? What are you doing?"
   "I  keep  Gateway esthetically attractive," he said. "I think you would
call it 'garbage collector.'"
   I  didn't know what to say. Gateway was kind of a trashy place; because
of  the  low  gravity,  any scrap of paper or bit of featherweight plastic
that was thrown away was likely to float anywhere inside the asteroid. You
couldn't  sweep  the  floor. The first stroke set everything flying. I had
seen  the  garbage men chasing scraps of newsprint and fluffs of cigarette
ash  with little hand-pumped vacuum cleaners, and I had even thought about
becoming one if I had to. But I didn't like Shicky doing it.
   He  was  following  what  I  was thinking about him without difficulty.
"It's all right, Rob. Really, I enjoy the work. But-please; if you do need
a crewman, think of me."

   I took my bonus and paid up my per capita for three weeks in advance. I
bought  a  few items I needed-new clothes, and some music tapes to get the
sound  of  Mozart  and  Palestrina  out of my ears. That left me about two
hundred dollars in money.
   Two  hundred  dollars  was  a  lot like nothing at all. It meant twenty
drinks at the Blue Hell, or one chip at the blackjack table, or maybe half
a dozen decent meals outside the prospectors' commissary.
   So I had three choices. I could get another job and stall indefinitely.
Or  I  could  ship  out  within the three weeks. Or I could give up and go
home. None of the choices was attractive. But, provided I didn't spend any
money  on  anything  much, I didn't have to decide for, oh, a long time-as
long  as  twenty  days.  I resolved to give up smoking and boughten meals;
that  way  I  could  budget myself to a maximum spending of nine dollars a
day, so that my per capita and my cash would run out at the same time.
   I  called  Klara.  She  looked  and sounded guarded but friendly on the
P-phone,  so  I  spoke  guardedly and amiably to her. I didn't mention the
party,  and she didn't mention wanting to see me that night, so we left it
at  that: nowhere. That was all right with me. I didn't need Klara. At the
party  that  night  I  met  a new girl around called Doreen MacKenzie. She
wasn't  a  girl,  really; she was at least a dozen years older than I was,
and  she had been out five times. What was exciting about her was that she
had  really  hit  it once. She'd taken one and a half mil back to Atlanta,
spent the whole wad trying to buy herself a career as a PV singer-material
writer,  manager,  publicity  team, advertising, demo tapes, the works-and
when it hadn't worked she had come back to Gateway to try again. The other
thing was she was very, very pretty.
   But  after two days of getting to know Doreen I was back on the P-phone
to  Klara.  She  said,  "Come on down," and she sounded anxious; and I was
there  in  ten  minutes,  and  we were in bed in fifteen. The trouble with
getting to know Doreen was that I had got to know her. She was nice, and a
hell of a racing pilot, but she wasn't Klara Moynlin.
   When  we  were  lying  in  the hammock together, sweaty and relaxed and
spent,  Klara  yawned, ruffled my hair, pulled back her head and stared at
me.  "Oh,  shit," she said drowsily, "I think this is what they call being
in love."
   I  was gallant. "It's what makes the world go around. No, not 'it.' You
are."
   She  shook  her  head  regretfully.  "Sometimes I can't stand you," she
said.  "Sagittarians  never  make  it  with  Geminis.  I'm a fire sign and
you-well, Geminis can't help being confused."
   "I wish you wouldn't keep going on about that crap," I said.
   She didn't take offense. "Let's get something to eat."
   I  slid  over  the  edge  of  the hammock and stood up, needing to talk
without  touching  for  a moment. "Dear Klara," I said, "look, I can't let
you  keep  me because you'll be bitchy about it, sooner or later-or if you
aren't, I'll be expecting you to, and so I'll be bitchy to you. And I just
don't have the money. You want to eat outside the commissary, you do it by
yourself.  And I won't take your cigarettes, your liquor, or your chips at
the casino. So if you want to get something to eat go ahead, and I'll meet
you later. Maybe we could go for a walk."
   She sighed. "Geminis never know how to handle money," she told me, "but
they can be awfully nice in bed."
   We put our clothes on and went out and got something to eat, all right,
but  in the Corporation commissary, where you stand in line, carry a tray,
and eat standing up. The food isn't bad, if you don't think too much about
what  substrates  they  grow  it  on.  The price is right. It doesn't cost
anything.  They  promise  that if you eat all your meals in the commissary
you  will  have  one  hundred  plus percent of all the established dietary
needs. You will, too, only you have to eat all of everything to be sure of
that.  Single-cell  protein and vegetable protein come out incomplete when
considered  independently,  so it's not enough to eat the soybean jelly or
the bacterial pudding alone. You have to eat them both.
   The  other thing about Corporation meals is that they produce a hell of
a  lot  of  methane, which produces a hell of a lot of what all ex-Gateway
types remember as the Gateway fug.
   We  drifted down toward the lower levels afterward, not talking much. I
suppose  we  were both wondering where we were going. I don't mean just at
that moment. "Feel like exploring?" Klara asked.
   I  took  her hand as we strolled along, considering. That sort of thing
was  fun.  Some  of  the  old  ivy-choked  tunnels  that  no one used were
interesting,  and  beyond them were the bare, dusty places that no one had
troubled  even to plant ivy in. Usually there was plenty of light from the
ancient  walls  themselves,  still  glowing with that bluish Heechee-metal
sheen.  Sometimes-not  lately,  but  no  more  than  six  or  seven  years
ago-people  had  actually  found  Heechee artifacts in them, and you never
knew when you might stumble on something worth a bonus.

   |      The  Gateway  Anglican The Rev. Theo Durleigh,
   |    Chaplain  Parish  Communion 10:30 Sundays Evensong
   |                   by Arrangement
   |
   |      Eric  Manley,  who ceased to be my warden on 1
   |  December,  has  left  an indelible mark on Gateway
   |  All  Saints'  and  we owe him an incalculable debt
   |  for  placing  his multicompetence at our disposal.
   |  Born in Elatree, Herts., 51 years ago,he graduated
   |  as  an  LL.  B.  from the University of London and
   |  then   read  for  the  bar.  Subsequently  he  was
   |  employed  for  some  years in Perth at the natural
   |  gas  works.  If we are saddened for ourselves that
   |  he  is leaving us, it is tempered with joy that he
   |  has  now  achieved  his  heart's  desire  and will
   |  return  to  his  beloved  Hertfordshire,  where he
   |  expects  to  devote  his retirement years to civic
   |  affairs,  transcendental meditation, and the study
   |  of  plainsong.  A  new  warden will be elected the
   |  first   Sunday   we   attain   a  quorum  of  nine
   |  parishioners.

   But I couldn't keep up with her pace, and after a few moments she asked
if  I wanted to go back. Nothing is fun when you don't have a choice. "Why
not?"  I  said, but a few minutes later, when I saw where we were, I said,
"Let's go to the museum for a while."
   "Oh, right," she said, suddenly interested. "Did you know they've fixed
up  the  surround room? Metchnikov was telling me about it. They opened it
while we were out."
   So  we  changed  course,  dropped  two  levels and came out next to the
museum.  The  surround room was a nearly spherical chamber just beyond it.
It  was  big,  ten meters or more across, and in order to use it we had to
strap  on  wings  like  Shicky's,  hanging on a rack outside the entrance.
Neither  Klara  nor  I  had  ever used them before, but it wasn't hard. On
Gateway you weigh so little to begin with that flying would be the easiest
and  best  way to get around, if there were any places inside the asteroid
big enough to fly in.
   So we dropped through the hatch into the sphere, and were in the middle
of  a  whole  universe. The chamber was walled with hexagonal panels, each
one  of them projected from some source we could not see, probably digital
with liquid-crystal screens.
   "How pretty!" Klara cried.
   All  around us there was a sort of globarama of what the scouting ships
had  found.  Stars,  nebulae,  planets,  satellites.  Sometimes each plate
showed  its  own  independent  thing  so  that  there  were,  what was it,
something  like  a  hundred and twenty-eight separate scenes. Then, flick,
all  of  them  changed; flick again, and they began to cycle, some of them
holding  their  same  scene, some of them changing to something new. Flick
again,  and  one  whole  hemisphere  lit up with a mosaic view of the M-31
galaxy as seen from God-knew-where.
   "Hey," I said, really excited, "this is great!" And it was. It was like
being on all the trips any prospector had ever taken, without the drudgery
and the trouble and the constant fear.
   There was no one there but us, and I couldn't understand why. It was so
pretty.  You  would  think there would be a long line of people waiting to
get  in.  One  side  began  to run through a series of pictures of Heechee
artifacts,  as  discovered  by  prospectors:  prayer  fans  of all colors,
wall-lining  machines,  the  insides  of Heechee ships, some tunnels-Klara
cried  out  that  they were places she had been, back home on Venus, but I
don't  know  how she could tell. Then the pattern went back to photographs
from  space. Some of them wcre familiar. I could recognize the Pleadies in
one  quick  six- or eight-panel shot, which vanished and was replaced by a
view  of  Gateway  Two  from outside, two of the bright young stars of the
cluster  shining  in  reflection off its sides. I saw something that might
have  been the Horsehead Nebula, and a doughnutshaped puff of gas and dust
that  was  either  the  Ring  Nebula in Lyra or what an exploring team had
found a few orbits before and called the French Cruller, in the skies of a
planet  where  Heechee  digs  had  been detected, but not reached, under a
frozen sea.
   We  hung there for half an hour or so, until it began to look as though
we  were  seeing  the  same  things again, and then we fluttered up to the
hatch,  hung  up  the  wings, and sat down for a cigarette break in a wide
place in the tunnel outside the museum.
   Two  women  I  recognized vaguely as Corporation maintenance crews came
by,  carrying  rolled-up  strap-on wings. "Hi, Klara," one of them greeted
her. "Been inside?"
   Klara nodded. "It was beautiful," she said.
   "Enjoy it while you can," said the other one. "Next week it'll cost you
a  hundred  dollars.  We're  putting  in  a  P-phone  taped lecture system
tomorrow, and they'll have the grand opening before the next tourists show
up."
   "It's worth it," Klara said, but then she looked at me.
   I  became  aware that, in spite of everything, I was smoking one of her
cigarettes.  At  five  dollars a pack I couldn't afford very much of that,
but  I  made  up  my  mind  to  buy  at  least  one pack out of that day's
allowance, and to make sure she took as many from me as I took from her.
   "Want to walk some more?" she asked.
   "Maybe  a little later," I said. I was wondering how many men and women
had  died  to take the pretty pictures we had been watching, because I was
facing  one more time the fact that sooner or later I would have to submit
myself  again  to  the  lethal lottery of the Heechee ships, or give up. I
wondered  if the new information Metchnikov had given me was going to make
a  real difference. Everyone was talking about it now; the Corporation had
scheduled an all-phone announcement for the next day.
   "That reminds me," I said. "Did you say you'd seen Metchnikov?"
   "I  wondered  when you'd ask me about that," she said. "Sure. He called
and told me he'd shown the color-coding stuff to you. So?"
   I  stubbed  out the cigarette. "I think everybody in Gateway's going to
be fighting for the good launches, that's what I think."
   "But maybe Dane knows something. He's been working with the Corporation."
   "I  don't  doubt he does." I stretched and leaned back, rocking against
the low gravity, considering. "He's not that nice a guy, Klara. Maybe he'd
tell  us  if  there's  something  good  coming up, you know, that he knows
something special about. But he'll want something for it."
   Klara grinned. "He'd tell me."
   "What do you mean?"
   "Oh, he calls me once in a while. Wants a date."
   "Oh,  shit, Klara." I was feeling pretty irritated by then. Not just at
Klara,  and  not  just  about  Dane. About money. About the fact that if I
wanted  to  go back into the surround room next week it would cost me half
my  credit  balance.  About  the  dark, shadowed image looming up ahead in
time,  and  not very far ahead, when I would once again have to make up my
mind to do what I was scared silly to do again. "I wouldn't trust that son
of a bitch as far as-"
   "Oh,  relax,  Rob. He's not such a bad guy," she said, lighting another
cigarette  and  leaving  the  pack  where I could reach it if I wanted it.
"Sexually,  he might be kind of interesting. That raw, rough, rude Taurean
thing-anyway, you've got as much to offer him as I do."
   "What are you talking about?"
   She looked honestly surprised. "I thought you knew he swings both ways."
   "He's  never  given  me any indication-" But I stopped, remembering how
close  he  liked to get when he was talking to me, and how uncomfortable I
was with him inside my bodyspace.
   "Maybe you're not his type," she grinned. Only it wasn't a kindly grin.
A  couple  of Chinese crewmen, coming out of the museum, looked at us with
interest, and then politely looked away.
   "Let's get out of here, Klara."
   So  we  went  to  the  Blue Hell, and of course I insisted on paying my
share of the drinks. Forty-eight dollars down the tube in one hour. And it
wasn't  all  that  much  fun.  We wound up in her place and fell into bed,
although  the  drinks had given me a headache that was still there when we
finished. And the time was slipping by.

   There  are  people  who  never  pass a certain point in their emotional
development.  They  cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life
with  a  sexual  partner for more than a short time. Something inside them
will  not  tolerate  happiness.  The better it gets, the more they have to
destroy it.
   Hacking around Gateway with Klara, I began to suspect that I was one of
those  people.  I  knew  Klara was. She had never sustained a relationship
with a man for more than a few months in her life; she told me so herself.
Already I was pretty close to a record with her. And already it was making
her edgy.
   In  some  ways  Klara  was a lot more adult and responsible than I ever
would be. The way she got to Gateway in the first place, for instance. She
didn't  win  a  lottery  to  pay  her  fare.  She  earned it and saved it,
painfully,  over  a  period  of  years.  She was a fully qualified airbody
driver  with  a  guide's  license and an engineering degree. She had lived
like a fish-farmer while earning an income that would have entitled her to
a three-room flat in the Heechee warrens on Venus, vacations on Earth, and
Major  Medical.  She  knew  more  than  I did about the growing of food on
hydrocarbon  substrates,  in  spite  of  all my years in Wyoming. (She had
invested  in  a  food factory on Venus, and for all her life she had never
put  a dollar into anything she didn't fully understand.) When we were out
together,  she  was  the  senior member of the crew. It was she Metchnikov
wanted as a shipmate-if he wanted anybody-not me. She had been my teacher!
   And  yet between the two of us she was as inept and unforgiving as ever
I  had  been with Sylvia, or with Deena, Janice, Liz, Ester, or any of the
other  two-week  romances  that had all ended badly in all the years after
Sylvia.  It  was, she said, because she was Sagitarius and I was a Gemini.
Sagittarians  were  prophets.  Sagittarians loved freedom. Us poor Geminis
were  just terribly mixed up and indecisive. "It's no wonder," she told me
gravely one morning, eating breakfast in her room (I accepted no more than
a  couple  of sips of coffee), "that you can't make your mind up to go out
again. It isn't just physical cowardice, dear Robinette. Part of your twin
nature  wants to triumph. Part wants to fail. I wonder which side you will
allow to win?"
   I gave her an ambiguous answer. I said, "Honey, go screw yourself." And
she laughed, and we got through that day. She had scored her point.
   The  Corporation  made  its  expected  announcement,  and  there was an
immense  flurry  of  conferring  and  planning  and exchanging guesses and
interpretations  among  all  of  us.  It  was an exciting time. Out of the
master  computer's  files  the Corporation pulled twenty launches with low
danger  factors  and  high  profit  expectancies.  They  were  subscribed,
equipped, and launched within a week.
   And I wasn't on any of them, and neither was Klara; and we tried not to
discuss why.
   Surprisingly,  Dane  Metchnikov  didn't  go out on any of them. He knew
something,  or said he did. Or didn't say he didn't when I asked him, just
looked  at  me in that glowering, contemptuous way and didn't answer. Even
Shicky  almost went out. He lost out in the last hour before launch to the
Finnish  boy who had never been able to find anyone to talk to; there were
four  Saudis  who wanted to stay together, and settled for the Finnish kid
to fill out a Five. Louise Forehand didn't go out, either, because she was
waiting for some member of her family to come back, so as to preserve some
sort  of  continuity.  You  could  eat  in  the Corporation commissary now
without  waiting  in  line,  and there were empty rooms all up and down my
tunnel. And one night Klara said to me, "Rob, I think I'm going to go to a
shrink."
   I  jumped.  It  was a surprise. Worse than that, a betrayal. Klara knew
about my early psychotic episode and what I thought of psychotherapists.
   I  withheld the first dozen things I thought of to say to her-tactical:
"I'm  glad;  it's about time"; hypocritical: "I'm glad, and please tell me
how  I can help"; strategic: "I'm glad, and maybe I ought to go, too, if I
could afford it." I refrained from the only truthful response, which would
have been: "I interpret this move on your part as a condemnation of me for
bending  your  head." I didn't say anything at all, and after a moment she
went on:
   "I need help, Rob. I'm confused."
   That  touched  me,  and I reached out for her hand. She just let it lay
limp  in  mine,  not  squeezing  back  and not pulling away. She said: "My
psychology  professor  used  to say that was the first step-no, the second
step. The first step when you have a problem is to know you have it. Well,
I've  known  that for some time. The second step is to make a decision: Do
you  want  to  keep  the problem, or do you want to do something about it?
I've decided to do something about it."
   "Where will you go?" I asked, carefully noncommittal.
   "I  don't  know.  The  groups  don't  seem to do much. There's a shrink
machine  available  on  the Corporation master computer. That would be the
cheapest way."
   "Cheap  is  cheap," I said. "I spent two years with the shrink machines
when I was younger, after I-I was kind of messed up."
   "And  since  then  you've  been  operating  for twenty years," she said
reasonably. "I'd settle for that. For now, anyway."
   I  patted  her hand. "Any step you take is a good step," I said kindly.
"I've  had  the feeling all along that you and I could get along better if
you  could clear some of that old birthright crap out of your mind. We all
do it, I guess, but I'd rather have you angry at me on my own than because
I'm acting as a surrogate for your father or something."
   She  rolled over and looked at me. Even in the pale Heecheemetal glow I
could see surprise on her face. "What are you talking about?"
   "Why,  your  problem, Klara. I know it took a lot of courage for you to
admit to yourself that you needed help."
   "Well,  Rob,"  she  said, "it did, only you don't seem to know what the
problem  is.  Getting  along  with  you  isn't the problem. You may be the
problem.  I  just  don't  know.  What I'm worried about is stalling. Being
unable  to  make  decisions.  Putting  it  off  so  long before I went out
again-and, no offense, picking a Gemini like you to go out with."
   "I hate it when you give me that astrology crap!"
   "You  do  have a mixed-up personality, Rob, you know you do. And I seem
to lean on that. I don't want to live that way."
   We  were both wide awake again by then, and there seemed to be two ways
for   things  to  go.  We  could  get  into  a  but-you-said-you-loved-me,
but-I-can't-stand-this  scene,  probably  ending with either more sex or a
wide-open  split;  or  we  could  do  something  to take our minds off it.
Klara's  thoughts  were  clearly  moving  in  the  same direction as mine,
because  she  slid out of the hammock and began pulling on clothes. "Let's
go up to the casino," she said brightly. "I feel lucky tonight."
   There werent any ships in, and no tourists. There weren't all that many
prospectors,  either,  with  so  many  shiploads going out in the past few
weeks.  Half  the  tables  at  the cisino were closed down, with the green
cloth  hoods  over them. Klara found a seat at the blackjack table, signed
for  a  stack of hundred-dollar markers, and the dealer let me sit next to
her  without playing. "I told you this was my lucky night," she said when,
after  ten  minutes,  she  was more than two thousand dollars ahead of the
house.
   "You're doing fine," I encouraged her, but actually it wasn't that much
fun  for  me. I got up and roamed around a little bit. Dane Metchnikov was
cautiously feeding five-dollar coins into the slots, but he didn't seem to
want  to talk to me. Nobody was playing baccarat. I told Klara I was going
to  get  a cup of coffee at the Blue Hell (five dollars, but in slow times
like  this  they would keep filling the cup for nothing). She flashed me a
quarter-proffle smile without ever taking her eyes off the cards.
   In the Blue Hell Louise Forehand was sipping a rocket-fuel-and-water...
well,  it  wasn't really rocket fuel, just old-fashioned white whisky made
out  of  whatever happened to be growing well that week in the hydroponics
tanks. She looked up with a welcoming smile, and I sat down next to her.
   She  had,  it  suddenly  occurred to me, a rather lonely time of it. no
reason she had to. She was-well, I don't know exactly what there was about
her,   but  she  seemed  like  the  only  nonthreatening,  nonreproachful,
nondemanding  person  on Gateway. Everybody else either wanted something I
didn't  want  to  give, or refused to take what I was offering. Louise was
something  else.  She  was at least a dozen years older than I, and really
very  good-looking.  Like  me,  she  wore  only  the  Corporation standard
clothes, short coveralls in a choice of three unattractive colors. But she
had  remade  them  for  herself,  converting the jumpsuit into a two-piece
outfit  with  tight shorts, bare midriff, and a loose, open sort of top. I
discovered  that  she  was watching me take inventory, and I suddenly felt
embarrassed. "You're looking good," I said.
   "Thanks, Rob. All original equipment, too," she bragged, and smiled. "I
never could afford anything else."
   "You  don't  need  anything  you  haven't  had  all  along," I told her
sincerely, and she changed the subject.
   "There's a ship coming in," she said. "Been a long time out, they say."

   |      MISSION REPORT
   |
   |      Vessel A3-7, Voyage 022D55. Crew S. Rigney, E.
   |  Tsien, M. Sindler.
   |      Transit   time   18  days  0  hours.  Position
   |  vicinity Xi Pegasi A.
   |      Summary. "We emerged in close orbit of a small
   |  planet  approximately  9  A.  U. from primary. The
   |  planet  is  ice-covered,  but  we detected Heechee
   |  radiation from a spot near the equator. Rigney and
   |  Mary   Sindler   landed   nearby   and  with  some
   |  difficulty-the location was mountainous-reached an
   |  ice-free  warm  area  within  which was a metallic
   |  dome.  Inside  the  dome  were a number of Heechee
   |  artifacts,   including  two  empty  landers,  home
   |  equipment  of  unknown use, and a heating coil. We
   |  succeeded  in  transporting  most  of  the smaller
   |  items  to the vessel. It proved impossible to stop
   |  the  heating coil entirely, but we reduced it to a
   |  low level of operation and stored it in the lander
   |  for  the  return.  Even  so,  Mary  and Tsien were
   |  seriously dehydrated and in coma when we landed."
   |      Corporation  evaluation: Heating coil analyzed
   |  and  rebuilt.  Award  of  $3,000,000  made to crew
   |  against  royalties.  Other  artifacts  not  as yet
   |  analyzed.  Award  of  $25,000 per kilo mass, total
   |  $675,000, made against future exploitation if any.

   Well,  I  knew  what  that meant to her, and that explained why she was
sitting  around  in  the Blue Hell instead of being asleep at that hour. I
knew  she  was  worried  about  her  daughter,  but  she wasn't letting it
paralyze her.
   She  had a very good attitude about prospecting, too. She was afraid of
going  out,  which  was  sensible.  But  she didn't let that keep her from
going,  which I admired a lot. She was still waiting for some other member
of her family to return before she signed on again, as they had agreed, so
that whoever did come back would always find family waiting.
   She  told  me  a little more about their background. They had lived, as
far  as  you  could call it living, in the tourist traps of the Spindle on
Venus, surviving on what they could eke out, mostly from the cruise ships.
There  was  a lot of money there, but there was also a lot of competition.
The  Forehands  had  at one time, I discovered, worked up a nightclub act:
singing,  dancing,  comedy routines. I gathered that they were not bad, at
least  by  Venus  standards. But the few tourists that were around most of
the  year  had  so  many other birds of prey battling for a scrap of their
flesh  that there just wasn't enough to nurture them all. Sess and the son
(the  one  who  had  died) had tried guiding, with an old airbody they had
managed  to  buy  wrecked  and  rebuild. no big money there. The girls had
worked  at all kinds of jobs. I was pretty sure that Louise, at least, had
been  a hooker for a while, but that hadn't paid enough to matter, either,
for  the same sorts of reasons as everything else. They were nearly at the
end of their rope when they managed to get to Gateway.
   It  wasn't the first time for them. They'd fought hard to get off Earth
in the first place, when Earth got so bad for them that Venus had seemed a
less  hopeless alternative. They had more courage, and more willingness to
pull up stakes and go, than any other people I'd ever met.
   "How did you pay for all this travel?" I asked.
   "Well,"  said  Louise,  finishing  her  drink and looking at her watch,
"going to Venus we traveled the cheapest way there is. High-mass load. Two
hundred  and  twenty other immigrants, sleeping in shoulder clamps, lining
up  for  two-minute  appointments  in  the  toilets, eating compressed dry
rations and drinking recycled water. It was a hell of a way to spend forty
thousand  dollars  apiece.  Fortunately, the kids weren't born yet, except
Hat, and he was small enough to go for quarter-fare."
   "Hat's your son? What-"
   "He died," she said.
   I waited, but when she spoke again what she said was: "They should have
a radio report from that incoming ship by now."
   "It would have been on the P-phone."
   She  nodded,  and  for  a moment looked worried. The Corporation always
makes  routine  reports  on  incoming  contacts.  If  they  don't  have  a
contact-well, dead prospectors don't check in on radio. So I took her mind
off  her  troubles  by telling her about Kiara's decision to see a shrink.
She  listened  and then put hand over mine and said: "Don't get sore, Rob.
Did you ever think of seeing a shrink yourself?"
   "I don't have the money, Louise."
   "Not  even for a group? There's a primal-scream bunch on L Darling. You
can  hear  them  sometimes.  And  there've  been  ads  everything-TA, Est,
patterning. Of course, a lot of them may have shipped out."
   But her attention wasn't on me. From where we were sitting we could see
the   entrance  to  the  casino,  where  one  of  the  croup  was  talking
interestedly  to  a  crewman  from the Chinese cruiser. Louise was staring
that way.
   "Something's  going  on," I said. I would have added, "Let's look," but
Louise was out of the chair and heading for the casino before me.
   Play  had  stopped. Everybody was clustered around the blackjack table,
where,  I  noticed,  Dane  Metchnikov was now sitting next to Klara in the
seat  I  had vacated, with a couple of twentyfive-dollar chips in front of
him.  And  in  the  middle of them was Shicky Bakin, perched on a dealer's
stool,  talking.  "No,"  he  was  saying  as I came up, "I do not know the
names. But it's a Five."
   "And they're all still alive?" somebody asked.
   "As  far as I know. Hello, Rob. Louise." He nodded politely to us both.
"I see you've heard?"
   "Not  really," Louise said, reaching out unconsciously to take my hand.
"Just that a ship is in. But you don't know the names?"
   Dane  Metchnikov  craned  his  head  around to glare at us. "Names," he
growled.  "Who cares? It's none of us, that's what's important. And it's a
big  one."  He  stood up. Even at that moment I noticed the measure of his
anger: he forgot to pick up his chips from the blackjack table. "I'm going
down  there," he announced. "I want to see what a once-in-a-lifetime score
looks like."

   The  cruiser  crews  had closed off the area, but one of the guards was
Francy Hereira. There were a hundred people around the dropshaft, and only
Hereira  and  two  girls  from  the  American  cruiser  to keep them back.
Metchnikov  plunged  through to the lip of the shaft, peering down, before
one  of  the  girls  chased  him  away.  We  saw  him  talking  to another
five-bracelet prospector. Meanwhile we could hear snatches of gossip:
   "... almost dead. They ran out of water."
   "Nah! Just exhausted. They'll be all right..."
   "... ten-million-dollar bonus if it's a nickel, and then the royalties!"
   Klara  took  Louise's elbow and pulled her toward the front. I followed
in  the  space  they  opened.  "Does  anybody know whose ship it was?" she
demanded.
   Hereira smiled wearily at her, nodded at me, and said: "Not yet, Klara.
They're  searching  them  now.  I  think  they're  going  to be all right,
though."
   Somebody behind me called out,"What did they find?"
   "Artifacts. New ones, that's all I know."
   "But it was a Five?" Klara asked.
   Hereira nodded, then peered down the shaft. "All right," he said, "now,
please back up, friends. They're bringing some of them up now."
   We  all  moved microscopically back, but it didn't matter; they weren't
getting  off  at  our  level,  anyway.  The  first  one up the cable was a
Corporation  bigwig  whose  name  I didn't remember, then a Chinese guard,
then  someone in a Terminal Hospital robe with a medic on the same grip of
the  cable,  holding  him to make sure he didn't fall. I knew the face but
not  the  name;  I  had  seen him at one of the farewell parties, maybe at
several  of them, a small, elderly black man who had been out two or three
times  without scoring. His eyes were open and clear enough, but he looked
infinitely  fatigued.  He  looked without astonishment at the crowd around
the shaft, and then was out of sight.
   I looked away and saw that Louise was weeping quietly, her eyes closed.
Klara had an arm around her. In the movement of the crowd I managed to get
next  to Kiara and look a question at her. "It's a Five," she said softly.
"Her daughter was in a Three."
   I  knew  Louise  had  heard that, so I patted her and said: "I'm sorry,
Louise,"  and  then  a  space  opened at the lip of the shaft and I peered
down.
   I  caught a quick glimpse of what ten or twenty million do looked like.
It was a stack of hexagonal boxes made out of Heechee metal, not more than
half  a  meter  across and less than a meter tall. Then Francy Hereira was
coaxing,  "Come  on,  Rob, get back will you?" And I stepped away from the
shaft  while  another Inspector in a hospital robe came up. She didn't see
me  as  she went past; in fact her eyes were closed. But I saw her. It was
Sheri.


        Chapter 21

   "I feel pretty foolish, Sigfrid," I say.
   "Is there some way I can make you feel more comfortable?"
   "You  can drop dead." He has done his whole room over in nursery-school
motifs,  for  Christ's  sake. And the worst part is Sigfrid himself. He is
trying me out with a surrogate mother this time. He is on the mat with me,
a  big  stuffed  doll,  the size of a human being, warm, soft, made out of
something like a bath towel stuffed with foam. It feels good, but-"I guess
I don't want you to treat me like a baby," I say, my voice muffled because
I'm pressing my face against the toweling.
   "Just relax, Robbie. It's all right."
   "In a pig's ass it is."
   He  pauses,  and then reminds me: "You were going to tell me about your
dream."
   "Yech."
   "I'm sorry, Robbie?"
   "I  mean I don't really want to talk about it. Sigfrid," I say quickly,
lifting  my  mouth  away  from  the toweling, "I might as well do what you
want. It was about Sylvia, kind of."
   "Kind of, Robbie?"
   "Well,  she  didn't look like herself, exactly. More like-I don't know,
someone  older,  I  think. I haven't thought of Sylvia in years really. We
were both kids...."
   "Please go on, Robbie," he says after a moment.
   I  put my arms around him, looking up contentedly enough at the wall of
circus-poster  animals and clowns. It is not in the least like any bedroom
I occupied as a child, but Sigfrid knows enough about me already, there is
no reason for me to tell him that.
   "The dream, Robbie?"
   "I dreamed we were working in the mines. It wasn't actually food mines.
It  was, physically, I would say more like the inside of a Five-one of the
Gateway  ships,  you  know? Sylvia was in a kind of a tunnel that went off
it."
   "The tunnel went off?"
   "Now,  don't rush me into some kind of symbolism, Sigfrid. I know about
vaginal images and all that. When I say 'went off,' I mean that the tunnel
started  in  the  place  where  I  was  and led direction away from it." I
hesitate,  then  tell him the hard part: "Then her tunnel caved in. Sylvia
was trapped."
   I  sit  up.  "What's  wrong  with  that," I explain, "is that it really
couldn't happen. You only tunnel in order to plant charge to loosen up the
shale. All the real mining is scoop-shovel stuff. Sylvia's job would never
have put her in that position."
   "I don't think it matters if it could really have happened, Robbie."
   "I  suppose  not.  Well, there was Sylvia, trapped inside the collapsed
tunnel.  I  could see the heap of shale stirring. It wasn't real shale. It
was  fluffy  stuff,  more  like  scrap paper. She had a shovel and she was
digging  her  way  out.  I  thought she was going to be all right. She was
digging  a  good escape hole for herself. I waited her to come out... only
she didn't come out."
   Sigfrid,  in  his incarnation as a teddy-bear, lies warm and snuggly in
my  arms.  It  is good to feel him there. Of course, he isn't in there. He
isn't  really  anywhere,  except maybe in the central stores in Washington
Heights,  where the big machines are kept. All I have is his remote-access
terminal in a bunny suit.
   "Is there anything else, Robbie?"
   "Not really. Not part of the dream, anyway. But-well, have a feeling. I
feel  as though I kicked Klara in the head to keep her from coming out. As
though I was afraid the rest of the tunnel was going to fall on me."

   |  Out in the holes where the Heechee hid,
   |  Out in the caves of the stars,
   |  Sliding the tunnels they slashed and slid,
   |  Healing the Heechee-hacked scars,
   |  We're coming through!
   |  Little lost Heechee, we're looking for you.

   "What do you mean by a 'feeling,' Rob?"
   "What  I  said.  It  wasn't part of the dream. It was just that-I don't
know."
   He  waits, then he tries a different approach. "Rob, Are aware that the
name you said just then was 'Klara,' not 'Sylvia'?"
   "Really? That's funny. I wonder why."
   He waits, then he prods a little. "Then what happened, Rob?"
   "Then I woke up."
   I  roll  over on my back and look up at the ceiling, which was textured
tile with glittery five-pointed stars pasted to it. "That's all there is,"
I  say.  Then  I  add, conversationally, "Sigfrid, I wonder if all this is
getting anywhere."
   "I don't know if I can answer that question, Rob."
   "If you could," I say, "I would have made you do it like this." I still
have  S.  Ya.  's  little  piece  of paper, which gives kind of security I
prize.
   "I  think,"  he says, "that there is somewhere to get. By that I mean I
think  there is something in your mind that you don't want to think of, to
which this dream is related."
   "Something about Sylvia, for Christ's sake? That was years ago."
   "That doesn't really matter, does it?"
   "Oh,  shit. You bore me, Sigfrid! You really do." Then I say, "Say, I'm
getting angry. What does that mean?"
   "What do you think it means, Rob?"
   "If  I  knew  I  wouldn't have to ask you. I wonder. Am I trying to cop
out? Getting angry because you're getting close to something?"
   "Please don't think about the process, Rob. Just tell me how you feel."
   "Guilty," I say at once, without knowing that's what I'm going to say.
   "Guilty about what?"
   "Guilty  about...  I'm  not sure." I lift my wrist to look at my watch.
We've  got  twenty  minutes  yet.  A  hell  of  a lot can happen in twenty
minutes,  and  I stop to think about whether I want to leave really shaken
up. I've got a game of duplicate lined up for this afternoon, and I have a
good  chance  to  get into the finals. If I don't mess it up. If I keep my
concentration.
   "I wonder if I oughtn't to leave early today, Sigfrid," I say.
   "Guilty about what, Rob?"
   "I'm  not  sure I remember." I stroke the bunny neck and chuckle. "This
is really nice, Sigfrid, although it took me a while to get used to it."
   "Guilty about what, Rob?"
   I scream: "About murdering her, you jerk!"
   "You mean in your dream?"
   "No! Really. Twice."
   I  know  I  am  breathing  hard,  and  I  know  Sigfrid's  sensors  are
registering  it.  I  fight  to  get control of myself, so he won't get any
crazy ideas. I go over what I have just said in my mind, to tidy it up. "I
didn't  really  murder Sylvia, that is. But I tried! Went after