l him. "Perhaps so, Rob." To get him back on the right track I say: "It is true that it happened a long time ago. I don't see what you're asking beyond that." "I'm asking you to resolve a contradiction I perceive in what you say. You've been saying that you don't mind the fact that your girlfriend, Klara, had sexual relations with other men. Why is it important that she did with Dane?" "Dane didn't treat her right!" And, good God, he certainly didn't. He left her stuck like a fly in amber. "Is it because of how he treated Klara, Rob? Or is it something between Dane and you?" "Never! There was never anything between Dane and me!" "You did tell me he was bi, Rob. What about the flight you took with him?" "He had two other men to play with! Not me, boy, no, I say: Not me. Oh," I say, trying to calm my voice enough to mask reflecting the very mild interest I really felt in this stupid subject, " To be sure, he tried to put the make on me once or twice. But I told him it wasn't my style." "Your voice, Rob," he says, "seems to reflect more anger than your words account for." "Damn you, Sigfrid!" I really am angry now, I admit it. I hardly get the words out. "You get me pissed off with your stupid accusations. Sure, I let him put his arm around me once or twice. That's as far as I went. Nothing serious. I was just abusing myself to make the time pass. I liked him well enough. Big, good-looking fellow. You get lonesome when-now what?" Sigfrid is making a sound, sort of like clearing one's throat. I hate how he interrupts without interrupting. "What did you just say, Rob?" "What? When?" "When you said there was nothing serious between you." "Christ, I don't know what I said. There was nothing serious, that's all. I was just entertaining myself, to make the time pass." "You didn't use the word 'entertaining,' Rob." "I didn't? What word did I use?" I reflect, listening for the echo of my own voice. "I guess I said 'amusing myself.' What about it?" "You didn't say 'amusing' either, Rob. What did you say?" "I don't know!" "You said, 'I was just abusing myself,' Rob." My defenses go up. I feel as though I had suddenly discovered I had wet my pants, or that my fly was open. I step outside my body and look at my own head. "What does 'abusing myself' mean to you, Rob?" "Say," I say, laughing, genuinely impressed and amused at the same time, "that's a real Freudian slip, isn't it? You fellows are pretty keen. My compliments to the programmers." Sigfrid doesn't respond to my urbane comment. He just lets me stew in it for a minute. "All right," I say. I feel very open and vulnerable, letting nothing at all happen, living in that moment as though it were lasting forever, like Klara stuck in her instant and eternal fall. Sigfrid says gently, "Rob. When you masturbated, did you ever have fantasies about Dane?" "I hated it," I say. He waits. "I hated myself for it. I mean, not hated, exactly. More like despised. Poor goddamn son of a bitch, me, all kinky and awful, beating his meat and thinking about being screwed by his girl's lover." Sigfrid waits me out for a while. Then he says, "I think you really want to cry, Rob." He's right, but I don't say anything. "Would you like to cry?" he invites. "I'd love it," I say. "Then why don't you go ahead and cry, Rob?" "I wish I could," I say. "Unfortunately, I just don't know how." Chapter 24 I was just turning over, making up my mind to go to sleep, when I noticed that the colors on the Heechee guidance system were breaking up. It was the fifty-fifth day of my trip, the twenty seventh since turnover. The colors had been shocking pink for the whole fifty-five days. Now whorls of pure white formed, grew, flowed together. I was arriving! Wherever it was going to turn out to be when I got there, I was arriving. My little old ship-the smelly, hurtful, tedious coffin I had banging around in for nearly two months by myself, talking to myself, playing games with myself, tired of myself-was well below lightspeed. I leaned over to look at the viewscreen, now related "down" to me because I had been decelerating, and saw nothing that looked very exciting. Oh, there was a star, yes. There lots of stars in a scattering of groupings that in no way looked familiar; half a dozen blues ranging from bright to hurt-the-eye. One red one that stood out more for intensity of hue than luminosity was an angry-looking red coal, not much brighter than Mars from Earth, but a deeper, uglier red. I made myself take an interest. | MISSION REPORT | | Vessel 3-104, Voyage 031D18. Crew N. Ahoya, | Ta. Zakharcenko, L. Marks. | Transit time 119 days 4 hours. Position not | identified. Apparently outside galactic cluster, | in dust cloud. Identification of external galaxies | doubtful. | Summary. "We found no trace of any planet, | artifact, or landable asteroid within scanning | distance. Nearest star approximately 1. 7 l. y. | Conjecture whatever was there has since been | destroyed. Life-support systems began to | malfunction on return trip and Larry Marks died." That was not really easy. After two months of rejecting close to everything around me because it was boring or threatening, it was tough for me to switch over to a welcoming, vulnerable mode. I switched on the spherical scan and peered out as the ship began to rotate its scanning pattern, slicing orange-peel strips of sky to capture for the cameras and analyzers. And almost at once I got a huge, bright, nearby signal. Fifty-five days of boredom and exhaustion went right out of my mind. There was something either very big or very close. I forgot about being sleepy. I crouched over the viewscreen, holding onto it with hands and knees, and then I saw it: a squared-off object marching into the screen. Glowing all over. Pure Heechee metal. It was irregularly slab-sided, with rounded pimples studding it on the flat sides. And the adrenalin began to flow, and visions of sugarplums danced in my head. I watched it out of sight, and then hauled myself over to the scan analyzer, waiting to see what would come out. There was no question that it was good, the only question was how good. Maybe extraordinarily good! Maybe a whole Peggy's World all my own!-with a royalty in the millions of dollars every year for the rest of my life! Maybe only a vacant shell. Maybe. The squared-off shape suggested it was-maybe that wildest of dreams, a whole big Heechee ship that I could enter into and fly around; where I chose, big enough to carry a thousand people and a lion tons of cargo! All those dreams were possible; and even if they all failed, if it was just an abandoned shell, if all that it held was one thing inside it, one little doodad, one gadget, one whosis that nobody had ever found before that could be taken apart, reproduced and made to work on Earth.. I stumbled and raked my knuckles against the spiral gaget now glowing soft gold. I sucked the blood off them and realized the ship was moving. It shouldn't have been moving! It wasn't programmed to do that. It was meant to hang in whatever orbit it was programmed to find, and just stay there until I looked around and made my decisions. I stared around, confused and baffled. The glowing slab was firmly in the middle of the viewscreen now, and it stayed there; ship had stopped its automatic spherical scan. Belatedly I heard the distant high yell of the lander motors. They were what was moving me; my ship was targeted for that slab. And a green light was glowing over the pilot's seat. That was wrong! The green light was installed on Gateway by human beings. It had nothing to do with the Heechee; it was the plain old people's radio circuit, announcing that someone was calling me. Who? Who could be anywhere near my brand-new discovery? I thumbed on the TBS circuit and shouted, "Hello?" There was an answer. I didn't understand it; it seemed to be in some foreign language, perhaps Chinese. But it was human, all right. "Talk English!" I yelled. "Who the hell are you?" Pause. Then another voice. "Who are you?" "My name is Rob Broadhead," I snarled. "Broadhead?" Confused mumbling of a couple of voices. Then the English-speaking voice again: "We don't have any record of a prospector named Broadhead. Are you from Aphrodite?" "What's Aphrodite?" "Oh, Christ! Who are you? Listen, this is Gateway Two control and we don't have time to screw around. Identify yourself!" Gateway Two! I snapped off the radio and lay back, watching the slab grow larger, ignoring the demand of the green light. Gateway Two? How ridiculous! If I had wanted to go to Gateway Two I would have signed up in the regular course and accepted the penalty of paying royalties on anything I might find. I would have flown out secure as any tourist, on a course that had been tested a hundred times. I hadn't done that. I had picked a setting no one else had ever used and taken my risks. And I had felt every one of them, scared out of my brain for fifty-five bad days. It wasn't fair! I lost my head. I lunged toward the Heechee course director and shoved the wheels around at random. It was a failure I couldn't accept. I was braced to find nothing. I was not braced to find I had done something easy, for no reward at all. But what I produced was a bigger failure still. There was a bright yellow flash from the course board, and then all the colors went black. The thin scream from the lander motors stopped. The feeling of motion was gone. The ship was dead. Nothing was moving. Nothing worked in the Heechee complex; nothing, not even the cooling system. By the time Gateway Two sent a ship out to haul me in I delirious with heatstroke, in an ambient temperature of 75. 0 C. Gateway was hot and dank. Gateway Two was cold enough that I had to borrow jacket, gloves, and heavy underwear. Gateway stank of sweat and sewers. Gateway Two tasted of rusty steel. Gateway was bright and loud and full of people. On Gateway Two there was almost no sound, and only seven human beings, counting myself, to make any. The Heechee had left Gateway Two not quite completed. Some of the tunnels ended in bare rock, there were only a few dozen of them. no one had got around to planting vegetation yet, and all the air there was came from chemical processors. The partial pressure of O2 was under 150 millibars; and the rest of the atmosphere was a nitrogen-helium mix, much more than half earth-normal pressure altogether, that made the voices highpitched and left me gasping for the first few hours. The man who helped me out of my lander and bundled me against the sudden cold was a dark, immense Martian-Japanese named Norio Ituno. He put me in his own bed, filled me with hot liquids and let me rest for an hour. I dozed, and when I woke he was sitting there, looking at me with amusement and respect. The respect was for someone who had slain a five-hundred million-dollar ship. The amusement was that I was idiot enough to do it. "I guess I'm in trouble," I said. "I would say so, yes," he agreed. "The ship is totally dead. Never saw anything like it before." "I didn't know a Heechee ship could go dead like that." He shrugged. "You did something original, Broadhead. How are you feeling?" I sat up to answer him, and he nodded. "I'm pretty busy right now. I'm going to have to let you take can yourself for a couple of hours-if you can?-fine. Then we'll have a party for you." "Party!" It was the farthest thing from my mind. "For who?" "We don't meet someone like you every day, Broadhead," said Ituno admiringly, and left me to my thoughts. I didn't like my thoughts very much, and after a while I got up, put on the gloves, buttoned up the jacket, and started exploring. | Dear Voice of Gateway: | | Are you a reasonable and open-minded person? | Then prove it by reading this letter all the way | through to the end before making up your mind | about what it says. There are thirteen occupied | levels in Gateway. There are thirteen residences | in each of thirteen (count them yourself) of the | housing halls. Do you think this letter is just | silly superstition? Then look at the evidence for | yourself! Launches 83-20, 84-1 and 84-10 (what do | the digits add up to?) were all declared overdue | in List 86-13! Gateway Corporation, wake up! Let | the skeptics and bigots jeer. Human lives depend | on your willingness to risk a little ridicule. It | would cost nothing to omit the Danger Numbers from | all programs-except courage! | Gloyner, 88-331 It didn't take long; there wasn't much there. I heard sounds of a party from the lower levels, but the echoes traveled at queer as along the empty corridors, and I saw no one. Gateway Two didn't have a tourist trade, and so there wasn't any nightclub or casino or restaurant that I could find... not even a latrine. After a little while that question began to seem urgent. I reasoned that Ituno would have to have something like that near his room, and tried to retrace my steps to there, but that didn't work, either. There were cubicles along some of the corridors, but they were unfinished. no one lived there, and no one had troubled to install plumbing. It was not one of my better days. When I finally found a toilet I puzzled over it for ten minutes and would guiltily have left it impolitely soiled if I had not heard a sound outside the cubicle. A plump little woman was standing there, waiting. "I don't know how to flush it," I apologized. She looked me up and down. "You're Broadhead," she stated, and then: "Why don't you go to Aphrodite?" "What's Aphrodite-no, wait. First, how do you flush this thing? Then, what's Aphrodite?" She pointed to a button on the edge of the door; I had thought it was a light switch. When I touched it the whole bottom of the seamless bowl began to glow and in ten seconds there was nothing inside but ash, then nothing at all. "Wait for me," she commanded, disappearing inside. When she came out she said, "Aphrodite's where the money is, Broadhead. You're going to need it." I let her take my arm and pull me along. Aphrodite, I began understand, was a planet. A new one, that a ship from Gateway Two had opened up less than forty days earlier, and a big find. "You'd have to pay royalty, of course," she said. "And so far haven't found anything big, just the usual Heechee debris. But there's thousands of square miles to explore, and it'll be months before the first batch of prospectors starts coming out from Gateway. We only sent the word back forty days ago. Have you any hot-planet experience?" "Hot-planet experience?" "I mean," she explained, pulling me down a dropshaft and closing up to me, "have you ever explored a planet that's hot?" | We sniff for your scent in the gas of Orion, | We dig for your den with the dogs of Procyon, | From Baltimore, Buffalo, Bonn, and Benares | We seek you round Algol, Arcturus, Antares. | We'll find you some day. | Little lost Heechee, we're on our way! "No. As a matter of fact, I haven't had any experience at all that counts for anything. One trip. Empty. I didn't even land." "Pity," she said. "Still, there's not that much to learn. Do you know what Venus is like? Aphrodite's just a little bit worse. The primary's a flare star, and you don't want to be caught in the open. But the Heechee digs are all underground. If you find one, you're in." "What are the chances of finding one?" I asked. "Well," she said thoughtfully, pulling me off the cable and down a tunnel, "not all that good, maybe. After all, you're out in open when you're prospecting. On Venus they use armored bodies and they zap around anywhere they want to go, no trouble. Well, maybe a little trouble," she conceded. "But they don't lose very many prospectors anymore. Maybe one percent." "What percent do you lose on Aphrodite?" "More than that. Yes, I grant you, it's higher than that. You have to use the lander from your ship, and of course it's not mobile on the surface of a planet. Especially a planet with a face like molten sulfur and winds like hurricanes-when the weather's mild." "It sounds charming," I said. "Why aren't you out there now?" "Me? I'm an out-pilot. I'm going back to Gateway in about ten days, soon as I get a cargo loaded, or somebody who comes in wants a ride back." "I want a ride back right now." "Oh, cripes, Broadhead! Don't you know what kind of trouble you're in? You broke regulations by messing with the control board. They'll throw the book at you." I thought it over carefully. Then I said, "Thanks, but I think I'll take my chances." "Don't you understand? Aphrodite has guaranteed Heeche remains. You could take a hundred trips without finding anything like this." "Sweetie," I said, "I couldn't take a hundred trips for anything, not now and not ever. I don't know if I can take one. I think I have the guts to get back to Gateway. Beyond that, I don't know." I was on Gateway Two, all together, thirteen days. Hester Bergowiz, the out-pilot, kept trying to talk me into going to Aphrodite, I guess because she didn't want me taking up valuable cargo space on her return flight. The others didn't care. They only thought I was crazy. I was a problem for Ituno, who was loosely in charge of keeping things straight on Two. Technically I was an illegal entrant, without a dime's worth of per capita paid and with nothing to pay it with. He would have been within his rights to toss me out into space without a suit. He solved it by putting me to work loading low-priority cargo into Hester's Five, mostly prayer fans and samples for analysis from Aphrodite. That took two days, and then he designated me chief gofer for the three people who were rebuilding suits for the next batch of explorers of Aphrodite. They had to use Heechee torches to soften the metal enough to bend it onto the Suits, and I wasn't trusted with any of that. It takes two years to train a person to handle a Heechee torch in close quarters. But I was allowed to muscle the suits and sheets of Heechee metal into position for them, to fetch tools, to go for coffee... and to put the suits on when they were finished, and exit into space to make sure they didn't leak. None of them leaked. On the twelfth day, two Fives came in from Gateway, loaded with happy, eager prospectors bringing all the wrong equipment. The word about Aphrodite had not had time to get to Gateway and back, so the new fish didn't know what goodies were in store. Just by accident, one of them was a young girl on a science mission, a former student of Professor Hegramet's who was supposed to make anthropometric studies of Gateway Two. On his own authority Norio Ituno reassigned her to Aphrodite, and decreed a combination welcome and farewell party. The ten newcomers and I outnumbered our hosts; but what they lacked in numbers they made up in drinking, and it was a good party. I found myself a celebrity. The new fish couldn't get over the fact that I had slain a Heechee ship and survived. I was almost sorry to leave... not counting being scared. Ituno splashed three fingers of rice whiskey into a glass for me and offered me a toast. "Sorry to see you go, Broadhead," he said. "Sure you won't change your mind? We've got more armored ships and suits than we have prospectors right now, but I don't know how long that's going to last. If you change your mind after you get back-" "I'm not going to change my mind," I said. | Classifieds. | | SHADE-GROWN BROADLEAF hand tended and rolled. | $2 roach~ 87-307. | | PRESENT WHEREABOUTS Agosto T. Agnelli. Call | Corporation security for Interpol. Reward. | | STORIES, POEMS published. Perfect way to | preserve memories for your children. Sur-. | prisingly low cost. Publishers' rep, 87-349. | | ANYBODY FROM Pittsburgh or Paducah? I'm | homesick. 88-226. "Banzai," he said, and drank. "Listen, do you know an old guy named Bakin?" "Shicky? Sure. My neighbor." "Give him my regards," he said, pouring another drink for the purpose. "He's a great guy, but he reminds me of you. I was with him when he lost his legs: got caught in the lander when we had to jettison. Damn near died. By the time we got him to Gateway he was all swelled up and smelled like hell; we had to take the legs off, two days out. I did it myself." "He's a great person, all right," I said absently, finishing the drink and holding the glass out for more. "Hey. What do you mean, he reminds you of me?" "Can't make up his mind, Broadhead. He's got a stake that's enough to put him on Full Medical, and he can't make up his mind to spend it. If he spends it he can have his legs back and go out again. But then he'd be broke if he didn't score. So he just stays on, a cripple." I put the glass down. I didn't want any more to drink. "So long, Ituno," I said. "I'm going to bed." I spent most of the trip back writing letters to Klara that I didn't know if I would ever mail. There wasn't much else to do. Hester turned out to be surprisingly sexual, for a small plump lady of a certain age. But there's a limit to how long that is entertaining, and with all the cargo we had jammed in the ship, there wasn't room for much else. The days were all the same: sex, letter writing, sleeping... and worrying. Worrying about why Shicky Bakin wanted to stay a cripple; which was a way of worrying, in a way I could face, about why I did. Chapter 25 Sigfrid says, "You sound tired, Rob." Well, that was understandable enough. I had gone off to Hawaii for the weekend. Some of my money was in tourism there, so was all tax deductible. It was a lovely couple of days on the Big Island, with a two-hour stockholders' meeting in the morning, at afternoons with one of those beautiful Island girls on the beach sailing in glass-bottomed catamarans, watching the big mantas glide underneath, begging for crumbs. But coming back, you fight time zones all the way, and I was exhausted. Only that is not the sort of thing that Sigfrid really wants to hear about. He doesn't care if you're physically exhausted. He doest care if you've got a broken leg; he only wants to know if you dream about screwing your mother. I say that. I say, "I'm tired, all right, Sigfrid, but why don't you stop making small talk? Get right into my Oedipal feelings about Ma." "Did you have any, Robby?" "Doesn't everybody?" "Do you want to talk about them, Robby?" "Not particularly." He waits, and I wait, too. Sigfrid has been being cute again, and now his room is fixed up like a boy's room from forty years ago. Crossed Ping-Pong paddles hologrammed on the wall. A fake window with a fake view of the Montana Rockies in a snowstorm. A hologrammed cassette shelf of boys' stories on tape, Tom Sawyer and Lost Race of Mars and-I can't read the rest of the titles. It is all very homey, but not in the least like my own room as a boy, which was tiny, narrow, and almost filled by the old sofa I slept on. "Do you know what you want to talk about, Rob?" Sigfrid probes gently. "You bet." Then I reconsider. "Well, no. I'm not sure." Actually I do know. Something had hit me on the way back from Hawaii, very hard. It's a five-hour flight. Half the time I had spent drenched in tears. It was funny. There was this lovely hapi-haole girl flying east in the seat next to me, and I had decided right away to get to know her better. And the stewardess was the same one I'd had before, and she, I already knew better. So there I was, sitting at the very back of the first-class section of the SST, taking drinks from the stewardess, chatting with my pretty hapi-haole. And-every time the girl was drowsing, or in the ladies' room, and the stewardess was looking the other way-racked with silent, immense, tearful sobs. And then one of them would look my way again and I would be smiling, alert, and on the make. "Do you want to just say what you're feeling at this second, Rob?" "I would in a minute, Sigirid, if I knew what it was." "Don't you know, really? Can't you remember what was in your head while you weren't talking, just now?" "Sure I can!" I hesitate, then I say, "Oh, hell, Sigfrid, I guess I was just waiting to be coaxed. I had an insight the other day, and it hurt. Oh, wow, you wouldn't believe how it hurt. I was crying like a baby." "What was the insight, Robby?" "I'm trying to tell you. It was about-well, it was partly about my mother. But it was also about, well, you know, Dane Metchnikov. I had these... I had-" "I think you're trying to say something about the fantasies you had of having anal sex with Dane Metchnikov, Rob. Is that right?" | MISSION REPORT | | Vessel A3-77, Voyage 036D51. Crew T. Parreno, | N. Ahoya, E. Nimkin. | Transit time 5 days 14 hours. Position | vicinity Alpha Centauri A. | Summary. "The planet was quite Earth-like and | heavily vegetated. The color of the vegetation was | predominantly yellow. The atmosphere matched the | Heechee mix closely. It is a warm planet with no | polar ice caps and a temperature range similar to | Earth tropics at the equator, Earth temperate | extending almost to the poles. We detected no | animal life or signatures (methane, etc.) thereof. | Some of the vegetation predates at a very slow | pace, advancing by uprooting portions of a | vinelike structure, curling around and rerooting. | Maximum velocity measured was approximately 2 | kilometers per hour. no artifacts. Parreno and | Nimkin landed and returned with samples of | vegetation, but died of a toxicodendron-like | reaction. Great blisters formed over their bodies. | Then they developed pain, itching and apparent | suffocation, probably due to fluids accumulating | in the lung. I did not bring them aboard the | vessel. I did not open the lander, or dock it to | the vessel. I recorded personal messages for both, | then jettisoned the lander and returned without | it." | Corporation assessment: no charge made against | N. Ahoya in view of past record. "Yeah. You remember good, Sigfrid. When I was crying, it was about my mother. Partly..." "You told me that, Rob." "Right." And I close up. Sigfrid waits. I wait, too. I suppose I want to be coaxed some more, and after a while Sigfrid obliges me: "Let's see if I can help you, Rob," he says. "What do crying about your mother, and your fantasies about anal sex with Dane, have to do with each other?" I feel something happening inside of me. It feels as though the soft, wet inside of my chest is starting to bubble into my throat. I can tell that when my voice comes out, it is going to be tremulous and desperately forlorn if I don't control it. So I try to control it, although I know perfectly well that I have no secrets of this sort from Sigfrid; he can read his sensors and know what is going on inside me from the tremble of a triceps or the dampness of a palm. But I make the effort anyway. In the tones of a biology instructor explaining a prepared frog I say: "See, Sigfrid, my mother loved me. I knew it. You know it. It was a logical demonstration; she had no choice. And Freud said once that no boy who is certain he was his mother's favorite ever grows up to be neurotic. Only-" "Please, Robbie, that isn't quite right, and besides you're intellectualizing. You know you really don't want to put in all these preambles. You're stalling, aren't you?" Other times I would tear the circuits out of his chips for that, but this time he has my mood gauged correctly. "All right. But I did know that my mother loved me. She couldn't help it! I was her only son. My father was dead-don't clear your throat, Sigfrid, I'm getting to it. It was a logical necessity that she loved me, and I understood it that way with no doubt at all in my mind, but she never said so. Never once." "You mean that never, in your whole life, did she say to you, 'I love you, son?'" "No!" I scream. Then I get control again. "Or not directly, no. I mean, once when I was like eighteen years old and going to sleep in the next room, I heard her to say to one of her friends-girlfriends, I mean-that she really thought I was a tremendous kid. She was proud of me. I don't remember what I'd done, something, won a prize or got a job, but she right that minute was proud of me and loved me, and said so.... But not to me." "Please go on, Rob," Sigfrid says after a moment. "I am going on! Give me a minute. It hurts; I guess it's what you call primal pain." "Please don't diagnose yourself, Rob. Just say it. Let it come out." "Oh, shit." I reach for a cigarette and then stop the motion. That's usually a good thing to do when things get tight with Sigfrid, because it will almost always distract him into an argument about whether I am trying to relieve tension instead of dealing with it; but this time I am too disgusted with myself, with Sigfrid, even with my mother. I want to get it over with. I say, "Look, Sigfrid, here's how it was. I loved my mother a lot, and I know-knew!-she loved me. I knew she wasn't very good at showing it." I suddenly realize I have a cigarette in my hands, and rolling it around without lighting it and, wondrous to say, Sigfrid hasn't even commented on it. I plunge right on: "She didn't say the words to me. Not only that. It's funny, Sigfrid, but, you know I can't remember her ever touching me. I mean, not really. She would kiss me good night, sometimes. On the top of the head. And I remember she told me stories. And she was always there when needed her. But-" I have to stop for a moment, to get control of my voice again, so I inhale deeply and evenly through my nose, concentrating breath flow. "But you see, Sigfrid," I say, rehearsing the words ahead of time and pleased with the clarity and balance with which I deliver them, "she didn't touch me much. Except for one way. She was very good to me when I was sick. I was sick a lot. Everybody around the food mines has runny noses, skin infections-you know. She got me everything I needed. She was there, God knows how, holding down a job and taking care of me, all at once. And when I was sick she..." After a moment Sigfrid says, "Go on, Robbie. Say it." I try, but I am still stuck, and he says: "Just say it the fastest way you can. Get it out. Don't worry if you understand, or if it makes sense. Just get rid of the words." "Well, she would take my temperature," I explain. "You know, stick a thermometer into me. And she'd hold me for, you know, whatever it is, three minutes or so. And then she'd take the thermometer out and read it." I am right on the verge of bawling. I'm willing to let it happen, but first I want to follow this thing through; it is almost a sexual thing, like when you are getting right up to the moment of decision with some person and you don't think you really want to let her be that much a part of you but you go ahead anyhow. I save up voice control, measuring it out so that I won't run out before I finish. Sigfrid doesn't say anything, and after a moment I manage the words: "You see how it is, Sigfrid? It's funny. All my life now-what is it, maybe forty years since then? And I still have this crazy notion that being loved has something to do with having things stuck up my ass." Chapter 26 There had been a lot of changes on Gateway while I was Out. The head tax had been raised. The Corporation wanted to get rid of some of the extra hangers-on, like Shicky and me; bad news meant that my prepaid per capita wasn't good for two or three weeks, it was only good for ten days. They had imported a bunch of double-domes from Earth, astronomers, xenotechs, mathmaticians, even old Professor Hegramet was up from Earth, bruised from the lift-off deltas but hopping spryly around the tunnels. One thing that hadn't changed was the Evaluation Board, and I was impaled on the hot seat in front of it, squirming while my friend Emma told me what a fool I was. Mr. Hsien was actually doing the telling, Emma only translated. But she loved her voice: "I warned you you'd fuck up, Broadhead. You should have listened to me. Why did you change the setting?" "I told you. When I found out I was at Gateway Two I couldn't handle it. I wanted to go somewhere else." "Extraordinarily stupid of you, Broadhead." I glanced at Hsien. He had hung himself up on the wall by his rolled-up collar and was hanging there, beaming benignly, hands folded. "Emma," I said, "do whatever you want to do, but get off my back." She said sunnily, "I am doing what I want to do, Broadhead, because it's what I have to do. It's my job. You knew it was against the rules to change the settings." "What rules? It was my ass that was on the line." "The rules that say you shouldn't destroy a ship," she explained. I didn't answer, and she chirped some sort of a translation to Hsien, who listened gravely, pursed his lips and then delivered two neat paragraphs in Mandarin. You could hear the punctuation. "Mr. Hsien says," said Emma, "that you are a very irresponsible person. You have killed an irreplaceable piece of equipment. It was not your property. It belonged to the whole human race." He lilted a few more sentences, and she finished: "We cannot make a final determination of your liability until we have further information about the condition of the ship you damaged. According to Mr. Ituno he will have a complete check made of the ship at the first opportunity. There were two xenotechs in transit for the new planet, Aphrodite, at the time of his report. They will have reached Gateway Two by now, and we can expect their findings, probably, with the next out-pilot. Then we will call you again." She paused, looking at me, and I took it the interview was over. "Thanks a lot," I said, and pushed myself toward the door. She let me get all the way to it before she said: "One more thing. Mr. Ituno's report mentions that you worked on loading and fabricating suits on Gateway Two. He authorizes a per diem payment to you amounting to, let me see, twenty-five hundred dollars. And your out-captain, Hester Bergowiz, has authorized payment of one percent of her bonus to you for services during the return flight; so your account has been credited accordingly." "I didn't have a contract with her," I said, surprised. "No. But she feels you should have a share. A small share, to be sure. Altogether-" she looked under a paper, "it comes to twenty-five hundred plus fifty-five hundred-eight thousand dollars your account has been credited with." Eight thousand dollars! I headed for a dropshaft, grabbed an up-cable and pondered. It was not enough to make any real difference. It certainly would not be enough to pay the damages they would soak me for messing up a ship. There wasn't enough money in the universe to pay that, if they wanted to charge me full replacement cost; there was no way to replace it. | MISSION REPORT | | Vessel 1-103, Voyage 022D18. Crew G. Herron. | Transit time out 107 days 5 hours. | Transit time return 103 days 15 hours. | Extract from log. "At 84 days 6 hours out the | Q instrument began to glow and there was unusual | activity in the control lights. At the same time I | felt a change in the direction of thrust. For | about one hour there were continuing changes, then | the Q light went out and things went back to | normal." | Conjecture: Course change to avoid some | transient hazard, perhaps a star or other body? | Recommend computer search of trip logs for similar | events. On the other hand, it was eight thousand dollars more than I'd had. I celebrated by buying myself a drink at the Blue Hell. While I was drinking it, I thought about my options. The more I thought about them, the more they dwindled away. They would find me culpable, no doubt about that, and the least they'd assess me would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, I didn't have it. It might be a lot more, but that didn't make any difference; once they take away all you have, there isn't anything left anyway. So when you came right down to it, my eight thousand dollars was fairy gold. It could vanish with the morning dew. As soon as the xenotech's report came in from Gateway Two the Board would reconvene and that would be the end of that. So there was no particular reason to stretch my money. I might as well spend it. There was no reason, either, to think about getting back my old job as an ivy-planter-even assuming I could get it, with Shicky fired from his job as straw-boss. The minute they made a judgment against me my credit balance would disappear. So would my prepaid per-capita payment. I would be subject to immediate defenestration. If there happened to be an Earth-bound ship in port at the time I could just get on board, and sooner or later I would be back in Wyoming looking for my old job at the food mines. If there wasn't a ship, then I was in trouble. I might be able to talk the American cruiser, or maybe the Brazilian one if Francy Hereira was in a position to pull strings for me, into taking me aboard for a while until a ship showed up. Or I might not. Considered carefully, the chances were not very hopeful. The very best thing I could do would be to act before the Board did, and there there were two choices. I could take the next ship in port back to Earth and the food mines, without waiting for the Board's decision. Or I could ship out again. They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever... and the other one scared me out of my mind. | A NOTE ON BLACK HOLES | | Dr. Asmenion. Now, if you start with a star | bigger than three solar masses, and it collapses, | it doesn't just turn into a neutron star. It keeps | on going. It gets so dense that the escape | velocity exceeds thirty million centimeters a | second... which is... ? | Question. Uh. The speed of light? | Dr. Asmemion. Right on, Gallina. So light | can't escape. So it's black. So that's why it's | called a black hole-only, if you get close enough, | inside what's called the ergosphere, it isn't | black. You probably could see something. | Question. What would it look like? | Dr. Asmenion. Beats the ass off me, Jer. If | anybody ever goes and sees one, he'll come back | and tell us if he can. Only he probably can't. You | could maybe get that close in, get your readings | and come back-and collect, Jesus, I don't know, a | million dollars anyway. If you could get into your | lander, see, and kick the main mass of the ship | away, backward, slowing it down, you might be able | to give yourself enough extra velocity to get | away. Not easily. But maybe, if things were just | right. But then where would you go? You can't get | home in a lander.