The most easily swiped things, like the prayer fans and the blood diamonds and the fire pearls, were kept behind tough, breakproof glass. I think they were even wired to burglar alarms. That was surprising, on Gateway. There isn’t any law there, except what the Corporation imposes. There are the Corporation’s equivalent of police, and there are rules — you’re not supposed to steal or commit murder — but there aren’t any courts. If you break a rule all that happens is that the Corporation security force picks you up and takes you out to one of the orbiting cruisers. Your own, if there is one from wherever you came. Any one, if not. But if they won’t take you, or if you don’t want to go on your own nation’s ship and can persuade some other ship to take you, Gateway doesn’t care. On the cruisers, you’ll get a trial. Since you’re known to be guilty to start with, you have three choices. One is to pay your way back home. The second is to sign on as crew if they’ll have you. The third is to go out the lock without a suit. So you see that, although there isn’t much law on Gateway, there isn’t much crime, either.
But, of course, the reason for locking up the precious stuff in the museum was that transients might be tempted to lift a souvenir or two.
So Klara and I would muse over the treasures someone had found… and somehow not discuss with each other the fact that we were supposed to go out and find some more.
It was not just the exhibits. They were fascinating; they were things that Heechee hands (tentacles? claws?) had made and touched, and they came from unimaginable places incredibly far away. But the constantly flickering tube displays held me even more strongly. Summaries of every mission ever launched displayed one after another. A constant total of missions versus returns; of royalties paid to lucky prospectors; the roster of the unlucky ones, name after name in a slow crawl along one whole wall of the room, over the display cases. The totals told the story: 2355 launches (the number changed to 2356, then 2357 while we were there; we felt the shudder of the two launches), 841 successful returns.
Standing in front of that particular display, Klara and I didn’t look at each other, but I felt her hand squeeze mine.
That was defining “successful” very loosely. It meant that the ship had come back. It didn’t say anything about how many of the crew were alive and well.
We left the museum after that, and didn’t speak much on the way to the upshaft.
The thing in my mind was that what Emma Fother had said to me was true: the human race needed what we prospectors could give them. Needed it a lot. There were hungry people, and Heechee technology probably could make all their lives a lot more tolerable, if prospectors went out and brought samples of it back.
Even if it cost a few lives.
Even if the lives included Klara’s and mine. Did I, I asked myself, want my son — if I ever had a son — to spend his childhood the way I had spent mine?
We dropped off the up-cable at Level Babe and heard voices. I didn’t pay attention to them. I was coming to a resolution in my mind. “Klara,” I said, “listen. Let’s—”
But Klara was looking past my shoulder. “For Christ’s sake!” she said. “Look who’s here!”
And I turned, and there was Shicky fluttering in the air, talking to a girl, and I saw with astonishment that the girl was Willa Forehand. She greeted us, looking both embarrassed and amused.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Didn’t you just ship out — like maybe eight hours ago?”
“Ten,” she said.
“Did something go wrong with the ship, so you had to come back?” Klara guessed.
Willa smiled ruefully. “Not a thing. I’ve been there and back. Shortest trip on record so far: I went to the Moon.”
“Earth’s moon?”
“That’s the one.” She seemed to be controlling herself, to keep from laughter. Or tears.
Shicky said consolingly, “They’ll surely give you a bonus, Willa. There was one that went to Ganymede once, and the Corporation divvied up half a million dollars among them.”
She shook her head. “Even I know better than that, Shicky, dear. Oh, they’ll award us something. But it won’t be enough to make a difference. We need more than that.” That was the unusual, and somewhat surprising, thing about the Forehands: it was always “we.” They were clearly a very closely knit family, even if they didn’t like to discuss that fact with outsiders.
I touched her, a pat between affection and compassion. “What are you going to do?”
She looked at me with surprise. “Why, I’ve already signed up for another launch, day after tomorrow.”
“Well!” said Klara. “We’ve got to have two parties at once for you! We’d better get busy…” And hours later, just before we went to sleep that night, she said to me, “Wasn’t there something you wanted to say to me before we saw Willa?”
“I forget,” I said sleepily. I hadn’t forgotten. I knew what it was. But I didn’t want to say it anymore.
There were days when I worked myself up almost to that point of asking Klara to ship out with me again. And there were days when a ship came in with a couple of starved, dehydrated survivors, or with no survivors, or when at the routine time a batch of last year’s launches were posted as nonreturns. On those days I worked myself up almost to the point of quitting Gateway completely.
Most days we simply spent deferring decision. It wasn’t all that hard. It was a pretty pleasant way to live, exploring Gateway and each other. Klara took on a maid, a stocky, fair young woman from the food mines of Carmarthen named Hywa. Except that the feedstock for the Welsh single-cell protein factories was coal instead of oil shale, her world had been almost exactly like mine. Her way out of it had not been a lottery ticket but two years as crew on a commercial spaceship. She couldn’t even go back home. She had jumped ship on Gateway, forfeiting her bond of money she couldn’t pay. And she couldn’t prospect, either, because her one launch had left her with a heart arhythmia that sometimes looked like it was getting better and sometimes put her in Terminal Hospital for a week at a time. Hywa’s job was partly to cook and clean for Klara and me, partly to baby-sit the little girl, Kathy Francis, when her father was on duty and Klara didn’t want to be bothered. Klara had been losing pretty heavily at the casino, so she really couldn’t afford Hywa, but then she couldn’t afford me, either.
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PENPAL FROM Toronto would like to hear you tell what it’s like out there. Address Tony, 955 Bay, TorOntCan M5S 2A3.
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What made it easy to turn off our insights was that we pretended to each other, and sometimes to ourselves, that what we were doing was preparing ourselves, really well, for the day when the Right trip came along.
It wasn’t hard to do that. A lot of real prospectors did the same thing, between trips. There was a group that called itself the Heechee Seekers, which met on Wednesday nights; it had been started by a prospector named Sam Kahane, kept up by others while he was off on a trip that hadn’t worked out, and now had Sam back in it between trips, while he was waiting for the other two members of his crew to get back in shape for the next one. (Among other things, they had come back with scurvy, due to a malfunction in the food freezer.) Sam and his friends were gay and apparently set in a permanent three-way relationship, but that didn’t affect his interest in Heechee lore. He had secured tapes of all the lectures of several courses on exostudies from East Texas Reserve, where Professor Hegramet had made himself the world’s foremost authority on Heechee research. I learned a lot I hadn’t known, although the central fact, that there were far more questions than answers about the Heechee, was pretty well known to everybody.