“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 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.