“He was smart and strong.” Sess took up the story. “You have to be to explore. So he didn’t panic. But by the time anybody came out here to investigate he was out of life support. He could have lived a little longer. He could have used the lox and H-two from the lander tanks for air and water. I used to wonder why he didn’t.”
“Because he would have starved anyway,” Louise cut in, defending her relative.
“I think so. Anyway, they found his body, with his notes in his hand. He had cut his throat.”
They were nice people, but I had heard all this, and they were making me late for class.
Of course, class wasn’t all that exciting just at that point. We were up to Hammock Slinging (Basic) and Toilet Flushing (Advanced). You may wonder why they didn’t spend more time actually teaching us how to fly the ships. That’s simple. The things flew themselves, as the Forehands, and everybody else, had been telling me. Even the landers were no sweat to operate, although they did require a hand on the controls. Once you were in the lander all you had to do was compare a three-D sort of holographic representation of the immediate area of space with where you wanted to go, and maneuver a point of light in the tank to the point you wanted to reach. The lander went there. It calculated its own trajectories and corrected its own deviations. It took a little muscular coordination to get the hang of twisting that point of light to where you wanted it to go, but it was a forgiving system.
Between the sessions of flushing practice and hammock drill we talked about what we were going to do when we graduated. The launch schedules were kept up to date and displayed on the PV monitor in our class whenever anyone pushed the button. Some of them had names attached to them, and one or two of the names I recognized. Tikki Trumbull was a girl I had danced with and sat next to in the mess hall once or twice. She was an out-pilot, and as she needed crew I thought of joining her. But the wiseheads told me that out-missions were a waste of time.
I should tell you what an out-pilot is. He’s the guy who ferries fresh crews to Gateway Two. There are about a dozen Fives that do that as a regular run. They take four people out (which would be what Tikki wanted people for), and then the pilot comes back alone, or with returning prospectors—if any—and what they’ve found. Usually there’s somebody.
The team who found Gateway Two are the ones we all dreamed about. They made it. Man, did they make it! Gateway Two was another Gateway, nothing more or less, except that it happened to orbit around a star other than our own. There was not much more in the way of treasure on Gateway Two than there was on our own Gateway; the Heechee had swept everything pretty clean, except for the ships themselves. And there weren’t nearly as many ships there, only about a hundred and fifty, compared to almost a thousand on our old original solar Gateway. But a hundred and fifty ships are worth finding all by themselves. Not to mention the fact that they accept some destinations that our local Gateway’s ships don’t appear to.
The ride out to Gateway Two seems to be about four hundred light-years and takes a hundred and nine days each way. Two’s principal star is a bright blue B-type. They think it is Alcyone in the Pleiades, but there is some doubt. Well, actually that’s not Gateway Two’s real star. It doesn’t orbit the big one, but a little cinder of a red dwarf nearby. They say the dwarf is probably a distant binary with the blue B, but they also say it shouldn’t be because of the difference in ages of the two stars. Give them a few more years to argue and they’ll probably know. One wonders why the Heechee would have put their spacelines junction in orbit around so undistinguished a star, but one wonders a lot about the Heechee.
However, all that doesn’t affect the pocketbook of the team who happened to find the place. They get a royalty on everything that any later prospector finds! I don’t know what they’ve made so far, but it has to be in the tens of millions apiece. Maybe the hundreds. And that’s why it doesn’t pay to go with an out-pilot; you don’t really have a much better chance of scoring, and you have to split what you get.
So we went down the list of upcoming launches and hashed them over in the light of our five-day expertise. Which wasn’t much. We appealed to Gelle-Klara Moynlin for advice. After all, she’d been out twice. She studied the list of flights and names, pursing her lips. “Terry Yakamora’s a decent guy,” she said. “I don’t know Parduk, but it might be worth taking a chance on that one. Lay off Dorlean’s flight. There’s a million-dollar bonus, but what they don’t tell you is that they’ve got a bastard control board in it. The Corporation’s experts have put in a computer that’s supposed to override the Heechee target selector, and I wouldn’t trust it. And, of course, I wouldn’t recommend a One in any circumstances.”
Lois Forehand asked, “Which one would you take if it was up to you, Klara?”
She scowled thoughtfully, rubbing that dark left eyebrow with the tips of her fingers. “Maybe Terry. Well, any of them. But I’m not going out again for a while.” I wanted to ask her why, but she turned away from the screen and said, “All right, gang, let’s get back to the drill. Remember, up for pee; down, close, wait ten and up for poo.”
I celebrated completing the week on ship-handling by offering to buy Dane Metchnikov a drink. That wasn’t my first intention. My first intention had been to buy Sheri a drink and drink it in bed, but she was off somewhere. So I worked the buttons on the piezophone and got Metchnikov.
He sounded surprised at my offer. “Thanks,” he said, and then considered. “Tell you what. Give me a hand carrying some stuff, and then I’ll buy you a drink.”
So I went down to his place, which was only one level below Babe; his room was not much better than my own, and bare, except for a couple of full carry-alls. He looked at me almost friendly. “You’re a prospector now,” he grunted.
“Not really. I’ve got two more courses.”
“Well, this is the last you see of me, anyway. I’m shipping out with Terry Yakamora tomorrow.”
I was surprised. “Didn’t you just get back, like ten days ago?”
“You can’t make any money hanging around here. All I was waiting for was the right crew. You want to come to my farewell party? Terry’s place. Twenty hundred.”
“That sounds fine,” I said. “Can I bring Sheri?”
“Oh, sure, she’s coming anyway, I think. Buy you the drink there, if you don’t mind. Give me a hand and we’ll get this stuff stored.”
He had accumulated a surprising amount of goods. I wondered how he had managed to stash them all away in a room as tiny as my own: three fabric carriers all stuffed full, holodisks and a viewer, book tapes and a few actual books. I took the carriers. On Earth they would have weighed more than I could handle, probably fifty or sixty kilos, but of course on Gateway lifting them was no problem; it was only tugging them through the corridors and jockeying them down the shafts that was tricky. I had the mass, but Metchnikov had the problems, since what he was carrying was in odd shapes and varying degrees of fragility. It was about an hour’s haul, actually. We wound up in a part of the asteroid I’d never seen before, where an elderly Pakistani woman counted the pieces, gave Metchnikov a receipt and began dragging them away down a thickly vine-grown corridor.
“Whew,” he grunted. “Well, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” We started back toward a dropshaft, and making conversation, I assume out of some recognition that he owed me a social favor and should practice some social skills, he said:
“So how was the course?”
“You mean apart from the fact that I’ve just finished it and still don’t have any idea how to fly those goddamned ships?”
“Well, of course you don’t,” he said, irritably. “The course isn’t going to teach you that. It just gives you the general idea. The way you learn, you do it. Only hard part’s the lander, of course. Anyway, you’ve got your issue of tapes?”
“Oh, yes.” There were six cassettes of them. Each of us had been given a set when we completed the first week’s course. They had everything that had been said, plus a lot of stuff about different kinds of controls that the Corporation might, or might not, fit on a Heechee board and so on.