We all talked about going out. Almost every day we could hear the thud and vibration as some lander cut itself loose from its dock, pushing the whole ship out to where the Heechee main drive could go into operation. Almost as often we felt the different kind of smaller, quicker shock when some ship returned. In the evenings we went to someone’s parties. My whole class was gone by now, almost. Sheri had shipped out on a Five—I didn’t see her to ask her why she changed her plans and wasn’t sure I really wanted to know; the ship she went on had an otherwise all-male crew. They were German-speaking, but I guess Sheri figured she could get by pretty well without talking much. The last one was Willa Forehand. Klara and I went to Willa’s farewell party and then down to the docks to watch her launch the next morning. I was supposed to be working, but I didn’t think Shicky would mind. Unfortunately, Mr. Hsien was there, too, and I could see that he recognized me.
“Oh, shit,” I said to Klara.
She giggled and took my hand, and we ducked out of the launch area. We strolled away until we came to an up-shaft and lifted to the next level. We sat down on the edge of Lake Superior. “Rob, old stud,” she said, “I doubt he’ll fire you for screwing off one time. Chew you out, probably.”
I shrugged and tossed a chip of filter-pebble into the upcurving lake, which stretched a good two hundred meters up and around the shell of Gateway in front of us. I was feeling tacky, and wondering whether I was reaching the point when the bad vibes about risking nasty death in space were being overtaken by the bad vibes about cowering on Gateway. It’s a funny thing about fear. I didn’t feel it. I knew that the only reason I was staying on was that I was afraid, but it didn’t feel as though I were afraid, only reasonably prudent.
“I think,” I said, watching myself going into the sentence without being sure how it was going to come out, “that I’m going to do it. Want to come along?”
Klara sat up and shook herself. She took a moment before she said, “Maybe. What’ve you got in mind?”
I had nothing in mind. I was only a spectator, watching myself talk myself into something that made my toes curl. But I said, as though I had planned it out for days, “I think it might be a good idea to take a rerun.”
“No deal!” She looked almost angry. “If I go, I go where the real money is.”
That was also where the real danger was, of course. Although even reruns have turned out bad often enough.
The thing about reruns is that you start out with the knowledge that somebody has already flown that trip and made it back, and, not only that, made a find that’s worth following up on. Some of them are pretty rich. There’s Peggy’s World, where the heater coils and the fur come from. There’s Eta Carina Seven, which is probably full of good stuff if you could only get at it. The trouble is, it has had an ice age since the Heechees were last on it. The storms are terrible. Out of five landers, one returned with a full crew, undamaged. One didn’t return at all.
Generally speaking, Gateway doesn’t particularly want you to do a rerun. They will make a cash offer instead of a percentage where the pickings are fairly easy, as on Peggy. What they pay for is not so much trade goods as maps. So you go out there and you spend your time making orbital runs, trying to find the geological anomalies that indicate Heechee digs may be present. You may not land at all. The pay is worth having, but not lavish. You’d have to make at least twenty runs to build up a lifetime stake, if you take the Corporation’s one-pay deal. And if you decide to go on your own, prospecting, you have to pay a share of your profits to the discovery crew, and a cut on what’s left of your share to the Corporation. You wind up with a fraction of what you might get on a virgin find, even if you don’t have a colony already established on the scene to contend with.
Or you can take a shot at the bonuses: a hundred million dollars if you find an alien civilization, fifty million for the first crew to locate a Heechee ship bigger than a Five, a million bucks to locate a habitable planet.
Seems funny that they would only pay a lousy million for a whole new planet? But the trouble is, once you’ve found it, what do you do with it? You can’t export a lot of surplus population when you can only move them four at a time. That, plus the pilot, is all you can get into the largest ship in Gateway. (And if you don’t have a pilot, you don’t get the ship back.) So the Corporation has underwritten a few little colonies, one’s very healthy on Peggy and the others are spindly. But that does not solve the problem of twenty-five billion human beings, most of them underfed.
You’ll never get that kind of bonus on a rerun. Maybe you can’t get some of those bonuses at all; maybe the things they’re for don’t exist.
It is strange that no one has ever found a trace of another intelligent creature. But in eighteen years, upwards of two thousand flights, no one has. There are about a dozen habitable planets, plus another hundred or so that people could live on if they absolutely had to, as we have to on Mars and on, or rather in, Venus. There are a few traces of past civilizations, neither Heechee nor human. And there are the souvenirs of the Heechee themselves. At that, there’s more in the warrens of Venus than we’ve found almost anywhere else in the Galaxy, so far. Even Gateway was swept almost clean before they abandoned it.
Damn Heechee, why did they have to be so neat?
So we gave up on the rerun deals because there wasn’t enough money in them, and put the special finders’ bonuses out of our heads, because there’s just no way of planning to look for them.
And finally we just stopped talking, and looked at each other, and then we didn’t even look at each other.
No matter what we said, we weren’t going. We didn’t have the nerve. Klara’s had run out on her last trip, and I guess I hadn’t ever had it.
“Well,” said Klara, getting up and stretching, “I guess I’ll go up and win a few bucks at the casino. Want to watch?”
I shook my head. “Guess I’d better get back to my job. If I still have one.”
So we kissed good-bye at the upshaft, and when we came to my level I reached up and patted her ankle and jumped off. I was not in a very good mood. We had spent so much effort trying to reassure ourselves that there weren’t any launches that offered a promise of reward worth the risks that I almost believed it.
Of course, we hadn’t even mentioned the other kind of rewards: the danger bonuses.
You have to be pretty frayed to go for them. Like, the Corporation will sometimes put up half a million or so incentive bonus for a crew to take the same course as some previous crew tried and didn’t come back from. Their reasoning is that maybe something went wrong with the ship, ran out of gas or something, and a second ship might even rescue the crew from the first one. (Fat chance!) More likely, of course, whatever killed the first crew would still be there, and ready to kill you.
Then there was a time when you could sign up for a million, later they raised it to five million, if you would try changing the course settings after launch.
The reason they raised the bonus to five million was that crews stopped volunteering when none of them, not one of them, ever came back. Then they cut it out, because they were losing too many ships, and finally they made it a flat no-no. Every once in a while they come up with a bastard control panel, a snappy new computer that’s supposed to work symbiotically with the Heechee board. Those ships aren’t good gambling bets, either. There’s a reason for the safety lock on the Heechee board. You can’t change destination while it’s on. Maybe you can’t change destination at all, without destroying the ship.
I saw five people try for a ten-million-dollar danger bonus once. Some Corporation genius from the permanent-party was worrying about how to transport more than five people, or the equivalent in cargo, at once. We didn’t know how to build a Heechee ship, and we’d never found a really big one. So he figured that maybe we could end-run around that obstacle by using a Five as a sort of tractor.