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.”
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.
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.