There’s no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way. The rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage.
The return trip is free . . . but to what?
I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel, and ran into a man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn’t speak English, but he pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the up-cable, ascended one level, crossed to another dropshaft, and tried again.
The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. “You can’t come through here,” he said.
“I just want to see the ships.”
“Sure. You can’t. You’ve got to have a blue badge,” he said, tapping his own. “That’s Corporation specialist, flight crew or maintenance.”
“I am flight crew.”
He grinned. “You’re a new fish off the Earth transport, aren’t you? Friend, you’ll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not before. Go on back up.”
I said reasonably, “You understand how I feel, don’t you? I just want to get a look.”
“You can’t, till you’ve finished your course, except they’ll bring you down here for part of it. After that, you’ll see more than you want.”
I argued a little more, but he had too many arguments on his side. But as I reached for the up-cable the tunnel seemed to lurch and a blast of sound hit my ears. For a minute I thought the asteroid was blowing up. I stared at the guard, who shrugged, in a not unfriendly way. “I only said you couldn’t see them,” he said. “I didn’t say you couldn’t hear them.”
I bit back the “wow” or “Holy God!” that I really wanted to say, and said, “Where do you suppose that one’s going?”
“Come back in six months. Maybe we’ll know by then.”
Well, there was nothing in that to feel elated about. All the same, I felt elated. After all those years in the food mines, here I was, not only on Gateway, but right there when some of those intrepid prospectors set out on a trip that would bring them fame and incredible fortune! Never mind the odds. This was really living on the top line.
So I wasn’t paying much attention to what I was doing, and as a result I got lost again on the way back. I reached Level Babe ten minutes late.
Dane Metchnikov was striding down the tunnel away from my room. He didn’t appear to recognize me. I think he might have passed me if I hadn’t put out my arm.
“Huh,” he grunted. “You’re late.”
“I was down on Level Tanya, trying to get a look at the ships.”
“Huh. You can’t go down there unless you have a blue badge or a bangle.”
Well, I had found that out already, hadn’t I? So I tagged along after him, without wasting energy on attempts at further conversation.
Metchnikov was a pale man, except for the marvelously ornate curled whisker that followed the line of his jaw. It seemed to be waxed, so that each separate curl stood out with a life of its own. “Waxed” was wrong. It had something in it besides hair, but whatever it was wasn’t stiff. The whole thing moved as he moved, and when he talked or smiled the muscles moored to the jawbone made the beard ripple and flow. He finally did smile, after we got to the Blue Hell. He bought the first drink, explaining carefully that that was the custom, but that the custom only called for one. I bought the second. The smile came when, out of turn, I also bought the third.
Over the noise in the Blue Hell talk wasn’t easy, but I told him about hearing a launch. “Right,” he said, lifting his glass. “Hope they have a good trip.” He wore six blue-glowing Heechee metal bracelets, hardly thicker than wire. They tinkled faintly as he swallowed half the drink.
“Are they what I think they are?” I asked. “One for every trip out?”
He drank the other half of the drink. “That’s right. Now I’m going to dance,” he said. My eyes followed his back as he lunged toward a woman in a luminous pink sari. He wasn’t much of a talker, that was sure.
On the other hand, at that noise level you couldn’t talk much anyhow. You couldn’t really dance much, either. The Blue Hell was up in the center of Gateway, part of the spindle-shaped cave. Rotational G was so low that we didn’t weigh more than two or three pounds; if anyone had tried to waltz or polka he would have gone flying. So they did those no-touching junior-high-school sort of dances that appear to be designed so fourteen-year-old boys won’t have to look up at too sharp an angle to the fourteen-year-old girls they’re dancing with. You pretty much kept your feet in place, and your head and arms and shoulders and hips went where they wanted to. Me, I like to touch. But you can’t have everything. I like to dance, anyway.
I saw Sheri, way across the room, with an older woman I took to be her proctor, and danced one with her. “How do you like it so far?” I shouted over the tapes. She nodded and shouted something back, I couldn’t say what. I danced with an immense black woman who wore two blue bracelets, then with Sheri again, then with a girl Dane Metchnikov dropped on me, apparently because he wanted to be rid of her, then with a tall, strong-faced woman with the blackest, thickest eyebrows I had ever seen under a female hairdo. (She wore it pulled back in two pigtails that floated around behind her as she moved.) She wore a couple of bracelets, too. And between dances I drank.
They had tables that were meant for parties of eight or ten, but there weren’t any parties of eight or ten. People sat where they wanted to, and took each other’s seats without worrying about whether the owner was coming back. For a while there were half a dozen crewmen in Brazilian Navy dress whites sitting with me, talking to each other in Portuguese. A man with one golden earring joined me for a while, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying, either. (I did, pretty well, understand what he meant.)
There was that trouble all the time I was in Gateway. There always is. Gateway sounds like an international conference when the translation equipment has broken down. There’s a sort of lingua franca you hear a lot, pieces of a dozen different languages thrown together, like, “Ecoutez, gospodin, tu es verreckt.” I danced twice with one of the Brazilians, a skinny, dark little girl with a hawk nose but sweet brown eyes, and tried to say a few simple words. Maybe she understood me. One of the men she was with, though, spoke fine English, introduced himself and the others all around. I didn’t catch any of the names but his, Francesco Hereira. He bought me a drink, and let me buy one for the crowd, and then I realized I’d seen him before: He was one of the detail that searched us on the way in.
While we were commenting on that, Dane leaned over me and grunted in my ear, “I’m going to gamble. So long, unless you really want to come.”
It wasn’t the warmest invitation I’d ever had, but the noise in the Blue Hell was getting heavy. I tagged after him and discovered a full-scale casino just next to the Blue Hell, with blackjack tables, poker, a slow-motion roulette with a big, dense ball, craps with dice that took forever to stop, even a roped-off section for baccarat. Metchnikov headed for the blackjack tables and drummed his fingers on the back of a player’s chair, waiting for an opening. Around then he noticed I had come with him.
“Oh.” He looked around the room. “What do you like to play?”
“I’ve played it all,” I said, slurring the words a little. Bragging a little, too. “Maybe a little baccarat.”
He looked at me first with respect, then amusement. “Fifty’s the minimum bet.”
I had five or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged.
“That’s fifty thousand,” he said.
I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip stack was running out, “You can get down for ten dollars at roulette. Hundred minimum for most of the others. Oh, there’s a ten-dollar slot machine around somewhere, I think.” He dived for the open chair and that was the last I saw of him.
I watched for a moment and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was at the same table, busy studying her cards. She didn’t look up.
I could see I wasn’t going to be able to afford much gambling here. At that point I realized I couldn’t really afford all the drinks I’d been buying, either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me realize just how many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized was that I had to get back to my room, pretty fast.