Gateway

Chapter 28

Out in the holes where the Heechee hid, out in the caves of the stars, sliding the tu

INTERESTS HARPSICHORD, Go, group sex. Seek four likeminded prospectors view toward teaming. Gerriman, 78-109.

TUNNEL SALE. Must sell holodisks, clothes, sex aids, books, everything. Level Babe, Tu

TENTH MAN needed for minyan for Abram R. Sorchuk, presumed dead, also ninth, eighth, and seventh men. Please. 87-103.

The first Five had been launched thirty seconds ahead of us, so then it was just arithmetic: about one light-day. 3 x 108 centimeters per second times 60 seconds times 60 minutes times 24 hours. At turnaround Klara was a good seventeen and a half billion kilometers ahead of us. It seemed very far, and was. But after turnaround we were getting closer every day, following her in the same weird hole through space that the Heechee had drilled for us. Where our ship was going, hers had gone. I could feel that we were catching up; sometimes I fantasized that I could smell her perfume.

When I said something like that to Da

I laughed, a little embarrassed. “It was just a notion.”

“So go to sleep,” he said, “and have a nice dream about it.” He knew how I felt about Klara; the whole ship did, even Metchnikov, even Susie, and maybe that was a fantasy, too, but I thought they all wished us well. We were all wishing all of us well, constructing elaborate plans about what we were going to do with our bonuses. For Klara and me, at a million dollars apiece, it came to a right nice piece of change. Maybe not enough for Full Medical — no, not if we wanted anything left over to have fun on. But Major Medical, at least, which meant really good health, barring something terribly damaging, for another thirty or forty years. We could live happily ever after on what was left over: travel; children and nice home in a decent part of-wait a minute, I cautioned myself. Home where? Not back anywhere near the food mines. Maybe not on Earth at all. Would Klara want to go back to Venus? I couldn’t see myself taking to the life of a tu

But I didn’t feel like going to sleep. I was hungry, and there wasn’t any reason not to eat. For nineteen days we had been practicing food discipline, which is what you do on the way out for the first half of the trip. Once you’ve reached turnaround you know how much you can consume for the rest of the trip, which is why some prospectors come back fat. I climbed down out of the lander, where Susie and both the Da

“Is there enough for two?”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “I guess so.” He opened the squeeze-fit lid, peered inside, milked another hundred cc of water into it out of the vapor trap, and said, “Give it another ten minutes. I was going to have a drink first.”

I accepted the invitation, and we passed a wine flask back and forth. While he shook the stew and added a dollop of salt, I took the star readings for him. We were still close to maximum velocity and there was nothing on the viewscreen that looked like a familiar constellation, or even much like a star; but it was all begi

All I had really heard was the one word, and that I had heard loud and surprising: “Poet?”

He gri

This was the fellow who had been shrieking viciously at the two Da

And when we’d finished eating, and wiped out the pot and dishes and put them away, Dane looked at his watch. “Too early to wake the others up,” he said, “and not a damn thing to do.”

A NOTE ON PIEZOELECTRICITY

Professor Hegramet. The one thing we found out about blood diamonds is that they’re fantastically piezoelectric. Does anybody know what that means?

Question. They expand and contract when an electric current is imposed?

Professor Hegramet. Yes. And the other way around. Squeeze them and they generate a current. Very rapidly if you like. That’s the basis for the piezophone and piezovision. About a fifty-billion-dollar industry.

Question. Who gets the royalties on all that loot?

Professor Hegramet. You know, I thought one of you would ask that. Nobody does. Blood diamonds were found years and years ago, in the Heechee warrens back on Venus. Long before Gateway. It was Bell Labs that figured out how to use them. Actually they use something a little different, a synthetic they developed. They make great communications systems, and Bell doesn’t have to pay anybody but themselves.

Question. Did the Heechee use them for that?

Professor Hegramet. My personal opinion is that they probably did, but I don’t know how. You’d think if they left them around they’d leave the rest of the communications receivers and transmitters, too, but if they did I don’t know where.