Gateway Read Free Page B

come out of it with the problem solved: Sell the fish-farm stock in Baja and buy plumbing supplies on the commodities exchange. That was one, and it really paid out. Or: Take Rachel to Merida for waterskling on the Bay of Campeche. That got her into my bed the first time, when I'd tried everything else. And then Sigfrid says, "You're not responding, Rob." "I'm thinking about what you said." "Please don't think about it, Rob. Just talk. Tell me what you're feeling about Klara right now." I try to think it out honestly. Sigfrid won't let me get into TI for it, so I look inside my mind for suppressed feelings. "Well, not much," I say. Not much on the surface, anyway. "Do you remember the feeling at the time, Rob?" "Of course I do." "Try to feel what you felt then, Rob." "All right." Obediently I reconstruct the situation in my mind. There I am, talking to Klara on the radio. Dane is shouting something in the lander. We're all frightened out of our wits. Down underneath us the blue mist is opening up, and I see the dim skeletal star for the first time. The Three-ship -- no, it was a Five. . Anyway, it stinks of vomit and perspiration. My body aches. I can remember it exactly, although I would be lying if I said I was letting myself feel it. I say lightly, half chuckling, "Sigfrid, there's an intensity of pain and guilt and misery there that I just can't handle." Sometimes I try that with him, saying a kind of painful truth in the tone you might use to ask the waiter at a cocktail party to bring you another rum punch. I do that when I want to divert his attack. I don't think it works. Sigfrid has a lot of Heechee circuits in him. He's a lot better than the machines at the Institute were, when I had my episode. He continuously monitors all my physical parameters: skin conductivity and pulse and beta-wave activity and so on. He gets readings from the restraining straps that hold me on the mat, to show how violently I fling myself around. He meters the volume of my voice and spectrum-scans the print for overtones. And he also understands what the words mean. Sigfrid is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is. It is very hard, sometimes, to fool him. I get to the end of a session absolutely limp, with the feeling that if I had stayed with him for one more minute I would have found myself falling right down into that pain and it would have destroyed me. Or cured me. Perhaps they are the same thing.
    ---------------------------------------- I don't know why I keep coming back to you, Sigfrid. I remind you, Robby, you've already used up three stomachs and, let me see, nearly five meters of intestine. Ulcers, cancer. Something appears to be eating away at you, Rob. ----------------------------------------
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    So there was Gateway, getting bigger and bigger in the ports of the ship up from Earth: An asteroid. Or perhaps the nucleus of a comet. About ten kilometers through, the longest way. Pear-shaped. On the outside it looks like a lumpy charred blob with glints of blue. On the inside it's the gateway to the universe. Sheri Loffat leaned against my shoulder, with the rest of our bunch of would-be prospectors clustered behind us, staring. "Jesus, Rob. Look at the cruisers!" "They find anything wrong," said somebody behind us, "and they blow us out of space." "They won't find anything wrong," said Sheri, but she ended her remark with a question mark. Those cruisers looked mean, circling jealously around the asteroid, watching to see that whoever comes in isn't going to steal the secrets that are worth more than anyone could ever pay. We hung to the porthole braces to rubberneck at them. Foolishness, that was. We could have been killed. There wasn't really much likelihood that our ship's matching orbit with Gateway or the Brazilian cruiser would take much delta-V, but there only had to be one quick course correction to spatter us. And there was always the other possibility, that our ship would rotate a quarterturn or so and we'd