Frederik Pohl: Gateway

I reach down into my mind for places where I know it hurts, because it has hurt there before. The way I felt when I was seven years old, parading up and down the Rock Park walk in front of the other kids, begging for someone to pay attention to me? The way it was when we were out of realspace and knew that we were trapped, with the ghost star coming up out of nothingness below us like the smile of a Cheshire cat? Oh, I have a hundred memories like those, and they all hurt. That is, they can. They are pain. They are clearly labeled PAINFUL in the index to my memory. I know where to find them, and I know what it feels like to let them surface.

But they will not hurt unless I let them out.

“I’m waiting, Rob,” Sigfrid says.

“I’m thinking,” I say. As I lie there it comes to my mind that I’ll be late for my guitar lesson. That reminds me of something, and I look at the fingers of my left hand, checking to see that the fingernails have not grown too long, wishing the calluses were harder and thicker. I have not learned to play the guitar very well, but most people are not that critical and it gives me pleasure. Only you have to keep practicing and remembering. Let’s see, I think, how do you make that transition from the D-maj to the C-7th again?

“Rob,” Sigfrid says, “this has not been a very productive session. There are only about ten or fifteen minutes left. Why don’t you just say the first thing that comes into your mind… now.”

I reject the first thing and say the second. “The first thing that comes into my mind is the way my mother was crying when my father was killed.”

“I don’t think that was actually the first thing, Rob. Let me make a guess. Was the first thing something about Klara?”

My chest fills, tingling. My breath catches. All of a sudden there’s Klara rising up before me, sixteen years earlier and not yet an hour older… I say, “As a matter of fact, Sigfrid, I think what I want to talk about is my mother.” I allow myself a polite, deprecatory chuckle.

Sigfrid doesn’t ever sigh in resignation, but he can be silent in a way that sounds about the same.

“You see,” I go on, carefully outlining all the relevant issues, “she wanted to get married again after my father died. Not right away. I don’t mean that she was glad about his death, or anything like that. No, she loved him, all right. But still, I see now, she was a healthy young woman — well, fairly young. Let’s see, I suppose she was about thirty-three. And if it hadn’t been for me I’m sure she would have remarried. I have feelings of guilt about that. I kept her from doing it. I went to her and said, ’Ma, you don’t need another man. I’ll be the man in the family. I’ll take care of you.’ Only I couldn’t, of course. I was only about five years old.”

“I think you were nine, Robbie.”

“Was I? Let me think. Gee, Sigfrid, I guess you’re right—” And then I try to swallow a big drop of spit that has somehow instantly formed in my throat and I gag and cough.

“Say it, Rob!” Sigfrid says insistently. “What do you want to say?”

“God damn you, Sigfrid!”

“Go ahead, Rob. Say it.”

“Say what? Christ, Sigfrid! You’re driving me right up the wall! This shit isn’t doing either one of us any good!”

“Say what’s bothering you, Rob, please.”

“Shut your flicking tin mouth!” All that carefully covered pain is pushing its way out and I can’t stand it, can’t deal with it.

“I suggest, Rob, that you try—”

I surge against the straps, kicking chunks out of the foam matting, roaring, “Shut up, you! I don’t want to hear. I can’t cope with this, don’t you understand me? I can’t! Can’t cope, can’t cope!”

Sigfrid waits patiently for me to stop weeping, which happens rather suddenly. And then, before he can say anything, I say wearily, “Oh, hell, Sigfrid, this whole thing isn’t getting us anywhere. I think we should call it off. There must be other people who need your services more than I do.”

“As to that, Rob,” he says, “I am quite competent to meet all the demands on my time.”

I am drying my tears on the paper towels he has left beside the mat and don’t answer.

“There is still excess capacity, in fact,” he goes on. “But you must be the judge of whether we continue with these sessions or not.”

“Have you got anything to drink in the recovery room?” I ask him.

“Not in the sense you mean, no. There is what I am told is a very pleasant bar on the top floor of this building.”

“Well,” I say, “I just wonder what I’m doing here.”

And, fifteen minutes later, having confirmed my appointment for the next week, I am drinking a cup of tea in Sigfrid’s recovery cubicle. I listen to hear if his next patient has started screaming yet, but I can’t hear anything.

So I wash my face, adjust my scarf, and slick down the little cowlick in my hair. I go up to the bar for a quick one. The headwaiter, who is human, knows me, and gives me a seat looking south toward the Lower Bay rim of the bubble. He looks toward a tall, copper-skinned girl with green eyes sitting by herself, but I shake my head. I drink one short drink, admire the legs on the copper-skinned girl and, thinking mostly about where I am going to go for dinner, keep my appointment for my guitar lesson.

All my life I wanted to be a prospector, as far back as I can remember. I couldn’t have been more than six when my father and mother took me to a fair in Cheyenne. Hot dogs and popped soya, colored-paper hydrogen balloons, a circus with dogs and horses, wheels of fortune, games, rides. And there was a pressure tent with opaque sides, a dollar to get in, and inside somebody had arranged a display of imports from the Heechee tunnels on Venus. Prayer fans and fire pearls, real Heechee-metal mirrors that you could buy for twenty-five dollars apiece. Pa said they weren’t real, but to me they were real. We couldn’t afford twenty-five dollars apiece, though. And when you came right down to it, I didn’t really need a mirror. Freckled face, buck teeth, hair I brushed straight back and tied. They had just found Gateway. I heard my father talking about it going home that night in the airbus, when I guess they thought I was asleep, and the wistful hunger in his voice kept me awake.

If it hadn’t been for my mother and me he might have found a way to go. But he never got the chance. He was dead a year later. All I inherited from him was his job, as soon as I was big enough to hold it.

I don’t know if you’ve ever worked in the food mines, but you’ve probably heard about them. There isn’t any great joy there. I started, half-time and half-pay, at twelve. By the time I was sixteen I had my father’s rating: charge driller — good pay, hard work.

But what can you do with the pay? It isn’t enough for Full Medical. It isn’t enough even to get you out of the mines, only enough to be a sort of local success story. You work six hours on and ten hours off. Eight hours’ sleep and you’re on again, with your clothes stinking of shale all the time. You can’t smoke, except in sealed rooms. The oil fog settles everywhere. The girls are as smelly and slick and frazzled as you are.

So we all did the same things, we worked and chased each other’s women and played the lottery. And we drank a lot, the cheap, powerful liquor that was made not ten miles away. Sometimes it was labeled Scotch and sometimes vodka or bourbon, but it all came off the same slime-still columns. I was no different from any of the others… except that, one time, I won the lottery. And that was my ticket out.