Frederik Pohl - Gateway

She reached over and patted my arm. “It will be pretty lonely,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette. “I’ve got pretty used to waking up next to you. On the other hand—”

“I’ll pick up my stuff on the way back from the hospital,” I said. I wasn’t enjoying the conversation that much. I didn’t want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn’t account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.

At the hospital they kept me waiting for more than an hour, and then they hurt me a lot. I bled like a stuck pig, all over my shirt and pants, and while they were reeling out of my nose those endless yards of cotton gauze that Ham Tayeh had stuffed there to keep me from bleeding to death, it felt exactly as if they were pulling out huge gobbets of flesh. I yelled. The little old Japanese lady who was working as outpatient paramedic that day gave me scant patience. “Oh, shut up, please,” she said. “You sound like that crazy returnee who killed himself. Screamed for an hour.”

I waved her away, one hand to my nose to stop the blood. Alarm bells were going off. “What? I mean, what was his name?”

She pushed my hand away and dabbed at my nose. “I don’t know — oh, wait a minute. You were from that same hard-luck ship, weren’t you?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Was it Sam Kahane?”

She became suddenly more human. “I’m sorry, sweet,” she said. “I guess that was the name. They went to give him a shot to keep him quiet, and he got the needle away from the doctor and — well, he stabbed himself to death.”

It was a real bummer of a day, all right.

In the long run she got me cauterized. “I’m going to put in just a little packing,” she said. “Tomorrow you can take it out yourself. Just be slow about it, and if you hemorrhage get your ass down here in a hurry.”

She let me go, looking like an ax-murder victim. I skulked up to Klara’s room to change my clothes, and the day went on being rotten. “Fucking Gemini,” she snarled at me. “Next time I go out, it’s going to be with a Taurean like that fellow Metchnikov.”

“What’s the matter, Klara?”

“They gave us a bonus. Twelve thousand five! Christ. I tip my maid more than that.”

I was surprise for a split-second and in the same split-second wondered whether, under the circumstances, they wouldn’t divide it by four instead.

Dr. Asmenion . Naturally, if you can get good readings on a nova, or especially on a supernova, that’s worth a lot. While it’s happening, I mean. Later, not much good. And always look for our own sun, and if you can identify it take all the tape you can get, at all frequencies, around the immediate area — up to, oh, about five degrees each way, anyway. With maximum magnification.

Question . Why’s that, Danny?

Dr. Asmenion . Well, maybe you’ll be on the far side of the sun from something like Tycho’s Star, or the Crab Nebula, which is what’s left of the 1054 supernova in Taurus. And maybe you’ll get a picture of what the star looked like before it blew. That ought to be worth, gee, I don’t know, fifty or a hundred thousand right there.

“They called on the P-phone ten minutes ago. Jesus. The rottenest son-of-a-bitching trip I’ve ever been on, and I wind up with the price of one green chip at the casino out of it.” Then she looked at my shirt and softened a little. “Well, it’s not your fault, Rob, but Geminis never can make up their minds. I should’ve known that. Let me see if I can find you some clean clothes.”

And I did let her do that, but I didn’t stay, anyway. I picked up my stuff, headed for a dropshaft, cached my goods at the registry office where I signed up to get my room back, and borrowed the use of their phone. When she mentioned Metchnikov’s name she had reminded me of something I wanted to do.

Metchnikov grumbled, but finally agreed to meet me in the schoolroom. I was there before him, of course. He loped in, stopped at the doorway, looked around, and said: “Where’s what’s-her-name?”

“Klara Moynlin. She’s in her room.” Neat, truthful, deceitful. A model answer.

“Um.” He ran an index finger down each jaw-whisker, meeting under the chin. “Come on, then.” Leading me, he said over his shoulder, “Actually, she would probably get more out of this than you would.”

“I suppose she would, Dane.”

“Um.” He hesitated at the bump in the floor that was the entrance to one of the instruction ships, then shrugged, opened the hatch, and clambered down inside.

He was being unusually open and generous, I thought as I followed him inside. He was already crouched in front of the courseselector panel, setting up numbers. He was holding a portable hand readout data-linked to the Corporation’s master computer system; I knew that he was punching in one of the established settings, and so I was not surprised when he got color almost at once. He thumbed the fine-tuner and waited, looking over his shoulder at me, until the whole board was drowned in shocking pink.

“All right,” he said. “Good, clear setting. Now look at the bottom part of the spectrum.”

That was the smaller line of rainbow colors along the right side. Colors merged into one another without break, except for occasional lines of bright color or black. They looked exactly like what the astronomers called Fraunhofer lines, when the only way they had to know what a star or planet was made of was to study it through a spectroscope. They weren’t. Fraunhofer lines show what elements are present in a radiation source (or in something that has gotten itself between the radiation source and you). These showed God-knows-what.

God and, maybe, Dane Metchnikov. He was almost smiling, and astonishingly talkative. “That band of three dark lines in the blue,” he said. “See? They seem to relate to the hazardousness of the mission. At least the computer printouts show that, when there are six or more bands there, the ships don’t come back.”

He had my full attention. “Christ!” I said, thinking of a lot of good people who had died because they hadn’t known that. “Why don’t they tell us these things in school?”

He said patiently (for him), “Broadhead, don’t be a jerk. All this is brand new. And a lot of it is guesswork. Now, the correlation between number of lines and danger isn’t quite so good under six. I mean, if you think that they might add one line for every additional degree of danger, you’re wrong. You would expect that the five-band settings would have heavy loss ratios, and when there are no bands at all there wouldn’t be any losses. Only it isn’t true. The best safety record seems to be with one or two bands. Three is good, too-but there have been some losses. Zero bands, we’ve had about as many as with three.”

For the first time I began to think that the Corporation’s science-research people might be worth their pay. “So why don’t we just go out on destination settings that are safer?”

“We’re not really sure they are safer,” Metchnikov said, again patiently for him. His tone was far more peremptory than his words. “Also, when you have an armored ship you should be able to deal with more risks than the plain ones. Quit with the dumb questions, Broadhead.”

“Sorry.” I was getting uncomfortable, crouched behind him and peering over his shoulder, so that when he turned to look at me his jaw-whiskers almost grazed my nose. I didn’t want to change position.

“So look up here in the yellow.” He pointed to five brighter lines in the yellow band. “These relate to the profitibility of the mission. God knows what we’re measuring — or what the Heechee were measuring — but in terms of financial rewards to the crews, there’s a pretty good correlation between the number of lines in that frequency and the amount of money the crews get.”