Frederik Pohl: Gateway

Mission Plan filed proposal that a Five with double life-support rations and a one-person crew might be able to complete this mission and return successfully. Proposal tabled on grounds of low priority: no evident benefit from repeating this mission.

When we get where we’re going we’ll be able to talk. Maybe even switch around to come back together. But meanwhile we’ll both have a chance to think about what we really want.”

The only words I seemed to know I seemed to be saying over and over again: “But, Klara—”

She kissed me, and pushed me away. “Rob,” she said, “don’t be in such a hurry. We’ve got all the time there is.”

“Tell me something, Sigfrid,” I say, “how nervous am I?”

He is wearing his Sigmund Freud hologram this time, true Viennese stare, not a bit gemillich. But his voice is the gently sad baritone: “if you are asking what my sensors say, Rob, you are quite agitated, yes.”

“I thought so,” I say, bouncing around the mat.

“Can you tell me why?”

“No!” The whole week has been like that, marvelous sex with Doreen and S. Ya., and floods of tears in the shower; fantastic gambling and play at the bridge tournament, and total despair on the way home. I feel like a yo-yo. “I feel like a yo-yo,” I yell. “You opened up something I can’t handle.”

“I think you underestimate your capacity for handling pain,” he says reassuringly.

“Fuck you, Sigfrid! What do you know about human capacities?”

He almost sighs. “Are we back to that again, Rob?”

“We bloody well are!” And funnily, I feel less nervous; I goad him into an argument again, and the peril is reduced.

“It is true, Rob, that I am a machine. But I am a machine designed to understand what humans are like and, believe me, well designed for my function.”

“Designed! Sigfrid,” I say reasonably, “you aren’t human. You may know, but you don’t feel. You have no idea what it feels like to have to make human decisions and carry the load of human emotion. You don’t know what it feels like to have to tie a friend up to keep him from committing murder. To have someone you love die. To know it’s your fault. To be scared out of your mind.”

“I do know those things, Rob,” he says gently. “I really do. I want to explore why you are feeling so turbulent, so won’t you please help me?”

“No!”

“But your agitation, Rob, means that we are approaching the central pain—”

“Get your bloody drill out of my nerve!” But the analogy doesn’t throw him for a second; his circuits are finely tuned today.

“I’m not your dentist, Rob, I’m your analyst, and I tell you—”

“Stop!” I know what I have to do to get him away from where it hurts. I haven’t used S. Ya.’s secret little formula since that first day, but now I want to use it again. I say the words, and convert him from a tiger to a pussycat; he rolls over and lets me stroke his tummy, as I command him to display the gaudier bits from some of his interviews with attractive and highly quirky female patients; and the rest of the hour is spent as a peepshow; and I have got out of his room one more time intact.

Or nearly.

Out in the holes where the Heechee hid, out in the caves of the stars, sliding the tunnels they slashed and slid, healing the Heechee-hacked scars… Jesus, it was like a Boy Scout camp; we sang and frolicked all the nineteen days after turnaround. I don’t think I ever felt that good in my life. Partly it was release from fear; when we hit turnaround we all breathed easier, as always do. Partly it was that the first half of the trip had been pretty gritty, with Metchnikov and his two boyfriends in a complicated triple spat most of the time and Susie Hereira a lot less interested in me on shipboard than she had been as a once-a-night out on Gateway. But mostly, I think, for me anyway, it knowing that I was getting closer and closer to Klara. Danny A. helped me work out the figures; he’d taught some of the courses on Gateway, and he may have been wrong but there wasn’t any around righter so I took his word for it: he calculated from time of turnaround that we were going something like three hundred light-years in all — a guess, sure, but close enough. The ship, the one Klara was in, was getting farther and farther ahead of us all the way to turnaround, at which point we were doing something over ten light-years a day (or so Danny said).

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, Tunnel Twelve, ask for DeVittorio, 1100 hours until it’s all gone.

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 10 8centimeters 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 Danny A. he looked at me queerly. “Do you know how far seventeen and a half billion kilometers is? You could fit the whole solar system in between them and us. Just about exactly; the semimajor axis of Pluto’s orbit is thirty-nine A.U. and change.”

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 tunnel rat. But I couldn’t see Klara in Dallas or New York, either. Of course, I thought, my wish racing far ahead of reality, if we really found anything a lousy million apiece might be only the beginning. Then we could have all the homes we wanted, anywhere we liked; and Full Medical, too, with transplants to keep us young and healthy and beautiful and sexually strong and- “You really ought to go to sleep,” said Danny A. from the seat next to mine; “the way you thrash around is a caution.”

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 Dannys were sacked in, and then I found out what it was that was making me hungry. Dane Metchnikov was cooking himself a stew.