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sensation of having to push through rapidly solidifying gas clouds. The bad
smell remained. The room smelled excessively foul, even by Gateway standards,
and I realized I had thrown up on the floor. I was only millimeters from doing
it again. Bakin, slowly stroking the air with his wings, dexterously dropped a
stoppered flask next to me on the hammock at the end of one stroke. Then he
propelled himself to the top of my chest of drawers, sat there, and said:
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WHO OWNS GATEWAY?
Gateway is unique In the history of humanity, and it was quickly realized that
it was too valuable a resource to be given to any one group of persons, or any
one government. Therefore
Gateway Enterprises, Inc., was formed.
Gateway Enterprises (usually referred to as "the Corporation") is a
multinational corporation whose general partners are the governments of the
United States of America, the Soviet
Union, the United States of Brazil, the Venusian Confederation, and New
People's Asia, and whose limited partners are all those persons who, like
yourself, have signed the attached Memorandum of
Agreement.
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"I believe you have a medical examination this morning at oh eight hundred
hours."
"Do I?" I managed to get the cap off the tea and took a sip. It was very hot,
sugarless, and almost tasteless, but it did seem to tip the scales inside my
gut in the direction opposite to throwing up again.
"Yes. I think so. It's customary. And in addition, your P-phone has rung
several times."
I went back to, "Uh?"
"I presume it was your proctor caffing you to remind you. It is now
seven-fifteen, Mr.--"
"Broadhead," I said thickly, and then more carefully: "My name is Rob
Broadhead."
"Yes. I took the liberty of making sure you were awake. Please enjoy your tea,
Mr.
Broadhead. Enjoy your stay on Gateway."
He nodded, fell forward off the chest, swooped toward the door, handed himself
through it, and was gone. With my head thudding at every change of attitude I
got myself out of the hammock, trying to avoid the nastier spots on the floor,
and somehow succeeded in getting reasonably clean.
I thought of depilating, but I had about twelve days on a beard and decided to
let it go for a while; it no longer looked unshaven, exactly, and I just
didn't have the strength.
When I wobbled into the medical examining room I was only about five minutes
late. The others in my group were all ahead of me, so I had to wait and go
last. They extracted three kinds of blood from me, fingertip, inside of the
elbow, and lobe of the ear, I was sure they would all run ninety proof. But it
didn't matter. The medical was only a formality. If you could survive the trip
up to Gateway by spacecraft in the first place; you could survive a trip in a
Heechee ship.
Unless something went wrong. In which case you probably couldn't survive
anyway, no matter how healthy you were.
I had time for a quick cup of coffee off a cart that someone was tending next
to a dropshaft (private enterprise on Gateway? I hadn't known that existed),
and then I got to the
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
y.txt (18 of 109) [1/15/03 6:31:20 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
y.txt first session of the class right on the tick. We met in a big room on
Level Dog, long and narrow and low-ceilinged. The seats were arranged two on
each side with a center aisle, sort of like a schoolroom in a
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SHOWER PROCEDURE
This shower will automatically deliver two 45-second sprays. Soap between
sprays.
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You are entitled to 1 use of the shower in each 3-day period.
Additional showers may be charged against your credit balance at the rate of
45 seconds --
$5
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converted bus. Sheri came in late, looking fresh and cheerful, and slipped in
beside me;
our whole group was there, all seven of us who had come up from Earth
together, the family of four from Venus and a couple others I knew to be new
fish like me. "You don't look too bad," Sheri whispered as the instructor
pondered over some papers on his desk.
"Does the hangover show?"
"Actually not. But I assume it's there. I heard you coming in last night. In
fact," she added thoughtfully, "the whole tunnel heard you."
I winced. I could still smell myself, but most of it was apparently inside me.
None of the others seemed to be edging away, not even Sheri.
The instructor stood up and studied us thoughtfully for a while. "Oh, well,"
he said, and looked back at his papers. Then he shook his head. "I won't take
attendance," he said. "I teach the course in how to run a Heechee ship." I
noticed he had a batch of bracelets; I couldn't count them, but there were at
least half a dozen. I wondered briefly about these people I kept seeing who
had been out a lot of times and still weren't rich. "This is only one of the
three courses you get. After this you get survival in unfamiliar environments,
and then how to recognize what's valuable. But this one is in ship-handling,
and the way we're going to start learning it is by doing it. All of you come
with me."
So we all got up and gaggled after him, out of the room, down a tunnel, onto
the down-
cable of a dropshaft and past the guards -- maybe the same ones who had chased
me away the night before. This time they just nodded to the instructor and
watched us go past. We wound up in a long, wide, low-ceilinged passage with
about a dozen squared-off and stained metal cylinders sticking up out of the
floor. They looked like charred tree stumps, and it was a moment before I
realized what they were.
I gulped.
"They're ships," I whispered to Sheri, louder than I intended. A couple of
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