Heechee - The Gateway Trip Part 10

All those lucky prospectors collected science bonuses. So did the ones who happened to find themselves near known objects, at least if they were the first to claim the rewards. Wolfgang Arretov was the first to arrive near the Sirius system, and Earthly astronomers were delighted. The stars Sirius A and B ("Bessel's satellite") had been studied intensively for centuries, because the primary star is so bright in Earthly skies. Arretov's data confirmed their deductions: Sirius A at 2.3 solar ma.s.ses, B only about one-but a white dwarf with a surface temperature over twenty thousand degrees. Arretov got half a million for letting the astronomers know they had been right all along. Later, Sally Kissendorf got a hundred thousand for the first good pictures of the tiny (well-three solar ma.s.ses, which is not real tiny; but just about invisible next to its huge primary) companion of Zeta Aurigae. She would have gotten more if the companion had happened to flare while she was nearby, but that might not have been worth her while, since it was very likely she could not have survived the experience. Matt Polofsky's picture of little Cygnus A only got him fifty thousand dollars, though-red dwarf stars simply weren't that interesting. Even well-studied nearby ones. And Rachel Morgenstern, with her husband and their three grown children, shared half a million for the Delta Cepheid shots. Cepheids aren't all that rare, but the Morgensterns happened to be there just when the star's surface layers were losing transparency through compression.

And then there were all the missions that wound .up in Oort clouds.

Oort clouds are ma.s.ses of comets that orbit a star very far out- the Oort in Earth's system doesn't get going until you're half a light-year from the Sun. There are lots of comets in your average Oort cloud. Trillions of them. They generally ma.s.s as much as the aggregate of a star's planets, and almost every star has an Oort.

They seemed to fascinate the Heechee.

In Gateway's first twenty years of operation, no fewer than eighty-five missions wound up in an Oort cloud and returned to tell of it.That was a big disappointment to the prospectors involved, be- cause the Gateway Corporation stopped paying bonuses for Oort data after the tenth such mission. So those prospectors who came back from an Oort complained a lot. They couldn't understand why the Heechee had targeted so many missions to the dumb things.

And, naturally, they had no idea how lucky they really were, because it was a long time before anyone found out that, for an astonis.h.i.+ng reason, most Oort missions never got back to the Gateway asteroid at all.

That billion dollars in astronomical science bonuses was welcome enough to the prospectors who got a share of it. But, really, it was chicken feed. What the Gateway Corporation was formed for was profit. The prospectors had come to the asteroid for the same reason, and big profit didn't come from taking instrument readings on something millions of miles away. The big bucks came from finding a planet, and landing on it-and bringing back something that made money.

Neither the Gateway Corporation nor the individual prospectors had much choice about that. Making a profit was the basic rule of survival, and neither the prospectors nor the Corporation made the rules. Those rules were made by the nature of the world they came from.

h.o.m.o sapiens evolved on the planet Earth, and the process of evolution made it certain that every human trait was custom-engineered to fit Earth's conditions, like a key in a lock. With three billioh years of Darwinian selection to make the fit perfect, life on Earth should have been pretty nearly heaven for its human inhabitants.

It wasn't. Not anymore, for rich Earth was getting close to filing for bankruptcy. It had spent its wealth.

Oh, there were many millionaires on Earth. Billionaires, too; people with more money than they could spend, enough to hire a hundred servants, enough to own a county for a backyard, enough to pay for Full Medical insurance coverage, so that for all their long lives they would have at their command the most wonderful of all the wonderful medical, pharmaceutical, and surgical techniques to keep them healthy, and to make those lives very long. There were hundreds of thousands of the very rich, and many millions of the more or less well to do . .

But there were ten billion others.

There were the ones who scratched out a living by farming on Asian plains and African savannahs; they made a crop when rain fell and wars stayed away and marauding insect pests devoured some other countryside than their own, and when the crop failed they died. There were the ones who lived in the barricaded slums of the big cities (the word "ghetto" was no longer a metaphor), or the barrios outside Latin metropolises, or the teeming warrens of the urban areas of the Orient. These people worked when they could. They lived on charity when there was any charity to be had. They lived at the bottom of the food chain-rice and beans, yams and barley; or, if they had the money to pay for it, single-cell proteins from the fossil-fuel conversions of the food mines-and they were very likely to be hungry throughout every hour of every day of their lives. Which were short. The poor people couldn't afford the medical plans. If they were very lucky there might be a free clinic, or a cheap doctor, to hand out pills and take out an appendix. But when one of their organs wore out they had only two alternatives. They managed to get along without it; or they died. The poor people could never afford organ transplants. They were lucky if they weren't caught in a dark alley some night and themselves converted into transplants for some richer person, by some more desperate one.

So there were two kinds of human beings on Earth. If you owned a few thousand shares of PetroFood or Chemways you didn't lack for much-not even health, because then you could afford Full Medical. But if you didn't If you didn't, the next best thing was to have a job. Any kind of a job.

Having a job was a dream of Utopia for the billions who had none, but for those who did have employment their work was generally a demeaning kind of drudgery that drowned the spirit and damaged the health. The food mines employed many, dipping fossil fuels out of the ground and breeding edible single-cell protein creatures on their hydrocarbon content. But when you worked at a food mine you breathed those same hydrocarbons every day-it was like living in a closed garage, with motors running all the time-and you probably died young. Factory work was better, a little, although the safest and most challenging parts of it were generally done by automatic machines for economic reasons; because they were more expensive to acquire, and to replace when damaged, than people. There was even domestic service as a possible career. But to be a servant in the homes of the wealthy was to be a slave, with a slave's intimate experience of luxury and plenty, and a slave's despair at ever attaining those things for himself.

Still, the ones who had even those jobs were lucky, for family agriculture was just a way of slowing down starvation, and in the developed world unemployment was terribly high. Especially in the cities. Especially for the young. So if you were one of the really rich, or even just one of the well-to-do, splurging on a trip to New York or Paris or Beijing, you usually saw the poor ones only when you walked out of your hotel, between police barricades, and into your waiting taxi.

You didn't have to do it that way. The police barricades were all one-way. If you chose to cross them the police would let you through. A grizzled old cop might try to warn you that going out among the crowds was a bad idea, if he happened to be charitably moved. But none of them would stop you if you insisted.

Then you were on your own. Which meant that you were immediately plunged into a noisy, smelly, dirty kind of unbarred zoo where you were immersed in a crowd of clamoring vendors: of drugs; of plastic reproductions of the Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, or the New York Bubble; of handmade key charms and hand-carved trinkets; of guide services, or discount coupons to night clubs; of- very often-themselves. That was a scary experience for any member of the privileged cla.s.ses encountering it for the first time. It wasn't necessarily very dangerous, though. The police wouldn't actually let them murder you or s.n.a.t.c.h your wallet-as long as you were in sight, anyway.

Quite often, the charging poor wouldn't harm you even if they succeeded in luring you away from the police cordons, especially if you offered them some less chancy way of making money from you. But that was not guaranteed. Most of the poor people were desperate.

For the rich, of course, the world was quite different. It always is. The rich lived long, healthy lives with other people's organs replacing any of their own that wore out. They lived those lives in balmy climates under the domes of major cities, if they chose, or cruising the warm and still-unpolluted southern seas, or even traveling in s.p.a.ce for the pure joy of it. When there were wars (and there often were, frequent though small-though quite large enough, of course, to satisfy the people killed in them), the rich went elsewhere until the wars were over. They felt that was their due. After all, they were the ones who paid the taxes-as much as they couldn't avoid, anyway.

The main trouble with being rich was that not all of the poor people acquiesced in being poor. Quite a few tried to find ways to better themselves, and sometimes they did so violently.

Kidnapping became a growth industry in America again. So did extortion. You paid what they demanded, or out of hiding someone would shoot away your kneecap (or torch your house, or b.o.o.bytrap your flyer, or poison your pets). Few in the solvent cla.s.ses would send their children to school without a bodyguard anymore. That did have a useful side effect. As it turned out, it helped ease the unemployment situation, a little, as some millions of the extortionists put on uniforms and began drawing salaries to protect their employers against extortion.

And, of course, there was political terror, too. It flourished in the same soil that nurtured kidnapping and extortion, and there was even more of it. Among the apathetic majority of the landless and the hungry, there were always a few who banded together to work the vengeance of the have-nots on the haves. Hostages were taken, officials were shot from ambush, aircraft were bombed out of the sky, reservoirs were poisoned, food supplies infected . . . oh, there were a thousand ingenious, injurious tricks the terror-wielders devised, and all of them devastating-at least, to those who had something to lose in the first place.

Nevertheless, in spite of all the fears and inconveniences, the haves had it made. And most other people didn't even have hope.

Then, into the life of this seething, overfull planet, along came Gateway.

For most of the ten billion people alive on the used-up planet of Earth, Gateway was an unexpected hope of paradise. Like the gold-rush miners of '49, like the hungry Irish fleeing their potato famine in the holds of immigrant s.h.i.+ps, like the sodbusting pioneers of the American West and human emigrants everywhere, through all of history, the poverty-stricken billions were willing to take any risk for the sake of-well, wealth, if wealth could be had; but at least for a chance to feed and clothe and house their children.

Even the rich saw that this surprising new event might offer them a good chance to get even richer. That made for a serious problem, for a while. The national governments who had built the s.p.a.ce rockets that first visited other planets and later supported the Gateway operation felt they were ent.i.tled to whatever profits came out of the Gateway discoveries. The rich people who owned the governments agreed. But they couldn't all own it, after all.

So there was a certain amount of buying and selling and horse-trading (and some pretty cutthroat wheeling and dealing, too, with the stakes as high as they were). Compromises were made. Bargains were struck; and out of the competing greeds of all the claimants to the limitless wealth that the galaxy promised came the just, or fairly just, invention of the Gateway Corporation.

Was Gateway a benefit to Earth's poor?

At first, not very much. It gave each of them a little hope-the hope of a lottery ticket, although few of them could raise the money even to buy that one-way ticket that might make them into winners. But it was a long time before any stay-at-home peasant or slum-dweller was a penny or a meal richer for anything the Heechee had left behind.

In fact, the knowledge that there were rich, empty planets out there was more tantalizing than useful to Earth's teeming billions. The livable planets were too far away. They could only be reached by faster-than-light travel. Although human beings actually improved on some Heechee s.p.a.ce-travel techniques (using Lofstrom ioops to get into orbit instead of Heechee landers, for instance, and thus sparing further damage to the acidified lakes and the ozone layer), no one had the slightest idea of how to build a Heechee s.h.i.+p-and the s.h.i.+ps on Gateway were far too few and much too small to carry sizable migrant populations to the new planets.

So a few prospectors got rich, when they didn't get dead instead. A number of rich people got quickly richer. But most of the penniless billions stayed on Earth.

And in the cities like Calcutta, with its two hundred million paupers, and on the starved farms and paddies of Africa and the Orient, hunger remained a fact of life, and terrorism and poverty got worse instead of better.

As our teachers keep telling us, the longest journey begins with a single step. That first step for the Gateway asteroid-the first voyage of exploration any human being ever took in a Heechee s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p- wasn't planned in advance. It wasn't even authorized. And it certainly wasn't prudent.

The name of the man who took that first trip into the unknown was Lieutenant Senior Grade Ernest T. Kaplan. He was a marine officer from the U.S. s.p.a.ce Navy cruiser Roanoke. Kaplan wasn't a scientist. He was so far from being a scientist that he had been given strict orders not to touch anything, but anything, on the Gateway asteroid. The only reason he was on the asteroid in the first place was that he had been ordered there as a guard, to keep anyone else from touching anything while the scientists who came hurrying up from Earth tried to figure out just what the devil they had here.

But Kaplan had a mind full of itchy curiosity, and what's more, he had access to the parked s.h.i.+ps. And one day, for lack of anything better to do, he sat down in the one s.h.i.+p that happened to have been equipped with food lockers and air and water tanks, just in case anyone got the locks closed and was trapped inside. Kaplan thought for a while about old Sylvester Macklin. Just for the fun of it, he practiced opening and closing the locks a few times. Then he played with the knurled wheels for a while, watching the changing colors.

Then he squeezed the funny-looking little thing at the base.

That was what later, more expert pilots would call "the launch teat," and as soon as he squeezed it Lieutenant Senior Grade Kaplan became the second human being to fly a Heechee s.h.i.+p. He was gone.

Ninety-seven days later he was back at the Gateway asteroid.

It was a miracle that he'd managed to return; it was even a bigger miracle that he was still alive. The supplies in the s.h.i.+p had been meant to last for a few days, not for months. For drinking water he had been reduced to catching the condensation from his own sweat and emanations as it beaded the lander port. For the last five weeks he hadn't eaten anything at all. He was scrawny and filthy and half out of his mind But he had been there. His s.h.i.+p had orbited a planet far out from a small, reddish star; a planet that had so little light that it seemed only grayish, with swirling yellow clouds-a little the way Jupiter or Saturn or Ura.n.u.s might have appeared, if their orbits had been as far from the Sun as the twilit Pluto.

The first reaction of the United States government was to courtmartial him. He certainly deserved it. He even expected it.

But before the court was convened the news services carried the word that the Brazilian parliament, carried away at the thought of sharing in the exploration of the galaxy, had voted Kaplan a million-dollar cash bonus. Then the Soviets not only made him an honorary citizen but invited him to Moscow to receive the Order of Lenin. The dam had burst. Every talk show on every television network in the world was begging him to be a guest.

You couldn't court-martial a hero.

So the American president jumped Lieutenant Kaplan to full colonel and then to general, in the same orders that grounded Colonel (or General) Kaplan forever. Then the president called all the s.p.a.cefaring nations together to decide just how to handle this situation.

The result was the Gateway Corporation.

Colonel Kaplan, like everyone before him, had failed to make one vital discovery, and that was that each one of the Heechee s.h.i.+ps was actually two s.h.i.+ps. Part One was the interstellar vessel that traveled faster than light to a programmed destination. Part Two was the smaller, simpler landing craft that nestled into the base of the s.h.i.+p itself.

The interstellar s.h.i.+ps themselves, with their unreproducible faster-than-light drives, were totally beyond the understanding of human scientists. It was a long time before any Earth person knew how they worked. Those who tried too hard to find out generally died because their drive engines blew up. The landers were much simpler. Basically, they were ordinary rockets. True, the guidance system was Heechee, but fortunately for the Gateway prospectors the controls turned out to be even simpler to operate than the faster-than-light vessels. The prospectors could use the lander successfully, even if they didn't know exactly how it worked, just as any average seventeen-year-old can learn to drive a car without any comprehension of the geometry of steering linkages or gear chains.

So when any Gateway prospector came out of FTL drive and found himself in the vicinity of an interesting-looking planet, he could use the lander for the purpose for which it was designed: to go down to the surface of the planet and see what it had to offer.

That was what Gateway was all about.

The planets were where you had to go, because they were the most likely places to look for the kind of precious thing the prospector could bring back and turn in to make his fortune-and, naturally, to add to the Corporation's.

It was easy to describe the kind of planets they were looking for. They were looking for another Earth. Or something enough like Earth, anyway, to support some form of organic life, because inorganic processes hardly ever produced anything worth the carrying s.p.a.ce it took to bring it home.

The most disappointing planets were the closest. When the Heechee came to Earth's solar system they gave it a good looking-over, and some of the s.h.i.+ps on the Gateway asteroid reflected that. They still had stored navigation codes for places so near that human be- ings could have visited them on their own-if they wanted to. Some of them in fact had already been reached by the crude human rockets-places like Venus, the Moon, Mars's south polar ice cap. Some were hardly worth the trouble, like Saturn's moon, Dione.

The prospectors were after bigger game than that. They wanted planets no man or woman had ever seen. They found a bewildering array of them.

The planets they reached in the Magic Mystery Bus Rides came in all shapes and sizes. There were two basic types. There were the orbiting rocks (like Earth; solid and landable-on), and then there were the would-be stars (like Jupiter; the gas giants, that were just a bit too small to start nuclear fusion in their cores and turn themselves into suns). No Gateway prospector ever landed on a gas giant, of course. They had nothing solid enough to land on. (That was a pity, for a few of them were interesting anyway .. . but that's another story.) It was the orbiting rocks that were prospected as vigorously as a few thousand scared, hurried human beings could explore them. There were plenty of the solid planets. Most of them had no apparent life at all, unfortunately. They were too far from their sun, so they were eternally frozen, or they were too close, so they were as scorched as the planet Mercury. Many of them had too little atmosphere (or none at all), like Mars (or the Moon). Some of them had satellites of their own, like the Earth's Moon. Some of the target objects were satellites, but big ones, big enough to retain atmospheres and to land on.

There were something over two hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, and a h.e.l.lish lot of them possessed planets of one kind or another. Even the Heechee s.h.i.+ps weren't programmed to set a course for all the possible planets to explore. There were hardly course settings for one planet in a hundred thousand, in fact. Still, that left plenty for the Gateway prospectors to visit-many more of them than a few thousand men and women could reach in the course of a few dozen years.

So the first discovery the Gateway prospectors made was that there were plenty of planets to choose from. Human astronomers were glad to know that, because they'd always wondered, and the Corporation didn't even have to pay a discovery bonus to find it out: all they had to do was add up the findings of the returning explorers. It developed that binary stars didn't ordinarily have planets. Solitary stars, on the other hand, generally did. Astronomers thought the reason for that probably had something to do with conserving rotational velocity. When two stars condensed together out of a single gas cloud they seemed to take care of each other's excess rotational energy. Bachelor stars apparently had to dissipate it on smaller satellites.

Hardly any of the planets were really Earth-like, though.

There were a lot of tests for that sort of thing that could be applied from a considerable distance. Temperature sensing, for one. Organic life didn't seem to develop except where water could exist in its liquid phase, which was to say in the narrow, 100-degree band between about 270 and 370 Kelvin. At lower temperatures the stuff was useless ice. At higher ones water wasn't usually there at afl, because the heat vaporized it and the sunlight-from whatever sun was nearby-split the hydrogen out of the water molecule and it was lost into s.p.a.ce.

That meant that each star had a quite narrow area of possible planetary orbits that might be worth investigating. As planets didn't care whether or not they were going to be hospitable to life when they were condensing out of the interstellar gases, most of them took orbits inside that life zone, or in the cold s.p.a.ces outside it.

Most alien life, like most Earthly life, was based on the chemistry of the carbon atoms. Carbon was the best of all possible elements for forming useful long-chain compounds, and happily it is so frequently found that it is the fourth most common element in the universe. Most alien life had something like DNA, too. That wasn't for any panspermian reason, but simply because systems like DNA provided a cheap and efficient way for organisms to replicate themselves.

So most living things followed certain basic guidelines. That was probably because they all started in pretty much the same way, since there is a timetable to the development of life. The first step is just chemistry: inorganic chemicals get forced to react with each other, under the spur of some sort of externally supplied energy-usually the light from their nearby star. Then crude, single-celled little things appear. These are only factories whose raw materials are the other inorganic chemicals in the soup that surrounds them. They, too, use the energy of sunlight (or whatever) to process the inorganic chemicals into more of themselves, and that's about all they do for a living. Since they are photosynthetic, you might call them plants.

Then these primitive "plants" themselves turn out to be pretty rich sources of a.s.similable chemicals. Since they've gone to the trouble of concentrating the more appetizing inorganic compounds into a preprocessed form, it is only a question of time until some of them learn a new diet. These new ones don't eat the raw materials of the environment. They eat their own weaker, more primitive cousins. Call this new batch of creatures "animals." The first animals aren't usually much. They consist of a mouth at one end, an a.n.u.s at the other, and some sort of processing system in between. That's all they are. But then, that's all they need to be to feast on their neighbors.

Then things get more complicated.

Evolution begins to happen. The fittest survive, pretty much the way Charles Darwin figured it out as he fondled his captive finches on board the Beagle. The plants go on making appetizing chemicals for the animals to feast on, and the animals go on feasting on the plants and on each other-but some plants accidentally develop traits that give their predators trouble, and so those plants survive; and some animals learn tricks to get around those defenses. Later generations of animals develop senses to locate their prey more efficiently, and musculatures to catch it, and ultimately complex behavioral systems (like the web of a spider or the stalking of a great cat) that make their predation more and more successful. (Then, of course, the plants, or the herbivores, or the less successful predators begin to develop defense mechanisms of their own: the poisons in a shrub's leaf, the quills of a porcupine, the fleet legs of a gazelle.) The compet.i.tion never stops getting more intense, and more sophisticated on all parts-until, finally, some of the creatures become "intelligent." But they take a lot longer to evolve . . . and it took the Gateway prospectors a lot longer to find any of them, too.

In the myriad worlds that the Heechee had explored- and to which the human Gateway prospectors followed them hundreds of thousands of years later-all those basics of the evolution of life were played out a thousand times, with a thousand variations. The variations were sometimes quite surprising. For instance, Earthly plants have one conspicuous trait in common: they don't move. But there wasn't any reason why that trait had to be universal, and in fact it wasn't. The Gateway prospectors foux~d bushes that rolled from place to place, setting roots down to one side and pulling them up on the other, like slow-motion tumble-weeds as they sought the richest soils and the best access to groundwater and the surest sunlight. Then, too, Earthly animals don't normally bother with photosynthesis. But in the seas of other worlds there were things like jellyfish that floated to the surface by day to generate their own hydrocarbons from the sun and the air, and then sank down to feast on algal things at night. Earthly corals stay in one place. Prospectors found some unearthly ones-or, at least, some unearthly things that looked more or less like corals-that flew apart into their component little animals when the coast was clear, to eat and mate, and then returned to form collective rockhard fortresses when the prowling marine predators approached.

Most of these things were useless to any prospector whose big interest was in making a fortune. A few were not. There was one good feature to finding an organism that was worth something, and that was that it was an easy import. You didn't have to bring tons of material back to Gateway. All you had to do was bring enough of some plant or animal back to breed others back on Earth, since living things were glad to reproduce themselves for you anywhere.

The zoos of Earth began to expand, and so did Earth's aquaria, and its pet stores. Every fas.h.i.+onable family was sure to own its exotic windowbox of alien ferns, or its furry little pet from the planet of some other star.

Before the Gateway prospectors could make an honest buck in the pet trade, though, they had to find the living things in the first place. That wasn't easy. Even when life was apparently possible, sometimes it was there, and sometimes it was not. The way to check for that was to look for chemical signatures in the atmosphere. (Oh, yes, the hopefully life-bearing planet had to possess an atmosphere, too, but that wasn't a serious constraint. Most planets in the habitable zone did.) If the atmosphere turned out to contain reactive gases that hadn't reacted-say, if it held free oxygen, with reducing substances like carbon or iron somewhere availably around-then it stood to reason that something must be continually replenis.h.i.+ng those gases. That something was probably, in some sense, alive.

(Later on the prospectors found there were exceptions to these simple rules ... but not many.) The very first planet that turned out to have living things on it was a solid ten when studied from orbit. Almost everything was there: blue skies, blue seas, fleecy white clouds and plenty of oxygen-meaning some antientropic (i.e., living) thing to keep it that way.

Prospectors Anatol and Sherba Mirsky and their partner, Leonie Tilden, slapped each other's backs in exultation as they prepared to land. It was their first mission-and they'd hit the jackpot right away.

Naturally they celebrated. They opened the one bottle of wine they'd brought along. Ceremonially they made a recording announcing their discovery, punctuating it with the pop of the wine cork. They called the planet New Earth.

Everything was going their way. They even thought it likely that they could figure out just where they were in the galaxy (a kind of knowledge usually hidden from the early Gateway prospectors, because there weren't any road signs on the way). But they had spotted the Magellanic Clouds in one direction and the Andromeda Nebula in another, and in still a third direction there was a tight, bright cl.u.s.ter that they were nearly sure was the Pleiades.

The celebration was a bit premature. It had not occurred to them that one interesting color was missing in their view of New Earth from s.p.a.ce, and that color was green.

When Sherba Mirsky and Leonie Tilden went down to the surface of New Earth in the lander, what they landed on was bare rock. Nothing grew there. Nothing moved. Nothing flew in the sky. There were no flowering plants. There were no plants at all, at their elevation; there wasn't any soil for them to grow in. Soil hadn't reached those parts of the world yet.

It was only one more disappointment to find that there wasn't much oxygen in its air, either-enough for a qualitative determination from orbit, yes, but nowhere near enough to breathe. For, although there certainly was life on New Earth, there just wasn't much of it yet. Most of what there was lived in the coastal shallows, with a few hardy adventurers just making a start in colonizing the sh.o.r.es-simple prokaryotic and eukaryotic denizens of the sludgy seas, with a few scraggly, mossy things that had struggled out onto the littoral.

The trouble with New Earth was that it was a lot too new. It would take a billion years or so to get really interesting-or to pay Tilden, the Mirskys, and the Gateway Corporation back for the trouble of looking it over.

Although it was planets that offered profits, planets were also the places where it was easiest to get killed. As long as a Gateway prospector stayed inside his s.h.i.+p he was well protected against most of the dangers of star wandering. It was when he landed that he exposed himself to unknown environments ... and often very hostile ones.

For example, there was- MISSION PRETTY POISON A fifty-year-old Venezuelan named Juan Mendoza Santamaria was the first Gateway prospector to discover a really nice-looking planet. It had taken him forty-three days to get there, all alone in a One. That was well within his margins. He was not likely to run out of air, food, or water. What he worried about running out of was money. Mendoza had spent the last of his credits on a farewell party before he left the asteroid. If he came back empty-handed to Gateway his future was bleak. So he crossed himself and whispered a prayer of grat.i.tude as he stepped out of his lander onto the alien soil.

He was grateful, but he wasn't stupid. Therefore he was also cautious. Mendoza knew very well that if anything went wrong he was in serious trouble. There was no one within many light-years who could help him-in fact, there wasn't anybody, anywhere, who even knew where he was. So he wore his s.p.a.ce suit at all times on the surface of the planet, and that turned out to be very fortunate for Juan Mendoza.

The planet didn't look threatening at all. The plants were an odd shade of orange, the distant trees (or were they simply very tall gra.s.ses?) looked harmless, and there were no obviously threatening large animals. On the other hand, there wasn't much to be seen that looked immediately profitable, either. There weren't any signs of civilization-no great abandoned cities, no friendly alien intelligences to welcome him, no Heechee artifacts lying about waiting to be picked up. There wasn't even any kind of metallic structure, natural or otherwise, on the surface large enough to be detected by his lander's sensors as he came down. But, Mendoza rea.s.sured himself, the fact that there was any kind of life ought to be worth at least a science bonus. He identified both "plant" and "animal" life- at least some of the things moved, and some of them were firmly rooted in the soil.

He took some samples of the plants, though they weren't impressive. He trekked painfully over to the "trees" and found that they were soft-bodied, like mushrooms. There weren't any large ferns or true gra.s.ses; but there was a kind of fuzzy moss that covered most of the soil, and there were things that moved on it. None of the moving things were very big. The largest life form Mendoza encountered was an "arthropod" about the size of his palm. The little beasts moved about in little herds, feeding on smaller beetly and buggy things, and they were covered with a dense "fur" of gla.s.sy white spicules, which made them look like herds of tiny sheep. Mendoza felt almost guilty as he trapped a few of the pretty little creatures, killed them, and put them, with samples of the smaller creatures they preyed on, in the sterile containers that would go back to Gateway.

There wasn't anything else worth transporting. What the planet had that was really worthwhile was beauty. It had a lot of that.

It was quite near-Mendoza estimated thirty or forty light-years-a bright, active gas cloud that he thought might be the Orion Nebula. (It wasn't, but like the one in Orion it was a nursery for bright young stars.) Mendoza happened to land in the right season of the year to appreciate it best, for as the planet's sun set on one horizon the nebula rose on the other. It came to fill the entire night sky, like a luminous, sea-green tapestry laced with diamonds, edged in glowing royal maroon. The "diamonds"-the brightest stars within the nebula-were orders of magnitude brighter even than Venus or Jupiter as seen from Earth, nearly as bright as Earth's full Moon. But they were point sources, not disks like the Moon, and they were almost painful to look upon.

It was the beauty that struck Mendoza. He was not an articulate man. When he got back and filed his report he referred to the planet as "a pretty place," and so it was logged in the Gateway atlases as "Pretty Place."

Mendoza got what he was after: a two-million-dollar science bonus for finding the planet at all, and the promise of a royalty share on whatever subsequent missions might discover on Pretty Place. That could have turned out to be really serious money. According to Gateway rules, if the planet was colonizable Mendoza would be collecting money from it for the rest of his life.

Almost at once two other missions, both Fives, copied his settings and made the same trip.

That was when they changed the name to Pretty Poison.

The follow-up parties were not as cautious as Mendoza. They didn't keep their s.p.a.ce suits on. They didn't have the natural protections that had been developed by Pretty Poison's own fauna, either. The local life had evolved to meet a real challenge; those furry silicon spikes were not for ornament. They were armor.

It was a pity Mendoza hadn't completed his radiation checks, because those bright young stars in the nebula were not radiating visible light alone. They were powerful sources of ionizing radiation and hard ultraviolets. Four of the ten explorers came down with critical sunburn before they began to show signs of something worse. All of them, by the time they got back to Gateway, required total blood replacement, and two of them died anyway.

It was a good thing that Mendoza was a prudent man. He hadn't spent his two million in wild carouse, expecting the vast royalties that might come as his percentage of all that colonizing his planet would bring about. The planet could not be inhabited by human beings. The royalties never came.

MISSION BURNOUT.

Of the nearly thousand Heechee vessels found on Gateway, only a few dozen were armored, and most of those were Fives. An armored Three was a rarity, and when the crew of Felicia Monsanto, Greg Running Wolf, and Daniel Pursy set out in one they knew there was a certain element of danger; its course setting might take them to some really nasty place.

But when they came out of FTL and looked around they had a moment of total rapture. The star they were near was quite sunlike, a G-2 the same size as Earth's Sol; they were orbiting a planet within the livable zone from the star, and their detectors showed Heechee metal in large quant.i.ties!

The biggest concentration was not on the planet. It was an asteroid in an out-of-ecliptic orbit-a lot like Gateway-and it had to be another of those abandoned parking garages for Heechee s.h.i.+ps! When they approached it they saw that the guess was correct But they also saw that the asteroid was empty. There were no s.h.i.+ps. There were no artifacts at all. It was riddled with tunnels, just like Gateway, but the tunnels were vacant. Worse than that, the whole asteroid seemed in very bad shape, as though it were far older, and had had a far harder life, than Gateway itself.

That puzzle cleared itself up when, with the last of their resources, two of the crew ventured down to the planet itself.

It had been a living planet once. It had life now, in fact, but in scant numbers and only in its seas-algae and sea-bottom invertebrates, nothing more. Somehow or other the planet had been seared and ravaged ... and the culprit was in view.

Six and a half light-years away from that system they discovered a neutron star. Like most neutron stars, it was a pulsar, but as their s.h.i.+p was nowhere near its axis of radiation they could hardly detect its jets. But it was a radio source, and their instruments showed that it was there, the remnant of a supernova.

The rest of the story the experts on Gateway filled in for them when they returned. That solar system had been visited by the Heechee, but it was in a bad neighborhood. After the Heechee left- probably knowing what was about to happen-the supernova exploded. The planet had been baked. Its gases had been driven off, and most of its seas boiled away. As the h.e.l.lish heat died away a thin new atmosphere was cooked out of the planet's crust, and the remaining water vapor had come down in incredible torrents of rain, scouring away mountain valleys, burying plains in silt, leaving nothing... and all of that had happened hundreds of thousands of years before.

Monsanto, Running Wolf, and Pursy got a science bonus for their mission-a small one, a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to be divided among the three of them.

By Gateway standards, that wasn't serious money. It was enough to pay their bills on Gateway for a few extra weeks. It was not nearly enough to retire on. All three of them s.h.i.+pped out again as soon as they found another berth, and from their next voyage none of them ever returned.