of any kind to me in connection with my activities under this contract.
In the event of any disagreement arising from this Memorandum of Agreement, I agree that the terms shall be interpreted according to the laws and precedents of Gateway itself, and that no laws or precedents of any other jurisdiction shall be considered relevant in any degree.
"Oh, hell, man! It's in that packet of stuff they gave you."
I opened the lockers at random until I found where I had put the envelope. Inside it were my copy of the articles of agreement, a booklet entitled Welcome to Gateway, my room assignment, my health questionnaire that I would have to fill out before 0800 the next morning… and a folded sheet that, opened up, looked like a wiring diagram with names on it.
"That's it. Can you locate where you are? Remember your room number: Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel Eight, Room Fifty-one. Write it down."
"It's already written here, Dane, on my room assignment."
"Well, don't lose it." Dane reached behind his neck and unhooked himself, let himself fall gently to the floor. "So why don't you look around by yourself for a while. I'll meet you here. Anything else you need to know right now?"
I thought, while he looked impatient. "Well — mind if I ask you a question about you, Dane? Have you been out yet?"
"Six trips. All right, I'll see you at twenty-two hundred." Then he pushed the flexible door open, slipped out into the jungly green of the corridor and was gone.
I let myself flop — so gently, so slowly — into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.
I don't know if I can make you feel it, how the universe looked to me from Gateway: like being young with Full Medical. Like a menu in the best restaurant in the world, when somebody else is going to pick up the check. Like a girl you've just met who likes you. Like an unopened gift.
The things that hit you first on Gateway are the tininess of the tunnels, feeling tinier even than they are because they're lined with windowboxy things of plants; the vertigo from the low gravity, and the stink. You get Gateway a little bit at a time. There's no way of seeing it all in one glance; it is nothing but a maze of tunnels in the rock. I'm not even sure they've all been explored yet. Certainly there are miles of them that nobody ever goes into, or not very often.
That's the way the Heechees were. They grabbed the asteroid, plated it over with wall metal, drove tunnels into it, filled them with whatever sort of possessions they had — most were empty by the time we got there, just as everything that ever belonged to the Heechees is, all over the universe. And then they left it, for whatever reason they left.
The closest thing to a central point in Gateway is Heecheetown. That's a spindle-shaped cave near the geometric center of the asteroid. They say that when the Heechees built Gateway they lived there. We lived there too, at first, or close to it, all of us new peopie off Earth. (And elsewhere. A ship from Venus had come in just before ours.) That's where the company housing is. Later on, if we got rich on a prospecting trip, we could move out farther toward the surface, where there was a little more gravity and less noise. And above all, less smell. A couple thousand people had breathed the air I was breathing, one time or another, voided the water I drank and exuded their smells into the atmosphere. The people didn't stay around very long, most of them. But the smells were still there.
I didn't care about the smell. I didn't care about any of it. Gateway was my big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a couple of kids, and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made me cocky about my chances of winning another.
It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough, too. There wasn't much luxury around. For your $238,575 what you get is transportation to Gateway, ten days' worth of food, lodging, and air, a cram course in ship handling, and an invitation to sign up on the next ship out. Or any ship you like. They don't make you take any particular ship,