Gateway - Frederik Pohl Page 0,100
said).
Classifieds.
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 108 centimeters 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.
"Is there enough for two?"
He looked at me thoughtfully. "I guess so." He opened the squeeze-fit lid, peered inside, milked another hundred cc of water into it out of the vapor trap, and said, "Give it another ten minutes. I was going to have a drink first."
I accepted the invitation, and we passed a wine flask back and forth. While he shook the stew and added a dollop of salt, I took the star readings for him. We were still close to maximum velocity and there was nothing on the viewscreen that looked like a familiar constellation, or even much like a star; but it was all beginning to look friendly and good to me. To all of us. I'd never seen Dane so cheerful and relaxed. "I've been thinking," he said. "A million's enough. After this one I'm going back to Syracuse, get my doctorate, get a job. There's going to be some school somewhere that'll