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 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 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.
SHOWER PROCEDURE
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"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 people looked at me curiously. One of them, I noticed, was a girl I had danced with the night before, the one with the dense black eyebrows. She nodded to me and smiled; I saw the bangles on her arm, and wondered what she was doing there — and how she had done at the gambling tables.
The instructor gathered us around him, and said, "As someone just said, these are Heechee ships. The lander part. This is the piece you go down to a planet in, if you're lucky enough to find a planet. They don't look very big, but five people can fit into each of those garbage