Gateway - Frederik Pohl Page 0,23

mine, and I realized that that nice musk-oil smell that had been in my nostrils for the last little while was hers. It wasn't just musk, either; her pheromones were snuggling nicely into my chemoreceptors. It made a very nice change from the rest of the Gateway stink.

But all the same, I didn't get even a show of color, although I tried for five minutes before she waved me away and gave Sheri another shot in my place.

When I got back to my room somebody had cleaned it up. I wondered gratefully who that had been, but I was too tired to wonder very long. Until you get used to it, low gravity can be exhausting; you find yourself overusing all your muscles because you have to relearn a whole pattern of economies.

I slung my hammock and was just dozing off when I heard a scratching at the lattice of my door and Sheri's voice: "Rob?"

"What?"

"Are you asleep?"

Obviously I wasn't, but I interpreted the question the way she had intended it. "No. I've been lying here thinking."

"So was I… Rob?"

"Yeah?"

"Would you like me to come into your hammock?"

I made an effort to wake myself up enough to consider the question on its merits.

"I really want to," she said.

"All right. Sure. I mean, glad to have you." She slipped into my room, and I slid over in the hammock, which swung slowly as she crawled into it. She was wearing a knitted T-shirt and underpants, and she felt warm and soft against me when we rolled gently together in the hollow of the hammock.

"It doesn't have to be sex, stud," she said. "I'm easy either way."

"Let's see what develops. Are you scared?"

Her breath was the sweetest-smelling thing about her; I could feel it on my cheek. "A lot more than I thought I would be."

"Why?"

"Rob—" she squirmed herself comfortable and then twisted her neck to look at me over her shoulder, "you know, you say kind of asshole things sometimes?"

"Sorry."

"Well, I mean it. I mean, look what we're doing. We're going to get into a ship that we don't know if it's going to get where it's supposed to go, and we don't even know where it's supposed to go. We go faster than light, nobody knows how. We don't know how long we'll be gone, even if we knew where we were going. So we could be traveling the rest of our lives and die before we got there, even if we didn't run into something that would kill us in two seconds. Right? Right. So how come you ask me why I'm scared?"

"Just making conversation." I curled up along her back and cupped a breast, not aggressively but because it felt good.

"And not only that. We don't know anything about the people who built these things. How do we know this isn't all a practical joke on their part? Maybe their way of luring fresh meat into Heechee heaven?"

"We don't," I agreed. "Roll over this way."

"And the ship they showed us this morning doesn't hardly look like I thought it was going to be, at all," she said, doing as I told her and putting a hand on the back of my neck.

There was a sharp whistle from somewhere, I couldn't tell where.

"What's that?"

"I don't know." It came again, sounding both out in the tunnel and, louder, inside my room. "Oh, it's the phone." What I was hearing was my own piezophone and the ones on either side of me, all ringing at once. The whistle stopped and there was a voice:

"This is Jim Chou. All you fish who want to see what a ship looks like when it comes back after a bad trip, come to Docking Station Four. They're bringing it in now."

I could hear a murmuring from the Forehands' room next door, and I could feel Sheri's heart pounding. "We'd better go," I said.

"I know. But I don't think I want to — much."

The ship had made it back to Gateway, but not quite all the way. One of the orbiting cruisers had detected it and closed in on it. Now a tug was bringing it in to the Corporation's own docks, where usually only the rockets from the planets latched in. There was a hatch big enough to hold even a Five. This was a Three, what there was left of it.

"Oh, sweet Jesus," Sheri whispered. "Rob, what do you suppose happened to them?"

"To the people? They died." There was not really any doubt of