Gateway - Frederik Pohl Page 0,29

of Gateway I didn't know, and of course I'd left my map back in my room. I drifted along, more or less at random, past star-points where some of the tunnels smelled musty and dusty and there weren't many people, then through an inhabited section that seemed to be mostly Eastern European. I didn't recognize the languages, but there were little notes and wall signs hanging from the everywhere-growing ivy that were in alphabets that looked Cyrillic or even stranger. I came to a dropshaft, thought for a moment, and then caught hold of the up-cable. The easy way not to be lost on Gateway is to go up until you get to the spindle, where "up" ends.

But this time I found myself passing Central Park and, on impulse, dropped off the up-cable to sit by a tree for a while.

Central Park isn't really a park. It's a large tunnel, not far from the center of rotation of the asteroid, which has been devoted to vegetation. I found orange trees there (which explained the juice), and grape vines; and ferns and mosses, but no grass. I am not sure why. Probably it has something to do with planting only varieties that are sensitive to the available light, mostly the blue gleam from the Heechee metal all around, and perhaps they couldn't find a grass that could use it efficiently for its photochemistry. The principal reason for having Central Park in the first place was to suck up CO2 and give back oxygen; that was before they spread planting all over the tunnels. But it also killed smells, or anyway it was supposed to, a little, and it grew a certain amount of food. The whole thing was maybe eighty meters long and twice as tall as I was. It was broad enough to have room for some winding paths. The stuff they grew in looked a lot like good old genuine Earthside dirt. What it was, really, was a humus made out of the sewage sludge from the couple of thousand people who had used Gateway toilets, but you couldn't tell that by looking at it, or by smelling it, either.

The first tree big enough to sit by was no good for that purpose; it was a mulberry, and under it were spread out sheets of fine netting to catch the dropping fruit. I walked past it, and down the path there were a woman and a child.

A child! I hadn't known there were any children on Gateway. She was a little bit of a thing, maybe a year and a half, playing with a ball so big, and so lazy in the light gravity, that it was like a balloon.

"Hello, Rob."

That was the other surprise; the woman who greeted me was Gelle-Klara Moynlin. I said without thinking, "I didn't know you had a little girl."

"I don't. This is Kathy Francis, and her mother lets me borrow her sometimes. Kathy, this is Rob Broadhead."

"Hello, Rob," the little thing called, studying me from three meters away. "Are you a friend of Klara's?"

"I hope so. She's my teacher. Do you want to play catch?"

Kathy finished her study of me and said precisely, each word separate from the one before it and as clearly formed as an adult's, "I don't know how to play catch, but I will get six mulberries for you. That's all you can have."

"Thank you." I slumped down next to Klara, who was hugging her knees and watching the child. "She's cute."

"Well, I guess so. It's hard to judge, when there aren't very many other children around."

"She's not a prospector, is she?"

I wasn't exactly joking, but Klara laughed warmly. "Her parents are permanent-party. Well, most of the time. Right now her mother's off prospecting; they do that sometimes, a lot of them. You can spend just so much time trying to figure out what the Heechee were up to before you want to try your own solutions to the puzzles."

"Sounds dangerous."

She shushed me. Kathy came back, with three of my mulberries in each open hand, so as not to crush them. She had a funny way of walking, which didn't seem to use much of the thigh and calf muscles; she sort of pushed herself up on the ball of each foot in turn, and let herself float to the next step. After I figured that out I tried it for myself, and it turned out to be a pretty efficient way of walking in near-zero gravity, but my