Gateway - Frederik Pohl Page 0,30

reflexes kept lousing it up. I suppose you have to be born on Gateway to come by it naturally.

Klara in the park was a lot more relaxed and feminine than Klara the teacher. The eyebrows that had looked masculine and angry became outdoorsy and friendly. She still smelled very nice.

It was pretty pleasant, chatting with her, while Kathy stepped daintily around us, playing with her ball. We compared places we'd been, and didn't find any in common. The one thing we did find in common was that I was born almost the same day as her two-year-younger brother.

"Did you like your brother?" I asked, a gambit played for the hell of it.

"Well, sure. He was the baby. But he was an Aries, born under Mercury and the Moon. Made him fickle and moody, of course. I think he would have had a complicated life."

This Park Is MONITORED By Closed-Circuit PV

You are welcome to enjoy it. Do not pick flowers or fruit. Do not damage any plant. While visiting, you may eat any fruits which have fallen, to the following limits:

Grapes, cherries 8 per person

Other small fruits or berries 6 per person

Oranges, limes, pears 1 per person

Gravel may not be removed from walks. Deposit all trash of any kind in receptacles.

MAINTENANCE DIVISION THE GATEWAY CORPORATION

I was less interested in asking her about what happened to him than in asking if she really believed in that garbage, but that didn't seem tactful, and anyway she went on talking. "I'm a Sagittarius, myself. And you — oh, of course. You must be the same as Davie."

"I guess so," I said, being polite. "I, uh, don't go much for astrology."

"Not astrology, genethlialogy. One's superstition, the other's science."

She laughed. "I can see you're a scoffer. Doesn't matter. If you believe, all right; if you don't — well, you don't have to believe in the law of gravity to get mashed when you fall off a two-hundred story building."

Kathy, who had sat down beside us, inquired politely, "Are you having an argument?"

"Not really, honey." Klara stroked her head.

"That's good, Klara, because I have to go to the bathroom now and I don't think I can, here."

"It's time to go anyway. Nice to see you, Rob. Watch out for melancholy, hear?" And they went away hand in hand, Klara trying to copy the little girl's odd walk. Looking very nice… for a flake.

That night I took Sheri to Dane Metchnikov's going-away party. Klara was there, looking even nicer in a bare-midriff pants suit. "I didn't know you knew Dane Metchnikov," I said.

"Which one is he? I mean, Terry's the one who invited me. Coming inside?"

The party had spilled out into the tunnel. I peered through the door and was surprised to find how much room there was inside; Terry Yakamora had two full rooms, both more than twice the size of mine. The bath was private and really did contain a bath, or at least a showerhead. "Nice place," I said admiringly, and then discovered from something another guest said that Klara lived right down the tunnel. That changed my opinion of Klara: if she could afford the high-rent district, why was she still on Gateway? Why wasn't she back home spending her money and having fun? Or contrariwise, if she was still on Gateway, why was she fooling around keeping barely even with the head tax by working as an assistant instructor, instead of going out for another killing? But I didn't get a chance to ask her. She did most of her dancing that night with Terry Yakamora and the others in the outgoing crew.

I lost track of Sheri until she came over to me after a slow, almost unmoving fox-trot, bringing her partner. He was a very young man — a boy, actually; he looked about nineteen. He looked familiar: dark skin, almost white hair, a wisp of a jaw-beard that drew an arc from sideburn to sideburn by way of the underside of his chin. He hadn't come up from Earth with me. He wasn't in our class. But I'd seen him somewhere.

Sheri introduced us. "Rob, you know Francesco Hereira?"

"I don't think so."

"He's from the Brazilian cruiser." Then I remembered. He was one of the inspectors who had gone in to fish through the baked gobbets of flesh on the shipwreck we'd seen a few days earlier. He was a torpedoman, according to his cuff stripes. They give the cruiser crews temporary duty as guards on Gateway, and sometimes they give them liberty