Gateway - Frederik Pohl Page 0,52

did what we could; by common consent we began letting one of us have the lander to himself (or herself) for an hour or two at a time. While I was there Klara was tolerated in the capsule. While Klara was there I usually played cards with the boys. While one of them was there the other two kept us company. I have no idea what the others did with their solo time; what I did with mine was mostly stare into space. I mean that literally: I looked out the lander ports at absolute blackness. There was nothing to see, but it was better than seeing what I had grown infinitely tired of seeing inside the ship.

Then, after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my tapes, Dred watched his pornodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard and played electronic music into earplugs (even so, some of it leaked out if you listened hard, and I got terribly, terribly sick of Bach, Palestrina and Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us into classes, and we spent a lot of time humoring him, discussing the nature of neutron stars, black holes and Seyfert galaxies, when we were not reviewing test procedures before landing on a new world. The good thing about that was that we managed not to hate each other for half an hour at a time. The rest of the time — well, yes, usually we hated each other. I could not stand Ham Tayeh's constant shuffling of the cards. Dred developed an unreasoning hostility toward my occasional cigarette. Sam's armpits were a horror, even in the festering reek of the inside of the capsule, against which the worst of Gateway's air would have seemed a rose garden. And Klara — well, Klara had this bad habit. She liked asparagus. She had brought four kilos of dehydrated foods with her, just for variety and for something to do; and although she shared them with me, and sometimes with the others, she insisted on eating asparagus now and then all by herself. Asparagus makes your urine smell funny. It is not a romantic thing to know when your darling has been eating asparagus by the change in air quality in the common toilet.

A NOTE ON STELLAR BIRTH

Dr. Asmenion. I suppose most of you are here more because you hope to collect a science bonus than because you're really interested in astrophysics. But you don't have to worry. The instruments do most of the work. You do your routine scan, and if you hit anything special, it'll come out in the evaluation when you're back.

Question. Isn't there anything special we should look out for?

Dr. Asmenion. Oh, sure. For instance, there was a prospector who cleaned up half a million, I think, by coming out in the Orion Nebula and realizing that one part of the gas cloud was showing a hotter temperature than the rest of it. He decided a star was being born. Gas was condensing and beginning to heat up. In another ten thousand years there'll probably be a recognizable solar system forming there, and he did a special scan mosaic of that whole part of the sky. So he got the bonus. And now, every year, the Corporation sends that ship out there to get new readings. They pay a hundred-thousand dollar bonus, and fifty thousand of it goes to him. I'll give you the coordinates for some likely spots, like the Trifid nebula, if you want me to. You won't get a half million, but you'll get something.

And yet — she was my darling, all right, she really was. We had not just been screwing in those endless hours in the lander; we had been talking. I have never known the inside of anyone's head a fraction as well as I came to know Klara's. I had to love her. I could not help it, and I could not stop. Ever.

On the twenty-third day I was playing with Ham's electronic piano when I suddenly felt seasick. The fluctuating gray force, that I had come hardly to notice, was abruptly intensifying.

I looked up and met Klara's eyes. She was timorously, almost weepily smiling. She pointed, and all up through the sinuous curves of the spiral of glass, golden sparks were chasing themselves like bright minnows in a stream.

We grabbed each other and held on, laughing, as space swooped around us and bottom became top. We had reached turnaround. And we had margin to spare.

Chapter 15

Sigfrid's