Gateway - Frederik Pohl Page 0,67

were any places inside the asteroid big enough to fly in.

So we dropped through the hatch into the sphere, and were in the middle of a whole universe. The chamber was walled with hexagonal panels, each one of them projected from some source we could not see, probably digital with liquid-crystal screens.

"How pretty!" Klara cried.

All around us there was a sort of globarama of what the scouting ships had found. Stars, nebulae, planets, satellites. Sometimes each plate showed its own independent thing so that there were, what was it, something like a hundred and twenty-eight separate scenes. Then, flick, all of them changed; flick again, and they began to cycle, some of them holding their same scene, some of them changing to something new. Flick again, and one whole hemisphere lit up with a mosaic view of the M-31 galaxy as seen from God-knew-where.

"Hey," I said, really excited, "this is great!" And it was. It was like being on all the trips any prospector had ever taken, without the drudgery and the trouble and the constant fear.

There was no one there but us, and I couldn't understand why. It was so pretty. You would think there would be a long line of people waiting to get in. One side began to run through a series of pictures of Heechee artifacts, as discovered by prospectors: prayer fans of all colors, wall-lining machines, the insides of Heechee ships, some tunnels—Klara cried out that they were places she had been, back home on Venus, but I don't know how she could tell. Then the pattern went back to photographs from space. Some of them wcre familiar. I could recognize the Pleadies in one quick six- or eight-panel shot, which vanished and was replaced by a view of Gateway Two from outside, two of the bright young stars of the cluster shining in reflection off its sides. I saw something that might have been the Horsehead Nebula, and a doughnutshaped puff of gas and dust that was either the Ring Nebula in Lyra or what an exploring team had found a few orbits before and called the French Cruller, in the skies of a planet where Heechee digs had been detected, but not reached, under a frozen sea.

We hung there for half an hour or so, until it began to look as though we were seeing the same things again, and then we fluttered up to the hatch, hung up the wings, and sat down for a cigarette break in a wide place in the tunnel outside the museum.

Two women I recognized vaguely as Corporation maintenance crews came by, carrying rolled-up strap-on wings. "Hi, Klara," one of them greeted her. "Been inside?"

Klara nodded. "It was beautiful," she said.

"Enjoy it while you can," said the other one. "Next week it'll cost you a hundred dollars. We're putting in a P-phone taped lecture system tomorrow, and they'll have the grand opening before the next tourists show up."

"It's worth it," Klara said, but then she looked at me.

I became aware that, in spite of everything, I was smoking one of her cigarettes. At five dollars a pack I couldn't afford very much of that, but I made up my mind to buy at least one pack out of that day's allowance, and to make sure she took as many from me as I took from her.

"Want to walk some more?" she asked.

"Maybe a little later," I said. I was wondering how many men and women had died to take the pretty pictures we had been watching, because I was facing one more time the fact that sooner or later I would have to submit myself again to the lethal lottery of the Heechee ships, or give up. I wondered if the new information Metchnikov had given me was going to make a real difference. Everyone was talking about it now; the Corporation had scheduled an all-phone announcement for the next day.

"That reminds me," I said. "Did you say you'd seen Metchnikov?"

"I wondered when you'd ask me about that," she said. "Sure. He called and told me he'd shown the color-coding stuff to you. So?"

I stubbed out the cigarette. "I think everybody in Gateway's going to be fighting for the good launches, that's what I think."

"But maybe Dane knows something. He's been working with the Corporation."

"I don't doubt he does." I stretched and leaned back, rocking against the low gravity, considering. "He's not that nice a guy, Klara. Maybe he'd tell us if there's something good coming up,