Gateway - Frederik Pohl Page 0,7

the cruisers were watching for thieves, but actually they were more to watch each other than to worry about anybody else. Including us. The Russians were suspicious of the Chinese, the Chinese were suspicious of the Russians, the Brazilians were suspicious of the Venusians. They were all suspicious of the Americans.

So the other four cruisers were surely watching the Brazilians more closely than they were watching us. But we all knew that if our coded navicerts had not matched the patterns their five separate consulates at the departure port on Earth had filed, the next step would not have been an argument. It would have been a torpedo.

It's funny. I could imagine that torpedo. I could imagine the cold-eyed warrior who would aim and launch it, and how our ship would blossom into a flare of orange light and we would all become dissociated atoms in orbit… . Only the torpedoman on that ship, I'm pretty sure, was at that time an armorer's mate named Francy Hereira. We got to be pretty good buddies later on. He wasn't what you'd really call a cold-eyed killer. I cried in his arms all the day after I got back from that last trip, in my hospital room, when he was supposed to be searching me for contraband. And Francy cried with me.

The cruiser moved away and we all surged gently out, then pulled ourselves back to the window with the grips, as our ship began to close in on Gateway.

"Looks like a case of smallpox," said somebody in the group.

It did; and some of the pockmarks were open. Those were the berths for ships that were out on mission. Some of them would stay open forever, because the ships wouldn't be coming back. But most of the pocks were covered with bulges that looked like mushroom caps.

Those caps were the ships themselves, what Gateway was all about.

The ships weren't easy to see. Neither was Gateway itself. It had a low albedo to begin with, and it wasn't very big: as I say, about ten kilometers on the long axis, half that through its equator of rotation. But it could have been detected. After that first tunnel rat led them to it, astronomers began asking each other why it hadn't been spotted a century earlier. Now that they know where to look, they find it. It sometimes gets as bright as seventeenth magnitude, as seen from Earth. That's easy. You would have thought it would have been picked up in a routine mapping program.

The thing is, there weren't that many routine mapping programs in that direction, and it seems Gateway wasn't where they were looking when they looked.

Stellar astronomy usually pointed away from the sun. Solar astronomy usually stayed in the plane of the ecliptic — and Gateway has a right-angle orbit. So it fell through the cracks.

The piezophone clucked and said, "Docking in five minutes. Return to your bunks. Fasten webbing."

We were almost there.

Sheri Loffat reached out and held my hand through the webbing. I squeezed back. We had never been to bed together, never met until she turned up in the bunk next to mine on the ship, but the vibrations were practically sexual. As though we were about to make it in the biggest, best way there ever could be; but it wasn't sex, it was Gateway.

When men began to poke around the surface of Venus they found the Heechee diggings.

They didn't find any Heechees. Whoever the Heechees were, whenever they had been on Venus, they were gone. Not even a body was left in a burial pit to exhume and cut apart. All there was, was the tunnels, the caverns, the few piddling little artifacts, the technological wonders that human beings puzzled over and tried to reconstruct.

Then somebody found a Heechee map of the solar system. Jupiter was there with its moons, and Mars, and the outer planets, and the Earth-Moon pair. And Venus, which was marked in black on the shining blue surface of the Heechee-metal map. And Mercury, and one other thing, the only other thing marked in black besides Venus: an orbital body that came inside the perihelion of Mercury and outside the orbit of Venus, tipped ninety degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic so that it never came very close to either. A body which had never been identified by terrestrial astronomers. Conjecture: an asteroid, or a comet — the difference was only semantic — which the Heechees had cared about specially for