Gateway - Frederik Pohl Page 0,71

some other member of her family to return before she signed on again, as they had agreed, so that whoever did come back would always find family waiting.

She told me a little more about their background. They had lived, as far as you could call it living, in the tourist traps of the Spindle on Venus, surviving on what they could eke out, mostly from the cruise ships. There was a lot of money there, but there was also a lot of competition. The Forehands had at one time, I discovered, worked up a nightclub act: singing, dancing, comedy routines. I gathered that they were not bad, at least by Venus standards. But the few tourists that were around most of the year had so many other birds of prey battling for a scrap of their flesh that there just wasn't enough to nurture them all. Sess and the son (the one who had died) had tried guiding, with an old airbody they had managed to buy wrecked and rebuild. No big money there. The girls had worked at all kinds of jobs. I was pretty sure that Louise, at least, had been a hooker for a while, but that hadn't paid enough to matter, either, for the same sorts of reasons as everything else. They were nearly at the end of their rope when they managed to get to Gateway.

It wasn't the first time for them. They'd fought hard to get off Earth in the first place, when Earth got so bad for them that Venus had seemed a less hopeless alternative. They had more courage, and more willingness to pull up stakes and go, than any other people I'd ever met.

"How did you pay for all this travel?" I asked.

"Well," said Louise, finishing her drink and looking at her watch, "going to Venus we traveled the cheapest way there is. High-mass load. Two hundred and twenty other immigrants, sleeping in shoulder clamps, lining up for two-minute appointments in the toilets, eating compressed dry rations and drinking recycled water. It was a hell of a way to spend forty thousand dollars apiece. Fortunately, the kids weren't born yet, except Hat, and he was small enough to go for quarter-fare."

"Hat's your son? What—"

"He died," she said.

I waited, but when she spoke again what she said was: "They should have a radio report from that incoming ship by now."

"It would have been on the P-phone."

She nodded, and for a moment looked worried. The Corporation always makes routine reports on incoming contacts. If they don't have a contact—well, dead prospectors don't check in on radio. So I took her mind off her troubles by telling her about Kiara's decision to see a shrink. She listened and then put hand over mine and said: "Don't get sore, Rob. Did you ever think of seeing a shrink yourself?"

"I don't have the money, Louise."

"Not even for a group? There's a primal-scream bunch on L Darling. You can hear them sometimes. And there've been ads everything — TA, Est, patterning. Of course, a lot of them may have shipped out."

But her attention wasn't on me. From where we were sitting we could see the entrance to the casino, where one of the croup was talking interestedly to a crewman from the Chinese cruiser. Louise was staring that way.

"Something's going on," I said. I would have added, "Let's look," but Louise was out of the chair and heading for the casino before me.

Play had stopped. Everybody was clustered around the blackjack table, where, I noticed, Dane Metchnikov was now sitting next to Klara in the seat I had vacated, with a couple of twentyfive-dollar chips in front of him. And in the middle of them was Shicky Bakin, perched on a dealer's stool, talking. "No," he was saying as I came up, "I do not know the names. But it's a Five."

"And they're all still alive?" somebody asked.

"As far as I know. Hello, Rob. Louise." He nodded politely to us both. "I see you've heard?"

"Not really," Louise said, reaching out unconsciously to take my hand. "Just that a ship is in. But you don't know the names?"

Dane Metchnikov craned his head around to glare at us. "Names," he growled. "Who cares? It's none of us, that's what's important. And it's a big one." He stood up. Even at that moment I noticed the measure of his anger: he forgot to pick up his chips from the blackjack table. "I'm going down there," he announced. "I want to