Heechee dig, opened it with great effort and, as m found it empty. Then they tracked another trace and found the lander. They had had to blast to get it open, and in the process two of the prospectors lost integrity of their spacesuits — too close to the blast, I guess. By the time they realized they were in trouble it was too late for them. They froze. Sheri and the other crewman tried to get them back into their own lander; it must have been pure misery and fear the whole time, and at the end they had to give up. The other man had made one more trip to the abandoned lander, found the tool kit in it, managed to get it back to their lander. Then they had taken off, leaving the two casualties fully frozen behind them. But they had overstayed their limit — they were physical wrecks when they docked with the orbiter. Manny wasn't clear on what happened after that, but apparently they failed to secure the lander's air supply and had lost a good deal from it; so they were on short oxygen rations all the way home. The other man was worse off than Sheri. There was a good chance of residual brain damage, and his $5,850,000 might not do him any good. But Sheri, they said, would be all right once she recovered from plain exhaustion.
I didn't envy them the trip. All I envied them was the results. I got up and got myself another cup of coffee in the commissary. As I brought it back to the corridor outside, where there were a few benches under the ivy planters, I became aware something was bugging me. Something about the trip. About the fact that it had been a real winner, one of the all-time greats in Gateway's history…
I dumped the coffee, cup and all, into a disposal hole out the commissary and headed for the schoolroom. It was only a minutes walk away and there was no one else there. That was good because I wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet about what had occurred to me. I keyed the P-phone to information access and got the settings for Sheri's trip; they were, of course, a matter of public record. Then I went down to the practice capsule, again hitting lucky because there was no one around, and set them up on the course selector. Of course, I got good color immediately; and when I pressed the fine-tuner the whole board turned bright pink, except for the rainbow of colors along the side.
There was only one dark line in the blue part of the spectrum.
Well, I thought, so much for Metchnikov's theory about danger readings. They had lost forty percent of the crew on that mission, and that struck me as being quite adequately dangerous; but according to what he had told me, the really hairy ones showed six or seven of those bands.
And in the yellow?
According to Metchnikov, the more bright bands in the yellow, the more financial reward from a trip.
Only in this one there were no bright bands in the yellow at all. There were two thick black "absorption" lines. That's all.
I thumbed the selector off and sat back. So the great brains had labored and brought forth a mouse again: what they had interpreted as an indication of safety didn't really mean you were safe, and what they had interpreted as a promise of good results didn't seem to have any relevance to the first mission in more than a year that had really come up rich.
Back to square one, and back to being scared.
For the next couple of days I kept pretty much to myself.
There are supposed to be eight hundred kilometers of tunnels inside Gateway. You wouldn't think there could be that many in a little chunk of rock that's only about ten kilometers across. But even so, only about two percent of Gateway is airspace; the rest is solid rock. I saw a lot of those eight hundred kilometers.
I didn't cut myself off completely from human companionship, I just didn't seek it out. I saw Klara now and then. I wandered around with Shicky when he was off duty, although it was tiring for him. Sometimes I wandered by myself, sometimes with chancemet friends, sometimes tagging along after a tourist group. The guides knew me and were not averse to having me along (I had been out! even if I didn't