cause the Gateway Corporation stopped paying bonuses for Oort data after the tenth such mission. So those prospectors who came back from an Oort complained a lot. They couldn't understand why the Heechee had targeted so many missions to the dumb things.
And, naturally, they had no idea how lucky they really were, because it was a long time before anyone found out that, for an astonishing reason, most Oort missions never got back to the Gateway asteroid at all.
That billion dollars in astronomical science bonuses was welcome enough to the prospectors who got a share of it. But, really, it was chicken feed. What the Gateway Corporation was formed for was profit. The prospectors had come to the asteroid for the same reason, and big profit didn't come from taking instrument readings on something millions of miles away. The big bucks came from finding a planet, and landing on it-and bringing back something that made money.
Neither the Gateway Corporation nor the individual prospectors had much choice about that. Making a profit was the basic rule of survival, and neither the prospectors nor the Corporation made the rules. Those rules were made by the nature of the world they came from.
Homo sapiens evolved on the planet Earth, and the process of evolution made it certain that every human trait was custom-engineered to fit Earth's conditions, like a key in a lock. With three billioh years of Darwinian selection to make the fit perfect, life on Earth should have been pretty nearly heaven for its human inhabitants.
It wasn't. Not anymore, for rich Earth was getting close to filing for bankruptcy. It had spent its wealth.
Oh, there were many millionaires on Earth. Billionaires, too; people with more money than they could spend, enough to hire a hundred servants, enough to own a county for a backyard, enough to pay for Full Medical insurance coverage, so that for all their long lives they would have at their command the most wonderful of all the wonderful medical, pharmaceutical, and surgical techniques to keep them healthy, and to make those lives very long. There were hundreds of thousands of the very rich, and many millions of the more or less well to do . .
But there were ten billion others.
There were the ones who scratched out a living by farming on
Asian plains and African savannahs; they made a crop when rain fell and wars stayed away and marauding insect pests devoured some other countryside than their own, and when the crop failed they died. There were the ones who lived in the barricaded slums of the big cities (the word 'ghetto' was no longer a metaphor), or the barrios outside Latin metropolises, or the teeming warrens of the urban areas of the Orient. These people worked when they could. They lived on charity when there was any charity to be had. They lived at the bottom of the food chain-rice and beans, yams and barley; or, if they had the money to pay for it, single-cell proteins from the fossil-fuel conversions of the food mines-and they were very likely to be hungry throughout every hour of every day of their lives. Which were short. The poor people couldn't afford the medical plans. If they were very lucky there might be a free clinic, or a cheap doctor, to hand out pills and take out an appendix. But when one of their organs wore out they had only two alternatives. They managed to get along without it; or they died. The poor people could never afford organ transplants. They were lucky if they weren't caught in a dark alley some night and themselves converted into transplants for some richer person, by some more desperate one.
So there were two kinds of human beings on Earth. If you owned a few thousand shares of PetroFood or Chemways you didn't lack for much-not even health, because then you could afford Full Medical. But if you didn't
If you didn't, the next best thing was to have a job. Any kind of a job.
Having a job was a dream of Utopia for the billions who had none, but for those who did have employment their work was generally a demeaning kind of drudgery that drowned the spirit and damaged the health. The food mines employed many, dipping fossil fuels out of the ground and breeding edible single-cell protein creatures on their hydrocarbon content. But when you worked at a food mine you breathed those same hydrocarbons every day-it was like
living in a closed garage, with motors running all the time-and you probably died young. Factory work was better, a little, although the safest and most challenging parts of it were generally done by automatic machines for economic reasons; because they were more expensive to acquire, and to replace when damaged, than people. There was even domestic service as a possible career. But to be a servant in the homes of the wealthy was to be a slave, with a slave's intimate experience of luxury and plenty, and a slave's despair at ever attaining those things for himself.
Still, the ones who had even those jobs were lucky, for family agriculture was just a way of slowing down starvation, and in the developed world unemployment was terribly high. Especially in the cities. Especially for the young. So if you were one of the really rich, or even just one of the well-to-do, splurging on a trip to New York or Paris or Beijing, you usually saw the poor ones only when you walked out of your hotel, between police barricades, and into your waiting taxi.
You didn't have to do it that way. The police barricades were all one-way. If you chose to cross them the police would let you through. A grizzled old cop might try to warn you that going out among the crowds was a bad idea, if he happened to be charitably moved. But none of them would stop you if you insisted.
Then you were on your own. Which meant that you were immediately plunged into a noisy, smelly, dirty kind of unbarred zoo where you were immersed in a crowd of clamoring vendors: of drugs; of plastic reproductions of the Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, or the New York Bubble; of handmade key charms and hand-carved trinkets; of guide services, or discount coupons to night clubs; of-very often-themselves. That was a scary experience for any member of the privileged classes encountering it for the first time. It wasn't necessarily very dangerous, though. The police wouldn't actually let them murder you or snatch your wallet-as long as you were in sight, anyway.
Quite often, the charging poor wouldn't harm you even if they
succeeded in luring you away from the police cordons, especially if you offered them some less chancy way of making money from you. But that was not guaranteed. Most of the poor people were desperate.
For the rich, of course, the world was quite different. It always
is. The rich lived long, healthy lives with other people's organs replacing any of their own that wore out. They lived those lives in balmy climates under the domes of major cities, if they chose, or
cruising the warm and still-unpolluted southern seas, or even traveling in space for the pure joy of it. When there were wars (and there often were, frequent though small-though quite large enough, of course, to satisfy the people killed in them), the rich went elsewhere until the wars were over. They felt that was their due. After all, they were the ones who paid the taxes-as much as they couldn't avoid, anyway.
The main trouble with being rich was that not all of the poor
people acquiesced in being poor. Quite a few tried to find ways to better themselves, and sometimes they did so violently.
Kidnapping became a growth industry in America again. So did extortion. You paid what they demanded, or out of hiding someone would shoot away your kneecap (or torch your house, or boobytrap your flyer, or poison your pets). Few in the solvent classes would send their children to school without a bodyguard anymore. That did have a useful side effect. As it turned out, it helped ease the unemployment situation, a little, as some millions of the extortionists put on uniforms and began drawing salaries to protect their employers against extortion.
