And, of course, there was political terror, too. It flourished in the same soil that nurtured kidnapping and extortion, and there was even more of it. Among the apathetic majority of the landless and
the hungry, there were always a few who banded together to work the vengeance of the have-nots on the haves. Hostages were taken, officials were shot from ambush, aircraft were bombed out of the sky, reservoirs were poisoned, food supplies infected . . . oh, there were a thousand ingenious, injurious tricks the terror-wielders devised, and all of them devastating-at least, to those who had something to lose in the first place.
Nevertheless, in spite of all the fears and inconveniences, the haves had it made. And most other people didn't even have hope.
Then, into the life of this seething, overfull planet, along came Gateway.
For most of the ten billion people alive on the used-up planet of Earth, Gateway was an unexpected hope of paradise. Like the gold-rush miners of '49, like the hungry Irish fleeing their potato famine in the holds of immigrant ships, like the sodbusting pioneers of the American West and human emigrants everywhere, through all of history, the poverty-stricken billions were willing to take any risk for the sake of-well, wealth, if wealth could be had; but at least for a chance to feed and clothe and house their children.
Even the rich saw that this surprising new event might offer
them a good chance to get even richer. That made for a serious problem, for a while. The national governments who had built the space rockets that first visited other planets and later supported the Gateway operation felt they were entitled to whatever profits came out of the Gateway discoveries. The rich people who owned the governments agreed. But they couldn't all own it, after all.
So there was a certain amount of buying and selling and horse-trading (and some pretty cutthroat wheeling and dealing, too, with the stakes as high as they were). Compromises were made. Bargains were struck; and out of the competing greeds of all the claimants to the limitless wealth that the galaxy promised came the just, or fairly just, invention of the Gateway Corporation.
Was Gateway a benefit to Earth's poor?
At first, not very much. It gave each of them a little hope-the hope of a lottery ticket, although few of them could raise the money even to buy that one-way ticket that might make them into winners. But it was a long time before any stay-at-home peasant or slum-dweller was a penny or a meal richer for anything the Heechee had left behind.
In fact, the knowledge that there were rich, empty planets out there was more tantalizing than useful to Earth's teeming billions. The livable planets were too far away. They could only be reached by faster-than-light travel. Although human beings actually improved on some Heechee space-travel techniques (using Lofstrom ioops to get into orbit instead of Heechee landers, for instance, and thus sparing further damage to the acidified lakes and the ozone layer), no one had the slightest idea of how to build a Heechee ship-and the ships on Gateway were far too few and much too small to carry sizable migrant populations to the new planets.
So a few prospectors got rich, when they didn't get dead instead. A number of rich people got quickly richer. But most of the penniless billions stayed on Earth.
And in the cities like Calcutta, with its two hundred million paupers, and on the starved farms and paddies of Africa and the Orient, hunger remained a fact of life, and terrorism and poverty got worse instead of better.
As our teachers keep telling us, the longest journey begins with a single step. That first step for the Gateway asteroid-the first voyage of exploration any human being ever took in a Heechee spaceship-wasn't planned in advance. It wasn't even authorized. And it certainly wasn't prudent.
The name of the man who took that first trip into the unknown was Lieutenant Senior Grade Ernest T. Kaplan. He was a marine officer from the U.S. Space Navy cruiser Roanoke. Kaplan wasn't a scientist. He was so far from being a scientist that he had been given strict orders not to touch anything, but anything, on the Gateway asteroid. The only reason he was on the asteroid in the first place was that he had been ordered there as a guard, to keep anyone else from touching anything while the scientists who came hurrying up from Earth tried to figure out just what the devil they had here.
But Kaplan had a mind full of itchy curiosity, and what's more, he had access to the parked ships. And one day, for lack of anything better to do, he sat down in the one ship that happened to have been equipped with food lockers and air and water tanks, just in
case anyone got the locks closed and was trapped inside. Kaplan thought for a while about old Sylvester Macklin. Just for the fun of it, he practiced opening and closing the locks a few times. Then he played with the knurled wheels for a while, watching the changing colors.
Then he squeezed the funny-looking little thing at the base.
That was what later, more expert pilots would call 'the launch teat,' and as soon as he squeezed it Lieutenant Senior Grade Kaplan became the second human being to fly a Heechee ship. He was gone.
Ninety-seven days later he was back at the Gateway asteroid.
It was a miracle that he'd managed to return; it was even a bigger miracle that he was still alive. The supplies in the ship had been meant to last for a few days, not for months. For drinking water he had been reduced to catching the condensation from his own sweat and emanations as it beaded the lander port. For the last five weeks he hadn't eaten anything at all. He was scrawny and filthy and half out of his mind
But he had been there. His ship had orbited a planet far out from a small, reddish star; a planet that had so little light that it seemed only grayish, with swirling yellow clouds-a little the way Jupiter or Saturn or Uranus might have appeared, if their orbits had been as far from the Sun as the twilit Pluto.
The first reaction of the United States government was to courtmartial him. He certainly deserved it. He even expected it.
But before the court was convened the news services carried the word that the Brazilian parliament, carried away at the thought of sharing in the exploration of the galaxy, had voted Kaplan a million-dollar cash bonus. Then the Soviets not only made him an honorary citizen but invited him to Moscow to receive the Order of Lenin. The dam had burst. Every talk show on every television network in the world was begging him to be a guest.
You couldn't courtmartial a hero.
So the American president jumped Lieutenant Kaplan to full colonel and then to general, in the same orders that grounded Colonel (or General) Kaplan forever. Then the president called all the spacefaring nations together to decide just how to handle this situation.
The result was the Gateway Corporation.
Colonel Kaplan, like everyone before him, had failed to make one vital discovery, and that was that each one of the Heechee ships was actually two ships. Part One was the interstellar vessel that traveled faster than light to a programmed destination. Part Two was the smaller, simpler landing craft that nestled into the base of the ship itself.
The interstellar ships themselves, with their unreproducible faster-than-light drives, were totally beyond the understanding of human scientists. It was a long time before any Earth person knew how they worked. Those who tried too hard to find out generally died because their drive engines blew up. The landers were much simpler. Basically, they were ordinary rockets. True, the guidance system was Heechee, but fortunately for the Gateway
