“Well, maybe I’ll do that.” The old devil outwaits me. He knows I’m not going to make that decision, and he is giving me time to realize it for myself. Then he says:
“Rob? Why did you say you murdered her twice?”
I look at my watch before I answer, and I say, “I guess it was just a slip of the tongue. I really do have to go now, Sigfrid.”
I pass up the time in his recovery room, because I don’t actually have anything to recover from. Besides I just want to get out of there. Him and his dumb questions. He acts so wise and subjective but what does a teddy-bear know?
Chapter 22
I went back to my own room that night, but it took me a long time to get to sleep; and Shicky woke me up early to tell me what was happening. There had been only three survivors, and their base award had already been announced: seventeen million five hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Against royalties.
That drove the sleepies out of my eyes. “For what?” I demanded.
Shicky said, “For twenty-three kilograms of artifacts. They think it’s a repair kit. Possibly for a ship, since that is where they found it, in a lander on the surface of the planet. But at least they are tools of some sort.”
“Tools.” I got up, got rid of Shicky, and plodded down the tunnel to the community shower, thinking about tools. Tools could mean a lot. Tools could mean a way to open the drive mechanism in the Heechee ships without blowing up everything around. Tools could mean finding out how the drive worked and building our own. Tools could mean almost anything, and what they certainly meant was a cash award of seventeen million five hundred and fifty thousand dollars, not counting royalties, divided three ways.
One of which could have been mine.
It is hard to get a figure like $5,850,000 out of your mind (not to mention royalties) when you think that if you had been a little more foreseeing in your choice of girlfriends you could have had it in your pocket. Call it six million dollars. At my age and health I could have bought paid-up Full Medical for less than half of that, which meant all the tests, therapies, tissue replacements, and organ transplants they could cram into me for the rest of my life which would have been at least fifty years longer than I could expect without it. The other three million plus would have bought me a couple of homes, a career as a lecturer (nobody was more in demand than a successful prospector), a steady income for doing commercials on PV, women, food, cars, travel, women, fame, women… and, again, there were always the royalties. They could have come to anything at all, depending on what the R D people managed to do with the tools. Sheri’s find was exactly what Gateway was all about: the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
It took an hour for me to get down to the hospital, three tunnel segments and five levels in the dropshaft. I kept changing my mind and going back.
When I finally managed to purge my mind of envy (or at least to bury it where I didn’t think it was going to show) and turned up at the reception desk, Sheri was asleep anyway. “You can go in,” said the ward nurse.
“I don’t want to wake her up.”
“I don’t think you could,” he said. “Don’t force it, of course. But she’s allowed visitors.”
She was in the lowest of three bunks in a twelve-bed room. Three or four of the others were occupied, two of them behind the isolation curtains, milky plastic that you could see through only vaguely. I didn’t know who they were. Sheri herself looked quite peacefully resting, one arm under her head, her pretty eyes closed and her strong, dimpled chin resting on her wrist. Her two companions were in the same room, one asleep, one sitting under a holoview of Saturn’s rings. I had met him once or twice, a Cuban or Venezuelan or something like that from New Jersey. The only name I could remember for him was Manny. We chatted for a while, and he promised to tell Sheri I had been there. I left and went for a cup of coffee at the commissary, thinking about their trip.
They had come out near a tiny, cold planet way out from a K-6 orange-red cinder of a star, and according to Manny, they hadn’t even been sure it was worth the trouble of landing. The readings showed Heechee-metal radiation, but not much; and almost all of it, apparently, was buried under carbon-dioxide snow. Manny was the one who stayed in orbit. Sheri and the other three went down and found a 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
