make any. The Heechee had left Gateway Two not quite completed. Some of the tunnels ended in bare rock, there were only a few dozen of them. No one had got around to planting vegetation yet, and all the air there was came from chemical processors. The partial pressure of O2 was under 150 millibars; and the rest of the atmosphere was a nitrogen-helium mix, much more than half earth-normal pressure altogether, that made the voices highpitched and left me gasping for the first few hours.
The man who helped me out of my lander and bundled me against the sudden cold was a dark, immense Martian-Japanese named Norio Ituno. He put me in his own bed, filled me with hot liquids and let me rest for an hour. I dozed, and when I woke he was sitting there, looking at me with amusement and respect. The respect was for someone who had slain a five-hundred million-dollar ship. The amusement was that I was idiot enough to do it.
“I guess I’m in trouble,” I said.
“I would say so, yes,” he agreed. “The ship is totally dead. Never saw anything like it before.”
“I didn’t know a Heechee ship could go dead like that.”
He shrugged. “You did something original, Broadhead. How are you feeling?” I sat up to answer him, and he nodded. “I’m pretty busy right now. I’m going to have to let you take can yourself for a couple of hours — if you can? — fine. Then we’ll have a party for you.”
“Party!” It was the farthest thing from my mind. “For who?”
“We don’t meet someone like you every day, Broadhead,’ said Ituno admiringly, and left me to my thoughts.
I didn’t like my thoughts very much, and after a while I got up, put on the gloves, buttoned up the jacket, and started exploring. It didn’t take long; there wasn’t much there. I heard sounds of a party from the lower levels, but the echoes traveled at queer as along the empty corridors, and I saw no one. Gateway Two didn’t have a tourist trade, and so there wasn’t any nightclub or casino or restaurant that I could find… not even a latrine. After a little while that question began to seem urgent. I reasoned that Ituno would have to have something like that near his room, and tried to retrace my steps to there, but that didn’t work, either. There were cubicles along some of the corridors, but they were unfinished. No one lived there, and no one had troubled to install plumbing.
Are you a reasonable and open-minded person? Then prove it by reading this letter all the way through to the end before making up your mind about what it says. There are thirteen occupied levels in Gateway. There are thirteen residences in each of thirteen (count them yourself) of the housing halls. Do you think this letter is just silly superstition? Then look at the evidence for yourself! Launches 83-20, 84-1 and 84-10 (what do the digits add up to?) were all declared overdue in List 86-13! Gateway Corporation, wake up! Let the skeptics and bigots jeer. Human lives depend on your willingness to risk a little ridicule. It would cost nothing to omit the Danger Numbers from all programs — except courage!
It was not one of my better days.
When I finally found a toilet I puzzled over it for ten minutes and would guiltily have left it impolitely soiled if I had not heard a sound outside the cubicle. A plump little woman was standing there, waiting.
“I don’t know how to flush it,” I apologized.
She looked me up and down. “You’re Broadhead,” she stated, and then: “Why don’t you go to Aphrodite?”
“What’s Aphrodite — no, wait. First, how do you flush this thing? Then, what’s Aphrodite?”
She pointed to a button on the edge of the door; I had thought it was a light switch. When I touched it the whole bottom of the seamless bowl began to glow and in ten seconds there was nothing inside but ash, then nothing at all.
“Wait for me,” she commanded, disappearing inside. When she came out she said, “Aphrodite’s where the money is, Broadhead. You’re going to need it.”
I let her take my arm and pull me along. Aphrodite, I began understand, was a planet. A new one, that a ship from Gateway Two had opened up less than forty days earlier, and a big find. “You’d have to pay royalty, of course,” she said. “And so far haven’t found anything big, just the usual Heechee debris. But there’s thousands of square miles to explore, and it’ll be months before the first batch of prospectors starts coming out from Gateway. We only sent the word back forty days ago. Have you any hot-planet experience?”
“Hot-planet experience?”
“I mean,” she explained, pulling me down a dropshaft and closing up to me, “have you ever explored a planet that’s hot?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had any experience at all that counts for anything. One trip. Empty. I didn’t even land.’
“Pity,” she said. “Still, there’s not that much to learn. Do you know what Venus is like? Aphrodite’s just a little bit worse. The primary’s a flare star, and you don’t want to be caught in the open. But the Heechee digs are all underground. If you find one, you’re in.”
“What are the chances of finding one?” I asked.
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, pulling me off the cable and down a tunnel, “not all that good, maybe. After all, you’re out in open when you’re prospecting. On Venus they use armored bodies and they zap around anywhere they want to go, no trouble. Well, maybe a little trouble,” she conceded. “But they don’t lose very many prospectors anymore. Maybe one percent.”
“What percent do you lose on Aphrodite?”
“More than that. Yes, I grant you, it’s higher than that. You have to use the lander from your ship, and of course it’s not mobile on the surface of a planet. Especially a planet with a face like molten sulfur and winds like hurricanes — when the weather’s mild.”
“It sounds charming,” I said. “Why aren’t you out there now?”
“Me? I’m an out-pilot. I’m going back to Gateway in about ten days, soon as I get a cargo loaded, or somebody who comes in wants a ride back.”
“I want a ride back right now.”
“Oh, cripes, Broadhead! Don’t you know what kind of trouble you’re in? You broke regulations by messing with the control board. They’ll throw the book at you.”
I thought it over carefully. Then I said, “Thanks, but I think I’ll take my chances.”
“Don’t you understand? Aphrodite has guaranteed Heeche remains. You could take a hundred trips without finding anything like this.”
“Sweetie,” I said, “I couldn’t take a hundred trips for anything, not now and not ever. I don’t know if I can take one. I think I have the guts to get back to Gateway. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
I was on Gateway Two, all together, thirteen days. Hester Bergowiz, the out-pilot, kept trying to talk me into going to Aphrodite, I guess because she didn’t want me taking up valuable cargo space on her return flight. The others didn’t care. They only thought I was crazy. I was a problem for Ituno, who was loosely in charge of keeping
