Gateway

“Susie was, my God, only a child! And from that I realize — I realize now, I mean — that there are some resemblances. But the age is all wrong.”

“Rob,” says Sigfrid, “how old was your mother when you were little?”

“She was very young.” I add after a moment, “As a matter of fact, she looked a lot younger than she was even.”

Sigfrid lets me hang there for a moment, and then he waves his hand again and the figure disappears, and instead we are suddenly looking at a picture of two Fives butted lander-to-lander in midspace, and beyond them is- is- “Oh, my God, Sigfrid,” I say. He waits me out for a while. As far as I am concerned, he can wait forever; I simply do not know what to say. I am not hurting, but I am paralyzed. I cannot say anything, and I cannot move.

“This,” he begins, speaking very softly and gently, “is a reconstruction of the two ships in your expedition in the vicinity of the object SAG YY. It is a black hole or, more accurately, a singularity in a state of extremely rapid rotation.”

“I know what it is, Sigfrid.”

“Yes. You do. Because of its rotation, the translation velocity of what is called its event threshold or Schwarzschlld discontinuity exceeds the speed of light, and so it is not properly black; in fact it can be seen by virtue of what is called Cerenkov radiation. It was because of the instrument readings on this and other aspects of the singularity that your expedition was awarded a ten-million-dollar bonus, in addition to the agreed-upon sum which, along with certain other lesser amounts, is the foundation of your present fortune.”

“I know that, too, Sigfrid.” Pause.

“Would you care to tell me what else you know about it, Rob?”

Pause.

“I’m not sure I can, Sigfrid.”

Pause again.

He isn’t even urging me to try. He knows that he doesn’t have to. I want to try, and I take my cue from his own manner. There is something in there that I can’t talk about, that scares me even to think about; but wrapped around that central terror there is something I can talk about, and that is the objective reality.

“I don’t know how much you know about singularities, Sigfrid.”

“Perhaps you can just say what you think it is that I ought to know, Rob.”

I put out the current cigarette and light another one. “Well,” I say, “you know and I know that if you really wanted to know about singularities it’s all in the data-banks somewhere, and a lot more exactly and informatively than I can say it, but anyway. . The thing about black holes is they’re traps. They bend light. They bend time. Once you’re in you can’t get out. Only… Only…”

A NOTE ON NUTRITION

Question. What did the Heechee eat?

Professor Hegramet. About what we do, I would say. Everything. I think they were omnivores, ate anything they could catch. We really don’t know a thing about their diet, except that you can make some deductions from the shell missions.

Question. Shell missions?

Professor Hegramet. There are at least four recorded missions that didn’t go as far as another star, but went clear out of the solar system. Out where the shell of comets hangs out, you know, half a light-year or so away. The missions are marked as failures, but I don’t think they are. I’ve been pushing the Board to give science bonuses for them. Three seemed to wind up in meteorite swarms. The other came out at a comet, all hundreds of A.U. out. Meteorite swarms, of course, are usually the debris of old, dead comets.

Question. Are you saying the Heechee ate comets?

Professor Hegramet. Ate the things comets are made out of. Do you know what they are? Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen — the same elements you ate for breakfast. I think they used comets for feedstocks to manufacture what they ate. I think one of those missions to the cometary shell is sooner or later going to turn up a Heechee food factory, and then maybe we won’t have anybody ever starving anywhere anymore.

After a moment Sigfrid says, “It’s all right for you to cry if you want to, Rob,” which is the way that I suddenly realize that that’s what I’m doing.

“Jesus,” I say, and blow my nose into one of the tissues that he always keeps handy right next to the mat. He waits.

“Only I did get out,” I say.

And Sigfrid does something else I had never expected from him; he permits himself a joke. “That,” he says, “is pretty obvious, from the fact that you’re here.”

“This is bloody exhausting, Sigfrid,” I say.

“I am sure it is for you, Rob.”

“I wish I had a drink.”

Click. “The cabinet behind you,” says Sigfrid, “that has just opened contains some rather good sherry. It isn’t made from grapes, I’m sorry to say; the health service doesn’t go in for luxuries. But I don’t think you’ll be aware of its natural-gas origins. Oh, and it is laced with just a dollop of THC to soothe the nerves.”

“Holy Christ,” I say, having run out of ways of expressing surprise. The sherry is all he says it is, and I can feel the warmth of it expanding inside me.

“Okay,” I say, setting the glass down. “Well. When I got back to Gateway they’d written the expedition off. We were almost a year overdue. Because we’d been almost inside the event horizon. Do you understand about time dilation? . . . Oh, never mind,” I say, before he can answer, “that was a rhetorical question. What I mean is, what happened was the phenomenon they call time dilation. You get that close to a singularity and you come up against the twin paradox. What was maybe a quarter of an hour for us was almost a year by clock time — clock time on Gateway, or here, or anywhere else in the nonrelativistic universe, I mean. And—”

I take another drink, then I go on bravely enough:

“And if we’d gone any farther down we would have been going slower and slower. Slower, and slower, and slower. A little closer, and that fifteen minutes would have turned out to be a decade. A little closer still, and it would have been a century. It was that close, Sigfrid. We were almost trapped, all of us.

“But I got out.”

And I think of something and look at my watch. “Speaking of time, my hour’s been up for the last five minutes!”

“I have no other appointments this afternoon, Rob.”

I stare. “What?”

Gently:

“I cleared my calendar before your appointment, Rob.”

I don’t say “Holy Christ” again, but I surely think it. “This makes me feel right up against the wall, Sigfrid!” I say angrily.

“I am not forcing you to stay past your hour, Rob. I am pointing out that you have that option if you choose.”

I mull that for a while.

“You are one brassbound ringding of a computer, Sigfrid,” I say. “All right. Well, you see, there was no way we could get out considered as a unit. Our ships were caught, well inside the of point of no return, and there just ain’t no way home from there. But Danny A., he was a sharp article. And he knew all about the holes in the laws. Considered as a unit, we were stuck.

“But we weren’t a unit! We were two ships! And each of those came apart into two other ships! And if we could somehow transfer acceleration from one part of our system to the other and you know, kick part of us deeper into the well and at the same kick the other part up and out — then part of the unit could get free!”

Long pause.

“Why don’t you have another drink, Rob?” says Sigfrid courteously. “After you finish crying, I mean.”