couple thousand people had breathed the air I was breathing, one time or another, voided the water I drank and exuded their smells into the atmosphere. The people didn’t stay around very long, most of them. But the smells were still there.
I didn’t care about the smell. I didn’t care about any of it. Gateway was my big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a couple of kids, and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made me cocky about my chances of winning another.
It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough, too. There wasn’t much luxury around. For your $238,575 what you get is transportation to Gateway, ten days’ worth of food, lodging, and air, a cram course in ship handling, and an invitation to sign up on the next ship out. Or any ship you like. They don’t make you take any particular ship, or for that matter any ship at all.
The Corporation doesn’t make any profit on any of that. All the prices are fixed at about cost. That doesn’t mean they were cheap, and it certainly doesn’t mean that what you got was good. The food was just about what I had been digging, and eating, all my life. The lodging was about the size of a large steamer trunk, one chair, a bunch of lockers, a fold-down table, and a hammock that you could stretch across it, corner to corner, when you wanted to sleep.
My next-door neighbors were a family from Venus. I caught a glimpse through the part-opened door. Imagine! Four of them sleeping in one of those cubicles! It looked like two to a hammock, with two hammocks crisscrossed across the room. On the other side was Sheri’s room. I scratched at her door, but she didn’t answer. The door wasn’t locked. Nobody locks his door much on Gateway, because there’s nothing much worth stealing among other reasons. Sheri wasn’t there. The clothes she had been wearing on the ship were thrown all over.
I guessed that she had gone out exploring, and wished I had been a little earlier. I would have liked someone to explore with. I leaned against the ivy growing out of one wall of the tunnel and pulled out my map.
It did give me some idea of what to look for. There were things marked “Central Park” and “Lake Superior.” What were they? I wondered about “Gateway Museum,” which sounded interesting, and “Terminal Hospital,” which sounded pretty bad-I found out later that “terminal” meant as in end of the line, on your return trip from wherever you went to. The Corporation must have known that it had another sound to it, too; but the Corporation never went to much trouble to spare a prospector’s feelings.
What I really wanted was to see a ship!
As soon as that thought percolated out of my mind I realized that I wanted it a lot. I puzzled over how to get to the outer skin, where the ship docks were located of course. Holding onto a railing with one hand, I tried to keep the map open with the other. It didn’t take me long to locate myself. I was at a five-way intersection which seemed to be the one marked “East Star Babe G” on the map. One of the five tunnels out of it led to a dropshaft, but I couldn’t tell which.
I tried one at random, wound up in a dead end, and on the way back scratched on a door for directions. It opened. “Excuse me—” I said… and stopped.
The man who opened the door seemed as tall as I, but was not. His eyes were on a level with my own. But he stopped at the waist. He had no legs.
He said something, but I didn’t understand it; it wasn’t in English. It wouldn’t have mattered. My attention was taken up with him. He wore gauzy bright fabric strapped from wrists to waist, and he fluttered the wings gently to stay in the air. It wasn’t hard, in Gateway’s low-G. But it was surprising to see. I said, “I’m sorry. I just wanted to know how to get to Level Tanya.” I was trying not to stare, but I wasn’t succeeding.
He smiled, white teeth in an unlined, old face. He had jet eyes under a crest of short white hair. He pushed past me out into the corridor and said in excellent English, “Certainly. Take the first turning on your right. Go to the next star, and take the second turning on your left. It’ll be marked.” He indicated with his chin the direction toward the star.
Congratulations!
You are one of a very few people each year who may become a limited partner in Gateway Enterprises, Inc. Your first obligation is to sign the enclosed Memorandum of Agreement. You need not do this at once. You are encouraged to study the agreement and to seek legal advice, if available.
However, until you sign you will not be eligible to occupy Corporation housing, dine at the Corporation commissary or participate in the Corporation instruction courses.
Accommodations are available at the Gateway Hotel and Restaurant for those who are here as visitors, or who do not at present wish to sign the Memorandum of Agreement.
I thanked him and left him floating behind me. I wanted to turn back, but it didn’t seem good manners. It was strange. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be any cripples on Gateway.
That’s how naive I was then.
In order to meet the costs of maintaining Gateway, all persons are required to pay a daily per-capita assessment for air, temperature control, administration, and other services.
If you are a guest, this cost is included in your hotel bill.
Rates for other persons are posted. The tax may be prepaid up to one year in advance if desired. Failure to pay the daily per-capita tax will result in immediate expulsion from Gateway.
Having seen him, I knew Gateway in a way I had not known it from the statistics. The statistics are clear enough, and we all studied them, all of us who came up as prospectors, and all of that vastly larger number who only wished they could. About eighty percent of flights from Gateway come up empty. About fifteen percent don’t come back at all. So one person in twenty, on the average, comes back from a prospecting trip with something that Gateway — that mankind in general — can make a profit on. Most of even those are lucky if they collect enough to pay their costs for getting here in the first place.
And if you get hurt while you’re out… well, that’s tough. Terminal Hospital is about as well equipped as any anywhere. But you have to get there for it to do you any good. You can be months in transit. If you get hurt at the other end of your trip — and that’s where it usually happens — there’s not much that can be done for you until you get back to Gateway. By then it can be too late to make you whole, and likely enough too late to keep you alive.
There’s no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way. The rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage.
The return trip is free… but to what?
I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel, and ran into a man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn’t speak English, but he pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the up- cable, ascended one level, crossed to another dropshaft, and tried again.
The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. “You can’t come through here,” he said.
“I just want to see the ships.”
“Sure. You can’t. You’ve got to have a blue badge,” he said, tapping his own. “That’s Corporation specialist, flight crew or maintenance.”
“I am flight crew.”
He grinned. “You’re a new fish off the Earth transport, aren’t you? Friend, you’ll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not before. Go on back up.”
I said reasonably, “You understand how I feel, don’t you? I just want to get a look.”
“You can’t, till you’ve finished your course, except they’ll bring you down here for part of it. After that, you’ll see more than you want.”
