[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
with the night before, the one with the dense black eyebrows. She nodded to me
and smiled; I saw the bangles on her arm, and wondered what she was doing
there -- and how she had done at the gambling tables.
The instructor gathered us around him, and said, "As someone just said, these
are Heechee ships. The lander part. This is the piece you go down to a planet
in, if you're lucky enough to find a planet. They don't look very big, but
five people can fit into each of those garbage cans you see. Not comfortably,
exactly. But they can. Generally speaking, of course, you'll always leave one
person in the main ship, so there'll be at most four in the lander."
He led us past the nearest of them, and we all satisfied the impulse to touch,
scratch, or pat it. Then he began to lecture:
"There were nine hundred and twenty-four of these ships docked at Gateway when
it was first explored. About two hundred, so far, have proved nonoperational.
Mostly we don't know why;
they just don't work. Three hundred and four have actually been sent out on at
least one trip.
Thirty-three of those are here now, and available for prospecting trips. The
others haven't been tried yet." He hiked himself up on the stumpy cylinder and
sat there while he went on:
"One thing you have to decide is whether you want to take one of the
thirty-three tested ones or one of the ones that has never been flown. By
human beings, I mean. There you just pay your money and take your choice. It's
a gamble either way. A high proportion of the trips that didn't come back were
Page 24
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
in first flights, so there's obviously some risk there. Well, that figures,
doesn't it? After all, nobody has done any maintenance on them for God knows
how long, since the
Heechee put them there.
"On the other hand, there's a risk in the ones that have been out and back
safely, too.
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
y.txt (19 of 109) [1/15/03 6:31:20 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
y.txt
There's no such thing as perpetual motion. We think some of the no-returns
have been because the ships ran out of fuel. Trouble is, we don't know what
the fuel is, or how much there is, or how to tell when a ship is about to run
out."
He patted the stump. "This, and all the others you see here, were designed for
five
Heechees in the crews. As far as we can tell. But we send them out with three
human beings. It seems the Heechee were more tolerant of each other's company
in confined spaces than people are.
There are bigger and smaller ships, but the no-return rate on them has been
very bad the last couple of orbits. It's probably just a string of bad luck,
but. . . Anyway, I personally would stick with a Three. You people, you do
what you want.
"So you come to your second choice, which is who you go with. Keep your eyes
open. Look for companions-- What?"
Sheri had been semaphoring her hand until she got his attention. "You said
'very bad," she said. "How bad is that?"
The instructor said patiently, "In the last fiscal orbit about three out of
ten Fives came back. Those are the biggest ships. In several cases the crews
were dead when we got them open, even so."
"Yeah," said Sheri, "that's very bad."
"No, that's not bad at all, compared to the one-man ships. Two orbits ago we
went a whole orbit and only two Ones came back at all. That's bad."
"Why is that?" asked the father of the tunnel-rat family. Their name was
Forehand. The instructor looked at him for a moment.
"If you ever find out," he said, "be sure and tell somebody. Now. As far as
selecting a crew is concerned, you're better off if you can get somebody who's
already been out. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. Prospectors who strike it
rich generally quit; the ones that are still hungry may not want to break up
their teams. So a lot of you fish are going to have to go out with other
virgins. Umm." He looked around thoughtfully. "Well, let's get our feet wet.
Sort yourselves out into groups of three -- don't worry about who's in your
group, this isn't where you pick your partners -- and climb into one of those
open landers. Don't touch anything. They're supposed to be in deactive mode,
but I have to tell you they don't always stay deactive. Just go in, climb down
to the control cabin and wait for an instructor to join you."
That was the first I'd heard that there were other instructors. I looked
around, trying to work out which were teachers and which were fish, while he
said, "Are there any questions?"
Sheri again. "Yeah. What's your name?"
"Did I forget that again? I'm Jimmy Chou. Pleased to meet you all. Now let's
go."
Now I know a lot more than my instructor did, including what happened to him
half an orbit later -- poor old Jimmy Chou, he went out before I did, and came
back while I was on my second trip, very dead. Flare burns, they say his eyes
were boiled out of his bead. But at that time he knew it all, and it was all
very strange and wonderful to me.
So we crawled into the funny elliptical hatch that let you slip between the
Page 25
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
thrusters and down into the landing capsule, and then down a peg-ladder one
step further into the main vehicle itself.
We looked around, three Ali Babas staring at the treasure cave. We heard a
scratching above us, and a head poked in. It had shaggy eyebrows and pretty
eyes, and it belonged to the girl
I had been dancing with the night before. "Having fun?" she inquired. We were
clinging together as far from anything that looked movable as we could get,
and I doubt we really looked at ease.
"Never mind," she said, "just look around. Get familiar with it. You'll see a
lot of it. That vertical line of wheels with the little spokes sticking out of
them? That's the target selector.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]