Gateway (Heechee Saga) by Pohl Frederik

Author:Pohl, Frederik [Pohl, Frederik]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Sci-Fi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

He punched a button and said: "Signatures for coded electromagnetic radiation." A slow sine curve leaped onto the scanner's readout plate, wiggled briefly for a moment, and then straightened to an absolutely motionless line.

"Negative," said Ham. "Anomalous time-variant temperatures."

That was a new one on me. "What's an anomalous time-variant temperature?" I asked.

"Like if something gets warmer when the sun sets," said Klara impatiently. "Well?"

But that line was flat, too. "None of them, either," said Ham. "High-albedo surface metal?"

Slow sine wave, then nothing. "Hum," said Ham. "Ha. Well, the rest of the signatures don't apply; there won't be any methane, because there isn't any atmosphere, and so on. So what do we do, boss?"

Sam opened his lips to speak, but Klara was ahead of him. "I beg your pardon," she said tightly, "but who do you mean when you say 'boss'?"

"Oh, shut up," Ham said impatiently. "Sam?"

Kahane gave Klara a slight, forgiving smile. "If you want to say something, go ahead and say it," he invited. "Me, I think we ought to orbit the moon."

"Plain waste of fuel!" Klara snapped. "I think that's crazy."

"Have you got a better idea?"

"What do you mean, 'better'? What's the point?"

"Well," said Sam reasonably, "we haven't looked all over the moon. It's rotating pretty slow. We could take the lander and look all around; there might be a whole Heechee city on the far side."

"Fat chance," Klara sniffed, almost inaudibly, thus clearing up the question of who had said it before. The boys weren't listening. All three of them were already on their way down into the lander, leaving Klara and me in sole possession of the capsule.

Klara disappeared into the toilet. I lit a cigarette, almost the last I had, and blew smoke plumes through the expanding smoke plumes before them, hanging motionless in the unmoving air. The capsule was tumbling slightly, and I could see the distant brownish disk of the planet's moon slide upward across the viewscreen, and a minute later the tiny, bright hydrogen flame of the lander heading toward it. I wondered what I would do if they ran out of fuel, or crashed, or suffered some sort of malfunction. What I would have to do in that case was leave them there forever. What I wondered was whether I would have the nerve to do what I had to do.

It did seem like a terrible, trivial waste of human lives.

What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?

I found that I was holding my chest, as though the metaphor were real. I spat on the end of the cigarette to put it out and folded it into a disposal bag. Little crumbs of ash were floating around where I had flicked them without thinking, but I didn't feel like chasing them. I watched the big mottled crescent of the planet swing into view in the corner of the screen, admiring it as an art object: yellowish green on the daylight side of the terminator, an amorphous black that obscured the stars on the rest of it.

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