[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
installations. The food-preparing section.
The waste disposers. The test kits, the weapons, the drills, the sample boxes,
the entire rig that you take down to the surface of the planet with you, if
you happen to be lucky enough to reach a planet you can land on.
What you have left is not very much. It is a little like living for weeks on
end under the hood of a very large truck, with the engine going, and with four
other people competing for space.
After the first two days I developed an unreasoning prejudice against Ham
Tayeh. He was too big. He took more than his fair share.
To be truthful, Ham wasn't even as tall as I was, though he weighed more. But
I didn't mind the amount of space I took up. I only minded when other people
got in the way of it. Sam
Kahane was a better size, no more than a hundred and sixty centimeters, with
stiff black beard and coarse crinkled hair all up his abdomen over his
cache-sexe to his chest, and all up and down his back as well. I didn't think
of Sam as violating my living space until I found a long, black beard hair in
my food. Ham at least was almost hairless, with a soft golden skin that made
him look like a Jordanian harem eunuch. (Did the Jordanian kings have eunuchs
in their harems? Did they have harems? Ham didn't seem to know much about
that; his parents had lived in New Jersey for three generations.)
I even found myself contrasting Klara with Sheri, who was at least two sizes
smaller. (Not usually. Usually Klara was just right.) And Dred Frauenglass,
who came with Sam's set, was a gentle, thin young man who didn't talk much and
seemed to take up less room than anyone else.
I was the virgin in the group, and everybody took turns showing me how to do
what little we had to do. You have to make the routine photographic and
spectrometer readings. Keep a tape of readouts from the Heechee control panel,
where there are constant minute variations in hue and intensity from the
colored lights. (They still keep studying them, hoping to understand what they
mean.) Snap and analyze the spectra of the tau-space stars in the viewscreen.
And all that put together takes, oh, maybe, two manhours a day. The household
tasks of preparing meals and cleaning up take about another two.
So you have used up some four man-hours out of each day for the five of you,
in which you have collectively something like eighty man-hours to use up.
I'm lying. That's not really what you do with your time. What you do with your
time is wait for turnaround.
Three days, four days, a week; and I became conscious that there was a
building tension that I didn't share. Two weeks, and I knew what it was,
because I was feeling it, too. We were all waiting for it to happen. When we
went to sleep our last look was at the golden spiral to see if miraculously it
had flickered alight. When we woke up our first thought was whether the
ceiling had become the floor. By the third week we were all definitely edgy.
Page 65
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Ham showed it the most, plump, golden-skinned Ham with the jolly genie's face:
"Let's play some poker, Rob."
"No, thanks."
"Come on, Rob. We need a fourth." (In Chinese poker you deal out the whole
deck, thirteen cards to each player. You can't play it any other way.)
"I don't want to."
And suddenly furious: "Piss on you! You're not worth a snake's fart as crew,
now you won't even play cards!"
And then he would sit cutting the cards moodily for half an hour at a time, as
though it were a skill he needed to perfect for his life's sake. And, come
right down to it, it almost was.
Because figure it out for yourself. Suppose you're in a Five and you pass
seventy-five days without turnaround. Right away you know that you're in
trouble: the rations won't support five people for more than three hundred
days.
But they might support four.
Or three. Or two. Or one.
At that point it has become clear that at least one person is not going to
come back from
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
y.txt (51 of 109) [1/15/03 6:31:21 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
y.txt the trip alive, and what most crews do is start cutting the cards. Loser
politely cuts his throat.
If loser is not polite, the other four give him etiquette lessons.
A lot of ships that went out as Fives have come back as Threes. A few come
back as Ones.
So we made the time pass, not easily and certainly not fast.
Sex was a sovereign anodyne for a while, and Klara and I spent hours on end
wrapped in each other's arms, drowsing off for a while and waking to wake the
other to sex again. I suppose the boys did much the same; it was not long
before the lander began to smell like the locker room in a boys' gym. Then we
began seeking solitude, all five of us. Well, there wasn't enough solitude on
the ship to split five ways, but we did what we could; by common consent we
began letting one of us have the lander to himself (or herself) for an hour or
two at a time. While I was there
Klara was tolerated in the capsule. While Klara was there I usually played
cards with the boys.
While one of them was there the other two kept us company. I have no idea what
the others did with their solo time; what I did with mine was mostly stare
into space. I mean that literally: I looked out the lander ports at absolute
blackness. There was nothing to see, but it was better than seeing what I had
grown infinitely tired of seeing inside the ship.
Then, after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my tapes,
Dred watched his pornodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard and played
electronic music into earplugs
(even so, some of it leaked out if you listened hard, and I got terribly,
terribly sick of Bach, Palestrina and Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us
into classes, and we spent a lot of time humoring him, discussing the nature [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl fopke.keep.pl
installations. The food-preparing section.
The waste disposers. The test kits, the weapons, the drills, the sample boxes,
the entire rig that you take down to the surface of the planet with you, if
you happen to be lucky enough to reach a planet you can land on.
What you have left is not very much. It is a little like living for weeks on
end under the hood of a very large truck, with the engine going, and with four
other people competing for space.
After the first two days I developed an unreasoning prejudice against Ham
Tayeh. He was too big. He took more than his fair share.
To be truthful, Ham wasn't even as tall as I was, though he weighed more. But
I didn't mind the amount of space I took up. I only minded when other people
got in the way of it. Sam
Kahane was a better size, no more than a hundred and sixty centimeters, with
stiff black beard and coarse crinkled hair all up his abdomen over his
cache-sexe to his chest, and all up and down his back as well. I didn't think
of Sam as violating my living space until I found a long, black beard hair in
my food. Ham at least was almost hairless, with a soft golden skin that made
him look like a Jordanian harem eunuch. (Did the Jordanian kings have eunuchs
in their harems? Did they have harems? Ham didn't seem to know much about
that; his parents had lived in New Jersey for three generations.)
I even found myself contrasting Klara with Sheri, who was at least two sizes
smaller. (Not usually. Usually Klara was just right.) And Dred Frauenglass,
who came with Sam's set, was a gentle, thin young man who didn't talk much and
seemed to take up less room than anyone else.
I was the virgin in the group, and everybody took turns showing me how to do
what little we had to do. You have to make the routine photographic and
spectrometer readings. Keep a tape of readouts from the Heechee control panel,
where there are constant minute variations in hue and intensity from the
colored lights. (They still keep studying them, hoping to understand what they
mean.) Snap and analyze the spectra of the tau-space stars in the viewscreen.
And all that put together takes, oh, maybe, two manhours a day. The household
tasks of preparing meals and cleaning up take about another two.
So you have used up some four man-hours out of each day for the five of you,
in which you have collectively something like eighty man-hours to use up.
I'm lying. That's not really what you do with your time. What you do with your
time is wait for turnaround.
Three days, four days, a week; and I became conscious that there was a
building tension that I didn't share. Two weeks, and I knew what it was,
because I was feeling it, too. We were all waiting for it to happen. When we
went to sleep our last look was at the golden spiral to see if miraculously it
had flickered alight. When we woke up our first thought was whether the
ceiling had become the floor. By the third week we were all definitely edgy.
Page 65
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Ham showed it the most, plump, golden-skinned Ham with the jolly genie's face:
"Let's play some poker, Rob."
"No, thanks."
"Come on, Rob. We need a fourth." (In Chinese poker you deal out the whole
deck, thirteen cards to each player. You can't play it any other way.)
"I don't want to."
And suddenly furious: "Piss on you! You're not worth a snake's fart as crew,
now you won't even play cards!"
And then he would sit cutting the cards moodily for half an hour at a time, as
though it were a skill he needed to perfect for his life's sake. And, come
right down to it, it almost was.
Because figure it out for yourself. Suppose you're in a Five and you pass
seventy-five days without turnaround. Right away you know that you're in
trouble: the rations won't support five people for more than three hundred
days.
But they might support four.
Or three. Or two. Or one.
At that point it has become clear that at least one person is not going to
come back from
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
y.txt (51 of 109) [1/15/03 6:31:21 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
y.txt the trip alive, and what most crews do is start cutting the cards. Loser
politely cuts his throat.
If loser is not polite, the other four give him etiquette lessons.
A lot of ships that went out as Fives have come back as Threes. A few come
back as Ones.
So we made the time pass, not easily and certainly not fast.
Sex was a sovereign anodyne for a while, and Klara and I spent hours on end
wrapped in each other's arms, drowsing off for a while and waking to wake the
other to sex again. I suppose the boys did much the same; it was not long
before the lander began to smell like the locker room in a boys' gym. Then we
began seeking solitude, all five of us. Well, there wasn't enough solitude on
the ship to split five ways, but we did what we could; by common consent we
began letting one of us have the lander to himself (or herself) for an hour or
two at a time. While I was there
Klara was tolerated in the capsule. While Klara was there I usually played
cards with the boys.
While one of them was there the other two kept us company. I have no idea what
the others did with their solo time; what I did with mine was mostly stare
into space. I mean that literally: I looked out the lander ports at absolute
blackness. There was nothing to see, but it was better than seeing what I had
grown infinitely tired of seeing inside the ship.
Then, after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my tapes,
Dred watched his pornodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard and played
electronic music into earplugs
(even so, some of it leaked out if you listened hard, and I got terribly,
terribly sick of Bach, Palestrina and Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us
into classes, and we spent a lot of time humoring him, discussing the nature [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]