Archiwum
- Index
- D'Onaglia Frederick Powrót do źródeł
- Forsyth Frederick Opowiadania
- Frederik Pohl Heechee 3 Heechee Rendevous
- Chaptr10
- Courths_Mahler Jadwiga WśÂ›ród obcych t2
- Gorgiasz Pochwala Heleny(1)
- Ksiega zycia Gregory Samak
- Tasso ValĂŠrie Dziennik nimfomanki
- Annie Flanigan Love and a Bad Hair Day (pdf)
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- epicusfuror.xlx.pl
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meters or more across, and in order to use it we had to strap on wings like
Shicky's, hanging on a rack outside the entrance.
Neither Klara nor I had ever used them before, but it wasn't hard. On Gateway
you weigh so little to begin with that flying would be the easiest and best
way to get around, if there were any places inside the asteroid big enough to
fly in.
So we dropped through the hatch into the sphere, and were in the middle of a
whole universe. The chamber was walled with hexagonal panels, each one of them
projected from some source we could not see, probably digital with
liquid-crystal screens.
"How pretty!" Klara cried.
All around us there was a sort of globarama of what the scouting ships had
found. Stars, nebulae, planets, satellites. Sometimes each plate showed its
own independent thing so that there were, what was it, something like a
hundred and twenty-eight separate scenes. Then, flick, all of them changed;
flick again, and they began to cycle, some of them holding their same scene,
some of them changing to something new. Flick again, and one whole hemisphere
lit up with a mosaic view of
file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
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file:///F|/rah/Frederik%20Pohl/Pohl,%20Frederik%20-%20Heechee%201%20-%20Gatewa
y.txt the M-31 galaxy as seen from God-knew-where.
"Hey," I said, really excited, "this is great!" And it was. It was like being
on all the trips any prospector had ever taken, without the drudgery and the
trouble and the constant fear.
There was no one there but us, and I couldn't understand why. It was so
pretty. You would think there would be a long line of people waiting to get
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in. One side began to run through a series of pictures of Heechee artifacts,
as discovered by prospectors: prayer fans of all colors, wall-lining machines,
the insides of Heechee ships, some tunnels--Klara cried out that they were
places she had been, back home on Venus, but I don't know how she could tell.
Then the pattern went back to photographs from space. Some of them wcre
familiar. I could recognize the Pleadies in one quick six- or eight-panel
shot, which vanished and was replaced by a view of Gateway Two from outside,
two of the bright young stars of the cluster shining in reflection off its
sides. I saw something that might have been the Horsehead Nebula, and a
doughnutshaped puff of gas and dust that was either the Ring Nebula in Lyra or
what an exploring team had found a few orbits before and called the French
Cruller, in the skies of a planet where Heechee digs had been detected, but
not reached, under a frozen sea.
We hung there for half an hour or so, until it began to look as though we were
seeing the same things again, and then we fluttered up to the hatch, hung up
the wings, and sat down for a cigarette break in a wide place in the tunnel
outside the museum.
Two women I recognized vaguely as Corporation maintenance crews came by,
carrying rolled-
up strap-on wings. "Hi, Klara," one of them greeted her. "Been inside?"
Klara nodded. "It was beautiful," she said.
"Enjoy it while you can," said the other one. "Next week it'll cost you a
hundred dollars.
We're putting in a P-phone taped lecture system tomorrow, and they'll have the
grand opening before the next tourists show up."
"It's worth it," Klara said, but then she looked at me.
I became aware that, in spite of everything, I was smoking one of her
cigarettes. At five dollars a pack I couldn't afford very much of that, but I
made up my mind to buy at least one pack out of that day's allowance, and to
make sure she took as many from me as I took from her.
"Want to walk some more?" she asked.
"Maybe a little later," I said. I was wondering how many men and women had
died to take the pretty pictures we had been watching, because I was facing
one more time the fact that sooner or later I would have to submit myself
again to the lethal lottery of the Heechee ships, or give up. I wondered if
the new information Metchnikov had given me was going to make a real
difference.
Everyone was talking about it now; the Corporation had scheduled an all-phone
announcement for the next day.
"That reminds me," I said. "Did you say you'd seen Metchnikov?"
"I wondered when you'd ask me about that," she said. "Sure. He called and told
me he'd shown the color-coding stuff to you. So?"
I stubbed out the cigarette. "I think everybody in Gateway's going to be
fighting for the good launches, that's what I think."
"But maybe Dane knows something. He's been working with the Corporation."
"I don't doubt he does." I stretched and leaned back, rocking against the low
gravity, considering. "He's not that nice a guy, Klara. Maybe he'd tell us if
there's something good coming up, you know, that he knows something special
about. But he'll want something for it."
Klara grinned. "He'd tell me."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, he calls me once in a while. Wants a date."
"Oh, shit, Klara." I was feeling pretty irritated by then. Not just at Klara,
and not just about Dane. About money. About the fact that if I wanted to go
back into the surround room next week it would cost me half my credit balance.
About the dark, shadowed image looming up ahead in time, and not very far
ahead, when I would once again have to make up my mind to do what I was scared
silly to do again. "I wouldn't trust that son of a bitch as far as--"
"Oh, relax, Rob. He's not such a bad guy," she said, lighting another
cigarette and leaving the pack where I could reach it if I wanted it.
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"Sexually, he might be kind of interesting. That raw, rough, rude Taurean
thing -- anyway, you've got as much to offer him as I
do."
"What are you talking about?"
She looked honestly surprised. "I thought you knew he swings both ways."
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