The Gateway Trip полностью

The greatest treasure the Heechee tunnels on Venus had to offer had already been discovered, though the first discoverers didn't know it. No one else knew, either-at least, no one except a solitary tunnel-rat named Sylvester Macklin, and he was not in a position to tell anybody what he had found.

Sylvester Macklin had discovered a Heechee spaceship.

If Macklin had reported his find he would have become the richest man in the solar system. He also would have lived to enjoy his wealth. But Sylvester Macklin was as crotchety a loner as any other tunnel-rat, and he did something quite different.

He saw that the ship looked to be in good condition. Maybe, he thought, he could even fly it.

Unfortunately for himself, he succeeded.

Macklin's ship did exactly what any Heechee ship was designed to do, and the Heechee were marvelously great designers. No one knows exactly what processes of thought and experiment and deduction Macklin went through when he blundered onto the wonderful find. He didn't survive to tell anyone. Still, obviously at some point he must have gotten into the ship and closed its hatch and begun poking and prodding at the things that looked as though they ought to be its controls.

As people later well learned, on the board of every Heechee ship is a thing shaped like a cow's teat. It is the thing that makes the ship go. When it is squeezed it is like slipping an automatic-shift car into "drive." The ship moves out. Where it goes to depends on what course was set into its automatic navigation systems.

Mackim didn't do anything about setting any particular courи, naturally. He didn't know how.

So the ship did what its Heechee designers had programmed it to do in such an event. It simply returned to the place it had come from when its Heechee pilot had left it, half a million years ago.

As it happened, that place was an asteroid.

It was an odd asteroid in several respects. Astronomically it was odd, because its orbit was at right angles to the ecliptic. For that reason, although it was a fair-sized chunk of rock and not far from Earth's own orbit at times, it had never been discovered by human astronomers.

The other odd thing about it was that it had been converted into a sort of parking garage for Heechee spacecraft. In total, there were nearly a thousand of the ships there.

What there was not any of anywhere on the asteroid was anything to eat or drink. So Sylvester Mackim, who could have been

the richest man in history, wound up as just one more starved-to-death corpse.

But before he died Macklin managed to get off a signal to Earth. It wasn't a call for help. No one could reach him in time to save his life. Mackim knew that. He accepted the fact that he would die; he just wanted people to know in what an unsuspected marvel of a place he was dying. And after a while other astronauts, flying the clumsy human rockets of the time, came to investigate.

What they found was the gateway to the universe.

Within the next decade the Gateway asteroid had become the center of mankind's most profitable industry, the exploration of the galaxy.

Macklin didn't own the Gateway asteroid, of course, in spite of the fact that he had discovered it. His luck wasn't that good. He didn't own anything, being dead.