least if they were the first to claim the rewards. Wolfgang Arretov was the first to arrive near the Sirius system, and Earthly astronomers were delighted. The stars Sirius A and B ("Bessel's satellite") had been studied intensively for centuries, because the primary star is so bright in Earthly skies. Arretov's data confirmed their deductions: Sirius A at 2.3 solar masses, B only about one-but a white dwarf with a surface temperature over twenty thousand degrees. Arretov got half a million for letting the astronomers know they had been right all along. Later, Sally Kissendorf got a hundred thousand for the first good pictures of the tiny (well-three solar masses, which is not real tiny; but just about invisible next to its huge primary) companion of Zeta Aurigae. She would have gotten more if the companion had happened to flare while she was nearby, but that might not have been worth her while, since it was very likely she could not have survived the experience. Matt Polofsky's picture of little Cygnus A only got him fifty thousand dollars, though-red dwarf stars simply weren't that interesting. Even well-studied nearby ones. And Rachel Morgenstern, with her husband and their three grown children, shared half a million for the Delta Cepheid shots. Cepheids aren't all that rare, but the Morgensterns happened to be there just when the star's surface layers were losing transparency through compression.
And then there were all the missions that wound .up in Oort clouds.
Oort clouds are masses of comets that orbit a star very far out-the Oort in Earth's system doesn't get going until you're half a light-year from the Sun. There are lots of comets in your average Oort cloud. Trillions of them. They generally mass as much as the aggregate of a star's planets, and almost every star has an Oort.
They seemed to fascinate the Heechee.
In Gateway's first twenty years of operation, no fewer than eighty-five missions wound up in an Oort cloud and returned to tell of it.
That was a big disappointment to the prospectors involved, be-
cause the Gateway Corporation stopped paying bonuses for Oort data after the tenth such mission. So those prospectors who came back from an Oort complained a lot. They couldn't understand why the Heechee had targeted so many missions to the dumb things.
And, naturally, they had no idea how lucky they really were, because it was a long time before anyone found out that, for an astonishing reason, most Oort missions never got back to the Gateway asteroid at all.
That billion dollars in astronomical science bonuses was welcome enough to the prospectors who got a share of it. But, really, it was chicken feed. What the Gateway Corporation was formed for was profit. The prospectors had come to the asteroid for the same reason, and big profit didn't come from taking instrument readings on something millions of miles away. The big bucks came from finding a planet, and landing on it-and bringing back something that made money.
Neither the Gateway Corporation nor the individual prospectors had much choice about that. Making a profit was the basic rule of survival, and neither the prospectors nor the Corporation made the rules. Those rules were made by the nature of the world they came from.
Homo sapiens evolved on the planet Earth, and the process of evolution made it certain that every human trait was custom-engineered to fit Earth's conditions, like a key in a lock. With three billioh years of Darwinian selection to make the fit perfect, life on Earth should have been pretty nearly heaven for its human inhabitants.
It wasn't. Not anymore, for rich Earth was getting close to filing for bankruptcy. It had spent its wealth.
Oh, there were many millionaires on Earth. Billionaires, too; people with more money than they could spend, enough to hire a hundred servants, enough to own a county for a backyard, enough to pay for Full Medical insurance coverage, so that for all their long lives they would have at their command the most wonderful of all the wonderful medical, pharmaceutical, and surgical techniques to keep them healthy, and to make those lives very long. There were hundreds of thousands of the very rich, and many millions of the more or less well to do . .
But there were ten billion others.
There were the ones who scratched out a living by farming on
