But when they came out of FTL and looked around they had a moment of total rapture. The star they were near was quite sunlike, a G-2 the same size as Earth's Sol; they were orbiting a planet within the livable zone from the star, and their detectors showed Heechee metal in large quantities!
The biggest concentration was not on the planet. It was an asteroid in an out-of-ecliptic orbit-a lot like Gateway-and it had to be another of those abandoned parking garages for Heechee ships! When they approached it they saw that the guess was correct
But they also saw that the asteroid was empty. There were no ships. There were no artifacts at all. It was riddled with tunnels, just like Gateway, but the tunnels were vacant. Worse than that, the whole asteroid seemed in very bad shape, as though it were far older, and had had a far harder life, than Gateway itself.
That puzzle cleared itself up when, with the last of their resources, two of the crew ventured down to the planet itself.
It had been a living planet once. It had life now, in fact, but in scant numbers and only in its seas-algae and sea-bottom invertebrates, nothing more. Somehow or other the planet had been seared and ravaged ... and the culprit was in view.
Six and a half light-years away from that system they discovered a neutron star. Like most neutron stars, it was a pulsar, but as their ship was nowhere near its axis of radiation they could hardly detect its jets. But it was a radio source, and their instruments showed that it was there, the remnant of a supernova.
The rest of the story the experts on Gateway filled in for them when they returned. That solar system had been visited by the Heechee, but it was in a bad neighborhood. After the Heechee left-probably knowing what was about to happen-the supernova exploded. The planet had been baked. Its gases had been driven off, and most of its seas boiled away. As the hellish heat died away a thin new atmosphere was cooked out of the planet's crust, and the
remaining water vapor had come down in incredible torrents of rain, scouring away mountain valleys, burying plains in silt, leaving nothing... and all of that had happened hundreds of thousands of years before.
Monsanto, Running Wolf, and Pursy got a science bonus for their mission-a small one, a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to be divided among the three of them.
By Gateway standards, that wasn't serious money. It was enough to pay their bills on Gateway for a few extra weeks. It was not nearly enough to retire on. All three of them shipped out again as soon as they found another berth, and from their next voyage none of them ever returned.
Probably the Gateway prospectors should have taken it for granted that hospitable, Earth-like planets were bound to be a lot rarer than malignant ones. Their own solar system made that much clear. Anyway, all those years of listening to Project Ozma radio signals should have taught them that much.
What they found out was that there was a myriad different kinds of hostile environments. There was Eta Carina Seven; it was the right size, it had air, it even had water-when it wasn't frozen, anyway. But Eta Carina Seven had a highly eccentric orbit. It was pretty well iced over, though still on its way to its frigid aphelion, and there were terrible storms. One lander never came back at all. Three of the others were damaged, or lost at least one crew member.
Mendoza was not the only one to find a planet that looked nice but turned out to be poison. One pleasing-looking planet was well vegetated, but the vegetation was all toxicodendrons. They were far worse than Earth's poison ivy. The slightest touch meant blisters, agonizing itching pain, and anaphylactic shock. On the first mission to it everyone who landed on its surface died of allergic reactions, and only the crew member who stayed with the ship in orbit was able to get back to Gateway.
But once in a while-oh, very seldom-there was a good one.
The happiest of all, in the first decade of Gateway's operation, was the mission of Margaret Brisch, usually called "Peggy."
Peggy Brisch went out in a One. She found what was really another Earth. In fact, in some ways it was nicer than Earth ever was. Not only were there no toxicodendrons to kill anyone who touched, or any nearby star with lethal radiation, there were not even any large, dangerous animals.
There was only one thing wrong with Peggy's Planet. It would have been an ideal place to take Earth's overflow population, if only it hadn't been located a good nineteen hundred light-years away.
There was no way to get to it except on a Heechee ship. And the largest Heechee ship carried only five people.
The colonization of Peggy's Planet would have to wait.
