I didn't like the idea of living in such close proximity to a lot of men. I hated living on in the same apartment after she was dead, but it was either that or go into bachelor quarters. There wasn't enough money to pay the medical expenses for both of us. I don't mean I planned it, I mean she would have lived if she hadn't had me to worry about. I was out of circulation for most of a year, and when they let me out of the shrink tank my mother had died.įace it: that was my fault. I had some trouble with my girl, and then for a while I just couldn't get out of bed in the morning. We got along all right until I had my psychotic episode. After my father was killed in the shaft fire she brought me up, with the help of the company crèche. except that, one time, I won the lottery. I was no different from any of the others. Sometimes it was labeled Scotch and sometimes vodka or bourbon, but it all came off the same slime-still columns. And we drank a lot, the cheap, powerful liquor that was made not ten miles away. So we all did the same things, we worked and chased each other's women and played the lottery. The girls are as smelly and slick and frazzled as you are. Eight hours' sleep and you're on again, with your clothes stinking of shale all the time. It isn't enough even to get you out of the mines, only enough to be a sort of local success story. By the time I was sixteen I had my father's rating: charge driller - good pay, hard work.īut what can you do with the pay? It isn't enough for Full Medical.

I started, half-time and half-pay, at twelve. I don't know if you've ever worked in the food mines, but you've probably heard about them. All I inherited from him was his job, as soon as I was big enough to hold it. If it hadn't been for my mother and me he might have found a way to go. I heard my father talking about it going home that night in the airbus, when I guess they thought I was asleep, and the wistful hunger in his voice kept me awake. Freckled face, buck teeth, hair I brushed straight back and tied. And when you came right down to it, I didn't really need a mirror. We couldn't afford twenty-five dollars apiece, though. Pa said they weren't real, but to me they were real. Prayer fans and fire pearls, real Heechee-metal mirrors that you could buy for twenty-five dollars apiece. And there was a pressure tent with opaque sides, a dollar to get in, and inside somebody had arranged a display of imports from the Heechee tunnels on Venus. Hot dogs and popped soya, colored-paper hydrogen balloons, a circus with dogs and horses, wheels of fortune, games, rides. I couldn't have been more than six when my father and mother took me to a fair in Cheyenne. See all of librarian Nancy Pearl's Sci-Fi and fantasy picks.Īll my life I wanted to be a prospector, as far back as I can remember.

Gateway by Frederik Pohl