Of course, you can’t build a high-tech, spacefaring civilization out of solitary, noninterfering individuals. But by the time the primitive Heechee had reached the point of projects so ambitious that they required the cooperation of many their habits were set. They had never formed the custom of patriotism. They didn’t have nations to be patriotic to. They did have a code of behavior—“laws”—and institutions to codify and enforce them (“councils,” “courts,” “police”), but that was about it. Earthly governments spent most of their energies defending themselves against the attacks of—or waging their own attacks against—the governments of other nations. When the reciprocal threat was physical, the method of doing so was military. When the threat was economic, the effort was expressed in subsidies, tariffs, and embargoes. The Heechee didn’t need such national enterprises, having no nations to compete with each other.
And so the Heechees lived in their crowded Core, contentedly enough, while they waited to be discovered.
Their lives within the Core were not entirely normal by human standards, however.
There was one significant divergence from normality. The Heechee had been living there for some half a million years—since not long after they visited the early Earth and carried away a handful of australopithecines to see what the stupid little beasts might develop into, given a chance—but it didn’t seem that long to them.
Albert Einstein would have immediately understood why that was. In fact, he had predicted something like it. The Heechee were within a black hole. Therefore they obeyed the cosmological rules governing black holes, including the phenomenon of time dilation. Time that sped along in the outer galaxy passed with glacial slowness inside the Core; the ratio was something like 40,000 to 1. That was a very great difference—so great that many of the Heechees who had left their ships on Gateway were still alive inside the Core. Oh, they had grown a bit older, yes. Time hadn’t stopped. But for them only a few decades had passed, not half a million years.
And when the Heechee ran away and hid they left sentinels behind them. They had a plan.
There was an unfortunate element of risk to their plan. The Heechee could not be certain that some other intelligent, spacefaring race would evolve and find the artifacts they had left and use them; and if those things didn’t happen, the plan was wasted. Still, that was the way to bet it. They counted on it, in fact; and so the Heechee had set robot sentinels in concealed places in the galaxy to find these new races when they showed up.
When the human race began to make noise in the galaxy, the Heechee’s watchmen heard it.
The Heechee then employed that twisted crystal and ebon rod that they called the Heechee equivalent of “can opener” to come out and check their “collection traps,” to see just what had begun to happen in the galaxy in the last few centuries (or, from their viewpoint, couple of days). As a normal precaution, the Heechee sent a routine scouting party out to investigate…
But that is, really, quite another story.
Frederik Pohl has been everything one man can be in the world of science fiction: fan (a founder of the fabled Futurians), book and magazine editor, agent, and, above all, writer. As editor of Galaxy in the 1950s, he helped set the tone for a decade of sf—including his own memorable stories such as The Space Merchants (in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth).
He has also written The Way the Future Was, a memoir of his first forty-five years in science fiction. Frederik Pohl was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1919, and now lives in Palatine, Illinois.
Frederik Pohl, The Gateway Trip
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