He had accumulated a surprising amount of goods. I wondered how he had managed to stash them all away in a room as tiny as my own: three fabric carriers all stuffed full, holodisks and a viewer, book tapes and a few actual books. I took the carriers. On Earth they would have weighed more than I could handle, probably fifty or sixty kilos, but of course on Gateway lifting them was no problem; it was only tugging them through the corridors and jockeying them down the shafts that was tricky. I had the mass, but Metchnikov had the problems, since what he was carrying was in odd shapes and varying degrees of fragility. It was about an hour's haul, actually. We wound up in a part of the asteroid I'd never seen before, where an elderly Pakistani woman counted the pieces, gave Metchnikov a receipt and began dragging them away down a thickly vine-grown corridor.

"Whew," he grunted. "Well, thanks."

"You're welcome." We started back toward a dropshaft, and making conversation, I assume out of some recognition that he owed me a social favor and should practice some social skills, he said:

"So how was the course?"

"You mean apart from the fact that I've just finished it and still don't have any idea how to fly those goddamned ships?"

"Well, of course you don't," he said, irritably. "The course isn't going to teach you that. It just gives you the general idea. The way you learn, you do it. Only hard part's the lander, of course. Anyway, you've got your issue of tapes?"

"Oh, yes." There were six cassettes of them. Each of us had been given a set when we completed the first week's course. They had everything that had been said, plus a lot of stuff about different kinds of controls that the Corporation might, or might not, fit on a Heechee board and so on.

"So play them over," he said. "If you've got any sense you'll take them with you when you ship out. Got plenty of time to play them then. Mostly the ships fly themselves anyway."

"They'd better," I said, doubting it. "So long." He waved and dropped onto the down-cable without looking back. Apparently I had agreed to take the drink he owed me at the party. Where it wouldn't cost him anything.

I thought of looking for Sheri again, and decided against it. I was in a part of Gateway I didn't know, and of course I'd left my map back in my room. I drifted along, more or less at random, past star-points where some of the tunnels smelled musty and dusty and there weren't many people, then through an inhabited section that seemed to be mostly Eastern European. I didn't recognize the languages, but there were little notes and wall signs hanging from the everywhere-growing ivy that were in alphabets that looked Cyrillic or even stranger. I came to a dropshaft, thought for a moment, and then caught hold of the up-cable. The easy way not to be lost on Gateway is to go up until you get to the spindle, where "up" ends.