"I suggest, Rob, that you try--"

I surge against the straps, kicking chunks out of the foam matting, roaring, "Shut up, you! I don't want to hear. I can't cope with this, don't you understand me? I can't! Can't cope, can't cope!"

Sigfrid waits patiently for me to stop weeping, which happens rather suddenly. And then, before he can say anything, I say wearily, "Oh, hell, Sigfrid, this whole thing isn't getting us anywhere. I think we should call it off. There must be other people who need your services more than I do."

"As to that, Rob," he says, "I am quite competent to meet all the demands on my time."

I am drying my tears on the paper towels he has left beside the mat and don't answer.

"There is still excess capacity, in fact," he goes on. "But you must be the judge of whether we continue with these sessions or not."

"Have you got anything to drink in the recovery room?" I ask him.

"Not in the sense you mean, no. There is what I am told is a very pleasant bar on the top floor of this building."

"Well," I say, "I just wonder what I'm doing here."

And, fifteen minutes later, having confirmed my appointment for the next week, I am drinking a cup of tea in Sigfrid's recovery cubicle. I listen to hear if his next patient has started screaming yet, but I can't hear anything.

So I wash my face, adjust my scarf, and slick down the little cowlick in my hair. I go up to the bar for a quick one. The headwaiter, who is human, knows me, and gives me a seat looking south toward the Lower Bay rim of the bubble. He looks toward a tall, copper-skinned girl with green eyes sitting by herself, but I shake my head. I drink one short drink, admire the legs on the copper-skinned girl and, thinking mostly about where I am going to go for dinner, keep my appointment for my guitar lesson.

2

All my life I wanted to be a prospector, as far back as I can remember. I couldn't have been more than six when my father and mother took me to a fair in Cheyenne. Hot dogs and popped soya, colored-paper hydrogen balloons, a circus with dogs and horses, wheels of fortune, games, rides. 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. Prayer fans and fire pearls, real Heechee-metal mirrors that you could buy for twenty-five dollars apiece. Pa said they weren't real, but to me they were real. We couldn't afford twenty-five dollars apiece, though. And when you came right down to it, I didn't really need a mirror. Freckled face, buck teeth, hair I brushed straight back and tied. They had just found Gateway. 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.