"I'll take any-- almost anything," I said.

She looked at me quizzically and then returned to her desk. She was astonishingly graceful, considering she had to mass a hundred kilos. Maybe a fat woman's fantasy of not sagging accounted for her desire to hold this job and stay on Gateway. "You'll be doing the lowest kind of unskilled labor," she warned. "We don't pay much for that. One-eighty a day."

"I'll take it!"

"Your per capita has to come out of it. Take that away and maybe twenty dollars a day for toke money, and what do you have left?"

"I could always do odd jobs if I needed more."

She sighed. "You're just postponing the day, Rob. I don't know. Mr. Hsien, the director, keeps a very close watch on job applications. I'll find it very hard to justify hiring you. And what are you going to do if you get sick and can't work? Who'll pay your tax?"

"I'll go back, I guess."

"And waste all your training?" She shook her head. "You disgust me, Rob."

But she punched me out a work ticket that instructed me to report to the crew chief on Level Grand, Sector North, for assignment in plant maintenance.

I didn't like that interview with Emma Fother, but I had been warned I wouldn't. When I talked it over with Klara that evening, she told me actually I'd got off light.

"You're lucky you drew Emma. Old Hsien sometimes keeps people hanging until their tax money's all gone."

"Then what?" I got up and sat on the edge of her cot, feeling for my footgloves. "Out the airlock?"

"Don't make fun, it could conceivably come to that. Hsien's an old Mao type, very hard on social wastrels."

"You're a fine one to talk!"

She grinned, rolled over, and rubbed her nose against my back. "The difference between you and me, Rob," she said, "is that I have a couple of bucks stashed away from my first mission. It didn't pay big, but it paid somewhat. Also I've been out, and they need people like me for teaching people like you."

I leaned back against her hip, half turned and put my hand on her, more reminiscently than aggressively. There were certain subjects we didn't talk much about, but-- "Klara?"

"What's it like, on a mission?"

She rubbed her chin against my forearm for a moment, looking at the holoview of Venus against the wall. ". . . Scary," she said.

I waited, but she didn't say any more about it, and that much I already knew. I was scared right there on Gateway. I didn't have to launch myself on the Heechee Mystery Bus Trip to know what being scared was like, I could feel it already.

"You don't really have a choice, dear Rob," she said, almost tenderly, for her.

I felt a sudden rush of anger. "No, I don't! You've exactly described my whole life, Klara. I've never had a choice -- except once, when I won the lottery and decided to come here. And I'm not sure I made the right decision then."