HNEFATAFL PLAYERS, Swedes or Muscovites. Grand Gateway Tournament. Will teach. 88-122.

PENPAL FROM Toronto would like to hear you tell what it's like out there. Address Tony, 955 Bay, TorOntCan M5S 2A3.

I NEED to cry. I will help you find your own pain. Ph 88-622.

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…hard. It was a pretty pleasant way to live, exploring Gateway and each other. Klara took on a maid, a stocky, fair young woman from the food mines of Carmarthen named Hywa. Except that the feedstock for the Welsh single-cell protein factories was coal instead of oil shale, her world had been almost exactly like mine. Her way out of it had not been a lottery ticket but two years as crew on a commercial spaceship. She couldn't even go back home. She had jumped ship on Gateway, forfeiting her bond of money she couldn't pay. And she couldn't prospect, either, because her one launch had left her with a heart arhythmia that sometimes looked like it was getting better and sometimes put her in Terminal Hospital for a week at a time. Hywa's job was partly to cook and clean for Klara and me, partly to baby-sit the little girl, Kathy Francis, when her father was on duty and Klara didn't want to be bothered. Klara had been losing pretty heavily at the casino, so she really couldn't afford Hywa, but then she couldn't afford me, either.

What made it easy to turn off our insights was that we pretended to each other, and sometimes to ourselves, that what we were doing was preparing ourselves, really well, for the day when the Right trip came along.

It wasn't hard to do that. A lot of real prospectors did the same thing, between trips. There was a group that called itself the Heechee Seekers, which met on Wednesday nights; it had been started by a prospector named Sam Kahane, kept up by others while he was off on a trip that hadn't worked out, and now had Sam back in it between trips, while he was waiting for the other two members of his crew to get back in shape for the next one. (Among other things, they had come back with scurvy, due to a malfunction in the food freezer.) Sam and his friends were gay and apparently set in a permanent three-way relationship, but that didn't affect his interest in Heechee lore. He had secured tapes of all the lectures of several courses on exostudies from East Texas Reserve, where Professor Hegramet had made himself the world's foremost authority on Heechee research. I learned a lot I hadn't known, although the central fact, that there were far more questions than answers about the Heechee, was pretty well known to everybody.