One of the absolute must-have top ten SF books of all time with an awesome new cover treatment.
Wealth or Death. Those were the choices Gateway offered.
Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee.
Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control. Some came back with discoveries which made their intrepid pilots rich; others returned with their remains barely identifiable.
It was the ultimate game of Russian roulette, but in this resource-starved future there was no shortage of desperate volunteers.
All the elements for a great read: humour, drama, tragedy, great one-liners, a marvellously quirky central character and a great supporting character in the form of a robotic psychologist. - Garry Kilworth.
A wonderfully satisfying SF premise. - New York Times Book Review.
Pohl and Kornbluth started writing together as early as 1940, although both authors produced a wide variety of stories separately, under their own names and psuedonyms. Each wrote sections, starting where the other left off, and through long experience they developed an almost telepathic awareness of each other's intentions.