Gateway by Frederik Pohl

Gateway won the 1978 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1978 Locus Award for Best Novel, the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1978 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

Nearly a thousand small, abandoned Heechee starships are located at Gateway. By extremely dangerous trial and error, humans have partially learned how to operate them. The controls for selecting a destination have been identified, but nobody knows where a particular setting will take the ship, how long the trip will last, or even if enough fuel is available to get back.

Most settings lead to useless or lethal places. A few, however, result in the discovery of new Heechee artifacts and habitable planets in other star systems, making the crews extremely wealthy.

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