Heechee - The Gateway Trip Part 3

For a man more than ninety years old, Boyce Cochenour was spry. I don't mean just that he was healthy. Full Medical will do that for you, because you just replace whatever wears out or begins to look tacky. You can't replace the brain, though. So what you usually see in the very rich old ones is a bronzed, muscular body that shakes and hesitates and drops things.

About that Cochenour had been very lucky.

He was going to be abrasive company for three weeks. He'd already insisted I show him how to pilot an airbody, and he had learned fast. When I decided to use a little flight time to give the cooling system a somewhat premature thousand-hour check, he helped me pull the covers, check the refrigerant levels, and clean the filters. Then he decided to cook us lunch.

Dorrie Keefer took over as my helper while I moved some of the supplies around, getting the autosonic probes out. At the steady noise level of the inside of an airbody, our normal voices wouldn't carry to Cochenour, a couple of meters away at the stove. I thought 0f pumping the girl about him while we checked the probes. I decided against it. I already knew the important thing about Cochenour, namely that with any luck he might be going to pay for my new liver. I didn't need to know what he and Dorrie thought about when they thought about each other.

So what we talked about was the probes. About how they would fire percussive charges into the Venusian rock and time the returning echoes. And about what the chances were of finding something really good. ("Well, what are the chances of winning a sweepstakes? For any individual ticket holder they're bad. But there's always one winner somewhere!") And about what had made me come to Venus in the first place. I mentioned my father's name, but she'd never heard of the deputy governor of Texas. Too young, no doubt. Anyway she had been born and bred in southern Ohio, where Cochenour had worked as a kid and to which he'd returned as abillionaire. She told me, without my urging, how he'd been building a new processing center there, and how many headaches that had been-trouble with the unions, trouble with the banks, bad trouble with the government-and so he'd decided to take a good long time off to loaf. I looked over to where he was stirring up a sauce and said, "He loafs harder than anybody else I ever saw."

"He's a work addict, Audee. I imagine that's how he got rich in the first place." The airbody lurched, and I dropped everything to jump for the controls. I heard Cochenour howl behind me, but I was busy locating a better transit level. By the time I had climbed a thousand meters and reset the autopilot he was rubbing his wrist and swearing at me.

"Sorry," I said.

He said dourly, "I don't mind your scalding the skin off my arm. Ican always buy more skin, but you nearly made me spill the gravy.

I checked the virtual globe. The bright ship marker was two-thirds of the way to our destination. "Is lunch about ready?," I asked. "We'll be there in an hour."

For the first time he looked startled. "So soon? I thought you said this thing was subsonic."

"I did. You're on Venus, Mr. Cochenour. At this level the speed of sound is a lot faster than on Earth."

He looked thoughtful, but all he said was "Well, we can eat any minute." Later he said, while we were finishing up, "I think maybe I don't know as much about this planet as I might. If you want to give us the guide's lecture, we'll listen."

"You already know the outlines," I told him. "Say, you're a great cook, Mr. Cochenour. I know I packed all the provisions, but I don't even know what this is I'm eating."

"If you come to my office in Cincinnati," he said, "you can ask for Mr. Cochenour, but while we're living in each other's armpits you might as well call me Boyce. And if you like the frica.s.see, why aren't you eating it?"

The answer was, because it might kill me. I didn't want to get into a discussion that might lead to why I needed his fee so badly. "Doctor's orders," I said, "Have to lay off the fats for a while. I think he thinks I'm putting on too much weight."

Cochenour looked at me appraisingly, but all he said was "The lecture?"

"Well, let's start with the most important part," I said, carefully pouring coffee. "While we're inside this airbody you can do what you like-walk around, eat, drink, smoke if you got 'em, whatever. The cooling system is built for more than three times this many people, plus their cooking and appliance loads, with a safety factor of two. Air and water, more than we'd need for two months. Fuel, enough for three round trips plus maneuvering. If anything went wrong we'd yell for help and somebody would come and get us in a couple of hours at the most. Probably it would be the Defense boys, because they're closest and they have really fast airbodies. The worst thing would be if the hull breached and the whole Venusian atmosphere tried to come in. If that happened fast we'd just be dead. It never happens fast, though. We'd have time to get into the suits, and we can live in them for thirty hours. Long before that we'd be picked up."

"a.s.suming, of course, that nothing went wrong with the radio at the same time."

"Right. a.s.suming that. You know that you can get killed anywhere, if enough accidents happen at once."

He poured himself another cup of coffee and tipped a little brandy into it. "Go on."

"Well, outside the airbody it's a lot trickier. You've only got the suit to keep you alive, and its useful life, as I say, is only thirty hours. It's a question of refrigeration. You can carry plenty of air and water, and you don't have to worry about food on that time scale, but it takes a lot of compact energy to get rid of the diffuse energy all around you. That means fuel. The cooling systems use up a lot of fuel, and when that's gone you'd better be back in the airbody. Heat isn't the worst way to die. You pa.s.s out before you begin to hurt. But in the end you're dead.

"The other thing is, you want to check your Suit every time you put it on. Pressure it up, and watch the gauge for leaks. I'll check, too, but don't rely on me. It's your life. And watch the face-plates. They're pretty strong-you can drive nails with them without breaking them-but if they're hit hard enough by something that's also hard enough they can crack all the same. That way you're dead, too."

Dorrie asked quietly, "Have you ever lost a tourist?"

"No." But then I added, "Others have. Five or six get killed every year."

"I'll play at those odds," Cochenour said seriously. "Anyway, that wasn't the lecture I wanted, Audee. I mean, I certainly want to hear how to stay alive, but I a.s.sume you would have told us all this before we left the ship anyway. What I really wanted to know was how come you picked this particular mascon to prospect."

This old geezer with the muscle-beach body was beginning to bother me, with his disturbing habit of asking the questions I didn't want to answer. There definitely was a reason why I had picked this site. It had to do with about five years of study, a lot of digging, and about a quarter of a million dollars' worth of correspondence, at s.p.a.ce-mail rates, with people like Professor Hegramet back on Earth.

But I didn't want to tell him all my reasons. There were about a dozen sites that I really wanted to explore. If this happened to be one of the payoff places, he would come out of it a lot richer than I would-that's what the contracts you sign say: forty percent to the charterer, five percent to the guide, the rest to the government- and that should be enough for him. If this one happened not to pay off, I didn't want him taking some other guide to one of the others I'd marked.

So I only said, "Call it an informed guess. I promised you a good shot at a tunnel that's never been opened, and I hope to keep my promise. And now let's get the food put away; we're within ten minutes of where we're going."

With everything strapped down and ourselves belted up, we dropped out of the relatively calm layers into the big surface winds again.

We were over the big south-central ma.s.sif, about the same elevation as the lands surrounding the Spindle. That's the elevation where most of the action is on Venus. Down in the lowlands and the deep rift valleys the pressures run a hundred and twenty thousand millibars and up. My airbody wouldn't take any of that for very long. Neither would anybody else's, except for a few of the special research and military types. Fortunately, it seemed the Heechee didn't care for the lowlands, either. Nothing of theirs has ever been located much below ninety-bar. Doesn't mean it isn't there, of course.

Anyway, I verified our position on the virtual globe and on the detail charts, and deployed the first three autosonic probes.

The winds threw them all over the place as soon as they dropped free. That was all right. It doesn't much matter where the probes land, within broad limits, which is a good thing. They dropped like javelins at first, then flew around like straws in the wind until their little rockets cut in and the ground-seeking controls fired them to the surface.

Every one embedded itself properly. You aren't always that lucky, so it was a good start.

I verified their position on the detail charts. It was close enough to an equilateral triangle, which is about how you want them. Then I made sure everybody was really strapped in, opened the scanning range, and began circling around.

"Now what?" bellowed Cochenour. I noticed the girl had put her earplugs back in, but he wasn't willing to risk missing a thing.

"Now we wait for the probes to feel around for Heechee tunnels. It'll take a couple of hours." While I was talking I brought the airbody down through the surface layers. Now we were being thrown around by the gusts. The buffeting got pretty bad.

But I found what I was looking for, a surface formation like a blind arroyo, and tucked us into it with only one or two bad moments. Cochenour was watching very carefully, and I grinned to myself. This was where pilotage counted, not en route or at the prepared pads over the Spindle. When he could do what I was doing now he could get along without someone like me-not before.

Our position looked all right, so I fired four hold-downs, tethered stakes with explosive heads that opened out in the ground. I winched them tight, and all of them held.

That was also a good sign. Reasonably pleased with myself, I released the belt catches and stood up. "We're here for at least a day or two," I told them. "More if we're lucky. How did you like the ride?"

Dorrie was taking the earplugs out, now that the protecting walls of the arroyo had cut the thundering down to a mere scream. "I'm glad I don't get airsick," she said.

Cochenour was thinking, not talking. He was studying the air-body controls while he lit another cigarette.

Dorotha said, "One question, Audee. Why couldn't we stay up where it's quieter?"

"Fuel. I carry enough to get us around, but not to hover for days. Is the noise bothering you?"

She made a face.

"You'll get used to it. It's like living next to a s.p.a.ceport. At first you wonder how anybody stands the noise for a single hour. After you've been there a week you'll miss it if it stops."

She moved over to the bull's-eye and gazed pensively out at the landscape. We'd crossed over into the night portion, and there wasn't much to see but dust and small objects whirling around through our external light beams. "It's that first week I'm worrying about," she said.

I flicked on the probe readout. The little percussive heads were firing their slap-charges and measuring each other's echoes, but it was too early to see anything. The screen was barely beginning to build up a shadowy pattern. There were more holes than detail.

Cochenour finally spoke up. "How long until you can make some sense out of the readout?" he demanded. Another point: he hadn't asked what it was.

"Depends on how close and how big anything is. You can make a guess in an hour or so, but I like all the data I can get. Six or eight hours, I'd say. There's no hurry."

He growled, "I'm in a hurry, Walthers."

The girl cut in. "What should we do, Audee? Play three-handed bridge?"

"Whatever you want, but I'd advise some sleep. I've got pills if you want them. If we do find anything-and remember, the odds are really rotten on the first try-we'll want to be wide awake for a while."

"All right," Dorotha said, reaching out for the spansules, but Cochenour stopped her.

"What about you?" he demanded.

"I'll sack in pretty soon. I'm waiting for something."

He didn't ask what. Probably, I thought, because he already knew. I decided that when I did hit my bunk I wouldn't t~ke a sleepy pill right away. This Cochenour was not only the richest tourist I had ever guided, he was one of the best informed. And I wanted to think about that for a while.

So none of us went right to sleep, and what I was waiting for took almost an hour to come. The boys at the base were getting a little sloppy; they should have been after us before this.

The radio buzzed and then blared. "Unidentified vessel at one three five, zero seven, four eight, and seven two, five one, five four! Please identify yourself and state your purpose."

Cochenour looked up inquiringly from his gin game with the girl. I smiled rea.s.suringly. "As long as they're saying 'please' there's no problem," I told him, and opened the transmitter.

"This is pilot Audee Walthers, airbody Poppa Tare Nine One, out of the Spindle. We are licensed and have filed approved flight plans. I have two Terry tourists aboard, purpose recreational exploration."

"Acknowledged. Please wait," blared the radio. The military always broadcasts at maximum gain. Hangover from drill-sergeant days, no doubt.

I turned off the microphone and told my pa.s.sengers, "They're checking our flight plan. Nothing to worry about."

In a moment the Defense communicator came back, loud as ever. "You are eleven point four kilometers bearing two eight three degrees from terminator of a restricted area. Proceed with caution. Under Military Regulations One Seven and One Eight, Sections-"

"I know the drill," I cut in. "I have my guide's license and have explained the restrictions to the pa.s.sengers."

"Acknowledged," blared the radio. "We will keep you under surveillance. If you observe vessels or parties on the surface, they are our perimeter teams. Do not interfere with them in any way. Respond at once to any request for identification or information." The carrier buzz cut off.

"They act nervous," Cochenour said.

"No. That's how they always are. They're used to seeing people like us around. They've got nothing else to do with their time, that's all."

Dorrie said hesitantly, "Audee, you told them you'd explained the restrictions to us. I don't remember that part."

"Oh, I explained them, all right. We stay out of the restricted area, because if we don't they'll start shooting. That is the Whole of the Law."

VII.

I set a wake-up for four hours, and the others heard me moving around and got up, too. Dorrie fetched us coffee from the warmer, and we stood drinking it and looking at the patterns the probe computer had traced.

I took several minutes to study them, although the patterns were clear enough at first look. They showed eight major anomalies that could have been Heechee warrens. One was almost right outside our door. We wouldn't have to move the airbody to dig for it.

I showed them the anomalies, one by one. Cochenour just studied them thoughtfully. Dorotha asked, "You mean all of those blobs are unexplored tunnels?"

"No. Wish they were. But even if they were: One, any or all of them could have been explored by somebody who didn't go to the trouble of recording it. Two, they don't have to be tunnels. They could be fracture faults, or dikes, or little rivers of some kind of molten material that ran out of somewhere and hardened and got covered over a billion years ago. The only thing we know for sure so far is that there probably aren't any unexplored tunnels in this area except in those eight places."

"So what do we do?"

"We dig. And then we see what we've got."

Cochenour asked, "Where do we dig?"

I pointed right next to the bright delta shape of our airbody. "Right here."

"Is that the best bet?"

"Well, not necessarily." I considered what to tell him and decided to experiment with the truth. "There are three traces altogether that look like better bets than the others-here, I'll mark them." I keyed the chart controls, and the three good traces immediately displayed letters: A, B, and C. "A is the one that runs right under the arroyo here, so we'll dig it first."

"The brightest ones are best, is that it?"

I nodded.

"But C over here is the brightest of the lot. Why don't we dig that first?"

I chose my words carefully. "Partly because we'd have to move the airbody. Partly because it's on the outside perimeter of the survey area; that means the results aren't as reliable as right around the ship. But those aren't the most important reasons. The most important reason is that C is on the edge of the line our itchy-fingered Defense friends are telling us to stay away from."

Cochenour snickered incredulously. "Are you telling me that if you find a real untouched Heechee tunnel you'll stay out of it just because some soldier tells you it's a no-no?"

I said, "The problem doesn't arise. We have seven legal anomalies to look at. Also-the military will be checking us from time to time. Particularly in the next day or two."

"All right," Cochenour insisted, "suppose we come up empty on the legal ones. What then?"

"I never borrow trouble."

"But suppose."

"d.a.m.n it, Boyce! How do I know?"

He gave it up then, but winked at Dorrie and chuckled. "What did I tell you, honey? He's a bigger bandit than I am!"

But she was looking at me, and what she said was "Why are you that color?"

I fobbed her off, but when I looked in the mirror I could see that even the whites of my eyes were turning yellowish.

The next few hours we were too busy to talk about theoretical possibilities. We had some concrete facts to worry about.

The biggest concrete fact was an awful lot of high-temperature, high-pressure gas that we had to keep from killing us. That was what the heatsuits were for. My own suit was custom-made, of course, and needed only the fittings and tanks to be checked. Boyce and the girl had rental units. I'd paid top dollar for them, and they were good. But good isn't perfect. I had them in and out of the suits half a dozen times, checking the fit and making adjustments until they were as right as I could get them. The suits were laminated twelve-ply, with nine degrees of freedom at the essential joints, and their own little fuel batteries. They wouldn't fail. I wasn't worried about failure. What I was worried about was comfort, because a very small itch or rub can get serious when there's no way to stop it.

Finally they were good enough for a trial. We all huddled in the lock and opened the port to the surface of Venus.

We were still in darkness, but there's so much scatter from the sun that it doesn't get really dark ever. I let them practice walking around the airbody, leaning into the wind, bracing themselves against the hold-downs and the side of the ship, while I got ready to dig.