Heechee - The Gateway Trip Part 4

I hauled out our first instant igloo, dragged it into position, and ignited it. As it smoldered it puffed up like the children's toy that used to be called a Pharaoh's Serpent, producing a light yet tough ash that grew up around the digging site and joined in a seamless dome at the top. I had already emplaced the digging torch and the crawl-through lock. As the ash grew I manhandled the lock to get a close union and managed to get a perfect join the first time.

Dorrie and Cochenour stayed out of the way, watching from the ship through their plug windows. Then I keyed the radio on.

"You want to come in and watch me start it up?" I shouted.

Inside the helmets, they both nodded their heads; I could just see the bobbing motion through the plugs. "Come on, then," I yelled, and wiggled through the crawl lock. I signed for them to leave it open as they followed me in.

With the three of us and the digging equipment in it, the igloo was even more crowded than the airbody had been. They backed away as far from me as they could get, bent against the arc of the igloo wall, while I started up the augers, checked that they were vertical, and watched the first castings begin to spiral out of the cut.

The foam igloo reflects a lot of sound and absorbs even more. All the same, the din inside the igloo was a lot worse than in the howling winds outside; cutters are noisy. When I thought they'd seen enough to satisfy them for the moment, I waved them out of the crawl-through, followed, sealed it behind us, and led them back into the airbody.

"So far, so good," I said, twisting off the helmet and loosenng the suit. "We've got about forty meters to cut, I think. Might as well wait in here as out there."

"How long will it take?"

"Maybe an hour. You can do what you like; what I'm going to do is take a shower. Then we'll see how far we've got."

That was one of the nice things about having only three people aboard: we didn't have to worry much about water discipline. It's astonishing how a quick wet-down revives you after coming out of a heatsuit. When I'd finished mine I felt ready for anything.

I was even prepared to eat some of Boyce Cochenour's three. thousand-calorie gourmet cooking, but fortunately it wasn't necessary. Dorrie had taken over the kitchen, and what she laid out was simple, light, and reasonably nontoxic. On cooking like hers I might be able to survive long enough to collect my charter fee. It crossed my mind to wonder why she was a health nut, but then I thought,of course, she wants to keep Cochenour alive. With all his spare parts, no doubt he had dietary problems worse than mine.

Well, not "worse," exactly. At least he probably wasn't quite as likely to die of them.

The Venusian surface at that point was little more than ashy sand. The augers chewed it out very rapidly. Too rapidly, in fact. When I went back into the igloo it was filled almost solid with castings. I had a devil of a job getting to the machines so that I could rotate the auger to pump the castings out through the crawl lock.

It was a dirty job, but it didn't take long.

I didn't bother to go back into the airbody. I reported over the radio to Boyce and the girl, whom I could see staring out of the bull's-eyes at me. I told them I thought we were getting close.

But I didn't tell them exactly how close.

Actually, we were only a meter or so from the indicated depth of the anomaly, so close that I didn't bother to auger all the castings out. I just made enough room to maneuver around inside the igloo.

Then I redirected the augers. And in five minutes the castings were beginning to come up with the pale blue Heechee-metal glimmer that was the sign of a real tunnel.

VIII.

About ten minutes later, I keyed my helmet transmitter on and shouted, "Boyce! Dorrie! We've hit a tunnel!"

Either they were already in their suits or they dressed faster than any maze-rat. I unsealed the crawl-through and wriggled out to help them ... and they were already coming out of the airbody, pulling themselves hand over hand against the wind toward me.

They were both yelling questions and congratulations, but I stopped them. "Inside," I ordered. "You can see for yourself." As a matter of fact, they didn't have to go that far. They could see the blue color as soon as they knelt to enter the crawl-through.

I followed and sealed the outer port of the crawl-through behind me. The reason for that is simple enough. As long as the tunnel isn't breached, it doesn't matter what you do. But the interior of a Heechee tunnel that has remained inviolate is at a pressure only slightly above Earth-normal. Without the sealed dome of the igloo, the minute you crack the casing you let the whole ninety-thousandmillibar atmosphere of Venus pour in, heat and ablation and corrosive chemicals and all. If the tunnel is empty, or if what's in it is simple, st.u.r.dy stuff, there might not be any harm. But there are a couple of dozen mysterious chunks of sc.r.a.p in the museums that might have been interesting machines-if whoever found them hadn't let the atmosphere in to squeeze them into junk. If you hit the jackpot, you can destroy in a second what has waited hundreds of thousands of years to be discovered.

We gathered around the shaft, and I pointed down. The augers had left a clean shaft, about seventy centimeters by a little over a hundred, with rounded edges. At the bottom you could see the cold blue glow of the outside of the tunnel, only pocked by the augers and blotched by the loose castings I hadn't bothered to get out.

"Now what?" Cochenour demanded. His voice was hoa.r.s.e with excitement-natural enough, I guessed.

"Now we burn our way in."

I backed my clients as far away as they could get inside the igloo, pressed against the remaining heap of castings. Then I unlimbered the fire-jets. I'd already hung shear-legs over the shaft. The jets slipped right down on their cable until they were just a few centimeters above the round of the tunnel.

Then I fired them up.

You wouldn't think that anything a human being might do would make anything hotter than Venus does already, but the firejets were something special. In the small s.p.a.ce of the igloo the heat flamed up and around us. Our heatsuit cooling systems were overwhelmed in a moment.

Dorrie gasped, "Oh! I-I think I'm going to-"

Cochenour grabbed her arm. "Faint if you want to," he said fiercely, "but don't get sick inside your suit. Waithers! How bug does this go on?"

It was as hard for me as it was for them. Practice doesn't get you used to something like standing in front of a blast furnace with the doors off the hinges. "Maybe a minute," I gasped. "Hold on- it's all right."

It actually took a little more than that, maybe ninety seconds. My suit telltales were shouting overload alarm for more than half of that time. But the suits were built for these temporary overloads. As long as we didn't cook inside them, the suits themselves would survive.

Then we were through. A half-meter circular section of the tunnel roof sagged, fell at one side, and hung there, swaying.

I turned off the jets. We all breathed hard for a couple of minutes, while the Suit coolers gradually caught up with the load.

"Wow," said Dorotha. "That was pretty rough."

In the light that splashed up out of the shaft I could see that Cochenour was frowning. I didn't say anything. I just gave the jets another five-second burn to cut away the rest of the circular section. It fell free to the tunnel floor, with a smack like rock.

Then I turned on my helmet radio.

"There's no pressure differential," I said.

Cochenour's frown didn't change, nor did he speak.

"That means this one has been breached," I went on. "Somebody found it, opened it up-probably cleaned it out, if there ever was anything here-and just didn't report it. Let's go back to the airbody and get cleaned up."

Dorotha shrieked, "Audee, what's the matter with you? I want to go down there and see what's inside!"

"Shut up, Dorrie," Cochenour said bitterly. "Don't you hear what he's saying? This one's a washout."

Well, there's always the chance that a breached tunnel might have been opened by some seismological event, not a maze-rat with a cutting torch. If so, there might possibly be something in it worth having anyway. And I didn't have the heart to kill all Dorotha's enthusiasm with one blow.

So we did swing down the cable, one by one, into the Heechee dig. We looked around. It was wholly bare, as most of them are, as far as we could see. That wasn't actually very far. The other thing wrong with a breached tunnel is that you need special equipment to explore it. With the overloads they'd already had, our suits were all right for another few hours but not much more than that.

So we tramped down the tunnel about a kilometer and found bare walls, chopped-off struts on the glowing blue walls that might once have held something-and nothing movable. Not even junk.

Then they were both willing to tramp back and climb up the cable to the airbody. Cochenour made it on his own. So did Dorrie, though I was standing by to help her; she did it all hand over hand, using the stirrups s.p.a.ced along the cable.

We cleaned up and made ourselves a meal. We had to eat, but Cochenour was not in a mood for his gourmet exhibition. Silently, Dorotha threw tablets into the cooker and we fed gloomily on prefabs.

"Well, that's only the first one," she said at last, determined to be sunny about it. "And it's only our second day."

Cochenour said, "Shut up, Dorrie. If there's one thing I'm not, it's a good loser." He was staring at the probe trace, still displayed on the screen. "Walthers, how many tunnels are unmarked but empty, like this one?"

"How do I know? If they're unmarked, there's no record."

"Then those traces don't mean anything, do they? We might dig all eight and find every one a dud."

I nodded. "We surely might, Boyce."

He looked at me alertly. "And?"

"And that's not the worst part of it. At least this trace was a real tunnel. I've taken parties out who would've gone mad with joy to open even a breached tunnel, after a couple of weeks of digging up dikes and intrusions. It's perfectly possible all seven of those others are nothing at all. Don't knock it, Boyce. At least you got some action for your money."

He brushed that off. "You picked this spot, Walthers. Did you know what you were doing?"

Did I? The only way to prove that to him would be to find a live one, of course. I could have told him about the months of studying records from the first landings on. I could have mentioned how much trouble I went to, and how many regulations I broke to get a look at the military survey reports, or how far I'd traveled to talk to the Defense crews who'd been on some of the early digs. I might have let him know how hard it had been to locate old Jorolemon Hegramet, now teaching exotic archaeology back in Tennessee; but all I said was, "The fact that we found one tunnel shows that I know my business. That's all you paid for. It's up to you whether we keep looking or not."

He gazed at his thumbnail, considering.

"Buck up, Boyce," Dorrie said cheerfully. "Look at the other chances we've still got-and even if we miss, it'll still be fun telling everybody about it back in Cincinnati."

He didn't even look at her, just said, "Isn't there a way of telling whether or not a tunnel has been breached without going inside?"

"Sure. You can tell by tapping the outside sh.e.l.l. You can hear the difference in the sound."

"But you have to dig down to it first?"

"Right."

We left it at that. I got back into my heatsuit to strip away the now useless igloo so that we could move the drills.

I didn't really want to discuss it anymore, because I didn't want him to ask me a question I might have to lie about. I try the best I can to stick to the truth, because it's easier to remember what you've said that way.

On the other hand, I'm not fanatic about it. I don't see that it's any of my business to correct a mistaken impression. For instance, obviously Cochenour supposed I hadn't bothered to sound the tunnel before calling them in.

But, of course, I had. That was the first thing I did as soon as the drill got down that far. And when I heard the high-pressure thunk it broke my heart. I had to wait a couple of minutes before I could call them to announce that we'd reached the outer casing.

At that time I had not quite faced up to the question of just what I would have done if it had turned out the tunnel was Un-breached.

IX.

Boyce Cochenour and Dorrie Keefer were maybe the fiftieth or sixtieth party I'd taken on a Heechee dig. I wasn't surprised that they were willing to work like coolies. I don't care how lazy and bored Terry tourists start out, by the time they actually come close to finding something that once belonged to an almost completely unknown alien race, left there when the closest thing to a human being on Earth was a sbope-browed, furry little beast whose best trick was killing other beasts by hitting them on the head with antelope bones ... by then they begin to burn with exploration fever.

So the two of them worked hard. And they drove me hard. And I was as eager as they. Maybe more so as the days went past and I found myself rubbing my right side, just under the short ribs, more and more of the time.

We got a couple looks from the Defense boys. They overfiew us in their high-speed airbodies half a dozen times in the first few days. They didn't say much, just formal radio requests for identification. Regulations say that if you find anything you're supposed to report it right away. Over Cochenour's objections I reported finding that first breached tunnel, which surprised them a little, I think.

That's all we had to report.

Site B was a pegmat.i.te dike. The other two fairly bright ones, that I called D and E, showed nothing at all when we dug-meaning that the sound reflections had probably been caused by nothing more than invisible interfaces in rock or ash or gravel.

I vetoed trying to dig Site C, the best looking of the bunch.

Cochenour gave me a h.e.l.l of an argument about it, but I held out. The military were still looking in on us every now and then, and I didn't want to get any closer to their perimeter than we already were. I said maybe, if we didn't have any luck elsewhere, we could sneak back to C for a quick dig before returning to the Spindle, and we left it at that.

We lifted the airbody, moved to a new position, and set out a new pattern of probes.

By the end of the second week we had dug nine times and come up empty all nine. We were getting low on igloos and probe percussers. We'd run out of tolerance for each other completely.

Cochenour had turned sullen and savage. I hadn't planned on being best buddies with the man when I first met him, but I hadn't expected him to be as bad company as that. I didn't think he had any right to take it so hard, because it was obviously only a game with him. With all his fortune, the extra money he might pick up by discovering some new Heechee artifacts couldn't have meant much-just extra points on a scorepad-but he was playing for blood.

I wasn't particularly gracious myself, for that matter. The plain fact was that the pills from the Quackery weren't helping as much as they should. My mouth tasted as though rats had nested in it, I was getting headaches, and every once in a while I'd be woozy enough to knock things over.

See, the thing about the liver is that it sort of regulates your internal diet. It filters out poisons. It converts some of the carbohydrates into other carbohydrates that you can use. It patches together amino acids into proteins. If it isn't working, you die.

The doctor had been all over it with me. Maze-rats get liver trouble a lot; it comes when you save yourself a little trouble by letting your internal suit pressure build up-it sort of compresses the gas in your gut and squeezes the liver. He'd showed me pictures. I could visualize what was going on in my insides, with the mahogany-red liver cells dying and being replaced by cl.u.s.ters of fat and yellowish stuff. It was an ugly picture. The ugliest part was that there wasn't anything I could do about it. Only go on taking pills- and they wouldn't work much longer. I counted the days to bye-bye, liver, h.e.l.lo, hepatic failure.

So we were a bad bunch. I was being a b.a.s.t.a.r.d because I was beginning to feel sick and desperate. Cochenour was being a b.a.s.t.a.r.d because that was his nature. The only decent human being aboard was the girl.

Dorrie did her best, she really did. She was sometimes sweet (and often even pretty), and she was always ready to meet the power people, Cochenour and me, more than halfway.

It was obvious that it was tough on her. Dorotha Keefer was only a kid. No matter how grown-up she acted, she just hadn't been alive long enough to grow defenses against concentrated meanness. Add in the fact that we were all beginning to hate the sight and sound and smell of each other (and in an airbody you get to know a lot about how people smell), and there wasn't much joy in this skylarking tour of Venus for Dorrie Keefer.

Or for any of us . . . especially after I broke the news that we were down to our last igloo.

Cochenour cleared his throat. It wasn't a polite sound. It was the beginning of a war cry. He sounded like a fighter-plane jockey blowing the covers off his guns in preparation for combat, and Dorne tried to head him off with a diversion. "Audee," she said brightly, "do you know what I think we could do? We could go back to that Site C, the one that looked good near the military reservation."

It was the wrong diversion. I shook my head. "No."

"What the h.e.l.l do you mean, 'No'?" Cochenour rumbled, revving up for battle.

"What I said. No. It's too close to the Defense guys. If there's a tunnel, it will run right onto the reservation, and they'll come down on us." I tried to be persuasive. "That's a desperation trick, and I'm not that desperate."

"Walthers," he snarled, "you'll be desperate if I tell you to be desperate. I can still stop p..ayment on that check."

I corrected him. "No, you can't. The union won't let you. The regulations are very clear about that. You pay up unless I disobey a lawful request. What you want isn't lawful. Going inside the military reservation is extremely against the law."

He shifted over to cold war. "No," he said softly. "You're wrong about that. It's only against the law if a court says it is, after we do it. You're only right if your lawyers are smarter than my lawyer. Honestly, Waithers, they won't be. I pay my lawyers to be the smartest there are."

I was not in a good bargaining position. It wasn't just that what Cochenour said was true enough. He had help from a very powerful ally. My liver was on his side. I certainly could not spare time for arbitration, because without the transplant his payment was going to buy I wouldn't live that long.

Dorrie had been listening with her birdlike air of friendly inter- est. She got between us. "Well, then, how about this? We just got to where we are now. Why don't we wait and see what the probes show? Maybe we'll hit something even better than that Site C-"

"There isn't going to be anything good here," he said without taking his eyes off me.