The Gateway Trip Read online

  By my suit chronometer thirteen hours were gone. That left thirty-some before Cochenour would come back to get us. I didn’t see any point in spending it all sitting there.

  But, on the other hand, I didn’t see any point in doing anything else.

  Of course, I thought, I could always go to sleep for a while…and then I woke up, and realized that that was what I had been doing.

  Dorrie was curled up beside me, also asleep.

  You may wonder how a person can sleep in the teeth of a south polar thermal gale. It isn’t all that hard. All it takes is that you be wholly worn out, and wholly despairing. Sleeping isn’t just to knit that old raveled sleeve, it is a good way to shut the world off when the world is too lousy to face. As ours was.

  But Venus may be the last refuge of the Puritan ethic. On Venus you work. The ones who don’t feel that way get selected out early, because they don’t survive.

  It was crazy, of course. In any logical estimate I knew I was as good as dead, but I felt I had to be doing something. I eased away from Dorrie, making sure her suit was belted to the hold-tight ring at the base of the igloo, and stood up.

  It took a great deal of concentration for me to be able to stand up. That was all right. It was almost as good as sleeping at keeping thoughts of the world out.

  It occurred to me—I admit that even then it seemed like no more than an outside possibility—that something good had happened while Dorrie and I were asleep. Something like—oh, let’s say…oh, maybe that there still might be eight or ten live Heechee in the tunnel…and maybe they’d heard us knocking and opened up the bottom of the shaft for us. So I crawled into the igloo to see if they had.

  Nope. They hadn’t. I peered down the shaft to make sure, but it was still just a blind hole that disappeared into dirty dark at the end of the light from my head lamp. I swore at the inhospitable Heechee—for being nonexistent, I guess—and kicked some tailings down the hole onto their absent heads.

  The Puritan ethic was itching at me somewhere. I wondered what I ought to be doing. I couldn’t think of too many choices. Die? Well, sure, but I was well on my way to doing that as fast as I could. Wasn’t there something constructive?

  The Puritan ethic reminded me that you always ought to leave a place the way you found it, so I hauled the drills up on the eight-to-one winch and left them hanging neatly while I kicked some more tailings down the useless hole. When I had made enough space for a place to sit, I sat down and thought things over.

  I mused about what we had done wrong—not with a view toward doing it right, you see, but more like an old chess puzzle. How had we missed finding a tunnel?

  After some time of cloudy cogitation, I thought I knew the answer to that.

  It had to do with what an autosonic trace was like. People like Dorrie and Cochenour have the idea that a seismic trace is like one of those underground maps of downtown Dallas that shows all the sewers and utility conduits and water pipes and subways, marked so if you need to get into one of them you can just dig down where it says and you’ll find what you want right there.

  It isn’t exactly like that. The trace is more probabilistic. It comes out as a sort of hazy approximation. It is built up, minute by minute, by the echoes from the pinger. It looks like a band of spiderweb shadows, much wider than any actual tunnel would be and very fuzzy at the edges. When you look at the trace, you know that the best it’s telling you is that there’s something that makes the shadows. Maybe it’s a rock interface or a pocket of gravel. Hopefully it’s a Heechee dig. Whatever it is, it’s there somewhere, but you don’t know just where, exactly. If a tunnel is ten meters wide, which is fair average for a Heechee connecting link, the shadow trace is sure to look like fifty, and may appear to be a hundred.

  So where do you dig?

  That’s where the art of prospecting comes in. You have to make an informed guess.

  Maybe you dig in the exact geometrical center—as it is given you to see where the center is. That’s the easiest way. Or maybe you dig where the shadows are densest, which is the way the most experienced prospectors do. That works as well as anything else.

  But that’s not good enough for smart, skilled old Audee Walthers. I do it my own way. What I do, I try to think like a Heechee. I look at the trace as a whole and try to see what points the Heechee might have been trying to connect. Then I plot an imaginary course between them, where I would have put the tunnel if I’d been the Heechee engineer in charge, and I dig where I would have planted the thing in the first place.

  That’s what I had done. Evidently I had done it wrong.

  Of course, there was one good way I could have gone wrong: the trace could have been a pocket of gravel.

  That was a really good possible explanation, but not a useful one. If there had never been a tunnel there in the first place we were just all out of luck. What I wanted was a more hopeful answer, and in a fuzzy-brained sort of way, I began to think I saw one.

  I visualized the way the trace had looked on the scope. I had set the airbody down as close to that as I could manage.

  Then, of course, I couldn’t dig right there, because the airbody was on top of it. So I’d set the igloo up a few meters upslope.

  I began to believe that those few meters were what made us miss.

  That fuzzy conjecture pleased my fuzzy brain. It explained everything. It was admirable of me, I told myself, to figure it all out in my present state. Of course, I couldn’t see that it made any practical difference. If I’d had another igloo I would have been glad to move back to where the airbody had been and try again, assuming I could live long enough to get all that done.

  But that didn’t mean much, because I didn’t have another igloo.

  So I sat on the edge of the dark shaft, nodding approvingly to myself over the intelligent way I had thought the problem through, dangling my legs, and now and then sweeping some tailings back in. I think all that was part of some kind of death wish, because I know that I thought, every once in a while, that the nicest thing for me to do just then would be to jump in and pull the tailings down over me.

  But the Puritan ethic didn’t want me to do that.

  Anyway, I would have only solved my own personal problem that way. It wouldn’t have done a thing for young Dorotha Keefer, snoring away outside in the thermal gale. I worried about Dorotha Keefer. I wanted something better for her than a life of chancy, sordid scrounging in the Spindle. She was too sweet and kind and—

  It struck me as a revelation that one of the reasons for my hostility to Boyce Cochenour had been that he had Dorrie Keefer and I didn’t.

  That was kind of interesting to think about, too. Suppose, I thought, tasting the bad flavors inside my mouth and feeling my head begin to pound—suppose Cochenour’s suit had ruptured when the drill fell on him and he had died right there. Suppose (going a little farther) we’d then found the tunnel, and it was all we wanted from it, and we went back to the Spindle and got rich, and Dorrie and I had—

  I spent a lot of time thinking about what Dorrie and I might have done if things had gone just a little different way and all that had happened to be true.

  But they hadn’t, and it wasn’t.

  I kicked some more scraps down into the shaft. The tunnel, I was now pretty well convinced, couldn’t be more than a few meters away from where that shaft had bottomed out empty. I thought of climbing down into it and scraping away with my gloves.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  I’m not sure how much of what I was thinking was plain day-dreamy whimsy, and how much the bizarre delusions of a very sick man. I kept thinking strange things. I thought how nice it would be if there were Heechee still in there, and when I climbed down to scratch my way to the tunnel I could just knock on the first blue wall material I came to and they’d open it up and let me in.

  That would have been very nice. I even had a picture of what they were going to look like: sort of friendly and godlike. Maybe they would wear togas a
nd offer me scented wines and rare fruits. Maybe they could even speak English, so I could talk to them and ask some of the questions that were on my mind. “Heechee, what did you really use the prayer fans for?” I could ask him. Or, “Listen, Heechee, I hate to be a nuisance, but do you have anything in your medicine chest that will keep me from dying?” Or, “Heechee, I’m sorry we messed up your front yard, and I’ll try to clean it up for you.”

  Maybe it was that last thought that made me push more of the tailings back into the shaft. I didn’t have anything better to do. And, who could tell, maybe they’d appreciate it.

  After a while I had it more than half full and I’d run out of tailings, except for the ones that were pushed outside the igloo. I didn’t have the strength to go after them. I looked for something else to do. I reset the augers, replaced the dull blades with the last sharp ones we had, pointed them in the general direction of a twenty-degree offset angle downslope, and turned them on.

  It wasn’t until I noticed that Dorrie was standing next to me, helping me steady the augers for the first meter or two of cut, that I realized I had made a plan. I didn’t remember it. I didn’t even remember when Dorrie had wakened and come into the igloo.

  It probably wasn’t a bad plan, I thought. Why not try an offset cut? Did we have any better way to spend our time?

  We did not. We cut.

  When the drills stopped bucking in our hands and settled down to chew through the rock and we could leave them, I cleared a space at the side of the igloo and shoved tailings out for a while.

  Then we just sat there, watching the drills spit rock chips out of the new hole. We didn’t speak.

  Presently I fell asleep again.

  I didn’t wake up until Dorrie pounded on my helmet. We were buried in tailings. They glowed blue, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.

  The augers must have been scratching at the Heechee wall material for an hour or more. They had actually worn pits into it.

  When we looked down, we could see the round, bright, blue eye of the tunnel staring up at us. She was a beauty, all right.

  We didn’t speak.

  Somehow I managed to kick and wriggle my way through the drift to the crawl-through. I got the lock closed and sealed, after kicking a couple of cubic meters of rock outside.

  Then I began fumbling through the pile of refuse for the flame drills.

  Ultimately I found them. Somehow. Ultimately I managed to get them shipped and primed.

  We ducked back out of range as I fired them. I watched the bright spot of light that bounced out of the shaft make a pattern on the roof of the igloo.

  Then there was a sudden, short scream of gas, and a clatter as the loose fragments at the bottom of the shaft dropped free.

  We had cut into the Heechee tunnel.

  It was unbreached and waiting for us. Our beauty was a virgin. We took her maidenhead with all love and reverence and entered into her.

  XII

  I must have blacked out again, because when I realized where I was I was on the floor of the tunnel. My helmet was open. So were the side-zips of my heatsuit. I was breathing stale, foul air that had to be a quarter of a million years old and smelled every minute of it.

  But it was air.

  It was denser than Earth-normal and a lot less humid, but the partial pressure of oxygen was close enough to the same. I was proving that by the fact that I had been breathing it without dying.

  Next to me on the floor was Dorrie Keefer.

  Her helmet was open, too. The blue Heechee wall light didn’t flatter her complexion, so she looked about as ghastly as a pretty girl can. At first I wasn’t sure she was breathing. But in spite of the way she looked, her pulse was going, her lungs were functioning, and when she felt me poking at her she opened her eyes.

  “God, I’m beat,” she said. “But we made it!”

  I didn’t say anything. She’d said it all for both of us. We sat there, grinning foolishly at each other, looking like Halloween masks in the blue Heechee glow.

  That was about all I was able to do just then. I was feeling very light-headed. I had my hands full just comprehending the fact that I was alive. I didn’t want to endanger that odds-against precarious fact by moving around.

  I wasn’t comfortable, though, and after a moment I realized that I was very hot. I closed up my helmet to shut out some of the heat, but the smell inside was so bad that I opened it again, figuring that the heat was better.

  It then occurred to me to wonder why the heat was only unpleasant, instead of instantly, incineratingly fatal.

  Energy transport through a Heechee wall-material surface is slow, but not hundreds of thousands of years slow. My sad, sick old brain ruminated that thought around for a while and finally staggered to a conclusion: At least until quite recently, maybe some centuries or thousands of years at most, this tunnel had been kept artificially cool. So, I told myself sagely, there had to be some sort of automatic machinery. Wow, I said to myself. That ought to be worth finding all by itself. Broken down or not, it could be the kind of thing fortunes are built on…

  And that made me remember why we had come there in the first place. I looked up the corridor and down, hungry for the first sight of the Heechee loot that might make us all well again.

  When I was a schoolkid in Amarillo Central, my favorite teacher was a crippled lady named Miss Stevenson. She used to tell us stories out of Bulfinch and Homer.

  Miss Stevenson spoiled one whole weekend for me with the sad story of one Greek fellow whose biggest ambition was to become a god. I gathered that was a fairly ordinary goal for a bright young Greek in those days, though I’m not sure how often they made it. This man started out with a few big steps up the ladder—he was already a king, of a little place in Lydia—but he wanted more. He wanted divinity. The gods even let him come to Olympus, and it looked as though he had it made…until he fouled up.

  I don’t remember the details of what he did wrong, except that it had something to do with a dog and some nasty trick he played on one of the gods by getting him to eat his own son. (Those Greeks had pretty primitive ideas of humor, I guess.) Whatever it was, they punished him for it. What he got was solitary confinement—for eternity—and he served it standing neck deep in a cool lake in hell but unable to drink. Every time he opened his lips the water pulled away. The fellow’s name was Tantalus…and in that Heechee tunnel I thought I had a lot in common with him.

  We found the treasure trove we were looking for, all right. But we couldn’t reach it.

  It seemed that what we had dug into wasn’t the main tunnel after all. It was a sort of right-angled, Thielly-tube detour in the tunnel, and it was blocked at both ends.

  “What do you suppose it is?” Dorrie asked wistfully, trying to peer through the gaps in the ten-ton slabs of Heechee metal before us. “Do you suppose it could be that weapon you were talking about?”

  I blinked my fuzzy eyes. There were machines of all kinds there, and irregular mounds of things that might have been containers for other things, and some objects that seemed to have rotted and spilled their contents, also rotted, on the floor. But we hadn’t the strength to get at them.

  I stood there with my helmet pressed against the side of one of the slabs, feeling like Alice peering into her tiny garden without the bottle of drink-me. “All I know for sure,” I said, “is that, whatever it is, there’s more of it there than anybody ever found before.”

  And I slumped to the floor, exhausted and sick and, all the same, feeling very contented with the world.

  Dorrie sat down next to me, in front of that barred gate to Eden, and we rested for a moment.

  “Gram would’ve been pleased,” she murmured.

  “Oh, sure,” I agreed, feeling a little drunk. “Gram?”

  “My grandmother,” she explained, and then maybe I blacked out again. When I heard what she was saying again, she was talking about how her grandmother had refused to marry Cochenour, long and long ago. It seemed to matter
to Dorotha Keefer, so I tried politely to pay attention, but some of it didn’t make a lot of sense.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “She didn’t want him because he was poor?”

  “No, no! Not because he was poor, although he was that. Because he was going off to the oil fields, and she wanted somebody steadier. Like my grandfather. And then when Boyce came by a year ago—”

  “He gave you a job,” I said, nodding to show I was following, “as his girlfriend.”

  “No, damn it!” she said, annoyed with me. “In his office. The—other part came later. We fell in love.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. I wasn’t looking for an argument.

  She said stiffly, “He’s really a sweet man, Audee. Outside of business, I mean. And he would’ve done anything for me.”

  “He could’ve married you,” I pointed out, just to keep the conversation going.

  “No, Audee,” she said seriously, “he couldn’t. He wanted to get married. I was the one who said no.”

  She turned down all that money? I blinked at her. I didn’t have to ask the question; she knew what it was.

  “When I marry,” she said, “I want kids, and Boyce wouldn’t hear of it. He said if I’d caught him when he was a lot younger, maybe seventy-five or eighty, he might’ve taken a chance, but now he was just too old to be raising a family.”

  “Then you ought to be looking around for a replacement, shouldn’t you?”

  She looked at me in that blue glow. “He needs me,” she said simply. “Now more than ever.”

  I mulled that over for a while. Then it occurred to me to check the time.

  It was nearly forty-six hours since he had left us. He was due back any time.

  And if he came back while we were doddering around in here—I realized, foggily, bit by bit—then ninety thousand millibars of poison gas would hammer in on us. It would kill us if we had our suits open. Besides that, it would damage our virgin tunnel. The corrosive scouring of that implosion of gas might easily wreck all those lovely things behind the barrier.