PLATINUM POHL Read online

  I sat down next to them—well, not at the same table, I mean; I didn’t even look at them. But I could hear what they said. Vastra didn’t look at me, either, but of course he had seen me come in and knew I had my eye on them. But I had to let his number-three wife take my order, because Vastra wasn’t going to waste any time on me when he had a charter-ship Terry at his table. “The usual,” I said to her, meaning straightalk in a tumbler of soft drink. “And a copy of your briefing,” I added, more softly. Her eyes twinkled at me over her flirtation veil. Cute little vixen. I patted her hand in a friendly way, and left a rolled-up bill in it; then she left.

  The Terry was inspecting his surroundings, including me. I looked back at him, polite but distant, and he gave me a sort of quarter-nod and turned back to Subhash Vastra. “Since I’m here,” he said, “I might as well go along with whatever action there is. What’s to do here?”

  Sub grinned widely, like a tall, skinny frog. “Ah, whatever you wish, sah! Entertainment? In our private rooms we have the finest artists of three planets, nautch dancers, music, fine comedians—”

  “We’ve got plenty of that in Cincinnati. I didn’t come to Venus for a nightclub act.” He wouldn’t have known it, of course, but that was a good move; Sub’s private rooms were way down the list of night spots on Venus, and the top of the list wasn’t much.

  “Of course, sah! Then perhaps you would like to consider a tour?”

  “Aw.” Cochenour shook his head. “What’s the point? Does any of it look any different than the space pad we came in on, right over our heads?”

  Vastra hesitated; I could see him calculating second-order consequences in his head, measuring the chance of the Terry going for a surface tour against what he might get from me as commission. He didn’t look my way. Honesty won out—that is, honesty reinforced by a quick appraisal of Cochenour’s gullibility. “Not much different, no, sah,” he admitted. “All pretty hot and dry on the surface, at least for the next thousand kilometers. But I wasn’t thinking of the surface.”

  “What then?”

  “Ah, the Heechee warrens, sah! There are many miles just below this settlement. A guide could be found—”

  “Not interested,” Cochenour growled. “Not in anything that close.”

  “Sah?”

  “If a guide can lead us through them,” Cochenour explained, “that means they’ve all been explored. Which means they’ve been looted. What’s the fun of that?”

  “Of course,” said Vastra immediately. “I see what you’re driving at, sah.” He looked noticeably happier, and I could feel his radar reaching out to make sure I was listening, though he didn’t look in my direction at all. “To be sure,” he said, “there is always the chance of finding new digs, sah, provided one knows where to look. Am I correct in assuming that this would interest you?”

  The third of Vastra’s house brought me my drink and a thin powder-faxed slip of paper. “Thirty percent,” I whispered to her. “Tell Sub. Only no bargaining, no getting anybody else to bid—” She nodded and winked; she’d been listening too, and she was as sure as I that this Terry was firmly on the hook. It had been my intention to nurse the drink as long as I could, but prosperity loomed before me; I was ready to celebrate; I took a long happy swallow.

  But the hook didn’t have a barb. Unaccountably the Terry shrugged. “Waste of time, I bet,” he grumbled. “I mean, really. If you knew where to look, why wouldn’t you have looked there already, right?”

  “Ah, mister,” cried Subhash Vastra, “but there are hundreds of tunnels not explored! Thousands! And in them, who knows, treasures beyond price!”

  Cochenour shook his head. “Skip it,” he said. “Bring us another drink. And see if you can’t get the ice cold this time.”

  Somewhat shaken, I put down my drink, half-turned away to hide my hand from the Terries, and looked at the facsimile copy of Sub’s report on them to see if it could tell me why Cochenour had lost interest.

  It couldn’t. It did tell me a lot, though. The girl with Cochenour was named Dorotha Keefer. She had been traveling with him for a couple of years now, this being their first time off Earth; there was no indication of any marriage, or any intention of it, at least on his part. She was in her early twenties—real age, not simulated by drugs and transplants. Cochenour himself was well over ninety.

  He did not, of course, look anywhere near that. I’d watched him come over to the table, and he moved lightly and easily, for a big man. His money came from land and petro-foods; according to the synoptic on him, he had been one of the first oil millionaires to switch over from selling oil as fuel for cars and heating plants to food production, growing algae in the crude that came out of his wells and selling the algae in processed form for human consumption. So he’d stopped being a mere millionaire and turned into something much bigger.

  And that accounted for the way he looked. He’d been on Full Medical, with extras. The report said his heart was titanium and plastic. His lungs had been transplanted from a twenty-year-old killed in a copter crash. His skin, muscles and fats—not to mention his various glandular systems—were sustained by hormones and cell-builders at what had to be a cost of well over a thousand dollars a day. To judge by the way he stroked the girl sitting next to him, he was getting his money’s worth. He looked and acted no more than forty, at most—except perhaps for the look of his pale-blue, diamond-bright, weary and disillusioned eyes.

  What a lovely mark! I swallowed the rest of my drink, and nodded to the third for another. There had to be a way to get him to charter my airbody.

  All I had to do was find it.

  Outside the rail of Vastra’s cafe, of course, half the Spindle was thinking exactly the same thoughts. This was the worst of the low season, the Hohmann crowd were still three months in the future; all of us were beginning to run low on money. My liver transplant was just a little extra incentive; of the hundred maze-runners I could see out of the corner of my eye, ninety-nine needed to cut in on this rich tourist’s money as much as I did, just for the sake of staying alive.

  We couldn’t all do it. Two of us, three, maybe even half a dozen could score enough to make a real difference. No more than that. And I had to be one of these few.

  I took a deep swallow of my second drink, tipped Vastra’s third lavishly—and conspicuously—and turned idly around until I was facing the Terries dead-on.

  The girl was talking with a knot of souvenir vendors, looking interested and uncertain. “Boyce?” she said over her shoulder.

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s this thing for?”

  He bent over the rail and peered. “Looks like a fan,” he said.

  “Heechee prayer fan, right,” cried the dealer; I knew him, Booker Allemang, an old-timer in the Spindle. “Found it myself, miss! It’ll grant your every wish, letters every day from people reporting miraculous results—”

  “Sucker bait,” grumbled Cochenour. “Buy it if you want.”

  “But what does it do?”

  He laughed raucously. “What any fan does. It cools you down.” And he looked at me, grinning.

  I finished my drink, nodded, stood up and walked over to the table. “Welcome to Venus,” I said. “May I help you?”

  The girl looked at Cochenour for approval before she said, “I thought this was very pretty.”

  “Very pretty,” I agreed. “Are you familiar with the story of the Heechees?”

  Cochenour pointed to a chair. I sat and went on. “They built these tunnels about a quarter of a million years ago. They lived here for a couple of centuries, give or take a lot. Then they went away again. They left a lot of junk behind, and some things that weren’t junk; among other things they left a lot of these fans. Some local con man like BeeGee here got the idea of calling them ‘prayer fans’ and selling them to tourists to make wishes with.”

  Allemang had been hanging on my every word trying to guess where I was going. “You know it’s right,” he said.

  “But you
two are too smart for that kind of come-on,” I added. “Still, look at the things. They’re pretty enough to be worth having even without the story.”

  “Absolutely!” cried Allemang. “See how this one sparkles, miss! And the black and gray crystal, how nice it looks with your fair hair!”

  The girl unfurled the crystalline one. It came rolled like a diploma, only cone-shaped. It took just the slightest pressure of the thumb to keep it open, and it really was very pretty as she waved it gently. Like all the Heechee fans, it weighed only about ten grams, and its crystalline lattice caught the lights from the luminous Heechee walls, as well as the fluorescents and gas tubes we maze-runners had installed, and tossed them all back in iridescent sparks.

  “This fellow’s name is Booker Garey Allemang,” I said. “He’ll sell you the same goods as any of the o thers, but he won’t cheat you as much as most of them.”

  Cochenour looked at me dourly, then beckoned Sub Vastra for another round of drinks. “All right,” he said. “If we buy, we’ll buy from you, Booker Garey Allemang. But not now.”

  He turned to me. “And what do you want to sell me?”

  “Myself and my airbody, if you want to go looking for new tunnels. We’re both as good as you can get.”

  “How much?”

  “One million dollars,” I said immediately. “All found.”

  He didn’t answer at once, though it gave me some pleasure to notice that the price didn’t seem to scare him. He looked as pleasant, or anyway as unangrily bored, as ever. “Drink up,” he said, as Vastra and his third served us, and gestured with his glass to the Spindle. “Know what this was for?” he asked.

  “You mean why the Heechees built it? No. They were pretty small, so it wasn’t for headroom. And it was entirely empty when it was found.”

  He gazed tolerantly at the busy scene, balconies cut into the sloping sides of the Spindle with eating and drinking places like Vastra’s, rows of souvenir booths, most of them empty at this idle season. But there were still a couple of hundred maze rats around, and the number had been quietly growing all the time Cochenour and the girl had been sitting there.

  He said, “It’s not much to see, is it? A hole in the ground, and a lot of people trying to take my money away from me.”

  I shrugged.

  He grinned again. “So why did I come, eh? Well, that’s a good question, but since you didn’t ask it I don’t have to answer it. You want a million dollars. Let’s see. A hundred K to charter an airbody. A hundred and eighty or so to rent equipment, per week. Ten days minimum, three weeks a safer guess. Food, supplies, permits, another fifty K. So we’re up to close to seven hundred thousand, not counting your own salary and what you give our host here as his cut for not throwing you off the premises. Right, Walthers?”

  I had a little difficulty in swallowing the drink I had been holding to my mouth, but I managed to say, “Close enough, Mr. Cochenour.” I didn’t see any point in telling him that I already owned the equipment, as well as the airbody, although I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that he knew that too.

  “You’ve got a deal, then. And I want to leave as soon as possible, which should be, um, about this time tomorrow.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, and got up, avoiding Sub Vastra’s thunderstricken expression. I had some work to do, and a little thinking. He’d caught me off base, which is a bad place to be when you can’t afford to make a mistake. I knew he hadn’t missed my calling him by name. That was all right; he’d known that I had checked him out immediately. But it was a little surprising that he had known mine.

  3

  The first thing I had to do was double-check my equipment; the second was go to the local, validate a contract, and settle up with Sub Vastra; the third was see my doctor. The liver hadn’t been giving me much trouble for a while, but then I hadn’t been drinking grain alcohol for a while.

  It took about an hour to make sure that everything we would need for the expedition was i.s., with all the spare parts I might reasonably fear needing. The Quackery was on my way to the union office, so I stopped in there first. It didn’t take long. The news was no worse than I had been ready for; Dr. Morius studied the readout from his instruments carefully. It turned out to be a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of carefully, and expressed the guarded hope that I would survive three weeks away from his office, provided I took all the stuff he gave me and wandered no more than usual from his dietary restrictions. “And when I get back?” I asked.

  “About the same, Audee,” he said cheerily. “Total collapse in, ah, oh, maybe ninety more days.”

  He patted his fingertips. “I hear you’ve got a live one,” he added. “Want me to book you for a transplant?”

  “How live did you hear he was?” I asked.

  “Oh, the price is the same in any case,” he told me good-humoredly. “Two hundred K, plus the hospital, anesthesiologist, preop psychiatrist, pharmaceuticals—you’ve already got the figures.”

  I did, and I knew that with what I might make from Cochenour, plus what I had put away, plus a small loan on the airbody, I could just about meet it. Leaving me broke when it was over but, of course, alive.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Three weeks from tomorrow.” And I left him looking mildly pleased, like a Burmese hydro-rice man watching another crop being harvested. Dear daddy. Why hadn’t he sent me through medical school instead of giving me an education?

  It would have been nice if the Heechee had been the same size as human beings, instead of being about 40 percent shorter. In the smaller tunnels, like the one that led to the Local 88 office, I had to half-crouch all the way.

  The deputy organizer was waiting for me. He had one of the few good jobs that didn’t depend on the tourists, or at least not directly. He said, “Subhash Vastra’s been on the line. He says you agreed to thirty percent, and besides you forgot to pay your bar bill to the third of his house.”

  “Admitted, both ways.”

  “And you owe me a little too, Audee. Three hundred for a powderfax copy of my report on your pigeon. A hundred for validating your contract with Vastra. And if you want guide’s papers, sixteen hundred for that.”

  I gave him my credit card and he checked the total out of my account into the local’s. Then I signed and card-stamped the contract he’d drawn up. Vastra’s 30 percent would not be on the whole million-dollar gross, but on my net; even so, he might make as much out of it as I would, at least in liquid cash, because I’d have to pay off all the outstanding balances on equipment and loans. The factors would carry a man until he scored, but then they wanted to get paid. They knew how long it might be until he scored again.

  “Thanks, Audee,” said the deputy, nodding over the signed contract. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Not at your prices,” I told him.

  “Ah, you’re putting me on. ‘Boyce Cochenour and Dorotha Keefer, Earth-Ohio, traveling S. V. Yuri Gagarin, Odessa registry, chartered. No other passengers.’ No other passengers,” he repeated, quoting from the synoptic report he’d furnished. “Why, you’ll be a rich man, Audee, if you work this pigeon right.”

  “That’s more than I ask,” I told him. “All I want is to be a living one.”

  But it wasn’t entirely true. I did have some little hope—not much, not enough to talk about, and in fact I’d never said a word about it to anyone—that I might be coming out of this rather better than merely alive.

  There was, however, a problem.

  See, in the standard guide’s contract and airbody leasing terms, I get my money and that’s all I get. If we take a mark like Cochenour on a hunt for new Heechee tunnels and he finds something valuable—marks have, you know; not often, but enough to keep them hopeful—then it’s his. We just work for him.

  On the other hand, I could have gone out by myself any time and prospected; and then anything I found would be all mine.

  Obviously anybody with any sense would go by himself if he thought he was really goin
g to find anything. But in my case, that wasn’t such a good idea. If I staked myself to a trip and lost, I hadn’t just wasted time and maybe fifty K in supplies and wear and tear. If I lost, I was dead.

  I needed what I would make out of Cochenour to stay alive. Whether we found anything interesting or not, my fee would take care of that.

  Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I had a notion that I knew where something very interesting might be found; and my problem was that, as long as I had an all-rights contract with Cochenour. I couldn’t afford to find it.

  The last stop I made was in my sleeping room. Under the bed, keystoned into the rock, was a guaranteed break-proof safe that held some papers I wanted to have in my pocket from then on.

  When I came down on to Venus for the first time, it wasn’t scenery that interested me. I wanted to make my fortune.

  I didn’t see much of the surface of Venus then, or for nearly two years after that. You don’t see much in the kind of spacecraft that can land on Venus; a twenty-thousand-millibar surface pressure means you need something a little more rugged than the bubble-ships that go to the Moon or Mars or farther out, and there’s not much tolerance in the design for putting unnecessary windows into the hull. It didn’t matter much, because anywhere except near the poles there’s not much you can see. Everything worth seeing on Venus is in Venus, and all of it once belonged to the Heechees.

  Not that we know much about the Heechees. We don’t even rightly know their name—“heechee” is how somebody once wrote down the sound that a fire-pearl makes when you stroke it, and as that’s the only sound anybody knows that’s connected with them, it got to be a name.

  The hesperologists don’t know where the Heechees came from, although there are some markings on scraps of stuff that the Heechees used for paper that seem to be a star chart—faded, incomplete, pretty much unrecognizable; if we know the exact position of every star in the galaxy two hundred fifty thousand years ago, we might be able to locate them from that, I suppose. Assuming they came from this galaxy. There are no traces of them anywhere else in the solar system, except maybe in Phobos; the experts still fight about whether the honeycomb cells inside the Martian moon are natural or artifacts, and if they’re artifacts they’re no doubt Heechee. But they don’t look much like ours.