PLATINUM POHL Read online

  “See over here, where we are now”—I rotated the virtual globe slightly by turning a dial—“that’s the big digging we just came out of. You can see the shape of the Spindle. It’s a common shape, by the way. You can see it in some of the others if you look, and there are digs where it doesn’t show on these tracings but it’s there if you’re on the spot. That particular mascon where the Spindle is is called Serendip; it was discovered by accident by a hesperological—”

  “Hesperological?”

  “—a geological team operating on Venus, which makes it a hesperological team. They were drilling out core samples and hit the Heechee digs. Now these other digs in the northern high-latitudes you see are all in one bunch of associated mascons. They connect through interventions of less dense rock, but only where absolutely necessary.”

  Cochenour said sharply, “They’re north and we’re going south. Why?”

  It was interesting that he could read the navigation instruments, but I didn’t say so. I only said, “They’re no good. They’ve been probed.”

  “They look even bigger than the Spindle.”

  “Hell of a lot bigger, right. But there’s nothing much in them, or anyway not much chance that anything in them is in good enough shape to bother with. Subsurface fluids filled them up a hundred thousand years ago, maybe more. A lot of good men have gone broke trying to pump and excavate them, without finding anything. Ask me. I was one of them.”

  “I didn’t know there was any liquid water on Venus or under it,” Cochenour objected.

  “I didn’t say water, did I? But as a matter of fact some of it was, or anyway a sort of oozy mud. Apparently water cooks out of the rocks and has a transit time to the surface of some thousands of years before it seeps out, boils off, and cracks to hydrogen and oxygen and gets lost. In case you didn’t know it, there’s some under the Spindle. It’s what you were drinking, and what you were breathing.”

  The girl said, “Boyce, this is all very interesting, but I’m hot and dirty. Can I change the subject for a minute?”

  Cochenour barked; it wasn’t really a laugh. “Subliminal prompting, Walthers, you agree? And a little old-fashioned prudery, too, I expect. What she really wants to do is go to the bathroom.”

  Given a little encouragement from the girl, I would have been mildly embarrassed for her, but she only said, “If we’re going to live in this thing for three weeks, I’d like to know what it offers.”

  I said, “Certainly, Miss Keefer.”

  “Dorotha. Dorrie, if you like it better.”

  “Sure, Dorrie. Well, you see what we’ve got. Five bunks; they partition to sleep ten if wanted, but we don’t want. Two shower stalls. They don’t look big enough to soap yourself in, but they are if you work at it. Three chemical toilets. Kitchen over there—well. Pick the bunk you like, Dorrie. There’s a screen arrangement that comes down when you want it for changing clothes and so on, or just if you don’t want to look at the rest of us for a while.”

  Cochenour said, “Go on, Dorrie, do what you want to do. I want Walthers to show me how to fly this thing anyway.”

  It wasn’t a bad start. I’ve had some real traumatic times, parties that came aboard drunk and steadily got drunker, couples that fought every waking minute and got together only to hassle me. This one didn’t look bad at all, apart from the fact that it was going to save my life for me.

  There’s not much to flying an airbody, at least as far as making it move the way you want it to is concerned. In Venus’s atmosphere there’s lift to spare. You don’t worry about things like stalling out; and anyway the autonomic controls do most of your thinking for you.

  Cochenour learned fast. It turned out he had flown everything that moved on Earth and operated one-man submersibles as well. He understood as soon as I mentioned it to him that the hard part of pilotage was selecting the right flying level and anticipating when you’d have to change it, but he also understood that he wasn’t going to learn that in one day. Or even in three weeks. “What the hell, Walthers,” he said cheerfully enough. “At least I can make it go where I have to, in case you get caught in a tunnel or shot by a jealous husband.”

  I gave him the smile his pleasantry was worth, which wasn’t much. “The other thing I can do,” he said, “is cook. Unless you’re really good at it? No, I thought not. Well, I paid too much for this stomach to fill it with hash, so I’ll make the meals. That’s a little skill Dorrie never got around to learning. Same with her grandmother. Most beautiful woman in the world, but had the idea that was all there was to it.”

  I put that aside to sort out later; he was full of little unexpected things, this ninety years old young athlete. He said, “All right, now while Dorrie’s using up all the water in the shower—”

  “Not to worry; it all recycles.”

  “Anyway. While she’s cleaning up, finish your little lecture on where we’re going.”

  “Right.” I spun the virtual globe a little. The bright spot that was us had moved a dozen degrees already. “See that cluster where our track intersects those grid marks?”

  “Yeah. Five big mascons close together, and no diggings indicated. Is that where we’re going?”

  “In a general sense, yes.”

  “Why in a general sense?”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s one little thing I didn’t tell you. I’m assuming you won’t jump salty over it, because then I’ll have to get salty too and tell you you should have taken the trouble to learn more about Venus before you decided to explore it.”

  He studied me appraisingly for a moment. Dorrie came quietly out of the shower in a long robe, her hair in a towel, and stood near him, watching. “It depends on what you didn’t tell me,” he said.

  “There’s a no-trespassing sign on most of those mascons,” I said. I activated the pilotage chart overlay, and bright cherry-red warning lines sprang up all around the cluster.

  “That’s the south polar security area,” I said. “That’s where the Defense boys keep the missile range and the biggest part of their weapons development areas. And we’re not allowed to enter.”

  He said harshly, “But there’s only a little piece of one mascon that isn’t off-limits.”

  “And that’s where we’re going,” I said.

  6

  For a man more than ninety years old, Boyce Cochenour was spry. I don’t mean just healthy looking. Full Medical will do that for you, because you just replace whatever wears out or begins to look shopworn and tatty. You cannot, however, very well replace the brain, so what you usually see in the very rich old ones is a bronzed, strong body that shakes and hesitates and drops things and stumbles. About that Cochenour had been very lucky.

  He was going to be wearing company for three weeks. He’d insisted I show him how to pilot the airbody. 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.

  The girl took over as my helper while I restowed some of the supplies to get the autosonic probes out. At the steady noise level of the inside of an airbody our normal conversational voices wouldn’t carry to Cochenour, less than three meters away, and I thought of pumping her about him. I decided against it. What I didn’t know was just curiosity. I knew he was paying me the price of a new liver already. I didn’t need to know what he and the girl thought about when they thought about each other.

  So our conversation was along the lines of how the probes would fire charges and time the echoes, and what the chances were of finding something really good (“Well, what are the chances of winning a sweepstake? Bad for any individual who buys a ticket—but there’s always one winner somewhere!”), and what had made me come to Venus in the first place. I mentioned my father’s name, but she’d never heard of him. Too young, for one thing, no doubt. And she was born and bred in Southern Ohio, where Cochenour had worked as a kid and to which he’d returne
d as a billionaire. He’d been building a new processing center there and it had been a lot of headaches—trouble with the unions, trouble with the banks, trouble, bad trouble, with the government—so he’d decided to take a few months off and 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. 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 the right transit level. By the time I had climbed a thousand meters and reset the autopilot, he was rubbing his wrist and glowering at me.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He said dourly, “I don’t mind your scalding the skin off my arm, I can always buy more skin, but you nearly made me spill the gravy.”

  I checked the virtual globe. The bright marker was two-thirds of the way to our destination. “Is it 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 maybe five thousand kilometers an hour.”

  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 usual guide’s lecture, we’ll listen.”

  I said, “Well, you pretty much know the outlines. Say, you’re a great cook, Mr. Cochenour. I packed all these 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 it, why aren’t you eating it?”

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

  Cochenour looked at me appraisingly, but only said, “The lecture?”

  “Well, let’s start with the most important part,” I said, carefully pouring coffee. “While we’re in the 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 as 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 and some maneuvering. If anything went wrong we’d yell for help and somebody would come and get us in a couple of hours at most—probably it would be the Defense boys, and they have supersonic bodies. The worst thing would be if the hull breached and the whole Venusian atmosphere tried to come in. If it happened fast we’d be dead. It never happens fast, though. We’d have time to get in the suits, and we can live in them for thirty hours. Long before that we’d be picked up.”

  “Assuming, of course, that nothing went wrong with the radio at the same time,” said Cochenour.

  “Right. You can get killed anywhere, if enough accidents happen at once.”

  He poured himself another cup of coffee, tipped a little brandy into it and said, “Go on.”

  “Well, outside the airbody it’s a little more tricky. You’ve only got the suit, and its useful life, as I say, is only thirty hours. It’s a question of refrigeration. You can carry all the air and water you want, and you don’t have to worry about food, but it takes a lot of compact energy to get rid of the diffuse energy all around you. It takes fuel for the cooling systems, and when that’s gone you better be back in the airbody. Heat isn’t the worst way to die. You pass out before you begin to hurt. But the end result is 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 it too, but don’t rely on me. It’s your life. And the faceplates are pretty strong; you can drive nails with them without breaking them, but they can be broken if hit hard enough against a hard enough surface. That way you’re dead too.”

  Dorrie said quietly, “One question. Have you ever lost a tourist?”

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

  “I don’t mind odds like that,” said Cochenour. “Actually, that wasn’t the lecture I was asking for, Audee. I mean, I certainly want to hear how to stay alive, but I assume 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. He had a disturbing habit of asking the questions I didn’t want to answer. There 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 space-mail rates, with people like Professor Hegramet back on Earth.

  But I didn’t want to tell him all of 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 richer than I would—that’s what the contracts you sign say: 40 percent to the charterer, 25 percent to the guide, the rest to the government—and that should be enough for him. If it 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 winds again.

  We were over the big south-central massif, 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 fifty thousand millibars and up. My airbody wouldn’t take any of that for very long, and neither would anybody else’s, except for a few of the special research and military types. Fortunately, the Heechee didn’t care for the lowlands either. Nothing of theirs has ever been located much below twenty-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 autosonic probes. The winds threw them all over the place as soon as they dropped free. It doesn’t much matter where they go, within broad limits, which is a good thing. They dropped like javelins at first, then flew around like straws until the little rockets cut in and the ground-seeking controls fired them to the ground.

  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 opened the scanning range and began circling around.

  “Now what?” bellowed Cochenour. I noticed the girl had put the earplugs back, but he wasn’t willing to miss 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. The buffeting got pretty bad, and so did the noise.

  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. That was where pilotage counted, not en route or at the prepared pads around the Spindle. When he could do that he could get along without somebody like me.

  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. Reaso
nably pleased with myself, I opened the belt catches and stood up. “We’re here for at least a day or two,” I said. “More if we’re lucky. How did you like the ride?”

  The girl was taking the earplugs out, now that the protecting walls of the arroyo had cut the thundering down to a mere constant scream. “I’m glad I don’t get airsick,” she said.

  Cochenour was thinking, not talking. He was studying the control board while he lit another cigarette.

  Dorotha said, “One question, Audee. Why couldn’t we stay up where it’s quieter?”

  “Fuel. I carry about thirty hours, full thrust, but that’s it. Is the noise bothering you?”

  She made a face.

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

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

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

  Cochenour finally spoke. “How long until you can make some sense out of that?” he demanded. Another point: He didn’t ask 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.”