The Gateway Trip Read online

  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 to the trip. I’ve had worse. I’ve had some real traumatic times, parties that came aboard drunk and steadily got drunker, couples that fought each other every waking moment and only got together long enough so they could fight in a united front against me. This trip didn’t look bad at all, even apart from the fact that I hoped it was going to save my life for me.

  You don’t need much skill to fly an airbody—at least, just to make it move in the direction you want to go. In Venus’s atmosphere there is lift to spare. You don’t worry about things like stalling out; and anyway the automatic controls do most of your thinking for you.

  Cochenour learned fast. It turned out he had flown everything that moved through the air on Earth, and operated one-man submersibles, as well, in the deep-sea oil fields of his youth. He understood as soon as I mentioned it to him that the hard part of pilotage on Venus 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 trapped in a tunnel. Or shot by a jealous husband.”

  I gave him the smile that little pleasantry was worth, which wasn’t much. “The other thing I can do,” he went on, “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. It was the same with her grandmother. The most beautiful woman in the world, but she had the idea that was all she had to be to own it.”

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

  “Not to worry; it recycles.”

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

  “Right.” I spun the globe a little. The bright spot that was us had been heading steadily south while we were talking. “See that cluster where our track intersects those grid marks, just short of Lise Meitner?”

  “Who’s Lise Meitner?” he grunted.

  “Somebody they named that formation after, that’s all I know. Do you see where I’m pointing?”

  “Yeah. Those five big mascons close together. No diggings indicated. Is that where we’re going?”

  “In a general way, yes.”

  “Why in a general way?”

  “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 me. “That depends a lot on what you didn’t tell me, friend,” he said—not sounding friendly.

  “That part there is 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 civilians aren’t allowed to enter.”

  He was glowering at the map. “But there’s only that one little piece of a mascon that isn’t off limits!”

  “And that little piece,” I said, “is where we’re going.”

  VI

  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 of 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 a billionaire. 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. I can 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 fricassee, 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.”

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

  “Right. Assuming 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 pass 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 faceplates. 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 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, 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 space-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 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 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 airbody 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 spaceport. 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 take 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 reassuringly. “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 passengers, “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 passengers.”