The Gateway Trip Read online

  “Acknowledged,” blared the radio. “We will keep you under surveillance. If you observe vessels or parties on the surface, they are our perimeter teams. Do not interfere with them in any way. Respond at once to any request for identification or information.” The carrier buzz cut off.

  “They act nervous,” Cochenour said.

  “No. That’s how they always are. They’re used to seeing people like us around. They’ve got nothing else to do with their time, that’s all.”

  Dorrie said hesitantly, “Audee, you told them you’d explained the restrictions to us. I don’t remember that part.”

  “Oh, I explained them, all right. We stay out of the restricted area, because if we don’t they’ll start shooting. That is the Whole of the Law.”

  VII

  I set a wake-up for four hours, and the others heard me moving around and got up, too. Dorrie fetched us coffee from the warmer, and we stood drinking it and looking at the patterns the probe computer had traced.

  I took several minutes to study them, although the patterns were clear enough at first look. They showed eight major anomalies that could have been Heechee warrens. One was almost right outside our door. We wouldn’t have to move the airbody to dig for it.

  I showed them the anomalies, one by one. Cochenour just studied them thoughtfully. Dorotha asked, “You mean all of those blobs are unexplored tunnels?”

  “No. Wish they were. But even if they were: One, any or all of them could have been explored by somebody who didn’t go to the trouble of recording it. Two, they don’t have to be tunnels. They could be fracture faults, or dikes, or little rivers of some kind of molten material that ran out of somewhere and hardened and got covered over a billion years ago. The only thing we know for sure so far is that there probably aren’t any unexplored tunnels in this area except in those eight places.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We dig. And then we see what we’ve got.”

  Cochenour asked, “Where do we dig?”

  I pointed right next to the bright delta shape of our airbody. “Right here.”

  “Is that the best bet?”

  “Well, not necessarily.” I considered what to tell him and decided to experiment with the truth. “There are three traces altogether that look like better bets than the others—here, I’ll mark them.” I keyed the chart controls, and the three good traces immediately displayed letters: A, B, and C. “A is the one that runs right under the arroyo here, so we’ll dig it first.”

  “The brightest ones are best, is that it?”

  I nodded.

  “But C over here is the brightest of the lot. Why don’t we dig that first?”

  I chose my words carefully. “Partly because we’d have to move the airbody. Partly because it’s on the outside perimeter of the survey area; that means the results aren’t as reliable as right around the ship. But those aren’t the most important reasons. The most important reason is that C is on the edge of the line our itchy-fingered Defense friends are telling us to stay away from.”

  Cochenour snickered incredulously. “Are you telling me that if you find a real untouched Heechee tunnel you’ll stay out of it just because some soldier tells you it’s a no-no?”

  I said, “The problem doesn’t arise. We have seven legal anomalies to look at. Also—the military will be checking us from time to time. Particularly in the next day or two.”

  “All right,” Cochenour insisted, “suppose we come up empty on the legal ones. What then?”

  “I never borrow trouble.”

  “But suppose.”

  “Damn it, Boyce! How do I know?”

  He gave it up then, but winked at Dorrie and chuckled. “What did I tell you, honey? He’s a bigger bandit than I am!”

  But she was looking at me, and what she said was “Why are you that color?”

  I fobbed her off, but when I looked in the mirror I could see that even the whites of my eyes were turning yellowish.

  The next few hours we were too busy to talk about theoretical possibilities. We had some concrete facts to worry about.

  The biggest concrete fact was an awful lot of high-temperature, high-pressure gas that we had to keep from killing us. That was what the heatsuits were for. My own suit was custom-made, of course, and needed only the fittings and tanks to be checked. Boyce and the girl had rental units. I’d paid top dollar for them, and they were good. But good isn’t perfect. I had them in and out of the suits half a dozen times, checking the fit and making adjustments until they were as right as I could get them. The suits were laminated twelve-ply, with nine degrees of freedom at the essential joints, and their own little fuel batteries. They wouldn’t fail. I wasn’t worried about failure. What I was worried about was comfort, because a very small itch or rub can get serious when there’s no way to stop it.

  Finally they were good enough for a trial. We all huddled in the lock and opened the port to the surface of Venus.

  We were still in darkness, but there’s so much scatter from the sun that it doesn’t get really dark ever. I let them practice walking around the airbody, leaning into the wind, bracing themselves against the hold-downs and the side of the ship, while I got ready to dig.

  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 loosening 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 ba
ck 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-thousand-millibar 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, sturdy stuff, there might not be any harm. But there are a couple of dozen mysterious chunks of scrap 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 hoarse 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 fire-jets were something special. In the small space 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. Walthers! How long 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 spaced 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 shell. 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 unbreached.

  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 slope-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.