The Gateway Trip Read online

  So the two of them worked hard. And they drove me hard. And I was as eager as they. Maybe more so as the days went past and I found myself rubbing my right side, just under the short ribs, more and more of the time.

  We got a couple looks from the Defense boys. They overflew us in their high-speed airbodies half a dozen times in the first few days. They didn’t say much, just formal radio requests for identification. Regulations say that if you find anything you’re supposed to report it right away. Over Cochenour’s objections I reported finding that first breached tunnel, which surprised them a little, I think.

  That’s all we had to report.

  Site B was a pegmatite dike. The other two fairly bright ones, that I called D and E, showed nothing at all when we dug—meaning that the sound reflections had probably been caused by nothing more than invisible interfaces in rock or ash or gravel.

  I vetoed trying to dig Site C, the best looking of the bunch.

  Cochenour gave me a hell of an argument about it, but I held out. The military were still looking in on us every now and then, and I didn’t want to get any closer to their perimeter than we already were. I said maybe, if we didn’t have any luck elsewhere, we could sneak back to C for a quick dig before returning to the Spindle, and we left it at that.

  We lifted the airbody, moved to a new position, and set out a new pattern of probes.

  By the end of the second week we had dug nine times and come up empty all nine. We were getting low on igloos and probe percussers. We’d run out of tolerance for each other completely.

  Cochenour had turned sullen and savage. I hadn’t planned on being best buddies with the man when I first met him, but I hadn’t expected him to be as bad company as that. I didn’t think he had any right to take it so hard, because it was obviously only a game with him. With all his fortune, the extra money he might pick up by discovering some new Heechee artifacts couldn’t have meant much—just, extra points on a scorepad—but he was playing for blood.

  I wasn’t particularly gracious myself, for that matter. The plain fact was that the pills from the Quackery weren’t helping as much as they should. My mouth tasted as though rats had nested in it, I was getting headaches, and every once in a while I’d be woozy enough to knock things over.

  See, the thing about the liver is that it sort of regulates your internal diet. It filters out poisons. It converts some of the carbohydrates into other carbohydrates that you can use. It patches together amino acids into proteins. If it isn’t working, you die.

  The doctor had been all over it with me. Maze-rats get liver trouble a lot; it comes when you save yourself a little trouble by letting your internal suit pressure build up—it sort of compresses the gas in your gut and squeezes the liver. He’d showed me pictures. I could visualize what was going on in my insides, with the mahogany-red liver cells dying and being replaced by clusters of fat and yellowish stuff. It was an ugly picture. The ugliest part was that there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Only go on taking pills—and they wouldn’t work much longer, I counted the days to bye-bye, liver, hello, hepatic failure.

  So we were a bad bunch. I was being a bastard because I was beginning to feel sick and desperate. Cochenour was being a bastard because that was his nature. The only decent human being aboard was the girl.

  Dorrie did her best, she really did. She was sometimes sweet (and often even pretty), and she was always ready to meet the power people, Cochenour and me, more than halfway.

  It was obvious that it was tough on her. Dorotha Keefer was only a kid. No matter how grown-up she acted, she just hadn’t been alive long enough to grow defenses against concentrated meanness. Add in the fact that we were all beginning to hate the sight and sound and smell of each other (and in an airbody you get to know a lot about how people smell), and there wasn’t much joy in this skylarking tour of Venus for Dorrie Keefer.

  Or for any of us…especially after I broke the news that we were down to our last igloo.

  Cochenour cleared his throat. It wasn’t a polite sound. It was the beginning of a war cry. He sounded like a fighter-plane jockey blowing the covers off his guns in preparation for combat, and Dorrie tried to head him off with a diversion. “Audee,” she said brightly, “do you know what I think we could do? We could go back to that Site C, the one that looked good near the military reservation.”

  It was the wrong diversion. I shook my head. “No.”

  “What the hell do you mean, ‘No’?” Cochenour rumbled, revving up for battle.

  “What I said. No. It’s too close to the Defense guys. If there’s a tunnel, it will run right onto the reservation, and they’ll come down on us.” I tried to be persuasive. “That’s a desperation trick, and I’m not that desperate.”

  “Walthers,” he snarled, “you’ll be desperate if I tell you to be desperate. I can still stop payment on that check.”

  I corrected him. “No, you can’t. The union won’t let you. The regulations are very clear about that. You pay up unless I disobey a lawful request. What you want isn’t lawful. Going inside the military reservation is extremely against the law.”

  He shifted over to cold war. “No,” he said softly. “You’re wrong about that. It’s only against the law if a court says it is, after we do it. You’re only right if your lawyers are smarter than my lawyer. Honestly, Walthers, they won’t be. I pay my lawyers to be the smartest there are.”

  I was not in a good bargaining position. It wasn’t just that what Cochenour said was true enough. He had help from a very powerful ally. My liver was on his side. I certainly could not spare time for arbitration, because without the transplant his payment was going to buy I wouldn’t live that long.

  Dorrie had been listening with her birdlike air of friendly interest. She got between us. “Well, then, how about this? We just got to where we are now. Why don’t we wait and see what the probes show? Maybe we’ll hit something even better than that Site C—”

  “There isn’t going to be anything good here,” he said without taking his eyes off me.

  “Why, Boyce, how do you know that? We haven’t even finished the soundings.”

  He said, “Look, Dorotha, listen close this one time and then shut up. Walthers is playing games with me. Do you see where we just put down?”

  He brushed past me and tapped out the command for a full map display, which somewhat surprised me. I hadn’t known he knew how. The charts sprang up. They showed the virtual images of our position and of the shafts we’d already cut, and the great irregular border of the military reservation—all overlaid on the plot of mascons and navigation aids.

  “Do you see the picture? We’re not even in the high-density mass-concentration areas now. Isn’t that true, Walthers? Are you saying we’ve tried all the good locations around here and come up dry?”

  “No,” I said. “That is, you’re partly right, Mr. Cochenour. Only partly; I’m not playing any games with you. This site is a good possibility. You can see it on the map. It’s true that we’re not right over any mascon, but we’re right between those two right there, that are pretty close together. That’s a good sign. Sometimes you find a dig that connects two complexes, and it has happened that the connecting passage was closer to the surface there than any other part of the system. I can’t guarantee that we’ll hit anything here. But it’s worth a gamble.”

  “It’s just damn unlikely, right?”

  “Well, no more unlikely than anywhere else. I told you a week ago, you got your money’s worth the first day, just finding any Heechee tunnel at all. Even a spoiled one. There are maze-rats in the Spindle who went five years without seeing that much.” I thought for a minute. “I’ll make a deal with you,” I offered.

  “I’m listening.”

  “We’re already on the ground here. There’s at least a chance we can hit something. Let’s try. We’ll deploy the probes and see what they turn up. If we get a good trace we’ll dig it. If not…well, then I’ll think about going back to Site C.”


  “Think about it!” he roared.

  “Don’t push me, Cochenour. You don’t know what you’re getting into. The military reservation is not to be fooled with. Those boys shoot first and ask later, and there aren’t any policemen around to holler for help.”

  “I don’t know,” he said after a moment’s glowering thought.

  “No,” I told him, “you don’t, Mr. Cochenour. I do. That’s what you’re paying me for.”

  He nodded. “Yes, you probably do know, Walthers, but whether you’re telling me the truth about what you know is another question. Hegramet never said anything about digging between mascons.”

  And then he looked at me with a completely opaque expression, waiting to see whether I would catch him up on what he’d just said.

  I didn’t respond. I gave him an opaque look back. I didn’t say a word. I only waited to see what would come next. I was pretty sure it would not be any sort of explanation of how he happened to know Professor Hegramet’s name, or what dealings he had had with the greatest Earthside authority on Heechee diggings.

  It wasn’t.

  “Put out your probes,” he said at last. “We’ll try it your way one more time.”

  I plopped the probes out, got good penetration on all of them, and started firing the noisemakers. Then I sat watching the first lines of the cast build up on the scan, as though I expected them to carry useful information. They weren’t going to for quite a while, but I wanted to think privately for a bit.

  Cochenour needed to be thought about. He hadn’t come to Venus just for the ride. He had planned to dig for Heechee tunnels before he ever left the Earth. He had gone to the trouble of briefing himself even on the instruments he would encounter in an airbody.

  My sales talk about Heechee treasures had been wasted on a customer whose mind had been made up to buy at least half a year earlier and tens of millions of miles away.

  I understood all that. But the more I understood, the more I saw that I didn’t understand. I wished I could slip Cochenour a couple of bucks and send him off to the games parlors for a while, so I could talk privately to the girl. Unfortunately there wasn’t anywhere to send him. I forced a yawn, complained about the boredom of waiting for the probe traces to build up, and suggested we all take a nap. Not that I would have been real confident he would be the one to turn in—but he didn’t even listen. All I got out of that ploy was an offer from Dorrie to watch the screen and wake me up if anything interesting developed.

  So I said the hell with it and turned in myself.

  I didn’t sleep well, because while I was lying there, waiting for sleep to happen, it gave me time to notice how truly lousy I was beginning to feel, and in how many different ways. There was a sort of permanent taste of bile in the back of my mouth—not so much as though I wanted to throw up as it was as though I just had. My head ached. My eyes were getting woozy; I was beginning to see ghost images wandering fuzzily around my field of vision.

  I roused myself to take a couple of my pills. I didn’t count the ones that were left. I didn’t want to know.

  I set my private wake-up for three hours, thinking maybe that would give Cochenour time to get sleepy and turn in, leaving Dorrie perhaps up and maybe feeling conversational. But when I woke up there was the wide-awake old man, cooking himself a herb omelet with the last of our sterile eggs. “You were right, Walthers,” he grinned. “I was sleepy, at that. So I had a nice little one-hour nap. Ready for anything now. Want some eggs?”

  Actually I did want them. A lot. But of course I didn’t dare eat them, so I glumly swallowed the nutritious and very unsatisfying stuff the diet department of the Quackery allowed me to have and watched him stuff himself. It was unfair that a man of ninety could be so healthy that he didn’t have to think about his digestion, while I was—

  Well, there wasn’t any profit in that kind of thinking. I offered to play some music to pass the time. Dorrie picked Swan Lake, and I started it up.

  And then I had an idea. I headed for the tool lockers. They didn’t really need checking. The auger heads were close to time for replacement, but I wasn’t going to replace them; we were running low on spares. The thing about the tool lockers was that they were about as far from the galley as you could get and still be inside the airbody.

  I hoped Dorrie would follow me. And she did.

  “Need any help, Audee?”

  “Glad to have it,” I told her. “Here, hold these for me. Don’t get the grease on your clothes.” I didn’t expect her to ask why they had to be held. She didn’t. She only laughed at the idea of getting grease on her clothes.

  “I don’t think I’d even notice a little extra grease, dirty as I am. I guess we’ll all be glad to get back to civilization.”

  Cochenour was frowning over the probe and paying no attention. I said, “Which kind of civilization do you mean? The Spindle, or all the way back to Earth?”

  What I had in mind was to start her talking about Earth, but she went the other way. “Oh, the Spindle,” she said. “I never dreamed I’d get to this planet, Audee! I loved it, I thought it was fascinating the way everybody got along together, and we really didn’t see much of it. Especially the people like that Indian fellow who ran the restaurant. The cashier was his wife, wasn’t she?”

  “She was one of them, yes. She’s Vastra’s number-one wife. The waitress was number three, and he has another one at home with the kids. There are five kids, all three wives involved.” But I wanted to turn the conversation around, so I said, “It’s pretty much the same as on Earth. Vastra would be running a tourist trap in Benares if he wasn’t running one here, and he wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t shipped out with the military and terminated here. I guess if I weren’t on Venus I’d be guiding in Texas. If there’s any open country left to guide hunters in—maybe up along the Canadian River. How about you?”

  All the time I was picking up the same four or five tools, studying the serial numbers and putting them back. She didn’t notice.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, what did you do on Earth, before you came here?”

  “Oh, I worked in Boyce’s office for a while.”

  That was encouraging. Maybe she’d remember something about his connection with Professor Hegramet. “What were you, a secretary?”

  She gave me an unfriendly look. “Something like that,” she said.

  Then I was embarrassed. She thought I was prying—I was, of course, but I wasn’t looking for sordid details about how a pretty young thing like her allowed herself to be seduced into being bedmate for a dirty old man. Not least because Cochenour, old though he was and nasty as he might be when he chose, was also obviously a pretty powerfully attractive figure to women. I said, trying to be placating, “It’s none of my business, of course.”

  “No,” she said, “it isn’t.” And then she said, “What’s that?”

  That was an incoming call on the radio, that’s what that was.

  “So answer it,” Cochenour snarled from across the airbody, looking up from his eggs.

  I was glad enough for the interruption. The call was voice-only, which surprised me a little. I kept it that way. In fact, I took the call on the earjack, since it is my nature to be cautious about some things. Anyway, there isn’t much privacy in an airbody, and I want what little crumbs of it I can find.

  It was the base calling, a Communications sergeant I knew named Littleknees. I signed in irritably, watching Dorrie go back to sit protectively with Boyce Cochenour.

  “A private word for you, Audee,” said Sergeant Littleknees. “Is your sahib lurking about?”

  Littleknees and I had exchanged radio chatter for a long time. There was something about the bright cheeriness of the tone that bothered me. I turned my back on Cochenour. I knew he was listening—but only to my side of the conversation, of course, because of the earjack. “In the area but not tuned in at present,” I said. “What have you got for me?”

  “Just a little news bull
etin,” the sergeant purred. “It came in over the synsat a couple of minutes ago, information only as far as we were concerned. That means we don’t have to do anything about it, but maybe you do, honey.”

  “Standing by,” I said, studying the plastic housing of the radio.

  The sergeant chuckled. “Your sahib’s charter captain would like to have a word with him when found. It’s kind of urgent, ’cause the captain is righteously pissed off.”

  “Yes, Base,” I said. “Your signals received, strength ten.”

  Sergeant Amanda Littleknees made an amused noise again, but this time it wasn’t a chuckle. It was a downright giggle. “The thing is,” she said, “his check for the charter fee for the Yuri Gagarin went bouncy-bouncy. Do you want to know what the bank said? You’d never guess. ‘Insufficient funds,’ that’s what they said.”

  The pain under my right lower ribs was permanent, but right then it seemed to get a lot worse. I gritted my teeth. “Ah, Sergeant Littleknees,” I croaked. “Can you verify that estimate?”

  “Sorry, honey,” she buzzed in my ear, “but there’s no doubt in the world. The captain got a credit report on your Boyce Cochenour fellow, and it turned up n.g. When your customer gets back to the Spindle there’ll be a warrant waiting for him.”

  “Thank you for the synoptic estimate,” I said hollowly. “I will verify departure time before we take off.”

  And I turned off the radio and gazed at my rich billionaire client.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Walthers?” he growled.

  But I wasn’t hearing his voice. I was only hearing what my happy sawbones at the Quackery had told me. The equations were unforgettable. Cash = new liver + happy survival. No cash = total hepatic failure + death. And my cash supply had just dried up.