1-The Merchants of Venus Read online

  I lit another cigarette—lung cancer was the least of my worries just then—and thought for a minute while they waited, watching me. I was wondering how much to tell them of what I had spent five years finding out and figuring out, schooling myself not even to hint at it to anyone else. I was sure in my mind that nothing I said would make a difference anymore. Even so, the habits of years were strong. The words didn't want to say themselves.

  It took a real effort for me to make myself start.

  "You remember Subhash Vastra, the fellow who ran the trap where I met you? Sub came to Venus during his hitch with the military. He was a weapons specialist. There isn't any civilian career for a weapons specialist, especially on Venus, so he went into the cafe business with most of his termination bonus when he got out. Then he sent for his wives with the rest of it. But he was supposed to be pretty good at weaponry while he was in the service."

  "What are you saying, Audee?" Dorrie asked. "I never heard of any Heechee weapons."

  "No. Nobody has ever found a Heechee weapon. But Sub thinks they found targets."

  It was actually physically difficult for me to force my lips to speak the next part, but I got it out. "Anyway, Sub Vastra thought they were targets. He said the higher brass didn't believe him, and I think the matter has been pigeonholed on the reservation now. But what they found was triangular pieces of Heechee wall material—that blue, light-emitting stuff they lined the tunnels with. There were dozens of the things. They all had a pattern of radiating lines; Sub says they looked like targets to him. And they had been drilled through, by something that left the holes as chalky as talcum powder. Do you happen to know of anything that will do that to Heechee wall material?"

  Dorrie was about to say she didn't, but Cochenour said it for her. "That's impossible," he said flatly.

  "Right, that's what the brass told Sub Vastra. They decided that the holes were made in the process of fabrication, for some Heechee purpose we'll never know. Vastra doesn't believe that. Vastra says he figured they were just about the same as the paper targets soldiers use on the firing range. The holes weren't all in the same place. The lines looked to him like scoring markers. That's all the evidence there is that Vastra's right. Not proof. Even Vastra doesn't think it's proof. But it's evidence, anyway."

  "And you think you can find the gun that made those holes where we located Site C?" Cochenour asked.

  I hesitated. "I wouldn't put it that strongly. Call it a hope. Maybe even a very outside hope. But there's one more thing.

  "These targets, or whatever they are, were turned up by a prospector nearly forty years ago. There wasn't any military reservation then. He turned them in to see if anybody would buy them, and nobody was very interested. Then he went out looking for something better, and after a while he got himself killed. That happened a lot in those days. No one paid much attention to the things until some military types got a look at them, and then somebody had the same idea Vastra had years later. So they got serious. They identified the site where he'd reported finding them, near the South Pole. They staked off everything for a thousand kilometers around and labeled it off limits: that's how come the reservation is where it is. And they dug and dug. They turned up about a dozen Heechee tunnels, but most of them were bare and the rest were cracked and spoiled. They didn't find anything like a weapon."

  "Then there's nothing there," Cochenour growled, looking perplexed.

  "There's nothing they found," I corrected him. "Remember, this was forty years ago."

  Cochenour looked at me, puzzled, then his expression cleared. "Oh," he said. "The location of the find."

  I nodded. "That's right. In those days prospectors lied a lot—if they found something good, they didn't want other people horning in. So he gave the wrong location for his tunnel. At that time, he was shacked up with a young lady who later married a man named Allemang —her son, Booker, is a friend of mine. BeeGee. You met him. And he had a map."

  Cochenour was looking openly skeptical now. "Oh, right," he said sourly. "The famous treasure map. And he just gave it to you out of friendship."

  "He sold it to me," I said.

  "Wonderful. How many copies do you suppose he sold other suckers."

  "Not many." I didn't blame Cochenour for doubting the story, but he was rubbing me the wrong way. "I got him right when he came back from trying to find it on his own; he didn't have time to try anybody else." I saw Cochenour opening his mouth and went ahead to forestall him. "No, he didn't find anything. Yes, he thought he followed the map. That's why I didn't have to pay much. But you see I think he missed the right place. The right location on the map, as near as I can figure—the navigation systems then weren't what they are now—is right about where we set down the first time, give or take some. I saw some digging marks a couple of times. I think they were pretty old." I slipped the little private magnetofiche out of my pocket while I was talking and put it into the virtual map display. It showed one central mark, an orange X. "That's where I think we might find the right tunnel, somewhere near that X. And, as you can see, that's pretty close to our old Site C."

  Silence for a minute. I listened to the distant outside rumble of the winds, waiting for the others to say something:

  Dorrie was looking troubled. "I don't know if I like the idea of trying to find a new weapon," she said. "It's—it's like bringing back the bad old days."

  I shrugged.

  Cochenour was beginning to look more like himself again. "The point isn't whether we really want to find a weapon, is it? The point is that we want to find an untapped Heechee dig for whatever's in it. But the soldiers think there might be a weapon somewhere around, so they aren't going to let us dig, right?"

  "Not 'think.' 'Thought.' I doubt any of them believe it anymore."

  "All the same, they'll shoot us first and ask questions later. Isn't that what you said?"

  "That's what I said. Nobody's ever allowed on the reservation without clearance. Not because of Heechee weapons; they've got lots of their own stuff there that they don't want people seeing."

  He nodded. "So how do you propose to get around that little problem?" he asked.

  If I were a completely truthful man I probably should have said that I wasn't sure I would get around it. Looked at honestly, the odds were pretty poor. We could easily get caught and, although I didn't think it was certain, very possibly shot.

  But we had so little to lose, Cochenour and I at least, that I didn't think that was important enough to mention. I just said, "We'll try to fool them. We'll send the air-body off. You and I will stay behind to do the digging. If they think we're gone, they won't be keeping us under surveillance. All we'd have to worry about is being picked up on a routine perimeter patrol, but they're fairly careless about those. I hope."

  "Audee!" the girl cried. "What are you talking about? If you and Boyce stay here, who's going to run the air-body? I can't!"

  "No," I agreed, "you can't, or not very well—even after I give you a couple of lessons. But you can let the thing fly itself. Oh, you'll waste fuel, and you'll get bounced around a lot. But you'll get where you're going on autopilot. It'll even land you on its own."

  "You haven't landed that way," Cochenour pointed out.

  "I didn't say it would be a good landing. You'd better be strapped in." What it would be, of course, was something more like a controlled crash; I closed my mind to the thought of what an autopilot landing might do to my one and only airbody. Dorrie would survive it, though. Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred.

  "Then what do I do?" Dorrie asked.

  There were big holes in my plan at that point, too, but I closed my mind to them, as well. "That depends on where you go. I think the best plan would be for you to head right back to the Spindle."

  "And leave you here?" she demanded, looking suddenly rebellious.

  "Not permanently. In the Spindle you look up my friend BeeGee Allemang and tell him what's been going on. He'll want a share, naturally, but that's all right;
we can give him twenty-five percent, and he'll be happy with that. I'll give you a note for him with all the coordinates and so on, and he'll fly the airbody right back here to pick us up. Say twenty-four hours later."

  "Can we do all that in a day?" Cochenour wanted to know.

  "Sure we can. We have to."

  "And what if Dorrie can't find him, or he gets lost, or something?"

  "She'll find him, and he won't get lost. Of course," I admitted, "there's always the possibility of some 'something.' We have a little margin for error. We can take tanks for extra air and power—we should be all right for as much as forty-eight hours. No more than that. It'll be cutting it very close, but that's plenty of time, I think. If he's late, of course, we're in trouble; but he won't be. What I really worry about is that we'll dig that tunnel and it'll be no good. Then we've wasted our time. But if we do find anything . . ."I left it there.

  "Sounds pretty chancy," Cochenour observed, but he was looking at Dorrie, not at me. She shrugged.

  "I didn't say it was a guarantee," I told him. "I only said it was a chance."

  XI

  I was beginning to think very well of Dorotha Keefer. She was a pretty nice person, considering her age and circumstances, and smart and strong, too. But one thing she lacked was self-confidence. She had just never been trained to it. She had been getting it as a prosthesis—from Cochenour most recently, I supposed, before that maybe whoever preceded Cochenour in her life—at her age, perhaps that had been her father. She had the air of somebody who'd been surrounded by dominating people for a long time.

  That was the biggest problem, persuading Dorrie that she could do her part. "It won't work," she kept saying, as I went over the controls with her. "I'm sorry. It isn't that I don't want to help. I do, but I can't. It just won't work."

  Well, it would have.

  Or at least, I think it would have. In the event, we never got to try the plan out.

  Between us, Cochenour and I finally got Dorrie to agree to give it a whirl. We packed up what little salvageable gear we'd put outside. We flew back to the ravine, landed, and began to set up for a dig. But I was feeling poorly—thick, headachy, clumsy—and I suppose Cochenour had his own problems, though I must admit he didn't complain. Between the two of us we managed to catch the casing of the drill in the exit port while we were off-loading it.

  And, while I was jockeying it one way from above, Cochenour pulled the other way from beneath . . . and the whole hard, heavy thing came right down on top of him.

  It didn't kill him. It just gouged his suit and broke his leg and knocked him unconscious, and that took care of any possibility of having him to help me dig Site C.

  The first thing I did was to check the drill to make sure it wasn't damaged. It wasn't. The second was to manhandle Cochenour back into the airbody lock.

  That took about everything I had, with the combined weight of our suits and bodies, getting the drill out of the way, and my general physical condition. But I managed it.

  Dorrie was great. No hysteria, no foolish questions. We got him out of his heatsuit and looked him over.

  The suit leg had been ruptured through eight or ten plies, but there had been enough left to keep the air out, if not all the pressure. He was alive. Unconscious, all right, but breathing. The leg fracture was compounded, with bone showing through the bleeding flesh. He was bleeding, too, from the mouth and nose, and he had vomited inside his helmet.

  All in all, he was about the worst-looking hundred-or-whatever-year- old man you'll ever see—live one, anyway. But he didn't seem to have taken enough heat to cook his brain. His heart was still going—well, I mean whoever's heart it had been in the first place was still going. It was a good investment, because it was pumping right along. We put compresses on everything we could find, and most of the bleeding stopped by itself, except from the nasty business on his leg.

  For that we needed more expert help. Dorrie called the military reservation for me. She got Amanda Littleknees and was put right through to the base surgeon, Colonel Eve Marcuse. Dr. Marcuse was a friend of my own Quackery fellow; I'd met her once or twice, and she was good about telling me what to do.

  At first Colonel Marcuse wanted me to pack up and bring Cochenour right over. I vetoed that. I gave her satisfactory reasons—I wasn't in shape to pilot, and it would be a rough ride for Cochenour. I certainly didn't give her the real reason, namely that I didn't want to get into the reservation and have to explain my way out of it again. So instead she gave me step-by-step instructions on what to do with the casualty.

  They were easy enough to follow, and I did all she commanded: reduced the fracture, packed the gash, stuck Cochenour with broad-spectrum antibiotics, closed the wound with surgical Velcro and meat glue, sprayed a bandage all around, and poured on a cast. It depleted our first-aid supplies pretty thoroughly and took about an hour of our time. Cochenour would have come to while we were doing it, except that I had also given him a sleepy needle.

  Then he was stable enough. From then on it was just a matter of taking pulse and respiration and blood-pressure readings to satisfy the surgeon, and promising to get him back to the Spindle pretty soon. When Dr. Marcuse was through, still annoyed with me for not bringing Cochenour in for her to play with—I think she was fascinated by the idea of cutting into a man composed almost entirely of other people's parts —Sergeant Littleknees came back on the circuit.

  I could tell what was on her mind. "Uh, honey? How did it happen, exactly?"

  "A great big Heechee came exactly up out of the ground and bit him exactly on the leg," I told her. "I know what you're thinking. You've got an evil mind. It was just an accident."

  "Of course it was," she said. "I just wanted you to know that I don't blame you a bit." And she signed off.

  Dorrie was cleaning the old man off as best she could—pretty profligate with our spare sheets and towels, I thought, considering that my airbody didn't carry a washing machine aboard. I left her to it while I made myself some coffee, lit another cigarette, and sat and thought up another plan.

  By the time Dorrie had done what she could for Cochenour, then cleaned up the worst of the mess, then begun such remaining important tasks as the repair of her eye makeup, I had thought up a dandy.

  As the first step, I gave Cochenour a wake-up needle,

  Dorrie patted him and talked to him while he got his bearings. She was not a girl who carried a grudge. On the other hand, I did, a little. I wasn't as tender as she. As soon as he seemed coherent I got him up, to try out his muscles—a lot faster than he really wanted to. His expression told me that they all ached. They worked all right, though, and he could stump around on the cast.

  He was even able to grin. "Old bones," he said. "I knew I should have gone for another recalciphylaxis. That's what happens when you try to save a buck."

  He sat down heavily, wincing, the leg stuck out in front of him. He wrinkled his nose as he smelled himself. "Sorry to have messed up your nice clean airbody," he added.

  "It's been messed up worse. You want to finish cleaning yourself up?"

  He looked surprised. "Well, I guess I'd better, pretty soon—"

  "Do it now. I want to talk to you both."

  He didn't argue. He just stuck out his hand, and Dorrie took it. With her help he stumped, half-hopping, toward the clean-up. Actually Dorrie had already done the worst of the job of getting him clean before he woke up, but he splashed a little water on his face and swished some around in his mouth. He was pretty well recovered when he turned around to look at me.

  "All right, Walthers, what is it? Do we give up and go back now?"

  "No," I said. "We'll do it a different way."

  "He can't, Audee!" Dorrie cried. "Look at him. And the condition his suit is in, he couldn't last outside an hour, much less help you dig."

  "I know that, so we'll have to change the plan. I'll dig by myself. The two of you will slope off in the air-body."

  "Oh, brave heroic man," Cochenour sai
d flatly. "Are you crazy? Who are you kidding? That's a two-man job."

  "I did the first one by myself, Cochenour."

  "And came into the airbody to cool off every little while. Sure. That's a whole other thing."

  I hesitated. "It'll be harder," I admitted. "Not impossible. Lone prospectors have dug out tunnels before, though the problems were a little different. I know it'll be a rough forty-eight hours for me, but we'll have to try it—there isn't any alternative."

  "Wrong," Cochenour said. He patted Dorrie's rump. "Solid muscle, that girl is. She isn't big, but she's healthy. Takes after her grandmother. Don't argue, Walthers. Just think a little bit. I'll fly the airbody; she'll stick around to help you. The job is as safe for Dorrie as it is for you; and with two of you to spell each other there's a chance you might make it before you pass out from heat prostration. What's the chance by yourself? Any chance at all?"