The Gateway Trip Read online

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  When you get a really big piece of news you have to let it trickle through your system and get thoroughly absorbed before you do anything about it. It isn’t a matter of seeing the implications. I saw those right away, you bet I did. It’s a matter of letting the system reach equilibrium.

  So I puttered for a few minutes. I listened to Tchaikovsky’s swan hunters tooling up to meet the queen. I made sure the radio switch was off so as not to waste power. I checked the synoptic plot the thumpers were building up.

  It would have been nice if there had been something wonderful beginning to show on it, but, the way things were going, there wouldn’t be, of course. There wasn’t. A few pale echoes were beginning to form. But nothing with the shape of a Heechee tunnel, and nothing very bright. The data were still coming in, but I knew there was no way for those feeble plots to develop into the mother lode that could save us all, even crooked, dead-broke, bastard Cochenour.

  I even looked out at as much of the sky as I could manage through the windows, to see how the weather was. It didn’t matter, but some of the big white calomel clouds were scudding among the purples and yellows of the other mercury halides; the sun was getting ready to rise in the west.

  It was beautiful, and I hated it.

  Cochenour had put away the last of his omelet and was watching me thoughtfully. So was Dorrie, back at the parts rack, once again holding the augers in their grease-paper wrap. I grinned at her. “Pretty,” I said, referring to the music. The Auckland Philharmonic was just getting to the part where the baby swans come out arm in arm and do a fast, bouncy pas de quatre across the stage. It has always been one of my favorite parts of Swan Lake…but not now.

  “We’ll listen to the rest of it later,” I said, and switched the player off.

  Cochenour snapped, “All right, Walthers. What’s going on?”

  I sat down on an empty igloo pack and lit a cigarette, because one of the adjustments my internal system had made was to calculate that we didn’t need to worry much about coddling our oxygen supply anymore. “There are some questions that have been bothering me, Cochenour. For one, how did you happen to get in touch with Professor Hegramet?”

  He grinned and relaxed. “Oh, is that all that’s on your mind? No reason you shouldn’t know that. I did a lot of checking on Venus before I came out here—why not?”

  “No reason, except you let me think you didn’t know a thing.”

  Cochenour shrugged. “If you had any brains at all you’d know I didn’t get rich by being stupid. You think I’d travel umpty-million miles without knowing what I was going to find when I got here?”

  “No, you wouldn’t, but you did your best to make me think you would. No matter. So you went looking for somebody who could point you to whatever was worth stealing on Venus, and then that person steered you to Hegramet. Then what? Did Hegramet tell you that I was dumb enough to be your boy?”

  Cochenour wasn’t quite as relaxed, but he hadn’t turned aggressive, either. He said mildly, “Hegramet did mention your name, yes. He told me you were as good a guide as any if I wanted to look for a virgin tunnel. Then he answered a lot of questions for me about the Heechee and so on. So, yes, I knew who you were. If you hadn’t come to us I would have come to you; you just saved me the trouble.”

  I said, feeling a little surprise as I said it, “You know, I think you’re telling me the truth. Except that you left out one thing.”

  “Which was?”

  “It wasn’t the fun of making more money that you were after, was it? It was just money, right? Money that you needed pretty badly.” I turned to Dorotha, standing frozen with the augers in her hands. “How about it, Dorrie? Did you know the old man was broke?”

  It wasn’t too smart of me to put it to her like that. I saw what she was about to do just before she did it, and jumped off the igloo crate. I was a little too late. She dropped the augers before I could take them away from her, but fortunately they landed flat and the blades weren’t chipped. I picked them up and put them away.

  She had answered the question well enough.

  “I see he didn’t tell you about that,” I said. “That’s tough on you, doll. His check to the captain of the Gagarin is still bouncing, and I would imagine the one he gave me isn’t going to be much better. I hope you got it all in fur and jewels, Dorrie. My advice to you is to hide them before the creditors want them back.”

  She didn’t ever look at me. She was only looking at Cochenour, whose expression was all the confirmation she needed.

  I don’t know what I expected from her, rage or reproaches or tears. What she did was whisper, “Oh, Boyce, dear, I’m so sorry.” And she went over and put her arms around him.

  I turned my back on them, because I wasn’t enjoying looking at the way he was. The strapping ninety-year-old buck on Full Medical had turned into a defeated old man. For the first time since he’d walked cockily into the Spindle, he looked all of his age and maybe a little bit more. The mouth was half-open, trembling; the straight back was stooped; the bright blue eyes were watering. Dorrie stroked him and crooned to him, looking at me with an expression filled with pain.

  It had never occurred to me that she might really care about the guy.

  I turned and studied the synoptic web again, for lack of anything better to do. It was about as clear as it was ever going to get, and it was empty. We had a little overlap from one of our previous soundings, so I could tell that the interesting-looking scratches on one edge were nothing to get excited about. We’d checked them out already. They were only ghosts.

  There was no instant salvation waiting for us there.

  Curiously, I felt kind of relaxed. There is something tranquilizing about the realization that you don’t have anything much to lose anymore. It puts things in a different perspective.

  I don’t mean to say that I had given up. There were still things I could do. They didn’t have much to do with prolonging my life anymore—that was one of the things I had had to readjust to—but then the taste in my mouth and the pain in my gut weren’t letting me enjoy life very much anyway.

  One thing I could do was to write good old Audee Walthers off. Since only a miracle could keep me from that famous total hepatic collapse in a week or two, I could accept the fact that I wasn’t going to be alive much longer. So I could use what time I had left for something else.

  What else? Well, Dorrie was not a bad kid. I could fly the airbody back to the Spindle, turn Cochenour over to the gendarmes, and spend my last couple of walking-around days introducing Dorrie to the people who could help her. Vastra or BeeGee would be willing to give her some kind of a start, maybe. She might not even have to go into prostitution or the rackets. The high season wasn’t all that far off, and she had the kind of personality that might make a success out of a little booth of prayer fans and Heechee lucky pieces for the Terry tourists.

  Maybe that wasn’t much, from anyone’s point of view. But the captain of the Gagarin was surely not going to fly her back to Cincinnati for nothing, and scrounging in the Spindle beat starving. Somewhat.

  Then maybe I didn’t really have to give up on myself, even? I thought about that for a bit. I could fling myself on the mercy of the Quackery. Conceivably they might let me have a new liver on credit. Why not?

  There was one good reason why not; namely, they never had.

  Or I could open the two-fuel valves and let them mix for ten minutes or so before hitting the igniter. The explosion wouldn’t leave much of the airbody—or of us—and nothing at all of our various problems.

  Or—

  I sighed. “Oh, hell,” I said. “Buck up, Cochenour. We’re not dead yet.”

  He looked at me for a moment to see if I’d gone crazy. Then he patted Dorrie’s shoulder and pushed her away, gently enough. “I will be, soon enough. I’m sorry about all this, Dorotha. And I’m sorry about your check, Walthers; I expect you needed the money.”

  “You have no idea.”

  He sa
id with some difficulty, “Do you want me to try to explain?”

  “I don’t see that it makes any difference—but, yes,” I admitted, “out of curiosity I do.”

  It didn’t take him long. Once he started, he was succinct and clear and he didn’t leave any important things out—although actually I could have guessed most of it. (But hadn’t. Hindsight is so much better.)

  The basic thing is that a man Cochenour’s age has to be one of two things. Either he’s very, very rich, or he’s dead. Cochenour’s trouble was that he was only quite rich. He’d done his best to keep all his industries going with a depleted cash flow of what was left after he siphoned off the costs of transplants and treatments, calciphylaxis and prosthesis, protein regeneration here, cholesterol flushing there, a million for this, a hundred grand a month for that…oh, it went fast enough. I could see that. “You just don’t know,” he said, not pitifully, just stating a fact, “what it takes to keep a hundred-year-old man alive until you try it.”

  Oh, don’t I just, I said, but not out loud. I let him go on with the story of how the minority stockholders were getting inquisitive and the federal inspectors were closing in…and so he skipped Earth to make his fortune all over again on Venus.

  But I wasn’t listening attentively anymore by the time he got to the end of it. I didn’t even pick up on the fact that he’d been lying about his age—imagine that vanity! Thinking it was better to say he was ninety!

  I had more important things to do than make Cochenour squirm anymore. Instead of listening I was writing on the back of a navigation form. When I was finished, I passed it over to Cochenour. “Sign it,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “Does it matter? You don’t have any choice that I can see. But what it is is a release from the all-rights section of our charter agreement. You acknowledge that the charter is void, that you have no claim, that your check was rubber, and that you voluntarily waive your ownership of anything we might find in my favor.”

  He was frowning. “What’s this bit at the end?”

  “That’s where I agree to give you ten percent of my share of the profits on anything we find, if we do find anything worth money.”

  “That’s charity,” he said, looking up at me. But he was already signing. “I don’t mind taking a little charity, especially since, as you point out, I don’t have any choice. But I can read that synoptic web over there as well as you can, Walthers. There’s nothing on it to find.”

  “No, there isn’t,” I agreed, folding the paper and putting it in my pocket. “That trace is as bare as your bank account. But we’re not going to dig there. What we’re going to do is go back and dig Site C.”

  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 café 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 o
f 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 airbody? 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.”