1-The Merchants of Venus Read online

  I didn't answer the last part. For some reason, his attitude put me in a bad temper. "You talk as though she didn't have anything to say about it."

  "Well," Dorrie said, sweetly enough, "come to that, so do you, Audee. Boyce is right. I appreciate your being all gallant and trying to make things easy for me, but, honestly, I think you'll need me. I've learned a lot. And if you want the truth, you look a lot worse than I do."

  I said, with all the contemptuous command I could get into my voice, "Forget it. We're going to do it my way. You can both help me for an hour or so, while I get set up. Then you're on your way. No arguments. Let's get going."

  Well, that made two mistakes.

  The first was that we didn't get set up in an hour. It took more than two, and I was sweating—sick, oily sweat—long before we finished. I really felt bad. I was past worrying about the way I felt; I was only a little surprised, and kind of grateful, every time I noticed that my heart was still beating.

  Dorrie was as strong and willing as promised. She did more of the muscle work than I did, firing up the igloo and setting the equipment in place, and Cochenour checked over the instruments and made sure he knew what he had to do to make the airbody fly. He flatly rejected the notion of going back to the Spindle, though; he said he didn't want to risk the extra time, when he could just as easily set down for twenty-four hours a few hundred kilometers away.

  Then I took two cups of strong coffee, heavily laced with my private supply of gin, smoked my last cigarette for a while, and put in a call to the military reservation.

  Amanda Littleknees was flirtatious but a little puzzled when I told her we were departing the vicinity, no fixed destination; but she didn't argue.

  Then Dorrie and I tumbled out of the lock and closed it behind us, leaving Cochenour strapped in the driver's seat.

  That was the other mistake I had made. In spite of everything I had said, we did it Cochenour's way after all. I never agreed to it. It just happened that way.

  Under the ashy sky Dorrie just stood there for a moment, looking forlorn. But then she grabbed my hand, and the two of us swam through the thick, turbulent air toward the shelter of our last igloo. She had remembered my coaching about the importance of staying out of the jet exhaust. Inside, she flung herself flat and didn't move.

  I was less cautious. I couldn't help myself. I had to see. So, as soon as I could judge from the flare that the jets were angled away from us, I stuck my head up and watched Cochenour take off in a sleet of ash.

  It wasn't a bad takeoff. In circumstances like that, I define "bad" as total demolition of the airbody and the death or maiming of one or more persons. He avoided that, but as soon as he was out of the slight shelter of the arroyo the gusts caught him and the airbody skittered and slid wildly. It was going to be a rough ride for him, going just the few hundred kilometers north that would take him out of detection range.

  I touched Dorrie with my toe, and she struggled to her feet. I slipped the talk cord into the jack on her helmet —radio was out, because of possible eavesdropping from the perimeter patrols that we wouldn't be able to see.

  "Have you changed your mind yet?" I asked.

  It was a fairly obnoxious question, but she took it nicely. She giggled. I could tell that because we were faceplate to faceplate, and I could see her face shadowed inside the helmet. But I couldn't hear what she was saying until she remembered to nudge her voice switch, and then what I heard was, ". . . romantic, just the two of us."

  Well, we didn't have time for that kind of chitchat. I said irritably, "Let's quit wasting time. Remember what I told you. We have air, water, and power for forty-eight hours, and that's it. Don't count on any margin. The water might last a little longer than the others, but you need the other two things to stay alive. Try not to work too hard. The less you metabolize, the less your waste-disposal system has to handle. If we find a tunnel and get in, maybe we can eat some of those emergency rations over there—provided the tunnel's unbreached and hasn't heated up too much in the last couple hundred thousand years. Otherwise, don't even think about food. As to sleeping, forget it; maybe while the drills are going we can catch a couple of naps, but—"

  "Now who's wasting time? You've told me all this stuff before." But her voice was still cheery.

  So we climbed into the igloo and started work.

  The first thing we had to do was to clear out some of the tailings that had already begun to accumulate where we'd left the drill going. The usual way, of course, is to reverse and redirect the augers. We couldn't waste drilling time that way; it would have meant taking them away from cutting the shaft. We had to do it the hard way, namely manually.

  It was hard, all right. Heatsuits are uncomfortable to begin with. When you have to work in them, they're miserable. When the work is both hard physically and complicated by the cramped space inside an igloo that already contains two people and a working drill, it's next to impossible.

  We did it anyway.

  Cochenour hadn't lied to me about Dorrie. She was as good a partner as any man I'd ever had. The big question before us was whether that was going to be good enough. Because there was another question, which was bothering me more and more every minute, and that was whether I was still as good as a man.

  Lord knew, I wasn't feeling good. The headache was really pounding at me, and when I moved suddenly I found myself close to blacking out. It all seemed suspiciously like the prognosis they'd given me at the Quackery. To be sure, they'd promised me three weeks before acute hepatic failure, but that hadn't been meant to include this sort of bone-breaking work. I had to figure that I was on plus time already.

  That was a disconcerting way to figure.

  Especially when the first ten hours went by . . . and I realized that our shaft was down lower than the soundings had shown the tunnel to be and no luminous blue tailings had come in sight.

  We were drilling a dry hole.

  Now, if we had had plenty of time and the airbody close by, this would have been no more than an annoyance. Maybe a really big annoyance, sure, but nothing like a disaster. All it would have meant was that I'd get back into the airbody, clean up, get a good night's sleep, eat a meal, and recheck the trace. Probably we were just digging in the wrong spot. All right, next step would be to dig in the right one. Study the terrain, pick a spot, ignite another igloo, start up the drills, and try, try again.

  That's what we would have done.

  But we didn't have any of those advantages. We didn't have the airbody. We had no chance for food or a decent sleep. We were out of igloos. We didn't have the trace to look at—and time was running out on us, and I was feeling lousier every minute.

  I crawled out of the igloo, sat down in the next thing there was to the lee of the wind, and stared up at the scudding yellow-green sky.

  There ought to be something to do, if I could only think what it was.

  I ordered myself to think.

  Let's see, I said to myself. Could I maybe uproot the igloo and move it to another spot?

  No. That was a no-go. I could break the igloo loose with the augers, but the minute it was free the winds would catch it and it would be good-bye, Charlie. I'd never see that igloo again. Plus there would be no way to make it gastight anyway.

  Well, then, how about drilling without an igloo?

  Possible, I judged. Pointless, though. Suppose we did hit lucky and hole in? Without a sealed igloo to lock out those ninety thousand millibars of hot, destructive air, we'd destroy anything fragile inside before we got a look at it.

  I felt a nudge on my shoulder and discovered that Dorrie was sitting next to me. She didn't ask any questions, didn't try to say anything at all. I guess it was all clear enough without talking about it.

  By my suit chronometer thirteen hours were gone. That left thirty-some before Cochenour would come back to get us. I didn't see any point in spending it all sitting there.

  But, on the other hand, I didn't see any point in doing anything else.


  Of course, I thought, I could always go to sleep for a while . . . and then I woke up, and realized that that was what I had been doing.

  Dorrie was curled up beside me, also asleep.

  You may wonder how a person can sleep in the teeth of a south polar thermal gale. It isn't all that hard. All it takes is that you be wholly worn out, and wholly despairing. Sleeping isn't just to knit that old raveled sleeve, it is a good way to shut the world off when the world is too lousy to face. As ours was.

  But Venus may be the last refuge of the Puritan ethic. On Venus you work. The ones who don't feel that way get selected out early, because they don't survive.

  It was crazy, of course. In any logical estimate I knew I was as good as dead, but I felt I had to be doing something. I eased away from Dorrie, making sure her suit was belted to the hold-tight ring at the base of the igloo, and stood up.

  It took a great deal of concentration for me to be able to stand up. That was all right. It was almost as good as sleeping at keeping thoughts of the world out.

  It occurred to me—I admit that even then it seemed like no more than an outside possibility—that something good had happened while Dorrie and I were asleep. Something like—oh, let's say . . . oh, maybe that there still might be eight or ten live Heechee in the tunnel . . . and maybe they'd heard us knocking and opened up the bottom of the shaft for us. So I crawled into the igloo to see if they had.

  Nope. They hadn't. I peered down the shaft to make sure, but it was still just a blind hole that disappeared into dirty dark at the end of the light from my head lamp. I swore at the inhospitable Heechee—for being nonexistent, I guess—and kicked some tailings down the hole onto their absent heads.

  The Puritan ethic was itching at me somewhere. I wondered what I ought to be doing. I couldn't think of too many choices. Die? Well, sure, but I was well on my way to doing that as fast as I could. Wasn't there something constructive?

  The Puritan ethic reminded me that you always ought to leave a place the way you found it, so I hauled the drills up on the eight-to-one winch and left them hanging neatly while I kicked some more tailings down the useless hole. When I had made enough space for a place to sit, I sat down and thought things over.

  I mused about what we had done wrong—not with a view toward doing it right, you see, but more like an old chess puzzle. How had we missed finding a tunnel?

  After some time of cloudy cogitation, I thought I knew the answer to that.

  It had to do with what an autosonic trace was like. People like Dorrie and Cochenour have the idea that a seismic trace is like one of those underground maps of downtown Dallas that shows all the sewers and utility conduits and water pipes and subways, marked so if you need to get into one of them you can just dig down where it says and you'll find what you want right there.

  It isn't exactly like that. The trace is more probabilistic. It comes out as a sort of hazy approximation. It is built up, minute by minute, by the echoes from the pinger. It looks like a band of spiderweb shadows, much wider than any actual tunnel would be and very fuzzy at the edges. When you look at the trace, you know that the best it's telling you is that there's something that makes the shadows. Maybe it's a rock interface or a pocket of gravel. Hopefully it's a Heechee dig. Whatever it is, it's there somewhere, but you don't know just where, exactly. If a tunnel is ten meters wide, which is fair average for a Heechee connecting link, the shadow trace is sure to look like fifty, and may appear to be a hundred.

  So where do you dig?

  That's where the art of prospecting comes in. You have to make an informed guess.

  Maybe you dig in the exact geometrical center—as it is given you to see where the center is. That's the easiest way. Or maybe you dig where the shadows are densest, which is the way the most experienced prospectors do. That works as well as anything else.

  But that's not good enough for smart, skilled old Audee Walthers. I do it my own way. What I do, I try to think like a Heechee. I look at the trace as a whole and try to see what points the Heechee might have been trying to connect. Then I plot an imaginary course between them, where I would have put the tunnel if I'd been the Heechee engineer in charge, and I dig where I would have planted the thing in the first place.

  That's what I had done. Evidently I had done it wrong.

  Of course, there was one good way I could have gone wrong: the trace could have been a pocket of gravel.

  That was a really good possible explanation, but not a useful one. If there had never been a tunnel there in the first place we were just all out of luck. What I wanted was a more hopeful answer, and in a fuzzy-brained sort of way, I began to think I saw one.

  I visualized the way the trace had looked on the scope. I had set the airbody down as close to that as I could manage.

  Then, of course, I couldn't dig right there, because the airbody was on top of it. So I'd set the igloo up a few meters upslope.

  I began to believe that those few meters were what made us miss.

  That fuzzy conjecture pleased my fuzzy brain. It explained everything. It was admirable of me, I told myself, to figure it all out in my present state. Of course, I couldn't see that it made any practical difference. If I'd had another igloo I would have been glad to move back to where the airbody had been and try again, assuming I could live long enough to get all that done.

  But that didn't mean much, because I didn't have another igloo.

  So I sat on the edge of the dark shaft, nodding approvingly to myself over the intelligent way I had thought the problem through, dangling my legs, and now and then sweeping some tailings back in. I think all that was part of some kind of death wish, because I know that I thought, every once in a while, that the nicest thing for me to do just then would be to jump in and pull the tailings down over me.

  But the Puritan ethic didn't want me to do that.

  Anyway, I would have only solved my own personal problem that way. It wouldn't have done a thing for young Dorotha Keefer, snoring away outside in the thermal gale. I worried about Dorotha Keefer. I wanted something better for her than a life of chancy, sordid scrounging in the Spindle. She was too sweet and kind and—

  It struck me as a revelation that one of the reasons for my hostility to Boyce Cochenour had been that he had Dorrie Keefer and I didn't.

  That was kind of interesting to think about, too. Suppose, I thought, tasting the bad flavors inside my mouth and feeling my head begin to pound— suppose Cochenour's suit had ruptured when the drill fell on him and he had died right there. Suppose (going a little farther) we'd then found the tunnel, and it was all we wanted from it, and we went back to the Spindle and got rich, and Dorrie and I had—

  I spent a lot of time thinking about what Dorrie and I might have done if things had gone just a little different way and all that had happened to be true.

  But they hadn't, and it wasn't.

  I kicked some more scraps down into the shaft. The tunnel, I was now pretty well convinced, couldn't be more than a few meters away from where that shaft had bottomed out empty. I thought of climbing down into it and scraping away with my gloves.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  I'm not sure how much of what I was thinking was plain day-dreamy whimsy, and how much the bizarre delusions of a very sick man. I kept thinking strange things. I thought how nice it would be if there were Heechee still in there, and when I climbed down to scratch my way to the tunnel I could just knock on the first blue wall material I came to and they'd open it up and let me in.

  That would have been very nice. I even had a picture of what they were going to look like: sort of friendly and godlike. Maybe they would wear togas and offer me scented wines and rare fruits. Maybe they could even speak English, so I could talk to them and ask some of the questions that were on my mind. "Heechee, what did you really use the prayer fans for?" I could ask him. Or, "Listen, Heechee, I hate to be a nuisance, but do you have anything in your medicine chest that will keep me from d
ying?" Or, "Heechee, I'm sorry we messed up your front yard, and I'll try to clean it up for you."

  Maybe it was that last thought that made me push more of the tailings back into the shaft. I didn't have anything better to do. And, who could tell, maybe they'd appreciate it.

  After a while I had it more than half full and I'd run out of tailings, except for the ones that were pushed outside the igloo. I didn't have the strength to go after them. I looked for something else to do. I reset the augers, replaced the dull blades with the last sharp ones we had, pointed them in the general direction of a twenty-degree offset angle downslope, and turned them on.

  It wasn't until I noticed that Dorrie was standing next to me, helping me steady the augers for the first meter or two of cut, that I realized I had made a plan. I didn't remember it. I didn't even remember when Dorrie had wakened and come into the igloo.