Pohl, Frederik - The Gateway Trip

Dorrie had been listening with her birdlike air of friendly inter-

est. 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 beast 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 airbo~Iy.

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 Dorne 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?"