Pohl, Frederik - The Gateway Trip

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 even 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 gendarthes, and spend my last couple of walking-around days introducing Dorne 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 said 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 cafй 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?" Dornie asked. "I never heard of any Heechee weapons."

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