Pohl, Frederik - The Gateway Trip

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 daydreamy 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 dying?" 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.

It probably wasn't a bad plan, I thought. Why not try an offset cut? Did we have any better way to spend our time?

We did not. We cut.

When the drills stopped bucking in our hands and settled down to chew through the rock and we could leave them, I cleared a space at the side of the igloo and shoved tailings out for a while.

Then we just sat there, watching the drills spit rock chips out of the new hole. We didn't speak.

Presently I fell asleep again.

I didn't wake up until Dorrie pounded on my helmet. We were buried in tailings. They glowed blue, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.

The augers must have been scratching at the Heechee wall material for an hour or more. They had actually worn pits into it.

When we looked down, we could see the round, bright, blue eye of the tunnel staring up at us. She was a beauty, all right.

We didn't speak.

Somehow I managed to kick and wriggle my way through the drift to the crawl-through. I got the lock closed and sealed, after kicking a couple of cubic meters of rock outside.

Then I began fumbling through the pile of refuse for the flame drills.

Ultimately I found them. Somehow. Ultimately I managed to get them shipped and primed.

We ducked back out of range as I fired them. I watched the

bright spot of light that bounced out of the shaft make a pattern on the roof of the igloo.

Then there was a sudden, short scream of gas, and a clatter as the loose fragments at the bottom of the shaft dropped free.

We had cut into the Heechee tunnel.

It was unbreached and waiting for us. Our beauty was a virgin. We took her maidenhead with all love and reverence and entered into her.

xii

I must have blacked out again, because when I realized where I was

I was on the floor of the tunnel. My helmet was open. So were the

side-zips of my heatsuit. I was breathing stale, foul air that had to

be a quarter of a million years old and smelled every minute of it. But it was air.

It was denser than Earth-normal and a lot less humid, but the partial pressure of oxygen was close enough to the same. I was proving that by the fact that I had been breathing it without dying.

Next to me on the floor was Dorrie Keefer.

Her helmet was open, too. The blue Heechee wall light didn't flatter her complexion, so she looked about as ghastly as a pretty girl can. At first I wasn't sure she was breathing. But in spite of the way she looked, her pulse was going, her lungs were functioning, and when she felt me poking at her she opened her eyes.

"God, I'm beat," she said. "But we made it!"

I didn't say anything. She'd said it all for both of us. We sat there, grinning foolishly at each other, looking like Halloween masks in the blue Heechee glow.

That was about all I was able to do just then. I was feeling very light-headed. I had my hands full just comprehending the fact that I was alive. I didn't want to endanger that odds-against precarious fact by moving around.

I wasn't comfortable, though, and after a moment I realized that I was very hot. I closed up my helmet to shut out some of the heat, but the smell inside was so bad that I opened it again, figuring that the heat was better.

It then occurred to me to wonder why the heat was only unpleasant, instead of instantly, incineratingly fatal.

Energy transport through a Heechee wall-material surface is slow, but not hundreds of thousands of years slow. My sad, sick old brain ruminated that thought around for a while and finally staggered to a conclusion: At least until quite recently, maybe some centuries or thousands of years at most, this tunnel had been kept artificially cool. So, I told myself sagely, there had to be some sort of automatic machinery. Wow, I said to myself. That ought to be worth finding all by itself. Broken down or not, it could be the kind of thing fortunes are built on

And that made me remember why we had come there in the first place. I looked up the corridor and down, hungry for the first site of the Heechee loot that might make us all well again.

When I was a schoolkid in Amarillo Central, my favorite teacher was a crippled lady named Miss Stevenson. She used to tell us stories out of Bulfinch and Homer.

Miss Stevenson spoiled one whole weekend for me with the sad story of one Greek fellow whose biggest ambition was to become a god. I gathered that was a fairly ordinary goal for a bright young Greek in those days, though I'm not sure how often they made it. This man started out with a few big steps up the ladder-he was already a king, of a little place in Lydia-but he wanted more. He wanted divinity. The gods even let him come to Olympus, and it looked as though he had it made ... until he fouled up.

I don't remember the details of what he did wrong, except that it had something to do with a dog and some nasty trick he played on one of the gods by getting him to eat his own son. (Those Greeks

had pretty primitive ideas of humor, I guess.) Whatever it was, they punished him for it. What he got was solitary confinement-for eternity-and he served it standing neck deep in a cool lake in hell but unable to drink. Every time he opened his lips the water pulled away. The fellow's name was Tantalus . .. and in that Heechee tunnel I thought I had a lot in common with him.

We found the treasure trove we were looking for, all right. But we couldn't reach it.

It seemed that what we had dug into wasn't the main tunnel after all. It was a sort of right-angled, Thielly-tube detour in the tunnel, and it was blocked at both ends.

"What do you suppose it is?" Dorrie asked wistfully, trying to peer through the gaps in the ten-ton slabs of Heechee metal before us. "Do you suppose it could be that weapon you were talking about?"