Pohl, Frederik - The Gateway Trip

I blinked my fuzzy eyes. There were machines of all kinds there, and irregular mounds of things that might have been containers for

other things, and some objects that seemed to have rotted and spilled their contents, also rotted, on the floor. But we hadn't the strength to get at them.

I stood there with my helmet pressed against the side of one of the slabs, feeling like Alice peering into her tiny garden without the bottle of drink-me. "All I know for sure," I said, "is that, whatever it is, there's more of it there than anybody ever found before."

And I slumped to the floor, exhausted and sick and, all the same, feeling very contented with the world.

Dorrie sat down next to me, in front of that barred gate to Eden, and we rested for a moment.

"Gram would've been pleased," she murmured.

"Oh, sure," I agreed, feeling a little drunk. "Gram?"

"My grandmother," she explained, and then maybe I blacked out again. When I heard what she was saying again, she was talking about how her grandmother had refused to marry Cochenour, long and long ago. It seemed to matter to Dorotha Keefer, so I tried politely to pay attention, but some of it didn't make a lot of sense.

"Wait a minute," I said. "She didn't want him because he was poor?"

"No, no! Not because he was poor, although he was that. Because he was going off to the oi1 fields, and she wanted somebody steadier. Like my grandfather. And then when Boyce came by a year ago- "He gave you a job," I said, nodding to show I was following,

"as his girlfriend."

"No, damn it!" she said, annoyed with me. "In his office. The-other part came later. We fell in love."

"Oh, right," I said. I wasn't looking for an argument.

She said stiffly, "He's really a sweet man, Audee. Outside of business, I mean. And he would've done anything for me."

"He could've married you," I pointed out, just to keep the conversation going.

"No, Audee," she said seriously, "he couldn't. He wanted to get married. I was the one who said no."

She turned down all that money? I blinked at her. I didn't have to ask the question; she knew what it was.

"When I marry," she said, "I want kids, and Boyce wouldn't hear of it. He said if I'd caught him when he was a lot younger, maybe seventy-five or eighty, he might've taken a chance, but now he was just too old to be raising a family."

"Then you ought to be looking around for a replacement, shouldn't you?"

She looked at me in that blue glow. "He needs me," she said simply. "Now more than ever."

I mulled that over for a while. Then it occurred to me to check the time.

It was nearly forty-six hours since he had left us. He was due back any time.

And if he came back while we were doddering around in here-I realized, foggily, bit by bit-then ninety thousand millibars of poison gas would hammer in on us. It would kill us if we had our

suits open. Besides that, it would damage our virgin tunnel. The corrosive scouring of that implosion of gas might easily wreck all those lovely things behind the barrier.

"We have to go back," I told Dorrie, showing her the time. She smiled.

"Temporarily," she said, and we got up, took a last lodk at those treasures of Tantalus behind the bars, and started back to our shaft to the igloo.

After the cheerful blue glow of the Heechee tunnel, the igloo was more cramped and miserable than ever before.

What was worse was that my cloudy brain nagged me into remembering that we shouldn't even stay inside it. Cochenour might remember to lock in and out of both ends of the crawl-through wh-~11 he got there-any minute now-but he also might not. 1 couldn't take the chance on letting the hot hammer of air in on our p retti Cs.

I tried to think of a way of plugging the shaft, maybe by pushing all the tailings back in again, but although my brain wasn't working very well I could see that that was stupid.

So the only way to solve that problem was for us to wait outside in the breezy Venusian weather. The one consolation was that it wouldn't be too much longer to wait. The other part of that was that we weren't equipped for a very long wait. The little watch dial next to our lifesupport meters, all running well into the warning red now, showed that Cochenour should in fact have arrived by now.

He wasn't there, though.

I squeezed into the crawl-through with Dorrie, locked us both through, and we waited.

I felt a scratching on my helmet and discovered Dorrie was plugging into my jack. "Audee, I'm really very tired," she told me. It didn't sound like a complaint, only a factual report of something she thought I probably should know about.

"You might as well go to sleep," I told her. "I'll keep watch. Cochenour will be here pretty soon, and I'll wake you up."

I suppose she took my advice, because she lowered herself down, pausing to let me take her talk line out of my helmet jack. Then she stretched out next to the tie-down clips and left me to think in peace.

I wasn't grateful. I wasn't enjoying what I was beginning to think.

Still Cochenour didn't come.

I tried to think through the significance of that. Of course, there could have been lots of reasons for a delay. He could've gotten lost. He could have been challenged by the military. He could have crashed the airbody.

But there was a much nastier possibility, and it seemed to make more sense than all of them.

The time dial told me he was nearly five hours late, and the lifesupport meters told me that we were right up against the "empty" line for power, near it for air, and well past it for water. If we hadn't had the remaining tunnel gases to breathe for a few hours, saving the air in our tanks, we would have been dead by now.

Cochenour couldn't have known that we would find breathable air in the Heechee tunnel. He must believe that we were dead.

The man hadn't lied about himself. He had told me he was a

bad loser.

So he had decided not to lose.

In spite of my fuzzy brain, I could understand what had gone on in his. When push came to shove the bastard in him won out. He had worked out an endgame maneuver that would pull a win out of all his defeats.

I could visualize him, as clearly as though I were in the airbody with him. Watching his clocks as our lives ticked away. Cooking himself an elegant little lunch. Playing the rest of the Tchaikovsky ballet music, maybe, while he waited for us to get through dying.

It wasn't a really frightening thought to me. I was close enough to being dead anyway for the difference to be pretty much of a technicality.. . and tired enough of being trapped in that foul heatsuit to accept almost any deliverance, even the final one.

But I wasn't the only person affected here.

The girl was also involved. The one tiny little rational tho~ight that stayed in my half.poisoned brain was that it was just unfair for Cochenour to let us both die. Me, yes, all right; I could see that from his point of view I was easily expendable. Her, no.

I realized I ought to do something, and after considering what that might be for a while I beat on her suit until she moved a little. After some talk through the phone jacks I managed to make her understand she had to go back down into the tunnel, where at least she could breathe.

Then I got ready for Cochenour's return.

There were two things he didn't know. He didn't know we'd found any breathable air, and he didn't know we could tap the drill batteries for additional power.

In all the freaked-out fury of my head, I was still capable of that much consecutive thought. I could surprise him-if he didn't stay away too much longer, anyway. I could stay alive for a few hours yet

And then, when he came to find us dead and see what prize we had won for him, he would find me waiting.