Pohl, Frederik - The Gateway Trip

"What then?"

"Ah, the Heechee warrens, sah! There are many miles of same just below this settlement. A reliable guide could be found-"

"Not interested," Cochenour growled. "Not in anything that

1 '

close.

''Sah?''

"If a guide can lead us through them," Cochenour explained, "that means they've all been explored, which means if there was anything good in them it's been looted already. What's the fun of that?"

"Of course!" Vastra cried immediately. "I understand your meaning, sah." He looked noticeably happier, and I could feel his radar reaching out to make sure I was listening, though he still didn't look in my direction at all. "To be sure," he went on weightily, an expert explaining complexities to a valued client, "there is always the chance that one may find new digs, sah, provided one knows where to look. Am I correct in assuming that this would interest you?"

The Third of Vastra's house had brought me my drink and a thin powder-faxed slip of paper. "Thirty percent," I whispered to her. "Tell Sub. Only no bargaining and no getting anybody else to bid." She nodded and winked; she'd been listening too, of course, and she was as sure as I was that this Terry was firmly on the hook.

It had been my intention to nurse my drink as long as I could, while the mark ripened under Vastra's skillful ministrations, but it looked like prosperity was looming ahead. I was ready to celebrate. I took a long, happy swallow.

Unfortunately, the hook didn't seem to have a barb. Unaccountably, the Terry shrugged. "Waste of time, I bet," he grumbled. "I mean, really, if anybody knew where to look, why wouldn't he have looked there on his own already, right?"

"Ah, mister!" Vastra cried, beginning to panic. "But I assure you, there are hundreds of tunnels not yet explored! Thousands, sah! And in them, who knows, treasures beyond price very likely!"

Cochenour shook his head. "Let's skip it," he said. "Just bring us another drink. And see if you can't get the ice really cold this time.''

That shook me. My nose for money was rarely wrong.

I put down my drink and half turned away to hide what I was doing from the Terries as I looked at the fax of Sub's briefing report on them to see if it might explain to me why Cochenour had lost interest so fast.

The report couldn't answer that question. It did tell me a lot, though. The woman with Cochenour was named Dorotha Keefer. She had been traveling with him for a couple of years now, according to their passports, though this was their first time off Earth. There was no indication of a marriage between them-or of any intention of it, at least on Cochenour's part. Keefer was in her early twenties-real age, not simulated by drugs and transplants. While Cochenour himself was well over ninety.

He did not, of course, look anywhere near that. I'd watched him walk over to their table, and he moved lightly and easily, for a big man. His money came from land and petro-foods. According to the synoptic on him, he had been one of the first oil millionaires to switch over from selling oil as fuel for cars to oil as a raw material for food production, growing algae in the crude oil that came out of his well and selling the algae, in processed form, for human consumption. So then he had stopped being a mere millionaire and turned into something much bigger.

That accounted for the way he looked. He had been living on Full Medical, with extras. The report said that his heart was titanium and plastic. His lungs had been transplanted from a twentyyear-old killed in a copter crash. His skin, muscles, and fats-not to mention his various glandular systems-were sustained by hormones

and cell-builders at what had to be a cost of several thousand dollars a day.

To judge by the way he stroked the thigh of the girl next to him, he was getting his money's worth. He looked and acted no more than forty, at most-except perhaps for the look of his pale-blue, diamond-bright, weary, and disillusioned eyes.

He was, in short, a lovely mark.

I couldn't afford to let him get away. I swallowed the rest of the drink and nodded to the Third of Vastra for another. There had to be some way, somehow, to land him for a charter of my airbody.

All I had to do was find it.

Of course, on the other side of the little railing that set Vastra's cafй off from the rest of the Spindle, half the tunnel-rats on Venus were thinking the same thoughts. This was the worst of the low season. The Hohmann crowd was still three months in the future, and all of us were beginning to run low on money. My need for a liver transplant was just a little extra incentive; of the hundred maze-runners I could see out of the corner of my eye, ninety-nine needed to cut a helping out of this tourist's bankroll as much as I did, just for the sake of staying alive.

We couldn't all do it. He looked pretty fat, but nobody could have been fat enough to feed us all. Two of us, maybe three, maybe even half a dozen might score enough to make a real difference. No more than that.

I had to be one of those few.

I took a deep swallow of my second drink, tipped the Third of Vastra's House lavishly-and conspicuously-and turned idly around until I was facing the Terries.

The girl was bargaining with the knot of souvenir vendors leaning over the rail. "Boyce?" she called over her shoulder. "What's this thing for?"

He bent over the rail and peered. "Looks like a fan," he told her.

"Heechee prayer fan, right!" the dealer cried. I knew him,

Booker Allemang, an old-timer in the Spindle. "Found it myself, miss! It'll grant your every wish, letters every day from people reporting miraculous results-"

"It's sucker bait," Cochenour grumbled. "Buy it if you want to."

"But what does it do?" she asked.

Cochenour had an unpleasant laugh; he demonstrated it. "It does what any fan does. It cools you down. Not that you need that," he added meanly, and looked over to me with a grin.

My cue.

I finished my drink, nodded to him, stood up, and walked over to their table. "Welcome to Venus," I said. "May I help you?"

The girl looked at Cochenour for permission before she said, "I thought this fan thing was pretty."

"Very pretty," I agreed. "Are you familiar with the story of the Heechee?"

I looked inquiringly toward the empty chair, and, as Cochenour didn't tell me to get lost, I sat down in it and went on. "The Heechee built these tunnels a long time ago-maybe a quarter of a million years. Maybe more. They seem to have occupied them for some time, anything up to a century or two, give or take a lot. Then they went away again. They left a lot of junk behind, and some things that weren't junk. Among other things, they left thousands of these fans. Some local con-man-it wasn't BeeGee here, I think, but somebody like him-got the idea of calling the things 'prayer fans' and selling them to tourists to make wishes on."

Allemang had been hanging on my every word, trying to guess where I was going. "Partly, that's right," he admitted.

"All of it is right. But you two are too smart for that kind of thing. Still," I added, "look at the fans. They're pretty enough to be worth having even without the story."

"They are, absolutely!" Allemang cried. "See how this one sparkles, miss! And this black and gray crystal, how nice it looks with your fair hair!"

The girl unfurled the black and gray one. It came rolled like a diploma, only cone-shaped. It took just the slightest pressure of the thumb to keep it open, and it really sparkled very prettily as she gently waved it about. Like all the Heechee fans, it weighed only about ten grams, not counting the simulated-wood handles that people like BeeGee Allemang put on them. Its crystalline lattice caught the lights from the luminous Heechee-metal walls, as well as from the fluorescents and gas tubes we maze-runners had installed, and tossed all the lights back as shimmering, iridescent sparks.