Pohl, Frederik - The Gateway Trip

Dorrie Keefer was inspecting the globe. It isn't real, of course; it's just a three-dimensional image that hangs in the air, and you can poke your finger right through it. "Venus doesn't really look like much," she commented.

"Those lines you see," I explained, "are just radio-range markers; you won't see them looking out the window. Venus doesn't

have any oceans, and it isn't cut up into countries, so making a map of it isn't quite what you'd expect on Earth. See this bright spot here? That's us. Now look."

I overlaid the radio-range grid and the contour colors with geological data. "Those blobby circles are mascon markers. You know what a mascon is?"

"A concentration of mass. A lump of heavy stuff," she offered.

"Fine. Now see what happens when I phase in the locations of known Heechee digs."

When I hit the control the digs appeared as golden patterns, like worms crawling across the planet. Dorotha said at once, "They're all in the mascons."

Cochenour gave her a look of approval, and so did I. "Not quite all," I corrected. "But damn near. Why? I don't know. Nobody knows. The mascons are mostly older, denser rock-basalt and so on-and maybe the Heechee felt safer with strong, dense rock around them." In my correspondence with Professor Hegramet back on Earth, in the days when I didn't have a dying liver in my gut and thus could afford to take an interest in abstract knowledge, we had kicked around the possibility that the Heechee digging machines would only work in dense rock, or rock of a certain chemical composition. But I wasn't prepared to discuss some of the ideas I'd gotten from Professor Hegramet with them.

I rotated the virtual globe slightly by turning a dial. "See over here, where we are now. This formation's Alpha Regio. There's the big digging which we just came out of. You can see the shape of the Spindle. That particular mascon where the Spindle is is called Serendip; it was discovered by a hesperological-"

"Hesperological?"

"By a geological team studying Venus, which makes it a hesperological team. They detected the mass concentration from orbit, then after the landings they drilled out a core sample there and hit the first Heechee dig. Now these other digs you see in the northern high latitudes are all in this one bunch of associated mascons. There

are interventions of less dense rock between them, and they tunnel right through to connect, but they're almost all right in the mascons.

"They're all north," Cochenour said sharply. "We're going south. Why?"

It was interesting that he could read the virtual globe, but I didn't say so. I only said, "The ones that are marked are no good. They've been probed already."

"Some of them look even bigger than the Spindle."

"A hell of a lot bigger, right. But there's nothing much in them, or anyway not much chance that anything in them is in good enough shape to bother with. Subsurface fluids filled them up a hundred thousand years ago, maybe more. A lot of good men have gone broke trying to pump one out and excavate, without finding anything. Ask me. I was one of them."

"I didn't know Venus had any liquid water," Cochenour objected.

"I didn't say water, did I? But as a matter of fact some of it was, or anyway a sort of oozy mud. Apparently water cooks out oc the rocks and has a transit time, getting to the surface, of some thousands of years before it seeps out, boils off, and cracks to hydrogen and oxygen and gets lost. In case you didn't know it, there's some under the Spindle. It's what you were drinking, and what you were breathing, while you were there."

"We weren't breathing water," he corrected.

"No, of course not. We were breathing air that we made. But sometimes the tunnels still have kept their air-I mean the original stuff, the air the Heechee left behind them. Of course, after a few hundred thousand years they generally turn into ovens. Then they tend to bake everything organic away. Maybe that's why we've found so little of, let's say, animal remains-they've been cremated. So-sometimes you might find air in a dig, but I've never heard of anybody finding drinkable water in one."

Dorotha said, "Boyce, this is all very interesting, but I'm hot

and dirty and all this talk about water's getting to me. Can I change the subject for a minute?"

Cochenour barked; it wasn't really a laugh. "Subliminal prompting, Walthers, don't you agree? And a little old-fashioned prudery too, I expect. I think what Dorrie really wants to do is go to the toilet."

Given a little encouragement from the girl, I would have been mildly embarrassed for her. She was evidently used to Cochenour. She only said, "If we're going to live in this thing for three weeks, I'd like to know what it offers."

"Certainly, Miss Keefer," I said.

"Dorotha. Dorrie, if you like it better."

"Sure, Dorrie. Well, you see what you've got. There are five bunks; they partition to sleep ten if wanted, but we don't want. Two shower stalls. They don't look big enough to soap yourself in, but they'll do the job if you work at it. Two chemical toilets in those cubbies. Kitchen over there-stove and storage, anyway. Pick the bunk you like, Dorrie. There's a screen arrangement that comes down when you want it for changing clothes and so on, or just if you don't want to look at the rest of us for a while."

Cochenour said, "Go on, Dorrie, do what you want to do. I want Walthers to show me how to fly this thing anyway."

It wasn't a bad start to the trip. I've had worse. I've had some real traumatic times, parties that came aboard drunk and steadily got drunker, couples that fought each other every waking moment and only got together long enough so they could fight in a united front against me. This trip didn't look bad at all, even apart from the fact that I hoped it was going to save my life for me.

You don't need much skill to fly an airbody-at least, just to make it move in the direction you want to go. In Venus's atmosphere there is lift to spare. You don't worry about things like stalling out; and anyway the automatic controls do most of your thinking for you.

Cochenour learned fast. It turned out he had flown everything that moved through the air on Earth, and operated one-man submersibles, as well, in the deep-sea oil fields of his youth. He ur~derstood as soon as I mentioned it tа him that the hard part of pilotage on Venus was selecting the right flying level, and anticipating when you'd have to change it. But he also understood that he wasn't going to learn that in one day. Or even in three weeks. "What the hell, Waithers," he said cheerfully enough. "At least I can make it go where I have to-in case you get trapped in a tunnel. Or shot by a jealous husband."

I gave him the smile that little pleasantry was worth, which wasn't much. "The other thing I can do," he went on, "is cook. Unless you're really good at it? No, I thought not. Well, I paid too much for this stomach to fill it with hash, so I'll make the meals. That's a little skill Dorrie never got around to learning. It was the same with her grandmother. The most beautiful woman in the world, but she had the idea that was all she had to be to own it."

I put that aside to sort out later. He was full of little unexpected

things, this ninety-year-old young athlete. He said, "All right. Now, while Dorrie's using up all the water in the shower-"

"Not to worry; it recycles."

"Anyway. While she's cleaning up, finish your little lecture on where we're going."

"Right." I spun the globe a little. The bright spot that was us had been heading steadily south while we were talking. "See that cluster where our track intersects those grid marks, just short of Lise Meitner?"

"Who's Lise Meitner?" he grunted.

"Somebody they named that formation after, that's all I know. Do you see where I'm pointing?"