Authors: Frederik Pohl
PLATINUM POHL (10 page)
I mused about what we had done wrong, as you might think about a chess puzzle.
I could still see the trace in my mind. It was bright and clear, so there was definitely something there. It was just tough that we’d lucked out and missed it.
How had we missed it?
After some time, I thought I knew the answer to that.
People like Dorrie and Cochenour have an idea that a seismic trace is like one of those underground maps of downtown Dallas, with all the sewers and utility conduits and water pipes marked, so you just dig where it says and you find what you want.
It isn’t exactly like that. The trace comes out as a sort of hazy approximation. It is built up, hour by hour, by measuring the echoes from the pinger. It looks like a band of spiderweb shadows, much wider than an actual tunnel and very fuzzy at the edges. When you look at it you know that somewhere in the shadows there’s something that makes them. Maybe it’s a rock interface or a pocket of gravel. Hopefully it’s a Heechee dig. Whatever it is, it’s there somewhere, but you don’t know just where, exactly. If a tunnel is twenty meters wide, which is a fair average for a Heechee connecting link, the shadow trace is sure to look like fifty, and may be a hundred.
So where do you dig?
That’s where the art of prospecting comes in. You have to make an informed guess.
Maybe you dig in the exact geometrical center—as far as it is given you to see where the center is. That’s the easiest way. Maybe you dig where the shadows are densest, which is the way the half-smart prospectors do, and that works almost half the time. Or maybe you do what I did, and try to think like a Heechee. You look at the trace as a whole and try to see what points they might have been trying to connect. Then you plot
an imaginary course between them, where you would have put the tunnel if you had been the Heechee engineer in charge, and you dig somewhere along there.
an imaginary course between them, where you would have put the tunnel if you had been the Heechee engineer in charge, and you dig somewhere along there.
That’s what I had done, but evidently I had done wrong.
In a fuzzy-brained sort of way, I began to think I saw what I’d done.
I visualized the trace. The right place to dig was where I had set the airbody down, but of course I couldn’t set up the igloo there because the airbody was in the way. So I’d set up about ten yards upslope.
I was convinced that ten yards was what made us miss.
I was pleased with myself for figuring it out, although I couldn’t see that it made a lot of practical difference. If I’d had another igloo I would have been glad to try again, assuming I could hold out that long. But that didn’t mean much, because I didn’t have another igloo.
So I sat on the edge of the dark shaft, nodding sagaciously over the way I had solved the problem, dangling my legs and now and then sweeping tailings in. I think that was part of a kind of death wish, because I know I thought, now and then, that the nicest thing to do would be to jump in and pull the tailings down over me.
But the Puritan ethic didn’t want me to do that. Anyway, it would have solved only my own personal problem. It wouldn’t have done anything for old Dorrie Keefer, snoring away outside in the thermal hurricane.
I then began to wonder why I was worrying about Dorrie. It was a pleasant enough subject to be thinking about, but sort of sad.
I went back to thinking about the tunnel.
The bottom of the shaft couldn’t be more than a few yards away from where we had bottomed out empty. I thought of jumping down and scraping away with my bare gloves. It seemed like a good idea. I’m not sure how much was whimsy and how much the fantasy of a sick man, but I kept thinking how nice it would be if there were Heechees still in there, and when I scratched into the blue wall material I could just knock politely and they’d open up and let me in. I even had a picture of what they looked like: sort of friendly and godlike. It would have been very pleasant to meet a Heechee, a live one that could speak English. “Heechee, what did you really use those things we call prayer fans for?” I could ask him. Or, “Heechee, have you got anything that will keep me from dying in your medicine chest?” Or, “Heechee, I’m sorry we messed up your front yard and I’ll try to clean it up for you.”
I pushed more of the tailings back into the shaft. I had nothing better to do, and who could tell, maybe they’d appreciate it. After a while I had it half full and I’d run out of tailings, except for the ones that were pushed outside the igloo, and 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 yards of cut, that I realized I had made a plan.
Why not try an offset cut? Did we have any better chance?
We did not. We cut.
When the drills stopped bucking and settled down to chew into 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 and watched the drills spit rock chips into the old shaft. It was filling up nicely. We didn’t speak. Presently I fell asleep again.
while; then we just sat there and watched the drills spit rock chips into the old shaft. It was filling up nicely. We didn’t speak. Presently I fell asleep again.
I didn’t wake up until Dorrie pounded on my head. We were buried in tailings, but they weren’t just rock. They glowed blue, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.
The augers must have been scratching at the Heechee wall liner for hours. They had actually worn pits into it.
We looked down, and we could see the round bright blue eye of the tunnel wall staring up at us. She was a beauty, all ours.
Even then 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. I fired them, and watched the bright spot of light that bounced out of the shaft and made a pattern on the igloo roof.
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.
I must have blacked out again, and 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 hotsuit. 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 more humid; but the partial pressure of oxygen was about the same. It was enough to live on, in any case. I was proving that by breathing it and not dying.
Next to me was Dorrie Keefer.
The blue Heechee wall light didn’t flatter her complexion. 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.
“We made it,” she said.
We sat there grinning foolishly at each other, like Hallowe’en masks in the blue Heechee glow.
To do anything more than that, just then, was quite impossible. 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. But I wasn’t comfortable, 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 up, figuring the heat was better.
Then it occurred to me to wonder why the heat was only unpleasant, instead of instantly fatal. Energy transport through a Heechee wall-material surface is very slow, but not a quarter of a million years slow. My sad old brain ruminated that thought around for awhile and came up with a conclusion: At least until quite recently, some centuries or thousands of years, maybe, this tunnel had been kept cool. Automatic machinery, of
course, I thought sagely. Wow, that by itself was worth finding. Broken down or not, it would be worth a lot of fortunes … .
course, I thought sagely. Wow, that by itself was worth finding. Broken down or not, it would be worth a lot of fortunes … .
And that made me remember why we were there in the first place, and I looked up the corridor and down, to see what treasures were waiting there for us.
When I was a school kid in Amarillo Central my favorite teacher was a crippled lady named Miss Stevenson, and she used to tell us stories out of Bulfinch and Homer. She spoiled a whole weekend for me with the story of one Greek fellow who wanted to be a god. He was king of a little place in Lydia, but he wanted more, and the gods let him come to Olympus, and he had it made until he fouled up. I forget how; it had something to do with a dog, and some nasty business about tricking the gods into eating his own son. Whatever it was, they gave him solitary confinement for eternity, standing neck deep in a cool lake in hell and unable to drink. The fellow’s name was Tantalus, and in that Heechee tunnel I had a lot in common with him. The treasure trove was there all right, but we couldn’t reach it. We hadn’t hit the main tunnel but a sort of angled, Thielly-tube detour in it, and it was blocked at both ends. We could peer past half-closed gates into the main shaft. We could see Heechee machines and irregular mounds of things that might once have been containers, now rotted, with their contents on the floor. But we hadn’t the strength to get at them.
It was the suits that made us so clumsy. With them off we might have been able to slip through, but then would we have the strength to put them back on again in time to meet Cochenour? I doubted it. I stood there with my helmet pressed to the gate, feeling like Alice peering into her garden without the bottle of drink-me, and then I thought about Cochenour again and checked the time.
It was forty-six hours and some odd minutes since he had left us. He was due back any time.
And if he came back while we were here, and opened the crawl-through to look for us and was careless about the seal at both ends, twenty thousand millibars of poison gas would hammer in on us. It would kill us, of course, but besides that it would damage the virgin tunnel. The corrosive scouring of that implosion of gas might wreck everything.
“We have to go back,” I told Dorrie, showing her the time. She smiled.
“Temporarily,” she said, and turned and led the way.
After the cheerful blue glow of the Heechee tunnel the igloo was cramped and miserable, and what was worse was that we couldn’t even stay inside it. Cochenour probably would remember to lock in and out of both ends of the crawl-through. But he might not. I couldn’t take that chance. 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 was stupid.
So we had to wait outside in the breezy Venusian weather, and not too much later, either. The little watch dial next to my life-support meters, all running well into the red now, showed that Cochenour should in fact have arrived by now.
I pushed Dorrie into the crawl-through, squeezed in with her, locked us both through, and we waited.
We waited a long time, Dorrie bent over the crawl-through and me leaning beside her, holding on to her and the tie-down clips. We could have talked, but I thought she
was either unconscious or asleep from the way she didn’t move, and anyway it seemed like an awful lot of work to plug in the phone jack.
was either unconscious or asleep from the way she didn’t move, and anyway it seemed like an awful lot of work to plug in the phone jack.
We waited longer than that, and still Cochenour didn’t come.
I tried to think things through.
There could have been a number of reasons for his being late. He could have crashed. He could have been challenged by the military. He could have got lost.
But there was another possibility that made more sense than all of them. The time dial told me he was nearly five hours late now, and the life-support meters told me we were right up against the upper maximum for power, near it for air, well past it for water. If it hadn’t been for breathing the Heechee gases for a while, we would have been dead by then, and Cochenour didn’t know about that.
He had said he was a bad loser. He had worked out an end-game maneuver so he wouldn’t have to lose. I could see him as clearly as though I were in the airbody with him, watching his own clocks, cooking himself a light lunch and playing music while he waited for us to die.
That was no frightening thought; I was close enough to it for the difference to be pretty much a technicality, and tired enough of being trapped in that foul hotsuit to be willing to accept almost any deliverance. But the girl was involved, and the one tiny little rational thought that stayed in my half-poisoned brain was that it was unfair for Cochenour to kill us both. Me, yes. Her, no. I beat on her suit until she moved a little, and after some time managed to make her move back into the crawl-through.
There were two things Cochenour didn’t know. He didn’t know we’d found 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. We could surprise him, if he didn’t wait much longer. We 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.
And so he did.
It must have been a terrible shock to him when he entered the igloo with the monkey wrench in his hand and leaned over me, and found that I was still alive and able to move, where he had expected only a well-done roast of meat. The drill caught him right in the chest. I couldn’t see his face, but I guess at his expression.
Then it was only a matter of doing four or five impossible things. Things like getting Dorrie up out of the tunnel and into the airbody. Like getting myself in after her, and sealing up, and setting a course. All these impossible things, and one other, that was harder than all of them, but very important to me.
I totalled the airbody when we landed, but we were strapped in and suited up, and when the ground crews came to investigate, Dorrie and I were still alive.
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