Authors: Frederik Pohl
PLATINUM POHL (2 page)
Frederik Pohl has probably heard from too many readers about the pun in the title of this suspenseful novella. The answer to your question is: No. This has nothing much to do with Shakespeare’s play. It has a lot to do with Venus, with people living on the edge, with the spirit of exploration, and the reasons people have for doing dangerous and otherwise risky business.
“The Merchants of Venus,” first published in 1972, was also the first story Pohl wrote about the presence of mysterious alien Heechee in the solar system. Since then, he has written a
lot
about the Heechee, and readers have been much the better for his interest in the artifacts and other leavings of that race.
Gateway(1976),
his first novel about our discovery of the Heechee, won the triple crown of science fiction—the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for best novel—and that was just the beginning of a memorable series of books.
lot
about the Heechee, and readers have been much the better for his interest in the artifacts and other leavings of that race.
Gateway(1976),
his first novel about our discovery of the Heechee, won the triple crown of science fiction—the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for best novel—and that was just the beginning of a memorable series of books.
Before
Gateway
came “The Merchants of Venus.”
Gateway
came “The Merchants of Venus.”
My Name, Audee Walthers. My job, airbody driver. My home, on Venus, in a Heechee hut most of the time; wherever I happen to be when I feel sleepy otherwise.
Until I was twenty-five I lived on Earth, in Amarillo Central mostly. My father, a deputy governor of Texas. He died when I was still in college, but he left me enough dependency benefits to finish school, get a master’s in business administration, and pass the journeyman examination for clerk-typist. So I was set up for life.
But, after I tried it for a few years, I discovered I didn’t like the life I was set up for. Not so much for the conventional reasons; I don’t mind smog suits, can get along with neighbors even when there are eight hundred of them to the square mile, tolerate noise, can defend myself against the hood kids. It wasn’t Earth itself I didn’t like, it was what I was doing on Earth I didn’t like, and so I sold my UOPWA journeyman’s card, mortgaged my pension accrual, and bought a one-way ticket to Venus. Nothing strange about that. What every kid tells himself he’s going to do, really. But I did it.
I suppose it would have been all different if I’d had a chance at Real Money. If my father had been full governor instead of a civil-service client. If the dependency benefits had included Unlimited Medicare. If I’d been at the top instead of in the middle, squeezed both ways. It didn’t happen that way, so I opted out by the pioneer route and wound up hunting Terry marks at the Spindle.
Everybody has seen pictures of the Spindle, the Colosseum and Niagara Falls. Like everything worth looking at on Venus, the Spindle was a Heechee leftover. Nobody had ever figured out what the Heechee wanted with an underground chamber three hundred meters long and spindle-shaped, but it was there, so we used it; it was the closest thing Venus had to a Times Square or a Champs Elysées. All Terry tourists head for it first. That’s where we fleece them.
My airbody-rental business is reasonably legitimate—not counting the fact that there really isn’t much worth seeing on Venus that wasn’t left there, below the surface, by the Heechee. The other tourist traps in the Spindle are reasonably crooked. Terries don’t mind, although they must know they’re being taken; they all load up on Heechee prayer fans and doll-heads, and those paperweights of transparent plastic in which a contoured globe of Venus swims in a kind of orange-brown snowstorm of make-believe fly ash, blood-diamonds, and fire-pearls. None of them are worth the price of their mass-charge back to Earth, but to a tourist who can get up the price of passage in the first place I don’t suppose that matters.
To people like me, who can’t get the price of anything, the tourist traps matter a lot. We live on them. I don’t mean we draw our disposable income from them; I mean that they are how we get the price of what to eat and where to sleep, and if we don’t have the price we die. There aren’t too many ways of earning money on Venus. The ones that might produce Real Money—oh, winning a lottery; striking it rich in the Heechee diggings; blundering into a well-paying job; that kind of thing—are all real long-shots. For bread and butter everybody on Venus depends on Terry tourists, and if we don’t milk them dry we’ve had it.
Of course, there are tourists and tourists. They come in three varieties. The difference between them is celestial mechanics.
There’s the quick-and-dirty kind. On Earth, they’re just well-to-do; they come every twenty-six months at Hohmann-orbit time, riding the minimum-energy circuit from Earth. Because of the critical times of a Hohmann orbit, they never can stay more than three weeks on Venus. So they come on the guided tours, determined to get the most out of the quarter-million-dollar minimum cabin fare their rich grandparents had given them for a graduation present, or they’d saved up for a second honeymoon, or whatever. The bad thing about them is that they don’t have much money, since they’d spent it all on fares. The nice thing about them is that there are a lot of them. While they’re on Venus, all the rental rooms are filled. Sometimes they’d have six couples sharing a single partitioned cubicle, two pairs at a time, hot-bedding eight-hour shifts around the clock. Then people like me would hold up in Heechee huts on the surface and rent out our own belowground rooms, and maybe make enough money to live a few months.
But you couldn’t make enough money to live until the next Hohmann-orbit time, so when the Class II tourists came along we cut each other’s throats over them.
They were medium-rich. What you might call the poor millionaires: the ones whose annual income was barely in seven figures. They could afford to come in powered orbits, taking a hundred days or so for the run, instead of the long, slow Hohmann drift. The price ran a million dollars and up, so there weren’t nearly as many of them; but they came every month or so at the times of reasonably favorable orbital conjunctions. They also had more money to spend. So did the other medium-rich ones who hit us four or
five times in a decade, when the ballistics of the planets had sorted themselves out into a low-energy configuration that allowed three planets to come into an orbit that didn’t have much higher energy cost than the straight Earth-Venus run. They’d hit us first, if we were lucky, then go on to Mars. If it was the other way around, we got the leavings. The leavings were never very much.
five times in a decade, when the ballistics of the planets had sorted themselves out into a low-energy configuration that allowed three planets to come into an orbit that didn’t have much higher energy cost than the straight Earth-Venus run. They’d hit us first, if we were lucky, then go on to Mars. If it was the other way around, we got the leavings. The leavings were never very much.
But the very rich—ah, the very rich! They came as they liked, in orbital season or out.
When my tipper on the landing pad reported the
Yuri Gagarin,
under private charter, my money nose began to quiver. It was out of season for everybody except the very rich; the only question on my mind was how many of my competitors would be trying to cut my throat for its passengers while I was cutting theirs.
Yuri Gagarin,
under private charter, my money nose began to quiver. It was out of season for everybody except the very rich; the only question on my mind was how many of my competitors would be trying to cut my throat for its passengers while I was cutting theirs.
Airbody rental takes a lot more capital than opening a prayer-fan booth. I’d been lucky in buying my airbody cheap when the fellow I worked for died; I didn’t have too many competitors, and a couple of them were U/S for repairs, a couple more had kited off on Heechee diggings of their own.
So, actually, I had the
Gagarin
’s passengers, whoever they were, pretty much to myself. Assuming they could be interested in taking a trip outside the Heechee tunnels.
Gagarin
’s passengers, whoever they were, pretty much to myself. Assuming they could be interested in taking a trip outside the Heechee tunnels.
I had to assume they would be interested, because I needed the money very much. I had this little liver condition, you see. It was getting pretty close to total failure. The way the doctors explained it to me, I had like three choices: I could go back to Earth and linger a while on external prostheses; or I could get up the money for a transplant. Or I could die.
The name of the fellow who had chartered the
Gagarin
was Boyce Cochenour. Age, apparently forty. Height, two meters. Ancestry, Irish-American-French.
Gagarin
was Boyce Cochenour. Age, apparently forty. Height, two meters. Ancestry, Irish-American-French.
He was the kind of fellow who was used to command. I watched him come into the Spindle as though it belonged to him and he was getting ready to sell it. He sat down in Sub Vastra’s imitation Paris Boulevard-Heechee sidewalk cafe. “Scotch,” he said, and Vastra hurried to pour John Begg over super-cooled ice and hand it to him, all crackling with cold and numbing to the lips. “Smoke,” he said, and the girl who was traveling with him instantly lit a cigarette and passed it to him. “Crummy-looking joint,” he said, and Vastra fell all over himself to agree.
I sat down next to them—well, not at the same table, I mean; I didn’t even look at them. But I could hear what they said. Vastra didn’t look at me, either, but of course he had seen me come in and knew I had my eye on them. But I had to let his number-three wife take my order, because Vastra wasn’t going to waste any time on me when he had a charter-ship Terry at his table. “The usual,” I said to her, meaning straightalk in a tumbler of soft drink. “And a copy of your briefing,” I added, more softly. Her eyes twinkled at me over her flirtation veil. Cute little vixen. I patted her hand in a friendly way, and left a rolled-up bill in it; then she left.
The Terry was inspecting his surroundings, including me. I looked back at him, polite but distant, and he gave me a sort of quarter-nod and turned back to Subhash Vastra. “Since I’m here,” he said, “I might as well go along with whatever action there is. What’s to do here?”
Sub grinned widely, like a tall, skinny frog. “Ah, whatever you wish, sah! Entertainment? In our private rooms we have the finest artists of three planets, nautch dancers, music, fine comedians—”
“We’ve got plenty of that in Cincinnati. I didn’t come to Venus for a nightclub act.” He wouldn’t have known it, of course, but that was a good move; Sub’s private rooms were way down the list of night spots on Venus, and the top of the list wasn’t much.
“Of course, sah! Then perhaps you would like to consider a tour?”
“Aw.” Cochenour shook his head. “What’s the point? Does any of it look any different than the space pad we came in on, right over our heads?”
Vastra hesitated; I could see him calculating second-order consequences in his head, measuring the chance of the Terry going for a surface tour against what he might get from me as commission. He didn’t look my way. Honesty won out—that is, honesty reinforced by a quick appraisal of Cochenour’s gullibility. “Not much different, no, sah,” he admitted. “All pretty hot and dry on the surface, at least for the next thousand kilometers. But I wasn’t thinking of the surface.”
“What then?”
“Ah, the Heechee warrens, sah! There are many miles just below this settlement. A guide could be found—”
“Not interested,” Cochenour growled. “Not in anything that close.”
“Sah?”
“If a guide can lead us through them,” Cochenour explained, “that means they’ve all been explored. Which means they’ve been looted. What’s the fun of that?”
“Of course,” said Vastra immediately. “I see what you’re driving at, sah.” He looked noticeably happier, and I could feel his radar reaching out to make sure I was listening, though he didn’t look in my direction at all. “To be sure,” he said, “there is always the chance of finding 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 brought me my drink and a thin powder-faxed slip of paper. “Thirty percent,” I whispered to her. “Tell Sub. Only no bargaining, no getting anybody else to bid—” She nodded and winked; she’d been listening too, and she was as sure as I that this Terry was firmly on the hook. It had been my intention to nurse the drink as long as I could, but prosperity loomed before me; I was ready to celebrate; I took a long happy swallow.
But the hook didn’t have a barb. Unaccountably the Terry shrugged. “Waste of time, I bet,” he grumbled. “I mean, really. If you knew where to look, why wouldn’t you have looked there already, right?”
“Ah, mister,” cried Subhash Vastra, “but there are hundreds of tunnels not explored! Thousands! And in them, who knows, treasures beyond price!”
Cochenour shook his head. “Skip it,” he said. “Bring us another drink. And see if you can’t get the ice
cold
this time.”
cold
this time.”
Somewhat shaken, I put down my drink, half-turned away to hide my hand from the Terries, and looked at the facsimile copy of Sub’s report on them to see if it could tell me why Cochenour had lost interest.
It couldn’t. It did tell me a lot, though. The girl with Cochenour was named Dorotha Keefer. She had been traveling with him for a couple of years now, this being their first time off Earth; there was no indication of any marriage, or any intention of it, at least
on his part. She was in her early twenties—real age, not simulated by drugs and transplants. Cochenour himself was well over ninety.
on his part. She was in her early twenties—real age, not simulated by drugs and transplants. Cochenour himself was well over ninety.
He did not, of course, look anywhere near that. I’d watched him come over to the 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 and heating plants to food production, growing algae in the crude that came out of his wells and selling the algae in processed form for human consumption. So he’d stopped being a mere millionaire and turned into something much bigger.
And that accounted for the way he looked. He’d been on Full Medical, with extras. The report said his heart was titanium and plastic. His lungs had been transplanted from a twenty-year-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 well over a thousand dollars a day. To judge by the way he stroked the girl sitting 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.
What a lovely mark! I swallowed the rest of my drink, and nodded to the third for another. There had to be a way to get him to charter my airbody.
All I had to do was find it.
Outside the rail of Vastra’s cafe, of course, half the Spindle was thinking exactly the same thoughts. This was the worst of the low season, the Hohmann crowd were still three months in the future; all of us were beginning to run low on money. My 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 in on this rich tourist’s money as much as I did, just for the sake of staying alive.
We couldn’t all do it. Two of us, three, maybe even half a dozen could score enough to make a real difference. No more than that. And I had to be one of these few.
I took a deep swallow of my second drink, tipped Vastra’s third lavishly—and conspicuously—and turned idly around until I was facing the Terries dead-on.
The girl was talking with a knot of souvenir vendors, looking interested and uncertain. “Boyce?” she said over her shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“What’s this thing for?”
He bent over the rail and peered. “Looks like a fan,” he said.
“Heechee prayer fan, right,” cried the dealer; 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—”
“Sucker bait,” grumbled Cochenour. “Buy it if you want.”
“But what does it do?”
He laughed raucously. “What any fan does. It cools you down.” And he looked at me, grinning.
I finished my drink, nodded, stood up and walked over to the table. “Welcome to Venus,” I said. “May I help you?”
The girl looked at Cochenour for approval before she said, “I thought this was very pretty.”
“Very pretty,” I agreed. “Are you familiar with the story of the Heechees?”
Cochenour pointed to a chair. I sat and went on. “They built these tunnels about a quarter of a million years ago. They lived here for a couple of centuries, 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 a lot of these fans. Some local con man like BeeGee here got the idea of calling them ‘prayer fans’ and selling them to tourists to make wishes with.”
Allemang had been hanging on my every word trying to guess where I was going. “You know it’s right,” he said.
“But you two are too smart for that kind of come-on,” I added. “Still, look at the things. They’re pretty enough to be worth having even without the story.”
“Absolutely!” cried Allemang. “See how this one sparkles, miss! And the black and gray crystal, how nice it looks with your fair hair!”
The girl unfurled the crystalline 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 was very pretty as she waved it gently. Like all the Heechee fans, it weighed only about ten grams, and its crystalline lattice caught the lights from the luminous Heechee walls, as well as the fluorescents and gas tubes we maze-runners had installed, and tossed them all back in iridescent sparks.
“This fellow’s name is Booker Garey Allemang,” I said. “He’ll sell you the same goods as any of the o thers, but he won’t cheat you as much as most of them.”
Cochenour looked at me dourly, then beckoned Sub Vastra for another round of drinks. “All right,” he said. “If we buy, we’ll buy from you, Booker Garey Allemang. But not now.”
He turned to me. “And what do you want to sell me?”
“Myself and my airbody, if you want to go looking for new tunnels. We’re both as good as you can get.”
“How much?”
“One million dollars,” I said immediately. “All found.”
He didn’t answer at once, though it gave me some pleasure to notice that the price didn’t seem to scare him. He looked as pleasant, or anyway as unangrily bored, as ever. “Drink up,” he said, as Vastra and his third served us, and gestured with his glass to the Spindle. “Know what this was for?” he asked.
“You mean why the Heechees built it? No. They were pretty small, so it wasn’t for headroom. And it was entirely empty when it was found.”
He gazed tolerantly at the busy scene, balconies cut into the sloping sides of the Spindle with eating and drinking places like Vastra’s, rows of souvenir booths, most of them empty at this idle season. But there were still a couple of hundred maze rats around, and the number had been quietly growing all the time Cochenour and the girl had been sitting there.
He said, “It’s not much to see, is it? A hole in the ground, and a lot of people trying to take my money away from me.”
I shrugged.
He grinned again. “So why did I come, eh? Well, that’s a good question, but since you didn’t ask it I don’t have to answer it. You want a million dollars. Let’s see. A hundred K to charter an airbody. A hundred and eighty or so to rent equipment, per week. Ten days minimum, three weeks a safer guess. Food, supplies, permits, another fifty K. So we’re up
to close to seven hundred thousand, not counting your own salary and what you give our host here as his cut for not throwing you off the premises. Right, Walthers?”
to close to seven hundred thousand, not counting your own salary and what you give our host here as his cut for not throwing you off the premises. Right, Walthers?”
I had a little difficulty in swallowing the drink I had been holding to my mouth, but I managed to say, “Close enough, Mr. Cochenour.” I didn’t see any point in telling him that I already owned the equipment, as well as the airbody, although I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that he knew that too.
“You’ve got a deal, then. And I want to leave as soon as possible, which should be, um, about this time tomorrow.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and got up, avoiding Sub Vastra’s thunderstricken expression. I had some work to do, and a little thinking. He’d caught me off base, which is a bad place to be when you can’t afford to make a mistake. I knew he hadn’t missed my calling him by name. That was all right; he’d known that I had checked him out immediately. But it was a little surprising that he had known mine.
Other books
Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun by Sackett, Jeffrey
The Devilish Montague by Rice, Patricia
A Texas Ranger's Family by Mae Nunn
An Exceptional Twist by Kimi Flores
Addicted to Him by Lauren Dodd
A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill
The Dynamite Room by Jason Hewitt
Duchess by Susan May Warren
Veil of Midnight by Lara Adrian
Tongues of Fire by Peter Abrahams