Authors: Frederik Pohl
PLATINUM POHL (6 page)
I turned off the microphone and told my passengers, “They’re checking our flight plan. Not to worry about.”
In a moment the Defense communicator came back, loud as ever. “You are eleven point four kilometers bearing one eight three degrees from terminator of a restricted area. Proceed with caution. Under Military Regulations One Seven and One Eight, Sections—”
I cut in, “I know the drill. I have my guide’s license and have explained the restrictions to the passengers.”
“Acknowledged,” blared the radio. “We will keep you under surveillance. If you observe
vessels or parties on the surface, they are our perimeter teams. Do not interfere with them in any way. Respond at once to any request for identification or information.” The carrier buzz cut off.
vessels or parties on the surface, they are our perimeter teams. Do not interfere with them in any way. Respond at once to any request for identification or information.” The carrier buzz cut off.
Cochenour said, “They act nervous.”
“No. They’re used to seeing us around. They’ve got nothing else to do, that’s all.”
Dorrie said hesitantly, “Audee, you told them you’d explained the restrictions to us. I don’t remember that part.”
“Oh, I explained them all right. We stay out of the restricted area, because if we don’t they’ll start shooting. That is the Whole of the Law.”
I set a wake-up for four hours, and the others heard me moving around and got up too. Dorrie fetched us coffee from the warmer, and we stood drinking it and looking at the patterns the computer had traced.
I took several minutes to study them, although it was clear enough at first look. There were eight major anomalies that could have been Heechee warrens. One was almost right outside our door. We wouldn’t even have to move the airbody to dig for it.
I showed them the anomalies, one by one. Cochenour just looked at them thoughtfully. Dorotha asked after a moment, “You mean all of these are unexplored tunnels?”
“No. Wish they were. But, one: Any or all of them could have been explored by someone who didn’t go to the trouble of recording it. Two: They don’t have to be tunnels. They might be fracture faults, or dikes, or little rivers of some kind of molten material that ran out of somewhere and hardened and got covered over a billion years ago. The only thing we know for sure so far is that there probably aren’t any unexplored tunnels in this area
except
in those eight places.”
except
in those eight places.”
“So what do we do?”
“We dig. And then we see what we’ve got.”
Cochenour said, “Where do we dig?”
I pointed right next to the bright delta of our airbody. “Right here.”
“Because it’s the best bet?”
“Well, not necessarily.” I considered what to tell him, and decided the truth was the best. “There are three that look like better bets than the others—here, I’ll mark them.” I keyed the chart controls, and the best looking traces immediately displayed letters: A, B and C. “A runs right under the arroyo here, so we’ll dig it first.”
“Those three because they’re the brightest?”
I nodded, somewhat annoyed at his quickness, although it was obvious enough.
.“But C over here is the brightest of the lot. Why don’t we dig that first?”
I chose my words carefully. “Because we’d have to move the airbody. And because it’s on the outside perimeter of the survey area; that means the results aren’t as reliable as they are for this one right under us. But those aren’t the most important reasons. The most important reason is that C is on the edge of the line our itchy-fingered friends are telling us to stay away from.”
Cochenour laughed incredulously. “You mean you’re telling me that if you find a real untouched Heechee tunnel you’ll stay out of it just because some soldier tells you it’s a no-no?”
I said, “The problem doesn’t arise just yet; we have seven anomalies to look at that are legal. Also, the military will be checking us from time to time, particularly in the next day or two.”
Cochenour insisted, “All right, suppose we check them and find nothing. What do we do then?”
I shook my head. “I never borrow trouble. Let’s check the legal ones.”
“But suppose.”
“Damn it, Boyce! How do I know?”
He gave it up then, but winked at Dorrie and chuckled. “What did I tell you, honey? He’s a bigger bandit than I am.”
For the next couple of hours we didn’t have much time to talk about theoretical possibilities, because we were too busy with concrete facts.
The biggest fact was an awful lot of hot high-speed gas that we had to keep from killing us. My own hot-suit was custom made, of course, and only needed the fittings and tanks to be checked. Boyce and the girl had rental units. They’d paid top dollar for them, and they were good, but good isn’t perfect. I had them in and out of them a dozen times, checking the fit and varying tensions until they were as right as I could get them. There’s a lot of heat and pressure to keep out when you go about the surface of Venus. The suits were laminated twelve-ply, with nine degrees of freedom at the essential joints. They wouldn’t fail; that wasn’t what I was worried about. What I was worried about was comfort, because a very small itch or rub can get serious when there’s no way to stop it.
But finally they were good enough for a first trial, and we all huddled in the lock and exited on to the surface of Venus.
We were still darkside, but there’s so much scatter from the sun that it doesn’t get really dark more than a quarter of the time. I let them practice walking around the airbody, leaning into the wind, bracing themselves against the hold-downs and the side of the ship, while I got ready to dig.
I hauled out our first instant igloo, dragged it into position, and ignited it. As it smoldered it puffed up like the children’s toy that used to be called a Pharaoh’s Serpent, producing a light, tough ash that grew up around the digging site and joined in a seamless dome at the top. I’d already emplaced the digging torch and the crawl-through lock; as the ash grew I manhandled the lock to get a close union, and got a perfect join first time.
Dorrie and Cochenour stayed out of the way when they caught sight of my waving arm, but hung together, watching through their triple-vision plugs. I keyed on the radio. “You want to come in and watch me start it up?” I shouted.
Inside the helmets, they both nodded their heads. “Come on, then,” I yelled, and wiggled through the crawl lock. I signed for them to leave it open as they followed me in.
With the three of us and the digging equipment in it, the igloo was even more crowded than the airbody. They backed away as far as they could get, bent against the arc of the igloo wall, while I started up the augers, checked they were vertical, and watched the first castings spiral out.
The foam igloo absorbs more sound than it reflects. Even so, the din inside the igloo was a lot worse than in the howling winds outside. When I thought they’d seen enough
to satisfy them for the moment, I waved them out of the crawl-through, followed, sealed it behind us, and led them back into the airbody.
to satisfy them for the moment, I waved them out of the crawl-through, followed, sealed it behind us, and led them back into the airbody.
“So far, so good,” I said, twisting off the helmet and loosening the suit. “We’ve got about forty meters to go, I think. Might as well wait in here as out there.”
“How long is that?”
“Maybe an hour. You can do what you like; what I’m going to do is take a shower. Then we’ll see how far we’ve got.”
That was one of the nice things about having only three people aboard: We didn’t have to worry about water discipline very much. It’s astonishing how a quick wet-down revives you after coming out of a hotsuit. When I’d finished mine I felt ready for anything.
I was even prepared to eat some of Boyce Cochenour’s gourmet cookery, but fortunately it wasn’t necessary. The girl had taken over the kitchen, and what she laid out was simple, light, and reasonably nontoxic. On cooking like hers I might be able to survive long enough to collect my charter fee. It crossed my mind for a moment to wonder what made her do it; and then I thought, of course, she’d had a lot of practice. With all the spare parts in Cochenour, no doubt he had dietary problems far worse than mine.
Well, not “worse,” exactly, in the sense that I didn’t think he was quite as likely to die of them.
According to the autosonic probes, the highest point of the tunnel I had marked “A,” or of whatever it was that had seemed like tunnels to their shock waves, was close to the little blind valley in which I’d tied down.
That was very lucky. It meant that we might very possibly be right over the Heechee’s own entrance.
The reason that was lucky was not that we would be able to use it the way the Heechee had used it. There wasn’t much chance that its mechanisms would have survived a quarter of a million years, much of it exposed to surface wind, ablation, and chemical corrosion. The good part was that if the tunnel had surfaced here it would be relatively easy to bore down to it. Even a quarter of a million years doesn’t produce really hard rock, especially without surface water to dissolve out solids and produce compact sediments.
Up to a point, it turned out pretty much the way I had hoped. What was on the surface was little more than ashy sand, and the augers chewed it out very rapidly. Too rapidly; when I went back into the igloo it was filled almost solid with castings, and I had a devil of a job getting to the machines to switch the auger over to pumping the castings out through the crawl lock.
It was a dull, dirty part of the job, but it didn’t take long.
I didn’t bother to go back into the airbody. I reported what was happening over the radio to Boyce and the girl, staring out of the ports at me. I told them I thought we were getting close.
But I didn’t tell them exactly how close. Actually, we were only a meter or two from the indicated depth of the anomaly, so close that I didn’t bother to pump out all of the castings. I just made enough room to maneuver around, then redirected the augers; and in five minutes the castings were beginning to come up with the pale blue glimmer that was the sign of a Heechee tunnel.
About ten minutes after that I keyed on my helmet transmitter and shouted: “Boyce! Dorrie! We’ve hit a tunnel!”
Either they were sitting around in their suits or they dressed faster than any maze rat. I unsealed the crawl-through and wiggled out to help them, and they were already coming out of the airbody, staggering against the wind over to me.
They were both yelling questions and congratulations, but I stopped them. “Inside,” I ordered. “See for yourself.” As a matter of fact, they didn’t have to go that far. They could see the color as soon as they knelt to enter the crawl-through.
I followed, and sealed the lock behind me. The reason for that is simple enough. As long as the tunnel isn’t breached, it doesn’t matter what you do. But the interior of a Heechee tunnel that has remained inviolate is at a pressure only slightly above Earth-normal. Without the sealed dome, the minute you crack the casing you let the whole twenty-thousand-millibar atmosphere of Venus pour in, heat and ablation and all. If the tunnel is empty, or if what’s in it is simple, sturdy stuff, there might not be any harm. But if you hit the jackpot you can destroy in half a second what has waited for a quarter of a million years.
We gathered around the shaft and I pointed down. The augers had left a clean shaft, about seventy centimeters by a little over a hundred, with rounded ends. At the bottom you could see the cold blue glow of the outside of the tunnel, only pocked and blotched by the loose castings I hadn’t bothered to get out.
“Now what?” demanded Boyce. His voice was hoarse with excitement, which was, I guessed, natural enough.
“Now we burn our way in.”
I backed my clients away as far as they could get, pressed against the remaining heap of castings, and unlimbered the fire-jets. I’d already hung sheer-legs over the shaft, and they went right down on their cable with no trouble until they were a few centimeters above the round of the tunnel. Then I fired them up.
You wouldn’t think that anything a human being might do would change the temperature of the surface of Venus, but those fire-drills were something special. In the small space of the igloo the heat flamed up and around us, and our hotsuit cooling systems were overloaded in seconds.
Dorrie gasped, “Oh! I—I think I’m going to—”
Cochenour grabbed her. “Faint if you want to,” he said fiercely, “but don’t get sick. Walthers! How long does this go on?”
It was as hard for me as it was for them; practice doesn’t get you used to something like standing in front of a blast furnace with the doors off the hinges. “Maybe a minute,” I gasped. “Hold on—it’s all right.”
It actually took a little more than that, maybe ninety seconds; my suit telltales were shouting alarm for more than half of the time. But they were built for these overloads, and as long as we didn’t cook, the suits wouldn’t take any permanent harm.
Then we were through. A half-meter circular section sagged, fell at one side and hung there.
I turned off the firejets, and we all breathed hard for a couple of minutes, while the suit coolers gradually caught up with the load.
“Wow,” said Dorotha. “That was pretty rough.”
I looked at Cochenour. In the light that splashed up out of the shaft I could see he was frowning. I didn’t say anything. I just gave the jets another five-second burn to cut away the rest of the circular section, and it fell free into the tunnel. We could hear it clatter against the floor.
Then I turned on my helmet radio. “There’s no pressure differential,” I said.
The frown didn’t change, nor did he speak.
“Which means this one has been breached,” I went on. “Let’s go back to the airbody and take a break before we do anything else.”
Dorotha shrieked, “Audee! What’s the matter with you? I want to go down there and see what’s inside!”
Cochenour said bitterly, “Shut up, Dorrie. Don’t you hear what he’s saying? This one’s a dud.”
Well, there’s always the chance that a breached tunnel opened up to a seismological invasion, not a maze rat with a cutting torch, and if so, there might be something worthwhile in it anyway. And I didn’t have the heart to kill all Dorotha’s enthusiasm with one blow.
So we did swing down the cable, one by one, into the Heechee dig, and look around.
It was wholly bare, as most of them are, as far as we could see. That wasn’t actually very far, for the other thing wrong with a breached tunnel is that you need pretty good equipment to explore it. With the overloads they’d already had, our suits were all right for a couple of hours but not much more than that, and when we tramped about half a mile down the tunnel without finding a thing, they were both willing to tramp back and return to the airbody.
We cleaned up and made ourselves something to drink. Even squandering more of the water reserves on showers didn’t do much for our spirits.
We had to eat, but Cochenour didn’t bother with his gourmet exhibition. Silently, Dorotha threw tabs into the radar oven, and we fed gloomily on emergency rations.
“Well, that’s only the first one,” she said at last, determined to be sunny about it. “And it’s only our second day.”
Cochenour said, “Shut up, Dorrie; the one thing I’m not is a good loser.” He was staring at the probe trace. “Walthers, how many tunnels are unmarked but empty, like this one?”
“How can I answer a question like that? If they’re unmarked, there’s no record of them.”
“So those traces don’t mean anything. We might dig one a day for the next three weeks and find every one a dud.”
I nodded. “We surely might, Boyce.”
He looked at me alertly. “And?”
“And that’s not the worst part of it. I’ve taken parties out to dig who would’ve gone mad with joy to open even a breached tunnel. It’s perfectly possible to dig every day for weeks and never hit a real Heechee tunnel at all. Don’t knock it; at least you got some action for your money.”
“I told you, Walthers, I’m not a good loser. Second place is no good.” He thought for a minute, then barked: “You picked this spot. Did you know what you were doing?”
Did I? The only way to answer that question would be to find a live one, of course. I could have told him about the months of studying records from the first landings on. I could have mentioned how much trouble I went to, and how many regulations I broke, to get the military survey reports, or how far I’d traveled to talk to the Defense crews who’d been on those early digs. I might have let him know how hard it had been to locate old Jorolemon Hegramet, now teaching exotic archeology back in Tennessee, and how many times we’d corresponded; but all I said was, “The fact that we found one tunnel shows I knew my business as a guide. That’s all you paid for. It’s up to you if we keep looking or not.”
He looked at his thumbnail, considering.
The girl said cheerfully, “Buck up, Boyce. Look at all the other chances we’ve got—and even if we miss, it’ll still be fun telling everybody about it back in Cincinnati.”
He didn’t even look at her, just said, “Isn’t there any way to tell whether a tunnel has been breached or not without going inside?”
“Sure,” I said. “You can tell by tapping the outside shell. You can hear the difference in the sound.”
“But you have to dig down to it first?”
“Right.”
We left it at that, and I got back into my hotsuit to strip away the now useless igloo so that we could move the drills.
I didn’t really want to discuss it anymore, because I didn’t want him to ask a question that I might want to lie about. I try the best I can to tell the truth, because it’s easier to remember what you’ve said that way.
On the other hand, I’m not fanatic about it, and I don’t see that it’s any of my business to correct a mistaken impression. For instance, obviously Cochenour and the girl had the impression that I hadn’t bothered to sound the tunnel casing because we’d already dug down to it and it was just as easy to cut in.
But, of course, I had tested it. That was the first thing I did as soon as the drill got down that far. And when I heard the high-pressure
thunk
it broke my heart. I had to wait a couple of minutes before I could call them to tell them that we’d reached the outer casing.
thunk
it broke my heart. I had to wait a couple of minutes before I could call them to tell them that we’d reached the outer casing.
At that time, I had not quite faced up to the question of just what I would have done if it had turned out that the tunnel had not been breached.
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