Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “Now what?” bellowed Cochenour. I noticed the girl had put the earplugs back, but he wasn’t willing to miss a thing.

  “Now we wait for the probes to feel around for Heechee tunnels. It’ll take a couple of hours.” While I was talking I brought the airbody down through the surface layers. Now we were being thrown around. The buffeting got pretty bad, and so did the noise.

  But I found what I was looking for, a surface formation like a blind arroyo, and tucked us into it with only one or two bad moments. Cochenour was watching very carefully, and I grinned to myself. That was where pilotage counted, not en route or at the prepared pads around the Spindle. When he could do that he could get along without somebody like me.

  Our position looked all right, so I fired four hold-downs, tethered stakes with explosive heads that opened out in the ground. I winched them tight and all of them held.

  That was also a good sign. Reasonably pleased with myself, I opened the belt catches and stood up. “We’re here for at least a day or two,” I said. “More if we’re lucky. How did you like the ride?”

  The girl was taking the earplugs out, now that the protecting walls of the arroyo had cut the thundering down to a mere constant scream. “I’m glad I don’t get airsick,” she said.

  Cochenour was thinking, not talking. He was studying the control board while he lit another cigarette.

  Dorotha said, “One question, Audee. Why couldn’t we stay up where it’s quieter?”

  “Fuel. I carry about thirty hours, full thrust, but that’s it. Is the noise bothering you?”

  She made a face.

  “You’ll get used to it. It’s like living next to a spaceport. At first you wonder how anybody stands the noise for a single hour. After you’ve been there a week you miss it if it stops.”

  She moved over to the bull’s-eye and gazed pensively out at the landscape. We’d crossed into the night portion, and there wasn’t much to see but dust and small objects whirling through our external light beams. “It’s that first week that I’m worried about,” she said.

  I flicked on the probe readout. The little percussive heads were firing their slap-charges and measuring each other’s sounds, but it was too early to see anything. The screen was barely beginning to build up a shadowy pattern, more holes than detail.

  Cochenour finally spoke. “How long until you can make some sense out of that?” he demanded. Another point: He didn’t ask what it was.

  “Depends on how close and how big anything is. You can make a guess in an hour or so, but I like all the data I can get. Six or eight hours. I’d say. There’s no hurry.”

  He growled, “I’m in a hurry, Walthers. Keep that in mind.”

  The girl cut in. “What should we do, Audee? Play three-handed bridge?”

  “Whatever you want, but I’d advise some sleep. I’ve got pills if you want them. If we do find anything—and remember, if we hit on the first try it’s just hundred-to-one luck—we’ll want to be wide awake for a while.”

  “All right,” said Dorotha, reaching out for the spansules, but Cochenour demanded:

  “What about you?”

  “Pretty soon. I’m waiting for something.” He didn’t ask what. Probably, I thought, because he already knew. I decided that when I did hit my bunk I wouldn’t take a sleeping pill right away. This Cochenour was not only the richest tourist I had ever guided, he was one of the best informed, and I wanted to think about that for a while.

  What I was waiting for took almost an hour to come. The boys were getting a little sloppy; they should have been after us before this.

  The radio buzzed and then blared: “Unidentified vessel at one three five, zero seven, four eight and seven two, five one, five four! Please identify yourself and state your purpose!”

  Cochenour looked up inquiringly from his gin game with the girl. I smiled reassuringly. “As long as they’re saying ‘please’ there’s no problem,” I told him, and opened the transmitter.

  “This is Pilot Audee Walthers, airbody Poppa Tare Nine One, out of the Spindle. We are licensed and have filed approved flight plans. I have two Terry tourists aboard, purpose recreational exploration.”

  “Acknowledge. Please wait,” blared the radio. The military always broadcasts at maximum gain. Hangover from drill-sergeant days, no doubt.

  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.

  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.”

  7

  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.”

  “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.

  “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.

  8

  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.”