The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl

  Cover artwork - Neal McPheeters

  (from DC SF Graphic Novel #4)

  Original magazine appearance

  Worlds of If, July-Aug 1972

  (illustrated by Jack Gaughan)

  DC SF Graphic Novel #4 Mar 1986

  adapted by Victoria Petersen

  and Neal McPheeters (artist)

  Copyright© 1972 by Frederik Pohl

  The Heechee Saga

  1 - The Merchants of Venus

  2 - Gateway

  3 - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

  4 - Heechee Rendezvous

  5 - The Annals of the Heechee

  6 - The Gateway Trip (coll)

  7 - The Boy Who Would Live Forever

  Contents

  The Merchants of Venus

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  I

  My name is Audee Walthers, my job airbody driver, my home on Venus—in the Spindle or 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, mostly in Amarillo Central. My father was deputy governor of Texas. He died when I was still in college, but he left me enough in civil-service dependency benefits for me to finish school, get a master's in business administration, and pass the journeyman's examination as clerk-typist in the Service. So I was set up for life, or so most people would have thought.

  After I had tried it for a few years, I made a discovery. I didn't like the life I was set up for. It wasn't so much for the reasons anyone might expect. Amarillo Central wasn't all that bad. I don't mind having to wear a smog suit, can get along with neighbors even when there are eight thousand of them to the square mile, tolerate noise, can defend myself against the hoodlum kid gangs—no, it wasn't Texas itself that bothered me. It was what I was doing with my life in Texas, and, for that matter, what I would have to be doing with it anywhere else on Earth.

  So I got out.

  I sold my UOPWA journeyman's card to a woman who had to mortgage her parents' room to pay for it; I mortgaged my own pension accrual; I took the little bit of money I had saved in the bank . . . and I bought a oneway ticket to Venus.

  There wasn't anything strange about that. It was what every kid tells himself he's going to do when he grows up. The difference is that I did it.

  I suppose it would all have been different if I'd had any chance at Real Money. If my father had been full governor, with all those chances for payoffs and handouts, instead of being just a civil-service flunky . . . If the dependency benefits he'd left me had included unlimited Full Medical . . . If I'd been at the top of the heap instead of stuck in the oppressed middle, squeezed from both directions . . .

  It didn't happen that way. So I took the pioneer route and wound up trying to make a living out of Terrestrial tourists in Venus's main place, the Spindle.

  Everybody has seen pictures of the Spindle, just as with the Colosseum and Niagara Falls. The difference, of course, is that the only view you ever get of the Spindle is from inside it. It's under the surface of Venus, in a place called Alpha Regio.

  Like everything worth looking at on Venus, the Spindle was something left over by the Heechee. Nobody had ever figured out exactly what it was the Heechee wanted with an underground chamber three hundred meters long and spindle-shaped, but there it was. So we used it. It was the closest thing Venus had to a Times Square or a Champs Élysées. All Terry tourists head first for the Spindle, so that's where we start fleecing them.

  My own airbody-rental business is reasonably legitimate, as tourist ventures go on Venus—I mean, at least it is if you don't count the fact that there isn't really much worth seeing on Venus that wasn't left there, under the surface, by the Heechee. All the other tourist traps in the Spindle are reasonably crooked. Terries don't seem to mind that. They must know they're being taken, though. 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 blood-diamonds, fire-pearls, and fly ash. None of the souvenirs are worth the price of their mass charge back to Earth, but to a tourist who can get up the price of the interplanetary passage in the first place I don't suppose that matters.

  To people like me, who can't get up the price of anything, the tourist traps matter a lot. We live on them.

  I don't mean that we draw our excess disposable income from them. I mean that they are how we get the price of what to eat and where to sleep. If we don't have the price we die.

  There aren't many legitimate ways of earning money on Venus. There's the army, if you call that legitimate; the rest is tourism and dumb luck. The dumb-lucky chances—oh, like winning a lottery, or striking it rich in the Heechee diggings, or blundering into a well-paying job with one of the scientific expeditions—are all real long shots. For our bread and butter, almost everybody on Venus depends on Terry tourists, and if we don't milk them dry when we get the chance we've had it.

  Of course, there are tourists and then there are tourists. They come in three varieties. The difference between them is celestial mechanics.

  Class III is the quick and dirty kind. Back on Earth, they are merely well-to-do. The Class IIIs come to Venus every twenty-six months at Hohmann-orbit time, riding the minimum-energy circuit from Earth. Because of the critical time windows of the Hohmann orbits they never can stay on Venus for more than three weeks. So they come out on their guided tours, determined to get the most out of the quarter-million-dollar minimum cabin fare their rich grandparents have given them for a graduation present, or that they've saved up for a second honeymoon, or whatever. The bad thing about them is that they don't usually have much extra money to spend, since they've spent it all on fares. The nice thing is that there are a lot of them. When the tour ships are in all the rental rooms on Venus are filled. Sometimes they'll 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 hole up in Heechee huts on the surface and rent out our own below-ground rooms, and that way maybe make enough money to live a few months.

  But you couldn't make enough out of Class IIIs to live until the next Hohmann-orbit time, so when the Class II tourists come in we cut each other's throats over them.

  The Class IIs are the medium-rich. What you might call the poor millionaires; the ones whose annual income is in the low seven figures. They can afford to come in powered orbits, taking a hundred days or so for the run, instead of the long, slow Hohmann drift. The price for that runs a million dollars and up, so there aren't nearly as many of the Class II tourists. But there are a few trickling in every month or so at the time of reasonably favorable orbital conjunctions. They also have more money to spend when they get to Venus. So do those other Class II medium-rich ones who wait for the four or five times in a decade when the ballistics of the planets sort themselves into the low-energy configuration that allows them to hit three planets in an orbit that doesn't have much higher energy costs than the straight Earth-Venus run. They hit us first, if we're lucky, and then go on to Mars. (As if there was anything to do on Mars!) If they've gone the other way around, we get the leavings from the Martian colonists. That's bad, because the leavings are never very much.

  But the very rich—ah, the very rich! The Class I marvels! They come as they like, in orbital season or not, and they can spend.

  When my informant on the landing pad reported the Yuri Gagarin incoming, under private charter, my money nose began to quiver.


  Whoever was on it had to be a good prospect. It was out of season for anybody except the really rich. The only question on my mind was how many of my competitors would be trying to cut my throat to get to the Gagarin's passengers first . . . while I was doing my best to cut theirs.

  It was important to me. I happened to have a pretty nasty cash-flow problem just then.

  Airbody rental takes a lot more capital than, say, opening a prayer-fan booth. I'd been lucky in buying my air-body cheap when the fellow I worked for died. I didn't have too many competitors; a couple of the ones who might've competed were out of service for repairs, and a couple more had kited off on Heechee diggings of their own.

  So, actually, I considered that I might have the Gagarin's passengers, whoever they were, pretty much to myself . . . assuming they could be interested in taking a trip outside the maze of Heechee tunnels right around the Spindle.

  I had to assume that they would be interested, because I needed the money very much. You see, I had this little liver condition. It was getting close to total failure. The way the doctors explained it to me, I had three choices: I could go back to Earth and live for a while on external dialysis. Or I could somehow find the money for a transplant. Or I could die.

  II

  The name of the fellow who had chartered the Gagarin turned out to be Boyce Cochenour. Age, apparently around forty. Height, easily two meters. Ancestry, Irish-American-French.

  I recognized his type at once: he was the kind that's used to being the boss wherever he is. I watched him come into the Spindle, looking as though he owned it and everything it held and was thinking about liquidating his holdings. He sat down in Sub Vastra's imitation of a combination Paris boulevard-Heechee sidewalk cafe. "Scotch," he said, without even looking to see if he was being waited on. He was. Vastra hurried to pour John Begg over supercooled ice and hand it to him, all crackling with cold and numbing to the lips. "Smoke," he said, and the girl with him instantly lit a cigarette and passed it to him. "Crummy-looking dump," he observed, glancing around, and Vastra fell all over himself to agree.

  I sat down next to them—well, I mean not at the same table; I didn't even look their way. But from the next table I could hear everything 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 these promising new marks. I had to let his number-three wife take my order instead of Vastra himself, because Vastra certainly wasn't going to waste his time on a tunnel-rat when he had a charter-ship Terry at his table. "The usual," I said to her, meaning straight alk in a tumbler of soft drink. "And a copy of your briefing," I added more softly. Her eyes twinkled understandingly 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, which included 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, in all the right tones for a bored tourist, "I might as well sample whatever action you've got. What's to do here?"

  Sub Vastra 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 enough of that stuff in Cincinnati. I didn't come to Venus for a nightclub act." Cochenour couldn't have known it, of course, but that was the right decision to make; Sub's private rooms were way down the list of night spots on Venus, and even 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 of running around? Does any of the planet look any different than the space pad we came in on, right over our heads?"

  Vastra hesitated. I could see him doing swift arithmetic in his head, measuring the chance of persuading the Terry to go for a surface tour against what he might get from me as his commission on something bigger. 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, all the same, pretty much. But I did not think of the surface."

  "What then?"

  "Ah, the Heechee warrens, sah! There are many miles of same just below this settlement. A reliable 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 if there was anything good in them it's been looted already. What's the fun of that?"

  "Of course!" Vastra cried immediately. "I understand your meaning, sah." He looked noticeably happier, and I could feel his radar reaching out to make sure I was listening, though he still didn't look in my direction at all. "To be sure," he went on weightily, an expert explaining complexities to a valued client, "there is always the chance that one may find 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 had brought me my drink and a thin powder-faxed slip of paper. "Thirty percent," I whispered to her. "Tell Sub. Only no bargaining and no getting anybody else to bid." She nodded and winked; she'd been listening too, of course, and she was as sure as I was that this Terry was firmly on the hook.

  It had been my intention to nurse my drink as long as I could, while the mark ripened under Vastra's skillful ministrations, but it looked like prosperity was looming ahead. I was ready to celebrate. I took a long, happy swallow.

  Unfortunately, the hook didn't seem to have a barb. Unaccountably, the Terry shrugged. "Waste of time, I bet," he grumbled. "I mean, really, if anybody knew where to look, why wouldn't he have looked there on his own already, right?"

  "Ah, mister!" Vastra cried, beginning to panic. "But I assure you, there are hundreds of tunnels not yet explored! Thousands, sah! And in them, who knows, treasures beyond price very likely!"

  Cochenour shook his head. "Let's skip it," he said. "Just bring us another drink. And see if you can't get the ice really cold this time."

  That shook me. My nose for money was rarely wrong.

  I put down my drink and half turned away to hide what I was doing from the Terries as I looked at the fax of Sub's briefing report on them to see if it might explain to me why Cochenour had lost interest so fast.

  The report couldn't answer that question. It did tell me a lot, though. The woman with Cochenour was named Dorotha Keefer. She had been traveling with him for a couple of years now, according to their passports, though this was their first time off Earth. There was no indication of a marriage between them—or of any intention of it, at least on Cochenour's part. Keefer was in her early twenties—real age, not simulated by drugs and transplants. While Cochenour himself was well over ninety.

  He did not, of course, look anywhere near that. I'd watched him walk over to their 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 to oil as a raw material for food production, growing algae in the crude oil that came out of his well and selling the algae, in processed form, for human consumption. So then he had stopped being a mere millionaire and turned into something much bigger.

  That accounted for the way he looked. He had been living on Full Medical, with extras. The report said that 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 several thousand dollars a day.

  To judge by the way he stroked the thigh of the girl 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.

  He was, in short, a lovely mark.

  I couldn't afford to let him get away. I swallowed the rest of the drink and nodded to the Third of Vastra for another. There had to be some way, somehow, to land him for a charter of my airbody.

  All I had to do was find it.

  Of course, on the other side of the little railing that set Vastra's cafe off from the rest of the Spindle, half the tunnel-rats on Venus were thinking the same thoughts.

  This was the worst of the low season. The Hohmann crowd was still three months in the future, and all of us were beginning to run low on money. My need for a 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 a helping out of this tourist's bankroll as much as I did, just for the sake of staying alive.

  We couldn't all do it. He looked pretty fat, but nobody could have been fat enough to feed us all. Two of us, maybe three, maybe even half a dozen might score enough to make a real difference. No more than that.