The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl

  I had to be one of those few.

  1 took a deep swallow of my second drink, tipped the Third of Vastra's House lavishly—and conspicuously—and turned idly around until I was facing the Terries.

  The girl was bargaining with the knot of souvenir vendors leaning over the rail. "Boyce?" she called over her shoulder. "What's this thing for?"

  He bent over the rail and peered. "Looks like a fan," he told her.

  "Heechee prayer fan, right!" the dealer cried. 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—"

  "It's sucker bait," Cochenour grumbled. "Buy it if you want to."

  "But what does it do?" she asked.

  Cochenour had an unpleasant laugh; he demonstrated it. "It does what any fan does. It cools you down. Not that you need that," he added meanly, and looked over to me with a grin.

  My cue.

  I finished my drink, nodded to him, stood up, and walked over to their table. "Welcome to Venus," I said. "May I help you?"

  The girl looked at Cochenour for permission before she said, "I thought this fan thing was pretty."

  "Very pretty," I agreed. "Are you familiar with the story of the Heechee?"

  I looked inquiringly toward the empty chair, and, as Cochenour didn't tell me to get lost, I sat down in it and went on. "The Heechee built these tunnels a long time ago—maybe a quarter of a million years. Maybe more. They seem to have occupied them for some time, anything up to a century or two, 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 thousands of these fans. Some local con-man—it wasn't BeeGee here, I think, but somebody like him—got the idea of calling the things 'prayer fans' and selling them to tourists to make wishes on."

  Allemang had been hanging on my every word, trying to guess where I was going. "Partly, that's right," he admitted.

  "All of it is right. But you two are too smart for that kind of thing. Still," I added, "look at the fans. They're pretty enough to be worth having even without the story."

  "They are, absolutely!" Allemang cried. "See how this one sparkles, miss! And this black and gray crystal, how nice it looks with your fair hair!"

  The girl unfurled the black and gray 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 sparkled very prettily as she gently waved it about. Like all the Heechee fans, it weighed only about ten grams, not counting the simulated-wood handles that people like BeeGee Allemang put on them. Its crystalline lattice caught the lights from the luminous Heechee-metal walls, as well as from the fluorescents and gas tubes we maze-runners had installed, and tossed all the lights back as shimmering, iridescent sparks.

  "This fellow's name is Booker Garey Allemang," I told the Terries. "He'll sell you the same goods as any of the others, but he won't cheat you as much as most of them—especially with me watching."

  Cochenour looked at me dourly, then beckoned Sub Vastra for another round of drinks. "All right," he said. "If we buy any of this we'll buy from you, Booker Garey Allemang. But not now." He turned to me. "And now what is it that you hope I'll buy from you?"

  I spoke right up. "My airbody and me. If you want to go looking for new tunnels, we're both as good as you can get."

  He didn't hesitate. "How much?"

  "One million dollars," I said immediately. "Three-week charter, all found."

  This time he didn't answer at once, although I was pleased to see that the price didn't seem to scare him away. He looked as receptive, or at least as merely bored, as ever. "Drink up," he said, as Vastra and his Third served us, and then he gestured with his glass to the Spindle around us. "Do you know what this is for?" he asked.

  "Do you mean, why the Heechee built it? No. The Heechee weren't any taller than we are, so it wasn't this big because they needed headroom. And it was entirely empty when it was found."

  He looked around, without excitement, at the busy scene. The Spindle is always busy. It had balconies cut into the sloping sides of the cavern, with eating and drinking places like Vastra's, along there, and rows of souvenir booths. Most of them were of course empty, in this slow season. But there were still a couple hundred maze-rats living in and near the Spindle, and the number of them hovering around us had been quietly growing all the time Cochenour and the girl had been sitting there.

  He said, "There's nothing much to see here, is there?" I didn't argue. "There's nothing but a hole in the ground, full of people trying to take my spare change away from me." I shrugged; he grinned at me—less meanly than before, I thought. "So why did I come to Venus, if that's how I feel? Well, that's a good question, but since you didn't ask it I don't have to answer."

  He looked at me to see if I might be going to press the matter. I didn't.

  "So let's just talk business," he went on. "You want a million dollars. Let's see what that pays for. It'd be around a hundred K to charter an airbody. A hundred and eighty K or so to rent equipment for a week, times three weeks. Food, supplies, permits, another fifty K. So we're up close to seven hundred thousand, not counting your own salary or what you have to give our host here as his cut for not throwing you off the premises. Is that about the way it adds up, Walthers?"

  I had not expected him to be a cost-accountant. I had a little difficulty swallowing the drink I had been holding in 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 airbody, as well as most of the other needed equipment—that was the only way there was going to be anything left for me after paying off all the other charges. But I wouldn't have been surprised to find out that he knew that, too.

  Then he surprised me. "Sounds like the right price," he said casually. "You've got a deal. I want to leave as soon as possible, which I want to be, um, just about this time tomorrow."

  "Fair enough," I said, getting up. "I'll see you then."

  I avoided Sub Vastra's thunder-stricken expression as I left. I had some work to do, and a little thinking. Cochenour had caught me off base, and that's a bad place to be when you can't afford to make a mistake. I knew he hadn't missed the fact that I'd called him by name. That was all right. He would easily guess that I had checked him out immediately, and his name was the least of the things he would assume I had found out about him. But it was a little surprising that he had known mine.

  III

  I had three major errands. The first thing I had to do was double-check my equipment to make sure it would still stand up against all the nastiness Venus can visit on a machine—or a person. The second was to go to the local union office and register a contract with Boyce Cochenour for validation, with a commission clause for Vastra.

  The third was to see my doctor. The liver hadn't been giving me much trouble for a while, but then I hadn't been drinking much grain alcohol for a while.

  The equipment turned out to be all right. It took me about an hour to complete the checks, but by the end of the time I was reasonably sure that I had all the gear and enough spare parts to keep us going. The Quackery was on the way to the union office, so I stopped in to see Dr. Morius first. It didn't take long. The news was no worse than I had been ready for. The doctor put all his instruments on me and studied the results carefully—about a hundred and fifty dollars worth of carefully—and then expressed the guarded hope that I would survive three weeks away from his office, provided I took all the stuff he gave me and wandered no more than usual from the diet he insisted on. "And when I get back?" I asked.

  "Same as I've been telling you, Audee," he said cheerily. "You can expect total hepatic collapse in, oh, maybe ninety days." He patted his fingertips, looking at me optimistically. "I hear you've got a live one, though. Want me to make a reservation for your transplant?"

  "How live did you hear my prospect was?" I asked.

&
nbsp; He shrugged. "The price is the same in any case," he told me good-naturedly. "Two hundred K for the new liver, plus the hospital, anesthesiologist, pre-op psychiatrist, pharmaceuticals, my own fee—you've already got the figures."

  I did. And I had already calculated that with what I might make from Cochenour, plus what I had put away, plus a loan on the airbody I could just about meet it. Leaving me broke when it was over, of course. But alive.

  "Happens I've got one in stock now that's just your; size," Dr. Morius said, half-kidding.

  I didn't doubt him. There are always plenty of spare parts in the Quackery. That's because people are always getting themselves killed, one way and another, and their heirs do their best to fatten up the estate by selling off the innards. I dated one of the quacks once or twice. When we'd been drinking she took me down to the Cold Cuts department and showed me all the frozen hearts and lungs and bowels and bladders, each one already dosed with anti-allergens so it wouldn't be rejected, all tagged and packed away, ready for a paying customer. It was a pity I wasn't in that class, because then Dr. Morius could have pulled one out, warmed it up in the microwave, and slapped it in. When I joked—I told her I was joking—about swiping just one little liver for me, the date went sour, and not long after that she packed it in and went back to Earth.

  I made up my mind.

  "Make the reservation," I said. "Three weeks from today." And I left him looking mildly pleased, like a Burmese hydro-rice planter watching the machines warm up to bring in another crop. Dear Daddy. Why hadn't he sent me through medical school instead of giving me an education?

  It would have been nice if the Heechee had been the same size as human beings, instead of being just that little bit shorter. It was reflected in their tunnels. In the smaller ones, like the one that led to the Local 88 union office, I had to half crouch all the way.

  The deputy organizer was waiting for me. He had one of the very few good jobs on Venus that didn't depend on tourism—or at least not directly. He said, "Subhash Vastra's been on the line. He says you agreed to thirty percent, and besides you took off without paying your bar bill to the Third of his house."

  "Admitted, both ways,"

  He made a note. "And you owe me a little too, Audee. Three hundred for the powder-fax copy of my report on your pigeon. A hundred for validating your contract with Vastra. And you're going to need a new guide's license; sixteen hundred for that."

  I gave him my currency card, and he checked the total out of my account into the local's. Then I signed and card-stamped the contract he'd drawn up. Vastra's thirty percent would not be on the whole million dollars, but on my net. Even so, he was likely to make as much out of it as I would, at least in liquid cash, because I was going to have to pay off the outstanding balances on equipment. The banks would carry a man until he scored, but then they wanted to get paid in full . . . because they knew how long it might be until he scored again.

  The deputy verified the signed contract. "That's that, then. Anything else I can do for you?"

  "Not at your prices," I told him.

  He gave me a sharp look, with a touch of envy in it. "Ah, you're putting me on, Audee." 'Boyce Cochenour and Dorotha Keefer, traveling S.S. Yuri Gagarin, Odessa registry, carrying no other passengers,'" he quoted from the report he'd intercepted for us. "No other passengers! Why, you can be a rich man, Audee, if you work this customer right."

  "Rich man is more than I ask," I told him. "All I want is to be a living one."

  It wasn't entirely true. I did have some little hope-not much, not enough to talk about, and in fact I'd never said a word about it to anyone—that I might be coming out of this rather better than just alive.

  There was, however, a problem.

  The problem was that if we did find anything, Boyce Cochenour would get most of it. If a tourist like Cochenour goes on a guided hunt for new Heechee tunnels, and he happens to find something valuable—tourists have, you know; not often, but enough to keep them hopeful—then it's the charterer who gets the lion's share. Guides get a taste, but that's all. We just work for the man who pays the bills.

  Of course, I could have gone out by myself at any time and prospected on my own. Then anything I found would be all mine. But in my case, that was a really bad idea. If I staked myself to a trip and lost I wouldn't just be wasting my time and fifty or a hundred K on used-up supplies and wear and tear on the airbody. If I lost, I would be dead shortly thereafter, when that beat-up old liver finally gave out.

  I needed every penny Cochenour would pay me just to stay alive. Whether we struck it rich or not, my fee from him would take care of that.

  Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I had a notion that I knew where something very interesting might be found; and my problem was that, as long as I had the standard charterer's-rights contract with Cochenour, I really couldn't afford to find it.

  The last stop I made was in my sleeping room. Under my bed, keystoned into the rock, was a guaranteed break-proof safe that held some papers I wanted to have in my pocket from then on.

  See, when I first came to Venus it wasn't scenery that interested me. I wanted to make my fortune.

  I didn't see much of the surface of Venus then, or for nearly two years after that. You don't see much in the kind of spacecraft that can land you on Venus. To survive the squeeze of a ninety-thousand-millibar surface pressure means you need a hull that's a little more rugged than the bubble-ships that go to the Moon or Mars or farther out. They don't put unnecessary windows into the skin of Venus-landers. That didn't matter much, because there isn't much on the surface of Venus that you can see. Everything the tourists can snap pictures of is inside Venus, and every bit of it once belonged to the Heechee,

  We don't know much about the Heechee. We don't even rightly know their name. "Heechee" isn't a name, it's how somebody once wrote down the sound that a fire-pearl makes when you stroke it. As that was the only sound anybody had ever heard that was connected with the Heechee, it got to be their name.

  The "hesperologists" don't have any idea where these Heechee folks came from, although there are some markings that seem to be a star chart—pretty much unrecognizable; if we knew the exact position of every star in the galaxy a few hundred thousand years ago we might be able to locate them from that. Maybe. Assuming they came from this galaxy.

  I wonder sometimes what they wanted. Escaping a dying planet? Political refugees? Tourists whose cruise ship had a breakdown between somewhere and somewhere, so that they had to hang around long enough to repair whatever they had to repair to get themselves going again? I don't know. Nobody else does, either.

  But, though the Heechee packed up nearly everything when they left, leaving behind only empty tunnels and chambers, there were a few scraps here and there that either weren't worth taking or were overlooked: all those "prayer fans," enough empty containers of one kind or another to look like a picnic ground at the end of a hard summer, some trinkets and trifles. I guess the best known of the "trifles" is the anisokinetic punch, the carbon crystal that transmits a blow at a ninety-degree angle. That made somebody a few billion just by being lucky enough to find one, though not until somebody else had made his own billions by being smart enough to analyze and duplicate it. But that's the best of the lot. What we usually find is, face it, just junk. There must once have been good stuff worth a million times as much as those sweepings.

  Did they take all the good stuff with them when they left?

  That was another thing that nobody knew. I didn't know, either, but I did think I knew something that had a bearing on it.

  I thought I knew a place where a Heechee tunnel had had something pretty neat in it, long ago; and that particular tunnel wasn't near any of the explored diggings.

  I didn't kid myself. I knew that that wasn't a guarantee of anything.

  But it was something to go on. Maybe when those last ships left the Heechee were getting impatient, and maybe not as thorough at cleaning up behind themselves.

 
And that was what being on Venus was all about.

  What other possible reason was there for being there? The life of a maze-rat was marginal at best. It took fifty thousand a year to stay alive—air tax, capitation tax, water assessment, subsistence-level bill for food. If you wanted to eat meat more than once a month, or demanded a private cubicle of your own to sleep in, it cost a lot more than that.

  Guide's papers cost a week's living costs. When any of us bought a set of them, we were gambling that week's cost of living against the chance of a big enough strike, either from the Terry tourists or from what we might find, to make it possible to go home to Earth—where no one died for lack of air and no one was thrust out into the high-pressure incinerator that was Venus's atmosphere. Not just to get back to Earth, but to get back there in the style every maze-rat had set himself as a goal when he headed sunward in the first place: with money enough to live the full life of a human being on Full Medical.