The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl

  "Now what?" bellowed Cochenour. I noticed the girl had put her earplugs back in, but he wasn't willing to risk missing 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 by the gusts. The buffeting got pretty bad.

  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. This was where pilotage counted, not en route or at the prepared pads over the Spindle. When he could do what I was doing now he could get along without someone like me—not before.

  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 released the belt catches and stood up. "We're here for at least a day or two," I told them. "More if we're lucky. How did you like the ride?"

  Dorrie was taking the earplugs out, now that the protecting walls of the arroyo had cut the thundering down to a mere scream. "I'm glad I don't get airsick," she said.

  Cochenour was thinking, not talking. He was studying the airbody controls while he lit another cigarette.

  Dorotha said, "One question, Audee. Why couldn't we stay up where it's quieter?"

  "Fuel. I carry enough to get us around, but not to hover for days. 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'll miss it if it stops."

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

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

  Cochenour finally spoke up. "How long until you can make some sense out of the readout?" he demanded. Another point: he hadn't asked 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."

  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, the odds are really rotten on the first try—we'll want to be wide awake for a while."

  "All right," Dorotha said, reaching out for the spansules, but Cochenour stopped her.

  "What about you?" he demanded.

  "I'll sack in 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 sleepy 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.

  So none of us went right to sleep, and what I was waiting for took almost an hour to come. The boys at the base 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."

  "Acknowledged. 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. Nothing to worry about."

  In a moment the Defense communicator came back, loud as ever. "You are eleven point four kilometers bearing two eight three degrees from terminator of a restricted area. Proceed with caution. Under Military Regulations One Seven and One Eight, Sections—"

  "I know the drill," I cut in. "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.

  "They act nervous," Cochenour said.

  "No. That's how they always are. They're used to seeing people like us around. They've got nothing else to do with their time, 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."

  VII

  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 probe computer had traced.

  I took several minutes to study them, although the patterns were clear enough at first look. They showed eight major anomalies that could have been Heechee warrens. One was almost right outside our door. We wouldn't have to move the airbody to dig for it.

  I showed them the anomalies, one by one. Cochenour just studied them thoughtfully. Dorotha asked, "You mean all of those blobs are unexplored tunnels?"

  "No. Wish they were. But even if they were: One, any or all of them could have been explored by somebody who didn't go to the trouble of recording it. Two, they don't have to be tunnels. They could 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 asked, "Where do we dig?"

  I pointed right next to the bright delta shape of our airbody. "Right here."

  "Is that the best bet?"

  "Well, not necessarily." I considered what to tell him and decided to experiment with the truth. "There are three traces altogether that look like better bets than the others—here, I'll mark them." I keyed the chart controls, and the three good traces immediately displayed letters: A, B, and C. "A is the one that runs right under the arroyo here, so we'll dig it first."

  "The brightest ones are best, is that it?"

  I nodded.

  "But C over here is the brightest of the lot. Why don't we dig that first?'

  I chose my words carefully. "Partly because we'd have to move the airbody. Partly because it's on the outside perimeter of the survey area; that means the results aren't as reliable as right around the ship. 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 Defense friends are telling us to stay away from."

  Cochenour snickered incredulously. "Are you 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. We have seven legal anomalies to look at. Also—the military will b
e checking us from time to time. Particularly in the next day or two."

  "All right," Cochenour insisted, "suppose we come up empty on the legal ones. What then?"

  "I never borrow trouble."

  "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!"

  But she was looking at me, and what she said was "Why are you that color?"

  I fobbed her off, but when I looked in the mirror I could see that even the whites of my eyes were turning yellowish.

  The next few hours we were too busy to talk about theoretical possibilities. We had some concrete facts to worry about.

  The biggest concrete fact was an awful lot of high-temperature, high-pressure gas that we had to keep from killing us. That was what the heatsuits were for. My own suit was custom-made, of course, and needed only the fittings and tanks to be checked. Boyce and the girl had rental units. I'd paid top dollar for them, and they were good. But good isn't perfect. I had them in and out of the suits half a dozen times, checking the fit and making adjustments until they were as right as I could get them. The suits were laminated twelve-ply, with nine degrees of freedom at the essential joints, and their own little fuel batteries. They wouldn't fail. I wasn't worried about failure. 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.

  Finally they were good enough for a trial. We all huddled in the lock and opened the port to the surface of Venus.

  We were still in darkness, but there's so much scatter from the sun that it doesn't get really dark ever. 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 yet tough ash that grew up around the digging site and joined in a seamless dome at the top. I had already emplaced the digging torch and the crawl-through lock. As the ash grew I manhandled the lock to get a close union and managed to get a perfect join the first time.

  Dorrie and Cochenour stayed out of the way, watching from the ship through their plug windows. Then I keyed the radio on. "You want to come in and watch me start it up?" I shouted.

  Inside the helmets, they both nodded their heads; I could just see the bobbing motion through the plugs. "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 had been. They backed away as far from me as they could get, bent against the arc of the igloo wall, while I started up the augers, checked that they were vertical, and watched the first castings begin to spiral out of the cut.

  The foam igloo reflects a lot of sound and absorbs even more. All the same, the din inside the igloo was a lot worse than in the howling winds outside; cutters are noisy. 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 cut, I think. Might as well wait in here as out there."

  "How long will it take?"

  "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 much about water discipline. It's astonishing how a quick wet-down revives you after coming out of a heatsuit. When I'd finished mine I felt ready for anything.

  I was even prepared to eat some of Boyce Cochenour's three-thousand-calorie gourmet cooking, but fortunately it wasn't necessary. Dorrie 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 to wonder why she was a health nut, but then I thought, of course, she wants to keep Cochenour alive. With all his spare parts, no doubt he had dietary problems worse than mine.

  Well, not "worse," exactly. At least he probably wasn't quite as likely to die of them.

  The Venusian surface at that point was little more than ashy sand. The augers chewed it out very rapidly. Too rapidly, in fact. When I went back into the igloo it was filled almost solid with castings. I had a devil of a job getting to the machines so that I could rotate the auger to pump the castings out through the crawl lock.

  It was a dirty job, but it didn't take long.

  I didn't bother to go back into the airbody. I reported over the radio to Boyce and the girl, whom I could see staring out of the bull's-eyes 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 so from the indicated depth of the anomaly, so close that I didn't bother to auger all the castings out. I just made enough room to maneuver around inside the igloo.

  Then I redirected the augers. And in five minutes the castings were beginning to come up with the pale blue Heechee-metal glimmer that was the sign of a real tunnel.

  VIII

  About ten minutes later, I keyed my helmet transmitter on and shouted, "Boyce! Dorrie! We've hit a tunnel!"

  Either they were already in their suits or they dressed faster than any maze-rat. I unsealed the crawl-through and wriggled out to help them . . . and they were already coming out of the airbody, pulling themselves hand over hand against the wind toward me.

  They were both yelling questions and congratulations, but I stopped them. "Inside," I ordered. "You can see for yourself." As a matter of fact, they didn't have to go that far. They could see the blue color as soon as they knelt to enter the crawl-through.

  I followed and sealed the outer port of the crawl-through 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 of the igloo, the minute you crack the casing you let the whole ninety-thousand-millibar atmosphere of Venus pour in, heat and ablation and corrosive chemicals and all. If the tunnel is empty, or if what's in it is simple, sturdy stuff, there might not be any harm. But there are a couple of dozen mysterious chunks of scrap in the museums that might have been interesting machines—if whoever found them hadn't let the atmosphere in to squeeze them into junk. If you hit the jackpot, you can destroy in a second what has waited hundreds of thousands of years to be discovered.

  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 edges. At the bottom you could see the cold blue glow of the outside of the tunnel, only pocked by the augers and blotched by the loose castings I hadn't bothered to get out.

  "Now what?" Cochenour demanded. His voice was hoarse with excitement —natural enough, I guessed.

  "Now we burn our way in."

  I backed my clients as far away as they could get inside the igloo, pressed against the remaining heap of castings. Then I unlimbered the fire-jets. I'd already hung shear-legs over the shaft. The jets slipped right down on their cable until they were just 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 make anything hotter than Venus does already, but the fire-jets were something special. In the small space of the igloo the heat flamed up and around us. Our heatsuit cooling systems were overwhelmed in a moment.

  Dorrie gasped, "Oh! I—I think I'm going to—"

  Cochenour grabbed her arm. "Faint if you want to,"
he said fiercely, "but don't get sick inside your suit. 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 overload alarm for more than half of that time. But the suits were built for these temporary overloads. As long as we didn't cook inside them, the suits themselves would survive.

  Then we were through. A half-meter circular section of the tunnel roof sagged, fell at one side, and hung there, swaying.