The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl

  I turned off the jets. 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."

  In the light that splashed up out of the shaft I could see that Cochenour 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. It fell free to the tunnel floor, with a smack like rock.

  Then I turned on my helmet radio.

  "There's no pressure differential," I said.

  Cochenour's frown didn't change, nor did he speak.

  "That means this one has been breached," I went on. "Somebody found it, opened it up—probably cleaned it out, if there ever was anything here—and just didn't report it. Let's go back to the airbody and get cleaned up."

  Dorotha shrieked, "Audee, what's the matter with you? I want to go down there and see what's inside!"

  "Shut up, Dorrie," Cochenour said bitterly. "Don't you hear what he's saying? This one's a washout."

  Well, there's always the chance that a breached tunnel might have been opened by some seismological event, not a maze-rat with a cutting torch. If so, there might possibly be something in it worth having 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. We looked around. It was wholly bare, as most of them are, as far as we could see. That wasn't actually very far. The other thing wrong with a breached tunnel is that you need special equipment to explore it. With the overloads they'd already had, our suits were all right for another few hours but not much more than that.

  So we tramped down the tunnel about a kilometer and found bare walls, chopped-off struts on the glowing blue walls that might once have held something—and nothing movable. Not even junk.

  Then they were both willing to tramp back and climb up the cable to the airbody. Cochenour made it on his own. So did Dorrie, though I was standing by to help her; she did it all hand over hand, using the stirrups spaced along the cable.

  We cleaned up and made ourselves a meal. We had to eat, but Cochenour was not in a mood for his gourmet exhibition. Silently, Dorotha threw tablets into the cooker and we fed gloomily on prefabs.

  "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. If there's one thing I'm not, it's a good loser." He was staring at the probe trace, still displayed on the screen. "Walthers, how many tunnels are unmarked but empty, like this one?"

  "How do I know? If they're unmarked, there's no record."

  "Then those traces don't mean anything, do they? We might dig all eight 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. At least this trace was a real tunnel. I've taken parties out who would've gone mad with joy to open even a breached tunnel, after a couple of weeks of digging up dikes and intrusions. It's perfectly possible all seven of those others are nothing at all. Don't knock it, Boyce. At least you got some action for your money."

  He brushed that off. "You picked this spot, Walthers. Did you know what you were doing?"

  Did I? The only way to prove that to him 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 a look at the military survey reports, or how far I'd traveled to talk to the Defense crews who'd been on some of the early digs. I might have let him know how hard it had been to locate old Jorolemon Hegramet, now teaching exotic archaeology back in Tennessee; but all I said was, "The fact that we found one tunnel shows that I know my business. That's all you paid for. It's up to you whether we keep looking or not."

  He gazed at his thumbnail, considering.

  "Buck up, Boyce," Dorrie said cheerfully. "Look at the other chances we've still 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 a way of telling whether or not a tunnel has been breached without going inside?"

  "Sure. 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. I got back into my heatsuit 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 me a question I might have to lie about. I try the best I can to stick to the truth, because it's easier to remember what you've said that way.

  On the other hand, I'm not fanatic about it. I don't see that it's any of my business to correct a mistaken impression. For instance, obviously Cochenour supposed I hadn't bothered to sound the tunnel before calling them in.

  But, of course, I had. 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 announce 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 the tunnel was unbreached.

  IX

  Boyce Cochenour and Dorrie Keefer were maybe the fiftieth or sixtieth party I'd taken on a Heechee dig. I wasn't surprised that they were willing to work like coolies. I don't care how lazy and bored Terry tourists start out, by the time they actually come close to finding something that once belonged to an almost completely unknown alien race, left there when the closest thing to a human being on Earth was a slope-browed, furry little beast whose best trick was killing other beasts by hitting them on the head with antelope bones . . . by then they begin to burn with exploration fever.

  So the two of them worked hard. And they drove me hard. And I was as eager as they. Maybe more so as the days went past and I found myself rubbing my right side, just under the short ribs, more and more of the time.

  We got a couple looks from the Defense boys. They overflew us in their high-speed airbodies half a dozen times in the first few days. They didn't say much, just formal radio requests for identification. Regulations say that if you find anything you're supposed to report it right away. Over Cochenour's objections I reported finding that first breached tunnel, which surprised them a little, I think.

  That's all we had to report.

  Site B was a pegmatite dike. The other two fairly bright ones, that I called D and E, showed nothing at all when we dug—meaning that the sound reflections had probably been caused by nothing more than invisible interfaces in rock or ash or gravel.

  I vetoed trying to dig Site C, the best looking of the bunch.

  Cochenour gave me a hell of an argument about it, but I held out. The military were still looking in on us every now and then, and I didn't want to get any closer to their perimeter than we already were. I said maybe, if we didn't have any luck elsewhere, we could sneak back to C for a quick dig before returning to the Spindle, and we left it at that.

  We lifted the airbody, moved to a new position, and set out a new pattern of probes.

  By the end of the second week we had dug nine times and come up empty all nine. We were getting low on igloos and probe percussers. We'd run out of tolerance for each other completely.

  Cochenour had turned sullen and savage. I hadn't planned on being best buddies with the man when I first met him, but I hadn't expected him to be as bad company as that. I didn't think he had any right to take it so hard, because it was obviously only a game with him. With all his fortune, the extra money he might pick up by discovering some new Heechee artifacts couldn't have meant much—just, extra points on a scorepad—but he was playing for blood.

  I wasn't particularly gracious myself, for that matter. The
plain fact was that the pills from the Quackery weren't helping as much as they should. My mouth tasted as though rats had nested in it, I was getting headaches, and every once in a while I'd be woozy enough to knock things over.

  See, the thing about the liver is that it sort of regulates your internal diet. It filters out poisons. It converts some of the carbohydrates into other carbohydrates that you can use. It patches together amino acids into proteins. If it isn't working, you die.

  The doctor had been all over it with me. Maze-rats get liver trouble a lot; it comes when you save yourself a little trouble by letting your internal suit pressure build up—it sort of compresses the gas in your gut and squeezes the liver. He'd showed me pictures. I could visualize what was going on in my insides, with the mahogany-red liver cells dying and being replaced by clusters of fat and yellowish stuff. It was an ugly picture. The ugliest part was that there wasn't anything I could do about it. Only go on taking pills—and they wouldn't work much longer, I counted the days to bye-bye, liver, hello, hepatic failure.

  So we were a bad bunch. I was being a bastard because I was beginning to feel sick and desperate. Cochenour was being a bastard because that was his nature. The only decent human being aboard was the girl.

  Dorrie did her best, she really did. She was sometimes sweet (and often even pretty), and she was always ready to meet the power people, Cochenour and me, more than halfway.

  It was obvious that it was tough on her. Dorotha Keefer was only a kid. No matter how grown-up she acted, she just hadn't been alive long enough to grow defenses against concentrated meanness. Add in the fact that we were all beginning to hate the sight and sound and smell of each other (and in an airbody you get to know a lot about how people smell), and there wasn't much joy in this skylarking tour of Venus for Dorrie Keefer.

  Or for any of us . . . especially after I broke the news that we were down to our last igloo.

  Cochenour cleared his throat. It wasn't a polite sound. It was the beginning of a war cry. He sounded like a fighter-plane jockey blowing the covers off his guns in preparation for combat, and Dorrie tried to head him off with a diversion. "Audee," she said brightly, "do you know what I think we could do? We could go back to that Site C, the one that looked good near the military reservation."

  It was the wrong diversion. I shook my head. "No."

  "What the hell do you mean, 'No'?" Cochenour rumbled, revving up for battle.

  "What I said. No. It's too close to the Defense guys. If there's a tunnel, it will run right onto the reservation, and they'll come down on us." I tried to be persuasive. "That's a desperation trick, and I'm not that desperate."

  "Walthers," he snarled, "you'll be desperate if I tell you to be desperate. I can still stop payment on that check."

  I corrected him. "No, you can't. The union won't let you. The regulations are very clear about that. You pay up unless I disobey a lawful request. What you want isn't lawful. Going inside the military reservation is extremely against the law."

  He shifted over to cold war. "No," he said softly. "You're wrong about that. It's only against the law if a court says it is, after we do it. You're only right if your lawyers are smarter than my lawyer. Honestly, Walthers, they won't be. I pay my lawyers to be the smartest there are."

  I was not in a good bargaining position. It wasn't just that what Cochenour said was true enough. He had help from a very powerful ally. My liver was on his side. I certainly could not spare time for arbitration, because without the transplant his payment was going to buy I wouldn't live that long.

  Dorrie had been listening with her birdlike air of friendly interest. She got between us. "Well, then, how about this? We just got to where we are now. Why don't we wait and see what the probes show? Maybe we'll hit something even better than that Site C—"

  "There isn't going to be anything good here," he said without taking his eyes off me.

  "Why, Boyce, how do you know that? We haven't even finished the soundings."

  He said, "Look, Dorotha, listen close this one time and then shut up. Walthers is playing games with me. Do you see where we just put down?"

  He brushed past me and tapped out the command for a full map display, which somewhat surprised me. I hadn't known he knew how. The charts sprang up. They showed the virtual images of our position and of the shafts we'd already cut, and the great irregular border of the military reservation—all overlaid on the plot of mascons and navigation aids.

  "Do you see the picture? We're not even in the high-density mass-concentration areas now. Isn't that true, Walthers? Are you saying we've tried all the good locations around here and come up dry?"

  "No," I said. "That is, you're partly right, Mr. Cochenour. Only partly; I'm not playing any games with you. This site is a good possibility. You can see it on the map. It's true that we're not right over any mascon, but we're right between those two right there, that are pretty close together. That's a good sign. Sometimes you find a dig that connects two complexes, and it has happened that the connecting passage was closer to the surface there than any other part of the system. I can't guarantee that we'll hit anything here. But it's worth a gamble."

  "It's just damn unlikely, right?"

  "Well, no more unlikely than anywhere else. I told you a week ago, you got your money's worth the first day, just finding any Heechee tunnel at all. Even a spoiled one. There are maze-rats in the Spindle who went five years without seeing that much." I thought for a minute. "I'll make a deal with you," I offered.

  "I'm listening."

  "We're already on the ground here. There's at least a chance we can hit something. Let's try. We'll deploy the probes and see what they turn up. If we get a good trace we'll dig it. If not . . . well, then I'll think about going back to Site C."

  "Think about it!" he roared.

  "Don't push me, Cochenour. You don't know what you're getting into. The military reservation is not to be fooled with. Those boys shoot first and ask later, and there aren't any policemen around to holler for help."

  "I don't know," he said after a moment's glowering thought.

  "No," I told him, "you don't, Mr. Cochenour. I do. That's what you're paying me for."

  He nodded. "Yes, you probably do know, Walthers, but whether you're telling me the truth about what you know is another question. Hegramet never said anything about digging between mascons."

  And then he looked at me with a completely opaque expression, waiting to see whether I would catch him up on what he'd just said.

  I didn't respond. I gave him an opaque look back. I didn't say a word. I only waited to see what would come next. I was pretty sure it would not be any sort of explanation of how he happened to know Professor Hegramet's name, or what dealings he had had with the greatest Earthside authority on Heechee diggings.

  It wasn't.

  "Put out your probes," he said at last. "We'll try it your way one more time."

  I plopped the probes out, got good penetration on all of them, and started firing the noisemakers. Then I sat watching the first lines of the cast build up on the scan, as though I expected them to carry useful information. They weren't going to for quite a while, but I wanted to think privately for a bit.

  Cochenour needed to be thought about. He hadn't come to Venus just for the ride. He had planned to dig for Heechee tunnels before he ever left the Earth. He had gone to the trouble of briefing himself even on the instruments he would encounter in an airbody.

  My sales talk about Heechee treasures had been wasted on a customer whose mind had been made up to buy at least half a year earlier and tens of millions of miles away.

  I understood all that. But the more I understood, the more I saw that I didn't understand. I wished I could slip Cochenour a couple of bucks and send him off to the games parlors for a while, so I could talk privately to the girl. Unfortunately there wasn't anywhere to send him. I forced a yawn, complained about the boredom of waiting for the probe traces to build up, and suggested we all take a nap. Not that I
would have been real confident he would be the one to turn in—but he didn't even listen. All I got out of that ploy was an offer from Dorrie to watch the screen and wake me up if anything interesting developed.

  So I said the hell with it and turned in myself. I didn't sleep well, because while I was lying there, waiting for sleep to happen, it gave me time to notice how truly lousy I was beginning to feel, and in how many different ways. There was a sort of permanent taste of bile in the back of my mouth—not so much as though I wanted to throw up as it was as though I just had. My head ached. My eyes were getting woozy; I was beginning to see ghost images wandering fuzzily around my field of vision.

  I roused myself to take a couple of my pills. I didn't count the ones that were left. I didn't want to know.