The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl

  It probably wasn't a bad plan, I thought. Why not try an offset cut? Did we have any better way to spend our time?

  We did not. We cut.

  When the drills stopped bucking in our hands and settled down to chew through the rock and we could leave them, I cleared a space at the side of the igloo and shoved tailings out for a while.

  Then we just sat there, watching the drills spit rock chips out of the new hole. We didn't speak.

  Presently I fell asleep again.

  I didn't wake up until Dorrie pounded on my helmet. We were buried in tailings. They glowed blue, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.

  The augers must have been scratching at the Heechee wall material for an hour or more. They had actually worn pits into it.

  When we looked down, we could see the round, bright, blue eye of the tunnel staring up at us. She was a beauty, all right.

  We didn't speak.

  Somehow I managed to kick and wriggle my way through the drift to the crawl-through. I got the lock closed and sealed, after kicking a couple of cubic meters of rock outside.

  Then I began fumbling through the pile of refuse for the flame drills.

  Ultimately I found them. Somehow. Ultimately I managed to get them shipped and primed.

  We ducked back out of range as I fired them. I watched the bright spot of light that bounced out of the shaft make a pattern on the roof of the igloo.

  Then there was a sudden, short scream of gas, and a clatter as the loose fragments at the bottom of the shaft dropped free.

  We had cut into the Heechee tunnel.

  It was unbreached and waiting for us. Our beauty was a virgin. We took her maidenhead with all love and reverence and entered into her.

  XII

  I must have blacked out again, because when I realized where I was I was on the floor of the tunnel. My helmet was open. So were the side-zips of my heatsuit. I was breathing stale, foul air that had to be a quarter of a million years old and smelled every minute of it.

  But it was air.

  It was denser than Earth-normal and a lot less humid, but the partial pressure of oxygen was close enough to the same. I was proving that by the fact that I had been breathing it without dying.

  Next to me on the floor was Dorrie Keefer.

  Her helmet was open, too. The blue Heechee wall light didn't flatter her complexion, so she looked about as ghastly as a pretty girl can. At first I wasn't sure she was breathing. But in spite of the way she looked, her pulse was going, her lungs were functioning, and when she felt me poking at her she opened her eyes.

  "God, I'm beat," she said. "But we made it!"

  I didn't say anything. She'd said it all for both of us. We sat there, grinning foolishly at each other, looking like Halloween masks in the blue Heechee glow.

  That was about all I was able to do just then. I was feeling very light-headed. I had my hands full just comprehending the fact that I was alive. I didn't want to endanger that odds-against precarious fact by moving around.

  I wasn't comfortable, though, and after a moment I realized that I was very hot. I closed up my helmet to shut out some of the heat, but the smell inside was so bad that I opened it again, figuring that the heat was better.

  It then occurred to me to wonder why the heat was only unpleasant, instead of instantly, incineratingly fatal.

  Energy transport through a Heechee wall-material surface is slow, but not hundreds of thousands of years slow. My sad, sick old brain ruminated that thought around for a while and finally staggered to a conclusion: At least until quite recently, maybe some centuries or thousands of years at most, this tunnel had been kept artificially cool. So, I told myself sagely, there had to be some sort of automatic machinery. Wow, I said to myself. That ought to be worth finding all by itself. Broken down or not, it could be the kind of thing fortunes are built on. . .

  And that made me remember why we had come there in the first place. I looked up the corridor and down, hungry for the first sight of the Heechee loot that might make us all well again.

  When I was a schoolkid in Amarillo Central, my favorite teacher was a crippled lady named Miss Stevenson. She used to tell us stories out of Bulfinch and Homer.

  Miss Stevenson spoiled one whole weekend for me with the sad story of one Greek fellow whose biggest ambition was to become a god. I gathered that was a fairly ordinary goal for a bright young Greek in those days, though I'm not sure how often they made it. This man started out with a few big steps up the ladder—he was already a king, of a little place in Lydia—but he wanted more. He wanted divinity. The gods even let him come to Olympus, and it looked as though he had it made . . . until he fouled up.

  I don't remember the details of what he did wrong, except that it had something to do with a dog and some nasty trick he played on one of the gods by getting him to eat his own son. (Those Greeks had pretty primitive ideas of humor, I guess.) Whatever it was, they punished him for it. What he got was solitary confinement—for eternity—and he served it standing neck deep in a cool lake in hell but unable to drink. Every time he opened his lips the water pulled away. The fellow's name was Tantalus . . . and in that Heechee tunnel I thought I had a lot in common with him.

  We found the treasure trove we were looking for, all right. But we couldn't reach it.

  It seemed that what we had dug into wasn't the main tunnel after all. It was a sort of right-angled, Thielly-tube detour in the tunnel, and it was blocked at both ends.

  "What do you suppose it is?" Dome asked wistfully, trying to peer through the gaps in the ten-ton slabs of Heechee metal before us. "Do you suppose it could be that weapon you were talking about?"

  I blinked my fuzzy eyes. There were machines of all kinds there, and irregular mounds of things that might have been containers for other things, and some objects that seemed to have rotted and spilled their contents, also rotted, on the floor. But we hadn't the strength to get at them.

  I stood there with my helmet pressed against the side of one of the slabs, feeling like Alice peering into her tiny garden without the bottle of drink-me. "All I know for sure," I said, "is that, whatever it is, there's more of it there than anybody ever found before."

  And I slumped to the floor, exhausted and sick and, all the same, feeling very contented with the world.

  Dorrie sat down next to me, in front of that barred gate to Eden, and we rested for a moment.

  "Gram would've been pleased," she murmured.

  "Oh, sure," I agreed, feeling a little drunk. "Gram?"

  "My grandmother," she explained, and then maybe I blacked out again. When I heard what she was saying again, she was talking about how her grandmother had refused to marry Cochenour, long and long ago. It seemed to matter to Dorotha Keefer, so I tried politely to pay attention, but some of it didn't make a lot of sense.

  "Wait a minute," I said. "She didn't want him because he was poor!"

  "No, no! Not because he was poor, although he was that. Because he was going off to the oil fields, and she wanted somebody steadier. Like my grandfather. And then when Boyce came by a year ago—"

  "He gave you a job," I said, nodding to show I was following, "as his girlfriend."

  "No, damn it!" she said, annoyed with me. "In his office. The—other part came later. We fell in love."

  "Oh, right," I said. I wasn't looking for an argument.

  She said stiffly, "He's really a sweet man, Audee. Outside of business, I mean. And he would've done anything for me."

  "He could've married you," I pointed out, just to keep the conversation going.

  "No, Audee," she said seriously, "he couldn't. He wanted to get married. I was the one who said no."

  She turned down all that money? I blinked at her. I didn't have to ask the question; she knew what it was.

  "When I marry," she said, "I want kids, and Boyce wouldn't hear of it. He said if I'd caught him when he was a lot younger, maybe seventy-five or eighty, he might've taken a chance, but now he was just too old to be ra
ising a family."

  "Then you ought to be looking around for a replacement, shouldn't you?"

  She looked at me in that blue glow. "He needs me," she said simply. "Now more than ever."

  I mulled that over for a while. Then it occurred to me to check the time.

  It was nearly forty-six hours since he had left us. He was due back any time.

  And if he came back while we were doddering around in here—I realized, foggily, bit by bit—then ninety thousand millibars of poison gas would hammer in on us. It would kill us if we had our suits open. Besides that, it would damage our virgin tunnel. The corrosive scouring of that implosion of gas might easily wreck all those lovely things behind the barrier.

  "We have to go back," I told Dorrie, showing her the time. She smiled.

  "Temporarily," she said, and we got up, took a last look at those treasures of Tantalus behind the bars, and started back to our shaft to the igloo.

  After the cheerful blue glow of the Heechee tunnel, the igloo was more cramped and miserable than ever before.

  What was worse was that my cloudy brain nagged me into remembering that we shouldn't even stay inside it. Cochenour might remember to lock in and out of both ends of the crawl-through when he got there—any minute now—but he also might not. I couldn't take the chance on letting the hot hammer of air in on our pretties.

  I tried to think of a way of plugging the shaft, maybe by pushing all the tailings back in again, but although my brain wasn't working very well I could see that that was stupid.

  So the only way to solve that problem was for us to wait outside in the breezy Venusian weather. The one consolation was that it wouldn't be too much longer to wait. The other part of that was that we weren't equipped for a very long wait. The little watch dial next to our life-support meters, all running well into the warning red now, showed that Cochenour should in fact have arrived by now.

  He wasn't there, though.

  I squeezed into the crawl-through with Dorrie, locked us both through, and we waited.

  I felt a scratching on my helmet and discovered Dorrie was plugging into my jack. "Audee, I'm really very tired," she told me. It didn't sound like a complaint, only a factual report of something she thought I probably should know about.

  "You might as well go to sleep," I told her. "I'll keep watch. Cochenour will be here pretty soon, and I'll wake you up."

  I suppose she took my advice, because she lowered herself down, pausing to let me take her talk line out of my helmet jack. Then she stretched out next to the tie-down clips and left me to think in peace.

  I wasn't grateful. I wasn't enjoying what I was beginning to think.

  Still Cochenour didn't come.

  I tried to think through the significance of that. Of course, there could have been lots of reasons for a delay. He could've gotten lost. He could have been challenged by the military. He could have crashed the airbody.

  But there was a much nastier possibility, and it seemed to make more sense than all of them.

  The time dial told me he was nearly five hours late, and the life-support meters told me that we were right up against the "empty" line for power, near it for air, and well past it for water. If we hadn't had the remaining tunnel gases to breathe for a few hours, saving the air in our tanks, we would have been dead by now.

  Cochenour couldn't have known that we would find breathable air in the Heechee tunnel. He must believe that we were dead.

  The man hadn't lied about himself. He had told me he was a bad loser.

  So he had decided not to lose.

  In spite of my fuzzy brain, I could understand what had gone on in his. When push came to shove the bastard in him won out. He had worked out an endgame maneuver that would pull a win out of all his defeats.

  I could visualize him, as clearly as though I were in the airbody with him. Watching his clocks as our lives ticked away. Cooking himself an elegant little lunch. Playing the rest of the Tchaikovsky ballet music, maybe, while he waited for us to get through dying.

  It wasn't a really frightening thought to me. I was close enough to being dead anyway for the difference to be pretty much of a technicality . . . and tired enough of being trapped in that foul heatsuit to accept almost any deliverance, even the final one.

  But I wasn't the only person affected here.

  The girl was also involved. The one tiny little rational thought that stayed in my half-poisoned brain was that it was just unfair for Cochenour to let us both die. Me, yes, all right; I could see that from his point of view I was easily expendable. Her, no.

  I realized I ought to do something, and after considering what that might be for a while I beat on her suit until she moved a little. After some talk through the phone jacks I managed to make her understand she had to go back down into the tunnel, where at least she could breathe.

  Then I got ready for Cochenour's return.

  There were two things he didn't know. He didn't know we'd found any breathable air, and he didn't know we could tap the drill batteries for additional power.

  In all the freaked-out fury of my head, I was still capable of that much consecutive thought. I could surprise him—if he didn't stay away too much longer, anyway. I could stay alive for a few hours yet . . .

  And then, when he came to find us dead and see what prize we had won for him, he would find me waiting.

  And so he did.

  It must have been a terrible shock to him when he entered the crawl-through to the igloo with the monkey wrench in his hand, leaned over me, and found I was still alive and able to move, when he had expected only a well-done roast of meat.

  If I had had any doubt about his intentions it was resolved when he swung immediately at my helmet. Age, busted leg, and surprise didn't slow his reflexes a bit. But he had to change position to get a good swing in the cramped space inside the crawl-through, and, being not only alive but pretty nearly conscious, I managed to roll away in time. And I already had the drill ready to go in my arms.

  The drill caught him right in the chest.

  I couldn't see his face, but I can guess at his expression.

  After that, it was only a matter of doing five or six impossible things at once. Things like getting Dorrie up out of the tunnel and into the airbody. Like getting myself in after her, and sealing up and setting a course. All those impossible things . . . and one more, that was harder than any of them, but very important to me. Dorrie didn't know why I insisted on bringing Cochenour's body back. I think she thought it was a kind gesture of reverence to the dead on my part, but I didn't straighten her out just then.

  I just about totaled the airbody when we landed, but we were suited up and strapped in, and when the ground crews came out from the Spindle to investigate Dorrie and I were still alive.

  XIII

  They had to patch me and rehydrate me for three days before they could even think about putting my new liver in. It was a wonder it had survived its ordeal, but they'd whipped it out and put it on nutrient pumps as soon as they got their hands on it. By the time it was ready to be transplanted into me it had had its allergenic nature tamed and was as good as any liver ever was—good enough, anyway, to keep me alive.

  They kept me sedated most of the time. The quacks woke me up every couple of hours to give me another bout of feedback training on how to monitor my hepatic flows—they said there was no point giving me a new liver if I didn't know how to use it—and other people kept waking me up to ask me questions, but it was all dreamlike. I didn't much want to be awake just then. Being awake was all sickness and pain and nagging, and I could have wished for the old days back again—when they just would have knocked me out with anesthesia until they were through—except, of course, that in the old days I would have died.

  But by the fourth day I hardly hurt at all—well, except when I moved. And they were letting me take my fluids by mouth instead of the other way.

  I realized I was going to be alive for a while. That was very good news, and, once
I believed it, I began to take more interest in what was going on.

  The Quackery was in its spring mood, which I appreciated. Of course, there's no such thing as a season in the Spindle, but the quacks get all sentimental about tradition and ties with the Mother Planet, so they create seasons for themselves. The current one was made by scenes of fleecy white clouds playing across the wall panels, and the air from the ventilator ducts smelled of lilac and green leaves.

  "Happy spring," I said to Dr. Morius while he was examining me.