Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “Something like that. Boyce let me handle—oh, what’s that?”

  That was an incoming call on the radio, that was what that was.

  “So go answer,” snarled Cochenour from across the airbody.

  I took it on the earjack, since that is my nature; there isn’t any privacy to speak of in an airbody, and I want what little crumbs of it I can find. It was the base calling, a comm sergeant I knew named Littleknees. I signed in irritably, regretting the lost chance to pump Dorotha about her boss.

  “A private word for you, Audee,” said Sergeant Littleknees. “Got your sahib around?”

  Littleknees and I had exchanged radio chatter for a long time, and there was something about the cheerfulness of the tone that bothered me. I didn’t look at Cochenour, but I knew he was listening—only to my side, of course, because of the earjack. “In sight but not receiving,” I said. “What have you got for me?”

  “Just a little news bulletin,” the sergeant purred. “It came over the synsat net a couple of minutes ago. Information only. That means we don’t have to do anything about it, but maybe you do, honey.”

  “Standing by,” I said, studying the plastic housing of the radio.

  The sergeant chuckled. “Your sahib’s charter captain would like to have a word with him when found. It’s kind of urgent, ’cause the captain is righteously kissed off.”

  “Yes, base,” I said. “Your signals received, strength ten.”

  The sergeant made an amused noise again, but this time it wasn’t a chuckle, it was a downright giggle. “The thing is,” she said, “his check for the charter fee bounced. Want to know what the bank said? You’d never guess. ‘Insufficient funds,’ that’s what they said.”

  The pain under my right lower ribs was permanent, but right then it seemed to get a lot worse. I gritted my teeth. “Ah, Sergeant Littleknees,” I croaked, “can you, ah, verify that estimate?”

  “Sorry, honey,” she buzzed sympathetically in my ear, “but there’s no doubt in the world. Captain got a credit report on him and it turned up n.g. When your customer gets back to the Spindle there’ll be a make-good warrant waiting for him.”

  “Thank you for the synoptic report,” I said hollowly. “I will verify departure time before we take off.”

  And I turned off the radio and gazed at my rich billionaire client.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Walthers?” he growled.

  But I wasn’t hearing his voice. I was hearing what the happy fellow at the Quackery had told me. The equations were unforgettable. Cash = new liver + happy survival. No cash = total hepatic failure + death. And my cash supply had just dried up.

  10

  When you get a really big piece of news you have to let it trickle through your system and get thoroughly absorbed before you do anything about it. It isn’t a matter of seeing the implications. I saw them right away, you bet. It’s a matter of letting the system reach an equilibrium state. So I puttered for a minute. I listened to Tchaikovsky. I made sure the radio switch was off so as not to waste power. I checked the synoptic plot. It would have been nice if there had been something to show, but, the way things were going, there wouldn’t be, of course, and there wasn’t. A few pale echoes were building up. But nothing with the shape of a Heechee dig, and nothing very bright. The data were still coming in, but there was no way for those feeble plots to turn into the mother lode that could save us all, even broke bastard Cochenour. I even looked out at as much of the sky as I could to see how the weather was. It didn’t matter, but some of the high white calomel clouds were scudding among the purples and yellows of the other mercury halides. It was beautiful and I hated it.

  Cochenour had forgotten about his omelette and was watching me thoughtfully. So was Dorrie, still holding the augers in their grease-paper wrap. I grinned at her. “Pretty,” I said, referring to the music. The Auckland Philharmonic was just getting to the part where the little swans come out arm in arm and do a fast, bouncy pas de quatre across the stage. It has always been one of my favorite parts of Swan Lake. “We’ll listen to the rest of it later,” I said, and snapped it off.

  “All right,” snarled Cochenour, “what’s going on?”

  I sat down on an igloo pack and lit a cigarette, because one of the adjustments my internal system had made was to calculate that we didn’t have to worry much about coddling our oxygen supply anymore. I said, “There’s a question that’s bothering me, Cochenour. How did you get on to Professor Hegramet?”

  He grinned and relaxed. “Is that all that’s on your mind? I checked the place out before I came. Why not?”

  “No reason, except that you let me think you didn’t know a thing.”

  He shrugged. “If you had any brains you’d know I didn’t get rich by being stupid. You think I’d come umpty-million miles without knowing what I was coming to?”

  “No, you wouldn’t, but you did your best to make me think you would. No matter. So you dug up somebody who could point you to whatever was worth stealing on Venus, and somebody steered you to Hegramet. Then what? Did he tell you I was dumb enough to be your boy?”

  Cochenour wasn’t quite as relaxed, but he wasn’t aggressive either. He said, “Hegramet told me you were the right guide to find a virgin tunnel. That’s all—except briefing on the Heechee and so on. If you hadn’t come to us I would have come to you; you just saved me the trouble.”

  I said, a little surprised, “You know, I think you’re telling me the truth. Except you left out one thing: It wasn’t the fun of making more money that you were after, it was just money, right? Money that you needed.” I turned to Dorotha, standing frozen with the augers in her hand. “How about it, Dorrie? Did you know the old man was broke?”

  Putting it that way was not too smart. I saw what she was about to do just before she did it, and jumped off the igloo. I was a little too late. She dropped the augers before I could get them from her, but fortunately they landed flat and the blades weren’t chipped. I picked them up and put them away.

  She had answered the question well enough.

  I said, “I see you didn’t know. Tough on you, doll. His check to the captain of the Gagarin is still bouncing, and I would imagine the one he gave me isn’t going to be much better. I hope you got it in furs and jewels, and my advice to you is to hide them before the creditors want them back.”

  She didn’t even look at me. She was only looking at Cochenour, whose expression was all the confirmation she needed.

  I don’t know what I expected from her, rage or reproaches or tears. What she did was whisper, “Oh, Boyce, I’m so sorry,” and she went over and put her arm around him.

  I turned my back on them, because I didn’t like looking at him. The strapping ninety years old buck in Full Medical had turned into a defeated old man. For the first time, he looked all of his age and maybe a little more: the mouth half open, trembling; the straight back stooped; the bright blue eyes watering. She stroked him and crooned to him.

  I looked at the synoptic web again, for lack of anything better to do. It was about as clear as it was going to get, and it was empty. We had nearly a 50 percent overlap from our previous soundings, so I could tell that the interesting-looking scratches at one edge were nothing to get excited about. We’d checked them out already. They were only ghosts.

  There was no rescue there.

  Curiously, I felt kind of relaxed. There is something tranquillizing about the realization that you have nothing much left to lose. It puts things in a different perspective. I don’t mean to say that I had given up completely. There were still things I could do. They might not have anything to do with prolonging my life, but the taste in my mouth and the pain in my gut weren’t letting me enjoy life very much anyway. I could, for instance, write Audee Walthers off; since only a miracle could keep me from dying in a matter of days, I could accept the fact that I wasn’t going to be alive a week from now and use what time I had for something else. What else? Well, Dorrie was a nice kid. I
could fly the airbody back to the Spindle, turn Cochenour over to the gendarmes, and spend my last day or so introducing her around. Vastra or BeeGee would help her get organized. She might not even have to go into prostitution or the rackets. The high season wasn’t that far off, and she would do well with a little booth of prayer fans and Heechee lucky pieces for the Terry tourists. Maybe that wasn’t much, even from her point of view, but it was something.

  Or I could fling myself on the mercy of the Quackery. They might let me have the new liver on credit. The only reason I had for thinking they wouldn’t was that they never had.

  Or I could open the two-fuel valves and let them mix for ten minutes or so before hitting the igniter. The explosion wouldn’t leave much of the airbody or us, and nothing at all of our problems.

  Or—

  “Oh, hell.” I said. “Buck up, Cochenour. We’re not dead yet.”

  He looked at me for a minute. He patted Dorrie’s shoulder and pushed her away, gently enough. He said, “I will be, soon enough. I’m sorry about all this, Dorotha. And I’m sorry about your check, Walthers; I expect you needed the money.”

  “You have no idea.”

  He said with difficulty, “Do you want me to explain?”

  “I don’t see that it makes any difference, but, yes, out of curiosity I do.”

  I let him tell me, and he did it steadily and succinctly. I could have guessed. A man his age is either very, very rich or dead. He was only quite rich. He’d kept his industries going on what was left after he siphoned off the costs of transplant and treatment, calciphylaxis and prosthesis, protein regeneration here, cholesterol flushing there, a million for this, a hundred grand a week for that…oh, it went, I could see that. “You just don’t know,” he said, “what it takes to keep a hundred-year-old man alive until you try it.”

  I corrected him automatically. “Ninety, you mean.”

  “No, not ninety, and not even a hundred. I think it’s at least a hundred and ten, and it could be more than that. Who counts? You pay the doctors and they patch you up for a month or two. You wouldn’t know.”

  Oh, wouldn’t I just, I said, but not out loud. I let him go on, telling about how the federal inspectors were closing in and he skipped Earth to make his fortune all over again on Venus.

  But I wasn’t listening anymore; I was writing on the back of a navigation form. When I was finished, I passed it over to Cochenour. “Sign it,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “Does it matter? You don’t have any choice, do you? But it’s a release from the all-rights section of our charter agreement; you acknowledge you have no claim, that your check’s rubber, and that you voluntarily waive your ownership of anything we find in my favor.”

  He frowned. “What’s this bit at the end?”

  “That’s where I give you ten percent of anything we do find, if we do find anything.”

  “That’s charity,” he said, but he was signing. “I don’t mind charity, especially since, as you point out, I don’t have any choice. But I can read that web as well as you can, Walthers, and there’s nothing on it to find.”

  “No,” I said, folding the paper and putting it in my pocket. “But we’re not going to dig here. That trace is bare as your bank account. What we’re going to do is dig Trace C.”

  I lit another cigarette and thought for a minute. I was wondering how much to tell them of what I had spent five years finding out and figuring out, schooling myself not even to hint at it to anyone else. I was sure in my mind that nothing I said would make a difference, but the words didn’t want to say themselves anyway.

  I made myself say:

  “You remember Subhash Vastra, the fellow who ran the trap where I met you. He came to Venus with the military. He was a weapons specialist. There’s no civilian career for a weapons specialist so he went into the cafe business when they terminated him, but he was pretty big at it in the service.”

  Dorrie said, “Do you mean there are Heechee weapons on the reservation?”

  “No. Nobody has ever found a Heechee weapon. But they found targets.”

  It was actually physically difficult for me to speak the next part, but I got it out. “Anyway, Sub Vastra says they were targets. The higher brass wasn’t sure, and I think the matter has been pigeonholed on the reservation by now. But what they found was triangular pieces of Heechee wall material—that blue, light-emitting stuff they lined the tunnels with. There were dozens of them, and they all had a pattern of radiating lines; Sub said they looked like targets to him. And they had been drilled through, by something that left the holes chalky as talc. Do you know anything that would do that to Heechee wall material?”

  Dorrie was about to say she didn’t, but Cochenour interrupted her. “That’s impossible,” he said flatly.

  “Right, that’s what the brass said. They decided it had to be done in the process of fabrication, for some Heechee purpose we’ll never know. But Vastra says not. He says they looked exactly like the paper targets from the firing range under the reservation. The holes weren’t all in the same place; the lines looked like scoring markers. That’s evidence he’s right. Not proof. But evidence.”

  “And you think you can find the gun that made those holes where we marked Trace C?”

  I hesitated. “I wouldn’t put it that strongly. Call it a hope. But there is one more thing.

  “These targets were turned up by a prospector nearly forty years ago. He turned them in, reported his find, went out looking for more and got killed. That happened a lot in those days. No one paid much attention until some military types got a look at them; and that’s how come the reservation is where it is. They spotted the site where he’d reported finding them, staked out everything for a thousand kilometers around and labeled it all off limits. And they dug and dug, turned up about a dozen Heechee tunnels, but most of them bare and the rest cracked and spoiled.”

  “Then there’s nothing there,” growled Cochenour, looking perplexed.

  “There’s nothing they found,” I corrected him. “But in those days prospectors lied a lot. He reported the wrong location for the find. At the time, he was shacked up with a young lady who later married a man named Allemang, and her son is a friend of mine. He had a map. The right location, as near as I can figure—the navigation marks weren’t what they are now—is right about where we are now, give or take some. I saw digging marks a couple of times and I think they were his.” I slipped the little private magneto-fiche out of my pocket and put it into the virtual map display; it showed a single mark, an orange X. “That’s where I think we might find the weapon, somewhere near that X. And as you can see, the only undug indication there is good old Trace C.”

  Silence for a minute. I listened to the distant outside howl of the winds, waiting for them to say something.

  Dorrie was looking troubled. “I don’t know if I like trying to find a new weapon,” she said. “It’s—it’s like bringing back the bad old days again.”

  I shrugged. Cochenour, beginning to look more like himself again, said, “The point isn’t whether we really want to find a weapon, is it? The point is that we want to find an untapped Heechee dig for whatever is in it—but the soldiers think there might be a weapon somewhere around, so they aren’t going to let us dig, right? They’ll shoot us first and ask questions later. Wasn’t that what you said?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “So how do you propose to get around that little problem?” he asked.

  If I were a truthful man I would have said I wasn’t sure I could. Looked at honestly, the odds were we would get caught and very likely shot; but we had so little to lose, Cochenour and I, that I didn’t think that important enough to mention. I said:

  “We try to fool them. We send the airbody off, and you and I stay behind to do the digging. If they think we’re gone, they won’t be keeping us under surveillance, and all we have to worry about is being picked up on a routine perimeter search.”

  “Audee!”
cried the girl. “If you and Boyce stay here—But that means I have to take the airbody, and I can’t fly this thing.”

  “No, you can’t. But you can let it fly itself.” I rushed on: “Oh, you’ll waste fuel and you’ll get bounced around a lot. But you’ll get there on autopilot. It’ll even land you at the Spindle.” Not necessarily easily or well; I closed my mind to the thought of what an automatic landing might do to my one and only airbody. She would survive it, though, ninety-nine chances out of a hundred.

  “Then what?” Cochenour demanded.

  There were big holes in the plan at this point, but I closed my mind to them, too. “Dorrie looks up my friend BeeGee Allemang. I’ll give you a note to give him with all the coordinates and so on, and he’ll come and pick us up. With extra tanks, we’ll have air and power for maybe forty-eight hours after you leave. That’s plenty of time for you to get there, find BeeGee and give him the message, and for him to get back. If he’s late, of course, we’re in trouble. If we don’t find anything, we’ve wasted our time. But if we do—”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t say it was a guarantee,” I added, “I only said it gave us a chance.”

  Dorrie was quite a nice person, considering her age and her circumstances, but one of the things she lacked was self-confidence. She had not been trained to it; she had been getting it as a prosthesis, from Cochenour most recently, I suppose before that from whoever preceded Cochenour in her life—at her age, maybe her father.

  That was the biggest problem, persuading Dorrie she could do her part. “It won’t work,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry. It isn’t that I don’t want to help. I do, but I can’t. It just won’t work.”

  Well, it would have.

  Or at least I think it would have.

  In the event, we never got to try it. Between us, Cochenour and I did get Dorrie to agree to give it a try. We packed up what little gear we’d put outside, flew back to the ravine, landed and began to set up for the dig. But I was feeling poorly, thick, headachy, clumsy, and I suppose Cochenour had his own problems. Between the two of us we managed to catch the casing of the drill in the exit port while we were off-loading it, and while I was jockeying it one way from above, Cochenour pulled the other way from beneath and the whole thing came down on top of him. It didn’t kill him. But it gouged his suit and broke his leg, and that took care of my idea of digging Trace C with him.