Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  Why not try an offset cut? Did we have any better chance?

  We did not. We cut.

  When the drills stopped bucking and settled down to chew into 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 and watched the drills spit rock chips into the old shaft. It was filling up nicely. We didn’t speak. Presently I fell asleep again.

  I didn’t wake up until Dorrie pounded on my head. We were buried in tailings, but they weren’t just rock. They glowed blue, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.

  The augers must have been scratching at the Heechee wall liner for hours. They had actually worn pits into it.

  We looked down, and we could see the round bright blue eye of the tunnel wall staring up at us. She was a beauty, all ours.

  Even then 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. I fired them, and watched the bright spot of light that bounced out of the shaft and made a pattern on the igloo roof.

  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.

  12

  I must have blacked out again, and 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 hotsuit. 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 more humid; but the partial pressure of oxygen was about the same. It was enough to live on, in any case. I was proving that by breathing it and not dying.

  Next to me was Dorrie Keefer.

  The blue Heechee wall light didn’t flatter her complexion. 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.

  “We made it,” she said.

  We sat there grinning foolishly at each other, like Hallowe’en masks in the blue Heechee glow.

  To do anything more than that, just then, was quite impossible. 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. But I wasn’t comfortable, 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 up, figuring the heat was better.

  Then it occurred to me to wonder why the heat was only unpleasant, instead of instantly fatal. Energy transport through a Heechee wall-material surface is very slow, but not a quarter of a million years slow. My sad old brain ruminated that thought around for awhile and came up with a conclusion: At least until quite recently, some centuries or thousands of years, maybe, this tunnel had been kept cool. Automatic machinery, of course, I thought sagely. Wow, that by itself was worth finding. Broken down or not, it would be worth a lot of fortunes…

  And that made me remember why we were there in the first place, and I looked up the corridor and down, to see what treasures were waiting there for us.

  When I was a school kid in Amarillo Central my favorite teacher was a crippled lady named Miss Stevenson, and she used to tell us stories out of Bulfinch and Homer. She spoiled a whole weekend for me with the story of one Greek fellow who wanted to be a god. He was king of a little place in Lydia, but he wanted more, and the gods let him come to Olympus, and he had it made until he fouled up. I forget how; it had something to do with a dog, and some nasty business about tricking the gods into eating his own son. Whatever it was, they gave him solitary confinement for eternity, standing neck deep in a cool lake in hell and unable to drink. The fellow’s name was Tantalus, and in that Heechee tunnel I had a lot in common with him. The treasure trove was there all right, but we couldn’t reach it. We hadn’t hit the main tunnel but a sort of angled, Thielly-tube detour in it, and it was blocked at both ends. We could peer past half-closed gates into the main shaft. We could see Heechee machines and irregular mounds of things that might once have been containers, now rotted, with their contents on the floor. But we hadn’t the strength to get at them.

  It was the suits that made us so clumsy. With them off we might have been able to slip through, but then would we have the strength to put them back on again in time to meet Cochenour? I doubted it. I stood there with my helmet pressed to the gate, feeling like Alice peering into her garden without the bottle of drink-me, and then I thought about Cochenour again and checked the time.

  It was forty-six hours and some odd minutes since he had left us. He was due back any time.

  And if he came back while we were here, and opened the crawl-through to look for us and was careless about the seal at both ends, twenty thousand millibars of poison gas would hammer in on us. It would kill us, of course, but besides that it would damage the virgin tunnel. The corrosive scouring of that implosion of gas might wreck everything.

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

  “Temporarily,” she said, and turned and led the way.

  After the cheerful blue glow of the Heechee tunnel the igloo was cramped and miserable, and what was worse was that we couldn’t even stay inside it. Cochenour probably would remember to lock in and out of both ends of the crawl-through. But he might not. I couldn’t take that chance. 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 was stupid.

  So we had to wait outside in the breezy Venusian weather, and not too much later, either. The little watch dial next to my life-support meters, all running well into the red now, showed that Cochenour should in fact have arrived by now.

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

  We waited a long time, Dorrie bent over the crawl-through and me leaning beside her, holding on to her and the tie-down clips. We could have talked, but I thought she was either unconscious or asleep from the way she didn’t move, and anyway it seemed like an awful lot of work to plug in the phone jack.

  We waited longer than that, and still Cochenour didn’t come.

  I tried to think things through.

  There could have been a number of reasons for his being late. He could have crashed. He could have been challenged by the military. He could have got lost.

  But there was another possibility that made more sense than all of them. The time dial told me he was nearly five hours late now, and the life-support meters told me we were right up against the upper maximum for power, near it for air, well past it for water. If it hadn’t been for breathing the Heechee gases for a while, we would have been dead by then, and Cochenour didn’t know about that.

  He had said he was a bad loser. He had worked out an end-game maneuver so he wouldn’t have to lose. I could see him as clearly as though I were in the airbody with him, watching his own clocks, cooking himself a light lunch and playing music while he waited for us to die.

  That was no frightening thought; I was close enough to it for the difference to be pretty much a technicality, and tired enough of being trapped in that foul hotsuit to be willing to accept almost any deliverance. But the girl was involved, and the one tiny little rational thought that stayed in my half-poisoned brain was that it was unfair for Cochenour to kill us both. Me, yes. Her, no. I beat on her suit until she moved a little, and after some time managed to make her move back into the crawl-through.

  There were two things Cochenour didn’t k
now. He didn’t know we’d found 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. We could surprise him, if he didn’t wait much longer. We 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 igloo with the monkey wrench in his hand and leaned over me, and found that I was still alive and able to move, where he had expected only a well-done roast of meat. The drill caught him right in the chest. I couldn’t see his face, but I guess at his expression.

  Then it was only a matter of doing four or five impossible things. 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 these impossible things, and one other, that was harder than all of them, but very important to me.

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

  13

  They had to patch me and rehydrate me for three days before they could even think about putting my new liver in. In the old days they would have kept me sedated the whole time, but, of course, they kept waking me up every couple of hours for some feedback training on monitoring my hepatic flows. I hated it, because it was all sickness and pain and nagging from Dr. Morius and the nurses and I could have wished for the old days back again, except, of course, that in the old days I would have died.

  But by the fourth day I hardly hurt at all, 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, and looked-upon my surroundings, and found them good.

  There’s no such thing as a season in the Spindle, but the Quackery is all sentimental about tradition and ties with the Mother Planet. They were playing scenes of fleecy white clouds on the wall panels, and the air from the ventilator ducts smelled of green leaves and lilac.

  “Happy spring,” I said to Dr. Morius.

  “Shut up,” he said, shifting a couple of the needles that pincushioned my abdomen and watching the tell-tales. “Um.” He pursed his lips, pulled out a couple of needles, and said:

  “Well, let’s see, Walthers. We’ve taken out the splenovenal shunt. Your new liver is functioning well, although you’re not flushing wastes through as fast as you ought to. We’ve got your ion levels back up to something like a human being, and most of your tissues have a little moisture in them again. Altogether,” he scratched his head, “yes, in general, I would say you’re alive, so presumably the operation was a success.”

  “Don’t be a funny doctor,” I said. “When do I get out of here?”

  “Like right now?” he asked thoughtfully. “We could use the bed. Got a lot of paying patients coming in.”

  Now, one of the advantages of having blood in my brain instead of the poison soup it had been living on was that I could think reasonably clearly. So I knew right away that he was kidding me; I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t been a paying patient, one way or another, and though I couldn’t imagine how, I was willing to wait a while to find out.

  Anyway, I was more interested in getting out. They packed me up in wetsheets and rolled me through the Spindle to Sub Vastra’s place. Dorrie was there before me, and the third of Vastra’s house fussed over us both, lamb broth and that flat hard bread they like, before tucking us in for a good long rest. There was only the one bed, but Dorrie didn’t seem to mind, and anyway at that point the question was academic. Later on, not so academic. After a couple of days of that I was up and as good as I ever was.

  By then I had found out who paid my bill at the Quackery. For about a minute I had hoped it was me, quickly filthy rich from the spoils of our tunnel, but I knew that was impossible. We could have made money only on the sly, and we were both too near dead when we got back to the Spindle to conceal anything.

  So the military had moved in and taken everything, but they had shown they had a heart. Atrophied and flinty, but a heart. They’d gone into the dig while I was still getting glucose enemas in my sleep, and had been pleased enough with what they’d found. I even tried to get Sergeant Littleknees a finder’s fee. Not much, to be sure. But enough to save my life. It turned out to be enough to pay off the loosely secured checks I’d written to finance the expedition, and surgical fee and hospital costs, and just about enough left over to put a down payment on a Heechee hut of our own.

  For a while it bothered me that they wouldn’t tell me what they’d found. I even tried to get Sergeant Littleknees drunk when she was in the Spindle on furlough. But Dorrie was right there, and how drunk can you get one girl when another girl is right there watching you? Probably Eve Littleknees didn’t know anyhow. Probably no one did except a few weapons specialists. But it had to be something, because of the cash award, and most of all because they didn’t prosecute for trespass on the military reservation. And so we get along, the two of us. Or three of us.

  Dorrie turned out to be good at selling fire pearls to the Terry tourists, especially when her pregnancy began to show. She kept us in eating money until the high season started, and by then I found I was a sort of celebrity, which I parlayed into a bank loan and a new airbody, and so we’re doing well enough. I’ve promised that I’ll marry her if our kid turns out to be a boy, but as a matter of fact I’m going to do it anyway. She was a great help, especially with my own private project back there at the dig. She couldn’t have known what I wanted to bring back Cochenour’s body for, but she didn’t argue, and sick and wretched as she was, she helped me get it into the airbody lock.

  Actually, I wanted it very much.

  It’s not actually a new liver, of course. Probably it’s not even secondhand. Heaven knows where Cochenour bought it, but I’m sure it wasn’t original equipment with him. But it works. And bastard though he was, I kind of liked him in a way, and I don’t mind at all the fact that I’ve got a part of him with me always.

  THE THINGS THAT HAPPEN

  In his long career, Frederik Pohl has been interviewed a number of times, especially on radio. In the course of his public career he has met both those who do magic and those who debunk it. He has written stories in which someone is fooled or tricked for some reason, and some in which a trickster is himself tricked.

  The protagonist of “The Things That Happen” is a mentalist and a very, very good one. There are always those, however, who doubt the truth of such powers. When such antagonists meet, interesting things are bound to happen, as they do in this subtly twisted tale from 1985.

  When I do a college date all I promise is to give a forty-minute talk with half an hour additional for “discussion.” That’s in the contract. There isn’t a word about bending any spoons, or reading minds, or saying what somebody has in his pocket. I never say I’ll do anything at all, outside of talk for a while. Sometimes I don’t. I’ve got my memorized BAPS, or Basic All-Purpose Speech, which tells them how I don’t understand my gifts, and how sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, and how maybe (I make a joke out of it) there’s some truth to what somebody told me, that superior beings from the planet Clarion keep interfering with my gifts. Then I tell them a bunch of funny little stories about Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin and various celebrities I’ve appeared with…and then, after I’ve said thank-you-very-much to let them know it’s time to applaud, when some of them start yelling out, “Stop my watch for me, Hans!” I’ll just shake my head. “Not tonight, please,” I say. “I just don’t feel a thing, please.” And I let them hiss.

  Fritzl didn’t like that. He said if they hissed too often there wouldn’t be any more college dates, but then I got really tired of what Fritzl said. Besides, there hadn’t been that many college lecture dates lately anyway.


  In fact, the whole paranormal powers business had been really slow for me lately, which was why I let Fritzl talk me into this enterprise. I didn’t want to. But he kept on saying, “Fifty. Thousand. Dollars.” the way he did, and I couldn’t hold out.

  We did it carefully. First he staked the office out for a couple of days, and then I turned up cold one early afternoon. The guy and the woman were out to lunch, and the bookkeeper was filling in for the usual receptionist while she had her lunch. Perfect timing. I walked in the door, big grin, a little apologetic. “I’d like to see Dr. Smith or Miss Baker, please. My name is Hans Geissen. Oh, they’re not? Well, I’ll just wait, if you don’t mind.” And I didn’t give the woman much of a chance to mind, because I was off rubbernecking around the walls before she answered. I was careful not to give her any reason to worry about me. There was a railing that divided Them from Us, and I stayed on the unprivileged side. But I didn’t sit down. I walked around the waiting room, looking at the scrolls and the certificates and the portraits. There was a Doctor of Divinity sheepskin made out to the Reverend Samuel Shipperton Smith, from some denominational college in Hobart, Tasmania. There was a portrait of a skinny woman in Grecian robes, with a Grecian hairdo and holding a Grecian kind of lyre or harp or whatever they are. The Honorable Miss Gwendoline Stella Baker was the name on the gold plate on the frame.

  There’s always plenty of interesting stuff in a waiting room, if you know how to look for it. What you don’t want is for anyone to see you looking at it, so as I passed the coffee table by the orange plastic-covered couch I picked up a copy of People and paged it slowly as I wandered. I didn’t overdo it. When I thought I’d done enough I sat down with the magazine in my lap and read it assiduously, looking up not at all, until the changing of the guard. When the real receptionist came back from her Burger King hold-the-lettuce Whopper and the two of them whispered over me I didn’t raise my head. The bookkeeper scuttled away. The receptionist took her seat and immediately began a whispery phone conversation. Time passed. I let it pass. When, half an hour later, she disappeared into a private office in response to a faint murmur, I was when she came out just where she had left me when she went in. “Mr. Geissen?” she said.