Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  But you couldn’t make enough money to live until the next Hohmann-orbit time, so when the Class II tourists came along we cut each other’s throats over them.

  They were medium-rich. What you might call the poor millionaires: the ones whose annual income was barely in seven figures. They could afford to come in powered orbits, taking a hundred days or so for the run, instead of the long, slow Hohmann drift. The price ran a million dollars and up, so there weren’t nearly as many of them; but they came every month or so at the times of reasonably favorable orbital conjunctions. They also had more money to spend. So did the other medium-rich ones who hit us four or five times in a decade, when the ballistics of the planets had sorted themselves out into a low-energy configuration that allowed three planets to come into an orbit that didn’t have much higher energy cost than the straight Earth-Venus run. They’d hit us first, if we were lucky, then go on to Mars. If it was the other way around, we got the leavings. The leavings were never very much.

  But the very rich—ah, the very rich! They came as they liked, in orbital season or out.

  When my tipper on the landing pad reported the Yuri Gagarin, under private charter, my money nose began to quiver. It was out of season for everybody except the very rich; the only question on my mind was how many of my competitors would be trying to cut my throat for its passengers while I was cutting theirs.

  Airbody rental takes a lot more capital than opening a prayer-fan booth. I’d been lucky in buying my airbody cheap when the fellow I worked for died; I didn’t have too many competitors, and a couple of them were U/S for repairs, a couple more had kited off on Heechee diggings of their own.

  So, actually, I had the Gagarin’s passengers, whoever they were, pretty much to myself. Assuming they could be interested in taking a trip outside the Heechee tunnels.

  I had to assume they would be interested, because I needed the money very much. I had this little liver condition, you see. It was getting pretty close to total failure. The way the doctors explained it to me, I had like three choices: I could go back to Earth and linger a while on external prostheses; or I could get up the money for a transplant. Or I could die.

  2

  The name of the fellow who had chartered the Gagarin was Boyce Cochenour. Age, apparently forty. Height, two meters. Ancestry, Irish-American-French.

  He was the kind of fellow who was used to command. I watched him come into the Spindle as though it belonged to him and he was getting ready to sell it. He sat down in Sub Vastra’s imitation Paris Boulevard-Heechee sidewalk cafe. “Scotch,” he said, and Vastra hurried to pour John Begg over super-cooled ice and hand it to him, all crackling with cold and numbing to the lips. “Smoke,” he said, and the girl who was traveling with him instantly lit a cigarette and passed it to him. “Crummy-looking joint,” he said, and Vastra fell all over himself to agree.

  I sat down next to them—well, not at the same table, I mean; I didn’t even look at them. But I could hear what they said. Vastra didn’t look at me, either, but of course he had seen me come in and knew I had my eye on them. But I had to let his number-three wife take my order, because Vastra wasn’t going to waste any time on me when he had a charter-ship Terry at his table. “The usual,” I said to her, meaning straightalk in a tumbler of soft drink. “And a copy of your briefing,” I added, more softly. Her eyes twinkled at me over her flirtation veil. Cute little vixen. I patted her hand in a friendly way, and left a rolled-up bill in it; then she left.

  The Terry was inspecting his surroundings, including me. I looked back at him, polite but distant, and he gave me a sort of quarter-nod and turned back to Subhash Vastra. “Since I’m here,” he said, “I might as well go along with whatever action there is. What’s to do here?”

  Sub grinned widely, like a tall, skinny frog. “Ah, whatever you wish, sah! Entertainment? In our private rooms we have the finest artists of three planets, nautch dancers, music, fine comedians—”

  “We’ve got plenty of that in Cincinnati. I didn’t come to Venus for a nightclub act.” He wouldn’t have known it, of course, but that was a good move; Sub’s private rooms were way down the list of night spots on Venus, and the top of the list wasn’t much.

  “Of course, sah! Then perhaps you would like to consider a tour?”

  “Aw.” Cochenour shook his head. “What’s the point? Does any of it look any different than the space pad we came in on, right over our heads?”

  Vastra hesitated; I could see him calculating second-order consequences in his head, measuring the chance of the Terry going for a surface tour against what he might get from me as commission. He didn’t look my way. Honesty won out—that is, honesty reinforced by a quick appraisal of Cochenour’s gullibility. “Not much different, no, sah,” he admitted. “All pretty hot and dry on the surface, at least for the next thousand kilometers. But I wasn’t thinking of the surface.”

  “What then?”

  “Ah, the Heechee warrens, sah! There are many miles just below this settlement. A guide could be found—”

  “Not interested,” Cochenour growled. “Not in anything that close.”

  “Sah?”

  “If a guide can lead us through them,” Cochenour explained, “that means they’ve all been explored. Which means they’ve been looted. What’s the fun of that?”

  “Of course,” said Vastra immediately. “I see what you’re driving at, sah.” He looked noticeably happier, and I could feel his radar reaching out to make sure I was listening, though he didn’t look in my direction at all. “To be sure,” he said, “there is always the chance of finding new digs, sah, provided one knows where to look. Am I correct in assuming that this would interest you?”

  The third of Vastra’s house brought me my drink and a thin powder-faxed slip of paper. “Thirty percent,” I whispered to her. “Tell Sub. Only no bargaining, no getting anybody else to bid—” She nodded and winked; she’d been listening too, and she was as sure as I that this Terry was firmly on the hook. It had been my intention to nurse the drink as long as I could, but prosperity loomed before me; I was ready to celebrate; I took a long happy swallow.

  But the hook didn’t have a barb. Unaccountably the Terry shrugged. “Waste of time, I bet,” he grumbled. “I mean, really. If you knew where to look, why wouldn’t you have looked there already, right?”

  “Ah, mister,” cried Subhash Vastra, “but there are hundreds of tunnels not explored! Thousands! And in them, who knows, treasures beyond price!”

  Cochenour shook his head. “Skip it,” he said. “Bring us another drink. And see if you can’t get the ice cold this time.”

  Somewhat shaken, I put down my drink, half-turned away to hide my hand from the Terries, and looked at the facsimile copy of Sub’s report on them to see if it could tell me why Cochenour had lost interest.

  It couldn’t. It did tell me a lot, though. The girl with Cochenour was named Dorotha Keefer. She had been traveling with him for a couple of years now, this being their first time off Earth; there was no indication of any marriage, or any intention of it, at least on his part. She was in her early twenties—real age, not simulated by drugs and transplants. Cochenour himself was well over ninety.

  He did not, of course, look anywhere near that. I’d watched him come over to the table, and he moved lightly and easily, for a big man. His money came from land and petro-foods; according to the synoptic on him, he had been one of the first oil millionaires to switch over from selling oil as fuel for cars and heating plants to food production, growing algae in the crude that came out of his wells and selling the algae in processed form for human consumption. So he’d stopped being a mere millionaire and turned into something much bigger.

  And that accounted for the way he looked. He’d been on Full Medical, with extras. The report said his heart was titanium and plastic. His lungs had been transplanted from a twenty-year-old killed in a copter crash. His skin, muscles and fats—not to mention his various glandular systems—were sustained by hormones an
d cell-builders at what had to be a cost of well over a thousand dollars a day. To judge by the way he stroked the girl sitting next to him, he was getting his money’s worth. He looked and acted no more than forty, at most—except perhaps for the look of his pale-blue, diamond-bright, weary and disillusioned eyes.

  What a lovely mark! I swallowed the rest of my drink, and nodded to the third for another. There had to be a way to get him to charter my airbody.

  All I had to do was find it.

  Outside the rail of Vastra’s cafe, of course, half the Spindle was thinking exactly the same thoughts. This was the worst of the low season, the Hohmann crowd were still three months in the future; all of us were beginning to run low on money. My liver transplant was just a little extra incentive; of the hundred maze-runners I could see out of the corner of my eye, ninety-nine needed to cut in on this rich tourist’s money as much as I did, just for the sake of staying alive.

  We couldn’t all do it. Two of us, three, maybe even half a dozen could score enough to make a real difference. No more than that. And I had to be one of these few.

  I took a deep swallow of my second drink, tipped Vastra’s third lavishly—and conspicuously—and turned idly around until I was facing the Terries dead-on.

  The girl was talking with a knot of souvenir vendors, looking interested and uncertain. “Boyce?” she said over her shoulder.

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s this thing for?”

  He bent over the rail and peered. “Looks like a fan,” he said.

  “Heechee prayer fan, right,” cried the dealer; I knew him, Booker Allemang, an old-timer in the Spindle. “Found it myself, miss! It’ll grant your every wish, letters every day from people reporting miraculous results—”

  “Sucker bait,” grumbled Cochenour. “Buy it if you want.”

  “But what does it do?”

  He laughed raucously. “What any fan does. It cools you down.” And he looked at me, grinning.

  I finished my drink, nodded, stood up and walked over to the table. “Welcome to Venus,” I said. “May I help you?”

  The girl looked at Cochenour for approval before she said, “I thought this was very pretty.”

  “Very pretty,” I agreed. “Are you familiar with the story of the Heechees?”

  Cochenour pointed to a chair. I sat and went on. “They built these tunnels about a quarter of a million years ago. They lived here for a couple of centuries, give or take a lot. Then they went away again. They left a lot of junk behind, and some things that weren’t junk; among other things they left a lot of these fans. Some local con man like BeeGee here got the idea of calling them ‘prayer fans’ and selling them to tourists to make wishes with.”

  Allemang had been hanging on my every word trying to guess where I was going. “You know it’s right,” he said.

  “But you two are too smart for that kind of come-on,” I added. “Still, look at the things. They’re pretty enough to be worth having even without the story.”

  “Absolutely!” cried Allemang. “See how this one sparkles, miss! And the black and gray crystal, how nice it looks with your fair hair!”

  The girl unfurled the crystalline one. It came rolled like a diploma, only cone-shaped. It took just the slightest pressure of the thumb to keep it open, and it really was very pretty as she waved it gently. Like all the Heechee fans, it weighed only about ten grams, and its crystalline lattice caught the lights from the luminous Heechee walls, as well as the fluorescents and gas tubes we maze-runners had installed, and tossed them all back in iridescent sparks.

  “This fellow’s name is Booker Garey Allemang,” I said. “He’ll sell you the same goods as any of the others, but he won’t cheat you as much as most of them.”

  Cochenour looked at me dourly, then beckoned Sub Vastra for another round of drinks. “All right,” he said. “If we buy, we’ll buy from you, Booker Garey Allemang. But not now.”

  He turned to me. “And what do you want to sell me?”

  “Myself and my airbody, if you want to go looking for new tunnels. We’re both as good as you can get.”

  “How much?”

  “One million dollars,” I said immediately. “All found.”

  He didn’t answer at once, though it gave me some pleasure to notice that the price didn’t seem to scare him. He looked as pleasant, or anyway as unangrily bored, as ever. “Drink up,” he said, as Vastra and his third served us, and gestured with his glass to the Spindle. “Know what this was for?” he asked.

  “You mean why the Heechees built it? No. They were pretty small, so it wasn’t for headroom. And it was entirely empty when it was found.”

  He gazed tolerantly at the busy scene, balconies cut into the sloping sides of the Spindle with eating and drinking places like Vastra’s, rows of souvenir booths, most of them empty at this idle season. But there were still a couple of hundred maze rats around, and the number had been quietly growing all the time Cochenour and the girl had been sitting there.

  He said, “It’s not much to see, is it? A hole in the ground, and a lot of people trying to take my money away from me.”

  I shrugged.

  He grinned again. “So why did I come, eh? Well, that’s a good question, but since you didn’t ask it I don’t have to answer it. You want a million dollars. Let’s see. A hundred K to charter an airbody. A hundred and eighty or so to rent equipment, per week. Ten days minimum, three weeks a safer guess. Food, supplies, permits, another fifty K. So we’re up to close to seven hundred thousand, not counting your own salary and what you give our host here as his cut for not throwing you off the premises. Right, Walthers?”

  I had a little difficulty in swallowing the drink I had been holding to my mouth, but I managed to say, “Close enough, Mr. Cochenour.” I didn’t see any point in telling him that I already owned the equipment, as well as the airbody, although I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that he knew that too.

  “You’ve got a deal, then. And I want to leave as soon as possible, which should be, um, about this time tomorrow.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, and got up, avoiding Sub Vastra’s thunderstricken expression. I had some work to do, and a little thinking. He’d caught me off base, which is a bad place to be when you can’t afford to make a mistake. I knew he hadn’t missed my calling him by name. That was all right; he’d known that I had checked him out immediately. But it was a little surprising that he had known mine.

  3

  The first thing I had to do was double-check my equipment; the second was go to the local, validate a contract, and settle up with Sub Vastra; the third was see my doctor. The liver hadn’t been giving me much trouble for a while, but then I hadn’t been drinking grain alcohol for a while.

  It took about an hour to make sure that everything we would need for the expedition was i.s., with all the spare parts I might reasonably fear needing. The Quackery was on my way to the union office, so I stopped in there first. It didn’t take long. The news was no worse than I had been ready for; Dr. Morius studied the readout from his instruments carefully. It turned out to be a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of carefully, and expressed the guarded hope that I would survive three weeks away from his office, provided I took all the stuff he gave me and wandered no more than usual from his dietary restrictions. “And when I get back?” I asked.

  “About the same, Audee,” he said cheerily. “Total collapse in, ah, oh, maybe ninety more days.”

  He patted his fingertips. “I hear you’ve got a live one,” he added. “Want me to book you for a transplant?”

  “How live did you hear he was?” I asked.

  “Oh, the price is the same in any case,” he told me good-humoredly. “Two hundred K, plus the hospital, anesthesiologist, preop psychiatrist, pharmaceuticals—you’ve already got the figures.”

  I did, and I knew that with what I might make from Cochenour, plus what I had put away, plus a small loan on the airbody, I could just about meet it. Leaving me brok
e when it was over but, of course, alive.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Three weeks from tomorrow.” And I left him looking mildly pleased, like a Burmese hydro-rice man watching another crop being harvested. Dear daddy. Why hadn’t he sent me through medical school instead of giving me an education?

  It would have been nice if the Heechee had been the same size as human beings, instead of being about 40 percent shorter. In the smaller tunnels, like the one that led to the Local 88 office, I had to half-crouch all the way.

  The deputy organizer was waiting for me. He had one of the few good jobs that didn’t depend on the tourists, or at least not directly. He said, “Subhash Vastra’s been on the line. He says you agreed to thirty percent, and besides you forgot to pay your bar bill to the third of his house.”

  “Admitted, both ways.”

  “And you owe me a little too, Audee. Three hundred for a powderfax copy of my report on your pigeon. A hundred for validating your contract with Vastra. And if you want guide’s papers, sixteen hundred for that.”

  I gave him my credit card and he checked the total out of my account into the local’s. Then I signed and card-stamped the contract he’d drawn up. Vastra’s 30 percent would not be on the whole million-dollar gross, but on my net; even so, he might make as much out of it as I would, at least in liquid cash, because I’d have to pay off all the outstanding balances on equipment and loans. The factors would carry a man until he scored, but then they wanted to get paid. They knew how long it might be until he scored again.

  “Thanks, Audee,” said the deputy, nodding over the signed contract. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Not at your prices,” I told him.

  “Ah, you’re putting me on. ‘Boyce Cochenour and Dorotha Keefer, Earth-Ohio, traveling S. V. Yuri Gagarin, Odessa registry, chartered. No other passengers.’ No other passengers,” he repeated, quoting from the synoptic report he’d furnished. “Why, you’ll be a rich man, Audee, if you work this pigeon right.”