Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  11

  The suit leg had been ruptured through eight or ten plies, but there was enough left to keep the air out, if not the pressure.

  The first thing I did was check the drill to make sure it wasn’t damaged. It wasn’t. The second thing was to fight Cochenour back into the lock. That took about everything I had, with the combined weight of our suits and bodies, getting the drill out of the way, and my general physical condition. But I managed it.

  Dorrie was great. No hysterics, no foolish questions. We got him out of his suit and looked him over. He was unconscious. The leg was compounded, with bone showing through; he was bleeding from the mouth and nose, and he had vomited inside his helmet. All in all he was about the worst-looking hundred-and-some-year-old man you’ll ever see—live one, anyway. But he hadn’t taken enough heat to cook his brain, his heart was still going—well, whoever’s heart it had been in the first place, I mean; it was a good investment, because it pumped right along. The bleeding stopped by itself, except from the nasty business on the leg.

  Dorrie called the military reservation for me, got Eve Littleknees, was put right through to the Base Surgeon. He told me what to do. At first he wanted me to pack up and bring Cochenour right over, but I vetoed that—said I wasn’t in shape to fly and it would be too rough a ride. Then he gave me step-by-steps and I followed it easily enough: reduced the fracture, packed the gash, closed the wound with surgical Velcro and meat glue, sprayed a bandage all around and poured on a cast. It took about an hour, and Cochenour would have come to while we were doing it except I gave him a sleepy needle.

  So then it was just a matter of taking pulse and respiration and blood-pressure readings to satisfy the surgeon, and promising to get him back to the Spindle shortly. When the surgeon was through, still annoyed at me for not bringing Cochenour over, Sergeant Littleknees came back on. I could tell what was on her mind. “Uh, honey? How did it happen?”

  “A great big Heechee came up out of the ground and bit him,” I said. “I know what you’re thinking and you’ve got an evil mind. It was just an accident.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Okay. I just wanted you to know I don’t blame you a bit.” And she signed off.

  Dorrie was cleaning Cochenour up as best she could—pretty profligate with the water reserves, I thought. I left her to it while I made myself some coffee, lit a cigarette, and sat and thought.

  By the time Dorrie had done what she could for Cochenour, then cleaned up the worst of the mess and begun to do such important tasks as repairing her eye makeup, I had thought up a dandy.

  I gave Cochenour a wake-up needle, and Dorrie patted him and talked to him while he got his bearings. She was not a girl who carried a grudge. I did, a little. I got him up to try out his muscles faster than he really wanted to. His expression told me that they all ached. They worked all right, though.

  He was able to grin. “Old bones,” he said. “I knew I should have gone for the recalciphylaxis. That’s what happens when you try to save a buck.”

  He sat down heavily, the leg stuck out in front of him. He wrinkled his nose. “Sorry to have messed up your nice clean airbody,” he added.

  “You want to clean yourself up?”

  He looked surprised. “Well, I think I’d better, pretty soon—”

  “Do it now. I want to talk to you both.”

  He didn’t argue, just held out his hand, and Dorrie took it. He stumped, half-hopped toward the cleanup. Actually Dorrie had done the worst of it, but he splashed a little water on his face and swished some around in his mouth. He was pretty well recovered when he turned around to look at me.

  “All right, what is it? Are we giving up?”

  I said. “No. We’ll do it a different way.”

  Dorrie cried, “He can’t, Audee! Look at him. And the condition his suit’s in, he couldn’t last outside an hour, much less help you dig.”

  “I know that, so we’ll have to change the plan. I’ll dig by myself. The two of you will slope off in the airbody.”

  “Oh, brave man,” said Cochenour flatly. “Who are you kidding? It’s a two-man job.”

  I hesitated. “Not necessarily. Lone prospectors have done it before, although the problems were a little different. I admit it’ll be a tough forty-eight for me, but we’ll have to try it. One reason. We don’t have any alternative.”

  “Wrong,” said Cochenour. He patted Dorrie’s rump. “Solid muscle, that girl. She isn’t big, but she’s healthy. Takes after her grandmother. Don’t argue, Walthers. Just think a little bit. It’s as safe for Dorrie as it is for you; and with the two of you, there’s a chance we might luck in. By yourself, no chance at all.”

  For some reason, his attitude put me in a bad temper. “You talk as though she didn’t have anything to say about it.”

  “Well,” said Dorrie, sweetly enough, “come to that, so do you. I appreciate your wanting to make things easy for me, Audee, but, honestly, I think I could help. I’ve learned a lot. And if you want the truth, you look a lot worse than I do.”

  I said with all the sneer I could get into my voice, “Forget it. You can both help me for an hour or so, while I get set up. Then we’ll do it my way. No arguments. Let’s get going.”

  That made two mistakes. The first was that we didn’t get set up in an hour; it took more than two, and I was sweating sick oily sweat before we finished. I really felt bad. I was past hurting or worrying about it; I just thought it a little surprising every time my heart beat. Dorrie did more muscle work than I did, strong and willing as promised, and Cochenour checked over the instruments, and asked a couple of questions when he had to to make sure he could handle his part of the job, flying the airbody. I took two cups of coffee heavily laced with my private supply of gin and smoked my last cigarette for a while, meanwhile checking out with the military reservation. Eve Littleknees was flirtatious but a little puzzled.

  Then Dorrie and I tumbled out of the lock and closed it behind us, leaving Cochenour strapped in the pilot’s seat.

  Dorrie stood there for a moment, looking forlorn; but then she grabbed my hand and the two of us lumbered to the shelter of the igloo we’d already ignited. I had impressed on her the importance of being out of the wash of the twin-fuel jets. She was good about it; flung herself flat and didn’t move.

  I was less cautious. As soon as I could judge from the flare that the jets were angled away from us, I stuck my head up and watched Cochenour take off in a sleet of heavy-metal ash. It wasn’t a bad take-off. In circumstances like that I define “bad” as total demolition of the airbody and the death or maiming of one or more persons. He avoided that, but the airbody skittered and slid wildly as the gusts caught it. It would be a rough ride for him, going just the few hundred kilometers north that would take him out of detection range.

  I touched Dorrie with my toe and she struggled up. I slipped the talk cord into the jack on her helmet—radio was out, because of possible perimeter patrols that we wouldn’t be able to see.

  “Change your mind yet?” I asked.

  It was a fairly obnoxious question, but she took it nicely. She giggled. I could tell that because we were faceplate to faceplate and I could see her face shadowed inside the helmet. But I couldn’t hear what she was saying until she remembered to nudge the voice switch, and then what I heard was:

  “—romantic, just the two of us.”

  Well, we didn’t have time for that kind of chitchat. I said irritably, “Let’s quit wasting time. Remember what I told you. We have air, water and power for forty-eight hours. Don’t count on any margin. One or two of them might hold out a little longer, but you need all three to stay alive. Try not to work too hard; the less you metabolize, the less your waste system has to handle. If we find a tunnel and get in, maybe we can eat some of those emergency rations over there—provided it’s unbreached and hasn’t heated up too much in a quarter of a million years. Otherwise don’t even think about food. As for sleeping, forget—”

  “Now who’s was
ting time? You told me all this before.” But she was still cheery.

  So we climbed into the igloo and started work.

  The first thing we had to do was clear out some of the tailings that had already begun to accumulate where we left the drill going. The usual way, of course, is to reverse and redirect the augers. We couldn’t do that. It would have meant taking them away from cutting the shaft. We had to do it the hard way, namely manually.

  It was hard, all right. Hotsuits are uncomfortable to begin with. When you have to work in them, they’re miserable. When the work is both very hard physically and complicated by the cramped space inside an igloo that already contains two people and a working drill, it’s next to impossible.

  We did it anyhow, having no choice.

  Cochenour hadn’t lied; Dorrie was as good as a man. The question was whether that was going to be good enough. The other question, which was bothering me more and more every minute, was whether I was as good as a man. The headache was really pounding at me, and I found myself blacking out when I moved suddenly. The Quackery had promised me three weeks before acute hepatic failure, but that hadn’t been meant to include this kind of work. I had to figure I was on plus time already. That is a disconcerting way to figure.

  Especially when ten hours went by and I realized that we were down lower than the soundings had shown the tunnel to be, and no luminous blue tailings were in sight.

  We were drilling a dry hole.

  Now, if we had had the airbody close by, this would have been an annoyance. Maybe a big annoyance, but not a disaster. What I would have done was get back in the airbody, clean up, get a good night’s sleep, eat a meal, and recheck the trace. We were digging in the wrong place. All right, next step is to dig in the right place. Study the terrain, pick a spot, ignite another igloo, start up the drills and try, try again.

  That’s what we would have done. But we didn’t have any of those advantages. We didn’t have the airbody. We had no chance for sleep or food. We were out of igloos. We didn’t have the trace to look at. And I was feeling lousier every minute.

  I crawled out of the igloo, sat down in the next thing there was to the lee of the wind, and stared at the scudding yellow green sky.

  There ought to be something to do, if I could only think of it. I ordered myself to think.

  Well, let’s see. Could I maybe uproot the igloo and move it to another spot?

  No. I could break it loose all right with the augers, but the minute it was free the winds would catch it and it would be good-bye, Charlie. I’d never see that igloo again. Plus there would be no way to make it gastight anyway.

  Well, then, how about drilling without an igloo?

  Possible, I judged. Pointless, though. Suppose we did hit lucky and hole in? Without an igloo to lock out those twenty thousand millibars of hot gas, we’d destroy the contents anyway.

  I felt a nudge on my shoulder, and discovered that Dorrie was sitting next to me. She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t try to say anything at all. I guess it was all clear enough without talking about it.

  By my suit chronometer fifteen hours were gone. That left thirty-some before Cochenour would come back and get us. I didn’t see any point in spending it all sitting there, but on the other hand I didn’t see any point in doing anything else.

  Of course, I thought, I could always go to sleep for a while…and then I woke up and realized that that was what I had been doing.

  Dorrie was asleep beside me.

  You may wonder how a person can sleep in the teeth of a south polar thermal gale. It isn’t all that hard. All it takes is that you be wholly worn out, and wholly despairing. Sleeping isn’t just to knit the raveled sleeve, it is a good way to shut the world off when the world is too lousy to face. As ours was.

  But Venus is the last refuge of the Puritan ethic. Crazy. I knew I was as good as dead, but I felt I had to be doing something. I eased away from Dorrie, made sure her suit was belted to the hold-tight ring at the base of the igloo, and stood up. It took a great deal of concentration for me to be able to stand up, which was almost as good at keeping care out as sleep.

  It occurred to me that there still might be eight or ten live Heechees in the tunnel, and maybe they’d heard us knocking and opened up the bottom of the shaft for us. So I crawled into the igloo to see.

  I peered down the shaft to make sure. No. They hadn’t. It was still just a blind hole that disappeared into dirty dark invisibility at the end of the light from my head lamp. I swore at the Heechees who hadn’t helped us out, and kicked some tailings down the shaft on their nonexistent heads.

  The Puritan ethic was itching me, and I wondered what I ought to do. Die? Well, yes, but I was doing that fast enough. Something constructive?

  I remembered that you always ought to leave a place the way you found it, so I hauled up the drills on the eight-to-one winch and stowed them neatly. I kicked some more tailings down the useless hole to make a place to sit, and I sat down and thought.

  I mused about what we had done wrong, as you might think about a chess puzzle.

  I could still see the trace in my mind. It was bright and clear, so there was definitely something there. It was just tough that we’d lucked out and missed it.

  How had we missed it?

  After some time, I thought I knew the answer to that.

  People like Dorrie and Cochenour have an idea that a seismic trace is like one of those underground maps of downtown Dallas, with all the sewers and utility conduits and water pipes marked, so you just dig where it says and you find what you want.

  It isn’t exactly like that. The trace comes out as a sort of hazy approximation. It is built up, hour by hour, by measuring the echoes from the pinger. It looks like a band of spiderweb shadows, much wider than an actual tunnel and very fuzzy at the edges. When you look at it you know that somewhere in the shadows there’s something that makes them. Maybe it’s a rock interface or a pocket of gravel. Hopefully it’s a Heechee dig. Whatever it is, it’s there somewhere, but you don’t know just where, exactly. If a tunnel is twenty meters wide, which is a fair average for a Heechee connecting link, the shadow trace is sure to look like fifty, and may be a hundred.

  So where do you dig?

  That’s where the art of prospecting comes in. You have to make an informed guess.

  Maybe you dig in the exact geometrical center—as far as it is given you to see where the center is. That’s the easiest way. Maybe you dig where the shadows are densest, which is the way the half-smart prospectors do, and that works almost half the time. Or maybe you do what I did, and try to think like a Heechee. You look at the trace as a whole and try to see what points they might have been trying to connect. Then you plot an imaginary course between them, where you would have put the tunnel if you had been the Heechee engineer in charge, and you dig somewhere along there.

  That’s what I had done, but evidently I had done wrong.

  In a fuzzy-brained sort of way, I began to think I saw what I’d done.

  I visualized the trace. The right place to dig was where I had set the airbody down, but of course I couldn’t set up the igloo there because the airbody was in the way. So I’d set up about ten yards upslope.

  I was convinced that ten yards was what made us miss.

  I was pleased with myself for figuring it out, although I couldn’t see that it made a lot of practical difference. If I’d had another igloo I would have been glad to try again, assuming I could hold out that long. But that didn’t mean much, because I didn’t have another igloo.

  So I sat on the edge of the dark shaft, nodding sagaciously over the way I had solved the problem, dangling my legs and now and then sweeping tailings in. I think that was part of a kind of death wish, because I know I thought, now and then, that the nicest thing to do would be to jump in and pull the tailings down over me.

  But the Puritan ethic didn’t want me to do that. Anyway, it would have solved only my own personal problem. It wouldn’t have done anythin
g for old Dorrie Keefer, snoring away outside in the thermal hurricane.

  I then began to wonder why I was worrying about Dorrie. It was a pleasant enough subject to be thinking about, but sort of sad.

  I went back to thinking about the tunnel.

  The bottom of the shaft couldn’t be more than a few yards away from where we had bottomed out empty. I thought of jumping down and scraping away with my bare gloves. It seemed like a good idea. I’m not sure how much was whimsy and how much the fantasy of a sick man, but I kept thinking how nice it would be if there were Heechees still in there, and when I scratched into the blue wall material I could just knock politely and they’d open up and let me in. I even had a picture of what they looked like: sort of friendly and godlike. It would have been very pleasant to meet a Heechee, a live one that could speak English. “Heechee, what did you really use those things we call prayer fans for?” I could ask him. Or, “Heechee, have you got anything that will keep me from dying in your medicine chest?” Or, “Heechee, I’m sorry we messed up your front yard and I’ll try to clean it up for you.”

  I pushed more of the tailings back into the shaft. I had nothing better to do, and who could tell, maybe they’d appreciate it. After a while I had it half full and I’d run out of tailings, except for the ones that were pushed outside the igloo, and I didn’t have the strength to go after them. I looked for something else to do. I reset the augers, replaced the dull blades with the last sharp ones we had, pointed them in the general direction of a twenty-degree offset angle downslope, and turned them on.

  It wasn’t until I noticed that Dorrie was standing next to me, helping me steady the augers for the first yards of cut, that I realized I had made a plan.