The Gateway Trip h-5

by Pohl Frederik

  "Same as I've been telling you, Audee," he said cheerily. "You can expect total hepatic collapse in, oh, maybe ninety days." He patted his fingertips, looking at me optimistically. "I hear you've

  got a live one, though. Want me to make a reservation for your transplant?"

  "How live did you hear my prospect was?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "The price is the same in any case," he told me good-naturedly. "Two hundred K for the new liver, plus the hospital, anesthesiologist, pre-op psychiatrist, pharmaceuticals, my own fee-you've already got the figures."

  I did. And I had already calculated that with what I might make from Cochenour, plus what I had put away, plus a loan on the airbody I could just about meet it. Leaving me broke when it was over, of course. But alive.

  "Happens I've got one in stock now that's just your size," Dr. Morius said, half-kidding.

  I didn't doubt him. There are always plenty of spare parts in the Quackery. That's because people are always getting themselves killed, one way and another, and their heirs do their best to fatten up the estate by selling off the innards. I dated one of the quacks once or twice. When we'd been drinking she took me down to the Cold Cuts department and showed me all the frozen hearts and lungs and bowels and bladders, each one already dosed with antiallergens so it wouldn't be rejected, all tagged and packed away, ready for a paying customer. It was a pity I wasn't in that class, because then Dr. Morius could have pulled one out, warmed it up in the

  microwave, and slapped it in. When I joked-I told her I was joking-about swiping just one little liver for me, the date went sour, and not long after that she packed it in and went back to Earth.

  I made up my mind.

  "Make the reservation," I said. "Three weeks from today." And I left him looking mildly pleased, like a Burmese hydro-rice planter watching the machines warm up to bring in another crop. 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 just that little bit shorter. It was reflected in their tunnels. In the smaller ones, like the one that led to the Local 88 union office, I had to half crouch all the way.

  The deputy organizer was waiting for me. He had one of the very few good jobs on Venus that didn't depend on tourism-or at least not directly. He said, "Subhash Vastra's been on the line. He says you agreed to thirty percent, and besides you took off without paying your bar bill to the Third of his house."

  "Admitted, both ways."

  He made a note. "And you owe me a little too, Audee. Three hundred for the powder-fax copy of my report on your pigeon. A hundred for validating your contract with Vastra. And you're going to need a new guide's license; sixteen hundred for that."

  I gave him my currency 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 thirty percent would not be on the whole million dollars, but on my net. Even so, he was likely to make as much out of it as I would, at least in liquid cash, because I was going to have to pay off the outstanding balances on equipment. The banks would carry a man until he scored, but then they wanted to get paid in full. .. because they knew how long it might be until he scored again.

  The deputy verified the signed contract. "That's that, then. Anything else I can do for you?"

  "Not at your prices," I told him.

  He gave me a sharp look, with a touch of envy in it. "Ah, you're putting me on, Audee. 'Boyce Cochenour and Dorotha Keefer, traveling S.S. Yuri Gagarin, Odessa registry, carrying no other passengers,' " he quoted from the report he'd intercepted for us. "No other passengers! Why, you can be a rich man, Audee, if you work this customer right."

  "Rich man is more than I ask," I told him. "All I want is to be a living one."

  It wasn't entirely true. I did have some little hope-not much, not enough to talk about, and in fact I'd never said a word about it to anyone-that I might be coming out of this rather better than just alive.

  There was, however, a problem.

  The problem was that if we did find anything, Boyce Cochenour would get most of it. If a tourist like Cochenour goes on a guided hunt for new Heechee tunnels, and he happens to find something valuable-tourists have, you know; not often, but enough to keep them hopeful-then it's the charterer who gets the lion's share. Guides get a taste, but that's all. We just work for the man who pays the bills.

  Of course, I could have gone out by myself at any time and prospected on my own. Then anything I found would be all mine. But in my case, that was a really bad idea. If I staked myself to a trip and lost I wouldn't just be wasting my time and fifty or a hundred K on used-up supplies and wear and tear on the airbody. If I lost, I would be dead shortly thereafter, when that beat-up old liver finally gave out.

  I needed every penny Cochenour would pay me just to stay alive. Whether we struck it rich or not, my fee from him would take care of that.

  Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I had a notion that I knew

  where something very interesting might be found; and my problem was that, as long as I had the standard charterer'srights contract with Cochenour, I really couldn't afford to find it.

  The last stop I made was in my sleeping room. Under my bed, keystoned into the rock, was a guaranteed break-proof safe that held some papers I wanted to have in my pocket from then on.

  See, when I first came to Venus it wasn't scenery that interested me. I wanted to make my fortune.

  I didn't see much of the surface of Venus then, or for nearly two years after that. You don't see much in the kind of spacecraft that can land you on Venus. To survive the squeeze of a ninetythousand-millibar surface pressure means you need a hull that's a little more rugged than the bubble-ships that go to the Moon or Mars or farther out. They don't put unnecessary windows into the skin of Venus-landers. That didn't matter much, because there isn't much on the surface of Venus that you can see. Everything the tourists can snap pictures of is inside Venus, and every bit of it or~ce belonged to the Heechee.

  We don't know much about the Heechee. We don't even rightly know their name. "Heechee" isn't a name, it's how somebody once wrote down the sound that a fire-pearl makes when you stroke it. As that was the only sound anybody had ever heard that was connected with the Heechee, it got to be their name.

  The "hesperologists" don't have any idea where these Heechee folks came from, although there are some markings that seem to be a star chart-pretty much unrecognizable; if we knew the exact position of every star in the galaxy a few hundred thousand years ago we might be able to locate them from that. Maybe. Assuming they came from this galaxy.

  I wonder sometimes what they wanted. Escaping a dying planet? Political refugees? Tourists whose cruise ship had a breakdown between somewhere and somewhere, so that they had to hang around

  long enough to repair whatever they had to repair to get themselves going again? I don't know. Nobody else does, either.

  But, though the Heechee packed up nearly everything when they left, leaving behind only empty tunnels and chambers, there were a few scraps here and there that either weren't worth taking or were overlooked: all those "prayer fans," enough empty containers of one kind or another to look like a picnic ground at the end of a hard summer, some trinkets and trifles. I guess the best known of the "trifles" is the anisokinetic punch, the carbon crystal that transmits a blow at a ninety-degree angle. That made somebody a few billion just by being lucky enough to find one, though not until somebody else had made his own billions by being smart enough to analyze and duplicate it. But that's the best of the lot. What we usually find is, face it, just junk. There must once have been good stuff worth a million times as much as those sweepings.

  Did they take all the good stuff with them when they left?

  That was another thing that nobody knew. I didn't know, either, but I did think I knew something that had a bearing on it.

  I thought I knew a pla
ce where a Heechee tunnel had had something pretty neat in it, long ago; and that particular tunnel wasn't near any of the explored diggings.

  I didn't kid myself. I knew that that wasn't a guarantee of anything.

  But it was something to go on. Maybe when those last ships left the Heechee were getting impatient, and maybe not as thorough at cleaning up behind themselves.

  And that was what being on Venus was all about.

  What other possible reason was there for being there? The life of a maze-rat was marginal at best. It took fifty thousand a year to stay alive-air tax, capitation tax, water assessment, subsistence-level bill for food. If you wanted to eat meat more than once a month, or demanded a private cubicle of your own to sleep in, it cost a lot more than that.

  Guide's papers cost a week's living costs. When any of us bought

  a set of them, we were gambling that week's cost of living against the chance of a big enough strike, either from the Terry tourists or from what we might find, to make it possible to go home to Earth-where no one died for lack of air and no one was thrust out into the high-pressure incinerator that was Venus's atmosphere. Not just to get back to Earth, but to get back there in the style every maze-rat had set himself as a goal when he headed sunward in the first place: with money enough to live the full life of a human being on Full Medical.

  That was what I wanted: the Big Score.

  IV

  The last thing I did that night was to visit the Hall of Discoveries. That wasn't just the whim of the moment. I'd made an arrangement with the Third of Vastra's House.

  The Third winked at me over her flirtation veil and turned to her companion, who looked around and recognized me. "Hello, Mr. Walthers," she said.

  "I thought I might find you here," I said, which was no more than the truth. I didn't know what to call the woman. My own mother had been old-fashioned enough to take my father's name when they married, but that didn't apply here, of course. "Miss Keefer" was accurate, "Mrs. Cochenour" might have been diplomatic; I got around the problem by saying, "Since we'll be seeing a lot of each other, how about getting right on to first names?"

  "Audee, is it?"

  I gave her a twelve-tooth smile. "Swede on my mother's side, old Texan on my father's. Name's been in his family a long time, I guess-Dorotha."

  Vastra's Third had melted into the background; I took over, to show this Dorotha Keefer what the Hall of Discoveries was all about.

  The Hall is there for the purposes of getting Terry tourists and prospectors hotted up, so they'll spend their money poking around Heechee digs. There's a little of everything in it, from charts of the worked diggings and a large-scale Mercator map of Venus to samples of all the principal finds. I showed her the copy of the anisokinetic punch, and the original solid-state piezophone that had made its discoverer almost as permanently rich as the guys who marketed the punch. There were about a dozen fire-pearls, quarter-inch jobbies; they sat behind armor glass, on cushions, blazing away with their cold milky light. "They were what made the piezophone possible," I told her. "The machine itself, that's a human invention; but the fire-pearls are what makes it work-they convert pressure into electricity and vice versa."

  "They're pretty," she said. "But why do they have to be protected like that? I saw bigger ones lying on a counter in the Spindle without anybody even watching them."

  "That's a little different, Dorotha," I told her. "These are real." She laughed out loud. I liked her laugh. No woman looks beautiful when she's laughing hard, and girls who worry about looking beautiful don't do it. Dorotha Keefer looked like a healthy, pretty

  woman having a good time, which, when you come down to it, is about the best way for a woman to look.

  She did not, however, look quite good enough to take my mind off my need for the money to buy a new liver, so I got down to business. "The little red marbles over there are blood-diamonds," I told her. "They're radioactive. Not so much that they'll hurt you, but they stay warm. Which is one way you can tell the real one from a fake: Anything over about three centimeters is a fake. A real one that big generates too much heat-the square-cube law, you know. So it melts."

  "So the ones your friend was trying to sell me-"

  "Were fakes. Right."

  She nodded, still smiling. "What about what you were trying to sell us, Audee? Real or fake?"

  The Third of Vastra's House had discreetly vanished by then, so I took a deep breath and told Dorotha the truth. Not the whole truth, maybe, but nothing but the truth.

  "All this stuff here," I said, "is what thousands of people have found after a hell of a lot of digging. It's not much. The punch, the piezophone, and two or three other gadgets that we can make work; a few busted pieces of things that they're still studying; and some trinkets. That's it."

  "That's the way I heard it," she said. "And one more thing. None of the discovery dates on these things is less than twenty years old." She was smarter and better informed than I had expected.

  "And the conclusion you can draw from that," I agreed, "is that as nothing new has been found lately, the planet has probably been mined dry. You're right. That's what the evidence seems to show. The first diggers found everything useful that there was to be found .. . so far."

  "But you think there's more."

  "I hope there's more. Look. Item. The tunnel walls. You see

  they're all alike-the blue walls, perfectly smooth; the light coming from them that never varies; the hardness. How do you suppose the Heechee made them?"

  "Why, I don't know."

  "Neither do I. Or anybody else. But every Heechee tunnel is the same, and if you dig into them from the outside you find the same basic substrate rock, then a boundary layer that's sort of half wall-metal and half substrate, then the wall itself. Conclusion: The Heechee didn't dig the tunnels and then line them, they had something that crawled around underground like an earthworm, leaving these tunnels behind. And one other thing: they overdug. That's to say they dug lots of tunnels they didn't need, going nowhere, never used for anything. Does that suggest anything to you?"

  "It must have been cheap and easy?" she guessed.

  I nodded. "So it was probably an automatic machine, and there really ought to be at least one of them, somewhere on this planet, to find. Next item. The air. They breathed oxygen like we do, and they must have got it from somewhere. Where?"

  "Why, there's oxygen in the atmosphere, isn't there?"

  "Hardly any. Less than a half of a percent. And most of what there is isn't free oxygen; it's compounded into carbon dioxide and other garbage. There's no water vapor to speak of, either. Oh, a little-not as much as, for instance, sulfur dioxide. When water seeps out of the rock it doesn't come out as a fresh, clear spring. It goes into the air as vapor pretty fast. It rises-the water molecule being lighter than the carbon dioxide molecule. When it reaches a point where the sun can get at it it splits into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen and half the hydrogen mostly go into turning the sulfur dioxide into sulfuric acid. The rest of the hydrogen just escapes into space."

  She was looking at me quizzically. "Audee," she said gently, "I already believe you're an expert on Venus."

  I grinned. "But do you get the picture?"

  "I think so. It looks pretty bad."

  "It is pretty bad, but all the same the Heechee managed to get that little bit of oxygen Out of the mixture, cheaply and easily-remember those extra tunnels they filled-along with inert gases like nitrogen-and they're present only in trace amounts-enough to make a breathing mixture. How? I don't know, but if there's a machine that did it I'd like to find that machine. Next item: aircraft. The Heechee flew around the surface of Venus a lot."

  "So do you, Audee! Aren't you a pilot?"

  "Airbody pilot, yes. But look what it takes to make an airbody go. There's a surface temperature of seven-thirty-five K, and not enough oxygen to keep a cigarette lit. So my airbody has to have two fuel tanks, one for the fuel, one for the thing to burn it with. That's not just
oil and air, you know."

  '' . ,

  It 15fl t.

  "Not here, Dorotha. Not at the kind of ambient temperatures we've got. It takes exotic fuels to get that hot. Did you ever hear of a fellow named Carnot?"

  "Old-time scientist, was he? The Carnot cycle fellow?"

  "Right again." That was the third time she'd surprised me, I noted cautiously. "The Carnot efficiency of an engine is expressed by its maximum temperature-the heat of combustion, let's say-divided by the temperature of its exhaust. Well, but the temperature

  of the exhaust can't be lower than the temperature of whatever it's exhausted into-otherwise you're not running an engine, you're running a refrigerator. And you've got that seven-thirty-five air temperature to fight, so even with special fuels you have basically a lousy engine. Any heat engine on Venus is lousy. Did you ever wonder why there are so few airbodies around? I don't mind; it helps to have something close to a monopoly. But the reason is that they're so damn expensive to run."

  "And the Heechee did it better?"

  "I think they did."

  She laughed again, unexpectedly and once more very attractively. "Why, you poor fellow," she said in good humor, "you're hooked on the stuff you sell, aren't you? You think that one of these days you're going to find the mother tunnel and pick up a few billion dollars' worth of Heechee stuff!"

  I wasn't pleased with the way she put that. I wasn't all that happy with the meeting I had set up with Vastra's Third, for that matter; I'd figured that, away from her boyfriend, I could pick this Dorotha Keefer's brains about him pretty easily. It wasn't working out that way. She was making me aware of her as a person, which was an undesirable development in itself-you can't treat a mark as a mark if you think of him, or her, as a fellow human being.