The Gateway Trip h-5

by Pohl Frederik

  Worse than that, she was making me take a good look at myself.

  So I just said, "You may be right. But I'm sure going to give it a good try."

  "You're angry, aren't you?"

  "No," I lied, "but maybe a little tired. And we've got a long trip tomorrow, so I'd better take you back to the Spindle, Miss Keefer."

  V

  My airbody was roped down at the edge of the spacepad and was reached the same way the spacepad was reached: elevator to the

  surface lock, then a sealed tractor cab to carry us across the dry, rocky, tortured surface of Venus, peeling away under the high-density wind. Normally I kept the airbody under a lashed-down foam housing, of course. You don't leave anything free and exposed on the surface of Venus if you want to find it intact when you get back to it, not even if it's made of chrome steel. I'd had the foam stripped off first thing that morning, when I checked it out and loaded supplies. Now it was ready. I could see it from the bull's-'йye ports of the crawler, through the howling, green-yellow murk outside.

  Cochenour and the girl could have seen it too, if they'd known where to look, but they might not have recognized it as something that would fly.

  "Did you and Dorrie have a fight?" Cochenour screamed in my ear.

  "No fight," I screamed back.

  "Don't care if you did. Just wanted to know. You don't have to like each other, just so you do what I want you to do." He was silent for a moment, resting his vocal cords. "Jesus. What a wind."

  "Zephyr," I told him. I didn't say any more; he would find out for himself. The area around the spacepad is a sort of natural calm area, by Venusian standards. Orographic lift throws the meanest of the winds up over the pad, and all we get is a sort of confused back

  eddy. That makes taking off and landing relatively easy. The bad part of that is that some of the heavy metal compounds in the air settle out on the pad. What passes for air on Venus has layers of red mercuric sulfide and mercurous chloride in the lower reaches, and when you get above them to those pretty fluffy clouds tourists see on the way down, you find that some of them are droplets of sulfuric and hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid.

  But there are tricks to that, too. Navigation over Venus takes 3-D skills. It's easy enough to proceed from Point A to Point B on the surface. Your transponders will link you to the radio range and map your position continuously on the charts. What's hard is to find the right altitude. That takes experience and maybe intuition, and that's why my airbody and I were worth a million dollars to people like Boyce Cochenour.

  By then we were at the airbody, and the telescoping snout from the crawler was poking out to its lock. Cochenour was staring out the bull's-eye. "It doesn't have any wings!" he shouted, as though I was cheating him.

  "It doesn't have sails or snow chains either," I shouted back. "Get aboard if you want to talk! It'll be easier in the airbody."

  We climbed through the little snout, I unlocked the entrance, and we got aboard without much trouble.

  We didn't even have the kind of trouble that I might have made for myself. You see, an airbody is a big thing on Venus. I was damn lucky to have been able to acquire it, and, well, I won't beat around the bush, you could say I loved it. Mine could have held ten people, without equipment. With what Sub Vastra's outfitting shop had sold us and Local 88 had certified as essential to have on board, it was crowded with just the three of us.

  I was prepared for at least sarcasm. But Cochenour merely looked around long enough to find the best bunk, strode over to it, and claimed it as his. The girl was acting like a good sport about all the inconveniences. And there I was, left with my glands charged up for hostile criticism, and nobody criticizing.

  It was a lot quieter inside the airbody. You could hear the noise of the winds right enough, but it was only annoying. I passed Out high-filter earplugs, and with them in place the noise was hardly even annoying.

  "Sit down and strap in," I ordered, and when they were stowed away I took off.

  At ninety thousand millibars, wings aren't just useless, they're poison. My airbody had all the lift it needed, built right into its seashell-shaped hull. I fed the double fuel mixture into the thermojets, we bounced across the reasonably flat ground at the edge of the spacepad (it was bulldozed once a week, which is how it stayed reasonably flat), and we were zooming off into the wild yellow-green yonder-a moment later, into the wild brown-gray yonder-after a run of no more than fifty meters.

  Cochenour had fastened his harness loosely to be comfortable.

  I enjoyed hearing him yell as he was thrown about in the savage,

  short-period turbulence. It wouldn't kill him, and it only lasted for

  a few moments. At a thousand meters I found our part of Venus's

  semipermanent atmospheric inversion, and the turbulence dropped

  to where I could take off my belt and stand.

  I took the plugs out of my ears and motioned to Cochenour and the girl to do the same.

  He was rubbing his head where he'd bounced into an overhead chart rack, but he was grinning a little. "Pretty exciting," he admitted, fumbling in his pocket. "All right if I smoke?"

  "They're your lungs."

  He grinned more widely. "They are now," he agreed. "Say, why didn't you give us those earplugs while we were in the tractor?"

  There is, as you might say, a tide in the affairs of guides, where you either let them flood you with questions and then spend the whole time explaining what that funny little dial means when it

  turns red... or you keep your mouth shut and go on to do your work and make your fortune. What it came down to was a choice:

  Was I going to come out of this liking Cochenour and his girlfriend, or not?

  If I was, I should try to be civil to them. More than civil. Living, the three of us, for three weeks in a space about as big as an apartment kitchenette meant that everybody would have to work real hard at being nice to everybody else, if we were going to come back without total hatred. And as I was the one who was being paid to be nice, I should be the one to set an example.

  On the other hand, the Cochenours of the world are sometimes just not likable. If that was going to be the case, the less talk the better, and I should slide questions like that off with something like, "I forgot."

  But he hadn't actually gone out of his way to be unpleasant. The girl had even actually attempted friendliness. So I opted for courtesy. "Well, that's an interesting thing. You see, you hear by differences in pressure. While the airbody was taking off, the plugs filtered out part of the sound-the pressure waves-but when I yelled at you to belt up, the plugs passed the overpressure of my voice and you could hear easily enough. However, there's a limit. Past about a hundred and twenty decibels-that's a unit of sound-"

  "I know what a decibel is," Cochenour growled.

  "Right. Past a hundred and twenty or so the eardrum just doesn't respond anymore. So in the crawler it was just too loud. You not only got sound in through the hull, it came up from the ground, conducted by the treads. If you'd had the plugs in you wouldn't even have been able to hear-well, anything at all," I finished lamely.

  Dorotha had been listening while she repaired her eye makeup. "Anything like what?" she demanded.

  I decided to think of them as friends, at least for the time being. "Like orders to get into your heatsuits. In case of accident, I mean. A gust could've tipped that crawler right over, or sometimes solid

  objects come flying over the hills and hit you before you know it." She was shaking her head, but she was laughing. "Lovely place

  you took us to, Boyce," she commented.

  He wasn't paying any attentiOn. He had something else on his mind. "Why aren't you flying this thing?" he demanded.

  I got up and activated the virtual globe. "Right," I said. "It's time we talked about that. Just now my airbody's on autopilot, heading in the general direction of this quadrant down here. We have to decide on a specific destination."

  Dorrie Keefer was
inspecting the globe. It isn't real, of course; it's just a three-dimensional image that hangs in the air, and you can poke your finger right through it. "Venus doesn't really look like much," she commented.

  "Those lines you see," I explained, "are just radio-range markers; you won't see them looking out the window. Venus doesn't

  have any oceans, and it isn't cut up into countries, so making a map of it isn't quite what you'd expect on Earth. See this bright spot here? That's us. Now look."

  I overlaid the radio-range grid and the contour colors with geological data. "Those blobby circles are mascon markers. You know what a mascon is?"

  "A concentration of mass. A lump of heavy stuff," she offered.

  "Fine. Now see what happens when I phase in the locations of known Heechee digs."

  When I hit the control the digs appeared as golden patterns, like worms crawling across the planet. Dorotha said at once, "They're all in the mascons."

  Cochenour gave her a look of approval, and so did I. "Not quite all," I corrected. "But damn near. Why? I don't know. Nobody knows. The mascons are mostly older, denser rock-basalt and so on-and maybe the Heechee felt safer with strong, dense rock around them." In my correspondence with Professor Hegramet back on Earth, in the days when I didn't have a dying liver in my gut and thus could afford to take an interest in abstract knowledge, we had kicked around the possibility that the Heechee digging machines would only work in dense rock, or rock of a certain chemical composition. But I wasn't prepared to discuss some of the ideas I'd gotten from Professor Hegramet with them.

  I rotated the virtual globe slightly by turning a dial. "See over here, where we are now. This formation's Alpha Regio. There's the big digging which we just came out of. You can see the shape of the Spindle. That particular mascon where the Spindle is is called Serendip; it was discovered by a hesperological-"

  "Hesperological?"

  "By a geological team studying Venus, which makes it a hesperological team. They detected the mass concentration from orbit, then after the landings they drilled out a core sample there and hit the first Heechee dig. Now these other digs you see in the northern high latitudes are all in this one bunch of associated mascons. There

  are interventions of less dense rock between them, and they tunnel right through to connect, but they're almost all right in the mascons.

  "They're all north," Cochenour said sharply. "We're going south. Why?"

  It was interesting that he could read the virtual globe, but I didn't say so. I only said, "The ones that are marked are no good. They've been probed already."

  "Some of them look even bigger than the Spindle."

  "A hell of a lot bigger, right. But there's nothing much in them, or anyway not much chance that anything in them is in good enough shape to bother with. Subsurface fluids filled them up a hundred thousand years ago, maybe more. A lot of good men have gone broke trying to pump one out and excavate, without finding anything. Ask me. I was one of them."

  "I didn't know Venus had any liquid water," Cochenour objected.

  "I didn't say water, did I? But as a matter of fact some of it was, or anyway a sort of oozy mud. Apparently water cooks out oc the rocks and has a transit time, getting to the surface, of some thousands of years before it seeps out, boils off, and cracks to hydrogen and oxygen and gets lost. In case you didn't know it, there's some under the Spindle. It's what you were drinking, and what you were breathing, while you were there."

  "We weren't breathing water," he corrected.

  "No, of course not. We were breathing air that we made. But sometimes the tunnels still have kept their air-I mean the original stuff, the air the Heechee left behind them. Of course, after a few hundred thousand years they generally turn into ovens. Then they tend to bake everything organic away. Maybe that's why we've found so little of, let's say, animal remains-they've been cremated. So-sometimes you might find air in a dig, but I've never heard of anybody finding drinkable water in one."

  Dorotha said, "Boyce, this is all very interesting, but I'm hot

  and dirty and all this talk about water's getting to me. Can I change the subject for a minute?"

  Cochenour barked; it wasn't really a laugh. "Subliminal prompting, Walthers, don't you agree? And a little old-fashioned prudery too, I expect. I think what Dorrie really wants to do is go to the toilet."

  Given a little encouragement from the girl, I would have been mildly embarrassed for her. She was evidently used to Cochenour. She only said, "If we're going to live in this thing for three weeks, I'd like to know what it offers."

  "Certainly, Miss Keefer," I said.

  "Dorotha. Dorrie, if you like it better."

  "Sure, Dorrie. Well, you see what you've got. There are five bunks; they partition to sleep ten if wanted, but we don't want. Two shower stalls. They don't look big enough to soap yourself in, but they'll do the job if you work at it. Two chemical toilets in those cubbies. Kitchen over there-stove and storage, anyway. Pick the bunk you like, Dorrie. There's a screen arrangement that comes down when you want it for changing clothes and so on, or just if you don't want to look at the rest of us for a while."

  Cochenour said, "Go on, Dorrie, do what you want to do. I want Walthers to show me how to fly this thing anyway."

  It wasn't a bad start to the trip. I've had worse. I've had some real traumatic times, parties that came aboard drunk and steadily got drunker, couples that fought each other every waking moment and only got together long enough so they could fight in a united front against me. This trip didn't look bad at all, even apart from the fact that I hoped it was going to save my life for me.

  You don't need much skill to fly an airbody-at least, just to make it move in the direction you want to go. In Venus's atmosphere there is lift to spare. You don't worry about things like stalling out; and anyway the automatic controls do most of your thinking for you.

  Cochenour learned fast. It turned out he had flown everything that moved through the air on Earth, and operated one-man submersibles, as well, in the deep-sea oil fields of his youth. He ur~derstood as soon as I mentioned it tа him that the hard part of pilotage on Venus was selecting the right flying level, and anticipating when you'd have to change it. But he also understood that he wasn't going to learn that in one day. Or even in three weeks. "What the hell, Waithers," he said cheerfully enough. "At least I can make it go where I have to-in case you get trapped in a tunnel. Or shot by a jealous husband."

  I gave him the smile that little pleasantry was worth, which wasn't much. "The other thing I can do," he went on, "is cook. Unless you're really good at it? No, I thought not. Well, I paid too much for this stomach to fill it with hash, so I'll make the meals. That's a little skill Dorrie never got around to learning. It was the same with her grandmother. The most beautiful woman in the world, but she had the idea that was all she had to be to own it."

  I put that aside to sort out later. He was full of little unexpected

  things, this ninety-year-old young athlete. He said, "All right. Now, while Dorrie's using up all the water in the shower-"

  "Not to worry; it recycles."

  "Anyway. While she's cleaning up, finish your little lecture on where we're going."

  "Right." I spun the globe a little. The bright spot that was us had been heading steadily south while we were talking. "See that cluster where our track intersects those grid marks, just short of Lise Meitner?"

  "Who's Lise Meitner?" he grunted.

  "Somebody they named that formation after, that's all I know. Do you see where I'm pointing?"

  "Yeah. Those five big mascons close together. No diggings indicated. Is that where we're going?"

  "In a general way, yes."

  "Why in a general way?"

  "Well," I said, "there's one little thing I didn't tell you. I'm assuming you won't jump salty over it, because then I'll have to get salty, too, and tell you you should have taken the trouble to learn more about Venus before you decided to explore it."

  He stu
died me appraisingly for a moment. Dorrie came quietly out of the shower in a long robe, her hair in a towel, and stood near him, watching me. "That depends a lot on what you didn't tell me, friend," he said-not sounding friendly.

  "That part there is the South Polar Security Area," I said. "That's where the Defense boys keep the missile range and the biggest part of their weapons development areas. And civilians aren't allowed to enter."

  He was glowering at the map. "But there's only that one little piece of a mascon that isn't off limits!"

  "And that little piece," I said, "is where we're going."

  VI

  For a man more than ninety years old, Boyce Cochenour was spry. I don't mean just that he was healthy. Full Medical will do that for you, because you just replace whatever wears out or begins to look tacky. You can't replace the brain, though. So what you usually see in the very rich old ones is a bronzed, muscular body that shakes and hesitates and drops things.

  About that Cochenour had been very lucky.

  He was going to be abrasive company for three weeks. He'd already insisted I show him how to pilot an airbody, and he had learned fast. When I decided to use a little flight time to give the cooling system a somewhat premature thousand-hour check, he helped me pull the covers, check the refrigerant levels, and clean the filters. Then he decided to cook us lunch.

  Dorrie Keefer took over as my helper while I moved some of the supplies around, getting the autosonic probes out. At the steady noise level of the inside of an airbody, our normal voices wouldn't carry to Cochenour, a couple of meters away at the stove. I thought 0f pumping the girl about him while we checked the probes. I decided against it. I already knew the important thing about Cochenour, namely that with any luck he might be going to pay for my new liver. I didn't need to know what he and Dorrie thought about when they thought about each other.