“We have to go back,” I told Dorrie, showing her the time. She smiled.
“Temporarily,” she said, and we got up, took a last look at those treasures of Tantalus behind the bars, and started back to our shaft to the igloo.
After the cheerful blue glow of the Heechee tunnel, the igloo was more cramped and miserable than ever before.
What was worse was that my cloudy brain nagged me into remembering that we shouldn’t even stay inside it. Cochenour might remember to lock in and out of both ends of the crawl-through when he got there—any minute now—but he also might not. I couldn’t take the chance on letting the hot hammer of air in on our pretties.
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 that was stupid.
So the only way to solve that problem was for us to wait outside in the breezy Venusian weather. The one consolation was that it wouldn’t be too much longer to wait. The other part of that was that we weren’t equipped for a very long wait. The little watch dial next to our life-support meters, all running well into the warning red now, showed that Cochenour should in fact have arrived by now.
He wasn’t there, though.
I squeezed into the crawl-through with Dorrie, locked us both through, and we waited.
I felt a scratching on my helmet and discovered Dorrie was plugging into my jack. “Audee, I’m really very tired,” she told me. It didn’t sound like a complaint, only a factual report of something she thought I probably should know about.
“You might as well go to sleep,” I told her. “I’ll keep watch. Cochenour will be here pretty soon, and I’ll wake you up.”
I suppose she took my advice, because she lowered herself down, pausing to let me take her talk line out of my helmet jack. Then she stretched out next to the tie-down clips and left me to think in peace.
I wasn’t grateful. I wasn’t enjoying what I was beginning to think.
Still Cochenour didn’t come.
I tried to think through the significance of that. Of course, there could have been lots of reasons for a delay. He could’ve gotten lost. He could have been challenged by the military. He could have crashed the airbody.
But there was a much nastier possibility, and it seemed to make more sense than all of them.
The time dial told me he was nearly five hours late, and the life-support meters told me that we were right up against the “empty” line for power, near it for air, and well past it for water. If we hadn’t had the remaining tunnel gases to breathe for a few hours, saving the air in our tanks, we would have been dead by now.
Cochenour couldn’t have known that we would find breathable air in the Heechee tunnel. He must believe that we were dead.
The man hadn’t lied about himself. He had told me he was a bad loser.
So he had decided not to lose.
In spite of my fuzzy brain, I could understand what had gone on in his. When push came to shove the bastard in him won out. He had worked out an endgame maneuver that would pull a win out of all his defeats.
I could visualize him, as clearly as though I were in the airbody with him. Watching his clocks as our lives ticked away. Cooking himself an elegant little lunch. Playing the rest of the Tchaikovsky ballet music, maybe, while he waited for us to get through dying.
It wasn’t a really frightening thought to me. I was close enough to being dead anyway for the difference to be pretty much of a technicality…and tired enough of being trapped in that foul heatsuit to accept almost any deliverance, even the final one.
But I wasn’t the only person affected here.
The girl was also involved. The one tiny little rational thought that stayed in my half-poisoned brain was that it was just unfair for Cochenour to let us both die. Me, yes, all right; I could see that from his point of view I was easily expendable. Her, no.
I realized I ought to do something, and after considering what that might be for a while I beat on her suit until she moved a little. After some talk through the phone jacks I managed to make her understand she had to go back down into the tunnel, where at least she could breathe.
Then I got ready for Cochenour’s return.
There were two things he didn’t know. He didn’t know we’d found any 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. I could surprise him—if he didn’t stay away too much longer, anyway. I 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 crawl-through to the igloo with the monkey wrench in his hand, leaned over me, and found I was still alive and able to move, when he had expected only a well-done roast of meat.
If I had had any doubt about his intentions it was resolved when he swung immediately at my helmet. Age, busted leg, and surprise didn’t slow his reflexes a bit. But he had to change position to get a good swing in the cramped space inside the crawl-through, and, being not only alive but pretty nearly conscious, I managed to roll away in time. And I already had the drill ready to go in my arms.
The drill caught him right in the chest.
I couldn’t see his face, but I can guess at his expression.
After that, it was only a matter of doing five or six impossible things at once. 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 those impossible things…and one more, that was harder than any of them, but very important to me. Dorrie didn’t know why I insisted on bringing Cochenour’s body back. I think she thought it was a kind gesture of reverence to the dead on my part, but I didn’t straighten her out just then.
I just about totaled the airbody when we landed, but we were suited up and strapped in, and when the ground crews came out from the Spindle to investigate Dorrie and I were still alive.
XIII
They had to patch me and rehydrate me for three days before they could even think about putting my new liver in. It was a wonder it had survived its ordeal, but they’d whipped it out and put it on nutrient pumps as soon as they got their hands on it. By the time it was ready to be transplanted into me it had had its allergenic nature tamed and was as good as any liver ever was—good enough, anyway, to keep me alive.
They kept me sedated most of the time. The quacks woke me up every couple of hours to give me another bout of feedback training on how to monitor my hepatic flows—they said there was no point giving me a new liver if I didn’t know how to use it—and other people kept waking me up to ask me questions, but it was all dreamlike. I didn’t much want to be awake just then. Being awake was all sickness and pain and nagging, and I could have wished for the old days back again—when they just would have knocked me out with anesthesia until they were through—except, of course, that in the old days I would have died.
But by the fourth day I hardly hurt at all—well, 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. That was very good news, and, once I believed it, I began to take more interest in what was going on.
The Quackery was in its spring mood, which I appreciated. Of course, there’s no such thing as a season in the Spindle, but the quacks get all sentimental about tradition and ties with the Mother Planet, so they create seasons for themselves. The current one was made by scenes of fleecy white clouds playing across the wall panels, and the air from the ventilator ducts smelled of lilac and green leaves.
“Happy spring,” I said to Dr. Morius while he was examining me.
“Shut up,” he said to me. He shifted a couple of the needles that pincushioned my abdomen, watching the readi
ngs on the telltales. “Um,” he muttered.
“I’m glad you think so,” I said.
He disregarded my remark. Dr. Morius doesn’t like humorous conversation unless it comes from him. He pursed his lips and pulled out a couple of the needles. “Well, let’s see, Walthers. We’ve taken out the splenovenal shunt. Your new liver is functioning well—no sign of rejection—but you’re not flushing wastes through as fast as you ought to. You’ll have to work on that. 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 said, scratching his head in thought, “yes, in general, I would say you’re alive. So I think probably the operation was a success.”
“That’s very witty,” I said.
“You’ve got some people waiting for you,” he went on. “Vastra’s Third and your lady friend. They brought you some clothes.”
That interested me. “Does that mean I’m getting out?” I asked.
“Like right now,” he told me. “They’ll have to keep you in bed awhile, but your rent’s run out. We need the space for paying customers.”
Now, one of the advantages of having clean blood in my brains instead of the poisonous soup it had been living on was that I could begin to think reasonably clearly.
So I knew right away that good old comical Dr. Morius was making another of his little jokes. “Paying customers.” I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t been a paying patient. Though I couldn’t imagine what my bills were being paid with, I was willing to keep my curiosity in check until I was outside the Quackery.
That didn’t take long. The quacks packed me in wetsheets, and Dorrie and the Third of Vastra’s House rolled me through the Spindle to Sub Vastra’s place. Dorrie was pale and tired still—the last couple of weeks hadn’t been much of a vacation for either of us—but needing nothing more than a little rest, she said. Sub’s First had kicked some of the kids out of a cubicle and cleared it out for us, and his Third fussed over both of us, feeding us up on 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. Anyway, at that point the question was academic. Later on, not so academic. After a couple of days of that I was on my feet and as good as I ever was.
By then I found out who had paid my bill at the Quackery.
For about a minute I had hoped it was me—quickly filthy rich from the priceless spoils of our tunnel—but I knew that was an illusion. The tunnel had been right on the military reservation. Nobody was ever going to own anything in it but the military.
If we’d been hale and hearty we could have gotten around that, with a little inventive lying. We could have carted some of the things off to another tunnel and declared them, and almost certainly we would have gotten away with it…but not the way we were. We’d been a lot too near dead to conceal anything.
So the military had taken it all.
Still, they’d showed something I never had suspected. They did have a kind of a heart. Atrophied and flinty, yes, but a heart. They’d gone into the dig while I was still getting glucose enemas in my sleep, and they’d been pleased with what they’d found. They decided to pay me a kind of finder’s fee. Not much, to be sure. But enough to save my life. Enough to meet the Quackery’s bill for all their carpentry on me, and even enough left over to put some in the bank and pay the back rent on my own place, so Dorrie and I could move in when Vastra’s House decided we were well enough to be on our own.
Of course, they hadn’t had to pay for the transplant liver itself. That hadn’t cost anything at all.
For a while it bothered me that the military wouldn’t say what they’d found. I did my best to find out. I even tried to get Sergeant Littleknees drunk so I could worm it out of her, when she came to the Spindle on furlough. That didn’t work. Dorrie was right there, and how drunk can you get one girl when another girl is right there watching you? Probably Amanda Littleknees didn’t know, anyhow. Probably nobody did except a few specialists.
But it had to be something big, because of the cash award, and most of all because they didn’t prosecute us for trespassing on the military reservation. And so we get along all right, the two of us. Or the three of us.
Dorrie turned out to be really good at selling imitation prayer fans and fire-pearls to the Terry tourists, especially when her pregnancy began to show. We were both kind of celebrities, of course. She kept us in eating money until the high season started, and by then I had found out that my status as a famous tunnel discoverer was worth something, so I parlayed it into a cash loan and a new airbody. We’re doing pretty well, for tunnel-rats. I’ve promised 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 at the dig.
Especially with my own private project.
Dorrie couldn’t have known just what I wanted to bring Cochenour’s body back for. She didn’t argue, though. Sick and wretched as she was, she helped me get the cadaver into the airbody lock for the return to the Spindle.
Actually, I wanted that body very much—one piece of it, anyway.
It’s not really a new liver, of course. Probably it’s not even secondhand. Heaven knows where Cochenour bought it, but I’m sure it wasn’t his original equipment.
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.
PART THREE
THE
GATEWAY
ASTEROID
The greatest treasure the Heechee tunnels on Venus had to offer had already been discovered, though the first discoverers didn’t know it. No one else knew, either—at least, no one except a solitary tunnel-rat named Sylvester Macklin, and he was not in a position to tell anybody what he had found.
Sylvester Macklin had discovered a Heechee spaceship.
If Macklin had reported his find he would have become the richest man in the solar system. He also would have lived to enjoy his wealth. But Sylvester Macklin was as crotchety a loner as any other tunnel-rat, and he did something quite different.
He saw that the ship looked to be in good condition. Maybe, he thought, he could even fly it.
Unfortunately for himself, he succeeded.
Macklin’s ship did exactly what any Heechee ship was designed to do, and the Heechee were marvelously great designers. No one knows exactly what processes of thought and experiment and deduction Macklin went through when he blundered onto the wonderful find. He didn’t survive to tell anyone. Still, obviously at some point he must have gotten into the ship and closed its hatch and begun poking and prodding at the things that looked as though they ought to be its controls.
As people later well learned, on the board of every Heechee ship is a thing shaped like a cow’s teat. It is the thing that makes the ship go. When it is squeezed it is like slipping an automatic-shift car into “drive.” The ship moves out. Where it goes to depends on what course was set into its automatic navigation systems.
Macklin didn’t do anything about setting any particular course, naturally. He didn’t know how.
So the ship did what its Heechee designers had programmed it to do in such an event. It simply returned to the place it had come from when its Heechee pilot had left it, half a million years ago.
As it happened, that place was an asteroid.
It was an odd asteroid in several respects. Astronomically it was odd, because its orbit was at right angles to the ecliptic. For that reason, although it was a fair-sized chunk of rock and not far from Earth’s own orbit at times, it had never been discovered by human astronomers.
The other odd thing about it was that it had been converted into a sort of parking garage for Heechee spacecraft. In total, there were nearly a thousand of the ships there.
What there was not any of anywhere on the asteroid was anything to eat or drink. So Sylvester Macklin, who could have been
the richest man in history, wound up as just one more starved-to-death corpse.
But before he died Macklin managed to get off a signal to Earth. It wasn’t a call for help. No one could reach him in time to save his life. Macklin knew that. He accepted the fact that he would die; he just wanted people to know in what an unsuspected marvel of a place he was dying. And after a while other astronauts, flying the clumsy human rockets of the time, came to investigate.
What they found was the gateway to the universe.
Within the next decade the Gateway asteroid had become the center of mankind’s most profitable industry, the exploration of the galaxy.
Macklin didn’t own the Gateway asteroid, of course, in spite of the fact that he had discovered it. His luck wasn’t that good. He didn’t own anything, being dead.
Anyway, it soon became obvious that Gateway was much too important to be owned by any individual, or even by any single nation. The United Nations fought over the question for years, in Security Council and General Assembly—and, more than once, almost with guns and aircraft outside the UN itself. What the world powers wound up with was the Gateway Corporation, a five-power consortium that was set up to control it.
The Gateway asteroid was not a very congenial place for people to live—of course, it had never been designed for human people. It had been designed for the Heechee, and they had stripped it bare before they left. It was a chunk of rock the size of Manhattan, laced through and through with tunnels and chambers and not much else. The thing wasn’t even round. One Gateway prospector described it as shaped “more or less like a badly planned pear that the birds had been pecking at.” Its internal structure resembled the layers of an onion. The outer shell was where the Heechee ships were docked, their lander ports snuggled into hatch chambers. (Those chambers were the things that looked from the outside like bird peckings.) Then, inside, there were layers with great open spaces which the humans used for storing supplies and parts, and for the large water reservoir they called “Lake Superior.” Closer to the center were the residential tunnels, lined with small rooms like monastery cells, where the humans lived while they waited for their ships. In the heart of the asteroid was a spindle-shaped cavern. The Heechee seemed to like spindle-shaped spaces, though no one knew why. Gateway’s tenants used this one for a meeting place—and drinking place, and gambling place, and a place to try to forget what lay ahead of them.