The Gateway Trip

  “You haven’t landed that way,” Cochenour pointed out.

  “I didn’t say it would be a good landing. You’d better be strapped in.” What it would be, of course, was something more like a controlled crash; I closed my mind to the thought of what an autopilot landing might do to my one and only airbody. Dorrie would survive it, though. Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred.

  “Then what do I do?” Dorrie asked.

  There were big holes in my plan at that point, too, but I closed my mind to them, as well. “That depends on where you go. I think the best plan would be for you to head right back to the Spindle.”

  “And leave you here?” she demanded, looking suddenly rebellious.

  “Not permanently. In the Spindle you look up my friend BeeGee Allemang and tell him what’s been going on. He’ll want a share, naturally, but that’s all right; we can give him twenty-five percent, and he’ll be happy with that. I’ll give you a note for him with all the coordinates and so on, and he’ll fly the airbody right back here to pick us up. Say twenty-four hours later.”

  “Can we do all that in a day?” Cochenour wanted to know.

  “Sure we can. We have to.”

  “And what if Dorrie can’t find him, or he gets lost, or something?”

  “She’ll find him, and he won’t get lost. Of course,” I admitted, “there’s always the possibility of some ‘something.’ We have a little margin for error. We can take tanks for extra air and power—we should be all right for as much as forty-eight hours. No more than that. It’ll be cutting it very close, but that’s plenty of time, I think. If he’s late, of course, we’re in trouble; but he won’t be. What I really worry about is that we’ll dig that tunnel and it’ll be no good. Then we’ve wasted our time. But if we do find anything…” I left it there.

  “Sounds pretty chancy,” Cochenour observed, but he was looking at Dorrie, not at me. She shrugged.

  “I didn’t say it was a guarantee,” I told him. “I only said it was a chance.”

  I was beginning to think very well of Dorotha Keefer. She was a pretty nice person, considering her age and circumstances, and smart and strong, too. But one thing she lacked was self-confidence. She had just never been trained to it. She had been getting it as a prosthesis—from Cochenour most recently, I supposed, before that maybe whoever preceded Cochenour in her life—at her age, perhaps that had been her father. She had the air of somebody who’d been surrounded by dominating people for a long time.

  That was the biggest problem, persuading Dorrie that she could do her part. “It won’t work,” she kept saying, as I went over the controls with her. “I’m sorry. It isn’t that I don’t want to help. I do, but I can’t. It just won’t work.”

  Well, it would have.

  Or at least, I think it would have. In the event, we never got to try the plan out.

  Between us, Cochenour and I finally got Dorrie to agree to give it a whirl. We packed up what little salvageable gear we’d put outside. We flew back to the ravine, landed, and began to set up for a dig. But I was feeling poorly—thick, headachy, clumsy—and I suppose Cochenour had his own problems, though I must admit he didn’t complain. Between the two of us we managed to catch the casing of the drill in the exit port while we were off-loading it.

  And, while I was jockeying it one way from above, Cochenour pulled the other way from beneath…and the whole hard, heavy thing came right down on top of him.

  It didn’t kill him. It just gouged his suit and broke his leg and knocked him unconscious, and that took care of any possibility of having him to help me dig Site C.

  XI

  The first thing I did was to check the drill to make sure it wasn’t damaged. It wasn’t. The second was to manhandle Cochenour back into the airbody 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 hysteria, no foolish questions. We got him out of his heatsuit and looked him over.

  The suit leg had been ruptured through eight or ten plies, but there had been enough left to keep the air out, if not all the pressure. He was alive. Unconscious, all right, but breathing. The leg fracture was compounded, with bone showing through the bleeding flesh. He was bleeding, too, from the mouth and nose, and he had vomited inside his helmet.

  All in all, he was about the worst-looking hundred-or-whatever-year-old man you’ll ever see—live one, anyway. But he didn’t seem to have taken enough heat to cook his brain. His heart was still going—well, I mean whoever’s heart it had been in the first place was still going. It was a good investment, because it was pumping right along. We put compresses on everything we could find, and most of the bleeding stopped by itself, except from the nasty business on his leg.

  For that we needed more expert help. Dorrie called the military reservation for me. She got Amanda Littleknees and was put right through to the base surgeon, Colonel Eve Marcuse. Dr. Marcuse was a friend of my own Quackery fellow; I’d met her once or twice, and she was good about telling me what to do.

  At first Colonel Marcuse wanted me to pack up and bring Cochenour right over. I vetoed that. I gave her satisfactory reasons—I wasn’t in shape to pilot, and it would be a rough ride for Cochenour. I certainly didn’t give her the real reason, namely that I didn’t want to get into the reservation and have to explain my way out of it again. So instead she gave me step-by-step instructions on what to do with the casualty.

  They were easy enough to follow, and I did all she commanded: reduced the fracture, packed the gash, stuck Cochenour with broad-spectrum antibiotics, closed the wound with surgical Velcro and meat glue, sprayed a bandage all around, and poured on a cast. It depleted our first-aid supplies pretty thoroughly and took about an hour of our time. Cochenour would have come to while we were doing it, except that I had also given him a sleepy needle.

  Then he was stable enough. From then on 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 pretty soon. When Dr. Marcuse was through, still annoyed with me for not bringing Cochenour in for her to play with—I think she was fascinated by the idea of cutting into a man composed almost entirely of other people’s parts—Sergeant Littleknees came back on the circuit.

  I could tell what was on her mind. “Uh, honey? How did it happen, exactly?”

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

  “Of course it was,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that I don’t blame you a bit.” And she signed off.

  Dorrie was cleaning the old man off as best she could—pretty profligate with our spare sheets and towels, I thought, considering that my airbody didn’t carry a washing machine aboard. I left her to it while I made myself some coffee, lit another cigarette, and sat and thought up another plan.

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

  As the first step, I gave Cochenour a wake-up needle.

  Dorrie patted him and talked to him while he got his bearings. She was not a girl who carried a grudge. On the other hand, I did, a little. I wasn’t as tender as she. As soon as he seemed coherent I got him up, to try out his muscles—a lot faster than he really wanted to. His expression told me that they all ached. They worked all right, though, and he could stump around on the cast.

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

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

  “It’s been messed up worse. You want to finish cleaning yourself up?”

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

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

  He didn’t argue. He just stuck out his hand, and Dorrie took it. With her help he stumped, half-hopping, toward the clean-up. Actually Dorrie had already done the worst of the job of getting him clean before he woke up, 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, Walthers, what is it? Do we give up and go back now?”

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

  “He can’t, Audee!” Dorrie cried. “Look at him. And the condition his suit is 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 heroic man,” Cochenour said flatly. “Are you crazy? Who are you kidding? That’s a two-man job.”

  “I did the first one by myself, Cochenour.”

  “And came into the airbody to cool off every little while. Sure. That’s a whole other thing.”

  I hesitated. “It’ll be harder,” I admitted. “Not impossible. Lone prospectors have dug out tunnels before, though the problems were a little different. I know it’ll be a rough forty-eight hours for me, but we’ll have to try it—there isn’t any alternative.”

  “Wrong,” Cochenour said. He patted Dorrie’s rump. “Solid muscle, that girl is. She isn’t big, but she’s healthy. Takes after her grandmother. Don’t argue, Walthers. Just think a little bit. I’ll fly the airbody; she’ll stick around to help you. The job is as safe for Dorrie as it is for you; and with two of you to spell each other there’s a chance you might make it before you pass out from heat prostration. What’s the chance by yourself? Any chance at all?”

  I didn’t answer the last part. 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,” Dorrie said, sweetly enough, “come to that, so do you, Audee. Boyce is right. I appreciate your being all gallant and trying to make things easy for me, but, honestly, I think you’ll need me. I’ve learned a lot. And if you want the truth, you look a lot worse than I do.”

  I said, with all the contemptuous command I could get into my voice, “Forget it. We’re going to do it my way. You can both help me for an hour or so, while I get set up. Then you’re on your way. No arguments. Let’s get going.”

  Well, 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—long before we finished. I really felt bad. I was past worrying about the way I felt; I was only a little surprised, and kind of grateful, every time I noticed that my heart was still beating.

  Dorrie was as strong and willing as promised. She did more of the muscle work than I did, firing up the igloo and setting the equipment in place, and Cochenour checked over the instruments and made sure he knew what he had to do to make the airbody fly. He flatly rejected the notion of going back to the Spindle, though; he said he didn’t want to risk the extra time, when he could just as easily set down for twenty-four hours a few hundred kilometers away.

  Then I took two cups of strong coffee, heavily laced with my private supply of gin, smoked my last cigarette for a while, and put in a call to the military reservation.

  Amanda Littleknees was flirtatious but a little puzzled when I told her we were departing the vicinity, no fixed destination; but she didn’t argue.

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

  That was the other mistake I had made. In spite of everything I had said, we did it Cochenour’s way after all. I never agreed to it. It just happened that way.

  Under the ashy sky Dorrie just stood there for a moment, looking forlorn. But then she grabbed my hand, and the two of us swam through the thick, turbulent air toward the shelter of our last igloo. She had remembered my coaching about the importance of staying out of the jet exhaust. Inside, she flung herself flat and didn’t move.

  I was less cautious. I couldn’t help myself. I had to see. So, 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 ash.

  It wasn’t a bad takeoff. 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 as soon as he was out of the slight shelter of the arroyo the gusts caught him and the airbody skittered and slid wildly. It was going to 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 to her feet. I slipped the talk cord into the jack on her helmet—radio was out, because of possible eavesdropping from the perimeter patrols that we wouldn’t be able to see.

  “Have you changed 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 her 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, and that’s it. Don’t count on any margin. The water might last a little longer than the others, but you need the other two things to stay alive. Try not to work too hard. The less you metabolize, the less your waste-disposal system has to handle. If we find a tunnel and get in, maybe we can eat some of those emergency rations over there—provided the tunnel’s unbreached and hasn’t heated up too much in the last couple hundred thousand years. Otherwise, don’t even think about food. As to sleeping, forget it; maybe while the drills are going we can catch a couple of naps, but—”

  “Now who’s wasting time? You’ve told me all this stuff before.” But her voice was still cheery.

  So we climbed into the igloo and started work.

  The first thing we had to do was to clear out some of the tailings that had already begun to accumulate where we’d left the drill going. The usual way, of course, is to reverse and redirect the augers. We couldn’t waste drilling time that way; 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. Heatsuits are uncomfortable to begin with. When you have to work in them, they’re miserable. When the work is both 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 anyway.

  Cochenour hadn’t lied to me about Dorrie. She was as good a partner as any man I’d ever had. The big question before us was whether that was going to be good enough. Because there was another question, which was bothering me more and more every minute, and that was whether I was still as good as a man.

  Lord knew, I wasn’t feeling good. The headache was really pounding at me, and when I moved suddenly I found myself close to blacking out. It all seemed suspiciously like the prognosis they’d given me at the Quackery. To be sure, they’d promised me three weeks before acute hepatic failure, but that hadn’t been meant to include this sort of bone-breaking work. I had to figure that I was on plus time already.

  That was a disconcerting way to figure.

  Especially when the first ten hours went by…and I realized that our shaft was down lower than the soundings had shown the tunnel to be…and no luminous blue tailings had come in sight.

  We were drilling
a dry hole.

  Now, if we had had plenty of time and the airbody close by, this would have been no more than an annoyance. Maybe a really big annoyance, sure, but nothing like a disaster. All it would have meant was that I’d get back into the airbody, clean up, get a good night’s sleep, eat a meal, and recheck the trace. Probably we were just digging in the wrong spot. All right, next step would be to dig in the right one. 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 food or a decent sleep. We were out of igloos. We didn’t have the trace to look at—and time was running out on us, 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 up at the scudding yellow-green sky.

  There ought to be something to do, if I could only think what it was.

  I ordered myself to think.

  Let’s see, I said to myself. Could I maybe uproot the igloo and move it to another spot?

  No. That was a no-go. I could break the igloo loose 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 a sealed igloo to lock out those ninety thousand millibars of hot, destructive air, we’d destroy anything fragile inside before we got a look at it.

  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.