The Space Merchants

  I set my private wake-up for three hours, thinking maybe that would give Cochenour time to get sleepy and turn in, leaving Dorrie perhaps up and maybe feeling conversational. But when I woke up there was the wideawake old man, cooking himself a herb omelet with the last of our sterile eggs. "You were right, Walthers," he grinned. "I was sleepy, at that. So I had-a nice little one-hour nap. Ready for anything now. Want some eggs?"

  Actually I did want them. A lot. But of course I didn't dare eat them, so I glumly swallowed the nutritious and very unsatisfying stuff the diet department of the Quackery allowed me to have and watched him stuff himself. It was unfair that a man of ninety could be so healthy that he didn't have to think about his digestion, while I was—

  Well, there wasn't any profit in that kind of thinking. I offered to play some music to pass the time. Dorrie picked Swan Lake, and I started it up.

  And then I had an idea. I headed for the tool lockers. They didn't really need checking. The auger heads were close to time for replacement, but I wasn't going to replace them; we were running low on spares. The thing about the tool lockers was that they were about as far from the galley as you could get and still be inside the airbody.

  I hoped Dorrie would follow me. And she did.

  "Need any help, Audee?"

  "Glad to have it," I told her. "Here, hold these for me. Don't get the grease on your clothes." I didn't expect her to ask why they had to be held. She didn't. She only laughed at the idea of getting grease on her clothes.

  "I don't think I'd even notice a little extra grease, dirty as I am. I guess we'll all be glad to get back to civilization."

  Cochenour was frowning over the probe and paying no attention. I said, "Which kind of civilization do you mean? The Spindle, or all the way back to Earth?"

  What I had in mind was to start her talking about Earth, but she went the other way. "Oh, the Spindle," she said. "I never dreamed I'd get to this planet, Audee! I loved it, I thought it was fascinating the way everybody got along together, and we really didn't see much of it. Especially the people like that Indian fellow who ran the restaurant. The cashier was his wife, wasn't she?"

  "She was one of them, yes. She's Vastra's number-one wife. The waitress was number three, and he has another one at home with the kids. There are five kids, all three wives involved." But I wanted to turn the conversation around, so I said, "It's pretty much the same as on Earth. Vastra would be running a tourist trap in Benares if he wasn't running one here, and he wouldn't be here if he hadn't shipped out with the military and terminated here. I guess if I weren't on Venus I'd be guiding in Texas. If there's any open country left to guide hunters in—maybe up along the Canadian River. How about you?"

  All the time I was picking up the same four or five tools, studying the serial numbers and putting them back. She didn't notice.

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well, what did you do on Earth, before you came here?"

  "Oh, I worked in Boyce's office for a while."

  That was encouraging. Maybe she'd remember something about his connection with Professor Hegramet. "What were you, a secretary?"

  She gave me an unfriendly look. "Something like that," she said.

  Then I was embarrassed. She thought I was prying—I was, of course, but I wasn't looking for sordid details about how a pretty young thing like her allowed herself to be seduced into being bedmate for a dirty old man. Not least because Cochenour, old though he was and nasty as he might be when he chose, was also obviously a pretty powerfully attractive figure to women. I said, trying to be placating, "It's none of my business, of course."

  "No," she said, "it isn't." And then she said, "What's that?"

  That was an incoming call on the radio, that's what that was.

  "So answer it," Cochenour snarled from across the airbody, looking up from his eggs.

  I was glad enough for the interruption. The call was voice-only, which surprised me a little. I kept it that way. In fact, I took the call on the earjack, since it is my nature to be cautious about some things. Anyway, there isn't much privacy in an airbody, and I want what little crumbs of it I can find.

  It was the base calling, a Communications sergeant I knew named Littleknees. I signed in irritably, watching Dorrie go back to sit protectively with Boyce Cochenour.

  "A private word for you, Audee," said Sergeant Littleknees. "Is your sahib lurking about?"

  Littleknees and I had exchanged radio chatter for a long time. There was something about the bright cheeriness of the tone that bothered me. I turned my back on Cochenour. I knew he was listening—but only to my side of the conversation, of course, because of the earjack. "In the area but not tuned in at present," I said. "What have you got for me?"

  "Just a little news bulletin," the sergeant purred. "It came in over the synsat a couple of minutes ago, information only as far as we were concerned. That means we don't have to do anything about it, but maybe you do, honey."

  "Standing by," I said, studying the plastic housing of the radio.

  The sergeant chuckled. "Your sahib's charter captain would like to have a word with him when found. It's kind of urgent, 'cause the captain is righteously pissed off."

  "Yes, Base," I said. "Your signals received, strength ten."

  Sergeant Amanda Littleknees made an amused noise again, but this time it wasn't a chuckle. It was a downright giggle. "The thing is," she said, "his check for the charter fee for the Yuri Gagarin went bouncy-bouncy. Do you want to know what the bank said? You'd never guess. 'Insufficient funds,' that's what they said."

  The pain under my right lower ribs was permanent, but right then it seemed to get a lot worse. I gritted my teeth. "Ah, Sergeant Littleknees," I croaked. "Can you verify that estimate?"

  "Sorry, honey," she buzzed in my ear, "but there's no doubt in the world. The captain got a credit report on your Boyce Cochenour fellow, and it turned up n.g. When your customer gets back to the Spindle there'll be a warrant waiting for him."

  "Thank you for the synoptic estimate," I said hollowly. "I will verify departure time before we take off."

  And I turned off the radio and gazed at my rich billionaire client.

  "What the hell's the matter with you, Walthers?" he growled.

  But I wasn't hearing his voice. I was only hearing what my happy sawbones at the Quackery had told me. The equations were unforgettable. Cash = new liver + happy survival. No cash = total hepatic failure + death. And my cash supply had just dried up.

  X

  When you get a really big piece of news you have to let it trickle through your system and get thoroughly absorbed before you do anything about it. It isn't a matter of seeing the implications. I saw those right away, you bet I did. It's a matter of letting the system reach equilibrium.

  So I puttered for a few minutes. I listened to Tchaikovsky's swan hunters tooling up to meet the queen. I made sure the radio switch was off so as not to waste power. I checked the synoptic plot the thumpers were building up.

  It would have been nice if there had been something wonderful beginning to show on it, but, the way things were going, there wouldn't be, of course. There wasn't. A few pale echoes were beginning to form. But nothing with the shape of a Heechee tunnel, and nothing very bright. The data were still coming in, but I knew there was no way for those feeble plots to develop into the mother lode that could save us all, even crooked, dead-broke, bastard Cochenour.

  I even looked out at as much of the sky as I could manage through the windows, to see how the weather was. It didn't matter, but some of the big white calomel clouds were scudding among the purples and yellows of the other mercury halides; the sun was getting ready to rise in the west.

  It was beautiful, and I hated it.

  Cochenour had put away the last of his omelet and was watching me thoughtfully. So was Dorrie, back at the parts rack, once again holding the augers in their grease-paper wrap. I grinned at her. "Pretty," I said, referring to the music. The Auckland Philharmonic was just gett
ing to the part where the baby swans come out arm in arm and do a fast, bouncy pas de quatre across the stage. It has always been one of my favorite parts of Swan Lake . . . but not now.

  "We'll listen to the rest of it later," I said, and switched the player off.

  Cochenour snapped, "All right, Walthers. What's going on?"

  I sat down on an empty igloo pack and lit a cigarette, because one of the adjustments my internal system had made was to calculate that we didn't need to worry much about coddling our oxygen supply anymore. "There are some questions that have been bothering me, Cochenour. For one, how did you happen to get in touch with Professor Hegramet?"

  He grinned and relaxed. "Oh, is that all that's on your mind? No reason you shouldn't know that. I did a lot of checking on Venus before I came out here—why not?"

  "No reason, except you let me think you didn't know a thing."

  Cochenour shrugged. "If you had any brains at all you'd know I didn't get rich by being stupid. You think I'd travel umpty-million miles without knowing what I was going to find when I got here?"

  "No, you wouldn't, but you did your best to make me think you would. No matter. So you went looking for somebody who could point you to whatever was worth stealing on Venus, and then that person steered you to Hegramet. Then what? Did Hegramet tell you that I was dumb enough to be your boy?"

  Cochenour wasn't quite as relaxed, but he hadn't turned aggressive, either. He said mildly, "Hegramet did mention your name, yes. He told me you were as good a guide as any if I wanted to look for a virgin tunnel. Then he answered a lot of questions for me about the Heechee and so on. So, yes, I knew who you were. If you hadn't come to us I would have come to you; you just saved me the trouble."

  I said, feeling a little surprise as I said it, "You know, I think you're telling me the truth. Except that you left out one thing."

  "Which was?"

  "It wasn't the fun of making more money that you were after, was it? It was just money, right? Money that you needed pretty badly." I turned to Dorotha, standing frozen with the augers in her hands. "How about it, Dorrie? Did you know the old man was broke?"

  It wasn't too smart of me to put it to her like that. I saw what she was about to do just before she did it, and jumped off the igloo crate. I was a little too late. She dropped the augers before I could take them away from her, but fortunately they landed flat and the blades weren't chipped. I picked them up and put them away.

  She had answered the question well enough.

  "I see he didn't tell you about that," I said. "That's tough on you, doll. His check to the captain of the Gagarin is still bouncing, and I would imagine the one he gave me isn't going to be much better. I hope you got it all in fur and jewels, Dorrie. My advice to you is to hide them before the creditors want them back."

  She didn't ever look at me. She was only looking at Cochenour, whose expression was all the confirmation she needed.

  I don't know what I expected from her, rage or reproaches or tears. What she did was whisper, "Oh, Boyce, dear, I'm so sorry." And she went over and put her arms around him.

  I turned my back on them, because I wasn't enjoying looking at the way he was. The strapping ninety-year-old buck on Full Medical had turned into a defeated old man. For the first time since he'd walked cockily into the Spindle, he looked all of his age and maybe a little bit more. The mouth was half-open, trembling; the straight back was stooped; the bright blue eyes were watering. Dorrie stroked him and crooned to him, looking at me with an expression filled with pain.

  It had never occurred to me that she might really care about the guy.

  I turned and studied the synoptic web again, for lack of anything better to do. It was about as clear as it was ever going to get, and it was empty. We had a little overlap from one of our previous soundings, so I could tell that the interesting-looking scratches on one edge were nothing to get excited about. We'd checked them out already. They were only ghosts.

  There was no instant salvation waiting for us there.

  Curiously, I felt kind of relaxed. There is something tranquilizing about the realization that you don't have anything much to lose anymore. It puts things in a different perspective.

  I don't mean to say that I had given up. There were still things I could do. They didn't have much to do with prolonging my life anymore—that was one of the things I had had to readjust to—but then the taste in my mouth and the pain in my gut weren't letting me enjoy life very much anyway.

  One thing I could do was to write good old Audee Walthers off. Since only a miracle could keep me from that famous total hepatic collapse in a week or two, I could accept the fact that I wasn't going to be alive much longer. So I could use what time I had left for something else.

  What else? Well, Dorrie was not a bad kid. I could fly the airbody back to the Spindle, turn Cochenour over to the gendarmes, and spend my last couple of walking-around days introducing Dorrie to the people who could help her. Vastra or BeeGee would be willing to give her some kind of a start, maybe. She might not even have to go into prostitution or the rackets. The high season wasn't all that far off, and she had the kind of personality that might make a success out of a little booth of prayer fans and Heechee lucky pieces for the Terry tourists.

  Maybe that wasn't much, from anyone's point of view. But the captain of the Gagarin was surely not going to fly her back to Cincinnati for nothing, and scrounging in the Spindle beat starving. Somewhat.

  Then maybe I didn't really have to give up on myself, even? I thought about that for a bit. I could fling myself on the mercy of the Quackery. Conceivably they might let me have a new liver on credit. Why not?

  There was one good reason why not; namely, they never had.

  Or I could open the two-fuel valves and let them mix for ten minutes or so before hitting the igniter. The explosion wouldn't leave much of the airbody—or of us—and nothing at all of our various problems.

  Or—

  I sighed. "Oh, hell," I said. "Buck up, Cochenour. We're not dead yet."

  He looked at me for a moment to see if I'd gone crazy. Then he patted Dorrie's shoulder and pushed her away, gently enough. "I will be, soon enough. I'm sorry about all this, Dorotha. And I'm sorry about your check, Walthers; I expect you needed the money."

  "You have no idea."

  He said with some difficulty, "Do you want me to try to explain?"

  "I don't see that it makes any difference—but, yes," I admitted, "out of curiosity I do."

  It didn't take him long. Once he started, he was succinct and clear and he didn't leave any important things out—although actually 1 could have guessed most of it. (But hadn't. Hindsight is so much better.)

  The basic thing is that a man Cochenour's age has to be one of two things. Either he's very, very rich, or he's dead. Cochenour's trouble was that he was only quite rich. He'd done his best to keep all his industries going with a depleted cash flow of what was left after he siphoned off the costs of transplants and treatments, calciphylaxis and prosthesis, protein regeneration here, cholesterol flushing there, a million for this, a hundred grand a month for that . . . oh, it went fast enough. I could see that. "You just don't know," he said, not pitifully, just stating a fact, "what it takes to keep a hundred-year-old man alive until you try it."

  Oh, don't I just, I said, but not out loud. I let him go on with the story of how the minority stockholders were getting inquisitive and the federal inspectors were closing in . . . and so he skipped Earth to make his fortune all over again on Venus.

  But I wasn't listening attentively anymore by the time he got to the end of it. I didn't even pick up on the fact that he'd been lying about his age—imagine that vanity! Thinking it was better to say he was ninety!

  I had more important things to do than make Cochenour squirm anymore. Instead of listening I was writing on the back of a navigation form. When I was finished, I passed it over to Cochenour. "Sign it," I said.

  "What is it?"

  "Does it matter?
You don't have any choice that I can see. But what it is is a release from the all-rights section of our charter agreement. You acknowledge that the charter is void, that you have no claim, that your check was rubber, and that you voluntarily waive your ownership of anything we might find in my favor."

  He was frowning. "What's this bit at the end?"

  "That's where I agree to give you ten percent of my share of the profits on anything we find, if we do find anything worth money."

  "That's charity," he said, looking up at me. But he was already signing. "I don't mind taking a little charity, especially since, as you point out, I don't have any choice. But I can read that synoptic web over there as well as you can, Walthers. There's nothing on it to find."

  "No, there isn't," I agreed, folding the paper and putting it in my pocket. "That trace is as bare as your bank account. But we're not going to dig there. What we're going to do is go back and dig Site C."