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 studied 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 of 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.
So what we talked about was the probes. About how they would fire percussive charges into the Venusian rock and time the returning echoes. And about what the chances were of finding something really good. (“Well, what are the chances of winning a sweepstakes? For any individual ticket holder they’re bad. But there’s always one winner somewhere!”) And about what had made me come to Venus in the first place. I mentioned my father’s name, but she’d never heard of the deputy governor of Texas. Too young, no doubt. Anyway she had been born and bred in southern Ohio, where Cochenour had worked as a kid and to which he’d returned as a billionaire. She told me, without my urging, how he’d been building a new processing center there, and how many headaches that had been—trouble with the unions, trouble with the banks, bad trouble with the government—and so he’d decided to take a good long time off to loaf. I looked over to where he was stirring up a sauce and said, “He loafs harder than anybody else I ever saw.”
“He’s a work addict, Audee. I imagine that’s how he got rich in the first place.” The airbody lurched, and I dropped everything to jump for the controls. I heard Cochenour howl behind me, but I was busy locating a better transit-level. By the time I had climbed a thousand meters and reset the autopilot he was rubbing his wrist and swearing at me.
“Sorry,” I said.
He said dourly, “I don’t mind your scalding the skin off my arm. I can always buy more skin, but you nearly made me spill the gravy.
I checked the virtual globe. The bright ship marker was two-thirds of the way to our destination. “Is lunch about ready?” I asked. “We’ll be there in an hour.”
For the first time he looked startled. “So soon? I thought you said this thing was subsonic.”
“I did. You’re on Venus, Mr. Cochenour. At this level the speed of sound is a lot faster than on Earth.”
He looked thoughtful, but all he said was “Well, we can eat any minute.” Later he said, while we were finishing up, “I think maybe I don’t know as much about this planet as I might. If you want to give us the guide’s lecture, we’ll listen.”
“You already know the outlines,” I told him. “Say, you’re a great cook, Mr. Cochenour. I know I packed all the provisions, but I don’t even know what this is I’m eating.”
“If you come to my office in Cincinnati,” he said, “you can ask for Mr. Cochenour, but while we’re living in each other’s armpits you might as well call me Boyce. And if you like the fricassee, why aren’t you eating it?”
The answer was, because it might kill me. I didn’t want to get into a discussion that might lead to why I needed his fee so badly. “Doctor’s orders,” I said, “Have to lay off the fats for a while. I think he thinks I’m putting on too much weight.”
Cochenour looked at me appraisingly, but all he said was “The lecture?”
“Well, let’s start with the most important part,” I said, carefully pouring coffee. “While we’re inside this airbody you can do what you like—walk around, eat, drink, smoke if you got 'em, whatever. The cooling system is built for more than three times this many people, plus their cooking and appliance loads, with a safety factor of two. Air and water, more than we’d need for two months. Fuel, enough for three round trips plus maneuvering. If anything went wrong we’d yell for help and somebody would come and get us in a couple of hours at the most. Probably it would be the Defense boys, because they’re closest and they have really fast airbodies. The worst thing would be if the hull breached and the whole Venusian atmosphere tried to come in. If that happened fast we’d just be dead. It never happens fast, though. We’d have time to get into the suits, and we can live in them for thirty hours. Long before that we’d be picked up.”
“Assuming, of course, that nothing went wrong with the radio at the same time.”
“Right. Assuming that. You know that you can get killed anywhere, if enough accidents happen at once.” He poured himself another cup of coffee and tipped a little brandy into it. “Go on.”