The radio buzzed and then blared. “Unidentified vessel at one three five, zero seven, four eight, and seven two, five one, five four! Please identify yourself and state your purpose.”
Cochenour looked up inquiringly from his gin game with the girl. I smiled reassuringly. “As long as they’re saying 'please' there’s no problem,” I told him, and opened the transmitter.
“This is pilot Audee Walthers, airbody Poppa Tare Nine One, out of the Spindle. We are licensed and have filed approved flight plans. I have two Terry tourists aboard, purpose recreational exploration.”
“Acknowledged. Please wait,” blared the radio. The military always broadcasts at maximum gain. Hangover from drill-sergeant days, no doubt.
I turned off the microphone and told my passengers, “They’re checking our flight plan. Nothing to worry about.”
In a moment the Defense communicator came back, loud as ever. “You are eleven point four kilometers bearing two eight three degrees from terminator of a restricted area. Proceed with caution. Under Military Regulations One Seven and One Eight, Sections—”
“I know the drill,” I cut in. “I have my guide’s license and have explained the restrictions to the passengers.”
“Acknowledged,” blared the radio. “We will keep you under surveillance. If you observe vessels or parties on the surface, they are our perimeter teams. Do not interfere with them in any way. Respond at once to any request for identification or information.” The carrier buzz cut off.
“They act nervous,” Cochenour said.
“No. That’s how they always are. They’re used to seeing people like us around. They’ve got nothing else to do with their time, that’s all. “Dorrie said hesitantly, “Audee, you told them you’d explained the restrictions to us. I don’t remember that part.”
“Oh, I explained them, all right. We stay out of the restricted area, because if we don’t they’ll start shooting. That is the Whole of the Law.”
VII
I set a wake-up for four hours, and the others heard me moving around and got up, too. Dorrie fetched us coffee from the warmer, and we stood drinking it and looking at the patterns the probe computer had traced.
I took several minutes to study them, although the patterns were clear enough at first look. They showed eight major anomalies that could have been Heechee warrens. One was almost right outside our door. We wouldn’t have to move the airbody to dig for it.
I showed them the anomalies, one by one. Cochenour just studied them thoughtfully. Dorotha asked, “You mean all of those blobs are unexplored tunnels?”
“No. Wish they were. But even if they were: One, any or all of them could have been explored by somebody who didn’t go to the trouble of recording it. Two, they don’t have to be tunnels. They could be fracture faults, or dikes, or little rivers of some kind of molten material that ran out of somewhere and hardened and got covered over a billion years ago. The only thing we know for sure so far is that there probably aren’t any unexplored tunnels in this area except in those eight places.”
“So what do we do?”
“We dig. And then we see what we’ve got.”
Cochenour asked, “Where do we dig?”
I pointed right next to the bright delta shape of our airbody. “Right here.”
“Is that the best bet?”
“Well, not necessarily.” I considered what to tell him and decided to experiment with the truth. “There are three traces altogether that look like better bets than the others—here, I’ll mark them.” I keyed the chart controls, and the three good traces immediately displayed letters: A, B, and C. “A is the one that runs right under the arroyo here, so we’ll dig it first.”
“The brightest ones are best, is that it?”
I nodded.
“But C over here is the brightest of the lot. Why don’t we dig that first?” I chose my words carefully. “Partly because we’d have to move the airbody. Partly because it’s on the outside perimeter of the survey area; that means the results aren’t as reliable as right around the ship. But those aren’t the most important reasons. The most important reason is that C is on the edge of the line our itchy-fingered Defense friends are telling us to stay away from.”
Cochenour snickered incredulously. “Are you telling me that if you find a real untouched Heechee tunnel you’ll stay out of it just because some soldier tells you it’s a no-no?”
I said, “The problem doesn’t arise. We have seven legal anomalies to look at. Also—the military will be checking us from time to time. Particularly in the next day or two.”
“All right,” Cochenour insisted, “suppose we come up empty on the legal ones. What then?”
“I never borrow trouble.”
“But suppose.”
“Damn it, Boyce! How do I know?”
He gave it up then, but winked at Dorrie and chuckled. “What did I tell you, honey? He’s a bigger bandit than I am!”
But she was looking at me, and what she said was “Why are you that color?” I fobbed her off, but when I looked in the mirror I could see that even the whites of my eyes were turning yellowish.
The next few hours we were too busy to talk about theoretical possibilities. We had some concrete facts to worry about.
The biggest concrete fact was an awful lot of high-temperature, high-pressure gas that we had to keep from killing us. That was what the heatsuits were for. My own suit was custom-made, of course, and needed only the fittings and tanks to be checked. Boyce and the girl had rental units. I’d paid top dollar for them, and they were good. But good isn’t perfect. I had them in and out of the suits half a dozen times, checking the fit and making adjustments until they were as right as I could get them. The suits were laminated twelve-ply, with nine degrees of freedom at the essential joints, and their own little fuel batteries. They wouldn’t fail. I wasn’t worried about failure. What I was worried about was comfort, because a very small itch or rub can get serious when there’s no way to stop it.
Finally they were good enough for a trial. We all huddled in the lock and opened the port to the surface of Venus.
We were still in darkness, but there’s so much scatter from the sun that it doesn’t get really dark ever. I let them practice walking around the airbody, leaning into the wind, bracing themselves against the hold-downs and the side of the ship, while I got ready to dig.
I hauled out our first instant igloo, dragged it into position, and ignited it. As it smoldered it puffed up like the children’s toy that used to be called a Pharaoh’s Serpent, producing a light yet tough ash that grew up around the digging site and joined in a seamless dome at the top. I had already emplaced the digging torch and the crawl-through lock. As the ash grew I manhandled the lock to get a close union and managed to get a perfect join the first time.
Dorrie and Cochenour stayed out of the way, watching from the ship through their plug windows. Then I keyed the radio on.
“You want to come in and watch me start it up?” I shouted.
Inside the helmets, they both nodded their heads; I could just see the bobbing motion through the plugs. “Come on, then,” I yelled, and wiggled through the crawl lock. I signed for them to leave it open as they followed me in.
With the three of us and the digging equipment in it, the igloo was even more crowded than the airbody had been. They backed away as far from me as they could get, bent against the arc of the igloo wall, while I started up the augers, checked that they were vertical, and watched the first castings begin to spiral out of the cut.
The foam igloo reflects a lot of sound and absorbs even more. All the same, the din inside the igloo was a lot worse than in the howling winds outside; cutters are noisy. When I thought they’d seen enough to satisfy them for the moment, I waved them out of the crawl-through, followed, sealed it behind us, and led them back into the airbody.