Then they were both willing to tramp back and climb up the cable to the airbody. Cochenour made it on his own. So did Dorrie, though I was standing by to help her; she did it all hand over hand, using the stirrups spaced along the cable.
We cleaned up and made ourselves a meal. We had to eat, but Cochenour was not in a mood for his gourmet exhibition. Silently, Dorotha threw tablets into the cooker and we fed gloomily on prefabs.
“Well, that’s only the first one,” she said at last, determined to be sunny about it. “And it’s only our second day.”
Cochenour said, “Shut up, Dorrie. If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a good loser.” He was staring at the probe trace, still displayed on the screen.
“Walthers, how many tunnels are unmarked but empty, like this one?”
“How do I know? If they’re unmarked, there’s no record.”
“Then those traces don’t mean anything, do they? We might dig all eight and find every one a dud.”
I nodded. “We surely might, Boyce.”
He looked at me alertly. “And?”
“And that’s not the worst part of it. At least this trace was a real tunnel. I’ve taken parties out who would’ve gone mad with joy to open even a breached tunnel, after a couple of weeks of digging up dikes and intrusions. It’s perfectly possible all seven of those others are nothing at all. Don’t knock it, Boyce. At least you got some action for your money.”
He brushed that off. “You picked this spot, Walthers. Did you know what you were doing?”
Did I? The only way to prove that to him would be to find a live one, of course. I could have told him about the months of studying records from the first landings on. I could have mentioned how much trouble I went to, and how many regulations I broke to get a look at the military survey reports, or how far I’d traveled to talk to the Defense crews who’d been on some of the early digs. I might have let him know how hard it had been to locate old Jorolemon Hegramet, now teaching exotic archaeology back in Tennessee; but all I said was, “The fact that we found one tunnel shows that I know my business. That’s all you paid for. It’s up to you whether we keep looking or not.”
He gazed at his thumbnail, considering.
“Buck up, Boyce,” Dorrie said cheerfully. “Look at the other chances we’ve still got—and even if we miss, it’ll still be fun telling everybody about it back in Cincinnati.”
He didn’t even look at her, just said, “Isn’t there a way of telling whether or not a tunnel has been breached without going inside?”
“Sure. You can tell by tapping the outside shell. You can hear the difference in the sound.”
“But you have to dig down to it first?”
“Right.”
We left it at that. I got back into my heatsuit to strip away the now useless igloo so that we could move the drills.
I didn’t really want to discuss it anymore, because I didn’t want him to ask me a question I might have to lie about. I try the best I can to stick to the truth, because it’s easier to remember what you’ve said that way.
On the other hand, I’m not fanatic about it. I don’t see that it’s any of my business to correct a mistaken impression. For instance, obviously Cochenour supposed I hadn’t bothered to sound the tunnel before calling them in.
But, of course, I had. That was the first thing I did as soon as the drill got down that far. And when I heard the high-pressure thunk it broke my heart. I had to wait a couple of minutes before I could call them to announce that we’d reached the outer casing.
At that time I had not quite faced up to the question of just what I would have done if it had turned out the tunnel was Un-breached.
IX
Boyce Cochenour and Dorrie Keefer were maybe the fiftieth or sixtieth party I’d taken on a Heechee dig. I wasn’t surprised that they were willing to work like coolies. I don’t care how lazy and bored Terry tourists start out, by the time they actually come close to finding something that once belonged to an almost completely unknown alien race, left there when the closest thing to a human being on Earth was a slope-browed, furry little beast whose best trick was killing other beasts by hitting them on the head with antelope bones . . . by then they begin to burn with exploration fever.
So the two of them worked hard. And they drove me hard. And I was as eager as they. Maybe more so as the days went past and I found myself rubbing my right side, just under the short ribs, more and more of the time.
We got a couple looks from the Defense boys. They overflew us in their high-speed airbodies half a dozen times in the first few days. They didn’t say much, just formal radio requests for identification. Regulations say that if you find anything you’re supposed to report it right away. Over Cochenour’s objections I reported finding that first breached tunnel, which surprised them a little, I think.
That’s all we had to report.
Site B was a pegmatite dike. The other two fairly bright ones, that I called D and E, showed nothing at all when we dug—meaning that the sound reflections had probably been caused by nothing more than invisible interfaces in rock or ash or gravel.
I vetoed trying to dig Site C, the best looking of the bunch.
Cochenour gave me a hell of an argument about it, but I held out. The military were still looking in on us every now and then, and I didn’t want to get any closer to their perimeter than we already were. I said maybe, if we didn’t have any luck elsewhere, we could sneak back to C for a quick dig before returning to the Spindle, and we left it at that.
We lifted the airbody, moved to a new position, and set out a new pattern of probes.
By the end of the second week we had dug nine times and come up empty all nine. We were getting low on igloos and probe percussers. We’d run out of tolerance for each other completely.
Cochenour had turned sullen and savage. I hadn’t planned on being best buddies with the man when I first met him, but I hadn’t expected him to be as bad company as that. I didn’t think he had any right to take it so hard, because it was obviously only a game with him. With all his fortune, the extra money he might pick up by discovering some new Heechee artifacts couldn’t have meant much—just extra points on a scorepad—but he was playing for blood.
I wasn’t particularly gracious myself, for that matter. The plain fact was that the pills from the Quackery weren’t helping as much as they should. My mouth tasted as though rats had nested in it, I was getting headaches, and every once in a while I’d be woozy enough to knock things over.
See, the thing about the liver is that it sort of regulates your internal diet. It filters out poisons. It converts some of the carbohydrates into other carbohydrates that you can use. It patches together amino acids into proteins.
If it isn’t working, you die.
The doctor had been all over it with me. Maze-rats get liver trouble a lot; it comes when you save yourself a little trouble by letting your internal suit pressure build up—it sort of compresses the gas in your gut and squeezes the liver. He’d showed me pictures. I could visualize what was going on in my insides, with the mahogany-red liver cells dying and being replaced by clusters of fat and yellowish stuff. It was an ugly picture. The ugliest part was that there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Only go on taking pills—and they wouldn’t work much longer. I counted the days to bye-bye, liver, hello, hepatic failure.
So we were a bad bunch. I was being a bastard because I was beginning to feel sick and desperate. Cochenour was being a bastard because that was his nature. The only decent human being aboard was the girl.
Dorrie did her best, she really did. She was sometimes sweet (and often even pretty), and she was always ready to meet the power people, Cochenour and me, more than halfway.