It was obvious that it was tough on her. Dorotha Keefer was only a kid. No matter how grown-up she acted, she just hadn’t been alive long enough to grow defenses against concentrated meanness. Add in the fact that we were all beginning to hate the sight and sound and smell of each other (and in an airbody you get to know a lot about how people smell), and there wasn’t much joy in this skylarking tour of Venus for Dorrie Keefer.
Or for any of us . . . especially after I broke the news that we were down to our last igloo.
Cochenour cleared his throat. It wasn’t a polite sound. It was the beginning of a war cry. He sounded like a fighter-plane jockey blowing the covers off his guns in preparation for combat, and Dorrie tried to head him off with a diversion. “Audee,” she said brightly, “do you know what I think we could do? We could go back to that Site C, the one that looked good near the military reservation.”
It was the wrong diversion. I shook my head. “No.”
“What the hell do you mean, 'No'?” Cochenour rumbled, revving up for battle.
“What I said. No. It’s too close to the Defense guys. If there’s a tunnel, it will run right onto the reservation, and they’ll come down on us.” I tried to be persuasive. “That’s a desperation trick, and I’m not that desperate.”
“Walthers,” he snarled, “you’ll be desperate if I tell you to be desperate. I can still stop payment on that check.”
I corrected him. “No, you can’t. The union won’t let you. The regulations are very clear about that. You pay up unless I disobey a lawful request. What you want isn’t lawful. Going inside the military reservation is extremely against the law.”
He shifted over to cold war. “No,” he said softly. “You’re wrong about that. It’s only against the law if a court says it is, after we do it. You’re only right if your lawyers are smarter than my lawyer. Honestly, Walthers, they won’t be. I pay my lawyers to be the smartest there are.”
I was not in a good bargaining position. It wasn’t just that what Cochenour said was true enough. He had help from a very powerful ally. My liver was on his side. I certainly could not spare time for arbitration, because without the transplant his payment was going to buy I wouldn’t live that long. Dorrie had been listening with her birdlike air of friendly interest. She got between us. “Well, then, how about this? We just got to where we are now. Why don’t we wait and see what the probes show? Maybe we’ll hit something even better than that Site C—”
“There isn’t going to be anything good here,” he said without taking his eyes off me.
“Why, Boyce, how do you know that? We haven’t even finished the soundings. “He said, “Look, Dorotha, listen close this one time and then shut up. Walthers is playing games with me. Do you see where we just put down?”
He brushed past me and tapped out the command for a full map display, which somewhat surprised me. I hadn’t known he knew how. The charts sprang up. They showed the virtual images of our position and of the shafts we’d already cut, and the great irregular border of the military reservation—all overlaid on the plot of mascons and navigation aids.
“Do you see the picture? We’re not even in the high-density mass-concentration areas now. Isn’t that true, Walthers? Are you saying we’ve tried all the good locations around here and come up dry?”
“No,” I said. “That is, you’re partly right, Mr. Cochenour. Only partly; I’m not playing any games with you. This site is a good possibility. You can see it on the map. It’s true that we’re not right over any mascon, but we’re right between those two right there, that are pretty close together. That’s a good sign. Sometimes you find a dig that connects two complexes, and it has happened that the connecting passage was closer to the surface there than any other part of the system. I can’t guarantee that we’ll hit anything here. But it’s worth a gamble.”
“It’s just damn unlikely, right?”
“Well, no more unlikely than anywhere else. I told you a week ago, you got your money’s worth the first day, just finding any Heechee tunnel at all. Even a spoiled one. There are maze-rats in the Spindle who went five years without seeing that much.” I thought for a minute. “I’ll make a deal with you,” I offered.
“I’m listening.”
“We’re already on the ground here. There’s at beast a chance we can hit something. Let’s try. We’ll deploy the probes and see what they turn up. If we get a good trace we’ll dig it. If not . . . well, then I’ll think about going back to Site C.”
“Think about it!” he roared.
“Don’t push me, Cochenour. You don’t know what you’re getting into. The military reservation is not to be fooled with. Those boys shoot first and ask later, and there aren’t any policemen around to holler for help.”
“I don’t know,” he said after a moment’s glowering thought.
“No,” I told him, “you don’t, Mr. Cochenour. I do. That’s what you’re paying me for.”
He nodded. “Yes, you probably do know, Walthers, but whether you’re telling me the truth about what you know is another question. Hegramet never said anything about digging between mascons.”
And then he looked at me with a completely opaque expression, waiting to see whether I would catch him up on what he’d just said.
I didn’t respond. I gave him an opaque look back. I didn’t say a word. I only waited to see what would come next. I was pretty sure it would not be any sort of explanation of how he happened to know Professor Hegramet’s name, or what dealings he had had with the greatest Earthside authority on Heechee diggings. It wasn’t.
“Put out your probes,” he said at last. “We’ll try it your way one more time.”
I plopped the probes out, got good penetration on all of them, and started firing the noisemakers. Then I sat watching the first lines of the cast build up on the scan, as though I expected them to carry useful information. They weren’t going to for quite a while, but I wanted to think privately for a bit. Cochenour needed to be thought about. He hadn’t come to Venus just for the ride. He had planned to dig for Heechee tunnels before he ever left the Earth. He had gone to the trouble of briefing himself even on the instruments he would encounter in an airbody.
My sales talk about Heechee treasures had been wasted on a customer whose mind had been made up to buy at least half a year earlier and tens of millions of miles away.
I understood all that. But the more I understood, the more I saw that I didn’t understand. I wished I could slip Cochenour a couple of bucks and send him off to the games parlors for a while, so I could talk privately to the girl. Unfortunately there wasn’t anywhere to send him. I forced a yawn, complained about the boredom of waiting for the probe traces to build up, and suggested we all take a nap. Not that I would have been real confident he would be the one to turn in—but he didn’t even listen. All I got out of that ploy was an offer from Dorrie to watch the screen and wake me up if anything interesting developed.
So I said the hell with it and turned in myself.
I didn’t sleep well, because while I was lying there, waiting for sleep to happen, it gave me time to notice how truly lousy I was beginning to feel, and in how many different ways. There was a sort of permanent taste of bile in the back of my mouth—not so much as though I wanted to throw up as it was as though I just had. My head ached. My eyes were getting woozy; I was beginning to see ghost images wandering fuzzily around my field of vision. I roused myself to take a couple of my pills. I didn’t count the ones that were left. I didn’t want to know.
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 wide-awake 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?”