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 bed-mate 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.