And along about the same time, the humans who lived on this little green planet called Earth finally reached the point where they could get off it for the first time. The age of human exploration of space had begun.
In a sense, this was a happy coincidence. By the time human beings reached the point of being able to launch a spaceship, it may well have been true that it was also getting to be a good time to think seriously about leaving the Earth, for good. The Earth was a pretty good place to be rich in. It was a very bad one to be poor.
By then, of course, the people who had dropped in on the australopithecines were long gone.
In their yearning quest for some other intelligent race to talk to they had surveyed more than half the galaxy. Actually, there were some successes, or almost successes. They did find a few promising species—well, at least as promising as the poor, dumb australopithecines.
Probably the race that came closest to what they were looking for were the ones they called the Slow Swimmers. These people (no, they didn’t look a bit like “people,” but in fairness that was more or less what they were) lived in the dense liquid-gas atmosphere of a heavy planet. The Slow Swimmers had language, at least. In fact, they sang beautiful, endless songs in their language, which the visitors finally managed to puzzle out enough to understand. The Slow Swimmers even had cities—sort of cities—well, what they had was domiciles and public structures that floated around in the soupy mud they lived in. The Slow Swimmers weren’t a lot of fun to talk to, but the main reason for that was that they were, you’d better believe it, really slow. If you tried to talk to them you had to wait a week for them to get out a word, a year to finish the first few bars of one of their songs—and a couple of lifetimes, anyway, to carry on a real conversation. That wasn’t the Slow Swimmers’ fault. They lived at such a low temperature that everything they did was orders of magnitude slower than warm-blooded oxygen-breathers like human beings—or like the visitors from space. Then the visitors found someone else . . . and that was a whole other thing, and a very scary one.
They stopped looking after that.
When human beings went into space they had their own agenda, which wasn’t quite the same as the purposes of their ancient visitors. The humans weren’t really looking for other intelligences, at least not in the same way. The human telescopes and probe rockets had told them long ago that no intelligent aliens were going to be found, at least in their own solar system—and they had little hope of going any farther than that.
The humans might well have looked for their long-ago visitors if they had had any idea they existed. But, of course, they didn’t.
Maybe the best way to find another intelligent race is to be lucky rather than purposeful. When human beings got to the planet Venus it didn’t look very promising. The first humans to look at it didn’t “look"—no one could see very far through its miserably dense and murky air—they just circled around it in orbit, feeling for surface features with radar. What they found wasn’t encouraging. Certainly when the first human rockets landed beside the Rift Valley of Aphrodite Terra and the first parties began to explore the inhospitable surface of Venus they had no hope of finding life there.
And, sure enough, they didn’t. But then, in a part of Venus called Aino Planitia, a geologist made a discovery. There was a fissure—call it a tunnel, though at first they thought it might be a lava tube—under the surface of the planet. It was long, it was regular . . . and it had no business being there.
The Venusian explorers, without warning, had found the first signs of that half-million-year-ago visit . . .
PART TWO: THE MERCHANTS OF VENUS
I
My name is Audee Waithers, my job: airbody driver, my home: on Venus—in the Spindle or in a Heechee hut most of the time; wherever I happen to be when I feel sleepy otherwise.
Until I was twenty-five I lived on Earth, mostly in Amarillo Central. My father was deputy governor of Texas. He died when I was still in college, but he left me enough in civil-service dependency benefits for me to finish school, get a master’s in business administration, and pass the journeyman’s examination as clerk-typist in the Service. So I was set up for life, or so most people would have thought.
After I had tried it for a few years, I made a discovery. I didn’t like the life I was set up for. It wasn’t so much for the reasons anyone might expect. Amarillo Central wasn’t all that bad. I don’t mind having to wear a smog suit, can get along with neighbors even when there are eight thousand of them to the square mile, tolerate noise, can defend myself against the hoodlum kid gangs—no, it wasn’t Texas itself that bothered me. It was what I was doing with my life in Texas, and, for that matter, what I would have to be doing with it anywhere else on Earth.
So I got out.
I sold my UOPWA journeyman’s card to a woman who had to mortgage her parents’ room to pay for it; I mortgaged my own pension accrual; I took the little bit of money I had saved in the bank . . . and I bought a one-way ticket to Venus. There wasn’t anything strange about that. It was what every kid tells himself he’s going to do when he grows up. The difference is that I did it.
I suppose it would all have been different if I’d had any chance at Real Money. If my father had been full governor, with all those chances for payoffs and handouts, instead of being just a civil-service flunky . . . If the dependency benefits he’d left me had included unlimited Full Medical . . . If I’d been at the top of the heap instead of stuck in the oppressed middle, squeezed from both directions.
It didn’t happen that way. So I took the pioneer route and wound up trying to make a living out of Terrestrial tourists in Venus’s main place, the Spindle. Everybody has seen pictures of the Spindle, just as with the Colosseum and Niagara Falls. The difference, of course, is that the only view you ever get of the Spindle is from inside it. It’s under the surface of Venus, in a place called Alpha Regio.
Like everything worth looking at on Venus, the Spindle was something left over by the Heechee. Nobody had ever figured out exactly what it was the Heechee wanted with an underground chamber three hundred meters long and spindle-shaped, but there it was. So we used it. It was the closest thing Venus had to a Times Square or a Champs Elysйes. All Terry tourists head first for the Spindle, so that’s where we start fleecing them.
My own airbody-rental business is reasonably legitimate, as tourist ventures go on Venus—I mean, at least it is if you don’t count the fact that there isn’t really much worth seeing on Venus that wasn’t left there, under the surface, by the Heechee. All the other tourist traps in the Spindle are reasonably crooked. Terries don’t seem to mind that. They must know they’re being taken, though. They all load up on Heechee prayer fans and doll-heads, and those paperweights of transparent plastic in which a contoured globe of Venus swims in a kind of orangy-browny snowstorm of make-believe blood-diamonds, fire-pearls, and fly ash. None of the souvenirs are worth the price of their mass charge back to Earth, but to a tourist who can get up the price of the interplanetary passage in the first place I don’t suppose that matters.