“Now who’s wasting time? You’ve told me all this stuff before.” But her voice was still cheery.
So we climbed into the igloo and started work.
The first thing we had to do was to clear out some of the tailings that had already begun to accumulate where we’d left the drill going. The usual way, of course, is to reverse and redirect the augers. We couldn’t waste drilling time that way; it would have meant taking them away from cutting the shaft. We had to do it the hard way, namely manually.
It was hard, all right. Heatsuits are uncomfortable to begin with. When you have to work in them, they’re miserable. When the work is both hard physically and complicated by the cramped space inside an igloo that already contains two people and a working drill, it’s next to impossible.
We did it anyway.
Cochenour hadn’t lied to me about Dorrie. She was as good a partner as any man I’d ever had. The big question before us was whether that was going to be good enough. Because there was another question, which was bothering me more and more every minute, and that was whether I was still as good as a man.
Lord knew, I wasn’t feeling good. The headache was really pounding at me, and when I moved suddenly I found myself close to blacking out. It all seemed suspiciously like the prognosis they’d given me at the Quackery. To be sure, they’d promised me three weeks before acute hepatic failure, but that hadn’t been meant to include this sort of bone-breaking work. I had to figure that I was on plus time already.
That was a disconcerting way to figure.
Especially when the first ten hours went by . . . and I realized that our shaft was down lower than the soundings had shown the tunnel to be . . . and no luminous blue tailings had come in sight.
We were drilling a dry hole.
Now, if we had had plenty of time and the airbody close by, this would have been no more than an annoyance. Maybe a really big annoyance, sure, but nothing like a disaster. All it would have meant was that I’d get back into the airbody, clean up, get a good night’s sleep, eat a meal, and recheck the trace. Probably we were just digging in the wrong spot. All right, next step would be to dig in the right one. Study the terrain, pick a spot, ignite another igloo, start up the drills, and try, try again.
That’s what we would have done.
But we didn’t have any of those advantages. We didn’t have the airbody. We had no chance for food or a decent sleep. We were out of igloos. We didn’t have the trace to look at—and time was running out on us, and I was feeling lousier every minute.
I crawled out of the igloo, sat down in the next thing there was to the lee of the wind, and stared up at the scudding yellow-green sky. There ought to be something to do, if I could only think what it was.
I ordered myself to think.
Let’s see, I said to myself. Could I maybe uproot the igloo and move it to another spot?
No. That was a no-go. I could break the igloo loose with the augers, but the minute it was free the winds would catch it arid it would be good-bye, Charlie. I’d never see that igloo again. Plus there would be no way to make it gastight anyway.
Well, then, how about drilling without an igloo?
Possible, I judged. Pointless, though. Suppose we did hit lucky and hole in? Without a sealed igloo to lock out those ninety thousand millibars of hot, destructive air, we’d destroy anything fragile inside before we got a look at it.
I felt a nudge on my shoulder and discovered that Dorrie was sitting next to me. She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t try to say anything at all. I guess it was all clear enough without talking about it.
By my suit chronometer thirteen hours were gone. That left thirty-some before Cochenour would come back to get us. I didn’t see any point in spending it all sitting there.
But, on the other hand, I didn’t see any point in doing anything else.
Of course, I thought, I could always go to sleep for a while and then I woke up, and realized that that was what I had been doing.
Dorrie was curled up beside me, also asleep.
You may wonder how a person can sleep in the teeth of a south polar thermal gale. It isn’t all that hard. All it takes is that you be wholly worn out, and wholly despairing. Sleeping isn’t just to knit that old raveled sleave, it is a good way to shut the world off when the world is too lousy to face. As ours was. But Venus may be the last refuge of the Puritan ethic. On Venus you work. The ones who don’t feel that way get selected out early, because they don’t survive. It was crazy, of course. In any logical estimate I knew I was as good as dead, but I felt I had to be doing something. I eased away from Dorrie, making sure her suit was belted to the hold-tight ring at the base of the igloo, and stood up.
It took a great deal of concentration for me to be able to stand up. That was all right. It was almost as good as sleeping at keeping thoughts of the world out.
It occurred to me—I admit that even then it seemed like no more than an outside possibility—that something good had happened while Dorrie and I were asleep. Something like—oh, let’s say oh, maybe that there still might be eight or ten live Heechee in the tunnel . . . and maybe they’d heard us knocking and opened up the bottom of the shaft for us. So I crawled into the igloo to see if they had.
Nope. They hadn’t. I peered down the shaft to make sure, but it was still just a blind hole that disappeared into dirty dark at the end of the light from my head lamp. I swore at the inhospitable Heechee—for being nonexistent, I guess—and kicked some tailings down the hole onto their absent heads.
The Puritan ethic was itching at me somewhere. I wondered what I ought to be doing. I couldn’t think of too many choices. Die? Well, sure, but I was well on my way to doing that as fast as I could. Wasn’t there something constructive?
The Puritan ethic reminded me that you always ought to leave a place the way you found it, so I hauled the drills up on the eight-to-one winch and left them hanging neatly while I kicked some more tailings down the useless hole. When I had made enough space for a place to sit, I sat down and thought things over. I mused about what we had done wrong—not with a view toward doing it right, you see, but more like an old chess puzzle. How had we missed finding a tunnel?
After some time of cloudy cogitation, I thought I knew the answer to that. It had to do with what an autosonic trace was like. People like Dorrie and Cochenour have the idea that a seismic trace is like one of those underground maps of downtown Dallas that shows all the sewers and utility conduits and water pipes and subways, marked so if you need to get into one of them you can just dig down where it says and you’ll find what you want right there.
It isn’t exactly like that. The trace is more probabilistic. It comes out as a sort of hazy approximation. It is built up, minute by minute, by the echoes from the pinger. It looks like a band of spiderweb shadows, much wider than any actual tunnel would be and very fuzzy at the edges. When you look at the trace, you know that the best it’s telling you is that there’s something that makes the shadows. Maybe it’s a rock interface or a pocket of gravel. Hopefully it’s a Heechee dig. Whatever it is, it’s there somewhere, but you don’t know just where, exactly. If a tunnel is ten meters wide, which is fair average for a Heechee connecting link, the shadow trace is sure to look like fifty, and may appear to be a hundred.