So where do you dig?
That’s where the art of prospecting comes in. You have to make an informed guess.
Maybe you dig in the exact geometrical center—as it is given you to see where the center is. That’s the easiest way. Or maybe you dig where the shadows are densest, which is the way the most experienced prospectors do. That works as well as anything else.
But that’s not good enough for smart, skilled old Audee Walthers. I do it my own way. What I do, I try to think like a Heechee. I look at the trace as a whole and try to see what points the Heechee might have been trying to connect. Then I plot an imaginary course between them, where I would have put the tunnel if I’d been the Heechee engineer in charge, and I dig where I would have planted the thing in the first place.
That’s what I had done. Evidently I had done it wrong.
Of course, there was one good way I could have gone wrong: the trace could have been a pocket of gravel.
That was a really good possible explanation, but not a useful one. If there had never been a tunnel there in the first place we were just all out of luck. What I wanted was a more hopeful answer, and in a fuzzy-brained sort of way, I began to think I saw one.
I visualized the way the trace had looked on the scope. I had set the airbody down as close to that as I could manage.
Then, of course, I couldn’t dig right there, because the airbody was on top of it. So I’d set the igloo up a few meters upslope.
I began to believe that those few meters were what made us miss.
That fuzzy conjecture pleased my fuzzy brain. It explained everything. It was admirable of me, I told myself, to figure it all out in my present state. Of course, I couldn’t see that it made any practical difference. If I’d had another igloo I would have been glad to move back to where the airbody had been and try again, assuming I could live long enough to get all that done. But that didn’t mean much, because I didn’t have another igloo.
So I sat on the edge of the dark shaft, nodding approvingly to myself over the intelligent way I had thought the problem through, dangling my legs, and now and then sweeping some tailings back in. I think all that was part of some kind of death wish, because I know that I thought, every once in a while, that the nicest thing for me to do just then would be to jump in and pull the tailings down over me.
But the Puritan ethic didn’t want me to do that.
Anyway, I would have only solved my own personal problem that way. It wouldn’t have done a thing for young Dorotha Keefer, snoring away outside in the thermal gale. I worried about Dorotha Keefer. I wanted something better for her than a life of chancy, sordid scrounging in the Spindle. She was too sweet and kind and—It struck me as a revelation that one of the reasons for my hostility to Boyce Cochenour had been that he had Dorrie Keefer and I didn’t. That was kind of interesting to think about, too. Suppose, I thought, tasting the bad flavors inside my mouth and feeling my head begin to pound—suppose Cochenour’s suit had ruptured when the drill fell on him and he had died right there. Suppose (going a little farther) we’d then found the tunnel, and it was all we wanted from it, and we went back to the Spindle and got rich, and Dorrie and I had—I spent a lot of time thinking about what Dorrie and I might have done if things had gone just a little different way and all that had happened to be true.
But they hadn’t, and it wasn’t.
I kicked some more scraps down into the shaft. The tunnel, I was now pretty well convinced, couldn’t be more than a few meters away from where that shaft had bottomed out empty. I thought of climbing down into it and scraping away with my gloves.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
I’m not sure how much of what I was thinking was plain daydreamy whimsy, and how much the bizarre delusions of a very sick man. I kept thinking strange things. I thought how nice it would be if there were Heechee still in there, and when I climbed down to scratch my way to the tunnel I could just knock on the first blue wall material I came to and they’d open it up and let me in.
That would have been very nice. I even had a picture of what they were going to look like: sort of friendly and godlike. Maybe they would wear togas and offer me scented wines and rare fruits. Maybe they could even speak English, so I could talk to them and ask some of the questions that were on my mind.
“Heechee, what did you really use the prayer fans for?” I could ask him. Or, “Listen, Heechee, I hate to be a nuisance, but do you have anything in your medicine chest that will keep me from dying?” Or, “Heechee, I’m sorry we messed up your front yard, and I’ll try to clean it up for you.”
Maybe it was that last thought that made me push more of the tailings back into the shaft. I didn’t have anything better to do. And, who could tell, maybe they’d appreciate it.
After a while I had it more than half full and I’d run out of tailings, except for the ones that were pushed outside the igloo. I didn’t have the strength to go after them. I looked for something else to do. I reset the augers, replaced the dull blades with the last sharp ones we had, pointed them in the general direction of a twenty-degree offset angle downslope, and turned them on.
It wasn’t until I noticed that Dorrie was standing next to me, helping me steady the augers for the first meter or two of cut, that I realized I had made a plan. I didn’t remember it. I didn’t even remember when Dorrie had wakened and come into the igloo.
It probably wasn’t a bad plan, I thought. Why not try an offset cut? Did we have any better way to spend our time?
We did not. We cut.
When the drills stopped bucking in our hands and settled down to chew through the rock and we could leave them, I cleared a space at the side of the igloo and shoved tailings out for a while. Then we just sat there, watching the drills spit rock chips out of the new hole. We didn’t speak.
Presently I fell asleep again.
I didn’t wake up until Dorrie pounded on my helmet. We were buried in tailings. They glowed blue, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.
The augers must have been scratching at the Heechee wall material for an hour or more. They had actually worn pits into it.
When we looked down, we could see the round, bright, blue eye of the tunnel staring up at us. She was a beauty, all right.
We didn’t speak.
Somehow I managed to kick and wriggle my way through the drift to the crawl-through. I got the lock closed and sealed, after kicking a couple of cubic meters of rock outside.
Then I began fumbling through the pile of refuse for the flame drills.
Ultimately I found them. Somehow. Ultimately I managed to get them shipped and primed.
We ducked back out of range as I fired them. I watched the bright spot of light that bounced out of the shaft make a pattern on the roof of the igloo.
Then there was a sudden, short scream of gas, and a clatter as the loose fragments at the bottom of the shaft dropped free.
We had cut into the Heechee tunnel.
It was unbreached and waiting for us. Our beauty was a virgin. We took her maidenhead with all love and reverence and entered into her.
XII
I must have blacked out again, because when I realized where I was I was on the floor of the tunnel. My helmet was open. So were the side-zips of my heatsuit. I was breathing stale, foul air that had to be a quarter of a million years old and smelled every minute of it. But it was air.
It was denser than Earth-normal and a lot less humid, but the partial pressure of oxygen was close enough to the same. I was proving that by the fact that I had been breathing it without dying.