Next to me on the floor was Dorrie Keefer.
Her helmet was open, too. The blue Heechee wall light didn’t flatter her complexion, so she looked about as ghastly as a pretty girl can. At first I wasn’t sure she was breathing. But in spite of the way she looked, her pulse was going, her lungs were functioning, and when she felt me poking at her she opened her eyes.
“God, I’m beat,” she said. “But we made it!”
I didn’t say anything. She’d said it all for both of us. We sat there, grinning foolishly at each other, looking like Halloween masks in the blue Heechee glow. That was about all I was able to do just then. I was feeling very light-headed. I had my hands full just comprehending the fact that I was alive. I didn’t want to endanger that odds-against precarious fact by moving around.
I wasn’t comfortable, though, and after a moment I realized that I was very hot. I closed up my helmet to shut out some of the heat, but the smell inside was so bad that I opened it again, figuring that the heat was better. It then occurred to me to wonder why the heat was only unpleasant, instead of instantly, incineratingly fatal.
Energy transport through a Heechee wall-material surface is slow, but not hundreds of thousands of years slow. My sad, sick old brain ruminated that thought around for a while and finally staggered to a conclusion: At least until quite recently, maybe some centuries or thousands of years at most, this tunnel had been kept artificially cool. So, I told myself sagely, there had to be some sort of automatic machinery. Wow, I said to myself. That ought to be worth finding all by itself. Broken down or not, it could be the kind of thing fortunes are built on
And that made me remember why we had come there in the first place. I looked up the corridor and down, hungry for the first site of the Heechee loot that might make us all well again.
When I was a schoolkid in Amarillo Central, my favorite teacher was a crippled lady named Miss Stevenson. She used to tell us stories out of Bulfinch and Homer.
Miss Stevenson spoiled one whole weekend for me with the sad story of one Greek fellow whose biggest ambition was to become a god. I gathered that was a fairly ordinary goal for a bright young Greek in those days, though I’m not sure how often they made it. This man started out with a few big steps up the ladder—he was already a king, of a little place in Lydia—but he wanted more. He wanted divinity. The gods even let him come to Olympus, and it looked as though he had it made . . . until he fouled up.
I don’t remember the details of what he did wrong, except that it had something to do with a dog and some nasty trick he played on one of the gods by getting him to eat his own son. (Those Greeks had pretty primitive ideas of humor, I guess.) Whatever it was, they punished him for it. What he got was solitary confinement—for eternity—and he served it standing neck deep in a cool lake in hell but unable to drink. Every time he opened his lips the water pulled away. The fellow’s name was Tantalus . . . and in that Heechee tunnel I thought I had a lot in common with him.
We found the treasure trove we were looking for, all right. But we couldn’t reach it.
It seemed that what we had dug into wasn’t the main tunnel after all. It was a sort of right-angled detour in the tunnel, and it was blocked at both ends.
“What do you suppose it is?” Dorrie asked wistfully, trying to peer through the gaps in the ten-ton slabs of Heechee metal before us. “Do you suppose it could be that weapon you were talking about?”
I blinked my fuzzy eyes. There were machines of all kinds there, and irregular mounds of things that might have been containers for other things, and some objects that seemed to have rotted and spilled their contents, also rotted, on the floor. But we hadn’t the strength to get at them. I stood there with my helmet pressed against the side of one of the slabs, feeling like Alice peering into her tiny garden without the bottle of drink-me. “All I know for sure,” I said, “is that, whatever it is, there’s more of it there than anybody ever found before.”
And I slumped to the floor, exhausted and sick and, all the same, feeling very contented with the world.
Dorrie sat down next to me, in front of that barred gate to Eden, and we rested for a moment.
“Gram would’ve been pleased,” she murmured.
“Oh, sure,” I agreed, feeling a little drunk. “Gram?”
“My grandmother,” she explained, and then maybe I blacked out again. When I heard what she was saying again, she was talking about how her grandmother had refused to marry Cochenour, long and long ago. It seemed to matter to Dorotha Keefer, so I tried politely to pay attention, but some of it didn’t make a lot of sense.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “She didn’t want him because he was poor?”
“No, no! Not because he was poor, although he was that. Because he was going off to the oil fields, and she wanted somebody steadier. Like my grandfather. And then when Boyce came by a year ago—”
“He gave you a job,” I said, nodding to show I was following, “as his girlfriend.”
“No, damn it!” she said, annoyed with me. “In his office. The other part came later. We fell in love.”
“Oh, right,” I said. I wasn’t looking for an argument.
She said stiffly, “He’s really a sweet man, Audee. Outside of business, I mean. And he would’ve done anything for me.”
“He could’ve married you,” I pointed out, just to keep the conversation going.
“No, Audee,” she said seriously, “he couldn’t. He wanted to get married. I was the one who said no.”
She turned down all that money? I blinked at her. I didn’t have to ask the question; she knew what it was.
“When I marry,” she said, “I want kids, and Boyce wouldn’t hear of it. He said if I’d caught him when he was a lot younger, maybe seventy-five or eighty, he might’ve taken a chance, but now he was just too old to be raising a family.”
“Then you ought to be looking around for a replacement, shouldn’t you?”
She looked at me in that blue glow. “He needs me,” she said simply. “Now more than ever.”
I mulled that over for a while. Then it occurred to me to check the time. It was nearly forty-six hours since he had left us. He was due back any time. And if he came back while we were doddering around in here—I realized, foggily, bit by bit—then ninety thousand millibars of poison gas would hammer in on us. It would kill us if we had our suits open. Besides that, it would damage our virgin tunnel. The corrosive scouring of that implosion of gas might easily wreck all those lovely things behind the barrier.
“We have to go back,” I told Dorrie, showing her the time. She smiled. “Temporarily,” she said, and we got up, took a last look at those treasures of Tantalus behind the bars, and started back to our shaft to the igloo.
After the cheerful blue glow of the Heechee tunnel, the igloo was more cramped and miserable than ever before.
What was worse was that my cloudy brain nagged me into remembering that we shouldn’t even stay inside it. Cochenour might remember to look in and out of both ends of the crawl-through when he got there—any minute now—but he also might not. I couldn’t take the chance on letting the hot hammer of air in on our find.
I tried to think of a way of plugging the shaft, maybe by pushing all the tailings back in again, but although my brain wasn’t working very well I could see that that was stupid.
So the only way to solve that problem was for us to wait outside in the breezy Venusian weather. The one consolation was that it wouldn’t be too much longer to wait. The other part of that was that we weren’t equipped for a very long wait. The little watch dial next to our life-support meters, all running well into the warning red now, showed that Cochenour should in fact have arrived by now.