“You’ve got some people waiting for you,” he went on. “Vastra’s Third and your lady friend. They brought you some clothes.”
That interested me. “Does that mean I’m getting out?” I asked.
“Like right now,” he told me. “They’ll have to keep you in bed awhile, but your rent’s run out. We need the space for paying customers.”
Now, one of the advantages of having clean blood in my brains instead of the poisonous soup it had been living on was that I could begin to think reasonably clearly.
So I knew right away that good old comical Dr. Morius was making another of his little jokes. “Paying customers.” I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t been a paying patient. Though I couldn’t imagine what my bills were being paid with, I was willing to keep my curiosity in check until I was outside the Quackery. That didn’t take long. The quacks packed me in wetsheets, and Dorrie and the Third of Vastra’s House rolled me through the Spindle to Sub Vastra’s place. Dorrie was pale and tired still—the last couple of weeks hadn’t been much of a vacation for either of us—but needing nothing more than a little rest, she said. Sub’s First had kicked some of the kids out of a cubicle and cleared it out for us, and his Third fussed over both of us, feeding us up on lamb broth and that flat hard bread they like, before tucking us in for a good long rest. There was only the one bed, but Dorrie didn’t seem to mind. Anyway, at that point the question was academic. Later on, not so academic. After a couple of days of that I was on my feet and as good as I ever was.
By then I found out who had paid my bill at the Quackery.
For about a minute I had hoped it was me—quickly filthy rich from the priceless spoils of our tunnel—but I knew that was an illusion. The tunnel had been right on the military reservation. Nobody was ever going to own anything in it but the military.
If we’d been hale and hearty we could have gotten around that, with a little inventive lying. We could have carted some of the things off to another tunnel and declared them, and almost certainly we would have gotten away with it . . . but not the way we were. We’d been a lot too near dead to conceal anything. So the military had taken it all.
Still, they’d showed something I never had suspected. They did have a kind of a heart. Atrophied and flinty, yes, but a heart. They’d gone into the dig while I was still getting glucose enemas in my sleep, and they’d been pleased with what they’d found. They decided to pay me a kind of finder’s fee. Not much, to be sure. But enough to save my life. Enough to meet the Quackery’s bill for all their carpentry on me, and even enough left over to put some in the bank and pay the back rent on my own place, so Dorrie and I could move in when Vastra’s House decided we were well enough to be on our own.
Of course, they hadn’t had to pay for the transplant liver itself. That hadn’t cost anything at all.
For a while it bothered me that the military wouldn’t say what they’d found. I did my best to find out. I even tried to get Sergeant Littleknees drunk so I could worm it out of her, when she came to the Spindle on furlough. That didn’t work. Dorrie was right there, and how drunk can you get one girl when another girl is right there watching you? Probably Amanda Littleknees didn’t know, anyhow. Probably nobody did except a few specialists.
But it had to be something big, because of the cash award, and most of all because they didn’t prosecute us for trespassing on the military reservation. And so we get along all right, the two of us. Or the three of us.
Dorrie turned out to be really good at selling imitation prayer fans and fire-pearls to the Terry tourists, especially when her pregnancy began to show. We were both kind of celebrities, of course. She kept us in eating money until the high season started, and by then I had found out that my status as a famous tunnel discoverer was worth something, so I parlayed it into a cash loan and a new airbody. We’re doing pretty well, for tunnel-rats. I’ve promised I’ll marry her if our kid turns out to be a boy, but as a matter of fact I’m going to do it anyway. She was a great help at the dig.
Especially with my own private project.
Dorrie couldn’t have known just what I wanted to bring Cochenour’s body back for. She didn’t argue, though. Sick and wretched as she was, she helped me get the cadaver into the airbody lock for the return to the Spindle.
Actually, I wanted that body very much—one piece of it, anyway.
It’s not really a new liver, of course. Probably it’s not even secondhand. Heaven knows where Cochenour bought it, but I’m sure it wasn’t his original equipment.
But it works.
And, bastard though he was, I kind of liked him in a way, and I don’t mind at all the fact that I’ve got a part of him with me always.
PART THREE: THE GATEWAY ASTEROID
The greatest treasure the Heechee tunnels on Venus had to offer had already been discovered, though the first discoverers didn’t know it. No one else knew, either—at least, no one except a solitary tunnel-rat named Sylvester Macklin, and he was not in a position to tell anybody what he had found.
Sylvester Macklin had discovered a Heechee spaceship.
If Macklin had reported his find he would have become the richest man in the solar system. He also would have lived to enjoy his wealth. But Sylvester Macklin was as crotchety a loner as any other tunnel-rat, and he did something quite different.
He saw that the ship looked to be in good condition. Maybe, he thought, he could even fly it.
Unfortunately for himself, he succeeded.
Macklin’s ship did exactly what any Heechee ship was designed to do, and the Heechee were marvelously great designers. No one knows exactly what processes of thought and experiment and deduction Macklin went through when he blundered onto the wonderful find. He didn’t survive to tell anyone. Still, obviously at some point he must have gotten into the ship and closed its hatch and begun poking and prodding at the things that looked as though they ought to be its controls.
As people later well learned, on the board of every Heechee ship is a thing shaped like a cow’s teat. It is the thing that makes the ship go. When it is squeezed it is like slipping an automatic-shift car into “drive.” The ship moves out. Where it goes to depends on what course was set into its automatic navigation systems.
Mackim didn’t do anything about setting any particular course, naturally. He didn’t know how.
So the ship did what its Heechee designers had programmed it to do in such an event. It simply returned to the place it had come from when its Heechee pilot had left it, half a million years ago.
As it happened, that place was an asteroid.
It was an odd asteroid in several respects. Astronomically it was odd, because its orbit was at right angles to the ecliptic. For that reason, although it was a fair-sized chunk of rock and not far from Earth’s own orbit at times, it had never been discovered by human astronomers.
The other odd thing about it was that it had been converted into a sort of parking garage for Heechee spacecraft. In total, there were nearly a thousand of the ships there.
What there was not any of anywhere on the asteroid was anything to eat or drink. So Sylvester Mackim, who could have been the richest man in history, wound up as just one more starved-to-death corpse. But before he died Macklin managed to get off a signal to Earth. It wasn’t a call for help. No one could reach him in time to save his life. Mackim knew that. He accepted the fact that he would die; he just wanted people to know in what an unsuspected marvel of a place he was dying. And after a while other astronauts, flying the clumsy human rockets of the time, came to investigate. What they found was the gateway to the universe.