To people like me, who can’t get up the price of anything, the tourist traps matter a lot. We live on them.
I don’t mean that we draw our excess disposable income from them. I mean that they are how we get the price of what to eat and where to sleep. If we don’t have the price we die.
There aren’t many legitimate ways of earning money on Venus. There’s the army, if you call that legitimate; the rest is tourism and dumb luck. The dumb—lucky chances—oh, like winning a lottery, or striking it rich in the Heechee diggings, or blundering into a well-paying job with one of the scientific expeditions—are all real long shots. For our bread and butter, almost everybody on Venus depends on Terry tourists, and if we don’t milk them dry when we get the chance we’ve had it.
Of course, there are tourists and then there are tourists. They come in three varieties. The difference between them is celestial mechanics.
Class III is the quick and dirty kind. Back on Earth, they are merely well-to-do. The Class IIIs come to Venus every twenty-six months at Hohmann-orbit time, riding the minimum-energy circuit from Earth. Because of the critical time windows of the Hohmann orbits they never can stay on Venus for more than three weeks. So they come out on their guided tours, determined to get the most out of the quarter-million-dollar minimum cabin fare their rich grandparents have given them for a graduation present, or that they’ve saved up for a second honeymoon, or whatever. The bad thing about them is that they don’t usually have much extra money to spend, since they’ve spent it all on fares. The nice thing is that there are a lot of them. When the tour ships are in all the rental rooms on Venus are filled. Sometimes they’ll have six couples sharing a single partitioned cubicle, two pairs at a time, hot-bedding eight-hour shifts around the clock. Then people like me hole up in Heechee huts on the surface and rent out our own below-ground rooms, and that way maybe make enough money to live a few months.
But you couldn’t make enough out of Class IIIs to live until the next Hohmann-orbit time, so when the Class II tourists come in we cut each other’s throats over them.
The Class IIs are the medium-rich. What you might call the poor millionaires; the ones whose annual income is in the low seven figures. They can afford to come in powered orbits, taking a hundred days or so for the run, instead of the long, slow Hohmann drift. The price for that runs a million dollars and up, so there aren’t nearly as many of the Class II tourists. But there are a few trickling in every month or so at the time of reasonably favorable orbital conjunctions. They also have more money to spend when they get to Venus. So do those other Class II medium-rich ones who wait for the four or five times in a decade when the ballistics of the planets sort themselves into the low-energy configuration that allows them to hit three planets in an orbit that doesn’t have much higher energy costs than the straight Earth-Venus run. They hit us first, if we’re lucky, and then go on to Mars. (As if there was anything to do on Mars!) If they’ve gone the other way around, we get the leavings from the Martian colonists. That’s bad, because the leavings are never very much.
But the very rich—ah, the very rich! The Class I marvels! They come as they like, in orbital season or not, and they can spend.
When my informant on the landing pad reported the Yuri Gagarin incoming, under private charter, my money nose began to quiver.
Whoever was on it had to be a good prospect. It was out of season for anybody except the really rich. The only question on my mind was how many of my competitors would be trying to cut my throat to get to the Gagarin’s passengers first . . . while I was doing my best to cut theirs.
It was important to me. I happened to have a pretty nasty cashflow problem just then.
Airbody rental takes a lot more capital than, say, opening a prayer-fan booth. I’d been lucky in buying my airbody cheap when the fellow I worked for died. I didn’t have too many competitors; a couple of the ones who might’ve competed were out of service for repairs, and a couple more had kited off on Heechee diggings of their own.
So, actually, I considered that I might have the Gagarin’s passengers, whoever they were, pretty much to myself . . . assuming they could be interested in taking a trip outside the maze of Heechee tunnels right around the Spindle.
I had to assume that they would be interested, because I needed the money very much. You see, I had this little liver condition. It was getting close to total failure. The way the doctors explained it to me, I had three choices: I could go back to Earth and live for a while on external dialysis. Or I could somehow find the money for a transplant. Or I could die.
II
The name of the fellow who had chartered the Gagarin turned out to be Boyce Cochenour. Age, apparently around forty. Height, easily two meters. Ancestry, Irish-American-French.
I recognized his type at once: he was the kind that’s used to being the boss wherever he is. I watched him come into the Spindle, looking as though he owned it and everything it held and was thinking about liquidating his holdings. He sat down in Sub Vastra’s imitation of a combination Paris boulevard—Heechee sidewalk cafй. “Scotch,” he said, without even looking to see if he was being waited on. He was. Vastra hurried to pour John Begg over supercooled ice and hand it to him, all crackling with cold and numbing to the lips. “Smoke,” he said, and the girl with him instantly lit a cigarette and passed it to him. “Crummy-looking dump,” he observed, glancing around, and Vastra fell all over himself to agree.
I sat down next to them—well, I mean not at the same table; I didn’t even look their way. But from the next table I could hear everything they said. Vastra didn’t look at me, either, but of course he had seen me come in and knew I had my eye on these promising new marks. I had to let his number-three wife take my order instead of Vastra himself, because Vastra certainly wasn’t going to waste his time on a tunnel-rat when he had a charter-ship Terry at his table. “The usual,” I said to her, meaning straight alk in a tumble of soft drink. “And a copy of your briefing,” I added more softly. Her eyes twinkled understandingly at me over her flirtation veil. Cute little vixen. I patted her hand in a friendly way and left a rolled-up bill in it; then she left.
The Terry was inspecting his surroundings, which included me. I looked back at him, polite but distant, and he gave me a sort of quarter-nod and turned back to Subhash Vastra. “Since I’m here,” he said, in all the right tones for a bored tourist, “I might as well sample whatever action you’ve got. What’s to do here?”
Sub Vastra grinned widely, like a tall, skinny frog. “Ah, whatever you wish, sah! Entertainment? In our private rooms we have the finest artists of three planets, nautch dancers, music, fine comedians—”
“We’ve got enough of that stuff in Cincinnati. I didn’t come to Venus for a nightclub act.” Cochenour couldn’t have known it, of course, but that was the right decision to make; Sub’s private rooms were way down the list of night spots on Venus, and even the top of the list wasn’t much.
“Of course, sah! Then perhaps you would like to consider a tour?”