It would have been nice if the Heechee had been the same size as human beings, instead of being just that little bit shorter. It was reflected in their tunnels. In the smaller ones, like the one that led to the Local 88 union office, I had to half crouch all the way.
The deputy organizer was waiting for me. He had one of the very few good jobs on Venus that didn’t depend on tourism—or at least not directly. He said, “Subhash Vastra’s been on the line. He says you agreed to thirty percent, and besides you took off without paying your bar bill to the Third of his house.”
“Admitted, both ways.”
He made a note. “And you owe me a little too, Audee. Three hundred for the powder-fax copy of my report on your pigeon. A hundred for validating your contract with Vastra. And you’re going to need a new guide’s license; sixteen hundred for that.”
I gave him my currency card, and he checked the total out of my account into the local’s. Then I signed and card-stamped the contract he’d drawn up. Vastra’s thirty percent would not be on the whole million dollars, but on my net. Even so, he was likely to make as much out of it as I would, at least in liquid cash, because I was going to have to pay off the outstanding balances on equipment. The banks would carry a man until he scored, but then they wanted to get paid in full . . . because they knew how long it might be until he scored again.
The deputy verified the signed contract. “That’s that, then. Anything else I can do for you?”
“Not at your prices,” I told him.
He gave me a sharp look, with a touch of envy in it. “Ah, you’re putting me on, Audee. 'Boyce Cochenour and Dorotha Keefer, traveling S. S. Yuri Gagarin, Odessa registry, carrying no other passengers,' “he quoted from the report he’d intercepted for us. “No other passengers! Why, you can be a rich man, Audee, if you work this customer right.”
“Rich man is more than I ask,” I told him. “All I want is to be a living one.” It wasn’t entirely true. I did have some little hope—not much, not enough to talk about, and in fact I’d never said a word about it to anyone—that I might be coming out of this rather better than just alive.
There was, however, a problem.
The problem was that if we did find anything, Boyce Cochenour would get most of it. If a tourist like Cochenour goes on a guided hunt for new Heechee tunnels, and he happens to find something valuable—tourists have, you know; not often, but enough to keep them hopeful—then it’s the charterer who gets the lion’s share. Guides get a taste, but that’s all. We just work for the man who pays the bills.
Of course, I could have gone out by myself at any time and prospected on my own. Then anything I found would be all mine. But in my case, that was a really bad idea. If I staked myself to a trip and lost I wouldn’t just be wasting my time and fifty or a hundred K on used-up supplies and wear and tear on the airbody. If I lost, I would be dead shortly thereafter, when that beat-up old liver finally gave out.
I needed every penny Cochenour would pay me just to stay alive. Whether we struck it rich or not, my fee from him would take care of that. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I had a notion that I knew where something very interesting might be found; and my problem was that, as long as I had the standard charterer’s-rights contract with Cochenour, I really couldn’t afford to find it.
The last stop I made was in my sleeping room. Under my bed, keystoned into the rock, was a guaranteed break-proof safe that held some papers I wanted to have in my pocket from then on.
See, when I first came to Venus it wasn’t scenery that interested me. I wanted to make my fortune.
I didn’t see much of the surface of Venus then, or for nearly two years after that. You don’t see much in the kind of spacecraft that can land you on Venus. To survive the squeeze of a ninetythousand-millibar surface pressure means you need a hull that’s a little more rugged than the bubble-ships that go to the Moon or Mars or farther out. They don’t put unnecessary windows into the skin of Venus-landers. That didn’t matter much, because there isn’t much on the surface of Venus that you can see. Everything the tourists can snap pictures of is inside Venus, and every bit of it once belonged to the Heechee.
We don’t know much about the Heechee. We don’t even rightly know their name. “Heechee” isn’t a name, it’s how somebody once wrote down the sound that a fire-pearl makes when you stroke it. As that was the only sound anybody had ever heard that was connected with the Heechee, it got to be their name. The “hesperologists” don’t have any idea where these Heechee folks came from, although there are some markings that seem to be a star chart—pretty much unrecognizable; if we knew the exact position of every star in the galaxy a few hundred thousand years ago we might be able to locate them from that. Maybe. Assuming they came from this galaxy.
I wonder sometimes what they wanted. Escaping a dying planet? Political refugees? Tourists whose cruise ship had a breakdown between somewhere and somewhere, so that they had to hang around long enough to repair whatever they had to repair to get themselves going again? I don’t know. Nobody else does, either.
But, though the Heechee packed up nearly everything when they left, leaving behind only empty tunnels and chambers, there were a few scraps here and there that either weren’t worth taking or were overlooked: all those “prayer fans,” enough empty containers of one kind or another to look like a picnic ground at the end of a hard summer, some trinkets and trifles. I guess the best known of the “trifles” is the anisokinetic punch, the carbon crystal that transmits a blow at a ninety-degree angle. That made somebody a few billion just by being lucky enough to find one, though not until somebody else had made his own billions by being smart enough to analyze and duplicate it. But that’s the best of the lot. What we usually find is, face it, just junk. There must once have been good stuff worth a million times as much as those sweepings.
Did they take all the good stuff with them when they left?
That was another thing that nobody knew. I didn’t know, either, but I did think I knew something that had a bearing on it.
I thought I knew a place where a Heechee tunnel had had something pretty neat in it, long ago; and that particular tunnel wasn’t near any of the explored diggings.
I didn’t kid myself. I knew that that wasn’t a guarantee of anything. But it was something to go on. Maybe when those last ships left the Heechee were getting impatient, and maybe not as thorough at cleaning up behind themselves.
And that was what being on Venus was all about.
What other possible reason was there for being there? The life of a maze-rat was marginal at best. It took fifty thousand a year to stay alive—air tax, capitation tax, water assessment, subsistence-level bill for food. If you wanted to eat meat more than once a month, or demanded a private cubicle of your own to sleep in, it cost a lot more than that.
Guide’s papers cost a week’s living costs. When any of us bought a set of them, we were gambling that week’s cost of living against the chance of a big enough strike, either from the Terry tourists or from what we might find, to make it possible to go home to Earth—where no one died for lack of air and no one was thrust out into the high-pressure incinerator that was Venus’s atmosphere. Not just to get back to Earth, but to get back there in the style every maze-rat had set himself as a goal when he headed sunward in the first place: with money enough to live the full life of a human being on Full Medical.
That was what I wanted: the Big Score.
IV
The last thing I did that night was to visit the Hall of Discoveries. That wasn’t just the whim of the moment. I’d made an arrangement with the Third of Vastra’s House.