“And the Heechee did it better?”
“I think they did.”
She laughed again, unexpectedly and once more very attractively. “Why, you poor fellow,” she said in good humor, “you’re hooked on the stuff you sell, aren’t you? You think that one of these days you’re going to find the mother tunnel and pick up a few billion dollars’ worth of Heechee stuff!”
I wasn’t pleased with the way she put that. I wasn’t all that happy with the meeting I had set up with Vastra’s Third, for that matter; I’d figured that, away from her boyfriend, I could pick this Dorotha Keefer’s brains about him pretty easily. It wasn’t working out that way. She was making me aware of her as a person, which was an undesirable development in itself—you can’t treat a mark as a mark if you think of him, or her, as a fellow human being. Worse than that, she was making me take a good look at myself.
So I just said, “You may be right. But I’m sure going to give it a good try. “
“You’re angry, aren’t you?”
“No,” I lied, “but maybe a little tired. And we’ve got a long trip tomorrow, so I’d better take you back to the Spindle, Miss Keefer.”
V
My airbody was roped down at the edge of the spacepad and was reached the same way the spacepad was reached: elevator to the surface lock, then a sealed tractor cab to carry us across the dry, rocky, tortured surface of Venus, peeling away under the high-density wind. Normally I kept the airbody under a lashed-down foam housing, of course. You don’t leave anything free and exposed on the surface of Venus if you want to find it intact when you get back to it, not even if it’s made of chrome steel. I’d had the foam stripped off first thing that morning, when I checked it out and loaded supplies. Now it was ready. I could see it from the bull’s-eye ports of the crawler, through the howling, green-yellow murk outside.
Cochenour and the girl could have seen it too, if they’d known where to look, but they might not have recognized it as something that would fly. “Did you and Dorrie have a fight?” Cochenour screamed in my ear.
“No fight,” I screamed back.
“Don’t care if you did. Just wanted to know. You don’t have to like each other, just so you do what I want you to do.” He was silent for a moment, resting his vocal cords. “Jesus. What a wind.”
“Zephyr,” I told him. I didn’t say any more; he would find out for himself. The area around the spacepad is a sort of natural calm area, by Venusian standards. Orographic lift throws the meanest of the winds up over the pad, and all we get is a sort of confused back eddy. That makes taking off and landing relatively easy. The bad part of that is that some of the heavy metal compounds in the air settle out on the pad. What passes for air on Venus has layers of red mercuric sulfide and mercurous chloride in the lower reaches, and when you get above them to those pretty fluffy clouds tourists see on the way down, you find that some of them are droplets of sulfuric and hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid.
But there are tricks to that, too. Navigation over Venus takes 3-D skills. It’s easy enough to proceed from Point A to Point B on the surface. Your transponders will link you to the radio range and map your position continuously on the charts. What’s hard is to find the right altitude. That takes experience and maybe intuition, and that’s why my airbody and I were worth a million dollars to people like Boyce Cochenour.
By then we were at the airbody, and the telescoping snout from the crawler was poking out to its lock. Cochenour was staring out the bull’s-eye. “It doesn’t have any wings!” he shouted, as though I was cheating him.
“It doesn’t have sails or snow chains either,” I shouted back. “Get aboard if you want to talk! It’ll be easier in the airbody.”
We climbed through the little snout, I unlocked the entrance, and we got aboard without much trouble.
We didn’t even have the kind of trouble that I might have made for myself. You see, an airbody is a big thing on Venus. I was damn lucky to have been able to acquire it, and, well, I won’t beat around the bush, you could say I loved it. Mine could have held ten people, without equipment. With what Sub Vastra’s outfitting shop had sold us and Local 88 had certified as essential to have on board, it was crowded with just the three of us.
I was prepared for at least sarcasm. But Cochenour merely looked around long enough to find the best bunk, strode over to it, and claimed it as his. The girl was acting like a good sport about all the inconveniences. And there I was, left with my glands charged up for hostile criticism, and nobody criticizing.
It was a lot quieter inside the airbody. You could hear the noise of the winds right enough, but it was only annoying. I passed Out high-filter earplugs, and with them in place the noise was hardly even annoying.
“Sit down and strap in,” I ordered, and when they were stowed away I took off. At ninety thousand millibars, wings aren’t just useless, they’re poison. My airbody had all the lift it needed, built right into its seashell-shaped hull. I fed the double fuel mixture into the thermojets, we bounced across the reasonably flat ground at the edge of the spacepad (it was bulldozed once a week, which is how it stayed reasonably flat), and we were zooming off into the wild yellow-green yonder—a moment later, into the wild brown-gray yonder—after a run of no more than fifty meters.
Cochenour had fastened his harness loosely to be comfortable. I enjoyed hearing him yell as he was thrown about in the savage, short-period turbulence. It wouldn’t kill him, and it only lasted fo ra few moments. At a thousand meters I found our part of Venus’s semipermanent atmospheric inversion, and the turbulence dropped to where I could take off my belt and stand.
I took the plugs out of my ears and motioned to Cochenour and the girl to do the same.
He was rubbing his head where he’d bounced into an overhead chart rack, but he was grinning a little. “Pretty exciting,” he admitted, fumbling in his pocket.
“All right if I smoke?”
“They’re your lungs.”
He grinned more widely. “They are now,” he agreed. “Say, why didn’t you give us those earplugs while we were in the tractor?”
There is, as you might say, a tide in the affairs of guides, where you either let them flood you with questions and then spend the whole time explaining what that funny little dial means when it turns red . . . or you keep your mouth shut and go on to do your work and make your fortune. What it came down to was a choice: Was I going to come out of this liking Cochenour and his girlfriend, or not?
If I was, I should try to be civil to them. More than civil. Living, the three of us, for three weeks in a space about as big as an apartment kitchenette meant that everybody would have to work real hard at being nice to everybody else, if we were going to come back without total hatred. And as I was the one who was being paid to be nice, I should be the one to set an example.
On the other hand, the Cochenours of the world are sometimes just not likable. If that was going to be the case, the less talk the better, and I should slide questions like that off with something like, “I forgot.”
But he hadn’t actually gone out of his way to be unpleasant. The girl had even actually attempted friendliness. So I opted for courtesy. “Well, that’s an interesting thing. You see, you hear by differences in pressure. While the airbody was taking off, the plugs filtered out part of the sound—the pressure waves—but when I yelled at you to belt up, the plugs passed the overpressure of my voice and you could hear easily enough. However, there’s a limit. Past about a hundred and twenty decibels—that’s a unit of sound—”