PLATINUM POHL (4 page)
Authors: Frederik Pohl
My airbody lay by the spacepad and was reached the same way the spacepad was reached. Elevator to the surface lock, a tractor-cab to carry us across the dry, tortured surface of Venus, peeling under the three-hundred-kilometer-an-hour wind. Normally I kept it under a foam housing, of course. You don’t leave anything free and exposed on the surface of Venus if you want to keep it intact, not even if it’s made of chrome steel. I’d had the foam stripped free when I checked it out and loaded supplies that morning. Now it was ready. I could see it from the bull’s-eye ports of the crawler, through the 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.
Cochenour screamed in my ear, “You and Dorrie have a fight?”
“No fight,” I screamed back.
“Don’t care if you did. You don’t have to like each other, just do what I want you to do.” He was silent a moment, resting his throat. “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 winds up over the pad and all we get is a sort of confused back eddy. The good part is that taking off and landing are relatively easy. The bad part is that some of the heavy metal compounds in the atmosphere 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 you find some of them are hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid.
But there are tricks to that, too. Navigation over Venus is 3-D. It’s easy enough to
proceed from point to point; your transponders will link you to the radio range and map your position continuously on to the charts. What’s hard is to find the right altitude, and that’s why my airbody and I were worth a million dollars to Cochenour.
proceed from point to point; your transponders will link you to the radio range and map your position continuously on to the charts. What’s hard is to find the right altitude, and that’s why my airbody and I were worth a million dollars to Cochenour.
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. “No wings!” he shouted, as though I was cheating him.
“No sails or snow chains, either,” I shouted back. “Get aboard if you want to talk! It’s 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 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 purchasing department had sold us and Local 88 had certified as essential aboard, it was crowded with just the three of us. I was prepared for sarcasm, at least. But Cochenour merely looked around long enough to find the best bunk, strode over to it and declared it his. The girl was a good sport, and there I was, left with my glands all charged up for an argument and no argument.
It was a lot quieter inside the airbody. You could hear the noise of the wind right enough, but it was only annoying. I passed out earplugs, and with them in place the noise was hardly even annoying.
“Sit down and strap up,” I ordered, and when they were stowed away I took off.
At twenty thousand millibars wings aren’t just useless, they’re poison. My airbody had all the lift it needed built into the seashell-shaped hull. I fed the double fuels into the thermojets, we bounced across the reasonably flat ground around the spacepad (it was bulldozed once a week, which is how come it stayed reasonably flat) and we were zooming off into the wild yellow-green yonder, a moment later the wild brown-gray yonder, after a run of no more than fifty meters.
Cochenour had fastened his harness loosely for comfort. I enjoyed hearing him yell as he was thrown about. It didn’t last. At the thousand-meter level I found 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 grinning a little. “Pretty exciting,” he admitted, fumbling in his pocket. Then he remembered to ask. “Is it all right if I smoke?”
“They’re your lungs.”
He grinned more widely. “They are now,” he agreed, and lit up. “Say. Why didn’t you give us those plugs 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 spend the whole time explaining what that funny little dial means or you go on to do your work and make your fortune. What it came down to was, 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 everybody would
have to work real hard at being nice to everybody else, 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 worlds are sometimes just not likeable. If that was going to be the case, the less talk the better; I should slide questions like that off with something like “I forgot.”
have to work real hard at being nice to everybody else, 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 worlds are sometimes just not likeable. If that was going to be the case, the less talk the better; I should slide questions like that off with something like “I forgot.”
But he hadn’t actually been unpleasant, and the girlfriend had actually tried to be friendly. I said, “Well, that’s an interesting thing. You see, you hear by differences in pressure. While we were 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 understood it. However, there’s a limit. Past about a hundred and twenty decibels—that’s a unit of sound—”
Cochenour growled, “I know what a decibel is.”
“Right. Past a hundred and twenty the eardrum just doesn’t respond anymore. So in the crawler it was too loud; with the plugs, you wouldn’t have heard anything.”
Dorotha had been listening while she repaired her eye makeup. “What was to hear?”
“Oh,” I said, “nothing, really. Except, well—” Then I voted to think of them as friends, at least for the time being. “Except in the case of an accident. If we’d had a gust, you know, that crawler could have flipped right over. Or sometimes solid objects come flying over the hills and into you before you know it. Or-”
She was shaking her head. “I understand. Lovely place we’re visiting, Boyce.”
“Yeah. Look,” he said. “Who’s flying this thing?”
I got up and activated the virtual globe. “That’s what I was just coming to. Right now it’s on autopilot, heading in the general direction of this quadrant down here. We have to pick out a specific destination.”
“That’s Venus?” the girl asked. “It doesn’t look like much.”
“Those lines are just radio range markers; you won’t see them looking out of the window. Venus doesn’t have any oceans, and it isn’t cut up into nations, so making a map of it isn’t quite like what you’d expect on Earth. That bright spot is us. Now look.” I overlaid the radio-range grid and the contour colors with mascon markings. “Those blobby circles are mascons. You know what a mascon is?”
“A concentration of mass. A lump of heavy stuff,” offered the girl.
“Fine. Now look at the known Heechee digs.” I phased them in as golden patterns.
“They’re all in the mascons,” Dorotha said at once. Cochenour gave her a look of tolerant approval.
“Not all. Look over here; this little one isn’t, and this one. But damn near all. Why? I don’t know. Nobody knows. The mass concentrations are mostly older, denser rock—basalt and so on—and maybe the Heechee found it easier to dig in. Or maybe they just liked it.” In my correspondence with Professor Hegramet back on Earth, in the days when I didn’t have a dying liver in my gut and took an interest in abstract knowledge, we had kicked around the possibility that the Heechee digging machines would only work in dense rock, or rock of a certain chemical composition. But I wasn’t prepared to discuss that with them.
“See over here, where we are now”—I rotated the virtual globe slightly by turning a dial—“that’s the big digging we just came out of. You can see the shape of the Spindle. It’s a common shape, by the way. You can see it in some of the others if you look, and there are digs where it doesn’t show on these tracings but it’s there if you’re on the spot.
That particular mascon where the Spindle is is called Serendip; it was discovered by accident by a hesperological—”
That particular mascon where the Spindle is is called Serendip; it was discovered by accident by a hesperological—”
“Hesperological?”
“—a geological team operating on Venus, which makes it a hesperological team. They were drilling out core samples and hit the Heechee digs. Now these other digs in the northern high-latitudes you see are all in one bunch of associated mascons. They connect through interventions of less dense rock, but only where absolutely necessary.”
Cochenour said sharply, “They’re north and we’re going south. Why?”
It was interesting that he could read the navigation instruments, but I didn’t say so. I only said, “They’re no good. They’ve been probed.”
“They look even bigger than the Spindle.”
“Hell of a lot bigger, right. But there’s nothing much in them, or anyway not much chance that anything in them is in good enough shape to bother with. Subsurface fluids filled them up a hundred thousand years ago, maybe more. A lot of good men have gone broke trying to pump and excavate them, without finding anything. Ask me. I was one of them.”
“I didn’t know there was any liquid water on Venus or under it,” Cochenour objected.
“I didn’t say water, did I? But as a matter of fact some of it was, or anyway a sort of oozy mud. Apparently water cooks out of the rocks and has a transit time to the surface of some thousands of years before it seeps out, boils off, and cracks to hydrogen and oxygen and gets lost. In case you didn’t know it, there’s some under the Spindle. It’s what you were drinking, and what you were breathing.”
The girl said, “Boyce, this is all very interesting, but I’m hot and dirty. Can I change the subject for a minute?”
Cochenour barked; it wasn’t really a laugh. “Subliminal prompting, Walthers, you agree? And a little old-fashioned prudery, too, I expect. What she really wants to do is go to the bathroom.”
Given a little encouragement from the girl, I would have been mildly embarrassed for her, but she only said, “If we’re going to live in this thing for three weeks, I’d like to know what it offers.”
I said, “Certainly, Miss Keefer.”
“Dorotha. Dorrie, if you like it better.”
“Sure, Dorrie. Well, you see what we’ve got. Five bunks; they partition to sleep ten if wanted, but we don’t want. Two shower stalls. They don’t look big enough to soap yourself in, but they are if you work at it. Three chemical toilets. Kitchen over there—well. Pick the bunk you like, Dorrie. There’s a screen arrangement that comes down when you want it for changing clothes and so on, or just if you don’t want to look at the rest of us for a while.”
Cochenour said, “Go on, Dorrie, do what you want to do. I want Walthers to show me how to fly this thing anyway.”
It wasn’t a bad start. I’ve had some real traumatic times, parties that came aboard drunk and steadily got drunker, couples that fought every waking minute and got together only to hassle me. This one didn’t look bad at all, apart from the fact that it was going to save my life for me.
There’s not much to flying an airbody, at least as far as making it move the way you want it to is concerned. In Venus’s atmosphere there’s lift to spare. You don’t worry about things like stalling out; and anyway the autonomic controls do most of your thinking for you.
Cochenour learned fast. It turned out he had flown everything that moved on Earth and operated one-man submersibles as well. He understood as soon as I mentioned it to him that the hard part of pilotage was selecting the right flying level and anticipating when you’d have to change it, but he also understood that he wasn’t going to learn that in one day. Or even in three weeks. “What the hell, Walthers,” he said cheerfully enough. “At least I can make it go where I have to, in case you get caught in a tunnel or shot by a jealous husband.”
I gave him the smile his pleasantry was worth, which wasn’t much. “The other thing I can do,” he said, “is cook. Unless you’re really good at it? No, I thought not. Well, I paid too much for this stomach to fill it with hash, so I’ll make the meals. That’s a little skill Dorrie never got around to learning. Same with her grandmother. Most beautiful woman in the world, but had the idea that was all there was to it.”
I put that aside to sort out later; he was full of little unexpected things, this ninety years old young athlete. He said, “All right, now while Dorrie’s using up all the water in the shower—”
“Not to worry; it all recycles.”
“Anyway. While she’s cleaning up, finish your little lecture on where we’re going.”
“Right.” I spun the virtual globe a little. The bright spot that was us had moved a dozen degrees already. “See that cluster where our track intersects those grid marks?”
“Yeah. Five big mascons close together, and no diggings indicated. Is that where we’re going?”
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