Heechee - The Gateway Trip Part 1

The gateway trip.

tales and vignettes of the Heechee.

Frederik Pohl.

There was a time, half a million years ago or so, when some new neighbors came into the vicinity of the Earth's solar system. They were eager to be friendly-that is, that was what they wanted to be, if they could find anyone around to be friends with. So one day they dropped in on the third planet of the system, the one we now know as Earth itself, to see who might be at home.

It wasn't a good time to pay a call. Oh, there was plenty of life on Earth, no doubt of that. The planet crawled with the stuff. There were cave bears and saber-tooth cats and things like elephants and things like deer. There were snakes and fish and birds and crocodiles; and there were disease germs and scavengers; and there were forests and savannahs and vegetation of all kinds. But one element was conspicuously missing in the catalogue of terrestrial living creatures. That was a great pity, because that was the one quality the visitors were most anxious to find.

What those visitors from s.p.a.ce couldn't find anywhere on the planet was intelligence. It just hadn't been invented yet.

The visitors sought it very diligently. The closest they could find to a being with what they were after was a furry little creature without language, fire, or social inst.i.tutions-but which did, at least, have a few promising skills. (For instance, it could manage to crunch tools out of random bits of rock.) When modern humans came along and began tracing their evolutionary roots they would namd this particular brand of prehuman "Australopithecus." The visitors didn't call it anything in particular . . . except one more disappointment in their quest for civilized company in s.p.a.ce.

The little animals weren't very tall-about the size of a modern six-year-old-but the visitors didn't hold that against them. They had no modern humans to compare the little guys with, and anyway they weren't terribly tall themselves.

This was the chancy Pleistocene, the time when the ice was growing and retreating in Europe and North America, when African rainfall patterns swelled and diminished, and adaptability was the key for any species that wanted to stay alive. At the time the visitors arrived, the countryside in which they found a tribe of their little pets was rolling, arid savannah, covered with gra.s.ses and occasional wildflowers. Where the australopithecines had camped was in a meadow by the banks of a slow, trickly little stream that flowed into a huge salty lake a few kilometers away. On the western horizon a line of mountains stretched away out of sight. The nearest of them steamed gently. The mountains were all volcanoes, though of course the australopithecines did not have any idea what a volcano was. They did have fire, to be sure; they'd gotten that far in technological sophistication. At least, most of the time they did, when lightning started gra.s.s burning (or even when hot ash from an eruption kindled something near them, though fortunately for the peace of mind of the little people that didn't happen often). They didn't use fire for much. They had not yet considered the possibility of cooking with it, for instance. What they found it good for was keeping large nocturnal predators away, at which it sometimes succeeded.

By day they could take pretty good care of themselves. They carried stone "hand axes"-not very elaborate, just rocks chipped into more or less the shape of a fat, sharp-edged clam-and clubs that were even less impressive looking: just the unmodified long leg bones of the deerlike grazers they liked to eat. That sort of weapon would never stop a saber-tooth. But enough of them, wielded by enough of the screaming little ape-men, could usually deter the hyenas that were the savannah's fiercest predators, especially if the little folk had first discouraged the hyena pack by pelting it with rocks from a distance. They didn't usually succeed in killing the hyenas, but most of the time they did convince the animals that their time would be better spent on more defenseless prey.

The little people did lose a baby to a carnivore now and then, of course, or an old person whose worn-out teeth were making his or her life chancy anyway. They could stand that. They seldom lost anyone important to the well-being of the tribe-except when hunting, of course. But they didn't have any choice about taking the risks of the hunt. They had to hunt to eat.

Although the australopithecines were tiny, they were quite strong. They tended to have pot bellies, but the gluteus maximus was quite small-even the females had no hips to speak of. Their faces were not very human: no chin worth mentioning, a broad nose, tiny ears almost hidden in the head fur-you wouldn't call it hair yet. An average australopithecine's skull did not have room for any large supply of brains. If you poured the brains out of his sloped skull into a pint beer mug, they would probably spill over the edge, but not much.

Of course, no modern beer drinker would do that, but one of the little furry people might have-gladly. In their diet, brains were a delicacy. Even each other's.

The visitors didn't think much of the furry people's eating habits. Still, the creatures had one anatomical characteristic that interested the visitors a lot-in a sort of winky-jokey way, with s.e.xual overtones. Like the visitors, the australopithecines were bipeds. Unlike the visitors, their legs were positioned so close to each other that they actually rubbed together at the thighs when they walked- and for the males, at least, that seemed to the visitors to present real problems, since the male s.e.xual organs hung between the thighs.

(Some hundreds of thousands of years later, the then paramount denizens of Earth, the human race, would ask themselves similar questions about the long-gone visitors ... and they, too, would fail to understand.) So the visitors from s.p.a.ce looked the little furry creatures over for a while, then chirruped their disappointment to each other, got back in their s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps, and went glumly away.

Their visit had not been a total loss. Any planet that bore life at all was a rare jewel in the galaxy. Still, they had really been hoping for a more sophisticated kind of life-someone to meet and be friends and interchange views and have discussions with. These little furry animals definitely weren't up to any of that. The visitors didn't leave them quite untouched, though. The visitors had learned, from dismal experience, that faintly promising species of creatures might easily die off, or take a wrong turning somewhere along the evolutionary line, and so never realize their promise. So the visitors had a policy of establis.h.i.+ng a sort of, well, call them "game preserves." Accordingly, they took a few of the australopithecines away with them in their s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps when they left. They put the little beasts in a safe place, in the hope that they might amount to something after all. Then the visitors departed.

Time pa.s.sed . . . a lot of time.

The australopithecines never did get very far on Earth. But then their close relatives-the genus h.o.m.o, better known as you and me and all our friends-came along. The genus h.o.m.o people worked out a lot better. Over some five hundred thousand years, in fact, they did just about all the things the visitors had hoped for from the australopithecines.

These "humans," as they called themselves, were pretty clever at thinking things up. As the ages pa.s.sed they invented a lot of neat stuff-the wheel, and agriculture, and draft animals, and cities, and levers and sailing s.h.i.+ps and the internal combustion engine and credit cards and radar and s.p.a.cecraft. They didn't invent them all at once, of course. And not everything they invented turned out to be an absolute boon, because along the way they also invented clubs and swords and bows and catapults and cannon and nuclear missiles. These humans had a real talent for messing things up.

For instance, a lot of their inventions were the kind that looked as though they ought to do something, but really did something very different-which was the case with all their "peacekeeping" gadgets, none of which kept any peace. "Medicine" was another case in point. They invented what they called medicine quite early- that is, they invented the practice of doing all sorts of bizarre things to people who were unfortunate enough to get sick. Ostensibly the things they did were intended to make the sick person better; often enough they went the other way. At best, they generally didn't help. The man who was dying of malaria may have been grateful to his local doctor for putting on the devil mask and dancing around the bed, hut the patient died anyway. By the time human medicine reached the point where a sick person's chances of recovery were better with a doctor than without one-that took about 499,900 of those 500,000 years-humans had managed to find a more efficient way of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g things up. They had invented money. Human medicine became fairly good at curing many human ailments, but more and more of the human race began to have trouble finding the money to pay for it.

And along about the same time, the humans who lived on this little green planet called Earth finally reached the point where they could get off it for the first time. The age of human exploration of s.p.a.ce had begun.

In a sense, this was a happy coincidence. By the time human beings reached the point of being able to launch a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, it may well have been true that it was also getting to be a good time to think seriously about leaving the Earth, for good. The Earth was a pretty good place to be rich in. It was a very bad one to be poor.

By then, of course, the people who had dropped in on the australopithecines were long gone.

In their yearning quest for some other intelligent race to talk to they had surveyed more than half the galaxy. Actually, there were some successes, or almost successes. They did find a few promising species-well, at least as promising as the poor, dumb australopithecines.

Probably the race that came closest to what they were looking for were the ones they called the Slow Swimmers. These people (no, they didn't look a bit like "people," but in fairness that was more or less what they were) lived in the dense liquid-gas atmosphere of a heavy planet. The Slow Swimmers had language, at least. In fact, they sang beautiful, endless songs in their language, which the visitors finally managed to puzzle out enough to understand. The Slow Swimmers even had cities-sort of cities-well, what they had was domiciles and public structures that floated around in the soupy mud they lived in. The Slow Swimmers weren't a lot of fun to talk to, but the main reason for that was that they were, you'd better believe it, really slow. If you tried to talk to them you had to wait a week for them to get out a word, a year to finish the first few bars of one of their songs-and a couple of lifetimes, anywa~r, to carry on a real conversation. That wasn't the Slow Swimmers' fault. They lived at such a low temperature that everything they did was orders of magnitude slower than warm-blooded oxygen-breathers like human beings-or like the visitors from s.p.a.ce.

Then the visitors found someone else ... and that was a whole other thing, and a very scary one.

They stopped looking after that.

When human beings went into s.p.a.ce they had their own agenda, which wasn't quite the same as the purposes of their ancient visitors. The humans weren't really looking for other intelligences, at least not in the same way. The human telescopes and probe rockets had told them long ago that no intelligent aliens were going to be found, at least in their own solar system-and they had little hope of going any farther than that.

The humans might well have looked for their long-ago visitors if they had had any idea they existed. But, of course, they didn't.

Maybe the best way to find another intelligent race is to be lucky rather than purposeful. When human beings got to the planet Venus it didn't look very promising. The first humans to look at it didn't "look"-no one could see very far through its miserably dense and murky air-they just circled around it in orbit, feeling for surface features with radar. What they found wasn't encouraging. Certainly when the first human rockets landed beside the Rift Valley of Aphrodite Terra and the first parties began to explore the inhospitable surface of Venus they had no hope of finding life there.

And, sure enough, they didn't. But then, in a part of Venus called Aino Planitia, a geologist made a discovery. There was a fissure-call it a tunnel, though at first they thought it might be a lava tube-under the surface of the planet. It was long, it was regular . . and it had no business being there.

The Venusian explorers, without warning, had found the first signs of that half-million-year-ago visit . .

I.

My name is Audee Waithers, my job airbody driver, my home 'on Venus-in the Spindle or in a Heechee hut most of the time; wherever I happen to be when I feel sleepy otherwise.

Until I was twenty-five I lived on Earth, mostly in Amarillo Central. My father was deputy governor of Texas. He died when I was still in college, but he left me enough in civil-service dependency benefits for me to finish school, get a master's in business administration, and pa.s.s the journeyman's examination as clerk-typist in the Service. So I was set up for life, or so most people would have thought.

After I had tried it for a few years, I made a discovery. I didn't like the life I was set up for. It wasn't so much for the reasons anyone might expect. Amarillo Central wasn't all that bad. I don't mind having to wear a smog suit, can get along with neighbors even when there are eight thousand of them to the square mile, tolerate noise, can defend myself against the hoodlum kid gangs-no, it wasn't Texas itself that bothered me. It was what I was doing with my life in Texas, and, for that matter, what I would have to be doing with it anywhere else on Earth.

So I got out.

I sold my UOPWA journeyman's card to a woman who had to mortgage her parents' room to pay for it; I mortgaged my own pension accrual; I took the little bit of money I had saved in the bank... and I bought a one-way ticket to Venus.

There wasn't anything strange about that. It was what every kid tells himself he's going to do when he grows up. The difference is that I did it.

I suppose it would all have been different if I'd had any chance at Real Money. If my father had been full governor, with all those chances for payoffs and handouts, instead of being just a civil-service flunky ... If the dependency benefits he'd left me had included unlimited Full Medical . . . If I'd been at the top of the heap instead of stuck in the oppressed middle, squeezed from both directions .

It didn't happen that way. So I took the pioneer route and wound up trying to make a living out of Terrestrial tourists in Venus's main place, the Spindle.

Everybody has seen pictures of the Spindle, just as with the Colosseum and Niagara Falls. The difference, of course, is that the only view you ever get of the Spindle is from inside it. It's under the surface of Venus, in a place called Alpha Regio.

Like everything worth looking at on Venus, the Spindle was something left over by the Heechee. n.o.body had ever figured out exactly what it was the Heechee wanted with an underground chamber three hundred meters long and spindle-shaped, but there it was. So we used it. It was the closest thing Venus had to a Times Square or a Champs Elysees. All Terry tourists head first for the Spindle, so that's where we start fleecing them.

My own airbody-rental business is reasonably legitimate, as tourist ventures go on Venus-I mean, at least it is if you don't count the fact that there isn't really much worth seeing on Venus that wasn't left there, under the surface, by the Heechee. All the other tourist traps in the Spindle are reasonably crooked. Terries don't seem to mind that. They must know they're being taken, though. They all load up on Heechee prayer fans and doll-heads, and those paperweights of transparent plastic in which a contoured globe of Venus swims in a kind of orangy-browny snowstorm of make-believe blood-diamonds, fire-pearls, and fly ash. None of the souvenirs are worth the price of their ma.s.s charge back to Earth, but to a tourist who can get up the price of the interplanetary pa.s.sage in the first place I don't suppose that matters.

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 b.u.t.ter, 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.

Cla.s.s III is the quick and dirty kind. Back on Earth, they are merely well-to-do. The Cla.s.s Ills 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 s.h.i.+ps are in all the rental rooms on Venus are filled. Sometimes they'll have six couples sharing a single part.i.tioned cubicle, two pairs at a time, hot-bedding eight-hour s.h.i.+fts 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 Cla.s.s Ills to live until the next Hohmann-orbit time, so when the Cla.s.s II tourists come in we cut each other's throats over them.

The Cla.s.s Ils 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 Cla.s.s 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 Cla.s.s 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 al lows 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 Cla.s.s 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 compet.i.tors would be trying to cut my throat to get to the Gagarin's pa.s.sengers 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 compet.i.tors; 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 pa.s.sengers, whoever they were, pretty much to myself . . . a.s.suming they could be interested in taking a trip outside the maze of Heechee tunnels right around the Spindle.

I had to a.s.sume 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 cafe. "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 pa.s.sed 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-s.h.i.+p 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?"

"Aw." Cochenour shook his head. "What's the point of running around? Does any of the planet look any different than the s.p.a.ce pad we came in on, right over our heads?"

Vastra hesitated. I could see him doing swift arithmetic in his head, measuring the chance of persuading the Terry to go for a surface tour against what he might get from me as his commission on something bigger. He didn't look my way. Honesty won out- that is, honesty reinforced by a quick appraisal of Cochenour's gullibility. "Not much different, no, sah," he admitted. "All pretty hot and dry on the surface, all the same, pretty much. But I did not think of the surface."

"What then?"

"Ah, the Heechee warrens, sah! There are many miles of same just below this settlement. A reliable guide could be found-"

"Not interested," Cochenour growled. "Not in anything that 1 ~'.

close.

''Sah?''

"If a guide can lead us through them," Cochenour explained, "that means they've all been explored, which means if there was anything good in them it's been looted already. What's the fun of that?"

"Of course!" Vastra cried immediately. "I understand your meaning, sah." He looked noticeably happier, and I could feel his radar reaching out to make sure I was listening, though he still didn't look in my direction at all. "To be sure," he went on weightily, an expert explaining complexities to a valued client, "there is always the chance that one may find new digs, sah, provided one knows where to look. Am I correct in a.s.suming that this would interest you?"

The Third of Vastra's house had brought me my drink and a thin powder-faxed slip of paper. "Thirty percent," I whispered to her. "Tell Sub. Only no bargaining and no getting anybody else to bid." She nodded and winked; she'd been listening too, of course, and she was as sure as I was that this Terry was firmly on the hook.

It had been my intention to nurse my drink as long as I could, while the mark ripened under Vastra's skillful ministrations, but it looked like prosperity was looming ahead. I was ready to celebrate. I took a long, happy swallow.

Unfortunately, the hook didn't seem to have a barb. Unaccountably, the Terry shrugged. "Waste of time, I bet," he grumbled. "I mean, really, if anybody knew where to look, why wouldn't he have looked there on his own already, right?"

"Ah, mister!" Vastra cried, beginning to panic. "But I a.s.sure you, there are hundreds of tunnels not yet explored! Thousands, sah! And in them, who knows, treasures beyond price very likely!"

Cochenour shook his head. "Let's skip it," he said. "Just bring us another drink. And see if you can't get the ice really cold this time.''

That shook me. My nose for money was rarely wrong.

I put down my drink and half turned away to hide what I was doing from the Terries as I looked at the fax of Sub's briefing report on them to see if it might explain to me why Cochenour had lost interest so fast.

The report couldn't answer that question. It did tell me a lot, though. The woman with Cochenour was named Dorotha Keefer. She had been traveling with him for a couple of years now, according to their pa.s.sports, though this was their first time off Earth. There was no indication of a marriage between them-or of any intention of it, at least on Cochenour's part. Keefer was in her early twenties-real age, not simulated by drugs and transplants. While Cochenour himself was well over ninety.

He did not, of course, look anywhere near that. I'd watched him walk over to their table, and he moved lightly and easily, for a big man. His money came from land and petro-foods. According to the synoptic on him, he had been one of the first oil millionaires to switch over from selling oil as fuel for cars to oil as a raw material for food production, growing algae in the crude oil that came out of his well and selling the algae, in processed form, for human consumption. So then he had stopped being a mere millionaire and turned into something much bigger.

That accounted for the way he looked. He had been living on Full Medical, with extras. The report said that his heart was t.i.tanium and plastic. His lungs had been transplanted from a twentyyear-old killed in a copter crash. His skin, muscles, and fats-not to mention his various glandular systems-were sustained by hormones and cell-builders at what had to be a cost of several thousand dollars a day.

To judge by the way he stroked the thigh of the girl next to him, he was getting his money's worth. He looked and acted no more than forty, at most-except perhaps for the look of his pale-blue, diamond-bright, weary, and disillusioned eyes.

He was, in short, a lovely mark.

I couldn't afford to let him get away. I swallowed the rest of the drink and nodded to the Third of Vastra for another. There had to be some way, somehow, to land him for a charter of my airbody.

All I had to do was find it.

Of course, on the other side of the little railing that set Vastra's cafe off from the rest of the Spindle, half the tunnel-rats on Venus were thinking the same thoughts. This was the worst of the low season. The Hohmann crowd was still three months in the future, and all of us were beginning to run low on money. My need for a liver transplant was just a little extra incentive; of the hundred maze-runners I could see out of the corner of my eye, ninety-nine needed to cut a helping out of this tourist's bankroll as much as I did, just for the sake of staying alive.

We couldn't all do it. He looked pretty fat, but n.o.body could have been fat enough to feed us all. Two of us, maybe three, maybe even half a dozen might score enough to make a real difference. No more than that.

I had to be one of those few.

I took a deep swallow of my second drink, tipped the Third of Vastra's House lavishly-and conspicuously-and turned idly around until I was facing the Terries.

The girl was bargaining with the knot of souvenir vendors leaning over the rail. "Boyce?" she called over her shoulder. "What's this thing for?"