The Gateway Trip (Short Stories) by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl [Pohl, Frederik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780345375445
Google: rovfAAAACAAJ
Publisher: Del Rey Books
Published: 1989-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

“We have to go back,” I told Dorrie, showing her the time. She smiled.

“Temporarily,” she said, and we got up, took a last look at those treasures of Tantalus behind the bars, and started back to our shaft to the igloo.

After the cheerful blue glow of the Heechee tunnel, the igloo was more cramped and miserable than ever before.

What was worse was that my cloudy brain nagged me into remembering that we shouldn’t even stay inside it. Cochenour might remember to lock in and out of both ends of the crawl-through when he got there—any minute now—but he also might not. I couldn’t take the chance on letting the hot hammer of air in on our pretties.

I tried to think of a way of plugging the shaft, maybe by pushing all the tailings back in again, but although my brain wasn’t working very well I could see that that was stupid.

So the only way to solve that problem was for us to wait outside in the breezy Venusian weather. The one consolation was that it wouldn’t be too much longer to wait. The other part of that was that we weren’t equipped for a very long wait. The little watch dial next to our life-support meters, all running well into the warning red now, showed that Cochenour should in fact have arrived by now.

He wasn’t there, though.

I squeezed into the crawl-through with Dorrie, locked us both through, and we waited.

I felt a scratching on my helmet and discovered Dorrie was plugging into my jack. “Audee, I’m really very tired,” she told me. It didn’t sound like a complaint, only a factual report of something she thought I probably should know about.

“You might as well go to sleep,” I told her. “I’ll keep watch. Cochenour will be here pretty soon, and I’ll wake you up.”

I suppose she took my advice, because she lowered herself down, pausing to let me take her talk line out of my helmet jack. Then she stretched out next to the tie-down clips and left me to think in peace.

I wasn’t grateful. I wasn’t enjoying what I was beginning to think.

Still Cochenour didn’t come.

I tried to think through the significance of that. Of course, there could have been lots of reasons for a delay. He could’ve gotten lost. He could have been challenged by the military. He could have crashed the airbody.

But there was a much nastier possibility, and it seemed to make more sense than all of them.

The time dial told me he was nearly five hours late, and the life-support meters told me that we were right up against the “empty” line for power, near it for air, and well past it for water. If we hadn’t had the remaining tunnel gases to breathe for a few hours, saving the air in our tanks, we would have been dead by now.

Cochenour couldn’t have known that we would find breathable air in the Heechee tunnel. He must believe that we were dead.

The man hadn’t lied about himself.

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