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 or~ce 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.
The Third winked at me over her flirtation veil and turned to her companion, who looked around and recognized me. 'Hello, Mr. Walthers,' she said.
'I thought I might find you here,' I said, which was no more than the truth. I didn't know what to call the woman. My own mother had been old-fashioned enough to take my father's name when they married, but that didn't apply here, of course. 'Miss Keefer' was accurate, 'Mrs. Cochenour' might have been diplomatic; I got around the problem by saying, 'Since we'll be seeing a lot of each other, how about getting right on to first names?'
'Audee, is it?'
I gave her a twelve-tooth smile. 'Swede on my mother's side, old Texan on my father's. Name's been in his family a long time, I guess-Dorotha.'
Vastra's Third had melted into the background; I took over, to show this Dorotha Keefer what the Hall of Discoveries was all about.
The Hall is there for the purposes of getting Terry tourists and prospectors hotted up, so they'll spend their money poking around Heechee digs. There's a little of everything in it, from charts of the worked diggings and a large-scale Mercator map of Venus to samples of all the principal finds. I showed her the copy of the anisokinetic punch, and the original solid-state piezophone that had made its discoverer almost as permanently rich as the guys who marketed the punch. There were about a dozen fire-pearls, quarter- inch jobbies; they sat behind armor glass, on cushions, blazing away with their cold milky light. 'They were what made the piezophone possible,' I told her. 'The machine itself, that's a human invention; but the fire-pearls are what makes it work-they convert pressure into electricity and vice versa.'
'They're pretty,' she said. 'But why do they have to be protected like that? I saw bigger ones lying on a counter in the Spindle without anybody even watching them.'
'That's a little different, Dorotha,' I told her. 'These are real.' She laughed out loud. I liked her laugh. No woman looks beautiful when she's laughing hard, and girls who worry about looking beautiful don't do it. Dorotha Keefer looked like a healthy, pretty
woman having a good time, which, when you come down to it, is about the best way for a woman to look.
