it.
Finally they were good enough for a trial. We all huddled in the lock and opened the port to the surface of Venus.
We were still in darkness, but there's so much scatter from the sun that it doesn't get really dark ever. I let them practice walking around the airbody, leaning into the wind, bracing themselves against the hold-downs and the side of the ship, while I got ready to dig.
I hauled out our first instant igloo, dragged it into position, and ignited it. As it smoldered it puffed up like the children's toy that
used to be called a Pharaoh's Serpent, producing a light yet tough ash that grew up around the digging site and joined in a seamless dome at the top. I had already emplaced the digging torch and the crawl-through lock. As the ash grew I manhandled the lock to get a close union and managed to get a perfect join the first time.
Dorrie and Cochenour stayed out of the way, watching from the ship through their plug windows. Then I keyed the radio on.
'You want to come in and watch me start it up?' I shouted.
Inside the helmets, they both nodded their heads; I could just see the bobbing motion through the plugs. 'Come on, then,' I yelled, and wiggled through the crawl lock. I signed for them to leave it open as they followed me in.
With the three of us and the digging equipment in it, the igloo was even more crowded than the airbody had been. They backed away as far from me as they could get, bent against the arc of the igloo wall, while I started up the augers, checked that they were vertical, and watched the first castings begin to spiral out of the cut.
The foam igloo reflects a lot of sound and absorbs even more. All the same, the din inside the igloo was a lot worse than in the howling winds outside; cutters are noisy. When I thought they'd seen enough to satisfy them for the moment, I waved them out of the crawl-through, followed, sealed it behind us, and led them back into the airbody.
'So far, so good,' I said, twisting off the helmet and loosenng
the suit. 'We've got about forty meters to cut, I think. Might as
well wait in here as out there.'
'How long will it take?'
'Maybe an hour. You can do what you like; what I'm going to
do is take a shower. Then we'll see how far we've got.'
That was one of the nice things about having only three people aboard: we didn't have to worry much about water discipline. It's astonishing how a quick wet-down revives you after coming out of a heatsuit. When I'd finished mine I felt ready for anything.
I was even prepared to eat some of Boyce Cochenour's three. thousand-calorie gourmet cooking, but fortunately it wasn't necessary. Dorrie had taken over the kitchen, and what she laid out was simple, light, and reasonably nontoxic. On cooking like hers I might be able to survive long enough to collect my charter fee. It crossed my mind to wonder why she was a health nut, but then I thought,
of course, she wants to keep Cochenour alive. With all his spare parts, no doubt he had dietary problems worse than mine.
Well, not 'worse,' exactly. At least he probably wasn't quite as likely to die of them.
The Venusian surface at that point was little more than ashy sand. The augers chewed it out very rapidly. Too rapidly, in fact. When I went back into the igloo it was filled almost solid with castings. I had a devil of a job getting to the machines so that I could rotate the auger to pump the castings out through the crawl lock.
It was a dirty job, but it didn't take long.
I didn't bother to go back into the airbody. I reported over the radio to Boyce and the girl, whom I could see staring out of the bull's-eyes at me. I told them I thought we were getting close.
But I didn't tell them exactly how close.
Actually, we were only a meter or so from the indicated depth of the anomaly, so close that I didn't bother to auger all the castings out. I just made enough room to maneuver around inside the igloo.
Then I redirected the augers. And in five minutes the castings were beginning to come up with the pale blue Heechee-metal glimmer that was the sign of a real tunnel.
VIII
About ten minutes later, I keyed my helmet transmitter on and shouted, 'Boyce! Dorrie! We've hit a tunnel!'
Either they were already in their suits or they dressed faster than any maze-rat. I unsealed the crawl-through and wriggled out to help them ... and they were already coming out of the airbody, pulling themselves hand over hand against the wind toward me.
They were both yelling questions and congratulations, but I
stopped them. 'Inside,' I ordered. 'You can see for yourself.' As a matter of fact, they didn't have to go that far. They could see the blue color as soon as they knelt to enter the crawl-through.
I followed and sealed the outer port of the crawl-through behind me. The reason for that is simple enough. As long as the tunnel isn't breached, it doesn't matter what you do. But the interior of a Heechee tunnel that has remained inviolate is at a pressure only slightly above Earth-normal. Without the sealed dome of the igloo, the minute you crack the casing you let the whole ninety-thousandmillibar atmosphere of Venus pour in, heat and ablation and corrosive chemicals and all. If the tunnel is empty, or if what's in it is simple, sturdy stuff, there might not be any harm. But there are a couple of dozen mysterious chunks of scrap in the museums that might have been interesting machines-if whoever found them hadn't let the atmosphere in to squeeze them into junk. If you hit the jackpot, you can destroy in a second what has waited hundreds of thousands of years to be discovered.
We gathered around the shaft, and I pointed down. The augers had left a clean shaft, about seventy
