It was unbreached and waiting for us. Our beauty was a virgin. We took her maidenhead with all love and reverence and entered into her.
xii
I must have blacked out again, because when I realized where I was
I was on the floor of the tunnel. My helmet was open. So were the
side-zips of my heatsuit. I was breathing stale, foul air that had to
be a quarter of a million years old and smelled every minute of it. But it was air.
It was denser than Earth-normal and a lot less humid, but the partial pressure of oxygen was close enough to the same. I was proving that by the fact that I had been breathing it without dying.
Next to me on the floor was Dorrie Keefer.
Her helmet was open, too. The blue Heechee wall light didn't flatter her complexion, so she looked about as ghastly as a pretty girl can. At first I wasn't sure she was breathing. But in spite of the way she looked, her pulse was going, her lungs were functioning, and when she felt me poking at her she opened her eyes.
'God, I'm beat,' she said. 'But we made it!'
I didn't say anything. She'd said it all for both of us. We sat there, grinning foolishly at each other, looking like Halloween masks in the blue Heechee glow.
That was about all I was able to do just then. I was feeling very light-headed. I had my hands full just comprehending the fact that I was alive. I didn't want to endanger that odds-against precarious fact by moving around.
I wasn't comfortable, though, and after a moment I realized that I was very hot. I closed up my helmet to shut out some of the heat, but the smell inside was so bad that I opened it again, figuring that the heat was better.
It then occurred to me to wonder why the heat was only unpleasant, instead of instantly, incineratingly fatal.
Energy transport through a Heechee wall-material surface is slow, but not hundreds of thousands of years slow. My sad, sick old brain ruminated that thought around for a while and finally staggered to a conclusion: At least until quite recently, maybe some centuries or thousands of years at most, this tunnel had been kept artificially cool. So, I told myself sagely, there had to be some sort of automatic machinery. Wow, I said to myself. That ought to be worth finding all by itself. Broken down or not, it could be the kind of thing fortunes are built on
And that made me remember why we had come there in the first place. I looked up the corridor and down, hungry for the first site of the Heechee loot that might make us all well again.
When I was a schoolkid in Amarillo Central, my favorite teacher was a crippled lady named Miss Stevenson. She used to tell us stories out of Bulfinch and Homer.
Miss Stevenson spoiled one whole weekend for me with the sad story of one Greek fellow whose biggest ambition was to become a god. I gathered that was a fairly ordinary goal for a bright young Greek in those days, though I'm not sure how often they made it. This man started out with a few big steps up the ladder-he was already a king, of a little place in Lydia-but he wanted more. He wanted divinity. The gods even let him come to Olympus, and it looked as though he had it made ... until he fouled up.
I don't remember the details of what he did wrong, except that it had something to do with a dog and some nasty trick he played on one of the gods by getting him to eat his own son. (Those Greeks
had pretty primitive ideas of humor, I guess.) Whatever it was, they punished him for it. What he got was solitary confinement-for eternity-and he served it standing neck deep in a cool lake in hell but unable to drink. Every time he opened his lips the water pulled away. The fellow's name was Tantalus . .. and in that Heechee tunnel I thought I had a lot in common with him.
We found the treasure trove we were looking for, all right. But we couldn't reach it.
It seemed that what we had dug into wasn't the main tunnel after all. It was a sort of right-angled, Thielly-tube detour in the tunnel, and it was blocked at both ends.
'What do you suppose it is?' Dorrie asked wistfully, trying to peer through the gaps in the ten-ton slabs of Heechee metal before us. 'Do you suppose it could be that weapon you were talking about?'
I blinked my fuzzy eyes. There were machines of all kinds there, and irregular mounds of things that might have been containers for
other things, and some objects that seemed to have rotted and spilled their contents, also rotted, on the floor. But we hadn't the strength to get at them.
I stood there with my helmet pressed against the side of one of the slabs, feeling like Alice peering into her tiny garden without the bottle of drink-me. 'All I know for sure,' I said, 'is that, whatever it is, there's more of it there than anybody ever found before.'
And I slumped to the floor, exhausted and sick and, all the same, feeling very contented with the world.
Dorrie sat down next to me, in front of that barred gate to Eden, and we rested for a moment.
'Gram would've been pleased,' she murmured.
'Oh, sure,' I agreed, feeling a little drunk. 'Gram?'
'My grandmother,' she explained, and then maybe I blacked out again. When I heard what she was saying again, she was talking about how her grandmother had refused to marry Cochenour, long and long ago. It seemed to matter to Dorotha Keefer, so I tried politely to pay attention, but some of it didn't make a lot of sense.
'Wait a minute,' I said. 'She didn't want him because he was poor?'
'No, no! Not because he was poor, although he was that. Because he was going off to the oi1 fields, and she wanted somebody steadier. Like my grandfather. And then when Boyce came by a year ago- 'He gave you a job,' I said, nodding to show I was following,
'as his girlfriend.'
'No, damn it!' she said, annoyed with me. 'In his office. The-other part came later. We fell in love.'
'Oh, right,' I said. I wasn't looking for an argument.
She said stiffly, 'He's really a sweet man, Audee. Outside of business, I mean. And he would've done anything
