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. Nobody 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 Elysйes. 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 mass charge back to Earth, but to a tourist who can get up the price of the interplanetary passage 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 butter, 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.
Class III is the quick and dirty kind. Back on Earth, they are merely well-to-do. The Class 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 ships are in all the rental rooms on Venus are filled. Sometimes they'll have six couples sharing a single partitioned cubicle, two pairs at a time, hot- bedding eight-hour shifts 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 Class Ills to live until the next Hohmann-orbit time, so when the Class II tourists come in we cut each other's throats over them.
The Class 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 Class 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 Class 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 Class 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 competitors would be trying to cut my throat to get to the Gagarin's passengers 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 competitors; 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 passengers, whoever they were, pretty much to myself . . . assuming they could be interested in taking a trip outside the maze of Heechee tunnels right around the Spindle.
I had to assume 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
