So the military had taken it all.
Still, they'd showed something I never had suspected. They did have a kind of a heart. Atrophied and flinty, yes, but a heart. They'd gone into the dig while I was still getting glucose enemas in my sleep, and they'd been pleased with what they'd found. They decided to pay me a kind of finder's fee. Not much, to be sure. But enough to save my life. Enough to meet the Quackery's bill for ll their carpentry on me, and even enough left over to put some in the bank and pay the back rent on my own place, so Dorrie and I could move in when Vastra's House decided we were well enough to be on our own.
Of course, they hadn't had to pay for the transplant liver itself. That hadn't cost anything at all.
For a while it bothered me that the military wouldn't say what they'd found. I did my best to find out. I even tried to get Sergeant Littleknees drunk so I could worm it out of her, when she came to the Spindle on furlough. That didn't work. Dorrie was right there, and how drunk can you get one girl when another girl is right there watching you? Probably Amanda Littleknees didn't know, anyhow. Probably nobody did except a few specialists.
But it had to be something big, because of the cash award, and most of all because they didn't prosecute us for trespassing on the
military reservation. And so we get along all right, the two of us. Or the three of us.
Dorrie turned out to be really good at selling imitation prayer fans and fire-pearls to the Terry tourists, especially when her pregnancy began to show. We were both kind of celebrities, of course. She kept us in eating money until the high season started, and by then I had found out that my status as a famous tunnel discoverer was worth something, so I parlayed it into a cash loan and a new airbody. We're doing pretty well, for tunnel-rats. I've promised I'll marry her if our kid turns out to be a boy, but as a matter of fact I'm going to do it anyway. She was a great help at the dig.
Especially with my own private project.
Dorrie couldn't have known just what I wanted to bring Cochenour's body back for. She didn't argue, though. Sick and wretched as she was, she helped me get the cadaver into the airbody lock for the return to the Spindle.
Actually, I wanted that body very much-one piece of it, anyway.
It's not really a new liver, of course. Probably it's not even secondhand. Heaven knows where Cochenour bought it, but I'm sure it wasn't his original equipment.
But it works.
And, bastard though he was, I kind of liked him in a way, and I don't mind at all the fact that I've got a part of him with me always.
The greatest treasure the Heechee tunnels on Venus had to offer had already been discovered, though the first discoverers didn't know it. No one else knew, either-at least, no one except a solitary tunnel-rat named Sylvester Macklin, and he was not in a position to tell anybody what he had found.
Sylvester Macklin had discovered a Heechee spaceship.
If Macklin had reported his find he would have become the richest man in the solar system. He also would have lived to enjoy his wealth. But Sylvester Macklin was as crotchety a loner as any other tunnel-rat, and he did something quite different.
He saw that the ship looked to be in good condition. Maybe, he thought, he could even fly it.
Unfortunately for himself, he succeeded.
Macklin's ship did exactly what any Heechee ship was designed to do, and the Heechee were marvelously great designers. No one knows exactly what processes of thought and experiment and deduction Macklin went through when he blundered onto the wonderful find. He didn't survive to tell anyone. Still, obviously at some point he must have gotten into the ship and closed its hatch and begun poking and prodding at the things that looked as though they ought to be its controls.
