The man who helped me out of my lander and bundled me against the sudden cold was a dark, immense Martian-Japanese named Norio Ituno. He put me in his own bed, filled me with hot liquids and let me rest for an hour. I dozed, and when I woke he was sitting there, looking at me with amusement and respect. The respect was for someone who had slain a five-hundred million-dollar ship. The amusement was that I was idiot enough to do it.
“I guess I’m in trouble,” I said.
“I would say so, yes,” he agreed. “The ship is totally dead. Never saw anything like it before.”
“I didn’t know a Heechee ship could go dead like that.”
He shrugged. “You did something original, Broadhead. How are you feeling?” I sat up to answer him, and he nodded. “I’m pretty busy right now. I’m going to have to let you take can yourself for a couple of hours—if you can? — fine. Then we’ll have a party for you.”
“Party!” It was the farthest thing from my mind. “For who?”
“We don’t meet someone like you every day, Broadhead,’ said Ituno admiringly, and left me to my thoughts.
I didn’t like my thoughts very much, and after a while I got up,
put on the gloves, buttoned up the jacket, and started exploring. It didn’t take long; there wasn’t much there. I heard sounds of a party from the lower levels, but the echoes traveled at queer as along the empty corridors, and I saw no one. Gateway Two didn’t have a tourist trade, and so there wasn’t any nightclub or casino or restaurant that I could find. . . not even a latrine. After a little while that question began to seem urgent. I reasoned that Ituno would have to have something like that near his room, and tried to retrace my steps to there, but that didn’t work, either. There were cubicles along some of the corridors, but they were unfinished. No one lived there, and no one had troubled to install plumbing.
It was not one of my better days.
When I finally found a toilet I puzzled over it for ten minutes and would guiltily have left it impolitely soiled if I had not heard a sound outside the cubicle. A plump little woman was standing there, waiting.
“I don’t know how to flush it,” I apologized.
She looked me up and down. “You’re Broadhead,” she stated, and then: “Why don’t you go to Aphrodite?”
“What’s Aphrodite—no, wait. First, how do you flush this thing? Then, what’s Aphrodite?”
She pointed to a button on the edge of the door; I had thought it was a light switch. When I touched it the whole bottom of the seamless bowl began to glow and in ten seconds there was nothing inside but ash, then nothing at all.
“Wait for me,” she commanded, disappearing inside. When she came out she said, “Aphrodite’s where the money is, Broadhead. You’re going to need it.”
I let her take my arm and pull me along. Aphrodite, I began understand, was a planet. A new one, that a ship from Gateway Two had opened up less than forty days earlier, and a big find. “You’d have to pay royalty, of course,” she said. “And so far haven’t found anything big, just the usual Heechee debris. But there’s thousands of square miles to explore, and it’ll be months before the first batch of prospectors starts coming out from Gateway. We only sent the word back forty days ago. Have you any hot-planet experience?”
“Hot-planet experience?”
“I mean,” she explained, pulling me down a dropshaft and closing up to me, “have you ever explored a planet that’s hot?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had any experience at all that counts for anything. One trip. Empty. I didn’t even land.”
“Pity,” she said. “Still, there’s not that much to learn. Do you know what Venus is like? Aphrodite’s just a little bit worse. The primary’s a flare star, and you don’t want to be caught in the open. But the Heechee digs are all underground. If you find one, you’re in.”
“What are the chances of finding one?” I asked.
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, pulling me off the cable and down a tunnel, “not all that good, maybe. After all, you’re out in open when you’re prospecting. On Venus they use armored bodies and they zap around anywhere they want to go, no trouble. Well, maybe a little trouble,” she conceded. “But they don’t lose very many prospectors anymore. Maybe one percent.”
“What percent do you lose on Aphrodite?”
“More than that. Yes, I grant you, it’s higher than that. You have to use the lander from your ship, and of course it’s not mobile on the surface of a planet. Especially a planet with a face like molten sulfur and winds like hurricanes—when the weather’s mild.”
“It sounds charming,” I said. “Why aren’t you out there now?”
“Me? I’m an out-pilot. I’m going back to Gateway in about ten days, soon as I get a cargo loaded, or somebody who comes in wants a ride back.”
“I want a ride back right now.”
“Oh, cripes, Broadhead! Don’t you know what kind of trouble you’re in? You broke regulations by messing with the control board. They’ll throw the book at you.”
I thought it over carefully. Then I said, “Thanks, but I think I’ll take my chances.”
“Don’t you understand? Aphrodite has guaranteed Heeche remains. You could take a hundred trips without finding anything like this.”
“Sweetie,” I said, “I couldn’t take a hundred trips for anything, not now and not ever. I don’t know if I can take one. I think I have the guts to get back to Gateway. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
I was on Gateway Two, all together, thirteen days. Hester Bergowiz, the out-pilot, kept trying to talk me into going to Aphrodite, I guess because she didn’t want me taking up valuable cargo space on her return flight. The others didn’t care. They only thought I was crazy. I was a problem for Ituno, who was loosely in charge of keeping things straight on Two. Technically I was an illegal entrant, without a dime’s worth of per capita paid and with nothing to pay it with. He would have been within his rights to toss me out into space without a suit. He solved it by putting me to work loading low-priority cargo into Hester’s Five, mostly prayer fans and samples for analysis from Aphrodite. That took two days, and then he designated me chief gofer for the three people who were rebuilding suits for the next batch of explorers of Aphrodite. They had to use Heechee torches to soften the metal enough to bend it onto the Suits, and I wasn’t trusted with any of that. It takes two years to train a person to handle a Heechee torch in close quarters. But I was allowed to muscle the suits and sheets of Heechee metal into position for them, to fetch tools, to go for coffee. . . and to put the suits on when they were finished, and exit into space to make sure they didn’t leak.
None of them leaked.
On the twelfth day, two Fives came in from Gateway, loaded with happy, eager prospectors bringing all the wrong equipment. The word about Aphrodite had not had time to get to Gateway and back, so the new fish didn’t know what goodies were in store. Just by accident, one of them was a young girl on a science mission, a former student of Professor Hegramet’s who was supposed to make anthropometric studies of Gateway Two. On his own authority Norio Ituno reassigned her to Aphrodite, and decreed a combination welcome and farewell party. The ten newcomers and I outnumbered our hosts; but what they lacked in numbers they made up in drinking, and it was a good party. I found myself a celebrity. The new fish couldn’t get over the fact that I had slain a Heechee ship and survived.
I was almost sorry to leave. . . not counting being scared.
Ituno splashed three fingers of rice whiskey into a glass for me and offered me a toast. “Sorry to see you go, Broadhead,” he said. “Sure you won’t change your mind? We’ve got more armored ships and suits than we have prospectors right now, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last. If you change your mind after you get back—”
“I’m not going to change my mind,” I said.
“Banzai,” he said, and drank. “Listen, do you know an old guy named Bakin?”
“Shicky? Sure. My neighbor.”
“Give him my regards,” he said, pouring another drink for the purpose. “He’s a great guy, but he reminds me of you. I was with him when he lost his legs: got caught in the lander when we had to jettison. Damn near died. By the time we got him to Gateway he was all swelled up and smelled like hell; we had to take the legs off, two days out. I did it myself.”