igloo?
Possible, I judged. Pointless, though. Suppose we did hit lucky and hole in? Without an igloo to lock out those twenty thousand millibars of hot gas, we’d destroy the contents anyway.
I felt a nudge on my shoulder, and discovered that Dorrie was sitting next to me. She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t try to say anything at all. I guess it was all clear enough without talking about it.
By my suit chronometer fifteen hours were gone. That left thirty-some before Cochenour would come back and get us. I didn’t see any point in spending it all sitting there, but on the other hand I didn’t see any point in doing anything else.
Of course, I thought, I could always go to sleep for a while … and then I woke up and realized that that was what I had been doing.
Dorrie was asleep beside me.
You may wonder how a person can sleep in the teeth of a south polar thermal gale. It isn’t all that hard. All it takes is that you be wholly worn out, and wholly despairing. Sleeping isn’t just to knit the ravelled sleeve, it is a good way to shut the world off when the world is too lousy to face. As ours was.
But Venus is the last refuge of the Puritan ethic. Crazy. I knew I was as good as dead, but I felt I had to be doing something. I eased away from Dorrie, made sure her suit was belted to the hold-tight ring at the base of the igloo, and stood up. It took a great deal of concentration for me to be able to stand up, which was almost as good at keeping care out as sleep.
It occurred to me that there still might be eight or ten live Heechees in the tunnel, and maybe they’d heard us knocking and opened up the bottom of the shaft for us. So I crawled into the igloo to see.
I peered down the shaft to make sure. No. They hadn’t. It was still just a blind hole that disappeared into dirty dark invisibility at the end of the light from my head lamp. I swore at the Heechees who hadn’t helped us out, and kicked some tailings down the shaft on their nonexistent heads.
The Puritan ethic was itching me, and I wondered what I ought to do. Die? Well, yes, but I was doing that fast enough. Something constructive?
I remembered that you always ought to leave a place the way you found it, so I hauled up the drills on the eight-to-one winch and stowed them neatly. I kicked some more tailings down the useless hole to make a place to sit, and I sat down and thought.
I mused about what we had done wrong, as you might think about a chess puzzle.
I could still see the trace in my mind. It was bright and clear, so there was definitely something there. It was just tough that we’d lucked out and missed it.
How had we missed it?
After some time, I thought I knew the answer to that.
People like Dorrie and Cochenour have an idea that a seismic trace is like one of those underground maps of downtown Dallas, with all the sewers and utility conduits and water pipes marked, so you just dig where it says and you find what you want.
It isn’t exactly like that. The trace comes out as a sort of hazy approximation. It is built up, hour by hour, by measuring the echoes from the pinger. It looks like a band of spiderweb shadows, much wider than an actual tunnel and very fuzzy at the edges. When you look at it you know that somewhere in the shadows there’s something that makes them. Maybe it’s a rock interface or a pocket of gravel. Hopefully it’s a Heechee dig. Whatever it is, it’s there somewhere, but you don’t know just where, exactly. If a tunnel is twenty meters wide, which is a fair average for a Heechee connecting link, the shadow trace is sure to look like fifty, and may be a hundred.
So where do you dig?
That’s where the art of prospecting comes in. You have to make an informed guess.
Maybe you dig in the exact geometrical center—as far as it is given you to see where the center is. That’s the easiest way. Maybe you dig where the shadows are densest, which is the way the half-smart prospectors do, and
Possible, I judged. Pointless, though. Suppose we did hit lucky and hole in? Without an igloo to lock out those twenty thousand millibars of hot gas, we’d destroy the contents anyway.
I felt a nudge on my shoulder, and discovered that Dorrie was sitting next to me. She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t try to say anything at all. I guess it was all clear enough without talking about it.
By my suit chronometer fifteen hours were gone. That left thirty-some before Cochenour would come back and get us. I didn’t see any point in spending it all sitting there, but on the other hand I didn’t see any point in doing anything else.
Of course, I thought, I could always go to sleep for a while … and then I woke up and realized that that was what I had been doing.
Dorrie was asleep beside me.
You may wonder how a person can sleep in the teeth of a south polar thermal gale. It isn’t all that hard. All it takes is that you be wholly worn out, and wholly despairing. Sleeping isn’t just to knit the ravelled sleeve, it is a good way to shut the world off when the world is too lousy to face. As ours was.
But Venus is the last refuge of the Puritan ethic. Crazy. I knew I was as good as dead, but I felt I had to be doing something. I eased away from Dorrie, made sure her suit was belted to the hold-tight ring at the base of the igloo, and stood up. It took a great deal of concentration for me to be able to stand up, which was almost as good at keeping care out as sleep.
It occurred to me that there still might be eight or ten live Heechees in the tunnel, and maybe they’d heard us knocking and opened up the bottom of the shaft for us. So I crawled into the igloo to see.
I peered down the shaft to make sure. No. They hadn’t. It was still just a blind hole that disappeared into dirty dark invisibility at the end of the light from my head lamp. I swore at the Heechees who hadn’t helped us out, and kicked some tailings down the shaft on their nonexistent heads.
The Puritan ethic was itching me, and I wondered what I ought to do. Die? Well, yes, but I was doing that fast enough. Something constructive?
I remembered that you always ought to leave a place the way you found it, so I hauled up the drills on the eight-to-one winch and stowed them neatly. I kicked some more tailings down the useless hole to make a place to sit, and I sat down and thought.
I mused about what we had done wrong, as you might think about a chess puzzle.
I could still see the trace in my mind. It was bright and clear, so there was definitely something there. It was just tough that we’d lucked out and missed it.
How had we missed it?
After some time, I thought I knew the answer to that.
People like Dorrie and Cochenour have an idea that a seismic trace is like one of those underground maps of downtown Dallas, with all the sewers and utility conduits and water pipes marked, so you just dig where it says and you find what you want.
It isn’t exactly like that. The trace comes out as a sort of hazy approximation. It is built up, hour by hour, by measuring the echoes from the pinger. It looks like a band of spiderweb shadows, much wider than an actual tunnel and very fuzzy at the edges. When you look at it you know that somewhere in the shadows there’s something that makes them. Maybe it’s a rock interface or a pocket of gravel. Hopefully it’s a Heechee dig. Whatever it is, it’s there somewhere, but you don’t know just where, exactly. If a tunnel is twenty meters wide, which is a fair average for a Heechee connecting link, the shadow trace is sure to look like fifty, and may be a hundred.
So where do you dig?
That’s where the art of prospecting comes in. You have to make an informed guess.
Maybe you dig in the exact geometrical center—as far as it is given you to see where the center is. That’s the easiest way. Maybe you dig where the shadows are densest, which is the way the half-smart prospectors do, and
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