PLATINUM POHL by Frederik Pohl Page A

that works almost half the time. Or maybe you do what I did, and try to think like a Heechee. You look at the trace as a whole and try to see what points they might have been trying to connect. Then you plot
an imaginary course between them, where you would have put the tunnel if you had been the Heechee engineer in charge, and you dig somewhere along there.
    That’s what I had done, but evidently I had done wrong.
    In a fuzzy-brained sort of way, I began to think I saw what I’d done.
    I visualized the trace. The right place to dig was where I had set the airbody down, but of course I couldn’t set up the igloo there because the airbody was in the way. So I’d set up about ten yards upslope.
    I was convinced that ten yards was what made us miss.
    I was pleased with myself for figuring it out, although I couldn’t see that it made a lot of practical difference. If I’d had another igloo I would have been glad to try again, assuming I could hold out that long. But that didn’t mean much, because I didn’t have another igloo.
    So I sat on the edge of the dark shaft, nodding sagaciously over the way I had solved the problem, dangling my legs and now and then sweeping tailings in. I think that was part of a kind of death wish, because I know I thought, now and then, that the nicest thing to do would be to jump in and pull the tailings down over me.
    But the Puritan ethic didn’t want me to do that. Anyway, it would have solved only my own personal problem. It wouldn’t have done anything for old Dorrie Keefer, snoring away outside in the thermal hurricane.
    I then began to wonder why I was worrying about Dorrie. It was a pleasant enough subject to be thinking about, but sort of sad.
     
    I went back to thinking about the tunnel.
    The bottom of the shaft couldn’t be more than a few yards away from where we had bottomed out empty. I thought of jumping down and scraping away with my bare gloves. It seemed like a good idea. I’m not sure how much was whimsy and how much the fantasy of a sick man, but I kept thinking how nice it would be if there were Heechees still in there, and when I scratched into the blue wall material I could just knock politely and they’d open up and let me in. I even had a picture of what they looked like: sort of friendly and godlike. It would have been very pleasant to meet a Heechee, a live one that could speak English. “Heechee, what did you really use those things we call prayer fans for?” I could ask him. Or, “Heechee, have you got anything that will keep me from dying in your medicine chest?” Or, “Heechee, I’m sorry we messed up your front yard and I’ll try to clean it up for you.”
    I pushed more of the tailings back into the shaft. I had nothing better to do, and who could tell, maybe they’d appreciate it. After a while I had it half full and I’d run out of tailings, except for the ones that were pushed outside the igloo, and I didn’t have the strength to go after them. I looked for something else to do. I reset the augers, replaced the dull blades with the last sharp ones we had, pointed them in the general direction of a twenty-degree offset angle downslope, and turned them on.
    It wasn’t until I noticed that Dorrie was standing next to me, helping me steady the augers for the first yards of cut, that I realized I had made a plan.
    Why not try an offset cut? Did we have any better chance?
    We did not. We cut.
    When the drills stopped bucking and settled down to chew into the rock and we could leave them, I cleared a space at the side of the igloo and shoved tailings out for a
while; then we just sat there and watched the drills spit rock chips into the old shaft. It was filling up nicely. We didn’t speak. Presently I fell asleep again.
    I didn’t wake up until Dorrie pounded on my head. We were buried in tailings, but they weren’t just rock. They glowed blue, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.
    The augers must have been scratching at the Heechee wall liner