"Well, let's start with the most important part," I said, carefully pouring coffee. "While we're inside this airbody you can do what you like-walk around, eat, drink, smoke if you got 'em, whatever. The cooling system is built for more than three times this many people, plus their cooking and appliance loads, with a safety factor of two. Air and water, more than we'd need for two months. Fuel, enough for three round trips plus maneuvering. If anything went wrong we'd yell for help and somebody would come and get us in a couple of hours at the most. Probably it would be the Defense boys, because they're closest and they have really fast airbodies. The worst thing would be if the hull breached and the whole Venusian atmosphere tried to come in. If that happened fast we'd just be dead. It never happens fast, though. We'd have time to get into the suits, and we can live in them for thirty hours. Long before that we'd be picked up."
"Assuming, of course, that nothing went wrong with the radio at the same time."
"Right. Assuming that. You know that you can get killed anywhere, if enough accidents happen at once."
He poured himself another cup of coffee and tipped a little brandy into it. "Go on."
"Well, outside the airbody it's a lot trickier. You've only got the suit to keep you alive, and its useful life, as I say, is only thirty hours. It's a question of refrigeration. You can carry plenty of air and water, and you don't have to worry about food on that time scale, but it takes a lot of compact energy to get rid of the diffuse energy all around you. That means fuel. The cooling systems use up a lot of fuel, and when that's gone you'd better be back in the airbody. Heat isn't the worst way to die. You pass out before you begin to hurt. But in the end you're dead.
"The other thing is, you want to check your Suit every time you put it on. Pressure it up, and watch the gauge for leaks. I'll check, too, but don't rely on me. It's your life. And watch the faceplates. They're pretty strong-you can drive nails with them without breaking them-but if they're hit hard enough by something that's also hard enough they can crack all the same. That way you're dead, too."
Dorrie asked quietly, "Have you ever lost a tourist?"
"No." But then I added, "Others have. Five or six get killed every year."
"I'll play at those odds," Cochenour said seriously. "Anyway, that wasn't the lecture I wanted, Audee. I mean, I certainly want to hear how to stay alive, but I assume you would have told us all this before we left the ship anyway. What I really wanted to know was how come you picked this particular mascon to prospect."
This old geezer with the muscle-beach body was beginning to bother me, with his disturbing habit of asking the questions I didn't want to answer. There definitely was a reason why I had picked this site. It had to do with about five years of study, a lot of digging, and about a quarter of a million dollars' worth of correspondence, at space-mail rates, with people like Professor Hegramet back on Earth.
But I didn't want to tell him all my reasons. There were about a dozen sites that I really wanted to explore. If this happened to be one of the payoff places, he would come out of it a lot richer than I would-that's what the contracts you sign say: forty percent to the charterer, five percent to the guide, the rest to the government-and that should be enough for him. If this one happened not to pay off, I didn't want him taking some other guide to one of the others I'd marked.
So I only said, "Call it an informed guess. I promised you a good shot at a tunnel that's never been opened, and I hope to keep my promise. And now let's get the food put away; we're within ten minutes of where we're going."
With everything strapped down and ourselves belted up, we dropped out of the relatively calm layers into the big surface winds again.
We were over the big south-central massif, about the same elevation as the lands surrounding the Spindle. That's the elevation where most of the action is on Venus. Down in the lowlands and the deep rift valleys the pressures run a hundred and twenty thousand millibars and up. My airbody wouldn't take any of that for very long. Neither would anybody else's, except for a few of the special research and military types. Fortunately, it seemed the Heechee didn't care for the lowlands, either. Nothing of theirs has ever been located much below ninety-bar. Doesn't mean it isn't there, of course.
Anyway, I verified our position on the virtual globe and on the detail charts, and deployed the first three autosonic probes.
The winds threw them all over the place as soon as they dropped free. That was all right. It doesn't much matter where the probes land, within broad limits, which is a good thing. They dropped like javelins at first, then flew around like straws in the wind until their little rockets cut in and the ground-seeking controls fired them to the surface.
