Cochenour gave me a hell of an argument about it, but I held out. The military were still looking in on us every now and then, and I didn't want to get any closer to their perimeter than we already were. I said maybe, if we didn't have any luck elsewhere, we could sneak back to C for a quick dig before returning to the Spindle, and we left it at that.
We lifted the airbody, moved to a new position, and set out a new pattern of probes.
By the end of the second week we had dug nine times and come up empty all nine. We were getting low on igloos and probe percussers. We'd run out of tolerance for each other completely.
Cochenour had turned sullen and savage. I hadn't planned on being best buddies with the man when I first met him, but I hadn't
expected him to be as bad company as that. I didn't think he had any right to take it so hard, because it was obviously only a game with him. With all his fortune, the extra money he might pick up by discovering some new Heechee artifacts couldn't have meant much-just extra points on a scorepad-but he was playing for blood.
I wasn't particularly gracious myself, for that matter. The plain fact was that the pills from the Quackery weren't helping as much as they should. My mouth tasted as though rats had nested in it, I was getting headaches, and every once in a while I'd be woozy enough to knock things over.
See, the thing about the liver is that it sort of regulates your internal diet. It filters out poisons. It converts some of the carbohydrates into other carbohydrates that you can use. It patches together amino acids into proteins. If it isn't working, you die.
The doctor had been all over it with me. Maze-rats get liver trouble a lot; it comes when you save yourself a little trouble by letting your internal suit pressure build up-it sort of compresses the gas in your gut and squeezes the liver. He'd showed me pictures. I could visualize what was going on in my insides, with the mahogany-red liver cells dying and being replaced by clusters of fat and yellowish stuff. It was an ugly picture. The ugliest part was that there wasn't anything I could do about it. Only go on taking pills-and they wouldn't work much longer. I counted the days to bye-bye, liver, hello, hepatic failure.
So we were a bad bunch. I was being a bastard because I was beginning to feel sick and desperate. Cochenour was being a bastard because that was his nature. The only decent human being aboard was the girl.
Dorrie did her best, she really did. She was sometimes sweet (and often even pretty), and she was always ready to meet the power people, Cochenour and me, more than halfway.
It was obvious that it was tough on her. Dorotha Keefer was only a kid. No matter how grown-up she acted, she just hadn't been alive long enough to grow defenses against concentrated meanness. Add in the fact that we were all beginning to hate the sight and
sound and smell of each other (and in an airbody you get to know a lot about how people smell), and there wasn't much joy in this skylarking tour of Venus for Dorrie Keefer.
Or for any of us . . . especially after I broke the news that we were down to our last igloo.
Cochenour cleared his throat. It wasn't a polite sound. It was the beginning of a war cry. He sounded like a fighter-plane jockey blowing the covers off his guns in preparation for combat, and Dorne tried to head him off with a diversion. "Audee," she said brightly, "do you know what I think we could do? We could go back to that Site C, the one that looked good near the military reservation."
It was the wrong diversion. I shook my head. "No."
"What the hell do you mean, 'No'?" Cochenour rumbled, revving up for battle.
"What I said. No. It's too close to the Defense guys. If there's a tunnel, it will run right onto the reservation, and they'll come down on us." I tried to be persuasive. "That's a desperation trick, and I'm not that desperate."
"Walthers," he snarled, "you'll be desperate if I tell you to be desperate. I can still stop p..ayment on that check."
I corrected him. "No, you can't. The union won't let you. The regulations are very clear about that. You pay up unless I disobey a lawful request. What you want isn't lawful. Going inside the military reservation is extremely against the law."
He shifted over to cold war. "No," he said softly. "You're wrong about that. It's only against the law if a court says it is, after we do it. You're only right if your lawyers are smarter than my lawyer. Honestly, Waithers, they won't be. I pay my lawyers to be the smartest there are."
I was not in a good bargaining position. It wasn't just that what Cochenour said was true enough. He had help from a very powerful ally. My liver was on his side. I certainly could not spare time for arbitration, because without the transplant his payment was going to buy I wouldn't live that long.
Dorrie had been listening with her birdlike air of friendly inter-
