Or I could open the two-fuel valves and let them mix for ten minutes or so before hitting the igniter. The explosion wouldn't leave much of the airbody-or of us-and nothing at all of our various problems.
Or-I sighed. "Oh, hell," I said. "Buck up, Cochenour. We're not
dead yet."
He looked at me for a moment to see if I'd gone crazy. Then he patted Dorrie's shoulder and pushed her away, gently enough. "I will be, soon enough. I'm sorry about all this, Dorotha. And I'm sorry about your check, Walthers; I expect you needed the money."
"You have no idea."
He said with some difficulty, "Do you want me to try to explain?"
"I don't see that it makes any difference-but, yes," I admitted, "out of curiosity I do."
It didn't take him long. Once he started, he was succinct and clear and he didn't leave any important things out-although actually I could have guessed most of it. (But hadn't. Hindsight is so much better.)
The basic thing is that a man Cochenour's age has to be one of two things. Either he's very, very rich, or he's dead. Cochenour's trouble was that he was only quite rich. He'd done his best to keep all his industries going with a depleted cash flow of what was left after he siphoned off the costs of transplants and treatments, calciphylaxis and prosthesis, protein regeneration here, cholesterol flushing there, a million for this, a hundred grand a month for that .
oh, it went fast enough. I could see that. "You just don't know," he said, not pitifully, just stating a fact, "what it takes to keep a hundred-year-old man alive until you try it."
Oh, don't I just, I said, but not out loud. I let him go on with the story of how the minority stockholders were getting inquisitive and the federal inspectors were closing in . . . and so he skipped Earth to make his fortune all over again on Venus.
But I wasn't listening attentively anymore by the time he got
to the end of it. I didn't even pick up on the fact that he'd been lying about his age-imagine that vanity! Thinking it was better to say he was ninety!
I had more important things to do than make Cochenour squirm anymore. Instead of listening I was writing on the back of a navigation form. When I was finished, I passed it over to Cochenour. "Sign it," I said.
"What is it?"
"Does it matter? You don't have any choice that I can see. But what it is is a release from the all-rights section of our charter agreement. You acknowledge that the charter is void, that you have no claim, that your check was rubber, and that you voluntarily waive your ownership of anything we might find in my favor."
He was frowning. "What's this bit at the end?"
"That's where I agree to give you ten percent of my share of the profits on anything we find, if we do find anything worth money."
"That's charity," he said, looking up at me. But he was already signing. "I don't mind taking a little charity, especially since, as you point out, I don't have any choice. But I can read that synoptic web over there as well as you can, Walthers. There's nothing on it to find."
"No, there isn't," I agreed, folding the paper and putting it in my pocket. "That trace is as bare as your bank account. But we're not going to dig there. What we're going to do is go back and dig Site C."
I lit another cigarette-lung cancer was the least of my worries just then-and thought for a minute while they waited, watching me. I was wondering how much to tell them of what I had spent five years finding out and figuring out, schooling myself not even to hint at it to anyone else. I was sure in my mind that nothing I said would make a difference anymore. Even so, the habits of years were strong. The words didn't want to say themselves.
It took a real effort for me to make myself start.
"You remember Subhash Vastra, the fellow who ran the trap where I met you? Sub came to Venus during his hitch with the military. He was a weapons specialist. There isn't any civilian career for a weapons specialist, especially on Venus, so he went into the cafй business with most of his termination bonus when he got out. Then he sent for his wives with the rest of it. But he was supposed to be pretty good at weaponry while he was in the service."
"What are you saying, Audee?" Dornie asked. "I never heard of any Heechee weapons."
"No. Nobody has ever found a Heechee weapon. But Sub thinks they found targets."
