"That's what I said. Nobody's ever allowed on the reservation without clearance. Not because of Heechee weapons; they've got lots of their own stuff there that they don't want people seeing."
He nodded. "So how do you propose to get around that little problem?" he asked.
If I were a completely truthful man I probably should have said that I wasn't sure I would get around it. Looked at honestly, the odds were pretty poor. We could easily get caught and, although I didn't think it was certain, very possibly shot.
But we had so little to lose, Cochenour and I at least, that I didn't think that was important enough to mention. I just said, "We'll try to fool them. We'll send the airbody off. You and I will stay behind to do the digging. If they think we're gone, they won~'t be keeping us under surveillance. All we'd have to worry about is being picked up on a routine perimeter patrol, but they're fairly careless about those. I hope."
"Audee!" the girl cried. "What are you talking about? If you and Boyce stay here, who's going to run the airbody? I can't!"
"No," I agreed, "you can't, or not very well-even after I give you a couple of lessons. But you can let the thing fly itself. Oh, you'll waste fuel, and you'll get bounced around a lot. But you'll get where you're going on autopilot. It'll even land you on its own."
"You haven't landed that way," Cochenour pointed out.
"I didn't say it would be a good landing. You'd better be strapped in." What it would be, of course, was something more like a controlled crash; I closed my mind to the thought of what an autopilot landing might do to my one and only airbody. Dorrie would survive it, though. Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred.
"Then what do I do?" Dorrie asked.
There were big holes in my plan at that point, too, but I closed my mind to them, as well. "That depends on where you go. I think the best plan would be for you to head right back to the Spindle."
"And leave you here?" she demanded, looking suddenly rebellious.
"Not permanently. In the Spindle you look up my friend BeeGee Allemang and tell him what's been going on. He'll want a share, naturally, but that's all right; we can give him twenty-five percent, and he'll be happy with that. I'll give you a note for him with all the coordinates and so on, and he'll fly the airbody right back here to pick us up. Say twenty-four hours later."
"Can we do all that in a day?" Cochenour wanted to know.
"Sure we can. We have to."
"And what if Dorrie can't find him, or he gets lost, or something?"
"She'll find him, and he won't get lost. Of course," I admitted, "there's always the possibility of some 'something.' We have a little margin for error. We can take tanks for extra air and power-we should be all right for as much as forty-eight hours. No more than that. It'll be cutting it very close, but that's plenty of time, I think. If he's late, of course, we're in trouble; but he won't be. What I really worry about is that we'll dig that tunnel and it'll be no good. Then we've wasted our time. But if we do find anything .. ." I left it there.
"Sounds pretty chancy," Cochenour observed, but he was looking at Dorrie, not at me. She shrugged.
"I didn't say it was a guarantee," I told him. "I only said it was a chance."
I was beginning to think very well of Dorotha Keefer. She was a pretty nice person, considering her age and circumstances, and smart and strong, too. But one thing she lacked was self-confidence.
She had just never been trained to it. She had been getting it as a prosthesis-from Cochenour most recently, I supposed, before that maybe whoever preceded Cochenour in her life-at her age, perhaps that had been her father. She had the air of somebody who'd been surrounded by dominating people for a long time.
That was the biggest problem, persuading Dorrie that she could do her part. "It won't work," she kept saying, as I went over the controls with her. "I'm sorry. It isn't that I don't want to help. I do, but I can't. It just won't work."
Well, it would have.
Or at least, I think it would have. In the event, we never got to try the plan out.
Between us, Cochenour and I finally got Dorrie to agree to give it a whirl. We packed up what little salvageable gear we'd put outside. We flew back to the ravine, landed, and began to set up for a dig. But I was feeling poorly-thick, headachy, clumsy-and I suppose Cochenour had his own problems, though I must admit he didn't complain. Between the two of us we managed to catch the casing of the drill in the exit port while we were off-loading it.
And, while I was jockeying it one way from above, Cochenour pulled the other way from beneath ... and the whole hard, heavy thing came right down on top of him.
It didn't kill him. It just gouged his suit and broke his leg and knocked him unconscious, and that took care of any possibility of having him to help me dig Site C.
xi
