PLATINUM POHL by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online

bodies. The worst thing would be if the hull breached and the whole Venusian atmosphere tried to come in. If it happened fast we’d be dead. It never happens fast, though. We’d have time to get in 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,” said Cochenour.
    “Right. You can get killed anywhere, if enough accidents happen at once.”
    He poured himself another cup of coffee, tipped a little brandy into it and said, “Go on.”
    “Well, outside the airbody it’s a little more tricky. You’ve only got the suit, and its useful life, as I say, is only thirty hours. It’s a question of refrigeration. You can carry all the air and water you want, and you don’t have to worry about food, but it takes a lot of compact energy to get rid of the diffuse energy all around you. It takes fuel for the cooling systems, and when that’s gone you better be back in the airbody. Heat isn’t the worst way to die. You pass out before you begin to hurt. But the end result is 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 it too, but don’t rely on me. It’s your life. And the faceplates are pretty strong; you can drive nails with them without breaking them, but they can be broken if hit hard enough against a hard enough surface. That way you’re dead too.”
    Dorrie said quietly, “One question. Have you ever lost a tourist?”
    “No.” But then I added, “Others have. Five or six get killed every year.”
    “I don’t mind odds like that,” said Cochenour. “Actually, that wasn’t the lecture I was asking for, 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. He had a disturbing habit of asking the questions I didn’t want to answer. There 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 of 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 richer than I would—that’s what the contracts you sign say: 40 percent to the charterer, 25 percent to the guide, the rest to the government—and that should be enough for him. If it 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 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 fifty thousand millibars and up. My airbody wouldn’t take any of that for very long, and neither would anybody else’s, except for a few of the special research and military types. Fortunately, the Heechee didn’t care for the lowlands either. Nothing of theirs has ever been located much below twenty-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 autosonic probes. The winds threw them all over the place as