Read Online PLATINUM POHL by Frederik Pohl - Free Book Online Page A

out, by the time they actually come close to finding something that belonged to an almost completely unknown alien race, left there when the closest thing to a human being on Earth was a slope-browed furry little beast killing other beasts with antelope bones, they begin to burn with exploration fever.
    So they worked hard, and drove me hard, and I was as eager as they. Maybe more so,
as the days went past and I found myself rubbing my right side, just under the short ribs, more and more of the time.
    The military boys overflew us half a dozen times in the first few days. They didn’t say much, just formal requests for identification, which they already well knew, then away. Regulations say if you find anything you’re supposed to report it right away. Over Cochenour’s objections, I reported finding that first breached tunnel, which surprised them a little, I think.
    And that’s all we had to report.
    Site B was a pegmatite dike. The other two fairly bright ones, that I called D and E, showed nothing at all when we dug, meaning that the sound reflections had probably been caused by nothing more than invisible interfaces in layers of rock or ash or gravel. I vetoed trying to dig C, the best looking of the bunch. 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 half-promised that, if we didn’t have any luck elsewhere in the mascons, we’d 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 every time. We were getting low on igloos and probes. We’d run out of tolerance for each other completely.
    Cochenour had turned sullen and savage. I hadn’t planned on liking the man much when I first met him, but I hadn’t expected him to be as bad as that. Considering that it had to be only a game with him—with all his money, the extra fortune he might pick up by discovering some new Heechee artifacts couldn’t have meant anything but extra points on a score pad—he was playing for blood.
    I wasn’t particularly graceful 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 like rats had nested in it, I was getting headaches, and I was beginning 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, and I could visualize what was going on inside me, the mahogany-red cells dying and being replaced by clusters of fat and yellowish matter. It was an ugly kind of 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 past a matter of a few days more. Liver, bye-bye; hepatic failure, hello.
    So we were a bad bunch. Cochenour was a bastard because it was his nature to be a bastard, and I was a bastard because I was sick and desperate. The only decent human being aboard was the girl.
    She 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 clearly tough on her. She was only a kid. No matter how grown up she acted, she just hadn’t been alive long enough to grow a defense 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). There wasn’t much joy on Venus for Dorrie Keefer.

    Or for any of us, especially after