Free PLATINUM POHL by Frederik Pohl

moment.
    “No,” I said, “you don’t, Mr. Cochenour, and that’s what you’re paying me for. I do know.”
    “Yes,” he agreed, “you probably do, but whether you’re telling me the truth about what you know is another question. Hegramet never said anything about digging between mascons.”
    And then he looked at me with a completely opaque expression, waiting to see whether I would catch him up on what he had just said.
    I didn’t respond. I gave him an opaque look back. I didn’t say a word; I only waited to see what would come next. I was pretty sure that it would not be any sort of explanation of how he happened to know Hegramet’s name, or what dealings he had had with the greatest Earthside authority on Heechee diggings, and it wasn’t.
    “Put out your probes and we’ll try it your way one more time,” he said at last.
     
    I plopped the probes out, got good penetration on all of them, started firing the noisemakers. I sat watching the first buildup of lines on the scan as though I expected them to carry useful information. They couldn’t, of course, but it was a good excuse to think privately for a moment.
    Cochenour needed to be thought about. He hadn’t come to Venus just for the ride, that was clear. He had known he was going to be sinking shafts after Heechee digs before he ever left Earth. He had briefed himself on the whole bit, even to handling the instruments on the airbody. My sales talk about Heechee treasures had been wasted on a customer whose mind had been made up to buy at least half a year earlier and tens of millions of miles away.
    All that I understood, but the more I understood the more I saw that I didn’t understand. What I really wanted was to give Cochenour a quarter and send him to the movies for a while so I could talk privately to the girl. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to send him. I managed to force a yawn, complain about the boredom of waiting for the probe traces to build up, and suggest a nap. Not that I would have been real confident he wasn’t lying there with his ears flapping, listening to us. It didn’t matter. Nobody acted sleepy but me. All I got out of it was an offer from Dorrie to watch the screen and wake me if anything interesting turned up.
    So I said the hell with it and went to sleep myself.
    It was not a good sleep, because lying there waiting for it gave me time to notice how truly lousy I felt, and in how many ways. There was a sort of permanent taste of bile in the back of my mouth not so much as though I wanted to throw up as it was as though I just had. My head ached, and I was beginning to see ghost images wandering fuzzily around my field of vision. When I took my pills I didn’t count the ones that were left. I didn’t want to know.
    I’d set my private alarm for three hours, thinking maybe that would give Cochenour time to get sleepy and turn in, leaving the girl up and about and perhaps conversational.
But when I woke up there was Cochenour, cooking himself a herb omelette with the last of our sterile eggs. “You were right, Walthers,” he grinned, “I was sleepy. Had a nice little nap. Ready for anything now. Want some eggs?”
    Actually I did want them; but of course I didn’t dare eat them, so I glumly swallowed what the Quackery had allowed me to have and watched him stuff himself. It was unfair that a man of ninety could be so healthy that he didn’t have to think about digestion, while I was—well, there wasn’t any profit in that kind of thinking, so I offered to play some music, and Dorrie picked Swan Lake, and I started it up.
    And then I had an idea and headed for the tool lockers. They needed checking. The auger heads were about due for replacement, and I knew we were low on spares; and the other thing about the tool lockers was that they were as far from the galley as you could get and stay inside the airbody, and I hoped Dorrie would follow me. And she did.
    “Need any help, Audee?”
    “Glad to have it,” I