Free PLATINUM POHL by Frederik Pohl Page B

before we take off.”
    And I turned off the radio and gazed at my rich billionaire client.
    “What the hell’s the matter with you, Walthers?” he growled.
    But I wasn’t hearing his voice. I was hearing what the happy fellow at the Quackery had told me. The equations were unforgettable. Cash = new liver + happy survival. No cash = total hepatic failure + death. And my cash supply had just dried up.
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    When you get a really big piece of news you have to let it trickle through your system and get thoroughly absorbed before you do anything about it. It isn’t a matter of seeing the implications. I saw them right away, you bet. It’s a matter of letting the system reach an equilibrium state. So I puttered for a minute. I listened to Tchaikovsky. I made sure the radio switch was off so as not to waste power. I checked the synoptic plot. It would have been nice if there had been something to show, but, the way things were going, there wouldn’t be, of course, and there wasn’t. A few pale echoes were building up. But nothing with the shape of a Heechee dig, and nothing very bright. The data were still coming in, but there was no way for those feeble plots to turn into the mother lode that could save us all, even broke bastard Cochenour. I even looked out at as much of the sky as I could to see how the weather was. It didn’t matter, but some of the high white calomel clouds were scudding among the purples and yellows of the other mercury halides. It was beautiful and I hated it.
    Cochenour had forgotten about his omelette and was watching me thoughtfully. So was Dorrie, still holding the augers in their grease-paper wrap. I grinned at her. “Pretty,” I said, referring to the music. The Auckland Philharmonic was just getting to the part
where the little swans come out arm in arm and do a fast, bouncy pas de quatre across the stage. It has always been one of my favorite parts of Swan Lake . “We’ll listen to the rest of it later,” I said, and snapped it off.
    “All right,” snarled Cochenour, “what’s going on?”
    I sat down on an igloo pack and lit a cigarette, because one of the adjustments my internal system had made was to calculate that we didn’t have to worry much about coddling our oxygen supply anymore. I said, “There’s a question that’s bothering me, Cochenour. How did you get on to Professor Hegramet?”
    He grinned and relaxed. “Is that all that’s on your mind? I checked the place out before I came. Why not?”
    “No reason, except that you let me think you didn’t know a thing.”
    He shrugged. “If you had any brains you’d know I didn’t get rich by being stupid. You think I’d come umpty-million miles without knowing what I was coming to?”
    “No, you wouldn’t, but you did your best to make me think you would. No matter. So you dug up somebody who could point you to whatever was worth stealing on Venus, and somebody steered you to Hegramet. Then what? Did he tell you I was dumb enough to be your boy?”
    Cochenour wasn’t quite as relaxed, but he wasn’t aggressive either. He said, “Hegramet told me you were the right guide to find a virgin tunnel. That’s all—except briefing on the Heechee and so on. If you hadn’t come to us I would have come to you; you just saved me the trouble.”
    I said, a little surprised, “You know, I think you’re telling me the truth. Except you left out one thing: It wasn’t the fun of making more money that you were after, it was just money, right? Money that you needed.” I turned to Dorotha, standing frozen with the augers in her hand. “How about it, Dorrie? Did you know the old man was broke?”
    Putting it that way was not too smart. I saw what she was about to do just before she did it, and jumped off the igloo. I was a little too late. She dropped the augers before I could get them from her, but fortunately they landed flat and the blades weren’t chipped. I picked them up and put them away.
    She had answered the