Heechee rendezvous Read Online Free PDF Page A

put his tail on the line so you could borrow a ship when you needed to?” I would have said indignantly, “Hell, yes! I wouldn’t forget a thing like that.” But I hadn’t been thinking about it every minute, either, and as a matter of fact I had no idea at that moment where he was or even if he was still alive.
    Walthers should have been easy to remember, because he looked rather unusual. He was short and not handsome. His face was wider at the jaw than at the temples, which made him look a little like a friendly frog. He was also married to a beautiful and dissatisfied woman less than half as old as he. Her age was nineteen; her name was Dolly. If Audee had asked my advice, I would have told him that such May and December affairs cannot work out-unless, of course, as in my case, December is remarkably rich. But he desperately wanted it to work out, because he loved his wife very much, and so he worked like a slave for Dolly. Audee Walthers was a pilot. Any kind of pilot. He had piloted airbodies on Venus. When the big Earth transport (which constantly reminded him of my existence since I owned a share in it and had renamed it after my wife) was in orbit at Peggy’s he piloted shuttlecraft to load and unload it, between times he piloted whatever he could rent on Peggy’s for whatever tasks a charter demanded. Like most everybody else on Peggy’s, he had come 4 X 1O’° kilometers from the place where he was born to scratch out a living, and sometimes he made it and sometimes he did not. So when he came back from one charter and Adjangba told him there was another to be had, Walthers scrambled to get it. Even if it meant searching every bar in Port
    Hegramet to find the charter party. That wasn’t easy. For a “city” of four thousand, Port Hegramet was bar-saturated. There were scores, and the obvious ones-the hotel cafe, the airport pub, the big gambling casino with Port Hegramet’s only floorshow-weren’t where the Arabs who were his next charter were. Nor was Dolly in the casino, where she might have been performing with her puppet show, or at home, or at least not to answer the phone. Half an hour later Walthers was still walking the ill-lit streets in search of his Arabs. He was no longer in the richer, more Western parts of the city, and when he finally found them it was in a shebeen at the edge of town, having an argument.
    All of the buildings in Port Hegramet were temporary. That was a necessary consequence of its being a colony planet; every month, when the new immigrants arrived in the big Heechee Heaven transport from Earth, the population exploded like a balloon at the hydrogen valve.
    Then it gradually shrank for a few weeks, as the colonists were moved out to plantations and lumbering sites and mines. It never collapsed quite to the former level, so each month there were a few hundred new residents, a few score new dwellings built and a few old ones swallowed up. But this shebeen was most obviously temporary of all. It was only three slabs of construction plastic propped together for walls, a fourth laid over them as a roof and the street side open to the warm Peggy’s air. Even so it was smoky and hazy inside, smoke of tobacco and smoke of hemp laced with the beery, sour smell of the home-brewed liquor they sold.
    Walthers recognized his quarry at once from his agent’s description. There were not many like him in Port Hegramet-many Arabs, of course, but how many rich ones? And how many old ones? Mr. Luqman was even older than Adjangba, fat and bald, and each one of his plump fingers wore a ring, many of them diamonds. He was with a group of other Arabs at the back of the shebeen, but as Walthers started toward them the barwoman put out a hand. “Private party,” she said. “They pay. You leave alone.”
    “They’re expecting me,” Walthers said, hoping it was true.
    “For what?”
    “Now, that’s none of your damn business,” Walthers said angrily, estimating the chances of what