PLATINUM POHL Read Online Free PDF Page B

once a week, which is how come it stayed reasonably flat) and we were zooming off into the wild yellow-green yonder, a moment later the wild brown-gray yonder, after a run of no more than fifty meters.
    Cochenour had fastened his harness loosely for comfort. I enjoyed hearing him yell as he was thrown about. It didn’t last. At the thousand-meter level I found Venus’s semipermanent atmospheric inversion, and the turbulence dropped to where I could take off my belt and stand.
    I took the plugs out of my ears and motioned to Cochenour and the girl to do the same.
    He was rubbing his head where he’d bounced into an overhead chart rack, but grinning a little. “Pretty exciting,” he admitted, fumbling in his pocket. Then he remembered to ask. “Is it all right if I smoke?”
    “They’re your lungs.”
    He grinned more widely. “They are now,” he agreed, and lit up. “Say. Why didn’t you give us those plugs while we were in the tractor?”
     
    There is, as you might say, a tide in the affairs of guides, where you either let them flood you with questions and spend the whole time explaining what that funny little dial means or you go on to do your work and make your fortune. What it came down to was, was I going to come out of this liking Cochenour and his girlfriend or not?
    If I was, I should try to be civil to them. More than civil. Living, the three of us, for three weeks in a space about as big as an apartment kitchenette meant everybody would
have to work real hard at being nice to everybody else, and as I was the one who was being paid to be nice, I should be the one to set an example. On the other hand, the Cochenours of the worlds are sometimes just not likeable. If that was going to be the case, the less talk the better; I should slide questions like that off with something like “I forgot.”
    But he hadn’t actually been unpleasant, and the girlfriend had actually tried to be friendly. I said, “Well, that’s an interesting thing. You see, you hear by differences in pressure. While we were taking off the plugs filtered out part of the sound—the pressure waves—but when I yelled at you to belt up, the plugs passed the overpressure of my voice, and you understood it. However, there’s a limit. Past about a hundred and twenty decibels—that’s a unit of sound—”
    Cochenour growled, “I know what a decibel is.”
    “Right. Past a hundred and twenty the eardrum just doesn’t respond anymore. So in the crawler it was too loud; with the plugs, you wouldn’t have heard anything.”
    Dorotha had been listening while she repaired her eye makeup. “What was to hear?”
    “Oh,” I said, “nothing, really. Except, well—” Then I voted to think of them as friends, at least for the time being. “Except in the case of an accident. If we’d had a gust, you know, that crawler could have flipped right over. Or sometimes solid objects come flying over the hills and into you before you know it. Or-”
    She was shaking her head. “I understand. Lovely place we’re visiting, Boyce.”
    “Yeah. Look,” he said. “Who’s flying this thing?”
    I got up and activated the virtual globe. “That’s what I was just coming to. Right now it’s on autopilot, heading in the general direction of this quadrant down here. We have to pick out a specific destination.”
    “That’s Venus?” the girl asked. “It doesn’t look like much.”
    “Those lines are just radio range markers; you won’t see them looking out of the window. Venus doesn’t have any oceans, and it isn’t cut up into nations, so making a map of it isn’t quite like what you’d expect on Earth. That bright spot is us. Now look.” I overlaid the radio-range grid and the contour colors with mascon markings. “Those blobby circles are mascons. You know what a mascon is?”
    “A concentration of mass. A lump of heavy stuff,” offered the girl.
    “Fine. Now look at the known Heechee digs.” I phased them in as golden