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out.
It occurred to me-I admit that even then it seemed like no more than an
outside possibility-that something good had happened while Dorrie and I were
asleep. Something like-oh, let's say oh, maybe that there still might be eight
or ten live Heechee in the tunnel
... and maybe they'd heard us knocking and opened up the bottom of the shaft
for us. So I crawled into the igloo to see if they had.
Nope. They hadn't. I peered down the shaft to make sure, but it was still just
a blind hole that disappeared into dirty dark at the end of the light from my
head lamp. I swore at the inhospitable Heechee-for being nonexistent, I guess-
and kicked some tailings down the hole onto their absent heads.
The Puritan ethic was itching at me somewhere. I wondered what I ought to be
doing. I couldn't think of too many choices. Die? Well, sure, but I was well
on my way to doing that as fast as I could. Wasn't there something
constructive?
The Puritan ethic reminded me that you always ought to leave a place the way
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you found it, so I hauled the drills up on the eight-to-one winch and left
them hanging neatly while I kicked some more tailings down the useless hole.
When I had made enough space for a place to sit, I sat down and thought things
over.
I mused about what we had done wrong-not with a view toward doing it right,
you see, but more like an old chess puzzle. How had we missed finding a
tunnel?
After some time of cloudy cogitation, I thought I knew the answer to that.
It had to do with what an autosonic trace was like. People like Dorrie and
Cochenour have the idea that a seismic trace is like one of those underground
maps of downtown Dallas that shows all the sewers and utility conduits and
water pipes and subways, marked so if you need to get into one of them you can
just dig down where it says and you'll find what you want right there.
It isn't exactly like that. The trace is more probabilistic. It comes out as a
sort of hazy approximation. It is built up, minute by minute, by the echoes
from the pinger. It looks like a band of spiderweb shadows, much wider than
any actual tunnel would be and very fuzzy at the edges. When you look at the
trace, you know that the best it's telling you is that there's something that
makes the shadows. Maybe it's a rock interface or a pocket of gravel.
Hopefully it's a Heechee dig. Whatever it is, it's there somewhere, but you
don't know just where, exactly. If a tunnel is ten meters wide, which is fair
average for a Heechee connecting link, the shadow trace is sure to look like
fifty, and may appear to be a hundred.
So where do you dig?
That's where the art of prospecting comes in. You have to make an informed
guess.
Maybe you dig in the exact geometrical center-as it is given you to see where
the center is. That's the easiest way. Or maybe you dig where the shadows are
densest, which is the way the most experienced prospectors do.
That works as well as anything else.
But that's not good enough for smart, skilled old Audee Walthers. I do it my
own way. What I do, I try to think like a Heechee. I look at the trace as a
whole and try to see what points the Heechee might have been trying to
connect. Then I plot an imaginary course between them, where I would have put
the tunnel if I'd been the Heechee engineer in charge, and I dig where I would
have planted the thing in the first place.
That's what I had done. Evidently I had done it wrong.
Of course, there was one good way I could have gone wrong:
the trace could have been a pocket of gravel.
That was a really good possible explanation, but not a useful one. If there
had never been a tunnel there in the first place we were just all out of luck.
What I wanted was a more hopeful answer, and in a fuzzy-brained sort of way, I
began to think I saw one.
I visualized the way the trace had looked on the scope. I had set the airbody
down as close to that as I could manage.
Then, of course, I couldn't dig right there, because the airbody was on top of
it. So I'd set the igloo up a few meters upslope.
I began to believe that those few meters were what made us miss.
That fuzzy conjecture pleased my fuzzy brain. It explained everything. It was
admirable of me, I told myself, to figure it all out in my present state. Of
course, I couldn't see that it made any practical difference. If I'd had
another igloo I would have been glad to move back to where the airbody had
been and try again, assuming I could live long enough to get all that done.
But that didn't mean much, because I didn't have another igloo.
So I sat on the edge of the dark shaft, nodding approvingly to myself over the
intelligent way I had thought the problem through, dangling my legs, and now
and then sweeping some tailings back in. I think all that was part of some
kind of death wish, because I know that I thought, every once in a while, that
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the nicest thing for me to do just then would be to jump in and pull the
tailings down over me.
But the Puritan ethic didn't want me to do that.
Anyway, I would have only solved my own personal problem that way. It wouldn't
have done a thing for young Dorotha Keefer, snoring away outside in the
thermal gale. I worried about Dorotha Keefer. I wanted something better for
her than a life of chancy, sordid scrounging in the Spindle. She was too sweet
and kind and- It struck me as a revelation that one of the reasons for my
hostility to Boyce Cochenour had been that he had Dorrie Keefer and I didn't.
That was kind of interesting to think about, too. Suppose, I thought, tasting
the bad flavors inside my mouth and feeling my head begin to pound-suppose
Cochenour's suit had ruptured when the drill fell on him and he had died right
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