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patterns.
    “They’re all in the mascons,” Dorotha said at once. Cochenour gave her a look of tolerant approval.
    “Not all. Look over here; this little one isn’t, and this one. But damn near all. Why? I don’t know. Nobody knows. The mass concentrations are mostly older, denser rock—basalt and so on—and maybe the Heechee found it easier to dig in. Or maybe they just liked it.” In my correspondence with Professor Hegramet back on Earth, in the days when I didn’t have a dying liver in my gut and took an interest in abstract knowledge, we had kicked around the possibility that the Heechee digging machines would only work in dense rock, or rock of a certain chemical composition. But I wasn’t prepared to discuss that with them.
    “See over here, where we are now”—I rotated the virtual globe slightly by turning a dial—“that’s the big digging we just came out of. You can see the shape of the Spindle. It’s a common shape, by the way. You can see it in some of the others if you look, and there are digs where it doesn’t show on these tracings but it’s there if you’re on the spot.
That particular mascon where the Spindle is is called Serendip; it was discovered by accident by a hesperological—”
    “Hesperological?”
    “—a geological team operating on Venus, which makes it a hesperological team. They were drilling out core samples and hit the Heechee digs. Now these other digs in the northern high-latitudes you see are all in one bunch of associated mascons. They connect through interventions of less dense rock, but only where absolutely necessary.”
    Cochenour said sharply, “They’re north and we’re going south. Why?”
    It was interesting that he could read the navigation instruments, but I didn’t say so. I only said, “They’re no good. They’ve been probed.”
    “They look even bigger than the Spindle.”
    “Hell of a lot bigger, right. But there’s nothing much in them, or anyway not much chance that anything in them is in good enough shape to bother with. Subsurface fluids filled them up a hundred thousand years ago, maybe more. A lot of good men have gone broke trying to pump and excavate them, without finding anything. Ask me. I was one of them.”
    “I didn’t know there was any liquid water on Venus or under it,” Cochenour objected.
    “I didn’t say water, did I? But as a matter of fact some of it was, or anyway a sort of oozy mud. Apparently water cooks out of the rocks and has a transit time to the surface of some thousands of years before it seeps out, boils off, and cracks to hydrogen and oxygen and gets lost. In case you didn’t know it, there’s some under the Spindle. It’s what you were drinking, and what you were breathing.”
    The girl said, “Boyce, this is all very interesting, but I’m hot and dirty. Can I change the subject for a minute?”
    Cochenour barked; it wasn’t really a laugh. “Subliminal prompting, Walthers, you agree? And a little old-fashioned prudery, too, I expect. What she really wants to do is go to the bathroom.”
    Given a little encouragement from the girl, I would have been mildly embarrassed for her, but she only said, “If we’re going to live in this thing for three weeks, I’d like to know what it offers.”
    I said, “Certainly, Miss Keefer.”
    “Dorotha. Dorrie, if you like it better.”
    “Sure, Dorrie. Well, you see what we’ve got. Five bunks; they partition to sleep ten if wanted, but we don’t want. Two shower stalls. They don’t look big enough to soap yourself in, but they are if you work at it. Three chemical toilets. Kitchen over there—well. Pick the bunk you like, Dorrie. There’s a screen arrangement that comes down when you want it for changing clothes and so on, or just if you don’t want to look at the rest of us for a while.”
    Cochenour said, “Go on, Dorrie, do what you want to do. I want Walthers to show me how to fly this thing anyway.”
     
    It wasn’t a bad start. I’ve had