PLATINUM POHL Read Free Page A

switch over from selling oil as fuel for cars and heating plants to food production, growing algae in the crude that came out of his wells and selling the algae in processed form for human consumption. So he’d stopped being a mere millionaire and turned into something much bigger.
    And that accounted for the way he looked. He’d been on Full Medical, with extras. The report said his heart was titanium and plastic. His lungs had been transplanted from a twenty-year-old killed in a copter crash. His skin, muscles and fats—not to mention his various glandular systems—were sustained by hormones and cell-builders at what had to be a cost of well over a thousand dollars a day. To judge by the way he stroked the girl sitting next to him, he was getting his money’s worth. He looked and acted no more than forty, at most—except perhaps for the look of his pale-blue, diamond-bright, weary and disillusioned eyes.
    What a lovely mark! I swallowed the rest of my drink, and nodded to the third for another. There had to be a way to get him to charter my airbody.
    All I had to do was find it.
    Outside the rail of Vastra’s cafe, of course, half the Spindle was thinking exactly the same thoughts. This was the worst of the low season, the Hohmann crowd were still three months in the future; all of us were beginning to run low on money. My liver transplant was just a little extra incentive; of the hundred maze-runners I could see out of the corner of my eye, ninety-nine needed to cut in on this rich tourist’s money as much as I did, just for the sake of staying alive.
    We couldn’t all do it. Two of us, three, maybe even half a dozen could score enough to make a real difference. No more than that. And I had to be one of these few.
    I took a deep swallow of my second drink, tipped Vastra’s third lavishly—and conspicuously—and turned idly around until I was facing the Terries dead-on.
    The girl was talking with a knot of souvenir vendors, looking interested and uncertain. “Boyce?” she said over her shoulder.
    “Yeah?”
    “What’s this thing for?”
    He bent over the rail and peered. “Looks like a fan,” he said.
    “Heechee prayer fan, right,” cried the dealer; I knew him, Booker Allemang, an old-timer in the Spindle. “Found it myself, miss! It’ll grant your every wish, letters every day from people reporting miraculous results—”
    “Sucker bait,” grumbled Cochenour. “Buy it if you want.”
    “But what does it do?”
    He laughed raucously. “What any fan does. It cools you down.” And he looked at me, grinning.
     
    I finished my drink, nodded, stood up and walked over to the table. “Welcome to Venus,” I said. “May I help you?”
    The girl looked at Cochenour for approval before she said, “I thought this was very pretty.”

    “Very pretty,” I agreed. “Are you familiar with the story of the Heechees?”
    Cochenour pointed to a chair. I sat and went on. “They built these tunnels about a quarter of a million years ago. They lived here for a couple of centuries, give or take a lot. Then they went away again. They left a lot of junk behind, and some things that weren’t junk; among other things they left a lot of these fans. Some local con man like BeeGee here got the idea of calling them ‘prayer fans’ and selling them to tourists to make wishes with.”
    Allemang had been hanging on my every word trying to guess where I was going. “You know it’s right,” he said.
    “But you two are too smart for that kind of come-on,” I added. “Still, look at the things. They’re pretty enough to be worth having even without the story.”
    “Absolutely!” cried Allemang. “See how this one sparkles, miss! And the black and gray crystal, how nice it looks with your fair hair!”
    The girl unfurled the crystalline one. It came rolled like a diploma, only cone-shaped. It took just the slightest pressure of the thumb to keep it open, and it really was very pretty as she waved it gently.