Jem

SIX

ON A PLANET that has no night the days are endless, Danny Dalehouse reflected, a meter down into the Klongan soil and at least that much more to go. His muscles told him he had been digging this latrine for at least eight hours. The discouragingly tiny spoil heap beside him contradicted them, and the ruddy glow that backlighted the clouds overhead offered no help. Latrine digging was not what he had signed on for. But it was something that had to be done, and he was clearly the most superfluous member of the party in line to do it — only why did it have to take so long?

They had been on the planet only three days (not that there were any days, but the old habits died hard), and already the pleasure was wearing thin. The parts that weren’t actively unpleasant like digging latrines were a bore. The parts that weren’t already boring were scary, like the madly violent thunderstorm that had blown away their first tent only hours after landing, or irritatingly uncomfortable, like the itchy rashes they had all developed and the stomach troubles that had made the latrines so vital. And to make it worse, they seemed to have company. Kappelyushnikov had come swearing in Russian to report that a third tactran vessel had climbed down its charge state to orbit Klong. Greasies, no doubt. That meant everybody in the world was now represented on Klong. What price the solitary pioneer?

His spade struck air.

Danny lost his balance, spun, and came down in a fetal crouch into the pit, his face almost in the hole that had unexpectedly opened up. From it came a cool, musty smell. It made him think of unopened cellars and the cages of pet mice, and he heard quick, furtive movements.

Snakes? He rejected the thought as soon as he formed it. That was an earthly fear, not appropriate on Klong. But whatever it was could easily be even more deadly than a nest of rattlers. He leaped with prudent speed out of the trench and yelled, “Morrissey!”

The biologist was only a few meters away, sealing plant samples pickled in preservative into plastic baggies. “What’s the matter?”

“I hit a hole, maybe a tunnel. You want to take a look?”

Morrissey looked down at the purplish seed pod in his forceps and back at Dalehouse’s trench, torn. Then he said, “Sure, only I have to stow these away first. Don’t dig any more till I finish.”

That was a welcome order, and Dalehouse accepted it gratefully. He was getting used to taking orders. Even as a latrine digger he was subject to instant draft whenever some presently more valuable member of the expedition needed another pair of hands: Harriet to set up her radio, Morrissey to heat-seal his baggies, Sparky Cerbo to locate the canned tomatoes and the kitchen knives that had vanished during the thunderstorm — anyone. Twice already he had had to empty the landing vehicle’s chemical toilet into a shallow pit and scrape the soil of Klong over it, because the rest of the crew couldn’t wait for him to finish the job they were preventing him from finishing.

It was a drag. But he was on Son of Kung! He could smell the strange Klongan smells — cinnamon and mold and cut vegetation and something that was a little like mom’s apple pie, but none of them really any of those things. He could see the Klongan landscape — he could see quite a lot of it, a shovelful at a time.

It was what he had expected in an expedition of specialists. Dalehouse was not a cook, not a farmer, not a doctor, not a radio surveyor. He had none of the hypertrophied skills that all the others possessed. He was the expedition’s only gener-alist and would stay that way until they made contact with the local sentients and he could employ the communications skills he was advertised to have. Meanwhile he was stoop labor.

The Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, was yelling his name. “You, Danny, you come have drink. Put back sweat!”

“Why not?” Danny was pleased to notice that Gappy was holding aloft a glass containing a centimeter of water, grinning broadly. He had finally got the still to working. Dalehouse swallowed the few drops and wiped his lips appreciatively, then his slippery brow. Kappelyushnikov was right enough about that. In the dank, humid air they were both covered with sweat. The still was powered with a small oil-spray flame, which made it like burning hundred-dollar bills to operate. Later it would be moved to the lakeshore and driven by solar power, but right now they needed water they could drink.

“Very good, is it?” Kappelyushnikov demanded. “You don’t feel faint, like is some poison? Okay. Then we go bring a drink to Gasha.”

The translator had given herself command of the setting-up phase of the camp, and no one had resisted; she was spending hours over her radio trying to make sense of the communications, but she claimed the other half of her mind was able to keep track of everyone’s duty assignments. She might have been right, Dalehouse thought. She was the least agreeable person on the expedition, and no one particularly wanted to disagree with her. She was also close to the least physically attractive, with stringy black hair and an expression of permanent disappointment. But she was grudgingly grateful for the water.

“Thank you for getting the still going. And the latrine, of course, Danny. Now if the two of you—”

“I’m not finished,” Danny corrected. “Jim wants to check out a hole first. Is there anything new on the radio?”

Harriet smiled with closed lips. “We have a message from the Peeps.”

“About that guy who’s stuck?”

“Oh, no. Take a look.” She handed over a facsimile film that said:

The People’s Republics extend the hand of friendship to the second expedition to arrive on Child of Kung. Through peaceful cooperation we will achieve a glorious triumph for all mankind. We invite you to join us for the celebration of the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the writings of Confucius, after whom our star was named.

Dalehouse was perplexed. “Isn’t that some kind of a winter holiday?”

“You are very well informed today, Dalehouse. It is in December. Our instructor called it the Confucian answer to Hanukkah, which is of course the Jewish answer to Christmas.”

He frowned, trying to remember — already, it was becoming hard. “But this isn’t even October yet.”

“You are very swift indeed, Danny. So translate that, won’t you?” requested the translator.

“I don’t know. Are they saying something like, ‘Don’t bother us for a couple of months’?”

“Is more like to drop dead,” the pilot put in.

“I don’t think so. They aren’t being unfriendly,” Harriet said, recapturing the fax and squinting at it. “Notice that they referred to Kung Fu-tze by the latinized form of the name. That’s a pretty courteous thing for them to do. Still—” She frowned. At best Harriet’s eyes were always faintly popped, like a rabbit’s, because of the heavy contacts she wore. Now her lips were pursed like a rabbit’s too. “On the other hand, they were careful to point out we’re the second expedition.”

“Meaning they’re the first. But what’s the difference? They can’t make territorial claims because they got here ahead of us; that’s all spelled out in the UN accords. Nobody gets to claim any more than a circle fifty kilometers around a self-sustaining base.”

“But they’re pointing out that they could have.”

Gappy was bored with the protocol. “Any love letters from the Oilies, Gasha?”

“Just a received-and-acknowledged. And now, about that latrine—”

“In a minute, Harriet. What about the Pak who’s stranded?”

“He’s still stranded. You want to hear the latest tapes?” She didn’t wait for an answer; she knew what it would be. She plugged in a coil of tape and played it for them. It was the Peeps’ automatic distress signal: every thirty seconds a coded SOS, followed by a five-second beep for homing. Between signals the microphone stayed open, transmitting whatever sounds were coming in.

“I’ve cut out most of the deadwood. Here’s the man’s voice.

Neither Dalehouse nor Kappelyushnikov included Urdu among their skills. “What is he say?” asked the pilot.

“Just asking for help. But he’s not in good shape. Most of the time he doesn’t talk at all, and we get this stuff.”

What came out of the tape player was a little like an impossibly huge cricket’s chirp and quite a lot like a Chinese New Year festival in which Australian aborigines were playing their native instruments.

“What the hell is that?” Danny demanded.

“That,” she said smugly, “is also language. I’ve been working on it, and I’ve sorted out a few key concepts. They are in some sort of trouble, I’m not sure what.”

“Not as much as Pak is,” grunted Kappelyushnikov. “Come, Danny, is time we go to work.”

“Yes, that latrine is—”

“Not on latrine! Other things in life than shit, Gasha.”

She paused, glowering at him. Kappelyushnikov was almost as dispensable as Danny Dalehouse. Maybe more so. After the expedition was well established, Dalehouse’s skills would come into play, or so they all hoped, in making contact with sentient life. The pilot’s main skill was piloting. A spacecraft by choice. If pressed, a clamjet, a racing vessel, or a canoe. None of those existed on Klong.

But what he had that was always useful was resourcefulness. “Gasha, dear,” he coaxed, “is not possible. Your Morrissey still has his micetraps in the trench. And besides, now we have water, I have to make wasserstoff. ”

“Hydrogen,” Harriet corrected automatically. “Hydrogen? What in the world do you want with hydrogen?”

“So I will have a job, dear Gasha. To fly.”

“You’re going to fly with hydrogen?”

“You understand me, Gasha,” the Russian beamed. He pointed. “Like them.”

Danny glanced up, then ran for the tent and the one remaining decent pair of binoculars — two pairs of them, too, had turned up missing after the thunderstorm.

There they were, the windblown flock of balloonists, high and near the clouds. They were at least two kilometers away, too far to hear the sounds of their song, but in the glasses Dalehouse could see them clearly enough. In the purplish sky they stood out in their bright greens and yellows. It was true, Dalehouse verified. Some of them were self-luminous, like fireflies! Traceries of veins stood out over the great five-meter gasbag of the largest and nearest of them, flickering with racing sparks of bioluminescence.

“Damn,” he snarled. “What are you saying, Gappy? Do you think you can fly up there?”

“With greatest of ease, Danny,” the pilot said solemnly. “Is only a matter of making bubbles and putting wasserstoff in them. Then we fly.”

“You’ve got a deal,” said Dalehouse firmly. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I’ll — wait a minute! What’s that?”

The balloon swarm was scattering, and behind it, coming through the place it was vacating, was something else, something that beat with a rhythmic flash of light.

The sound reached him then. “It’s a helicopter!” he cried in astonishment.

The chopper pilot was short, dark, and Irish. Not only Irish, but repatriated to the UK from eleven years in Houston, Texas. He and Morrissey hit it off immediately. “Remember Bismarck’s?” “Ever been to La Carafe?” “Been there? I lived there!” When they were all gathered he said:

“Glad to meet you all. Name’s Terry Boyne, and I bring you official greetings from our expedition, that’s the Organization of Fuel-Exporting Nations, to yours, that’s you. Nice place you’ve got here,” he went on appreciatively, glancing around. “We’re down toward the Heat Pole — ask my opinion, you folks picked a better spot. Where we are it’s wind you wouldn’t believe and scorching hot besides, if you please.”

“So why’d you pick it?” asked Morrissey.

“Oh,” said Boyne, “we do what our masters tell us. Isn’t it about the same with you? And what they told me to do today was to come over and make a good-neighbor call.”

Harriet, of course, stepped right in. “On behalf of the Food-Exporting States we accept your friendly greetings and in return—”

“Please to stow, Harriet?” rumbled Kappelyushnikov. “But we are not only other colony on Klong, Terry Boyne.”

“What’s ‘Klong’?”

“It’s what we call this place,” Dalehouse explained.

“Um. ‘Klong.’ We’ve been told to call it ‘Jem’ — short for ‘Geminorum’, you see. Heaven knows what the Peeps call it.”

“Have you been to see them?”

Boyne coughed. “Well, actually that’s more or less what it’s about, if you see what I mean. Have you people been monitoring their broadcasts?”

“Sure we have. Yours too.”

“Right, then you’ve heard their distress signals. Poor sod, stuck with those beasts that our translator says call themselves ‘Krinpit’. The Peeps don’t respond. We offered to help out, and they as much as told us to fuck off.”

Morrissey glanced at Harriet. Their translator was doing better than she. He said, “We’ve had much the same experience, Terry. They indicated we weren’t welcome in their part of the world. Of course, they have no right to take that kind of a stand—”

“—but you don’t want to start any bloc-to-bloc trouble,” finished Boyne, nodding. “Well, for humanitarian reasons—” He choked, and took a great swig of the drink Morrissey had handed him, before going on. “Hell, let’s be frank. For curiosity’s sake, and just to see what’s going on over there — but also for humanitarian reasons — we want to go and fish the guy out of there. The Peeps obviously can’t. We suppose the reason they shut you and us out is that they don’t want us to see how bad off they are. You folks can’t—” He hesitated delicately. “Well, obviously it would be easier for us to go in with a chopper than for you to send an expedition overland. We’re willing to do that. But not alone, if you see what I mean.”

“I think I do,” Harriet sniffed. “You want somebody to share the blame.”

“We want to make it a clearly interbloc errand of mercy,” Boyne corrected. “So I’m all set to go over there and snatch him out this minute. But I’d like one of you to go along.”

Eight out of the ten members of the expedition were speaking at once then, with Kappelyushnikov’s shouted “I go!” drowning out the rest.

Harriet glared around at her crew and then said petulantly, “Go then, if you want to, although we’re so shorthanded here—”

Danny Dalehouse didn’t wait for her to finish. “That’s right, Harriet! And that’s why it ought to be me. I can be spared, and besides—”

“No! I can be spared, Danny! And I am pilot—”

“Sorry, Gappy,” said Danny confidently. “We already have a pilot — Mr. Boyne there — and besides, you have to make your wasserstoff so you can take me flying when I come back. And, two, making contact with alien sentients is my basic job, isn’t it? And” — he didn’t wait for an answer — “besides, I think I know the guy who’s stuck there. Ahmed Dulla. We were both hassled by the cops in Bulgaria a couple of months ago.”

Wook, wook, wook changed to whickwhickwhickwhick as the pilot increased the pitch of the rotors and the copter rocked off the ground and headed for a cloud. Danny clung to the seat, marveling at the profligacy with which the Fuel Bloc spent its treasure — four metric tons of helicopter alone, tachyon-transported from Earth orbit at what cost in resources he could not guess.

“You don’t get airsick, do you?” shouted Boyne over the noise of the blades. Danny shook his head, and the pilot grinned and deflected the blade edges so that the chopper leaned toward and began to move after a bank of cumulus.

To Danny’s disappointment, the flock of balloonists was out of sight, but there were still small and large creatures in the air, keeping their distance. Dalehouse couldn’t see them very clearly and suspected they wanted it that way, staying at the limits of vision and disappearing into cloud as the copter came close. But below! That was laid out for him to enjoy as the chopper bounced along less than fifty meters over the tallest growth. Groves of trees like bamboo; clusters of thirty-meter ferns; tangles of things like mangroves, twenty or more trunks uniting to form a single cat’s-cradle tangle of vegetation. He could see small things scuttling and leaping to hide as they twisted overhead, colors of all sorts. The unwinking red glower of the dwarf star toned down rock and water, but the brightest colors were not reflections. They were foxfire glow and lightning-bug tail, the lights of the plants themselves.

Of course Dalehouse had studied the maps of Klong, orbital photos supplemented by side-scatter radar. But this was different, seeing the landscape as they soared above it. Back along the shore was their own camp, on a narrow neck of land that locked off a bay from the wider ocean, or lake, a kilometer or two away. There was the lake (or ocean) itself, curving around like a bitten-into watermelon slice, and in the light from Kung almost the same color. Down the shore of it was the Peeps’ encampment. Past that, off toward the part of Klong that lay just under the star, where the land was dryer and the temperatures even higher, was the Greasies’ camp. Both of those were out of sight, of course. The copter swung out across the water. Boyne pointed, and Dalehouse nodded; he could see their destination just taking form through the gloomy haze, on the far shore.

Boyne had not been entirely frank, Dalehouse discovered. He had not mentioned that this was not his first flight to the Krinpit community. There had been at least two overflights before that, because there were photos of the layout. Boyne pulled a sheaf of them out of an elastic pocket in the door of the copter, sorted through them, and passed one over to Danny. “There, by the water’s edge!” he bawled. His finger jabbed at a curled-up figure a few meters up the beach. Drawn up nearby was a plastic coracle, and there were sheds and more obscure structures all around. There were also some very unpleasant-looking creatures like square-ended crabs:

Krinpit. Some of them were suspiciously close to the huddled figure.

“Is he still alive?” Danny shouted.

“Don’t know. He was a day or two ago. He’s probably okay for water, but he must be getting damned hungry by now. And probably sick.”

From the air the Krinpit village looked like a stockyard, most of the structures comprising only unroofed walls, like cattle pens. The creatures were all around, Danny saw, moving astonishingly quickly, at least when matched against his image of Earthside crustaceans. And they were clearly aware the chopper was approaching. Some raised up to point their blind faces toward it, and an ominous number seemed to be converging on the waterside.

“Creepy looking things, ain’t they?” Boyne shouted.

“Listen,” said Danny, “how are we going to get Dulla away from them? They don’t just look creepy. They look mean.”

“Yeah.” Boyne rolled down his window and leaned out, circling the helicopter around. He shook his head, then pointed. “That your buddy?”

The figure had moved since the photograph had been taken, was no longer in the shelter of one of the sheds but a few meters away and lying outstretched, face down. Dulla didn’t look particularly alive, but he wasn’t clearly dead either.

Boyne frowned thoughtfully, then turned to Dalehouse. “Open that case between your feet there, will you, and hand me a couple of those things.”

The “things” were metal cylinders with a wire loop at the end. Boyne took half a dozen, pulled the loops, and tossed them carefully toward the Krinpit. As they struck, yellow smoke came billowing out of them, forming a dense cloud. The Krinpit staggered out of the smoke as though disoriented.

“Just tear gas,” Boyne grinned. “They hate it.” He stared down. Nearly all the creatures that had been converging around the prostrate man were fleeing now … all but one.

That one was obviously in distress, but it did not leave the vicinity of the prone human being. It seemed to be in pain. It moved dartingly back and forth as though torn between conflicting imperatives: to flee; to stay; perhaps even to fight.

“What are we going to do about that son of a bitch?” Boyne wondered out loud, hovering over the scene. But then the creature moved painfully away, and Boyne made his decision. He dropped to the ground between the Krinpit and the unconscious Pakistani. “Grab ’im, Danny!” he yelled.

Danny flung open his door and jumped out. He scooped up the Pakistani with more difficulty than he had expected. Dulla did not weigh much over fifty kilos here, but he was boneless as rubber, completely out of it. Danny got him under the arms and more dragged than carried him into the helicopter while Boyne swore worriedly. The rotors spun, and they started to lift off, and there was a rushing, clattering scramble from the other side. Two hundred kilograms of adult Krinpit launched itself onto the side-pallet. Boyne gibbered in rage and jockeyed the controls. The chopper staggered and seemed about to turn on its side; but he got it straight and it began to pull up and away.

“What are you going to do, Boyne?” yelled Danny, trying to pull Dulla’s legs inside so he could close the door. “You can’t just leave that thing there!”

“Hell I can’t!” Boyne stared worriedly at the stiff-jointed legs that were trying to scrape through the plastic to get at him, then turned the copter up and over the water. “I’ve always wanted a pet. Let’s see if I can get this bugger home!”

By the time he got back to his own camp, full of wonder and worries, Dalehouse was physically exhausted. He made a quick report to the rest of the expedition and then fell into a dreamless sleep.

“Night” was an arbitrary concept on Klong. When he woke, the sky was the same as it always was, clouds and the dull red cinder of Kung hanging far off center above.

It was back to work as usual. Kappelyushnikov, or somebody, had done some digging for him. He had less than an hour’s work, mostly neatening up the edges. He welcomed it, because he had more than an hour’s pondering to do.

After rescuing the Pakistani, Boyne had laid a beeline course for his own home base. He had not even asked if Dulla was alive; his attention was taken up to saturation by the hideous and very active creature only centimeters from his left ear and by the demands of piloting. Warned by radio, the Greasies had nets prepared. They had the Krinpit lashed and stowed before the beast knew what was happening. Then a quick meal while Dulla got some sort of emersericy medical treatment, mostly cleaning him up and flowing a little glucose into his bloodstream. Then over the barren, hot ground to the Peeps’ camp, where they left the sick man, accepted some haughty thanks from the Chinese in charge of the place, and took Dalehouse home.

All in all, he had been gone five or six hours. And every second filled with some new input to worry over in his mind.

He really begrudged them the Krinpit. There was no doubt the creature was intelligent. If the buildings hadn’t proved that by themselves, its methodical attempt to gouge its way into the helicopter, and its patient acceptance of failure when the plastic proved too tough, bespoke thought. It had struggled only briefly when the Greasies threw the nets over it, then allowed itself to be hauled into a steel-barred cage. Only after the cage door had slammed behind it did it systematically cut through the netting to free its limbs. Dalehouse had spent all the moments he could spare just watching it and trying to make sense of its sounds. If only he had taken the brain-split at some point in his studies! He knew that Harriet or even that Bulgarian girl, Ana, could have reasoned out some sort of linguistic pattern, but it was only noise to him.

Then there was the wonder of the Greasy camp itself. Steel bars! A helicopter! Bunks on legs, with metal springs! He could not begin to imagine what profligate burning of irreplaceable fuel had made it possible for them to hurl all that stuff at super-light speed to an orbit around Kung, and then to lower it safely to the surface of the planet. They even had air conditioning! True, they needed it; the surface temperature must have been well over forty so near to the Heat Pole. But no one forced them to settle where they would need the permanent drain of air conditioners to survive.

And by contrast, the Peeps. That was pathetic. Old What’sy had put the best face possible on it, but it was clear that the return of Dulla meant to him principally another casualty to try to take care of, with hardly anybody healthy enough to do the nursing — much less do anything else. He had proudly given the visitors to understand that another expedition was on the way, “nearly as big as our own.” But how big was that? Jim Morrissey interrupted his train of thought. The biologist had been out of the camp and had not heard the report; now he wanted it all over again, firsthand. Dalehouse obliged and then asked, “Did you catch anything in your micetraps?”

“Huh? Oh.” Obviously that was long in Morrissey’s past by now. “No. I ran a wire-tethered probe down the tunnel, but it kept hitting blind alleys. They’re pretty smart, whoever they are. As soon as you broke into their tunnel they closed it off.”

“So you don’t have any animals to send back to Earth?”

“No animals? Never say it, never think it, Danny! I’ve got a whole menagerie. Crabrats and bugs, creepers and flyers. God knows what they all are. I think the crabrats are probably related to the Krinpit, but you can’t really trace relationships until you do paleontology, and Christ, I haven’t even made a beginning on the taxonomy yet. And plants — well, anyway, you might as well call them plants. They don’t have stomata or mesophyll cells. Would you believe that?”

“Sure I would, Jim.”

“Where the photosynthetic process happens I don’t know,” Jim went on, marveling, “but it’s the same good old thing.

Starch production driven by sunlight, or what passes for sunlight — 6CO₂ plus 6H₂O still yields C₆H₁₂O₆ and some spare oxygen, on Earth as it is in the heavens. Or the other way around.”

“That’s starch?” Dalehouse guessed.

“You bet. But don’t eat any of it. And keep putting that jelly on your skin every time it rubs off. There’re congeners in all that stuff that will do you in.”

“Sure.” Dalehouse’s attention was wandering, and he hardly listened as Morrissey catalogued the vegetation he had so far identified on Klong: something like grasses that covered the plains; succulents like bamboo, with hollow stems that would make fine structural materials; forests of plants that looked like ferns but were fruiting and with woody stems. Some of them grew together from many trunks, like mangroves; others towered in solitary splendor, like redwoods. There were vines like grapes, spreading by transporting their hard-shelled seeds through the digestive tracts of animals. Some of them were luminous. Some were meat-eating, like the Venus flytrap. Some -

“That starch,” Dalehouse interrupted, pursuing his train of thought. “Can’t we eat it? I mean, sort of cook the poison out of it, like tapioca?”

“Danny, stick to what you know.”

“No, really,” Dalehouse persisted. “We’re shipping a lot of mass in the form of food. Couldn’t we?”

“No. Well, maybe. In a sense. It takes only a little bit of their proteins to kick off a reaction I can’t handle, so don’t experiment. Remember the Peeps’ white mice.”

“If they’re plants, why aren’t they green?”

“Well, they are, kind of. In this light they look purple because Kung’s so red, but if you shine a flashlight on them they’re a kind of greenish yellow. But, you know,” he went on earnestly, “it’s not the usual chlorophyll. Not even a porphyrin derivative. They do seem to use a magnesium ion—”

“I better get this finished up,” said Danny, patting the biologist on the shoulder.

It was almost done. He lugged the chemical toilet from the lander and balanced it over the slit trench, and then reported to Harriet.

“All done. First-class American crapper ready for use.”

She came over to inspect and then pursed her tiny lips. “Dalehouse, do you think we’re animals? Can’t you at least put a tent over it? And before it rains again, would you mind? Look at those clouds. Damn it, Danny, why do I have to tell everybody what to do around here?”

He got the tent up. But the storm, when it came, was a rouser. Lightning scored the entire sky, cloud to ground and air to air. Kung was completely obscured, not even a dull glow to mark where it hung in the sky, and the only light was the lightning itself. The first casualty was the power system. The second was Danny’s outhouse tent, torn flying away by the eighty-kilometer gusts. By the time it was over they were drenched and miserable, and all of them were busy trying to put the camp together again. East Lansing had had no storms like Klong’s, and Danny viewed with dismal foreboding the next few years on this treacherous planet. When he realized he had been more than twenty hours without sleep, he tumbled into bed and dreamed of a warm morning in Bulgaria with a pretty blond woman.

When he woke, Jim Morrissey was poking him. “Out. I get the bed next.”

It wasn’t really even a bed — just a sleeping bag on an air mattress — but at least it was warm and dry. Dalehouse reluctantly yielded it to the biologist. “So the camp survived?”

“More or less. Don’t go near Harriet, though. One of her radios is missing, and she thinks we’re all to blame.” As he climbed into the bed and stretched his legs down to the warm interior, he said, “Gappy wants to show you something.”

Danny didn’t rush to see the pilot; odds were, he considered, that it was just some other stoop-labor job that needed doing. It could wait until he had something to eat — although, he reflected, chewing doggedly through a guaranteed full daily requirement of essential vitamins and minerals (it looked like a dog biscuit), eating wasn’t a hell of a lot more fun than digging latrines.

But that wasn’t what Kappelyushnikov had in mind. “Is no more manual labor for you and me for awhile, Danny,” he grinned. “Have now been honored by appointment as chief meteorologist. Must make more wasserstoff to check winds, and you help.”

“Harriet was real shook up by the storm,” Dalehouse guessed.

“Gasha? Yes, that is what she wants, better weather forecasting. But what I want is exotic travel to faraway places! You will see.”

Kappelyushnikov’s still had been converted to solar power, a trough of brackish water from the lake running between aluminum reflecting V’s, and the vapor trapped on a plastic sheet overhead. The drops slipped down into a tank, and part of the fresh water was being electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen. From the hydrogen collector, a seamless plastic balloon, a small compressor whirred at regular intervals to pump the gas into a heavy metal cylinder.

Kappelyushnikov checked the pressure gauge and nodded gravely. “Is plenty. Now you go borrow theodolite from head boss, Gasha. Do not take no for answer; and then I will show you something that will truly amaze you.”

Fortunately for Dalehouse, Harriet was somewhere else when he went for the theodolite, a small sighting telescope that looked like a surveyor’s transit. By the time he got back with it Kappelyushnikov had filled a plastic balloon with hydrogen and was expertly balancing its lift against the weight of a silver ruble. “My good-luck piece,” he said dreamily. “Yes, fine. You have pencil?”

“What’s a pencil? I have a ballpoint.”

“Don’t make fun of old-fashioned Soviet values,” Kappelyushnikov said severely. “When I let go of balloon, you keep eye on watch. Every twenty seconds you tell me, I call off readings, you write down. You understand? Okay, let go.”

The little balloon did not leap out of Dalehouse’s fingers; it only drifted upward, bobbing gently as vagrant zephyrs caught it. In the still after the storm there was no strongly prevailing wind that Dalehouse could feel, but he could see the balloon move erratically. At each time-hack Kappelyushnikov read off right ascension and declination bearings. After the seventh reading he began to swear, and after the ninth he straightened up, scowling.

“Is no good! Lousy Kungson light! I cannot see. Next time we will tie on candle.”

“Fine, but would you mind telling me what we’re doing?”

“Measuring winds aloft, dear Danny! See how balloon curved around, started back way it came? Winds at different levels blow various individual different directions. Balloon follows. We follow balloon. Now we reduce readings, and soon I will truly astonish you with more than you wish to know about Klongan wind patterns.”

Dalehouse squinted thoughtfully at where the balloon had disappeared into the maroon murk. “How are we going to do that?”

“Oh, Danny, Danny. How ignorant you Americans are! Simple trigonometry. I have right ascension sighting of balloon after twenty seconds, correct? So I have one angle of right triangle. Second angle must be ninety degrees — you understand that this is so? Otherwise would not be right triangle. So simple subtraction from one hundred eighty gives me angle remaining, and I have thus described triangle perfectly, except for dimension of sides. Okay. I now feed in dimension of first side, and simple transformation—”

“Whoa! You didn’t measure anything. Where did you get the dimension of one side?”

“Altitude of balloon after twenty seconds, of course.” “But how do you know—”

“Ah,” said Kappelyushnikov smugly, “that is why care is so important in weighing off balloon. With fixed lift, balloon rises at fixed rate. Lift is equal to one silver ruble, and so in each twenty seconds rises nine point seven three meters. We now perform same arithmetic for declination and we have fixed position of balloon in three-dimensional space. Here, walk while we talk.” He took the jotted readings from Danny and scanned them, frowning. “Such terrible writing,” he complained. “Nevertheless, I can read them perhaps well enough to feed into computer. Is very easy computation.”

“Then why do you need a computer?”

“Oh, I could easily perform operations myself. But computer needs practice. Wait one, Danny.”

While the Russian was mumbling to himself over the keyboard, Harriet poked her head in the tent. “What are you doing?” she demanded sharply.

“Important scientific research,” said Kappelyushnikov airily, without looking up. To Danny’s surprise, the translator did not react. She looked sullen, confused, and unhappy — not conspicuously different from her normal look. But her normal behavior was a good deal more abrasive than her demeanor now. She came quietly into the tent and sat down, thumbing dispiritedly through her translation notes.

“Have it!” cried the pilot happily, and pressed a command button. The liquid crystal over the computer flashed colored darts of light, then revealed a plot of wind arrows. “Colors of spectrum,” Kappelyushnikov explained. “Red is lowest, up to fresh grass green for highest. You see? At fifty meters, wind heading one forty-five degrees, eight kilometers per hour. At one hundred meters, backing to ninety-five degrees and now fifteen kilometers. And so on. Triumph of Soviet technology.”

Dalehouse nodded appreciatively. “That’s very nice, but what do we want to know that for?”

“Meteorology,” Kappelyushnikov grinned, winking and moving his head toward Harriet.

The woman looked up and burst out, “Cut that out, Vissarion. I’m in no mood for you to make fun of me. Tell Dalehouse your real reason.”

The Russian looked surprised, and a little thoughtful, but he shrugged. “All right. Poor American Danny, you are helpless without your machines. But not I. I am pilot! I do not wish to be earthworm like one of those things we shit on in your latrine, Danny. I want something to fly. They will not give me fuel. They will not let me have structural materials for glider — would be easy, except for launching; plenty of winds here, you see. But Gasha says no, so what can I do? I look up and see balloonists floating around sky, and I say I also will be balloonist!” He pounded his fist on the top of the computer. “Have gas. Have navigation information for winds aloft. Have Soviet know-how. Have also little extra bonus of low gravity and high pressure of air. So now I will make little balloon, big enough for me, and I will pilot again.”

A surge of enthusiasm infected Dalehouse. “Hey, that’s great. Would it work?”

“Of course would work!”

“We could use it to take after those balloonists, get close to them. Harriet, do you hear that? It would give us a chance to try to talk to them.”

“That’s fine,” she said, and Dalehouse looked at her more closely. Even for Harriet she looked sullen.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She said, “I located the radio.”

“The one that blew away in the storm?”

She laughed, like a cartoon figure laughing: heh, heh, heh. “It takes a real idiot to believe that one. How could it blow away? Goddamn thing weighs twenty kilos. It occurred to me it might be transmitting, so I listened, and it was. I tried RDFing, and I got a fix right away. Straight down,” she said, staring at them.

“The damn thing is right down underneath us in the ground.”

A minute was still a minute. Danny made sure of that, because he had begun to doubt. His pulse was still forty-two in sixty seconds by the clock. He could hold his breath for three of the minutes and maybe a bit more. The small coinage of time had not altered in value. But one thousand four hundred and forty minutes did not seem to make a day anymore. Sometimes it felt as though a whole day had passed, and the clock said only six or seven hours. Sometimes it would occur to him to be tired, and the clock would show as much as thirty hours since he slept last. Fretfully Harriet tried to keep them all on some regular schedule, not because it seemed necessary, but because it was orderly. She failed. Within — what? a week? — they were sleeping when they wanted to and eating when they felt hungry and marking the passage of time, if at all, by events. The first near-visit by balloonists was after the big storm and before the Peeps received their reinforcement of personnel. The time Kappelyushnikov triangulated the missing radio for Harriet and discovered it was at least twenty meters underground was just after they sent their first reports and shipment of specimens back to Earth. And the time balloonists came to visit -

That was a whole other thing, the kind of event that changes everything fore and aft.

Dalehouse woke up with his mind in the sky. He did his chores. He helped Morrissey check his traps, prepared a meal of desecrated stew, fixed a valve in the shower stall by the lake. But what he was thinking of was Kappelyushnikov’s balloons. Danny had talked him out of the big single hydrogen-filled bag: too big, too clumsy, too hard to manufacture, and above all too likely to kill its passenger if anything popped its skin. So they had painstakingly blown a hundred pibal-sized bags, and the Russian had knotted up a netting to contain them. The aggregate lift would be as much as you wanted. All it took was more balloons; you could multiply them to lift the entire camp if you liked. But if one or two popped, it did not mean a dead aeronaut. The passenger would descend reasonably slowly — to be more accurate, they were hopeful the passenger would descend slowly. He might damage himself, but at least he would not be spread flat across the Klongan landscape.

Kappelyushnikov would not allow Danny to do the final stages of filling and tying the balloons — “Is my neck, dear Danny, so is my job to make sure it stays okay.”

“But you’re taking so damn long. Let me help.”

“Nyet. Is very clear,” grinned the pilot, “that you think pretty soon you too will fly my balloons. Maybe so. But this time I am sole cargo. And besides, have still static lift tests to finish. Until then not even I fly.”

Dalehouse moved impatiently away, disgruntled. He had been on Klong for — whatever length of time it was — a couple of weeks, at least. And the author of “Preliminary Studies toward a First Contact with Subtechnological Sentients” had yet to meet his first subtechnological sentient. Oh, he had seen them. There were burrowers under his feet, and he was sure he had caught a glimpse of something when Morrissey exploded a charge under a presumed tunnel. The Krinpit had been his fellow passenger for half an hour. And the balloonists were often in the sky, though seldom nearby. Three separate races to study and deal with! And the most productive thing he had done was dig a latrine.

He fidgeted his way into Harriet’s tent, hoping to find that she had miraculously made some giant leap in translation of one of the languages — if they were languages. She wasn’t there, but the tapes were. He played the best of them over and over until Kappelyushnikov came in, sweating and cheerful.

“Static test is good. Plenty lift. Now we let whole mishmash sit for a while, check for leaks. You are enjoying concert of airborne friends?”

“It isn’t a concert, it’s a language. I think it’s a language. It’s not random birdcalls. You can hear them singing in chords and harmonies. It’s chromatic rather than — do you know anything about music theory?”

“Me? Please, Danny. I am pilot, not longhair fiddle player.”

“Well, anyway, it’s chromatic rather than diatonic, but the harmonies are there, not too far off what you might hear in, say, Scriabin.”

“Fine composer,” the Russian beamed. “But tell me. Why do you listen to tapes when you have real thing right outside?”

Startled, Danny raised his head. It was true. Some of the sounds he was hearing came from somewhere outside the tent.

“Also,” Kappelyushnikov went on severely, “you are breaking Gasha’s rice bowl. She is translator, not you, and she is very difficult lady. So come now and listen to your pink and green friends.”

The balloonists had never been so close, or so numerous. The whole camp was staring up at them, hundreds of them, so many that they obscured each other and blotted out part of the sky. The red glower of Kung shone through them dimly as they passed before its disk, but many of them were glowing with their own firefly light, mostly, as Kappelyushnikov had said, pink and pale green. Their song was loud and clear. Harriet was there already, microphone extended to catch every note, listening critically with an expression of distaste. That meant nothing. It was just the way she always looked.

“Why so close?” Dalehouse marveled.

“I do not wish to break your rice bowl either, dear Danny. You are expert. But I think is possible they like what we put up for chopper pilot.” And Kappelyushnikov waved to the strobe beacon on the tower.

“Um.” Danny considered a moment. “Let’s see. Do me a favor and get one of the portable floodlights. We’ll see them better, and maybe it’ll bring them even closer.”

“Why not?” The Russian disappeared inside the supply tent and came back with the portable in one hand and the batteries in the other, cursing as he tried to avoid stumbling over the wires. He fumbled with it, and its dense white beam abruptly extended itself toward the horizon, then danced up toward the balloonists. It seemed to excite them. Their chirps, squeals, flatulences, and cello drones multiplied themselves in a shower of grace notes, and they seemed to follow the beam.

“How do they do that?” Harriet demanded fretfully. “They’ve got no wings or anything that I can see.”

“Same as I, dear Gasha,” boomed the Russian. “Up and down, to find a truly sympathetic current of air. Here, you hold light. I must watch experts and learn!”

The balloonists were coming closer. Evidently the light attracted them. Now that there was enough brightness to make the colors plain, the variety of their patterns was striking. There were cloudlike whorls, solid bands, cross-hatchings, dazzle designs that resembled World War I camouflage.

“Funny,” said Dalehouse, staring longingly at the swarm. “Why would they have all those colors when they can’t see them most of the time?”

“Is your opinion they can’t,” said Kappelyushnikov. “Light like beet juice is strange to us; we see only the red. But for them perhaps is — Ho, Morrissey! Good shot!”

Dalehouse jumped a quarter of a meter as the camp’s one and only shotgun went off behind him.

Overhead, one of the balloonists was spiraling toward the ground.

“I get,” yelled Kappelyushnikov, and sprinted off to intersect its fall.

“What the hell did you do?” blazed Dalehouse.

The biologist turned a startled and defensive face toward him. “I collected a specimen,” he said.

Harriet laughed disagreeably. “Shame on you, Morrissey. You didn’t get Dalehouse’s permission to shoot one of his friends. That’s the price you pay for being a specialist in sentients — you fall in love with your subjects.”

“Don’t be bitchy, Harriet. My job’s hard enough. This’ll make it impossible. Shooting at them is the surest way to drive them away.”

“Oh, sure, Dalehouse. Anybody can see they’re stampeding in terror, right?” She waved a casual hand at the flock, still milling through the light and singing as they soared delightedly overhead.

Kappelyushnikov came back with a rubbery sac draped over his shoulder. “Almost had to fight off one of your Krinpit friends to get it,” he growled. “Was big, ugly mother. Don’t know what I would have done if he had truly contested ownership. But he scuttled away.”

“There are no Krinpit around here,” Harriet said sharply.

“Are now, Gasha. Never mind. See how pretty our new pet is.”

The creature was not dead. It did not seem even wounded, or at least there was no blood. The shotgun pellets had blown a hole in the gasbag and nothing else. Its little face was working, looking like the countenance of an engorged tick, with great eyes staring at them. It was making the tiniest of sounds, almost like gasps.

“Disgusting,” said Harriet, drawing back. “Why isn’t it screaming?”

“If I knew the answers to questions like that,” said Morrissey, dropping to one knee beside the creature to see it better, “I wouldn’t have to collect specimens, would I? But at a guess, it would be if I hadn’t shot the breath out of it. I think it uses the hydrogen for vocalizing. God knows what it breathes. Must be oxygen, of course, but—” He shook his head and glanced up. “Maybe I ought to collect a few more.”

“No!”

“Christ, Dalehouse! You know, Harriet’s right about you. Well — I know. At least let’s see how phototropic they are. Hand me those shells.” Kappelyushnikov passed over the plastic belt of ammunition, and Morrissey pawed through it until he found a signal flare.

“You’ll set fire to them, Morrissey! That’s hydrogen in those bags!”

“Oh, cripes.” But the biologist aimed carefully to one side of the flock. More and more of them were entering into the beam, now steady, as Harriet had put it on the ground pointing up; the whole diffuse swarm was contracting into a knotted mass.

When the flare went off, the whole flock seemed to twitch like a single organism. They didn’t swarm toward it. They stayed bunched in an ellipsoidal huddle along the axis of the beam of light; but their song changed to a frantic crescendo, and there seemed to be a systematic rearranging of positions within the flock. The smaller and less brightly colored individuals bobbed toward the lower portions of the school, and the larger and gaudier ones lifted toward the top. Dalehouse stared in fascination, so entranced that he did not realize his face was sticky and wet until Kappelyushnikov grunted in surprise.

“Hey! Is raining?”

But it wasn’t rain. It was sweet and pungent on their lips, with an aftertaste that was animal and fetid; it fell like a gentle dew on their upturned faces and clung to their skins.

“Don’t swallow any!” cried Morrissey in belated panic, but some of the people were already licking their lips. Not that it mattered, thought Dalehouse; the stuff was all over them. If it was poisonous, they were done for.

“You fools!” cried Harriet, stamping her foot. She had never been attractive, and now she looked like a witch, sallow face in a grimace, uneven teeth bared. “We’ve got to get this stuff off. Kappelyushnikov! You and Morrissey get buckets of water at once.”

“Da, Gasha,” said the pilot dreamily.

“Now!” she screamed.

“Oh, of course, now.” He lumbered off a few steps, then paused and looked coquettishly back over his shoulder.

“Alyusha, dear. You help me get important water right away?”

The navigator simpered. She answered him in Russian, something that made Kappelyushnikov grin and Harriet swear. “Don’t you clods know we’re all in danger?” she cried, catching at Dalehouse’s hand imploringly. “You, Danny, you’ve always been nicer to me than those other bastards. Help me get water.”

He returned the pressure of her hand and whispered, “Hell, yes, honey, let’s get some water.”

“Danny!” But she wasn’t angry anymore. She was smiling, allowing him to tug her toward the lakefront.

He ran his tongue over his lips again. Whatever the dew was, the more he tasted it the better he liked it: not sweet, not tart, not like fruit or meat, not like flowers. It was not like anything he had ever tasted before, but it was a taste he wanted more of. He saw Harriet touching her pointed tongue to her own thin lips and was suddenly seized with the need to taste that Klongan mist from her mouth. He felt the damp heat rising inside him and caught her roughly around the waist.

They kissed desperately, their hands busy ripping each other’s clothes off.

It never occurred to them to think of hiding themselves. They cared nothing for what the others in the expedition might think of them, and the others cared no more for Harriet and Dalehouse. In couples and clusters the entire expedition was down on the ground in a mass fury of copulation, while overhead the swooping balloonists sang and soared through the searchlight and their gentle mist rained down on the human beings below.