Jem

FOUR

THE PILOT was Vissarion Ilyich Kappelyushnikov. He was short and dark in the standard cosmonaut tradition, with a lot more Tatar in his family tree than his name would suggest. The expedition’s eco-engineer was also a Soviet national, but Cossack-tall and fair-haired; his name was Pete Krivitin. The nominal commander of the expedition was an American, Alex Woodring. And they were all going at it at once. Alex was trying to arbitrate between the two Russians, helped by Harriet Santori, the translator. She wasn’t really helping, but then the commander wasn’t really succeeding at arbitrating. Kappelyushnikov wanted to land and get it over with. Krivitin wanted one more look at the probe reports before he would certify the landing site. Harriet wanted them all to act like adults, for heaven’s sake. Woodring’s difficulty was that until they landed, Kappelyushnikov was the captain of the ship and Alex’s authority was only potential. And it had been going on for more than an hour.

Danny Dalehouse swallowed the desire to intervene again.

He loosened the straps of his deceleration couch and peered out the porthole. There was the planet, filling the window. From less than a hundred thousand kilometers, it no longer looked “away"; it was beginning to look “down.” So let us the hell get there, he thought testily. These people didn’t seem to realize they were screwing around with his personal expedition, which none of them would have been on if he hadn’t persuaded that blond army female to authorize it.

A voice in his ear said, “Think we’ll ever get there?”

Danny drew back. The woman beside him was Sparky Cerbo, as amiable a person as there was on the expedition; but after nineteen days of sharing less than twenty cubic meters of space, they were all getting edgy. The ongoing spat an arm’s length away didn’t make it any better.

“It doesn’t look like much, does it?” Sparky went on, determinedly making the effort.

Dalehouse forced himself to respond. It wasn’t her fault that he was sick of the sound, the sight, and the smell of her — and besides, she was right. Son of Kung didn’t look like a proper planet at all. Danny knew what planets were supposed to look like. Some of them were red and bleak, like Mars. More often they were white or mottled white, like everything else from Venus through the gas giants. This one wasn’t even trying to look right.

It wasn’t so much the planet’s fault as Kung’s itself; as a star, it was simply incompetent. If Son of Kung had been in orbit around Earth’s Sol, it would have looked pretty fine. It had much the same makeup as Earth. What it didn’t have was decent sunlight. Kung glowered, not much brighter than Earth’s moon during a total lunar eclipse. The only light that fell on Son of Kung was bloody red, and what it looked like from orbit was an open wound.

It would have helped some if it had had a real terminator, but Kung’s light was so dim that there was no clear division between “daylight” and “night” sides — only a blurry transition from dark to darkest. Krivitin had assured them that once they landed and their eyes dark-adjusted, they would be able to see reasonably well. But from space that seemed doubtful. And for this, thought Danny, I gave up a perfectly good job at Michigan State.

The Russian language yelling peaked to climax and abruptly stopped. Krivitin, smiling as composedly as though the screaming match had been no more than a friendly chat about the weather, pulled himself around the lashed-down and nested machinery in the center of the main cubicle and peered in at them. “Sara, dear,” he said in his perfect English, “you’re wanted up front. You better come too, Daniel.”

“We’re going to land?” Sparky demanded.

“Most certainly not! Gappy has finally understood the necessity for another orbit.”

“Hell,” said Sparky, even her indomitable desire to please crumbling at last. Dalehouse shared her feelings: another orbit was close enough to another day, with nothing for him to do except try to stay out of the way.

“Yes, I agree,” said Krivitin, “but Alex wants you to try to tap the Peeps’ signals again.”

Harriet complained, but Dalehouse stopped listening. He shucked off his straps and reached wearily for the cassettes of data he had stored away for deceleration.

He plugged in, put the speaker in his ear, and touched the switch. There was a slight tape hiss, an occasional scratch or click, and a distant, somber wail. Those were the sounds from the wolftrap lander. Its primary mission was to secure biological samples and test them in its built-in laboratories; but its microphones had picked up sounds that did not come from itself. He had listened to them fifty times already. After a time he shrugged, stopped the tape, and put in a different cassette. This time the sounds were louder and clearer, with far more definition. The lander in this case had been a neutral-buoyancy floater with a small reserve of thrusting power and a locater for carbon dioxide. Like a female mosquito seeking a blood meal to fertilize its eggs, it was meant to drift until it found a trail of CO₂ and follow it until it found prey. Then it simply floated nearby as long as there were sounds for it to hear and transmit. But what sounds! Sometimes they resembled a chorus of bagpipes, sometimes a gang of teenage boys in a crepitation contest. Dalehouse had graphed the frequencies — from well below human hearing range to higher than a bat’s squeak — and identified at least twenty phonemes. These were no birdcalls; this was language, he was certain.

Heat smote his exposed skin, and he turned back to the port; Kung had drifted into view, looking like a thin-skinned Halloween pumpkin with the embers of Hades inside its mottled surface. He squinted and pulled a neutral-density blind over the porthole; it was not dangerous to glance at it, but there was the chance of burning out your cornea if you stared too long.

In the warmth he felt sleepy. Why not? he thought, snapping off the tape. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and was just drifting off when he heard his name called.

“Dalehouse! Krivitin! DiPaolo! Front and center, everybody.”

He shook himself awake, wished for a cup of coffee, and pulled himself toward the workspace. Alex Woodring said, “You’d better all see this. The Peeps have filed another report, and Harriet’s taped it for us.”

Dalehouse wriggled closer for a better view of the video screen just as it blinked and lighted up. There was a plant on the screen, rust-red and fernlike, with raspberrylike fruits hanging from its fronds. “Roll the tape, Harriet,” Woodring said impatiently. The images on the screen leaped and flickered, then stopped.

At first Dalehouse thought the picture was of another Klongan flower, possibly some desert succulent: red and yellow blobs oozing what he supposed was some sort of sap — Then it moved.

“Dear God,” whispered somebody. Dalehouse felt something rise in his throat. “What is it?”

“I think it used to be a white mouse,” said Morrissey, the biologist.

“What happened?”

“That,” said the biologist grimly, but with a trace of professional satisfaction, “is what I don’t know yet. The Peeps are transmitting their voice reports in code.”

“They’re supposed to share information!” snapped Dalehouse.

“Well, maybe they will. I assume Heir-of-Mao will have his UNESCO delegation deliver a report. And when it’s released in New York, Houston will no doubt send us a copy. But not very soon, I think. The picture was clear. When you come right down to it, that’s all we need to know: Klong is not as hospitable as we would like. I—” He hesitated, then went on. “I don’t think it’s an infectious disease. It looks more like an allergic reaction. I can’t really imagine an alien microorganism adapting that quickly to our body chemistry, anyway. I suspect we’re as poisonous to them as they are to us, so for openers, we don’t eat anything, we don’t drink anything but our own sealed supplies and distilled water.”

“You mean we’re landing anyhow?” the Canadian electronicist said incredulously.

Captain Kappelyushnikov snarled, “Da!” He nodded vigorously, then muttered to the translator, who said smoothly:

“He says that that is why we came here. He says we will take all precautions. He says on the next orbit, we go.”

Dalehouse played the strange songs from the mosquito probe a few times, but the equipment he needed to do any serious analysis had been stowed away and it made little sense to set it up again. Time to kill. Drowsily he peered out at the planet, and drifted off to sleep wondering what to call it. Kungson, Child of Kung, Son of Kung — “Klong, Son of Kung” was what one of the Americans had christened it — by any name, it was worrisome. When he woke he was given a tube of thick petroleum jelly to smear on himself — “Shuck your clothes and cover your whole body; maybe it will protect you from some kind of poison ivy or whatever that is until we get straightened out.” Then he dressed again and waited. The electronicist had patched herself in to monitor any further ground transmissions and was pinpointing sources on a likris map of the sunward surface of Klong.

“There seem to be two stations broadcasting,” Dalehouse commented.

“Yeah. Must be the base camp and, I suppose, somebody off on an expedition. There’s the Peep base” — she touched a dot on the purplish sea, on one side of a hundred-kilometer bay — “and there’s the other station.” That was across the bay. “We know that’s their base; we photographed it last time around. Nothing much. They aren’t really set up yet, I’d say. That signal’s pulse-coded, probably basic science data on its way to their orbiter for tachyon transmission back home.”

“What’s over on the other side of the bay?”

“Nothing much. There’s a sort of nest of some of the arthropods there, but they don’t have radio.” She pulled the earpiece away from her temple and handed it to Dalehouse. “Listen to that signal.”

Dalehouse put the phone in his ear. The sound was a staccato two-tone beep, plaintively repeated over and over.

“Sounds sad,” he said.

The woman nodded. “I think it’s a distress signal,” she said, frowning. “Only they don’t seem to be answering it.”