Jem

EIGHT

DANNY DALEHOUSE reached out to grab the theodolite as it tipped in the soft ground. Morrissey grinned and apologized. “Must’ve lost my balance.”

“Or else you’re stoned again,” said Dalehouse. He was angry — not just at Morrissey. In the candor of his heart he knew that most of his anger was at the fact that Kappelyush-nikov was flying and he was not. “Anyway,” he went on, “you’ve knocked this run in the head. Next time why don’t you just go sleep it off?”

They had all been freaked out by the stuff the balloonists had sprayed on them, and from time to time, for days afterward, all of them had recurring phases of lust and euphoria. Not only were Morrissey’s more intense, but Dalehouse was pretty sure the biochemist was still exposing himself. He had discovered that something in the semen or sperm of the male balloonists was highly hallucinogenic — better than that, was the long-sought-after true aphrodisiac fabled in song and story. It wasn’t Morrissey’s fault that his researches put him clear out of it from time to time. But he shouldn’t have insisted on helping with the theodolite readings.

Far overhead Kappelyushnikov’s cluster of bright yellow balloons gyrated as the pilot experimented with controlling his altitude to take advantage of the winds at various levels. When he was finished tracking them they would have basic information that could allow them to cruise the skies. Then Dalehouse’s turn would come. But he was tired of waiting.

“Gappy,” he said into the radio, “we’ve lost the readings. Might as well come on down.”

Harriet was walking toward them as Kappelyushnikov’s answer came through. It was in Russian; Harriet heard, and flinched irritably. That was in character. She had been a perfect bitch about the whole thing, Dalehouse thought. When they returned to normal after that first incredible trip, she had flamed at him, “Animal! Don’t you know you could have got me pregnant?” It had never occurred to him to ask. Nor had it occurred to her, at the time. It was no use reminding her that she had been as eager as he. She had retreated into her hard defiant-spinster shell. And ever since, she had been ten times as upright as before and fifty times as nasty to anyone who made sexual remarks in her presence or even, as with Kappelyushnikov just now, used some perfectly justifiable bad language.

“I’ve got some new tapes for you,” Harriet sniffed.

“Any progress?”

“Certainly there’s progress, Dalehouse. There’s a definite grammar. I’ll brief the whole camp on it after the next meal.” She glanced up at Gappy, having a last fling with his balloon as half a dozen of the Klongan gasbags soared around him, and retreated.

A definite grammar.

Well, there was no use trying to hurry Harriet. “Preliminary Studies toward a First Contact with Subtechnological Sentients” seemed very far away! Dalehouse counted up the score. It was not impressive. They had made no contact at all with the crablike things called Krinpit or with the burrowers. The gasbags had been hanging around quite a lot since the day they had showered the expedition with their milt. But they did not come close enough for the kind of contact Danny Dalehouse wanted. They bounced and swung hundreds of meters in the air most of the time, descending lower only when most of the camp was away or asleep. No doubt they had been trained to avoid ground-limited creatures through eons of predation. But it made it hard for Danny.

At least, with the gasbags in sight, rifle microphones had been able to capture quite a lot of their strident, singing dialogue — if dialogue was what it was. Harriet said she detected structure. Harriet said it was not birdsongs or cries of alarm. Harriet said she would teach him to speak to them. But what Harriet said was not always to be believed, Danny Dalehouse thought. The other thing he thought was that they needed a different translator. The split-brain operation facilitated language learning, but it had several drawbacks. It sometimes produced bad physical effects, including long-lasting pain. Once in awhile it produced personality changes. And it didn’t always work. A person who had no gift for languages to begin with came out of surgery still lacking the gift. In Harriet’s case, Danny would have guessed all three were true.

They had transmitted all the tapes to Earth anyway. Sooner or later the big semantic computers at Johns Hopkins and Texas A M would be checking in, and Harriet’s skills, or lack of them, would stop mattering so much.

What Danny needed, or at least what Danny wanted, so badly he could taste it, was to be up there in the sky with one of the gasbags, one on one, learning a language in the good old-fashioned way. Anything else was a compromise. They’d tried everything within their resources. Free-floating instrumented balloons with sensors programmed to respond to the signatures of life; wolftraps for the Krinpit; buried microphones for the burrowers; the rifle mikes and the zoom-lens cameras for the gasbags. They had kilometers of tape, with pictures and sounds of all manner of jumping, crawling, wriggling things, and in all the endless hours hardly as much as ten minutes’ worth that was any use to Danny Dalehouse.

Still, something had been accomplished. Enough for him to have composed a couple of reports to go back to Earth. Enough even for his jealous colleagues at MSU and the Dou-ble-A-L to pore over eagerly, even if not enough to satisfy Danny. It was still learning, even if much of it was negative.

The first thing to perish was the pretty fable of three independent intelligent races living in some sort of beneficent cooperation and harmony. There was no cooperation. At least, they had seen no signs of that, and many to the contrary. The burrowers seemed never to interact with the others at all. The gasbags and the Krinpit did, but not in any cooperative or harmonious way. The balloonists never touched ground, as far as Danny had seen, or at least not on purpose. There were at least a dozen species that enjoyed eating balloonists when they could catch them — sleek brown creatures that looked a little like stub-winged bats, froglike leapers, arthropods smaller than the Krinpit — not least of them, the Krinpit themselves. If a gasbag ever drifted low enough for one of them to reach it, it was dead. So the entire lives of the balloonists, from spawn to fodder, were spent in the air, and their ultimate burial was always in the digestive tract of some ground-bound race — so tawdry a fate for so pretty a species!

Kappelyushnikov was coming in low and fast, tossed by the low-level winds. He pulled the rip cord on his balloon at five meters and dropped like a stone, wriggling out of the harness to fall free. He tumbled over and over as he landed, then got up, rubbing himself, and ran to catch the deflated balloon cluster as it scudded before the breeze.

Danny winced, contemplating his own first flight. The last little bit of ballooning was going to be the hardest. He turned to help Gappy pick up the fabric, and a rifleshot next to his head made him duck and swear.

He spun around, furious. “What the hell are you up to, Morrissey?”

The biologist put the rifle at shoulder-arms and saluted the tumbling form of one of the hovering gasbags. “Just harvesting another specimen, Danny,” he said cheerfully. He had judged height and wind drift with precision, and the collapsed bag was dropping almost at their feet. “Ah, shit,” he said in disgust. “Another female.”

“Really?” said Danny, staring at what looked like an immense erection. “Are you sure?”

“Fooled me too,” Morrissey grinned. “No, the ones with the schlongs aren’t the males. They aren’t schlongs. I mean, they aren’t penises. These folks don’t make love like you and I, Danny. The females sort of squirt their eggs out to float around in the air, and then the boys come out and whack off onto them.”

“When did you find all that out?” Dalehouse was annoyed; the rule of the expedition was that each of them shared discoveries as soon as made.

“When you were bugged at me for being stoned out of my mind,” Morrissey said. “I think it has to do with the way they generate their hydrogen. Solar flares seem to be involved. So when they saw our lights they thought it was a flare — and that’s when they spawned. Only we happened to be underneath, and so we got sprayed with, uh, with—”

“I know what we got sprayed with,” Dalehouse said.

“Yeah! You know, Danny, when I took up this career they made dissecting specimens sound pretty tacky — but every time I go near one of the males’ sex glands I get high. I’m beginning to like this line of work.”

“Do you have to kill them all off to do it, though? You’ll chase the flock away. Then how am I going to make contact?”

Morrissey grinned. He didn’t answer. He just pointed aloft.

Dalehouse, in justice, had to concede the unspoken point. Whatever emotions the gasbags had, fear did not seem to be among them. Morrissey had shot down nearly a dozen of them, but ever since the first contact the swarm had almost always stayed within sight. Perhaps it was the lights that attracted them. In the permanent Klongan twilight, there was no such thing as “day.” The camp had opted to create one, marked by turning on the whole bank of floodlights at an arbitrary “dawn” and turning them off again twelve clock hours later. One light always stayed on — to keep off predators, they told themselves, but in truth it was to keep out the primordially threatening dark.

Morrissey picked up the balloonist. It was still alive, its wrinkled features moving soundlessly. Once down, they never uttered a sound — because, Morrissey said, the hydrogen that gave them voice was lost when their bags were punctured. But they kept on trying. The first one they had shot down had lived for more than forty hours. It had crept all around the camp, dragging its gray and wrinkled bag, and it had seemed in pain all of that time. Dalehouse had been glad when it died at last, was glad now when Morrissey plunged the new one into a killer bag for return to Earth.

Kappelyushnikov limped up to them, rubbing his buttocks. “Is always a martyr, first pioneer of flight,” he grumbled. “So, Danny Dalehouse. You want go up now?”

An electric shock hit Danny. “You mean now?”

“Sure, why not? Wind isn’t bad. I go with, soon as two balloons fill.”

It took longer than Dalehouse would have thought possible for the little pump to fill two batches of balloons big enough for human passengers — especially since the pump was a hastily rigged nonsparking compressor that leaked as much gas as it squeezed into the bags. Dalehouse tried to eat, tried to nap, tried to interest himself in other projects, and kept coming back to gaze at the tethered clusters of bags, quietly swelling with hydrogen, constrained by the cord netting that surrounded them.

The weather had taken a turn for the worse. Clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon, but Kappelyushnikov was stubbornly optimistic. “Clouds will blow away. Is positive skies will be clear.” When the first pinkening of sky began to show, he said decisively, “Is okay now. Strap in, Danny.”

Mistrustfully, Dalehouse buckled himself into the harness. He was a taller but lighter man than the Russian, and Kappelyushnikov grumbled to himself as he valved off surplus hydrogen. “Otherwise,” he explained, “you go back to state of Michigan, East Lansing, shwoosh! But next time, not so much wasting gas.”

The harness had a quick-release latch at the shoulders, and Dalehouse touched it experimentally.

“No, no!” screamed Kappelyushnikov. “You want to pull when you are up two hundred meters, fine, pull! Is your neck. But don’t waste gas for nothing.” He guided Danny’s hands to the two crucial cords. “Is not clamjet, you understand? Is free balloon. Clamjet uses lift to save fuel. Here is no fuel, only lift. Here you go where wind goes. You don’t like direction, you find different wind. Spill water ballast, you go up. Spill wasserstoff, you go down.”

Dalehouse wriggled in the harness. It was not going to be very much like sailplaning over the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, where there was always a west wind to bounce off the bluffs and keep a glider aloft for hours. But if the Russian could do it, he could do it. I hope, he added to himself, and said, “All right, I think I have the hang of it.”

“So let’s go,” cried the Russian, grinning as he slipped into his own harness. He bent and picked up a fair-sized rock, gesturing to Danny to do the same. The other members of the expedition were standing back, but one of them handed Danny a rock, and at Kappelyushnikov’s orders they untethered the balloons.

Kappelyushnikov danced over toward Danny like a diver stilting across a sea bottom. He came as close as he could under the bulk of their balloons, peering into his face. “You are all right?” Danny nodded. “So drop the rock and we go!” Kappelyushnikov cried. And he cast his own rock away and began to float diagonally upward.

Dalehouse took a deep breath and followed his example, watching the Russian move upward.

Nothing seemed to happen. Danny did not feel any acceleration, only that his feet seemed to have gone abruptly numb and there was no sensation of pressure on their bottoms. Because his eyes were on Kappelyushnikov he neglected to look down until he was fifty meters in the air.

They were drifting south, along the coastline. Far above them and inland, over the purple hills that marked the edge of the fern forest, the extended swarm of balloonists was grazing on whatever tiny organisms they could find floating in the sky. Below and behind was the dwindling campsite. Danny was already higher than the nose of their return rocket, the tallest object in camp. Off to his left was the sea itself, and a couple of islands in the muddy waters, covered with many-trunked trees.

He wrenched his attention away from sight-seeing; Kappelyushnikov was shouting at him. “What?” Dalehouse bellowed. The gap had widened; Gappy was now forty meters above him and moving inland, evidently in a different air layer.

“Drop… little… water!” shouted the Russian.

Dalehouse nodded and reached tentatively for the valve cord. He pulled at it with a light touch.

Nothing happened.

He pulled again, harder. Half a liter of ballast sprayed out of the tank, drenching him. Danny had not realized that the passenger was directly under the ballast tank, and gasping, he vowed to change that element of design before he went up again.

But he was flying!

Not easily. Not with grace. Not even with the clumsy control that Kappelyushnikov had taught himself. He spent the first hour chasing Gappy across the sky. It was like one of the fun-house games where you and your girl are on different rotating circles of a ride, when neither of you can take a step except to change from one spinning disk to another. Though Kappelyushnikov did all he could to make capture easy, he never caught the Russian — not that first time.

But — flying! It was exactly the dream he had always had, the dream everyone has had. The total conquest of the air. No jets. No wings. No engines. Just gently swimming through the atmospheric ocean, with no more effort than floating in a saltwater bay.

He reveled in it, and as time went on — not in the first flight or the tenth, but the supply of hydrogen was limitless, if slow in coming, and he made as many flights as he could — he began to acquire some skill.

And the problem of reaching the gasbags turned out to be no problem at all.

He didn’t have to seek them out. They were far more skilled at flying than he, and they came to him, bobbing around like great jack-o’-lanterns with hideous ticklike faces, peering inquisitively into his own face, and singing, singing. Oh! how they sang.

For the next week, or what passed on Klong for a week, Dalehouse spent every minute he could in the air. The life of the camp went on almost without him. Even Kappelyushnikov was more earthbound than he. There was nothing to hold Dalehouse there, and he found himself almost a stranger when he landed, slept, relieved bladder and bowels, ate, filled his balloons, and soared again. Harriet snapped at him for demanding more than she could handle in translation. The camp commander complained bitterly at the waste of power in generating hydrogen. Jim Morrissey pleaded for time and help in collecting and studying the other species. Even Gappy was surly about the wear and tear on his balloons. Danny didn’t care. In the skies of Klong he was alive. He progressed from feckless interloper to skilled aeronaut; from stranger to, almost, one of the great drifting swarm. He began to be able to exchange at least rudimentary ideas with some of the gasbags, especially the biggest of them — two meters across, with a pattern that looked almost like a tartan. Danny named him “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” lacking any clue as to what the gasbag called itself. Himself. Danny began to think of him as almost a friend. If it had not been for his physical needs, and one other thing, Dalehouse would hardly have bothered returning to the camp at all.

The one other thing was Harriet.

He could not do without her help in translation. It wasn’t enough. He was convinced a lot of it was wrong. But it was all he had in the endeavor to communicate with these beautiful and monstrous creatures of the air. He raged to the rest of the encampment and insisted on his complaints being relayed to Earth; he insulted her almost to the point of tears — from eyes that he would have sworn had never felt them before. It was not enough to suit him… but voyage by voyage, hour by hour, some sort of communication began to build up.

You never knew what part of your learning was going to be useful. Those long sessions of Chomsky and transactional grammar, the critiques of Lorenz and Dart, the semesters on territoriality and mating rites — none of them seemed very helpful in the skies of Klong. But he blessed every hour of sailplaning and every evening with his local barbershop quartet. The language of the gasbags was music. Not even Mandarin made such demands on pitch and tonality as did their songs. Even before he knew any words, he found himself chiming in on their chorus, and they responded to it with, if not exactly welcome, at least curiosity. The big plaid one even learned to sing Danny Dalehouse’s name — as well as he could with a sound-producing mechanism that was deficient in such basic phonemes as the fricative.

Danny learned that some of their songs were not unlike terrestrial birdcalls; there was one for food, and several for danger. There seemed to be three separate warning sounds, one for danger from the ground, and two for dangers, but evidently different kinds of dangers, from the air. One of the terms sounded almost Hawaiian, with its liquids and glottal stops; that seemed to belong to a kind of feral gasbag, a shark of the air that appeared to be their most dangerous natural enemy.

The other — Dalehouse could not be sure, and Harriet was not much help, but it appeared to relate to danger from above the air; and not just danger, but that kind of special macho risk-taking danger that involved mortal peril, even death, but was infinitely attractive for reasons he could not perceive. He puzzled over that for hours, making Harriet’s life a living hell. On that point, no solution. But the tapes went back to Earth, and the computer matches began to come back, and Harriet was able to construct sentences for him to say. He sang, “I am friend,” and, heart-stoppingly, the great crosshatched gasbag he called Charlie responded with a whole song.

“You are, you are, you are friend!” And the whole chorus joined in.

The fickle Klongan weather cooperated for eight calendar days, and then the winds began to rise and the clouds rolled in.

When the winds blew, even the gasbag swarm had trouble keeping station with each other, and Danny Dalehouse was blown all over the sky. He tried to keep the camp in range; and because he did, so did the whole swarm. But in the effort they were widely separated. When he decided to give up at last, he called good-bye and heard in response the song that seemed to mean “sky danger.” Dalehouse repeated it; it seemed appropriate enough, considering the weather. But then he became conscious of a deep fluttering sound behind the whine of the winds — the sound of a helicopter.

Dalehouse abandoned the flock, climbed high enough to find a return wind, then jockeyed himself expertly down through the cross-breezes toward the camp. There it was, dropping through the frayed bottom of a cloud: the Greasy copter, with a Union Jack on its tail strut. So profligate of energy! Not only did they ship that vast mass through tachyon transit at incredible cost, but they had also shipped enough fuel to allow the pilot to take joyrides. And what was it carrying slung between its skids? Some other kind of machine! Typical Greasy oil-hoggery!

Danny swore disgustedly at the wastefulness of the Greasies. With a fraction of the kilocalories they poured out in simple inefficiency and carelessness he could have had a decent computer, Kappelyushnikov could long since have had his glider, Morrissey could have had an outboard motor for his boat and thus a nearly complete selection of marine samples by now. There was something wrong in a world that let a handful of nations burn off energy so recklessly simply because they happened to be sitting on its sources. Sure, when it was gone, they would be as threadbare as the Peruvians or the Paks, but there was no comfort in that. Their downfall would be the world’s downfall…

Or at least that world’s downfall. Maybe something could be worked out for this one. Planning. Thought. Preparation. Control of growth so that scarce resources would not be pissed away irrevocably on foolishness. A fair division of Klong’s treasures so that no nation and no individual could profit by starving others. An attempt to insure equity to all -

Dalehouse’s train of thought snapped as he realized that he had been daydreaming. The winds had carried him farther than he intended, almost out over the sea. He vented hydrogen frantically and came down almost in the water, falling fast. He picked himself up and watched the ripped cases of the balloons floating out of reach in the water. Gappy would be furious.

At least he wouldn’t have to carry them on what looked like a long walk back up the shore to the camp, he thought. It was some consolation, but it didn’t last long. Before he was halfway back it began to rain.

And it rained. And it rained. It was no such ferocious, wind-slamming storm as had hit them soon after the landing, but it lasted most tediously and maddeningly long, far past the point where it was an incident, or an annoyance, to the point, and past the point, where it seemed they were all sentenced to fat, oily drops turning the ground into mud and the camp into a steam bath for all the miserable rest of their lives. There was no chance of ballooning. There were no native balloon-ists in sight to follow anyway. Kappelyushnikov grumpily seamed and filled new balloons in the hope of better times to come. Harriet Santori tongue-lashed everyone who came near her. Morrissey packed samples in his tent and pored over mysterious pictures and charts, coming out only to stare furiously at the rain and shake his head. Danny composed long tactran messages to SERDCOM and the Double-A-L, demanding gifts for his gasbag friends. Krivitin and Sparky Cerbo concocted some kind of witches’ brew from the native berries and got terribly drunk together, and then even more terribly sick as their bodies strove to defend themselves against the alien Klongan protein traces in the popskull. They very nearly died. They surely would have, exploded Alex Woodring, shaking with anger, if they had done any such moron’s trick earlier; the first total vulnerability had dwindled to reactions that no longer brought death — only protracted misery. Danny inherited the job of tending them and, at Harriet’s angry insistence, of packaging samples of their various untidy emissions for Jim Morrissey to analyze.

Morrissey was crouched over his pictures and diagrams when Danny came in, and when his duty was explained to him, he flatly refused it. “Gripes, Danny, I’ve got no equipment for that kind of thing. Throw those samples in the crapper. I don’t want them.”

“Harriet says we must know how serious the poisoning is.”

“We already know that, man. They got real sick. But they didn’t die.”

“Harriet says you can at least analyze them.”

“For what? I wouldn’t know what to look for.”

“Harriet says—”

“Oh, screw Harriet. ’Scuse me, Danny; I didn’t mean to remind you of your, uh, indiscretions. Anyway, I’ve got something better for us to do now that the rain’s stopping.”

“It hasn’t stopped, Jim.”

“It’s slowing down. When it does stop, Boyne’s going to be coming around to collect the backhoe I borrowed from him. I want to use it first.”

“For what?”

“For digging up some of our light-fingered friends.” He pointed straight down at the floor of the tent. “The ones that swiped Harriet’s radio.”

“We already tried that.”

“Yes, we did. We found out that the important thing is speed. They’ll close up the tunnels faster than you’d believe, so we’ve got to get in, get moving, and get to where they are before they have a chance to react. We’ll never have a clear field to pick them up otherwise — unless,” he added offhandedly, “we flooded the tunnels with cyanide first. Then we could take our time.”

“Is that all you think of — killing?” Dalehouse flared.

“No, no. I wasn’t suggesting it. I was excluding it. I know you don’t like killing off our alien brothers.”

Dalehouse took a deep breath. He had seen enough of the balloonists to stop thinking of them as preparations and learn to consider them, almost, as people. The burrowers were still total unknowns to him, and probably rather distasteful — he thought of termites and maggots and all sorts of vile crawling things when he thought of them — but he wasn’t ready for genocide.

“So what were you suggesting?” he asked.

“I borrowed a backhoe from Boyne. I want to use it before he takes it back. The thing is, I think I know where to dig.”

He gathered up a clump of the papers on the upended footlocker he was using for a desk and handed them over. The sheets on top seemed to be a map, which meant nothing to Dalehouse, but underneath was a sheaf of photographs. He recognized them; they were aerial views of the area surrounding the camp. Some he had taken himself, others were undoubtedly Kappelyushnikov’s.

“There’s something wrong with them,” he said. “The colors look funny. Why is this part blue?”

“It’s false-color photography, Danny. That batch is in the infrared; the bluer the picture, the warmer the ground. Here, see these sort of pale streaks? They’re two or three degrees warmer than what’s on either side of them.”

Dalehouse turned the pictures about in his hands and then asked, “Why?”

“Well, see if you figure it out the same way I did. Look at the one under it, in orthodox color. You took that one. Turn it so it’s oriented the same way as the false-color print — there. Do you see those clumps of orangey bushes? They seem to extend in almost straight lines. And those bright red ones? They are extensions of the same lines. The bushes are all the same plant; the difference is that the bright red ones are dead. Well, doesn’t it look to you like the pale lines in the false-color pictures match up with the lines of bushes in the ortho? And I’ve poked a probe down along some of those lines, and guess what I found.”

“Burrows?” Dalehouse hazarded.

“You’re so damn smart,” grumbled Morrissey. “All right, show me some real smarts. Why are those plants and markings related to the burrows?”

Dalehouse put down the pictures patiently. “That I don’t know. But I bet you’re going to tell me.”

“Well, no. Not for sure. But I can make a smart guess. I’d say digging out tunnels causes some sort of chemical change in the surface. Maybe it leeches out the nutrients selectively? And those plants happen to be the kind that survive best in that kind of soil? Or maybe the castings from the burrowers fertilize them, again selectively. Those are analogues from Earth: you can detect mole runs that way, and earthworms aerate the soil and make things grow better. This may be some wholly different process, but my bet is that that’s the general idea.”

He sat back on his folding campstool and regarded Danny anxiously.

Dalehouse thought for a second, listening to the dwindling plop of raindrops on the tent roof. “You tell me more than I want to know, Jim, but I think I get your drift. You want me to help you dig them up. How are we going to do that fast enough? Especially in the kind of mud there is out there?”

“That’s why I borrowed Boyne’s backhoe. It’s been in position ever since the rain began. I think the burrowers sense ground vibrations; I wanted them to get used to its being there before we started.”

“Did you tell him what you wanted it for? I got the impression they were digging burrows themselves.”

“So did I, and that’s why I didn’t tell him. I said we needed new latrines, and by gosh, we do — sometime or other. Anyway, it’s right over the best-looking patch of bushes right now, ready to go. Are you with me?”

Danny thought wistfully of his airborne friends, so much more inviting than these rats or worms. But they were out of reach for the time being…

“Sure,” he said.

Morrissey grinned, relieved. “Well, that was the easy part. Now we come up against the tough bit: convincing Harriet to go along.”

Harriet was every bit as tough as advertised. “You don’t seriously mean, ” she began, “that you want to drag everybody out in a downpour just for the sake of digging a few holes?”

“Come on, Harriet,” said Morrissey, trying not to explode. “The rain’s almost stopped.”

“And if it has, there are a thousand more important things to do!”

“Will be fun, Gasha,” Kappelyushnikov chipped in. “Digging for foxholes like landed oil-rich English country gentlemen! Excellent sport.”

“And it isn’t just a few holes,” Morrissey added. “Look at the seismology traces. There are big things down there, chambers twenty meters long and more. Not just tunnels. Maybe cities.”

Harriet said cuttingly, “Morrissey, if you wonder why none of us have any confidence in you, that’s just the reason. You’ll say any stupid thing that comes into your head. Cities! There are some indications of shafts and chambers somewhat bigger than the tunnels directly under the surface, yes. But I would not call them—”

“All right, all right. They’re not cities. Maybe they aren’t even villages, but they’re something. At the least, they are something like breeding chambers where they keep their young. Or store their food. Or, Christ, I don’t know, maybe it’s where they have ballet performances or play bingo — what’s the difference? Just because they’re bigger, it follows that they’re probably more important. It will be less likely, or at least harder, for them to seal them off.”

He looked toward Alex Woodring, who coughed and said, “I think that’s reasonable, Harriet. Don’t you?”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Reasonable? No, I certainly wouldn’t call it reasonable. Of course, you’re our leader, at least nominally, and if you think it wise for us to depart from the—”

“I do think it’s a good idea, Harriet,” Woodring said boldly.

“If you’ll let me finish, please? I was saying, if you think we should depart from the agreement we all made that group decisions should be arrived at unanimously, not by a vote or some one person throwing his weight around, then I suppose I have nothing further to say.”

“Gasha, dear,” said Kappelyushnikov soothingly, “shut up, please? Tell us plan, Jim.”

“You bet! First thing we do is open up as big a hole as we can with the backhoe. All of us are out there with shovels, and we jump in. What we want is specimens. We grab what we see. We should take them pretty much by surprise, and besides,” he said, with some self-satisfaction, “two of us can carry these.” He held up his camera. “They’ve got good bright strobes. I got that idea from Boyne when we were drinking together; I think that’s what they do at the Greasies’. They go in with these things, partly to get pictures and mostly to dazzle them. While they’re temporarily blinded we can grab them easily.”

Dalehouse put in, “Temporarily, Jim?”

“Well,” Morrissey said reluctantly, “no, I’m not real sure about that part. Their eyes are probably pretty delicate — but hell, Danny, we don’t even know if they have any eyes in the first place!”

“Then how do they get dazzled?”

“All right. But still, that’s the way I want to do it. And we’ll take walkie-talkies. If anything, uh, goes wrong—” He hesitated and then started over. “If you should get disoriented or anything, you just dig up. You should be able to do that with your bare hands. If not, you just turn your walkie-talkie on. We might be unable to get voice communication from under the surface, but we know from the radio that was stolen that we can at least get carrier sound, so we’ll RDF you and dig you out. That’s if anything goes wrong.”

Kappelyushnikov leaned forward and placed his hand on the biologist’s mouth. “Dear Jim,” he said, “please don’t encourage us anymore, otherwise we all quit. Let’s do this; no more talk.”

Predictably, Harriet would have nothing to do with the venture, and she insisted that at least two of the men stay behind — “In case we have to dig you heroes out.” But Sparky Cerbo volunteered to go in, and Alicia Dair claimed she could run the backhoe better than anyone else in the camp. So they had half a dozen in coveralls, head lamps, goggles, and gloves, ready to jump in when Morrissey signaled the digging to start.

He had been right about the mud; there wasn’t any, except right around the main paths of the camp, where they had trodden the Klongan ground cover to death. But the soil was saturated, and the backhoe threw as much moisture as it did dirt. In less than a minute it had broken through.

Morrissey swallowed, crossed himself, and jumped into the hole. Alex Woodring followed, then Danny, then Kappelyushnikov, di Paolo, and Sparky Cerbo.

The plan was to break up into pairs, each couple to follow one tunnel. The trouble with the plan was that it was predicated on there being more than two directions to take. There weren’t. The pit they dropped into was not much more than a meter broad. It smelled damp and — and bad, Danny thought, like a stale cage of pet mice; and it was no more than a tunnel. Di Paolo jumped down onto Danny’s ankle, and Sparky Cerbo, following, got him square in the middle of the back. They were all tangled together, cursing and grumbling, and if there was a burrower within a kilometer that didn’t know they were coming, that burrower, Danny thought, would have to be dead.

“Quit screwing around!” yelled Morrissey over his shoulder. “Dalehouse! Sparky! You two follow me.”

Dalehouse got himself turned around in time to see Morrissey’s hips and knees, outlined against the glow from his head lamp, moving away. The cross-section of the tunnel was more oval than round, shallower than it was broad; they couldn’t quite move on hands and knees, but they could scramble well enough on thighs and elbows.

“See anything?” he called ahead.

“No. Shut up. Listen.” Morrissey’s voice was muffled, but Dalehouse could hear it well enough. Past it and through it he thought he heard something else. What? It was faint and hard to identify — squirrellike squeals and rustlings, perhaps, and larger, deeper sounds from farther away. His own breath, the rubbing of his gear, the sounds the others made all conspired to drown it out. But there was something.

A bright flare made him blink. It hurt his eyes. It came from Morrissey’s strobe, up ahead. All Dalehouse got of it was what trickled back, impeded by the rough dirt walls almost without reflectance. In the other direction it must have been startling. Now he was sure he heard the squirrel squeals, and they sounded anguished. As well they should, Danny realized, with a moment’s empathy for the burrowers. What could light have meant to them, ever, but some predator breaking in, and death and destruction following?

He bumped into Morrissey’s feet and stopped. Over his shoulder, Morrissey snarled, “The fuckers! They’ve blocked it.”

“The tunnel?”

“Christ, yes, the tunnel! It’s packed tight, too. How the hell could they do that so fast?”

Dalehouse had a moment’s atavistic fear. Blocked! And in the other direction? He rolled onto his side, extinguished his light, and peered back between his feet down the tunnel. Past Sparky’s crouching form he could see — he was sure he could see — the reassuring dim red glow from the Klongan sky. Even so, he could feel the muscles at the back of his neck tensed and painful with the ancient human terror of being buried alive, and he suddenly remembered that the direction they had taken was the one that went under the backhoe. What if its weight crushed the roof through and pinned them? “Ah, Jim,” he called. “What do you think? Should we get back to the barn?”

Pause. Then, angrily, “Might as well. We’re not doing any good here. Maybe the guys had better luck the other way.”

But Gappy and the others were already outside, helping them out as they emerged. They had got only eight or nine meters into their tunnel before it was blocked; Dalehouse’s group had gone more than twice as far. It came out the same in the end, though, Dalehouse reflected. Incredible that their reactions could be so fast! No doubt they had been trained into them over endless Klongan millenia. Whatever the reason, it was not going to be easy to collect a specimen, much less try to make contact. Danny thought of his airborne friends longingly; how much nicer to fly to make contact than to wiggle through the mud like a snake!

Kappelyushnikov was brushing him off, and then, more lingeringly, doing the same for Sparky Cerbo. “Dearest girl,” he said, “you are disgracefully filthy! Let us all go swim in lake, take our minds off troubles.”

Good-naturedly the girl moved away from his hand. “Maybe we should see what Harriet wants first,” she suggested. And, sure enough, Harriet was standing at the entrance to the headquarters tent, a hundred meters away, evidently waiting for them to come to her.

As they straggled in, she looked them up and down with distaste. “A total failure, I see,” she said, nodding. “Of course, that was to be expected.”

“Harriet,” Jim Morrissey began dangerously.

She raised her hand. “It doesn’t matter. Perhaps you’ll be interested in what has happened while you were gone.”

“Harriet, we were only gone twenty or thirty minutes!” Morrissey exploded.

“Nevertheless. First there was a tactran signal. We’re being reinforced, and so are the Peeps. Second—” She stepped aside to let them pass through into the tent. The others who had stayed behind were clustered inside, looking, Dalehouse thought, curiously self-satisfied. “I believe you wanted a specimen of those underground creatures? We found one trying to steal some of our supplies. Of course, it would have been easier if so many of you hadn’t been wasting your time on foolishness, so you could have helped when we needed you—”

Kappelyushnikov bellowed, “Gasha! Get to point, right now. You caught specimen for us?”

“Of course,” she said. “We put him in one of Morrissey’s cages. I was quite severely scratched doing it, but that’s about what you can expect when—”

They didn’t let her finish; they were all inside and staring.

The stale mouse-cage smell was a thousand times stronger, almost choking Danny Dalehouse, but there it was. It was nearly two meters long, tiny eyes set close together above its snout, squeezed tight in anguish. It was squealing softly — Danny would almost have said brokenheartedly — to itself. It was gnawing at the metal bars of the cage and simultaneously scrabbling at the plastic flooring with duckfoot-shaped claws. It was covered with a sort of dun-colored down or short fur; it seemed to have at least six pairs of limbs, all stubby, all clawed, and all incredibly strong.

Whatever its teeth were made of, they were hard; one of the bars of the cage was almost gnawed through. And its squeals of pain never stopped.