Jem

  "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.

  NINE

  THE SWARM WAS half fledglings now, tiny balloonets that had just cast off their parachuting threads of silk and now struggled bravely to keep up with the great two-meter adult spheres. In the constant chorus of the swarm, the fledglings' voices were as tiny as their gasbags. Their shrill peepings used the least possible amount of hydrogen, to preserve their precarious lift balance against the few drops in their ballast bladders.

  Charlie patrolled majest
ically through the swarm, driving the bulk of his body reprovingly against a cluster of infant balloonets who were singing against the swarm melody, rotating his eye patches to scan the skies for ha'aye'i, listening to the countersongs of praise and complaint from the other adults of the swarm, and always, always, leading them as they sang. There was much praise, and much complaint. The praise he took for granted. To the complaint he attended with more care, ready either to remedy or rebuke. Three females sang despairingly of little ones who dropped their flying tails too soon, or who could not hold their hydrogen and so drifted helplessly down to the voracious world below. Another pealed a dirge of anger and sorrow, blaming the deformed fledglings on the Persons of the Middle Sun.

  This was just; and Charlie led the swarm in a concurrence of sympathy and advice. "Never"—(Never, never, never, sang the chorus)—"never again must we breed near the New Suns."

  The females chorused agreement, but some of the males sang in counterpoint, "But how can we know which is real Heaven-Danger and which is not? And where may we breed at all? The Persons of the Three Suns are under all our air!"

  Charlie's answering song was serene. "I will ask my friend of the Middle Sun. He will know." (He will know, he will know, chorused the swarm.)

  But a male sang a dire question. "And when the swarming rapture is on us, will we remember?"

  "Yes," sang Charlie. "We will remember because we must." (We must, we must.)

  That should have settled it. And yet, the song of the swarm was not at peace. Undertones buzzed and discorded against the dominant themes. Even Charlie's own song faltered how and then, and repeated itself when it should have burst into triumphant new themes. Currents were stirring under the surface of his mind. They never reached consciousness; if they had, no power could have kept him from expressing them in song. But they were there. Worries. Doubts. Puzzles. Who were these Persons of the Three Suns? Where had they come from? They seemed the same, as like as any swarms of balloonists. Yet Charlie's friend 'Anny 'Alehouse had explained that they were not the same.