“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.”