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.”