Jem

“What are you going to do, Boyne?” yelled Da

“Hell I can’t!” Boyne stared worriedly at the stiff-jointed legs that were trying to scrape through the plastic to get at him, then turned the copter up and over the water. “I’ve always wanted a pet. Let’s see if I can get this bugger home!”

By the time he got back to his own camp, full of wonder and worries, Dalehouse was physically exhausted. He made a quick report to the rest of the expedition and then fell into a dreamless sleep.

“Night” was an arbitrary concept on Klong. When he woke, the sky was the same as it always was, clouds and the dull red cinder of Kung hanging far off center above.

It was back to work as usual. Kappelyushnikov, or somebody, had done some digging for him. He had less than an hour’s work, mostly neatening up the edges. He welcomed it, because he had more than an hour’s pondering to do.

After rescuing the Pakistani, Boyne had laid a beeline course for his own home base. He had not even asked if Dulla was alive; his attention was taken up to saturation by the hideous and very active creature only centimeters from his left ear and by the demands of piloting. Warned by radio, the Greasies had nets prepared. They had the Krinpit lashed and stowed before the beast knew what was happening. Then a quick meal while Dulla got some sort of emersericy medical treatment, mostly cleaning him up and flowing a little glucose into his bloodstream. Then over the barren, hot ground to the Peeps’ camp, where they left the sick man, accepted some haughty thanks from the Chinese in charge of the place, and took Dalehouse home.

All in all, he had been gone five or six hours. And every second filled with some new input to worry over in his mind.

He really begrudged them the Krinpit. There was no doubt the creature was intelligent. If the buildings hadn’t proved that by themselves, its methodical attempt to gouge its way into the helicopter, and its patient acceptance of failure when the plastic proved too tough, bespoke thought. It had struggled only briefly when the Greasies threw the nets over it, then allowed itself to be hauled into a steel-barred cage. Only after the cage door had slammed behind it did it systematically cut through the netting to free its limbs. Dalehouse had spent all the moments he could spare just watching it and trying to make sense of its sounds. If only he had taken the brain-split at some point in his studies! He knew that Harriet or even that Bulgarian girl, Ana, could have reasoned out some sort of linguistic pattern, but it was only noise to him.

Then there was the wonder of the Greasy camp itself. Steel bars! A helicopter! Bunks on legs, with metal springs! He could not begin to imagine what profligate burning of irreplaceable fuel had made it possible for them to hurl all that stuff at super-light speed to an orbit around Kung, and then to lower it safely to the surface of the planet. They even had air conditioning! True, they needed it; the surface temperature must have been well over forty so near to the Heat Pole. But no one forced them to settle where they would need the permanent drain of air conditioners to survive.

And by contrast, the Peeps. That was pathetic. Old What’sy had put the best face possible on it, but it was clear that the return of Dulla meant to him principally another casualty to try to take care of, with hardly anybody healthy enough to do the nursing — much less do anything else. He had proudly given the visitors to understand that another expedition was on the way, “nearly as big as our own.” But how big was that? Jim Morrissey interrupted his train of thought. The biologist had been out of the camp and had not heard the report; now he wanted it all over again, firsthand. Dalehouse obliged and then asked, “Did you catch anything in your micetraps?”

“Huh? Oh.” Obviously that was long in Morrissey’s past by now. “No. I ran a wire-tethered probe down the tu

“So you don’t have any animals to send back to Earth?”

“No animals? Never say it, never think it, Da

“Sure I would, Jim.”

“Where the photosynthetic process happens I don’t know,” Jim went on, marveling, “but it’s the same good old thing.

Starch production driven by sunlight, or what passes for sunlight — 6CO2 plus 6H2O still yields C6H12O6 and some spare oxygen, on Earth as it is in the heavens. Or the other way around.”

“That’s starch?” Dalehouse guessed.

“You bet. But don’t eat any of it. And keep putting that jelly on your skin every time it rubs off. There’re congeners in all that stuff that will do you in.”

“Sure.” Dalehouse’s attention was wandering, and he hardly listened as Morrissey catalogued the vegetation he had so far identified on Klong: something like grasses that covered the plains; succulents like bamboo, with hollow stems that would make fine structural materials; forests of plants that looked like ferns but were fruiting and with woody stems. Some of them grew together from many trunks, like mangroves; others towered in solitary splendor, like redwoods. There were vines like grapes, spreading by transporting their hard-shelled seeds through the digestive tracts of animals. Some of them were luminous. Some were meat-eating, like the Venus flytrap. Some -

“That starch,” Dalehouse interrupted, pursuing his train of thought. “Can’t we eat it? I mean, sort of cook the poison out of it, like tapioca?”

“Da

“No, really,” Dalehouse persisted. “We’re shipping a lot of mass in the form of food. Couldn’t we?”

“No. Well, maybe. In a sense. It takes only a little bit of their proteins to kick off a reaction I can’t handle, so don’t experiment. Remember the Peeps’ white mice.”

“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 Da

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, Da

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 Da