Jem

EIGHT

DANNY DALEHOUSE reached out to grab the theodolite as it tipped in the soft ground. Morrissey gri

“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 Da

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, Da

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 Da

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 Da

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 Da

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.

Da

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, Da

“Really?” said Da

“Fooled me too,” Morrissey gri