Jem

The price of the gift Da

The designers at Camp Detrick had made good use of the samples. The two who were dead on arrival were dissected at once. Those were the lucky ones. The other three were studied in vivo. The biggest and strongest of them lasted two weeks.

The Camp Detrick experimenters also had a price to pay, because eight of them came down with the Klongan hives, and one had the severe misfortune to have his skull fill up with antigenic fluid, so that he would never again for the rest of his life stress an experimental subject. Or, indeed, hold a fork by himself. But probably the balloonists who had been his subjects would not have thought that price unfair.

Da

He put it back and, somewhat uncomfortably, took Charlie’s gift off the other shoulder. Now, that was more like it. Somebody somewhere had understood what Charlie’s people could do and what they needed in order to protect themselves against predators. It weighed even less than the carbine, and it contained no propellants at all. Its tiny winch could be operated by the claws of a Charlie to tighten a long-lasting elastic cord. Its trigger was sized to fit a balloonist, and what it fired was a cluster of minute needles or, alternatively, a capsule of some sort of fluid. Needles were for airborne predators. The fluid, or so Da

It would tax all of Dalehouse’s linguistics to convey any part of that to Charlie, but the way to get it done was to begin. He held the crossbow up and sang, carefully attending to the notes he had been taught by the computers at Texas A M. “I have brought you a gift.”

Charlie responded with a burst of song. Dalehouse could understand no more than a few phrases, but clearly it was a message of gratitude and polite inquiry; and anyway, the little tape recorder at his belt was getting it all down for later study.

Da

Song of confusion, with the words the swarm repeated over and over, not only by Charlie but by all his flock.

The hardest part of all was yet to come. “You must leave the swarm,” sang Dalehouse. “They will be safe. We will return. But now just you and I must fly to seek a ha’aye’i. ”

It took time; but the message ultimately seemed to get across. It was a measure of the balloonist’s trust in his friend from Earth that he was willing to embark on so fearful an adventure with him. The members of the flock never left it by choice. For more than an hour after they had dropped to a lower level and left the flock behind, Charlie’s song was querulous and sad. And no ha’aye’i appeared. They left the Food Bloc camp far behind, drifting down the shore of the sea-lake and then across a neck of it to the vicinity of the Peeps’ tattered colony. For some time Dalehouse had been wondering if the Texas computers had really given him the right words to sing. But then Charlie’s song turned to active fear. They dipped low under a bank of clouds, warm-weather cumuli that looked like female balloonists turned upside down, and from one of them dropped the predatory form of a killer.

Da

“Watch!” he cried, clumsily grasping the grip that had been designed for balloonist claws. He circled the swelling form of the airshark in the cross-haired sight, designed for balloonist eye patches, feeling the low vibrations of Charlie’s muttered song of terror. At twenty meters he squeezed the trigger.

A dozen tiny metal spikes lashed out at the ha’aye’i, spreading like the cone of fire of a shotgun shell. One was enough. The shark’s bag ripped open with a puff of moisture. The creature screamed once in pain and surprise, and then had no more breath to scream with. It dropped past them, its horrid little face writhing, its claws clutching uselessly toward them, meters away.

A bright trill of surprise from Charlie, and then a roaring paean of triumph. “This is a great good thing, ’A

“No, not I, Charlie. You will do it for yourself!” And hanging in the air, Da

They were no longer quite alone. Unbidden, the swarm had drifted after them and was floating half a kilometer away, all their eye patches rotated toward them, their distant song sweet and plaintive, like a puppy’s lonely begging to be let in. And down below, the Peeps’ camp was near; Dalehouse could see one or two upturned faces curiously staring at them. Let them look, he thought virtuously; let them see how the Food-Exporting Powers were helping the native races of Klong, if they had so little to do with their time. There were only a handful of them left of the original expedition, and their much-boasted reinforcements showed no signs of arriving.

Reinforcements. Reminded, Dalehouse began the rest of his message for Charlie. “This gift,” he sang, “is yours. But we would ask a gift of you, too.”

“What gift?” sang Charlie politely.

“I do not know words,” sang Da

“Beware, beware!” sang the distant, frantic voices of the swarm.

Tardily Da

If it had not been for the distant shrieking of the swarm, the creature might have had them both. But Charlie spun faster than Dalehouse, and before Da