The older, the bigger. The bigger, the more sperm or eggs they flung into the collective pool. Human beings, by contrast, cease to play a part in evolution before half their lives are over. Wisdom does not come at twenty-five. By the time there is a significant difference between a Da Vinci and a dolt the days of breeding are over. Selection plays no further part. Nor does it in resistance to the degenerative diseases of the old, which is why in two million years the human race has not selected against cancer, arthritis, or arteriosclerosis. Raunchy young cells have been disciplined by the stresses of fifty thousand generations. But past the breeding age the cell runs out of programming. It doesn’t know what to do next.
It begins to fall apart.
With the balloonists it was different. The Charlie-sized giants among them sprayed half a liter of mist-of-sperm into each receptive cloud of eggs, while the tiny first-swarm male balloonets squeezed out hardly a drop. The Charlies had proved their fitness to survive by the most conclusive of tests: they had survived.
Dalehouse was eager to try to settle questions like that as he called to Charlie and swung in to meet him, even more eager to try the new language elements the big computers on Earth had generated for him. What was occupying most of his attention, though, was his gift from Earth. Like the swarm’s greeting song, it was an example of the thing his society did best. It was a weapon.
It was not entirely a free gift, Dalehouse reflected, but then there is nothing without a price. Charlie’s song cost him some of his reserve of lifting gas, as the songs that were their life always cost the swarm. If they sang, they vented gas. If they vented gas, they lost lift. If they lost lift, sooner or later they drifted helplessly down to the eager mouths on the surface and were eaten. Or, almost as bad, had to live on there, helpless and voiceless, until they were able to accumulate and dissociate enough water molecules to recharge their stocks — quickly if Kung was kind enough to flare for them, painfully slowly otherwise. It was a price they paid gladly. To live was to sing; to be quiet was to be dead anyway. But in the end, for most of them, it was the price of their lives.
The price of the gift Danny Dalehouse brought was the lives of the five balloonists who had been sent back to Earth in the return capsule.
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.
Danny Dalehouse unslung the lightweight carbine from one shoulder and practiced aiming it. Its stock was metal shell, and sintered metal at that; it weighed hardly a kilogram, but half that weight was in high-velocity bullets. It was poor design. He felt sure the recoil would kick him halfway across the sky if he fired it, and anyway, what was the use of high-velocity bullets? What target was there in the Klongan air that needed that sort of impact to destroy it? But the word from Earth brought by the reinforcement party that had been labeled a UN peacekeeping committee was that it must be carried. So he carried it.
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 Danny was told, was against creatures like the crabrats, if a balloonist was forced down and needed defense; and it would only incapacitate them without killing.
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.
Danny moved on to the next sentence he had been taught. “You must come with me to find a ha’aye’i. ” That was hard to sing; English does not come with glottal stops, and practicing it for an hour had left Dalehouse’s throat sore. But Charlie seemed to understand, because the song of thanks changed to a thin melody of concern. Danny laughed. “Do not fear,” he sang. “I will be a ha’aye’i to the ha’aye’i. We will destroy them with this gift, and the swarm will no more need to fear.”
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.
Danny was uneasily tempted to slay this first one with his own carbine. It was frightening to see the ha’aye’i stoop toward them. But he wanted to demonstrate his gift to Charlie.
“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, ’Anny ’Alehouse! Will you slay all the ha’aye’i for us?”
“No, not I, Charlie. You will do it for yourself!” And hanging in the air, Danny showed him the clever little crank that worked the elastic cord, the simple breech that the cluster of needles dropped into. For a creature who had never used tools before, Charlie was quick to grasp the operation. Dalehouse had him fire a practice round at a cloud and then watched patiently while the balloonist painfully wound the winch for himself and loaded again.