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 Danny, “but soon I will show you. My swarm-mates ask you to carry some small things to other places. Some you will drop to the ground. Some you will bring back.” Teaching Charlie how to point the cameras and sound-recording instruments was going to take forever, Dalehouse thought glumly; and how were they ever going to tell him where to drop the clusters of wolftrap sensors and seismic mikes? What seemed so simple on Earth was something else entirely on Klong -
“Beware, beware!” sang the distant, frantic voices of the swarm.
Tardily Danny looked around. The ha’aye’i’s rush caught them unaware. It came from behind and below, where Dalehouse had not thought to look. And Charlie, fondling his new toy and trying to understand what Dalehouse wanted of him, had been careless.
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 Danny could unlimber his carbine the balloonist had shown how well he had learned his lesson by killing the killer. Either of them could have reached out and caught the long, wicked claws of the ha’aye’i as it fell past them; it was that close.
“Well done!” yelled Dalehouse, and Charlie pealed in rapture:
“Well, well done! How great a gift!” They rose to rejoin the swarm -
Lances of golden fire reached up faintly toward the flock from the Peeps’ camp below.
“My God!” shouted Danny. “The fools are setting off fireworks!”
The rockets exploded into showers of sparks, and all through the swarm balloonists were bursting into bright hydrogen flame.
TEN
WHEN DULLA WAS AWAKE, which was not much of the time, he was only blurrily conscious of what was going on. At first there had been a recurrent which, which that he could not identify, and some person who seemed vaguely familiar manhandling him into whatever it was that was making the sounds. Then pain — a lot of pain. Then long periods when people were talking to him or around him. But he felt no impulse to answer. In his brief conscious times he discovered by and by that he was no longer in pain. The treatment the Greasies had given him had been unpleasant, but it seemed to have done the trick. He was alive. He was rehydrated. The swellings had gone down. He was no longer blind. He was only very weak.
When he woke up and realized that he was not only awake but actually seemed able to keep his eyes open for awhile, Feng Hua-tse was standing by his cot. The Chinaman was looking very stretched out, Dulla thought with some contempt; he looked even worse than Dulla himself felt.
“You are feeling better?” Feng asked sadly.
Dulla thought it over. “Yes. I think so. What has happened?”
“I am glad you are feeling better. The long-noses brought you here from the place of your beetle friends. They said you would live, but I didn’t think so. It has been a long time. Do you want to eat?”
“Yes — no,” Dulla corrected himself. “I do, but not at this moment. I want the w.c. first.”
“Shall I help you?”
“No. I can do it myself.”
“I am glad of that, too,” said Feng, who had been functioning as bedpan orderly for all the days of Ahmed Dulla’s recovery and longer before that than he cared to remember. The Pakistani raised himself painfully from the inflatable cot and moved slowly toward the slit-trench latrine.
He gazed disapprovingly around the camp. One of the noises he had been hearing identified itself for him: a slapping, rasping sound that turned out to be the waterwheel. So at least there should be power. But where were the promised floodlights, the growing crops, the comforts? Where were all the people?
Feng had followed him and stood gazing mournfully as Dulla relieved himself. “Why do you stand there?” snapped Dulla, tying up his pajama cord and making hard work of it. “What has happened? Why has so little been done?”
The leader spread his hands. “What can I say? There were ten of us. Two died with you in this venture you found so necessary. One other died here. Two were so ill they had to be returned to Earth — by courtesy of the Greasies. We had no one well enough to fly the return capsule. The Italian is asleep, and the two women are gathering fuel.”
“Gathering fuel! Are we become peasants again, Feng?”
The leader sighed. “I have done my best,” he said. It was a sentence he had been saying over and over to himself for a long time. “Help is coming. Heir-of-Mao himself has ordered it. Two great ships, material and persons, soon—”
“Soon! And until then, what? Do we do nothing?”
“Go back to bed,” said Feng wearily. “You exhaust me, Dulla. Eat if you will. There is food. The Fats gave it to us; otherwise there would be none.”
“And now we are beggars,” sneered Dulla. He swayed and caught hold of Feng’s shoulder. “For this I studied and came all these light-years! For this I almost died! How foolish we will all look when we return in disgrace to Earth!”
Feng shook his head heavily. He disengaged the Pakistani’s hand from his shoulder and stepped downwind — the man was odorously unwashed. He did not need to hear any of this. He knew it for himself. He had accepted the charity of the Fats for the food without which they all would have starved; of the Greasies for the rescue of Dulla and for the return to Earth of the sick members of the expedition — who would no doubt even now be telling their debriefers how badly Feng Hua-tse had managed the expedition with which he had been entrusted. There would be large-character posters going up in K’ushui about that even now. They would be very critical of him. When they got back to Earth — if they got back — the best hope he had was to become a barefoot biochemist along the Yellow River again.
Of course, if somehow they mercifully spared him until the two great ships arrived -
Ah, then! He had pored over the tactran messages and pictures yearningly. The second ship would bring not ten, not fifteen, but a majestic thirty-four new persons. An agronomist! Someone to take up Feng’s own pitiful beginnings, the mushrooms he had sown, the wheat seedlings he had coaxed to sprout — the fittest of them would survive, and the fittest of their descendants would flourish. There were two more translators, both split-brained, one of them a skilled littoral pisciculturist as well. The Great Water might yet yield food they could eat. A doctor — no, Feng corrected himself, a fully schooled surgeon with a world reputation in the treatment of traumatic injuries. True, he was nearly two meters tall and black as a boy-child’s hair, by his photograph. But still. Three of the new additions had had limnology crash courses, and one of them, who had once been an officer in the Red Guards, had also had three years of experience as a scout in the Gobi, and later in the Himalayas.