But still — to be a balloonist! To soar and to sing! Above all, to share the chorused flocklore that united them every one, from the tiniest pod to the leaky, old, slow giants that even the ha’aye’i scorned. Charlie’s song was triumphant, and all the flock around him stopped their greedy gobbling to join in the harmony.
Still his eye patches rotated watchfully toward the mesa; but still there was no sign of the airplane or of the New Friend he had been told would rise from the spot. And they were drifting with the cloud, away from the camp of the Big Sun.
Many of the flock were sated now, softly singing their private courtesy songs of thanksgiving. They were a fine flock, although, Charlie admitted, very few in number.
He sang to them, “Stop feeding, stop feeding! We must go!”
“Go where, go where?” grumbled a chorus of the slower and hungrier ones, and an individual song sounded above the choir.
Faintly: “I must eat more. I die.” That was the old female, Blue-Rose Glow. Her bag had been meanly seared when half the flock was set aflame.
“Not now, not now,” sang Charlie commandingly. “Follow!” And he sang the new song, the duty song he had learned from his friend Danny Dalehouse. It was no longer enough to float and sing and replenish hydrogen and breed. Not anymore. Station must be kept and the mesa observed. And the camp of the Big Sun must be avoided, and the ha’aye’i guarded against, and the swarm kept together; so many imperatives, both the new and the old! And so he led them through their slow, bobbing dance, crisscross with the winds.
For a long time he led them, watching ceaselessly as he had promised. Even so, it was not he who first saw the thing. From far behind, old Blue-Rose Glow sang feebly, “There is a new Sky-Danger.”
“Catch up, catch up!” he commanded. “You sing poorly.” It was not sung in unkindness but only because it was true.
“I leak,” she apologized. “Nevertheless it is there, almost in reach of the Earth-Dangers, far away.”
He rotated his eye patches and rose to another air current. There it was. “I see the Sky-Danger,” he sang, and the rest of the flock confirmed. It was not a ha’aye’i. It was the hard mechanical thing from the camp of the Middle Sun, as he had been told. In it, he knew, was the Other Friend who had sometimes soared with Danny Dalehouse, and also the New Friend he had not yet seen.
It was all as had been said by Danny Dalehouse. The biplane slunk in at treetop level and set itself down on the dry mesa a dozen kilometers upwind of the Greasy camp. While the swarm watched, Kappelyushnikov and a female person emerged and began to fill a net of balloons out of tiny tanks.
When the New Friend’s cluster began to swell and she rose gently from the ground, the aircraft took off again, turned quickly, and slipped back down the slope toward the distant ocean-lake. The New Friend rose into the prevailing poleward wind and drifted directly toward the camp of the Big Sun.
Charlie dared come no closer, but he saw her venting gas as she approached the camp. She tumbled into the underbrush somewhere nearby; and it was all as had been foretold.
“The thing is done,” Charlie caroled triumphantly.
“And what now?” asked the swarm, milling around him, staring after the New Friend as she fell.
“I will ask the air,” he sang. His little insect legs fumbled at the switch of the hard, shiny speaker-to-air Danny Dalehouse had given him. He sang a questioning greeting to his friend.
He tried twice, listening between times as Dalehouse had taught him. There was no answer, only an unpleasant hissing song of static and distant storms.
“We must go near to the camp of the Middle Sun,” he announced. “The speaker-to-air cannot sing so far.” His skilled eyes read the signs of the clouds and the fern tops far below, seeking the currents he wanted. It was too bad that Dalehouse could so seldom soar with the flock these days because of the hated ha’aye’i of his own kind, but Charlie knew that once they were in line of sight the speaker-to-air would bring his song.
“Follow!” he sang. He swarmed the flock around him. They dropped, all fourteen of them, through a fast-moving layer of stratus cloud into the backflow near the surface.
When they emerged, old Blue-Rose Glow was gone, the leaks in her bag finally too great to allow her to remain airborne. So was the young female called Shrill-Squeal, nowhere in sight, even her song no longer audible.
By the time they approached the camp of the Middle Sun and Charlie began to sing through the radio to Dalehouse, there were only twelve left in the flock.
Marge Menninger looked up as Kappelyushnikov came in from the orderly room, closing the flap to her private office behind him. “Any word?” she asked.
“Danny has had radio from gasbag, yes. Your friend was seen to descend near Greasies, all in order.”
“How long ago?”
“With gasbags, who can say? Perhaps some hours. Not long after I departed spy-drop scene.”
“All right. Thanks.” After he left, Marge started to call the communications tent, then decided against it. If the Greasies radioed that they had rescued Tinka, blown helplessly off course, the communications clerk would let her know. And he hadn’t. So the Greasies were playing it covert and slick, and what was Tinka up against in their camp? Had they figured out that she really wasn’t there by accident? Could she… ? Were they… ? Wasn’t it… ? Questions multiplied themselves in Margie’s mind endlessly, and there was no straightforward way of getting answers. You could get your ass lost in those swamps of contingencies and subjunctives.
That was not the way Marge Menninger ran her life. She made a decision. In one hour exactly she would have the comm clerk radio a query to the Greasies, and until then she would put it out of her mind. Meanwhile, lunch was fifty minutes away, and what to use that time for?
The fifteen notes she had made to herself on this morning’s calendar had all been checked off. All current projects were on schedule, or close enough. Everyone had been assigned tasks. The first hectare of wheat was in the ground, sixteen different strains competing to see which would thrive best. The perimeter defenses were in order. Three turrets still sat on the beach, ready to be put where needed when she wanted to expand the perimeter or establish another post. She looked at the 1:1000 map, two meters long and a meter high, that covered almost all of one wall of her office. That was something! It showed every feature within a kilometer of where she sat — seven creeks or rivers, a dozen hills, two capes, several bays. Grid references were not enough, they needed names. What better way to name them than to let individual members of the camp pick them? She would organize a drawing; each winner could name something, and that would give them something to do. She called in her temporary orderly and dictated a short memo for the bulletin board. “Check it with the communications section,” she finished. “Make sure we list all the features worth naming.”