Frederik Pohl - Jem

At least he wouldn’t have to carry them on what looked like a long walk back up the shore to the camp, he thought. It was some consolation, but it didn’t last long. Before he was halfway back it began to rain.

And it rained. And it rained. It was no such ferocious, wind-slamming storm as had hit them soon after the landing, but it lasted most tediously and maddeningly long, far past the point where it was an incident, or an annoyance, to the point, and past the point, where it seemed they were all sentenced to fat, oily drops turning the ground into mud and the camp into a steam bath for all the miserable rest of their lives. There was no chance of ballooning. There were no native balloon-ists in sight to follow anyway. Kappelyushnikov grumpily seamed and filled new balloons in the hope of better times to come. Harriet Santori tongue-lashed everyone who came near her. Morrissey packed samples in his tent and pored over mysterious pictures and charts, coming out only to stare furiously at the rain and shake his head. Danny composed long tactran messages to SERDCOM and the Double-A-L, demanding gifts for his gasbag friends. Krivitin and Sparky Cerbo concocted some kind of witches’ brew from the native berries and got terribly drunk together, and then even more terribly sick as their bodies strove to defend themselves against the alien Klongan protein traces in the popskull. They very nearly died. They surely would have, exploded Alex Woodring, shaking with anger, if they had done any such moron’s trick earlier; the first total vulnerability had dwindled to reactions that no longer brought death — only protracted misery. Danny inherited the job of tending them and, at Harriet’s angry insistence, of packaging samples of their various untidy emissions for Jim Morrissey to analyze.

Morrissey was crouched over his pictures and diagrams when Danny came in, and when his duty was explained to him, he flatly refused it. “Gripes, Danny, I’ve got no equipment for that kind of thing. Throw those samples in the crapper. I don’t want them.”

“Harriet says we must know how serious the poisoning is.”

“We already know that, man. They got real sick. But they didn’t die.”

“Harriet says you can at least analyze them.”

“For what? I wouldn’t know what to look for.”

“Harriet says—”

“Oh, screw Harriet. ’Scuse me, Danny; I didn’t mean to remind you of your, uh, indiscretions. Anyway, I’ve got something better for us to do now that the rain’s stopping.”

“It hasn’t stopped, Jim.”

“It’s slowing down. When it does stop, Boyne’s going to be coming around to collect the backhoe I borrowed from him. I want to use it first.”

“For what?”

“For digging up some of our light-fingered friends.” He pointed straight down at the floor of the tent. “The ones that swiped Harriet’s radio.”

“We already tried that.”

“Yes, we did. We found out that the important thing is speed. They’ll close up the tunnels faster than you’d believe, so we’ve got to get in, get moving, and get to where they are before they have a chance to react. We’ll never have a clear field to pick them up otherwise — unless,” he added offhandedly, “we flooded the tunnels with cyanide first. Then we could take our time.”

“Is that all you think of — killing?” Dalehouse flared.

“No, no. I wasn’t suggesting it. I was excluding it. I know you don’t like killing off our alien brothers.”

Dalehouse took a deep breath. He had seen enough of the balloonists to stop thinking of them as preparations and learn to consider them, almost, as people. The burrowers were still total unknowns to him, and probably rather distasteful — he thought of termites and maggots and all sorts of vile crawling things when he thought of them — but he wasn’t ready for genocide.

“So what were you suggesting?” he asked.

“I borrowed a backhoe from Boyne. I want to use it before he takes it back. The thing is, I think I know where to dig.”

He gathered up a clump of the papers on the upended footlocker he was using for a desk and handed them over. The sheets on top seemed to be a map, which meant nothing to Dalehouse, but underneath was a sheaf of photographs. He recognized them; they were aerial views of the area surrounding the camp. Some he had taken himself, others were undoubtedly Kappelyushnikov’s.

“There’s something wrong with them,” he said. “The colors look funny. Why is this part blue?”

“It’s false-color photography, Danny. That batch is in the infrared; the bluer the picture, the warmer the ground. Here, see these sort of pale streaks? They’re two or three degrees warmer than what’s on either side of them.”

Dalehouse turned the pictures about in his hands and then asked, “Why?”

“Well, see if you figure it out the same way I did. Look at the one under it, in orthodox color. You took that one. Turn it so it’s oriented the same way as the false-color print — there. Do you see those clumps of orangey bushes? They seem to extend in almost straight lines. And those bright red ones? They are extensions of the same lines. The bushes are all the same plant; the difference is that the bright red ones are dead. Well, doesn’t it look to you like the pale lines in the false-color pictures match up with the lines of bushes in the ortho? And I’ve poked a probe down along some of those lines, and guess what I found.”

“Burrows?” Dalehouse hazarded.

“You’re so damn smart,” grumbled Morrissey. “All right, show me some real smarts. Why are those plants and markings related to the burrows?”

Dalehouse put down the pictures patiently. “That I don’t know. But I bet you’re going to tell me.”

“Well, no. Not for sure. But I can make a smart guess. I’d say digging out tunnels causes some sort of chemical change in the surface. Maybe it leeches out the nutrients selectively? And those plants happen to be the kind that survive best in that kind of soil? Or maybe the castings from the burrowers fertilize them, again selectively. Those are analogues from Earth: you can detect mole runs that way, and earthworms aerate the soil and make things grow better. This may be some wholly different process, but my bet is that that’s the general idea.”

He sat back on his folding campstool and regarded Danny anxiously.

Dalehouse thought for a second, listening to the dwindling plop of raindrops on the tent roof. “You tell me more than I want to know, Jim, but I think I get your drift. You want me to help you dig them up. How are we going to do that fast enough? Especially in the kind of mud there is out there?”

“That’s why I borrowed Boyne’s backhoe. It’s been in position ever since the rain began. I think the burrowers sense ground vibrations; I wanted them to get used to its being there before we started.”

“Did you tell him what you wanted it for? I got the impression they were digging burrows themselves.”

“So did I, and that’s why I didn’t tell him. I said we needed new latrines, and by gosh, we do — sometime or other. Anyway, it’s right over the best-looking patch of bushes right now, ready to go. Are you with me?”

Danny thought wistfully of his airborne friends, so much more inviting than these rats or worms. But they were out of reach for the time being…

“Sure,” he said.

Morrissey grinned, relieved. “Well, that was the easy part. Now we come up against the tough bit: convincing Harriet to go along.”

Harriet was every bit as tough as advertised. “You don’t seriously mean, ” she began, “that you want to drag everybody out in a downpour just for the sake of digging a few holes?”