Frederik Pohl - Jem

“Peace, Dulla,” panted Feng. “It does not matter if the Fats and the Greasies are angry at us now. Help is on the way.”

“You are as big a fool as he! Shooting off fireworks like some farm brigade celebrating the overfulfillment of its cabbage quota!”

“I wish,” said Feng, “that you had not been rescued, Dulla. There was less struggle here when you were with the Krinpit.”

“And I wish,” said Dulla, “that the Krinpit who tried to kill me was our leader here instead of you. He was less ugly, and less of a fool.”

That Krinpit was many kilometers away, and at that moment almost as angry as Dulla. He had been driven to the brink of insanity with the infuriating attempts of the Poison Ghosts of the Fuel camp to converse with him, with hunger, and above all with the continual blinding uproar of the camp.

In the noisy, bright world of the Krinpit there was never a time of silence. But the level of sound was always manageable: sixty or seventy decibels most of the time, except for the occasional thunderclap of a storm. It almost never reached over seventy-five.

To Sharn-igon, the Fuel camp was torture. Sometimes it was quiet and dim, sometimes blindingly loud. The Krinpit had no internal-combustion engines to punish their auditory nerves. The Greasies had dozens of them. Sharn-igon had no conception of how they worked or what they were for, but he could recognize each of them when it was operating: high clatter of the drilling machine, rubbery roar of the helicopter, rattle and whine of the power saws, steady chug of the water pump. He had arrived at the camp almost blind, for the near- ness of the helicopter’s turbojet had affected his hearing just as staring at the uncaged sun would damage a human’s eyes; the afterimage lasted for days and was still maddeningly distorting to his perceptions. He had been penned behind steel bars as soon as he arrived. However hard he gnawed and sawed, the bars of the cage would not give. As soon as he made a little scratch in one it was replaced. The Poison Ghosts troubled him endlessly, echoing his name and his sounds in a weirdly frightening way. Sharn-igon knew nothing of tape recording, and to hear his own sounds played back to him was as shattering an experience as it would be for a human to see his own form suddenly appear before him. He had realized that the Poison Ghosts wanted to communicate with him and had understood a tiny portion of what they were trying to say. But he seldom replied. He had nothing to say to them.

And he was nearly starving. He survived, barely, on the little he would eat of what they put before him — mostly vegetation, of which he disdained the majority as a human being would spurn thistle and grass. His hunger was maddeningly stimulated because he could smell the tasty nearness of Ghosts Below penned near him, and even a Ghost Above now and then. But the Poison Ghosts never brought him any of these to eat. And always there was the blinding roar of noise, or the equally unpleasant silences when the camp slept and only the faint echo from tents and soft bodies kept him company. Human beings, scantily fed on bread and water in an isolation cell, with bright lights denying them sleep, go mad. Sharn-igon was not far from it.

But he clung to sanity, because he had a goal. The Poison Ghosts had killed Cheee-pruitt.

He had not learned to tell one from another in time to know which was the culprit, but that was a problem easily solved. They were all guilty. Even in his madness it was clear to him that it was proper for him to kill a great many of them to redress their guilt, but what had not become clear to him was how. The chitin of claw and shell-sword were rubbed flat and sore against the bars, and still the bars held.

When all the sounds were out he chatted with the Ghost Above, straining longingly against the bars. “Desire to eat you,” he said. If it had not been for the bars, the Ghost Above would have been easy prey. It had lost most of its gas and was crawling about the floor of a cage like his own. Its song was no more than a pathetic whisper.

“You cannot reach me,” it pointed out, “unless you molt. And then I would eat you.” Each spoke in its own language, but over thousands of generations all the races of Klong knew a little of the language of the others. With the Ghosts Above you could not help being exposed to their constant singing, and even the Ghosts Below could be heard chattering and whistling in their tunnels. “I have eaten several of you hard-shells,” the Ghost Above wheezed faintly. “I particularly like the backlings and the first molt.”

The creature was boasting, but Sharn-igon could believe the story easily enough. The balloonists fed mostly on airborne detritus, but to make their young healthy they needed more potent protein sources now and then. When the breeding time was on, the females would drop like locusts to scour the ground clean of everything they could find. Adult Krinpit in shell were too dangerous, but in molt they were fair game. Best of all was a clutch of Ghosts Below caught on their thieving raids to the surface — for Krinpit as well as balloonist. The thought made Sharn-igon’s salivary glands flow.

“Hard-shell,” whispered the Ghost Above, “I am dying, I think. You can eat me then if you like.”

In all honesty, Sharn-igon was forced to admit, “You may be eating me before that.” But then he perceived that something was strange. The Ghost Above was no longer in its cage. It was dragging slowly across the floor. “How escape?” he demanded.

“Perhaps because I am so close to death,” sang the Ghost Above faintly. “The Killing Ones made a hole in my sac to let the life out of me and then closed it with a thing that stuck and clung and stung. But it has come loose, and almost all my life has spilled away, and so I was able to slide between the bars.”

“Wish I could slide through bars!”

“Why do you not open the cage? You have hard things. The Killing Ones push a hard thing into a place in the cage when they want to, and it opens.”

“What hard thing are you speaking of? I have worn my shell to pulp.”

“No,” sighed the balloonist. “Not like your shell. Wait, there is one by the door. I will show you.”

Sharn-igon’s conception of keys and locks was quite unlike a human’s, but the Krinpit too had ways of securing one thing to another temporarily. He chattered and scratched in feverish impatience while the dying gasbag slowly dragged itself toward him, with something bright and hard in its shadowy mouth.

“Could push hard thing into place in my cage?” he wheedled.

The Ghost Above sang softly to itself for a moment. Then it pointed out, “You will eat me.”

“Yes. Will. But you very close to dying anyway,” Sharn-igon pointed out, and added shrewdly, “Sing very badly now.”

The balloonist hissed sadly without forming words. It was true.

“If push thing in place in my cage so that I can go free,” bargained Sharn-igon, “will kill some of the Poison Ghosts for you.” He added honestly, “Intend to do that in any case, since they killed my he-wife.”

“How many?” whispered the balloonist doubtfully.

“As many as I can,” said Sharn-igon. “At least one. No, two. Two for you, and as many as I can for me.”

“Three for me. The three who come to this place and cause me pain.”

“All right, yes, three,” cried Sharn-igon. “Anything you like! But do quickly, before Poison Ghosts come back!”

Hours later, at almost the last of his strength, Sharn-igon staggered into a Krinpit village. It was not his own. He had seen the sounds of it on the horizon for a long time, but he was so weak and filled with pain that it had taken him longer to crawl the distance than the tiniest backling. “Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon,” he called as he approached the alien Krinpit. “Am not of your place. Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon!”