Frederik Pohl - Jem

“Name?”

Of course, it was right there, next to his thumb. “Ana Elena Dimitrova.”

“Place of birth?”

“My place of birth? It is Marek, Bulgaria. That is a city south of Sofia, not far from the Yugoslavian border.”

“Put your thumb here, please.” She pressed against the little pad he extended to her and then on a square white card, which he tucked into her passport. “Your papers will be returned to you later,” he said, and then unbent. “You like to dance? There’s a nice group at the club tonight. Ask for me if you don’t see me. Name’s Leroy.”

“Thank you, Leroy.”

“See you later, honey.” He winked and moved along. Ana found a tissue and wiped the ink off her thumb wonderingly. These Americans were even worse than Sir Tam — not just the Americans, she corrected herself, thinking of the Vietnamese colonel and his agile, tiny hands. Would it be like this always? Would it not be even worse when she was part of the small colony on Kungson and they were all living in each other’s pockets anyway?

But at least then Ahmed would be somewhere near! In the wrong encampment, yes. But she would find a way to see him.

Let her just get on the same planet with him again, and they would be together! It made the whole ordeal seem worthwhile.

By the next day, not even that made it seem altogether attractive. She could not have attended Leroy’s dance that night if she had wanted to. There was no time. Issue of new clothing: “You will wear these here fatigues at all times, except when instructed by your instructors.” Assignment to quarters: “You will maintain cleanliness at all times. At all times all personal possessions are to be kept in your footlock-ers.” Preliminary briefing: “You will fall out at oh six hundred hours for breakfast. From oh seven hundred to eleven hundred you will participate in your individual refresher courses of instruction in the application of your specialized skills on Klong. From twelve hundred to sixteen-thirty you will complete your survival course to teach you your survival skills for surviving in the environment of Klong. From eighteen hundred to lights out at twenty-two hundred you will conduct your personal affairs except when required to participate in additional refresher courses or survival instruction. Weekends? Who’s the guy who wants to know about weekends? Oh, you. Well, there aren’t any weekends here.” By the time all that was finished it was nearly midnight, and then Ana dragged her suitcase to the tiny, bare room that had been assigned to her, coldly furnished like the showcase cell in a county jail, only to find out that her roommate was the Vietnamese colonel. Even here rank had its privilege. But Ana was having none of it, and so it was back to the billeting office and a good deal of argument, and by the time she was able to get to sleep in a new room with a female roommate it was nearly two.

Breakfast was discouragingly huge — eggs and sausage and cereal, and breads with jams and marmalades, and peanut butter in opened liter cans on every table — and for dessert they spent an hour receiving inoculations. None of them were painful, but from the grins and jokes of the medics Ana knew that they would be later on. And then she lined up with the other two dozen of her detachment in a wet, cold wind, and they were marched off to their various refresher courses in the application of their specialized skills. Ana’s tiny group included the Canadian woman and two men unknown to her, and they wound through the camp streets, past a baseball field and a bowling alley, between barracks and anonymous buildings with armed guards patrolling before them, out into an open field half a kilometer square. In the center of it was a sort of tethered balloon shaped like a sausage, fifty meters long, with guards around the perimeter and three of them grouped before the entrance. There was a fence surrounding the whole thing, and more guards at the gate in the fence; and before any of them were permitted inside, they had to go through the same tedious business of checking IDs one more time.

Off to one side there was a tall chimney coupled to the main tent by a flexible plastic tube. The chimney roared. Though there was no smoke, the shimmering at the top showed that some very hot gases were boiling high into the air out of it. It did not seem to serve any function that Ana could guess. But then, neither did the weapons that all the permanent personnel carried. Who were they meant to be used against? What possible enemy threatened a training base for a scientific expedition which, after all, was in a sense the property of the entire world?

When she finally got through the gates and the guards, she found herself in a long, open shed covered with the opaque white plastic of the bubble. The atmosphere was damp and heavy, filled with strange smells, and the lighting was sultry red. At first she could see very little, but she was aware that people were moving about between rows of what seemed to be smaller, transparent bubbles. The lighting came from a bank of gas-glow tubes, all red, and there was not very much of it.

The guide who had brought her to this place was speaking to her. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I think so. Why not?”

“Sometimes people can’t stand the smell.”

She sniffed gingerly: pepper and spice and jungle rot. “No, it is fine.”

The Canadian woman said, “Everything sounds funny.”

“There’s positive pressure in the outer shell. Your ears probably popped a little. That’s so that if there’s any air leakage it will all be inward, not out, and of course the air from this chamber gets incinerated at fifteen hundred degrees as it is pumped out — maybe you saw the chimney.”

“One has heard stories of dangerous diseases,” Nan ventured.

“No. There aren’t any. Oh, sure,” the guide went on gloomily, “you can get killed around here. But that’s allergies, not disease, and you’ve all had your shots for them. Dimitrova, you’re for linguistics. You come with me; the rest of you stay right here till I get back.”

He led her through the hothouselike room, past the rows of plastic bubbles. As her eyes became dark-adapted she could see that each of them contained some sort of specimen — mostly plants, and some of them were immense. One towered ten meters, nearly to the top of the shell. It looked like a giant cluster of ferns, and Ana marveled at the money that had been spent to transport that immense mass over the light-years. Apart from the outside roaring of the incinerator, the sounds of pumps, and the noises the people in the shell made, there were sounds she could not identify — a sort of faint, wailing, high-pitched song, and groaning, clattering noises. They came from where she was heading for. The guide said, “Welcome to our zoo.”

And then she saw the balloonist.

She recognized it at once; there could not be another creature as strange as that anywhere in the universe! But it looked… damaged. It was tethered inside a cage. Its great bubble was throbbing but almost limp, sagging against the ground. She stared, fascinated, and saw that a flexible plastic coupling had been taped neatly to a hole in the gasbag, and the plastic line went to a cylinder of gas. A woman with a tape recorder was crouched by the cylinder, adjusting the gas valve as she listened to the balloonist’s plaintive song.

No wonder the voice sounded so faint! He was operating at a fraction of normal pressure, far too little to let him fly, only enough to let him gasp a sobbing sort of song. The woman looked up and said, “You’re Dimitrova? I’m Julia Arden, and this” — pointing at the balloonist—” is Shirley. She’s singing about her childhood right now.”

Ana shook hands courteously, staring at the sad, wrinkled little creature. Those sounds did not seem like language! She could not imagine understanding them, much less translating them, no matter how many times they halved her brain! She said doubtfully, “I will do my best, Mis Arden, but do you think you can really teach me to talk to that?”