Frederik Pohl - Jem

It had even helped them in their attempts to make contact with sentients. Sort of. Charlie was delighted with his crossbow and his radio. Jim Morrissey had taken another tack. He had used the new power auger to make three widely spaced holes along a Creepy burrow. The end holes held soft charges of explosives, the center one a hose connected to the exhaust of the auger’s little gasoline putt-putt. When Morrissey blew the charges he sealed both ends of that section of the tunnel, and the carbon monoxide caught four burrowers before they could dig away. By then they were no good for Dalehouse’s purposes, of course, but they were a joy to Morrissey.

Even further marvels were on their way. The third resupply had brought eight metric tons of equipment, but according to the tactran messages the next would bring nearly fifty, plus maybe a hundred additional personnel. It would be a city! The summons to the meeting at the Fuel camp had not only been a welcome tour of Jem, it had been a reprieve from the tedium of erecting tents to receive the reinforcements.

What the tactran had failed to say was just what the reinforcements would be used for. They certainly needed any number of specialists they didn’t have. A real cook. A dentist. Some better-looking women. A better translator… reminded, Dalehouse leaned back to see how Harriet was faring behind him.

The translator was most uncomfortably curled up in a space no more than a meter square, and studded, at that, with bolts and levers that must have been tattooing Harriet’s hips and ribs indelibly. If she had been anyone else Dalehouse would have thought of some friendly, commiserating remark. For Harriet he could find none. Her eyes were closed. Her expression registered resignation to the palpable injustice of being the smallest of the three of them, and thus the one to be squeezed into the tiny rear compartment.

“Getting close,” Kappelyushnikov bawled in his ear.

Dalehouse leaned forward, rubbing at the glass as though the Jemman murk were on the inside rather than all around. There was nothing but maroon cloud -

Then the stark white rim of the Heat Pole glittered through a break. And something else. The clouds themselves were clearly bright. As the biplane tunneled out of the last of the cloud bank they were leaving, Dalehouse saw the cause before him.

“Jesu Crist!” cried Kappelyushnikov. “Have they no shame?”

The light was the Oily camp. It stood out on the horizon like a bonfire, penetrating Jem’s dour maroon murk with beacons, lighted windows — my God, Dalehouse marveled, even streetlamps! It was no longer an expeditionary camp. It looked like a small town.

The vertical beacon dipped and swept across the biplane to acknowledge their approach, then courteously away so that they were not dazzled. Kappelyushnikov muttered inaudibly into his radio mouthpiece, listened for a moment, and then began to circle.

“What’s the matter?” Dalehouse demanded.

“Is nothing the matter, only we are no longer in hurry,” said the pilot. “Peeps will be unavoidably one hour detained, so let us study this miracle before landing on it.”

A miracle it very nearly was. There were only about forty people in the Greasy camp, but they seemed to have almost that many buildings. Buildings, not tents or plastic huts. What had they made them out of? And what buildings! Some were barracks, some seemed individual bungalows. One looked more like a tenth-size copy of the Eiffel Tower than like a structure one could live or work in. Another was a good twenty-five meters in length. And — what was that curious, shallow, round petaled cone on the far side of the camp? It seemed to be constructed of bent strips of shiny metal arrayed around a central black cylinder. Could it be a solar generator? If so, it was almost megawatt size! And — that stubby tower with the horizontally rotating fan. Wasn’t that the exhaust from an air conditioner?

Harriet had roused herself and was leaning forward over Dalehouse’s shoulder to see. Her breath buzzed annoyingly in his ear as she said sternly, “That is a … lascivious waste!”

“Oh, yes, dear Gasha!” cried the pilot. “How wonderful would be if we, too, could afford one!”

Over the rattles and groans that came from his Krinpit escort, Ahmed Dulla heard a sputtering distant sound. “Put me down. Wait. Try to be quiet,” he called peevishly in the mixture of Urdu and their own language that made communication possible between them. Or sometimes did. He lowered himself from the litter in which they had been carrying him and climbed onto a knee of a many-tree, pushing aside the pinkly glowing fronds to stare around the sky. A tiny two-winged aircraft was chuttering along just below cloud level. “So. Another triumph of technology arrives,” he said.

The Krinpit, Jorrn-fteet, reared back to study him more carefully, its stubby claws waving. “Your meaning is not loud,” it rattled.

“No matter. Let us move on.” Dulla was in no mood for a nice chat with these grossly hypertrophied bugs, however useful they were to him. “Go carry the litter and my bag; I will walk,” he ordered. “It is too steep here for riding.” They were climbing from the shallow valley of the river now, up through the last of the forested slopes onto the dry highlands. The vegetation began to change from many-trees and ferns to things like succulents, stubby barrels with glowing, bright red, luminous buttons. Dulla looked at them all with distaste. Study the plants, find new products; it is in this way that my fathers became independent of the machines of the outside world. So Feng Hua-tse had advised before he left; but Dulla was an astrophysicist, not an herbal healer, and he had no intention of following the fool’s instructions.

There was no overhang between him and the sky now, and he could see the little biplane circling, far off toward the bright white line of the Heat Pole. So. The Greasies had their helicopter, the Fats now had a plane, and what did the representative of the People’s Republics have to take him to this meeting? A litter carried by animals that looked like squashed crustaceans. Dulla fumed. If Feng had listened to him, they would have insisted that the three-party meeting be held at their own camp. So they would have been spared this humiliation of arriving on a plastic frame carried by creatures out of some children’s nonsense fable — if not the humiliation of exposing to the Fats and the Oilies the meanness of their encampment. What a disaster! And all Feng’s fault, or Heir-of-Mao’s. The expedition should have been properly supplied and reinforced in the first place, but leave it to the Chinamen to hoard coppers to the ruination of the project.

Without warning the Krinpit stopped, and Dulla, lost in his thoughts, almost tripped over them. “What, what?” he complained. “Why are you standing here?”

“A very loud thing moves quickly,” rattled Jorrn-fteet.

“I do not hear anything.” But now that he was awakened from his reverie he did see something, a swell of dust behind the hills. As he watched, a machine topped the rise, coming toward him. It was still a kilometer away, but it looked like a half-track.

“Another triumph of conspicuous waste,” sneered Dulla. “How dare they come for me, as though I could not make the journey by myself?” The Krinpit rattled inquiringly, and he added, “Never mind. Put down the litter; I will carry my knapsack myself now. Hide yourselves. I do not want the Greasies to see you.”

But the words conveyed no meaning to the Krinpit. A Krinpit could never hide from another Krinpit as long as they were close enough to hear each other. Dulla struggled to explain. “Go back to the place behind the hill. The Greasies will not hear you there. I will return in the space it took us to come up from the river.” He was not sure they understood that, either. The Krinpit had a clear sense of time, but the vocabulary of terms to mark its units did not map well from one language based on a diurnal cycle to another which had evolved on a planet without easy temporal reference points. But they lurched away obediently, and Dulla walked steadily toward the approaching half-track.