Frederik Pohl - Jem

“Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. If I could, I’d—”

She stopped. “What would you do, colonel?”

“Forget it. Don’t let me keep you from urgent business,” said Marge amiably, and watched the doctor go on toward the latrine. If she could, she’d get a whole stock of frozen sperm and ova from Earth, because the bigger the gene pool you started with, the better the chances you’d have a healthy, stable population in another two or three generations. But she was not quite ready to put that request in her next letter to Santa Claus. She would have quite enough trouble with the items she was already determined to requisition, and from Christ’s own number of light-years away her powers of argument were limited.

A few meters away the Bulgarian girl was in some sort of altercation with Stud Sweggert, the sergeant Marge had put onto the first of her ships. Normally she wouldn’t have interfered, but there was something she wanted from Dimitrova.

“Tinka,” she said softly over her shoulder.

“Yes’m.”

“Stay with.” Marge went up to the arguing couple, who stopped as she came close. “Sorry to break this up,” she said.

Dimitrova glared at her. Feisty little prunt; it crossed Marge’s mind that her first impulses about Ana Dimitrova might have been best, but it was not a useful thought anymore. She discarded it.

“There is nothing to break up, colonel,” the girl said. “The sergeant wished to show me something I did not want to see.”

“I bet he did, honey,” Marge smiled. “Will you excuse us a second, sergeant?” And, when he was out of earshot, she asked, “How is your Indonesian, Dimitrova?”

“Indonesian? It is not one of my four-oh languages, but I believe I could translate a document satisfactorily.”

“I don’t want a document translated. I want to know how to say, ‘Good morning. Where is the baseball park?’ ”

“What?”

“Shit, lady! Just tell us how to say it.”

Ana hesitated and then, with some disdain, said, “ Selamat pagi, dimana lapangan baseball?”

“Um.” Marge rehearsed it to herself for a moment, glancing at Tinka. The orderly shrugged. “Well, write it down for me. Now, how do you say, ‘Have you a map?’ ”

“ ‘Saudara punja peta?’ ”

“Got that?” asked Marge, looking at the orderly. “Not sure? All right, Dimitrova, take Tinka to my office and write it out for her. Make sure she gets it right.” For a moment she thought the Bulgarian might object, but then she nodded and the two of them started away.

Sergeant Sweggert was still standing there, three meters away, watching her with calm interest. Margie laughed. “What are you doing, sergeant — waiting to ask me for a dance? Or do you want to show me that little thing you were so anxious to drag out for Dimitrova?”

“Hell, colonel. You’ve got me all wrong.”

“I bet I do. Sweggert,” she said good-naturedly, “you’re not a bad guy, but it’s against my policy to, ah, fraternize with enlisted men. Except in an emergency, of course. And what you’ve got to show has been widely seen already, I guarantee you.”

“Ah, no, colonel! It was educational. They got a tame gasbag here, and it’s real interesting.”

“Yeah?” She looked at him more closely, and from the way he stood, the way his head sank into his shoulders, she realized that the man was pretty full of something. But he was also RA, and whether they chose to call the present time night or day, as a practical matter Kung made it pretty close to broad daylight. “I’ll take a look,” she decided. She followed him behind the cook-tent, and there was one of the balloonists, clinging to a rope and singing softly and mournfully to itself. It was much bigger than the female she had seen at Camp Detrick, but obviously in some sort of trouble.

“What’s it saying?” she demanded.

The sergeant said with a straight face, “I really don’t know, ma’am. You want to hold him a minute? Just pull down on the rope.”

Margie looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, but he was right — it was interesting. She pulled on the rope. “Damn thing’s strong,” she complained. “Hey, Sweggert! What are you doing?”

He had leaned down and pulled something out from under a tarpaulin. “Just a strobe light, ma’am.”

“And what are you going to do with it?”

“Well,” he said cunningly, “I haven’t never seen it, but the guys say if you give one of these things a flash it’s real interesting.”

She looked from him to the sad, wrinkled face of the balloonist, and back. “Sergeant,” she said grimly, “it damn well better be or I’ll have your ass on toast. Flash your fucking strobe.”

“Is that an order, ma’am?”

“Flash it!” she snarled. “Or—”

And then he did.

AFTER FOUR DAYS of trying, Ana was finally granted permission to use the radio for a call to the People’s camp. When the communications clerk signaled go, she leaned forward and spoke in Urdu into the microphone. “This is Ana Dimitrova calling from the camp of the Food-Exporting Bloc. I wish to speak to Ahmed Dulla, please.”

The comm clerk switched off the microphone and said, “Now you wait. It usually takes about ten minutes for a return message.”

“Message? Can I not speak directly to Dr. Dulla?”

“Not with the Peeps, honey. We transmit a message, they transmit an answer. If they feel like it.”

“How very queer. Well, thank you, I will wait outside.” As she left she added, “Please call me when the answer comes.”

“Count on it, sweets.”

What a nuisance, she thought crossly, sitting lotus-legged in the warm electric-heater glow from Kung overhead. Still — ten minutes! She had waited much longer than ten minutes to hear Ahmed’s voice. And at least his plight could no longer be as serious as she had feared at first. The word was out in the camp that the People’s Republics, through what superhuman exertions one could hardly imagine, had succeeded in reestablishing communication with their outpost on Jem. A ship had landed — a small one, to be sure, but at least they were no longer helplessly dependent on the other colonies for the means to survive. How that must have angered Dulla!

Around her the camp was very busy. Nearly a hectare had been cleared and seeded on the slopes above, and the stanchions were in place for the lights that would make the seeds grow. Power would be next, and that was already being attended to. The Food Bloc at last had its own solar-power plant in process of assembly, and meanwhile there was a nuclear-fueled steam plant already in operation — small, expensive, but reliable.

Ana was the best of the three translators in the camp and, since the disappearance of Harriet Santori, the only one who seemed capable of picking up the fine structure of an only partly understood language. Her Krinpit was quite imperfect, and there seemed little chance to practice it. For the burrowers she had spent much time with this James Morrissey, who seemed to have taken them as his personal reason for existence; but none of it had come to much. The microphones he insinuated so gently into the tunnels sometimes picked up a scrap or two of squealing, chittering, half-muffled sounds; but evidently the burrowers detected them at once and avoided them — when they didn’t steal them. More than once Morrissey had pulled out a probe and found the working head neatly disconnected.

But with the balloonists she had become almost fluent. She had worked closely with Professor Dalehouse, so far only by radio; the intriguing but frightening prospect of soaring with him under a cluster of bags of hydrogen was for some indeterminate time in the future. Then the Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, had taken off with Colonel Menninger’s orderly and a cluster of hydrogen tanks on some foolish, secretive errand, and she had been ordered off the radio until further notice. Instead she was assigned to clerical work in the tiny hospital, where there was no clerical work to speak of, since it had as yet no real patients.