“—but you don’t want to start any bloc-to-bloc trouble,” finished Boyne, nodding. “Well, for humanitarian reasons—” He choked, and took a great swig of the drink Morrissey had handed him, before going on. “Hell, let’s be frank. For curiosity’s sake, and just to see what’s going on over there — but also for humanitarian reasons — we want to go and fish the guy out of there. The Peeps obviously can’t. We suppose the reason they shut you and us out is that they don’t want us to see how bad off they are. You folks can’t—” He hesitated delicately. “Well, obviously it would be easier for us to go in with a chopper than for you to send an expedition overland. We’re willing to do that. But not alone, if you see what I mean.”

“I think I do,” Harriet sniffed. “You want somebody to share the blame.”

“We want to make it a clearly interbloc errand of mercy,” Boyne corrected. “So I’m all set to go over there and snatch him out this minute. But I’d like one of you to go along.”

Eight out of the ten members of the expedition were speaking at once then, with Kappelyushnikov’s shouted “I go!” drowning out the rest.

Harriet glared around at her crew and then said petulantly, “Go then, if you want to, although we’re so shorthanded here—”

Danny Dalehouse didn’t wait for her to finish. “That’s right, Harriet! And that’s why it ought to be me. I can be spared, and besides—”

“No! I can be spared, Danny! And I am pilot—”

“Sorry, Gappy,” said Danny confidently. “We already have a pilot — Mr. Boyne there — and besides, you have to make your wasserstoff so you can take me flying when I come back. And, two, making contact with alien sentients is my basic job, isn’t it? And” — he didn’t wait for an answer — “besides, I think I know the guy who’s stuck there. Ahmed Dulla. We were both hassled by the cops in Bulgaria a couple of months ago.”

Wook, wook, wook changed to whickwhickwhickwhick as the pilot increased the pitch of the rotors and the copter rocked off the ground and headed for a cloud. Danny clung to the seat, marveling at the profligacy with which the Fuel Bloc spent its treasure — four metric tons of helicopter alone, tachyon-transported from Earth orbit at what cost in resources he could not guess.

“You don’t get airsick, do you?” shouted Boyne over the noise of the blades. Danny shook his head, and the pilot grinned and deflected the blade edges so that the chopper leaned toward and began to move after a bank of cumulus.

To Danny’s disappointment, the flock of balloonists was out of sight, but there were still small and large creatures in the air, keeping their distance. Dalehouse couldn’t see them very clearly and suspected they wanted it that way, staying at the limits of vision and disappearing into cloud as the copter came close. But below! That was laid out for him to enjoy as the chopper bounced along less than fifty meters over the tallest growth. Groves of trees like bamboo; clusters of thirty-meter ferns; tangles of things like mangroves, twenty or more trunks uniting to form a single cat’s-cradle tangle of vegetation. He could see small things scuttling and leaping to hide as they twisted overhead, colors of all sorts. The unwinking red glower of the dwarf star toned down rock and water, but the brightest colors were not reflections. They were foxfire glow and lightning-bug tail, the lights of the plants themselves.

Of course Dalehouse had studied the maps of Klong, orbital photos supplemented by side-scatter radar. But this was different, seeing the landscape as they soared above it. Back along the shore was their own camp, on a narrow neck of land that locked off a bay from the wider ocean, or lake, a kilometer or two away. There was the lake (or ocean) itself, curving around like a bitten-into watermelon slice, and in the light from Kung almost the same color. Down the shore of it was the Peeps’ encampment. Past that, off toward the part of Klong that lay just under the star, where the land was dryer and the temperatures even higher, was the Greasies’ camp. Both of those were out of sight, of course. The copter swung out across the water. Boyne pointed, and Dalehouse nodded; he could see their destination just taking form through the gloomy haze, on the far shore.

Boyne had not been entirely frank, Dalehouse discovered. He had not mentioned that this was not his first flight to the Krinpit community. There had been at least two overflights before that, because there were photos of the layout. Boyne pulled a sheaf of them out of an elastic pocket in the door of the copter, sorted through them, and passed one over to Danny. “There, by the water’s edge!” he bawled. His finger jabbed at a curled-up figure a few meters up the beach. Drawn up nearby was a plastic coracle, and there were sheds and more obscure structures all around. There were also some very unpleasant-looking creatures like square-ended crabs:

Krinpit. Some of them were suspiciously close to the huddled figure.

“Is he still alive?” Danny shouted.

“Don’t know. He was a day or two ago. He’s probably okay for water, but he must be getting damned hungry by now. And probably sick.”

From the air the Krinpit village looked like a stockyard, most of the structures comprising only unroofed walls, like cattle pens. The creatures were all around, Danny saw, moving astonishingly quickly, at least when matched against his image of Earthside crustaceans. And they were clearly aware the chopper was approaching. Some raised up to point their blind faces toward it, and an ominous number seemed to be converging on the waterside.

“Creepy looking things, ain’t they?” Boyne shouted.

“Listen,” said Danny, “how are we going to get Dulla away from them? They don’t just look creepy. They look mean.”

“Yeah.” Boyne rolled down his window and leaned out, circling the helicopter around. He shook his head, then pointed. “That your buddy?”

The figure had moved since the photograph had been taken, was no longer in the shelter of one of the sheds but a few meters away and lying outstretched, face down. Dulla didn’t look particularly alive, but he wasn’t clearly dead either.

Boyne frowned thoughtfully, then turned to Dalehouse. “Open that case between your feet there, will you, and hand me a couple of those things.”

The “things” were metal cylinders with a wire loop at the end. Boyne took half a dozen, pulled the loops, and tossed them carefully toward the Krinpit. As they struck, yellow smoke came billowing out of them, forming a dense cloud. The Krinpit staggered out of the smoke as though disoriented.

“Just tear gas,” Boyne grinned. “They hate it.” He stared down. Nearly all the creatures that had been converging around the prostrate man were fleeing now … all but one.

That one was obviously in distress, but it did not leave the vicinity of the prone human being. It seemed to be in pain. It moved dartingly back and forth as though torn between conflicting imperatives: to flee; to stay; perhaps even to fight.

“What are we going to do about that son of a bitch?” Boyne wondered out loud, hovering over the scene. But then the creature moved painfully away, and Boyne made his decision. He dropped to the ground between the Krinpit and the unconscious Pakistani. “Grab ’im, Danny!” he yelled.

Danny flung open his door and jumped out. He scooped up the Pakistani with more difficulty than he had expected. Dulla did not weigh much over fifty kilos here, but he was boneless as rubber, completely out of it. Danny got him under the arms and more dragged than carried him into the helicopter while Boyne swore worriedly. The rotors spun, and they started to lift off, and there was a rushing, clattering scramble from the other side. Two hundred kilograms of adult Krinpit launched itself onto the side-pallet. Boyne gibbered in rage and jockeyed the controls. The chopper staggered and seemed about to turn on its side; but he got it straight and it began to pull up and away.