"Do you want to go home?"
Chingclonk walked to the map, stabbed a finger at one of the islands to the northwest of Stanton Bay.
"Go there."
"Is your home there?"
"Females there."
"Will you go in peace?" Duncan Rodrick asked.
"I have no choice."
"Please listen closely," Rodrick said.
Chingclonk jerked his head back. Yes.
"We are few," Rodrick said. "We cannot, repeat,not , allow the Whorsk to kill even one more human.
Do you understand?"
"Yes-you need numbers to steal our metals," The last word was in English. "Before we allow you to kill even one more human, we will be forced to kill all Whorsk."
"Give us things that make the killing sun, and we will share our metals."
"We will share the metals with you," Rodrick said, "but we will not give you the things that make the killing sun. We will have much more metal soon, more than you can ever gain in trade with the miners.
We will share with you in peace, or we will have to kill you in war."
"I have no choice. How will you get more metals?"
Rodrick showed him pictures of Stoner"s mining operations. Chingclonk nodded, impressed. "You will share?"
"In peace," Rodrick said.
"In peace," he agreed.
Before the captives could be released, there were some things that Rodrick had to know. "The gas that lifts your ships," he said. "How do you make it?"
"Magic," Chingclonk said.
"Where do you get the magic?"
"From you," Chingclonk said.
"Not from us," Rodrick replied.
Chingclonk walked to the board, drew the Omega system, and added the distance lines. "From you," he said.
"Do you trade for the magic?"
Head jerk back, yes. "Trade many babies."
"Your own babies?"
"Seed babies. We must go." He extended his organ. "Or seeds rot."
"Your females lay eggs?"
He drew a female on the board, posterior distended, eggs coming out in a stream. Then he drew sacs hanging on a rack, making squiggly lines to show movement of the sacs. "You want babies. We want magic."
"Are you sure the translating box is functioning correctly?" Rodrick asked Grace.
"It"s not perfected. But I think the trouble here is that we"re not dealing with a being that has a thought pattern anything like ours. Did you ever see a praying mantis having his dinner? He eats his victim bite by bite while it"s still wiggling and struggling, and he seems to do it not with enjoyment, but with coldnecessity. I sense something of that in our friend here."
It was Grace who remembered the drawing on the map taken from Chingclonk"s ship. She produced it, showed the Whorsk the drawing of-the human. "Who is this?"
"You know. You were there," he said, tapping the map with a hard nail. "You tell us to keep this woman." He said woman in English.
"Could the Russians have landed somewhere in the western hemisphere without us knowing it?" Grace asked.
Rodrick shook his head. "Our sensors would have picked up something as big as theKarl Marx when it came into orbit."
"Would you agree that there"s something very odd going on?"
"That I would," Rodrick said. "I think we"d better take a close look here. " He tapped the spot on the map of the largest western continent. "Chingclonk, are there Whorsk here?"
Back jerked the head.
"We want to talk with this woman. How can we do it without having to fight Whorsk?"
Chingclonk drew back his head and gave a great whistling, wailing blast of sound. "The signal of Chingclonk."
"Record that, please, Grace," Rodrick said. "And then I guess we can let our guests go home. What do you think?"
"I"d like to work on the language more, but in the interests of possible future peace with them, I suppose we"ll have to."
The Whorsk were taken by crawler to the area where their lighter-than-air fleet was moored. They had not been overly impressed by any of the technology aboard ship, except for the plentiful metal, and it was the metal of the crawlers that caught their attention, as well.
Chingclonk, using his own maps, explained how they navigated the huge Omega distances by air. They had charts much like those used by sea captains in the days of sail, which marked the prevailing winds.
To reach the islands to the northwest of Stanton Bay, they would have to pedal the airscrews to reach the northern and icy breath of the permanent icecap, and then drift on the icy winds to the west. To reach the large, southern hemisphere continent shaped like a diving duck, they quartered the northern hemisphere westerlies to the calm zones at the equator, leg-powered it, then drifted westward on the southern hemisphere easterlies.
"You have to admire them," Jack Purdy said as the gondolas lifted off. "How"d you like to try to steer one of those things around or through a tropical hurricane?"
"They seem to have made Omega their world," Rodrick agreed.
"With a certain amount of arrogance," Purdy commented. "There are so many unanswered questions," Rodrick said, as the ships began to move slowly to the northwest.
"I haven"t had a chance to read the section of Grace"s report dealing with Chingclonk"s statements about the dead city in Stoner"s Valley," Purdy said.
"The more things change, the more they remain the same," Rodrick commented. "The city was built by a race of giants, the ancestors of the Whorsk."
"Ah, there were giants on Earth in those days," Jack said, quoting a verse from the Bible.
"So it seems. So it seems. And if we can believe our unfriend Chingclonk, there is at least one human on the big western continent. He gave us what is supposed to be a peaceful greeting. I"d like two scouts to buzz down there and find that Whorsk settlement. It"s to the east of what Chingclonk called, according to the translator, the Great Misty River. I don"t mind telling you, Jack, that I"ve been having some pretty spooky feelings about Omega ever since Stoner found his abandoned city. I don"t know whether to be sorry that the race we"ve encountered is so savage, so alien, or to be relieved that they have only Stone Age weapons."
"And helium," Jack said. "Don"t forget that."
"Magic," Rodrick said musingly. "I asked the chemists to run some tests. There"s helium in the atmosphere here in just about the same ratio as on Earth, one part in about one hundred and eighty-six thousand. Separating the helium is a pretty complicated chemical process, involving washing with a couple of manmade chemicals, and then to get it pure it has to be cooled to minus three hundred degrees.
Any way you look at it, that"s pretty complicated technology."
"You"d think that a society that could produce helium would be advanced beyond bows and arrows in other ways," Purdy said.
"Who"d you suggest that we send to the Whorsk settlement?"
"I"d like to go myself."
"I hate to take all the joy out of your life, Jack," Rodrick said, "but I"d feel better if you"d ride herd on Chingclonk"s fleet, just to be sure he doesn"t decide to try to surprise us again."
"The wild bunch, then," Jack said, grinning. "The Injuns. Jacob and Renato."
"I flew across that continent one day," Rodrick mused. "I was letting Clay do some rocket practice, and we started at the west coast and came roaring across it about Mach three. It"s all jungle, d.a.m.ned big, with wide rivers. Too bad we didn"t fool around a little on the south coast. We might have seen the Whorsk"s airships, and then we might have been able to prevent the loss of two hundred people."
"Yeah, I"d have thought we"d covered this globe well enough to spot something like those airships,"
Jack said, "but what we keep forgetting is the sheer size of it."
Jacob West and Renato Cruz welcomed the new a.s.signment. "Hamilton control," Jacob said, "we"re airborne." "Roger on that, Jacob," Jackie Garvey Rodrick said.
"If we find this naked lady," Jacob said, "can I keep her?"
TWENTY-ONE.
Theresita Pulaski was as drunk as a czar. All around the Whorsk village, berries of autumn had ripened, and the Whorsk had gorged themselves on a concoction that was delicious-berries covered with the sweet, sticky honey of the stingless Omega bees. Theresita had discovered that, if left covered in a jar for a few days, the crushed berries, sweetened by honey, fermented into a sweet but potent drink that hit her like a falling s.p.a.ce station after so many months without alcohol.
She tried to share the goodies with some of the females, but they turned up their hard, shiny snouts in disgust, so she had it all to herself and lay on her bed, one bare knee crossed over the other, foot kicking in the air to the tune of a ribald Moscow drinking song. She suddenly leaped to her feet and did a little dance as she sang. She could hear the singing going on down in the big hut as the nightly party got under way.
"Bugorgy," she slurred, and it made her giggle, because they were bugs and because the males came on from the rear of the females. A bug orgy. "Bugorgy!" she shouted, giggling again.
G.o.dd.a.m.n, she was as lonely as a dissident in Siberia.
"To h.e.l.l with it," she said after considering joining the bugs at the bug orgy. At times it was interesting to watch the dancing, but in spite of the erotic aspects of what followed, it soon got to be boring in its sameness, the the village bug-s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g like crazy. And why were the males and females so perfectly matched in number? She was the only odd person out. For every bug there"s a bug.
There flashed into her mind a vivid memory, or dream, of a large, clean-limbed man lifting her gently, easily, to place her, with her legs opening of their own accord, on a clean, firm bed.
"Watch it, Theresita," she said, "or you"ll be playing with yourself. "
So real. And yet it could not have happened.
She staggered out into the compound. The singing of the Whorsk females was sweetly shrill, exotic, erotic, and alien. She heard little peeps of sound from the big hut where the larvae were hung, and stepped in. The fire was a glow, giving enough light to show that the sacs were really jumping, as if they, too, were stirred by the increasing frenzy of the singing. They"d be ready to hatch soon, and then the population of the village would be more than doubled. What the h.e.l.l would a young, freshly hatched Whorsk look like?
In spite of herself, she was drawn to the communal hut. Standing in the doorway watching the slow, ecstatic couplings, she finished off her container of honey beer, and decided that during the bug orgy would be a grand time to escape and sneak off to the west, to find that great river where the male Whorsk had gone that one time, and see if there had been any substance to her dream-memories of s.e.x.But not tonight. She was too drunk.
And the next day brought change. She knew something was going on when she awoke. She went out, her fur draped over her shoulders against the morning chill, to find the females carrying the squirming larvae sacs toward the tethered airships. She ate her breakfast, fruit and nuts, as she followed along.
There was a different type of singing from the females, a sort of sad little song, which repeated itself over and over.
Her command of the language was growing. She sought out the stickman who was chief. His name was a combination of a short, shrill whistle and a swallowed click.
"You go to sky?" she asked.
Yes.
"I go?"
Violent forward thrust of head.No .
"You bug-juice pip-squeak. I could rip you apart." She had a terrible hangover and was irritable. "You go where in sky?"
"River," was the only word she understood.
"Why take babies?"
The word he used meant either give or trade; she wasn"t sure. "Give/trade for magic."
"Magic?"
He whistled, "Enough," and turned away.
While the fleet lifted and disappeared with the larvae sacs toward the west, the females sang sadly, and then, the ships out of sight, they picked up the tempo, began dancing on the sands, and started back toward the village. Theresita joined the female who had once struck her with the whip.
"Where go babies?"
"Great Misty River."
"They come back?"