“The damn thing is right down underneath us in the ground.”

A minute was still a minute. Danny made sure of that, because he had begun to doubt. His pulse was still forty-two in sixty seconds by the clock. He could hold his breath for three of the minutes and maybe a bit more. The small coinage of time had not altered in value. But one thousand four hundred and forty minutes did not seem to make a day anymore. Sometimes it felt as though a whole day had passed, and the clock said only six or seven hours. Sometimes it would occur to him to be tired, and the clock would show as much as thirty hours since he slept last. Fretfully Harriet tried to keep them all on some regular schedule, not because it seemed necessary, but because it was orderly. She failed. Within — what? a week? — they were sleeping when they wanted to and eating when they felt hungry and marking the passage of time, if at all, by events. The first near-visit by balloonists was after the big storm and before the Peeps received their reinforcement of personnel. The time Kappelyushnikov triangulated the missing radio for Harriet and discovered it was at least twenty meters underground was just after they sent their first reports and shipment of specimens back to Earth. And the time balloonists came to visit -

That was a whole other thing, the kind of event that changes everything fore and aft.

Dalehouse woke up with his mind in the sky. He did his chores. He helped Morrissey check his traps, prepared a meal of desecrated stew, fixed a valve in the shower stall by the lake. But what he was thinking of was Kappelyushnikov’s balloons. Danny had talked him out of the big single hydrogen-filled bag: too big, too clumsy, too hard to manufacture, and above all too likely to kill its passenger if anything popped its skin. So they had painstakingly blown a hundred pibal-sized bags, and the Russian had knotted up a netting to contain them. The aggregate lift would be as much as you wanted. All it took was more balloons; you could multiply them to lift the entire camp if you liked. But if one or two popped, it did not mean a dead aeronaut. The passenger would descend reasonably slowly — to be more accurate, they were hopeful the passenger would descend slowly. He might damage himself, but at least he would not be spread flat across the Klongan landscape.

Kappelyushnikov would not allow Danny to do the final stages of filling and tying the balloons — “Is my neck, dear Danny, so is my job to make sure it stays okay.”

“But you’re taking so damn long. Let me help.”

“Nyet. Is very clear,” grinned the pilot, “that you think pretty soon you too will fly my balloons. Maybe so. But this time I am sole cargo. And besides, have still static lift tests to finish. Until then not even I fly.”

Dalehouse moved impatiently away, disgruntled. He had been on Klong for — whatever length of time it was — a couple of weeks, at least. And the author of “Preliminary Studies toward a First Contact with Subtechnological Sentients” had yet to meet his first subtechnological sentient. Oh, he had seen them. There were burrowers under his feet, and he was sure he had caught a glimpse of something when Morrissey exploded a charge under a presumed tunnel. The Krinpit had been his fellow passenger for half an hour. And the balloonists were often in the sky, though seldom nearby. Three separate races to study and deal with! And the most productive thing he had done was dig a latrine.

He fidgeted his way into Harriet’s tent, hoping to find that she had miraculously made some giant leap in translation of one of the languages — if they were languages. She wasn’t there, but the tapes were. He played the best of them over and over until Kappelyushnikov came in, sweating and cheerful.

“Static test is good. Plenty lift. Now we let whole mishmash sit for a while, check for leaks. You are enjoying concert of airborne friends?”

“It isn’t a concert, it’s a language. I think it’s a language. It’s not random birdcalls. You can hear them singing in chords and harmonies. It’s chromatic rather than — do you know anything about music theory?”

“Me? Please, Danny. I am pilot, not longhair fiddle player.”

“Well, anyway, it’s chromatic rather than diatonic, but the harmonies are there, not too far off what you might hear in, say, Scriabin.”

“Fine composer,” the Russian beamed. “But tell me. Why do you listen to tapes when you have real thing right outside?”

Startled, Danny raised his head. It was true. Some of the sounds he was hearing came from somewhere outside the tent.

“Also,” Kappelyushnikov went on severely, “you are breaking Gasha’s rice bowl. She is translator, not you, and she is very difficult lady. So come now and listen to your pink and green friends.”

The balloonists had never been so close, or so numerous. The whole camp was staring up at them, hundreds of them, so many that they obscured each other and blotted out part of the sky. The red glower of Kung shone through them dimly as they passed before its disk, but many of them were glowing with their own firefly light, mostly, as Kappelyushnikov had said, pink and pale green. Their song was loud and clear. Harriet was there already, microphone extended to catch every note, listening critically with an expression of distaste. That meant nothing. It was just the way she always looked.

“Why so close?” Dalehouse marveled.

“I do not wish to break your rice bowl either, dear Danny. You are expert. But I think is possible they like what we put up for chopper pilot.” And Kappelyushnikov waved to the strobe beacon on the tower.

“Um.” Danny considered a moment. “Let’s see. Do me a favor and get one of the portable floodlights. We’ll see them better, and maybe it’ll bring them even closer.”

“Why not?” The Russian disappeared inside the supply tent and came back with the portable in one hand and the batteries in the other, cursing as he tried to avoid stumbling over the wires. He fumbled with it, and its dense white beam abruptly extended itself toward the horizon, then danced up toward the balloonists. It seemed to excite them. Their chirps, squeals, flatulences, and cello drones multiplied themselves in a shower of grace notes, and they seemed to follow the beam.

“How do they do that?” Harriet demanded fretfully. “They’ve got no wings or anything that I can see.”

“Same as I, dear Gasha,” boomed the Russian. “Up and down, to find a truly sympathetic current of air. Here, you hold light. I must watch experts and learn!”

The balloonists were coming closer. Evidently the light attracted them. Now that there was enough brightness to make the colors plain, the variety of their patterns was striking. There were cloudlike whorls, solid bands, cross-hatchings, dazzle designs that resembled World War I camouflage.

“Funny,” said Dalehouse, staring longingly at the swarm. “Why would they have all those colors when they can’t see them most of the time?”

“Is your opinion they can’t,” said Kappelyushnikov. “Light like beet juice is strange to us; we see only the red. But for them perhaps is — Ho, Morrissey! Good shot!”

Dalehouse jumped a quarter of a meter as the camp’s one and only shotgun went off behind him.

Overhead, one of the balloonists was spiraling toward the ground.

“I get,” yelled Kappelyushnikov, and sprinted off to intersect its fall.

“What the hell did you do?” blazed Dalehouse.

The biologist turned a startled and defensive face toward him. “I collected a specimen,” he said.

Harriet laughed disagreeably. “Shame on you, Morrissey. You didn’t get Dalehouse’s permission to shoot one of his friends. That’s the price you pay for being a specialist in sentients — you fall in love with your subjects.”

“Don’t be bitchy, Harriet. My job’s hard enough. This’ll make it impossible. Shooting at them is the surest way to drive them away.”