Federation World

Chapter 14

Now that they knew what they were looking for and were going after it with sensors which penetrated the surface, they could see a number of underground tunnel systems, caverns, lakes, and rivers whose courses were far too straight to be natural. The complete absence of the outward signs of large-scale cultivation bothered them, until Beth noticed that certain areas of vegetation looked unhealthy, although not actually dying, while identical and adjacent plants were completely free of infection. Specimens retrieved showed die affected vegetation to be an edible root which was being cultivated and farmed from below the surface-but selectively, so as not to kill the plant by removing all of its roots. A combination of year-round growth and a chemical assist ensured that the plant would recover and its missing roots regrow.

One by one their questions were being answered, except for the really important one.

Why were these people hiding?

“When we see them,” Martin said firmly, “we’ll know whether or not their fear is based on physical weakness, and talking to them will tell us something about the way they think. All we have to do now is devise a safe method of letting me see and talk to them.”

It was decided that the landers touchdown would be overt but not noisy-the world was extremely quiet and the natives might prefer it that way. But even if the approach was well-mannered by Earth-human standards, there was no guarantee that the natives would regard it so, or react to it in human fashion. Martin would need protection.

Beth reminded him of the Prime Rule. “Weapons must not be taken into a first-contact situation, nor should defensive systems be used if, in operation, they appear to be offensive.”

Martin nodded. “I was thinking of a modified protector vehicle,” he said, “with a variable-speed digging or boring system forward so that I can maneuver underground. My best defense might be heating elements in the outer hull, precisely controlled so as to discourage would-be dismantles without burning them to a crisp. In case of trouble there should be a quick-escape facility to the lander by matter transmitter. Can your fabrication module handle that?”

Beth looked doubtful. She said, “The space needed for those little items would mean trebling the size of the vehicle. But do you have to go burrowing around down there? Initially, couldn’t we use an unmanned vehicle with…”

“How big,” Martin broke in. She knew as well as he did that personal contact was necessary, and sooner rather than later.

She turned away and busied herself at the console. An image took shape in the center of her screen and began sprouting colored lines and symbols. A few seconds later she faced him again and said, “Approximately twenty-five meters long and eight at its widest cross section. Removing soil and rock from in front of a vehicle that size would be a slow job. Your top subsurface speed would be a medium walking pace. And if you were to enter one of their underground inhabited areas riding a monster like that, I don’t think you’d make a good first impression.”

“I agree,” Martin said, laughing. “But if you reduced that cross section as much as possible by discarding the matter transmitter and antigravity systems, which are the biggest and most power hungry units in a protector, and stripped off unnecessary internal displays, how small could you make it then?”

“Without antigravity propulsers, mattran escape system, and with sensory equipment limited to sonic detectors, one vision input and two-way audio for external communication,” she said, after a brief return to her console, “we are talking about a vehicle eight meters long and one-and-a-half meters at its widest point.

“But you would have to lie prone,” she added worriedly, “and the specimen stowage space would double as your emergency exit. You would not be able to exit quickly.”

“Hopefully,” Martin said, “I won’t need to. If I stay close to the lander and don’t go too deep there shouldn’t be any problems. What will you do about nonoffensively protecting the lander?”

“Subsurface sensors below the landing struts,” she replied. “If anyone starts burrowing too close to it, yourself excepted, it will take off and land again wherever you need it.”

“Fine,” Martin said. “Is there anything I haven’t covered?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, not looking at him.

Reassuringly, he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be very, very careful. And after all, we’ve done this sort of thing before.”

“I know,” she said dryly, “just once before.”

Beth took the lander down to the surface on remote control with the newly fabricated digger attached to its hull and with Martin already strapped inside, and placed the vehicle nose down in the shallow crater left when their protector was undermined. The lander’s camera showed nothing moving on the utterly silent surface and the sonic probes were reporting negative movement underground.

“Here goes,” he said, and watched from the lander’s viewpoint as soil and shredded vegetation fountained up behind him. By the time the dust had settled he was at a depth of fifty feet.

In operation the digger produced so much noise and vibration that he was sonically as well as visually blind, so he switched off everything but the sound sensors, and waited. But all he could hear was an amplified, hissing silence broken occasionally by the rumble of soil falling into the tunnel he had made. Beth’s voice in his headset sounded incredibly loud.

“Nothing from the lander’s sensors, either,” she said..

“I’m going to make a slow pass under the area where they took our protector,” he said, “in case they left traces.”

At reduced boring speed the noise was less but the vibration much greater, and Martin was wishing that his weight saving instructions to the fabricator had allowed him a little more padding on his couch. Suddenly there was a decrease in vibration and an increase in noise. The lander’s sensors showed him passing through a small hollow which extended on both sides of the digger. He slowed the vehicle until the blades were pushing slowly through the densely packed soil instead of chopping it out and flinging it astern. When the hollow came level with his midship viewports he stopped and turned on the external lights.

“It’s a tunnel,” he reported, trying to control his excitement, “semicircular in section with maximum diameter at floor level of just over a meter. Vibration from the digger has caused a few minor cave-ins, but not enough to obstruct the view. On one side it angles upward in the direction of the pit where we lost the protector, on the other it curves to avoid what the sensors tell me is an area of solid rock. Are you getting this?”

“I see what you see,” she replied.

“The tunnel walls are unsupported,” he went on, “but there seems to be a difference in color between them and the floor, as if they had been smeared with something wet. There are short, shallow grooves at intervals on the tunnel walls and floor. They could have been caused by bits of the protector being dragged away. I want a specimen of that dark material on the tunnel walls, but I’ll have to reposition the digger to be able to bring it into the hold.”

“Go ahead,” Beth said, “you’re all alone.”

Once again the cutting blades bit into the soil and the vehicle made a climbing U-turn which ended with the tiny hold and its escape hatch level with the tunnel roof, which partially collapsed because of the digger’s weight. He checked the air in the tunnel, opened the hatch and deployed the telescoping collector to retrieve a sample of discolored oil. Before placing it in the analyzer, he re-sealed the hatch and had a precautionary look at his sensors.

“It appears to be some kind of organic glue,” he said after a few minutes. “I’d say that, given the small dimensions and semicircular configuration of the tunnel, it would be strong enough to keep the roof from falling in provided there were no major shocks. We’ll have to be careful, this vehicle could do serious damage to their tunnel system. Now I’m returning to my original position in… Did you see that?”

The vehicle had moved only a few meters when the direct vision ports on both sides showed it intersecting another opening in the soil, a small, near vertical fissure. He cut power again to enable the sensors to feel it out, and gradually a three-dimensional picture began to build up on his screen.

“It can’t be a natural fissure,” he said, “because it twists off the vertical, climbs, goes deeper, and finally joins with the tunnel I just left. It is a flattened oval in cross section, six inches deep, varying between four and five times that in width. There are a few traces of glue on the inner surfaces. The sensors are beginning to show other fissures with similar dimensions and characteristics, and they are either paralleling or joining the main tunnel. Which is what I’m going to do right now.”

“Computer analysis indicates a high probability,” Beth said quietly, “that the fissures are made by individual burrowers who may not need to use these channels again, or often. The patches of glue present in reduced quantities suggests, our mastermind says, that it is an organic discharge which, when a large number of the creatures are acting together, is used to strengthen the walls of the larger, permanent tunnels.”

“Body discharges to support their tunnels,” Martin said. “Our friends aren’t a physically attractive lot. Or maybe as a first-contactor I shouldn’t think like that.”

“Just so long as you don’t think out loud,” she said dryly. “But one thing about all this bothers me. Why, if they were so anxious to hide from us, did they advertise their presence by attacking the protector?”

“That bothers me, too,” Martin said. “Maybe there is a bunch of rebels among them who are opposed to the idea of hiding. If so, they might be the kind of people we should contact first. Their scientific curiosity would…”

“Company,” Beth interrupted.

His sensors registered no underground activity because of interference from the digger’s equipment, so Beth was reading the lander’s sensor data. But where were they?

“They aren’t coming along the tunnel,” she said, answering the unasked question. “They seem to be digging new ones.”

Martin swore, not quite under his breath, and halted the digger. “I see them now,” he said. “But if they burrow up against the digger through the soil, I won’t be able to see them. We need to have a rough idea of then-sensory equipment, at least, to program the translator.”

Beth was sympathetically silent.

“Why don’t they use the existing tunnel?” Martin went on. “It would get them here much faster. Do they have to be completely covered by soil to function effectively, or do they just not want us to see them?”

“If they maintain their present rate of approach,” she replied, “you’ll have some of the answers in just under seven minutes.”

As he watched the trace on his screen move down the distance scale, Martin felt himself begin to sweat. He no longer felt sure that he was doing the right thing down here. His defenses might not be adequate to sustain an attack-or a serious investigation of the structure of his vehicle, which amounted to the same thing so far as the occupant was concerned-by creatures which in their behavior resembled subterranean piranha fish. And if their investigation was to prove successful…

“I’m getting out of here,” he said.

When Beth replied, she did not mention his sudden decision, or the edge of panic apparent in his voice. She said calmly, “While you were speaking just now, they stopped moving. This supports our theory that they are highly sensitive to sound transmitted through the substrata, and probably use it as a medium for long-distance communication. They are three minutes from you now, and closing. Your vehicle isn’t moving.”

“I’ve had second thoughts,” he said apologetically. “If they have a high tolerance for heat, they would be able to stay in contact with my hull long enough to start taking it apart. My only protection then would be to move away. But I can’t do that without risk to the burrowers. Making mincemeat of a few of them with the digger blades would not be a friendly act. I think the best move now is to place the vehicle across a tunnel. That way I might be able to see some of them and better assess the risks on both sides.

“As well,” he admitted, “I was having a touch of claustrophobia just then, and cold feet.”

“Cold feet,” she said, laughing, “are a prime survival characteristic in this job.”

“I’m heading for the tunnel now,” he said.

“They’re moving quickly,” Beth reported. There are no indications that they are carrying metal objects, weapons, or tools. Their body temperature is high. Maybe they are ingesting and burning up the soil metabolically rather than compressing it. Your hull heating might not be much of a deterrent.”

“I’m in position,” Martin reported.

The sensor display showed the burrowers as bright, hot blobs trailing in their wakes the dull gray tails which were the tunnels they were making.

“I’ve had third thoughts,” he said suddenly. “I don’t want them to think they can trap me as easily as they did the protector, but I want to give them the idea that I want to meet, or investigate, them as much as they, me. If they are preparing a trap, I want to make it clear that I am walking into it of my own volition. So I’ll move out again, to show that I can easily escape, then return to the tunnel a little closer to their present position. Does that make sense to you?”

“You mean,” Beth said dryly, “will it make sense to them?”

The digger lurched forward and made a narrow U-turn which ended with his lateral vision ports looking out on the tunnel. He switched on the external lighting, at minimum power in case the burrowers had sensitive vision, and waited.

The over-amplified hissing and thumping of loose soil trickling onto the digger’s hull and tunnel floor died away, and the silence closed in and became so all-pervasive that he found himself holding his breath. Beth’s voice in his headset was deafening.

“They’ve stopped moving and are englobing you at a distance of about ten meters,” she said. “I count seventeen of them close in, and another three who have stopped at about four times that distance. Maybe they are the directors of this operation, and consider themselves less expendable than the others. Now the closer ones are beginning to move in, but slowly. The other three are staying put.”

“Careful people are the safest to talk to…” Martin began.

“Those three are moving in, now,” she broke in. “But there’s something odd here. When I’m talking on your headset there is no reaction from them, but they immediately stop moving when you speak. When the digger systems are shut down, they must be able to actually hear your voice.”

Martin felt the tension in his shoulder and neck muscles begin to ease. Seemingly there was no immediate danger, either of the digger being taken to pieces around him or of the burrowers committing suicide on his cutter blades. He was being given time to think.

If the burrowers were not carrying tools, and he could not believe that they had taken the protector apart with their equivalent of fingernails, then it was possible that they knew that his vehicle, unlike the protector, had an occupant. It was also possible that they were not carrying metal objects for the same reason that Martin was not bearing weapons.

The picture on his screen flickered, then sharpened as Beth replaced it with the image being sent up from the tender’s sensors. Unnecessarily, she said, “One of them is touching your hull now. Another two are moving into the tunnel on your tight. Can you hear anything?”

She was hearing the same hissing silence as he was, so he said nothing. The touch of a burrower, it seemed, could be incredibly light. Still dazzled by the light of the screen, he turned to peer into the tunnel.

It looked as if a large, thick piece of seaweed was growing out of the soil floor and was undulating slowly toward him. Another piece emerged, but not completely, from the roof and flapped slowly like a thick flag in a breeze. Loose soil brought down by the digger blades lay piled against the lower edge of the port, and the first burrower was climbing it. He moved forward for a closer look and his helmet tapped gently against the coaming.

The creature froze motionless for a few seconds, but otherwise ignored Martin’s face, which was only inches away, and resumed its climb. He and the recorders had a perfect view of its underside as it moved up and over the port.

He was about to increase the external lighting, but thought better of it. He had no wish to frighten it off or hurt its eyes, and, in any case, he did not have to use his own eyes.

“Enhance,” he said quietly.

The screen displayed pictures of a burrower viewed from above, below, and several lateral aspects. The main computer was capable of building up an accurate reconstruction from what, to human eyes, appeared to be a mass of confusing and incomplete detail. Outlined in ghostly blue and pink, so that they would contrast with the mottled gray and brown coloration of the skin and external features, were the main bone structure and organs.

In cross section die body was a narrow oval flattened slightly on the underside, circular in plan view and just over a meter in diameter. The upper and lower body surfaces were covered with short, organic stubble with swellings at the tips, which in the bad light Martin had mistaken for seaweed-like blisters. The stubble was equal in length but showed a wide diversity in thickness, the thicker bristles being on the underside.

The principal external features were a knife-edged, bony wedge flanked by two wide slit mouths on the forward section of the body, and a long, sharp sting or horn projecting rearward. Beth called for computer animation.

The mouths opened and closed rapidly as simulated soil was ingested and expelled through vents in the upper and lower rear body. Both mouths had large upper lips which could be curled down to seal the openings so that the creature was able to move forward without having to eat its way through the soil. When that option was chosen, the thicker stubble with enlarged tips retracted and extended rapidly to drive it forward; the sharp, wedge-shaped beak divided and compressed the soil in its path. When in motion, the finer stubble lay flat along the body, which was flexible enough to bend forward or backward on itself through nearly two hundred and seventy degrees.

With that horn or sting it could defend itself, Martin thought, from above, behind, and underneath and, with a small change in body position, from frontal attack.

“It couldn’t have taken the protector apart with that beak and horn,” Martin said, after he had studied the display for several minutes, “so the thinner stubble must act as digits specialized for fine work. But the stubble covers the entire body. Can you see any sensory organs?”

“Nothing,” she replied. “But there are two patches, one positioned on top and the other directly opposite it on the underside. I’m highlighting them now. The material is organic but not alive, fibrous, and foreign to the underlying stubble, which is compressed by it severely enough to confuse the X-ray scan.

“I need a clearer picture of the internal structure,” she went on. “Next time one of them is in clear sight, make a noise. For some reason those nearby freeze when you do that while the distant ones move about, perhaps in agitation or indecision. As soon as you can, stop a burrower and focus the X-ray scanner on it. The computer needs more physiological data for the translation program.”

He did as she asked a few minutes later, then returned his attention to the screen.

The patches on the burrower’s back and underside had an irregular, shredded look around the edges, Martin saw, and the individual threads were either tied or entangled with the underlying stubble securely enough for them to remain in position while the creature was burrowing.

“They might be decoration, or perform an identification function,” he said thoughtfully. “But I’ve a feeling they are more important than that. If we could get one of them to remove its patch we…”

He broke off because Beth was laughing.

“A being with pieces of material attached firmly, to its body suggests one thing to me,” she said, “that it normally keeps parts of its body covered up. If I had a nudity taboo and some off-worlder asked me to take off my…”

“Point taken,” Martin said, very quietly. “But I’ve had an idea. Increase your volume and I’ll explain…”

It had been apparent for some time that when Beth spoke to him via the headset there was no reaction from any of the nearby burrowers, so presumably they could not or were not carrying the equipment to receive radio frequencies. However, when he replied to her, even though he was using the headset only with the helmet external speaker switched off, the nearer burrowers showed a mild reaction and stopped moving, while the distant ones displayed something like agitation. Plainly they were hearing his voice, loudly if not clearly.

The sound was being transmitted through the air of his life-support module, the heavily insulated metal structure of the digger, and outward via the densely packed soil to the distant burrowers. For his voice to travel through such diverse media over a distance, the beings receiving it would have to possess hypersensitive hearing.

“…And I wouldn’t mind betting,” he ended, “that the distant burrowers are not wearing patches, and all of the nearby ones are.”

“I don’t follow you,” Beth said.

“They aren’t the burrower equivalent of a bikini,” he replied softly, “just simple, old-fashioned earmuffs.”

“You’re right,” she said excitedly, “and my omniscient computer friend here confirms it. The three distant burrowers are moving in, but at different rates of speed. A projection suggests that they will space themselves out into close, medium, and longer distances. The others haven’t moved and are probably awaiting instructions from their unprotected superiors. What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to be very, very quiet,” Martin said, “and turn my external mikes to maximum sensitivity. I should be able to hear something while instructions are being passed. But I’ll have to listen very hard because people with hypersensitive hearing will not have loud voices.”

“While you are being very, very quiet,” Beth asked, “what can I do?”

“You can keep on talking so I won’t go psycho from sensory deprivation,” he replied. “Keep showing me the overall picture from the lander’s sensors; they are more accurate than mine and fiddling about at my console might cause noise. And get your friend working on a translator program for the burrower language, as soon as we hear them using it.

“After that,” he added, “will come the difficult part.”

Martin began his long wait in the triply distilled silence of this unnaturally quiet world. There was the subterranean silence all around him, the silence of his vehicle’s inactive equipment, and his own personal silence which, to his straining ears, sounded positively noisy. His breathing was the biggest noise problem. Subjectively it had begun to sound like a gale blowing through high trees, but he experimented with it until he found that breathing very slowly through his nose was quietest. He increased the sensitivity of his external mikes once again, and listened.

But there was nothing to hear except an occasional trickle of soil falling from the tunnel roof with an over-amplified crash and rumble which made him wince. The sound of his suit rustling against the couch was even louder as he pointed to his ear.

“I can’t hear anything either,” Beth said. “But here is an update you’ll want to see.”

The picture on his screen was of a burrower viewed from the top and side, showing the positions of the being’s internal organs, connective ducting, and musculature, with close approximations of the circulatory and nervous systems.

“According to our mastermind here,” she went on, “the creature’s metabolism is not all that exotic. It is warm-blooded and oxygen-breathing, with the capability of metabolizing nutrient and oxidants from the soil and of breathing either water or air trapped in subsurface caves. The mouths have a triple valve arrangement which enables them to eat, drink, or breathe through the same orifices, and the longtitudinal flexibility of the body would allow it to undulate through water at a fairly high speed. In the hunting role it would be much more effective in water than on the ground, although the indications are that most of its evolutionary history was spent on or under the land.”

The physiological details were sharp and solidly colored where the functions and positions were known with certainty, fainter and with varying intensities of shading when they were based on data stored in the main computer covering other and.similar life forms encountered throughout the galaxy. But even then, the probabilities deemed worthy of display verged on certainties. Only in the area concerned with the nerve connections between the body surface and brain was there serious doubt.

The nerve linkages were so uniform and numerous that there was no way of telling where the organs of sight, hearing, smell, or touch were situated. The brain was housed behind and protected by a hollow in the wedge-shaped beak. For a creature which had less than one third the body mass of an Earth-human, the brain was exceptionally large. According to the computer, the possession of intelligence was a certainty.

Soon, Martin hoped, they would begin to show it.

As the computer had predicted, the three burrowers who were directing operations spaced themselves out so that any sounds emanating from the digger would be received by them in diminishing intensity. The nearest one had positioned itself inside die globe of subordinates, who had paired off and were taking turns to crawl onto each other’s backs.

“What are they doing?” Beth asked, in a carefully neutral voice.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Martin whispered. “My guess is that they’re helping each other remove their ear protectors.”

Suddenly the burrowers were emerging from the walls and floor and swarming silently over his hull. The tunnel on both sides of the digger was full of them. With a feeling of self-satisfaction he noted that none of them were wearing earmuffs.

They were ready to talk.

Carefully, so as not to hit his hand accidentally against the console, Martin switched off the external lighting, then turned it on again for precisely one second. He waited for ten seconds then switched it on and off again twice, then three and finally four times. He repeated the one-two-three-four sequence several times, indicating his willingness to communicate in a fashion which would not painfully overload their hypersensitive hearing.

There was no response.

He turned up the external lighting to its full, eye-searing intensity and tried again. Still they ignored him. He looked away from the brilliantly illuminated cave to rest his eyes, and then it was that an even greater light dawned.

Incredulously, he whispered, “They’re Wind!”