Federation World (20 page)

"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!"

ARE you sure?" Beth asked, matching his tone. "If you're right, it explains a lot."

It would certainly explain why the creatures preferred to remain under the surface. Above ground they would have little or no protection against the ultra-quiet predators and winged life forms who were guided to their victims by a sense the burrowers did not possess and might not even understand. Without sight, they would know only that on the surface there was death or serious in-. jury, inflicted by beings who could not be evaded. As a result they had remained safely underground, developed their own peculiar culture, and ignored the beasts who roamed the surface and the atmosphere above it.

But not entirely.

They had dealt very effectively with the six-legged predator who had attacked the protector vehicle, with the vehicle itself, and they had successfully hidden themselves from a hypership orbiting their planet. A sudden, uncontrollable shiver made Martin's suit rub noisily against the couch.

What kind of people were they, and what additional or heightened faculties did they possess to compensate for their blindness? The question was unspoken, but Beth began answering it, anyway.

"Correlation of the latest X-ray scans together with the key datum that the life form is blind," she said excitedly, "explains certain physiological anomalies. Not only is this species blind, the indications are that it is deaf and dumb as well. There are no organs resembling functional ears or mechanisms for producing speech. The entire sensorium, virtually the whole surface of the body, is responsive to touch. Apparently it is the only sense they possess.

"According to the mastermind here," she went on, "this makes them highly sensitive to vibration transmitted through the soil or water and, to a lesser extent, air. Their equivalent of talking is to tap or rub specialized groups of stubble sited above and below the beak, whose shape gives the sounds a degree of directional focus. Properly speaking they do not talk and listen to each other so much as touch at long range.

"I've never called the main computer a liar before,” she added, "but when I just did, it told me that if I disliked its conclusions I should have fed it a different set of data."

"So," Martin whispered, "they can hear, or rather feel me at a distance with the hypersensitive touch sensors we're calling their ears, but I can't hear diem. Surely their tapping and rubbing sounds are detectable?"

The screen showed burrowers moving away from the tunnel. The movement was steady and purposeful, he thought, and not a panic reaction to the sound of his voice.

"They're leaving the area," Beth said, "and putting on their ear protectors as they go. For the next stage you're going to need very special equipment. Your tri-di projector and other visual aids to communication will be singularly ineffective with a species that is blind. Will you return to the lander now?"

"I'm not sure," Martin said. "I think we're making progress, and this isn't the time to break off contact. These are the only members of the species who did not hide from us, and we might not be able to find them again to resume where we left off. I can't see the details on this small screen, but they seem to be taking up some kind of formation."

"They've taken up a hollow cone formation with you at the center of its base," she reported. "The cone is pointed in a southwesterly direction and inclined downward by twenty-three degrees, and is moving forward slowly. I'd say that they are pointing the way and want you to follow."

"I'm following," Martin said quietly. "But what I need now is a method of attenuating the sound of my voice so they won't be deafened every time I try to say something."

Slowly he moved the digger out of the tunnel and lined it up with the direction indicated by the cone. The speed seemed to be comfortable for the burrowers because they matched his pace exactly and were not moving farther out to escape his noise.

"You are headed toward one of the small, permanent tunnels which must be their equivalent of a minor road," Beth reported. "Further ahead there is a subterranean river which flows, for no natural geological reason, in a straight line. It passes through a large cave, which is not entirely a natural feature either, containing small accumulations of metal which could be tools, machinery, or weapons. At this range the picture is unclear.

"I'm going to reposition the lander above that cavern," she ended, "because that is where the action is likely to be."

Operating from the orbiting hypership as easily as if she were in the lander's control module, Beth lifted the ship out of contact with the surface and set it down again directly above the cave. Had it been necessary, she could just as easily have remote-controlled the digger, which made Martin feel very safe but just a bit redundant.

For the few minutes that the lander was in the air, Martin was sonically blind, and when its probes were redeployed he had to act quickly to avoid a serious and almost certainly fatal accident. His vehicle had wandered from the indicated course and was edging dangerously close to one of his escorts, who was steadfastly, or stupidly, refusing to move away from his cutters. He turned away, swearing, then remembered that the bur-rowers had no way of knowing that, when his vehicle was in motion, he was nearly as blind as they were without the lander to shed its sonic tight on the situation.

"This is interesting," Beth said suddenly. "Some of those metal objects are using power. Obviously the people in the cave aren't hiding from us anymore. But I'd like to know their purpose. Even the civilized, peace-loving races used weapons, both long- and short-range, at some period before they grew out of the habit. They could be getting ready to jump you."

"I can't imagine a long-range weapon being developed by a blind race," Martin said softly. "I wish they'd move faster."

He was impatient to reach that cave, now. But if he increased speed the noise would seriously inconvenience the burrowers and that, for the person wanting to establish contact with them, would not be a friendly thing to do. So he closed his eyes, forced patience on himself, and tried to think like a being who could only feel the world around it.

"The cone is changing direction," Beth said sharply. "Can't you see it?"

"I can now," Martin said, opening his eyes. "But wait a minute, they're pointing me nearly twenty degrees to the right of the cavern! That cavern is the place I want to see."

As he was speaking, Martin reduced speed until the burrowers forming the base of the cone had pulled more than thirty meters ahead, then he turned back on to the original course.

"What are you doing?" Beth asked. "No, dammit, what are they doing?..."

The cone formation was breaking up. Every borrower had changed direction and increased speed to head him off, and within a few minutes there was a tight screen of them blocking his path.

"Plainly they don't want you in that cavern," Beth said. "Probably they have delicate equipment there, or maybe some of their young. You should stay out."

"I realize that," Martin said irritably. "Driving in there would be like taking a bulldozer into a china shop. But I have to show them that that is where I want to go."

He fed a trickle of power to the cutting blades, just enough to inch the digger forward without endangering the burrowers ahead, then he brought the vehicle around until it was pointed in the direction they wanted him to go. Hopefully he was showing them that he was being a good little off-worlder and doing as he was told.

They were intelligent people and took only a few minutes to get the message. They reformed the cone and Martin and his escort were moving again.

Beth said, "They are leading you toward a tunnel which is one of several leading to their settlement. You should intersect it about one-eighty meters from the entrance.

"Your bio-sensors say that you are reasonably calm," she went on. "This suggests that you've already made up your mind about something, something which, knowing you, carries an element of risk. I wish you were a bit more worried. When you don't worry, I do."