Federation World

Chapter 15

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.”

“Don’t worry,” Martin said dryly, “I’m worried.”

On his screen, the shadowy, gray tube which was the tunnel was growing larger. His escort was slowing and beginning to break up again, but without the prior urgency. Obviously this was the end of the line. Martin guided the vehicle into the tunnel at right angles and cut the power when his ports gave a view in both directions along it and his cargo hatch was free to open. Then he waited.

His external lighting showed burrowers emerging from the tunnel roof and floor. They did not approach the vehicle closely, other than to remove the small heaps of soil his arrival had brought down. When the tunnel was smooth and unobstructed they, too, settled on the floor to wait.

“I think,” Martin whispered, “they’re ready to talk,”

When she replied, Beth’s voice sounded embarrassed, defensive, and angry-the tone one used when making excuses for a friend. She said, “The computer isn’t getting anywhere with the translation. It’s still working on a combination of amplification and filtration, trying to reproduce the process whereby Earth-people in noisy jobs, riveters, workers in sheet steel, and such, are able to carry on a quiet conversation while a boiler shop din is going on all around them. But all we can hear behind the background noise is more background noise. Listen.”

Martin clenched his teeth as the hiss and static built up to what sounded like a continual barrage of sharp, irregular explosions. Then suddenly they were gone, converted into bursts of silence in a new and quieter background.

He was able to identify and isolate the regular, soft pulsing of the lander’s sonic probes, but there was something more. It was a steady bubbling sound which rose and fell at frequent but irregular intervals, varying in pitch so that it sounded as if someone were playing a wind instrument under water. Beth stepped up the volume until there could be no doubt that the sound was not a natural phenomenon.

“If it is a language,” Beth said, “then everyone is talking at once and the babble is untranslatable. If it isn’t a language, then the sound is probably produced continually as an aid to fixing position and distance between individuals. The computer says there is a high probability that the sound performs both functions, but that doesn’t help us with the translation.”

“But that computer,” Martin protested, “is supposed to be capable of instantly translating any intelligence-bearing sounds which…”

“This isn’t a species like the Teldins,” Beth said defensively, “whose words and the actions to which they referred were implicit in previously observed behavior patterns. These people are blind and the vibrations they produce are received as touches, which refer to the feel, not the sight, of objects and actions. We receive them as sounds, so translation is theoretically possible. But it may well be that in this case a successful contact will be just that, an actual physical contact.”

When Martin did not reply, she went on, “We need a long, careful think about this one. You should return to the ship at once.”

“No,” Martin said firmly. ‘This bunch wants to make contact, and I don’t want to have it all to do again with another group. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble and considerable personal discomfort to…”

“The computer,” Beth said, just as firmly, “was not programmed with Braille.”

“I want to give it another shot,” Martin said stubbornly. “They’ve been whispering at me and I’ve been shouting at them, from inside a vehicle which has to be distorting the word sounds. Can I modify the digger’s external address system to step down, attentuate, my voice instead of amplifying it?”

“No problem,” she replied. “But the system is integral with the vehicle’s structure, so you’ll have to return here to have the… Oh, oh, they’re moving out. I think they are breaking off contact, not you.”

Bitterly disappointed, he watched them go. Obviously, the communication problem was presently insoluble, and hopefully they, too, were going back to have a long think about it. They were undulating rapidly along the tunnel, not burrowing through the soil, in the direction of their cavern-all except one, who stopped about ten meters from the digger.

“One of them still wants to talk,” said Martin.

“Don’t get too excited about it,” said Beth, “they may simply have left a guard.”

But she had to be wrong because the bubbling sounds in his headphones had become quieter, yet more distinct. Only one burrower was talking, the one outside who was tapping its forward stubble gently against its beak.

“My helmet!” said Martin suddenly. “Can I step down its external speaker?”

When she replied a few minutes later, her voice sounded far from enthusiastic. “There is an on-the-spot modification you can make to the helmet comm system.

If you wrap the mike and your lower jaw and mouth in sound absorbent material-some of your couch padding would do it-you should be able to talk quietly without the distortion caused by you pitching your voice unnaturally low.

“But it would mean you leaving the digger,” she concluded warningly. “That suit you’re wearing is little more than an overall, and your backpack has air for less than…”

“The air down here is breathable,” Martin broke in, “and the backpack is too big and awkward to wear in that tunnel. I would be able to move more quietly and quickly without it. Don’t worry, I won’t move far from the digger.”

To these people his voice must sound like a continuous, modulated explosion, Martin thought as he worked on the helmet, and unintelligible because of its sheer volume. He wondered how beings who had only the sense of touch would think of an explosion, how they had learned chemistry without being able to observe chemical reactions, and ultimately develop the other sources of energy which enabled them to detect starships entering their system.

It could not have been easy.

A boyhood memory came to him of reading a book on the early days of exploration and navigation on Earth. Instances had been mentioned of unsighted people who had been able to find their way among the widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean by sniffing the air for the almost imperceptible land smells, feeling the winds, and gauging direction by the warmth of the sunlight on their faces; in short, using the enhanced senses they had developed to compensate for the fact that they were blind.

There was growing in Martin a curiosity so intense, coupled with a feeling of such awe, that any risk he might have to take while getting to know and understand these blind borrowers seemed of secondary importance.

“The bio-sensors say you are less tense,” Beth said hopefully. “Are you having second thoughts about coming back?”

“No,” Martin said, “just thoughts.”

Unavoidably there were a few clicks and thuds as he wriggled through the tiny hatch onto the tunnel floor. The noise must have bothered the being outside because, when he directed his helmet light along the tunnel, the burrower had backed away by nearly three meters.

He left the hatch open in case he needed to return in a hurry, knowing that if a burrower tried to enter, Beth could use the remotes to close it. Slowly, and as silently as possible, he began crawling toward what he hoped was the spokesperson.

The tunnel was just high enough for him to move on his hands and knees provided he kept his head down, which meant that only a small area of the floor in front of him was illuminated. To see where he was going he had to crawl on his stomach, using his elbows, forearms, and the inside edges of his boots to move himself forward.

Of necessity, his approach to the borrower was slow and, he hoped, reassuring. But when he had closed to within arm’s reach it backed off to lie with its stubble rubbing gently against its beak three meters away. Martin tried again with the same result, although this time it halted a little closer to him. Once again he moved toward it, speaking quietly and noting by its reactions that it was hearing his attentuated voice with visible distress.

How would he have felt, Martin wondered, if an out-sized extraterrestrial he could not see was crawling toward him. He could understand and sympathize with its timidity. Then suddenly the burrower was moving away at the same rate he was trying to approach it.

“Except for your timid friend,” Beth said, “there are no other burrowers in the area. I think it wants you to follow it to the cavern. Maybe they have special communication equipment there that they want to use on you.

“You are twenty-eight meters from the digger,” she added warningly.

Deliberately, Martin closed his eyes and crawled on. Not seeing where he was going for a while might put him more closely in tune with the burrowers, who could not see at all. But it also made it impossible for him to see the tunnel, which seemed to be growing lower and more constricting.

He tried to imagine that he was in reality crawling along a narrow trench, keeping low because it was necessary for him not to be seen, while above him stretched a black, limitless sky and all the damp, earth-scented air that he could breathe. But his ability to delude himself had never been great, and so he knew with a dreadful certainty that a few inches above his head there were countless tons of the soil waiting to collapse and bury him alive.

“The bio-sensors report elevated pulse, respiration, blood pressure, and perspiration unaccompanied by a rise in ambient temperature,” Beth said urgently. “Is the air becoming unbreathable?”

“It isn’t the air,” Martin said, trying to keep his voice down. It was impossible, he thought wildly, to have hysterics in a whisper. “This idea isn’t working. I have to get back to the digger, at once.”

“Right,” she said briskly. “Stay put, relax, and I’ll send it for you. You’ll be back on the surface in no time.”

Behind him the digger came noisily to life, and a sprinkling of loose, brightly lit soil fell like dry rain through his spotlight beam.

“No,” he said with quiet desperation. “Don’t move the digger! You’ll bring down the roof wherever you come through, and I’d have to clear a way to the hatch with my hands. The tunnel isn’t safe. It was made by people who eat dirt and don’t mind being buried in it. I have to go back the way I came.” · But moving backward along the tunnel was incredibly slow and awkward. He could not see where he was going and his boots kept digging into the walls, bringing down sizeable quantities of soil, raising the level of the floor, and making it harder to squeeze through.

The floor-! he thought suddenly.

If he dug downward, that would not affect the unstable condition of the walls and ceiling, and a hole just deep enough to take his legs and lower body would allow him to crouch down into it and turn himself around.

He knew that what he intended doing was dangerous, but he had to try it. He had to try it because he was not sure how long he could continue to function as a thinking and physically coordinated being. More and more of his mind was being swamped by the one all-pervading and irresistible urge.

To get out!

With fingers which were beginning to bleed inside the thin, tough membrane of his gloves, Martin tore at the loosely packed soil of the floor. As the hole slowly deepened he pushed the dirt to either side, packing it against the walls or throwing handfuls of it into the tunnel ahead. The burrower had edged a little closer, but the sweat running into Martin’s eyes made it impossible to see what, if anything, it was doing.

Abruptly, he stifled a cry of pain as his fingers scraped against solid rock.

When Beth spoke she did not mention the gloves, which Martin had insisted on wearing because they would give him maximum touch sensitivity while dealing with the burrowers, or the shelf of rock he was uncovering, or even his bio-sensor readings which must have been worrying her badly. Her voice was calm and unhurried, as if by a process of sympathetic magic she could transfer those qualities to Martin. And even though they both knew what she was doing, it seemed to work.

“A suggestion,” she said, “You have moved more than one-quarter of the distance between the digger and the cavern. Do you think it might be easier to go on instead of turning back? I can guide the digger to the cavern, which is protected by a rock overhang, without bringing the roof down on top of you…”

The bio-sensors were already telling her what he thought of that suggestion. He said, “The burrowers would try to stop you again and be chewed up by the digger. They seem to place a lot of value on that place. No. I’m going back, backward.”

He had wriggled and pushed himself backward by less than two meters when it happened. One of his boot heels dug deeply into the tunnel wall and suddenly the leg, then both legs, were covered by what felt like a large, heavy cushion.

Martin made a sound halfway between a scream and a muffled grunt and tried to pull his legs free. They moved a little, but the pressure on them increased and began moving up to the back of his thighs, into the small of his back and toward his shoulders. Desperately he stretched forward, trying to grasp the edge of the hole he had dug to pull himself forward as the pressure from the falling soil rolled inexorably over his shoulders and head.

“The sensors show a cave-in! And the burrower is moving toward you. What can I do…”