Federation World (18 page)

The screen showed only a few widely scattered points and smudges of light now, but Martin was remembering how it had looked a few minutes earlier, when the reversed dayside image had been pockmarked as if by some ghostly plague.

"...And I'm glad there is somebody down there," Beth went on, "because I hate it when you brood. Now I won't have to be especially nice to you."

Martin laughed. "That was a terrific job you did just then, and I want to be especially nice to you."

"Sometimes," Beth said, "I can't win."

It was some time later when she said, "I suppose we should report back with the news that this planet contains indigenous intelligent life and that we are not, after all, on vacation. But if we did that, the supervisor would probably say that we know the situation here better than anyone else, and we'd be sent straight back to carry out the first contact and assessment procedures. We may as well save ourselves the round trip."

She was hoping, Martin could see, for an argument.

The risks encountered while trying to establish communication with a completely alien race were major and varied. For Martin especially it would be no vacation, and Beth was beginning to show her concern.

"What can they be afraid of," she said in a baffled voice, "to act this way?"

"When we know that," Martin said, "I have the feeling that, we'll know everything."

The recent game of hide and seek had proved that there was a highly advanced culture on, or rather under the surface of, this world beneath them-advanced enough to detect and react to a ship operating in their solar system. They had a knowledge of astronomy, at least, and therefore the philosophical acceptance of the idea that there might be other intelligent species among the stars. In every advanced culture there were a few beings who were actively interested in contact with off-worlders, while the majority minded its own more mundane business. But all of these people had hidden themselves at the first approach of a visitor from space.

That was very bad. Xenophobia of the kind being displayed here, unless there was a very good reason for it, would be an absolute bar to this culture achieving Federation citizenship.

"Let's return to our original station," Martin said. 'The natives are used to us being there, and it might be more reassuring to them if we resumed contact where it was broken off, where they stole our protector."

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?