by Hal Clement
Two hours after arriving, therefore, he had a relatively clear working space. The bottom of the pit was limestone, exposed by the complete removal of the overlying soil, some three meters square. Across it ran the crack, a trifle less than a meter wide, still packed with dirt. Everything was muddy—limestone, projecting roots, and Mitsuitei himself. A slender log with branches cut to ten-centimeter stubs leaned against one corner, forming a rough ladder and giving entrance and egress to and from the site.
The machinery which had done the original digging was at one side. Mitsuitei did not expect to need it again. He was now equipped with a hand shovel, and seemed about to use it. Lampert, standing at the edge of the pit, felt the incongruity, but managed not to laugh.
“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do down there with you?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not. From now on I want every bit of dirt to pass under my own eyes.”
“Are you going to try to throw it all up here as you finish?”
“No. That’s the purpose of the extra pit area down here. I can get a long way down the joint, simply heaping the material on the rock. It’s damp enough to pile quite steeply, too.”
“How far down do you think you can get? The crack’s rather narrow to work in, and you have three and a half meters to go before you hit tuff. That’s going to be rough shoveling. I still think you could use the machine safely for a little way further, at least.”
“No doubt I could, but I’m not going to. There’s one thing I might use, though. If you have another of those saws, such as the bonemen are using up on the cliff, I could widen this crack as I go—cut steps, in fact, to help get the mud up to this level when I’m further down.”
“That’s a good thought, but I don’t have any other. If you really get far enough down to need it, though, I could fly up to get it. They were going to shift over to hand labor anyway.”
“All right. Of course, it will be some time before I get that deep anyway; maybe I won’t need it today.” He bent to his work.
“But what do I do?” asked Lampert. “I can’t go off to attend to my own projects, because String has to stay here to guard you. I can’t get to the site where the others are working because I can’t land there. I can’t sit in the helicopter and twiddle my thumbs because I’ll go crazy before the day is over.” Mitsuitei straightened once more, and thought briefly.
“Is there nothing in the geophysical line you could do within sight of this pit?” he asked finally. “The saw and digging machine are not the only apparatus you brought.”
“That’s true. I brought some seismic gear, though I didn’t plan to use it quite like this. I might map the formations under this hill. The information will be usable, I should think, and the joints will give quite a calibrating job. It will keep me busy, anyway.”
“Just a minute!” Mitsuitei looked a trifle perturbed. “Does that mean you’re going to set off explosives around here? I want the sides of this pit held up by something better than roots, if you do.”
Lampert chuckled. “No explosives,” he said. “This is a nice little gadget with a robot like the core sampler. It puts out waves of any type desired from any depth down to two hundred fifty meters—a sort, of subterranean sonar. You’ll never know it’s working. The wave amplitude isn’t enough to feel.” He turned toward the helicopter on the river bank below, and was starting to walk toward it when McLaughlin interrupted. The guide had heard the conversation, and his question was purely rhetorical.
“You weren’t planning to walk down to the flyer alone, were you, Doctor?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact. After all, I won’t be working; I can keep my eyes open as I go. You can see me for the greater part of the journey from here, too.”
Rather to his surprise the guide approved this argument, after a moment’s thought.
“All right. But please keep your gun in your hand as well as your head on a swivel. I’d prefer to have Dr. Mitsuitei come down with us so we could stay together, but I know how he’d react to the interruption, and I realize you’re not a kid. Just be careful.”
Lampert promised; and the guide’s manner had impressed him to the point where he was almost afraid to make the return journey, after reaching the flyer and packing his new equipment. He was rather surprised to get back to the site without being attacked, and McLaughlin’s very evident relief at seeing him did nothing to ease his feelings.
He began to set up the machinery. This consisted of an assembly very similar to the drilling mole a small delving robot drawing a slender tail behind it, the tail wound on a drum which surrounded the control unit. A dozen smaller cylinders reposed in attached clips.
“The attached borer,” Lampert explained to the guide, “goes down to any depth I set, up to two hundred fifty meters. It can product any of the three normal types of earthquake wave, singly or in any combination, with sufficient intensity to be detected at a range of over two kilometers in reasonably well-conducting rock. The small cylinders are detectors, equipped not only to receive and analyze the wave coming through the ground but to measure electronically their location with respect to each other and the main station. I can use as many of them as I please, up to the full dozen;—but they can be planted only a little way below the surface. There exists equipment for getting readings at depths comparable to that of the transmitter, but I don’t have it. As it stands, by spotting the receivers carefully I can get a pretty good picture of the formations for a radius of a kilometer and a depth even greater with ten minutes measuring and ten hours computing.”
“How far out do you plan to place these receivers?” the guide asked pointedly.
“Well—I hadn’t made a detailed plan of that. I’d rather like to have them in radiating lines of three, the lines spreading about fifteen degrees, and the individual cylinders about two hundred meters apart.”
“And just how were you going to place them? I gather that someone has to walk the best part of four kilometers—or do these things fly, in addition to their other abilities?”
“Er—someone walks. I thought perhaps, since you don’t like the idea of my going alone through the jungle, that I might stand guard over Take in the pit while you set them out.”
“Hmm.” The guide did not explode, to Lampert’s relief. It had not occurred to the scientist that the job of wandering around a hole in the ground waiting for animals which never came might get a little boring to a man of McLaughlin’s background. “Let’s go over first and see how Dr. Mitsuitei is getting along. I guess you could stand over him with a gun for half an hour. Of course, the cover runs dangerously close to the pit. Maybe we’d better burn it off to a safer distance still, I guess that won’t be necessary. You can stand out here where it’s relatively clear, and see all the approaches to the pit. Something might jump in without your having time to hit it, and you’d at least see it and could get there fast enough to do any shooting necessary.”
They approached the hole and looked in. Mitsuitei was working busily. A fair quantity of earth lay spread on the rock, and some two thirds of the length of the crack had been excavated to a depth of perhaps a quarter of a meter. The geophysicist attracted the little man’s attention and told him of the plan; Mitsuitei nodded and bent once more to his work.
The Felodon was becoming restless. It could hardly be hungry as yet; but it was on its feet, snarling silently as it had when the helicopter first entered its ken. For perhaps a minute it stood; then, with the same air of determination it had shown days before and scores of kilometers away, it began to thread its way through the underbrush toward the river and the digging site.
“I’ll stand where you suggested, and never take my eyes off the pit,” Lampert promised.
“Then I’ll come back to find you missing,” replied the guide. “You’re guarding yourself too, remember. Don’t keep your eyes on anything. Keep them moving.”
He finished distributing the little cylinders in the various pockets of his outer clothing, and moved o
ff in the direction Lampert had indicated. He looked back frequently, but each time saw the scientist alert. When the underbrush finally cut off the view, he refused to worry too much.
Actually, McLaughlin had gone to considerable pains to make the jungles of Viridis sound more dangerous than they really are. His conscious motive was to make the inexperienced members of the party alert enough for their own safety. It was quite true that a man could be killed in quite a variety of ways in those rain forests. There was a distinct possibility, however, that he also wanted to impress them with the importance of his services.
He did not, therefore, suffer much from anxiety during his walk, though on the other hand he wasted no time. He had, of course, only a rough idea of the distance he had traveled, though he was able to keep his direction with a small impulse-compass tuned to the seismic apparatus and forming part of its regular equipment.
He dropped three of the cylinders at the required intervals, as nearly as he could guess, forcing each a little way into the ground as Lampert had shown him; then he turned at right angles, walked what he hoped was the right distance and started back toward the site, planting equipment as he went. Out again, in again; and the last of the dozen tubes was in the ground.
Mitsuitei’s shovel scraped deeper.
Lampert, glancing up and around every few seconds, made minute adjustments to the controls of his seismic apparatus. Its little mole robot had started on its downward trip.
The Felodon lurked thirty yards from the point where Lampert was standing, protected from his sight by the undergrowth and by one of the piles of dirt thrown up by the machine which had dug the pit. It seemed to be looking through the soil at the spot where the man was. The snarl was still on its face, but no muscle moved in its long body. It had been there for minutes without moving; it had frozen similarly when McLaughlin had passed it on his way out. Now it simply stood and waited.
On a cliffside kilometers away, Ndomi Sulewayo gave utterance to the first profanity Krendall had ever heard him use. They were on opposite sides of the block containing the fossil, so neither could see the other Krendall, naturally, asked what was wrong.
“Don’t tell me a bug got through one of these suits!”
“Worse, if possible. I told you’ this foreleg—” both had been carefully avoiding the use of such words as “arms”—“was sticking out sideways, so that I was afraid we might have cut off part of it in digging the tunnel.”
Krendall nodded. “I remember. Did we?”
“I don’t know.”
“Eh? How come? I should think there’d be no doubt, one way or the other, if you have that much of the limb clear.”
“Well, I haven’t. I got as far as the bone goes—and right there run out of tuff and into the limestone. If there’s anything more, it’s in an entirely different kind of rock, which is a trifle unlikely; but I’m going to have to check the blocks we cut from this part of the tunnel in order to make sure, and I don’t look forward to the job at all.” Krendall, properly sympathetic, came around to Sulewayo’s side to look, and agreed that the search was necessary. The bone the younger man had been clearing ended in a joint of the type they had come to regard as typical of the creature’s limbs; and this had occurred almost exactly at the surface they had left when first outlining the block with the saw.
Sulewayo, with a grunt of disgust, dropped his tools and went out into the rain, where the blocks cut from the cliff had been piled; Krendall, nobly sacrificing his personal inclinations, went along with him.
The search lasted for a long time; for a long time, in fact, after it became evident that it was going to be useless, for the chance of a perfect specimen is not easily thrown away. Finally, however, Krendall straightened up with a sigh.
“I guess we’ll have to be satisfied with a restoration on one side,” he said wearily. “I hope someone fifty years from now doesn’t find another and discover that it’s a sort of vertebrate fiddler crab, with one forelimb ending in a paw or claw something like five times the size of the one on the other.”
Sulewayo gave a gloomy assent, and the two went back to work in their respective tunnels.
Lampert saw McLaughlin the instant the underbrush made it possible, a fact which the guide later admitted was to the scientist’s credit. He had, of course, been eagerly awaiting that return, for the transmitter was down to its first set depth and awaiting only the word that all receivers were in place. He called eagerly the moment the guide came within earshot.
“Everything down?” McLaughlin nodded.
“Everything down, as nearly as I could tell the way you said. How long will the readings take?”
“Only a few minutes. I’ll take a couple of calibration shots from ten, fifteen and twenty meters depth; then ones at fifty, a hundred and so on down as far as the mole will go. The shooting takes practically no time. It’s the drilling that will hold us up.”
“What then?”
“Well,” Lampert smiled, “after that the usual procedure is to pick up the receivers and place them in a similar pattern in a new direction. If the field crew doesn’t go on strike, we take the whole circle about the transmitter.”
“I was afraid of that,” grunted McLaughlin, as he stopped by the machine. “Well, let’s go.” The two men bent over the controls in a silence broken only by the scraping of Mitsuitei’s shovel a dozen meters away. Lampert pressed his shot button, and a light on the panel flashed white momentarily. Below their feet, unfelt, the pulse of sound energy raced outward, echoing from the walls of deep striking joints, from the boundaries between rocks of differing densities or elastic constants, from the walls of caverns deep in the limestone; some tiny portion of the energy from time to time encountering and affecting one of the tiny receivers McLaughlin had buried.
As each receiver gathered its bit of data, it retransmitted the information to the master unit; and everything was recorded on a single sheet as the milliseconds sped by. Long before a full second had passed, the first of the pulses had damped out as heat energy, and enough had been transmitted for the machine to obtain an adequate averaging record. The light blinked out again. Lampert nodded in satisfaction, and sent the mole downward once more.
“Look, good. Now the next set,” he remarked.
As that pulse of seismic energy went forth, the Felodon rose to its full height, almost showing itself over the pile of dirt which was now its sole protection from the view of the men. The snarl on its face seemed to grow fiercer, if that were possible. For just an instant it seemed torn by conflicting desires. But that was for just an instant; any tendency to flee was smothered before it could take full form. There were two men now to worry about, and correspondingly less chance for the opportunity it had been awaiting. But the opportunity came. For just a moment the guide looked down at the panel which was absorbing Lampert’s full attention. In that moment a green-and-lavender streak flowed over the heap of soil in a single leap and vanished into the pit. It must have been timed and guided by the mysterious sense McLaughlin had mentioned. It could see none of the men when it leaped, yet it timed the act for the moment none were looking, and landed directly on Mitsuitei.
The little archaeologist never knew what hit him. He died without a sound, and the killer, as though nothing lived anywhere in the neighborhood, settled down to its meal.
In this it must have been disappointed. The chemicals in the clothing designed to repel Viridian insect were equally obnoxious to the carnivore, and it made no serious attempt to get through them. However, not all of the body was protected in this way . . .
A second pulse went from the buried transmitter, and then a third, each from a point a few meters deeper than the last. Lampert’s attention, of course, was centered on his controls. McLaughlin’s eyes were once more sweeping restlessly over the surrounding landscape. Both heard the sounds coming from the pit, but neither interpreted them as anything more than the scraping of Mitsuitei’s shovel. Neither, of course, considered them consciously. Their atte
ntion was finally attracted by something decidedly more noticeable.
The Felodon did not—or could not?—remain at its meal for more than a few moments. Its apparent indifference to the other men changed once more to what seemed like an internal struggle. An observer would have been sure, up to now, that it was using its peculiar sense to avoid the sight of men with guns; but that hypothesis failed now.
As Lampert started the mole robot downward once more, the Felodon leaped out of the pit toward the two men—regardless of the fact that McLaughlin was facing toward it.
VIII
McLaughlin saw the fanged head emerge, and his reflexes took over instantly. A streak of flame passed beside the leaping carnivore, exploding into a white-hot blossom of blazing gas as it contacted the pile of dirt on the far side of the pit. The guide ducked and rolled frantically sideward as another spring carried the creature toward him. Claws raked the air past his shoulder, and he fired again before the roll was complete and without any sort of aim.
Men and beast alike were spattered with white-hot droplets of metal from the seismic recorder as the second shot caught it squarely; and this seemed to be enough for the carnivore. Its next leap was away from the men instead of toward them. A geyser of steam and mud erupted beside it as Lampert finally got his weapon into action, and before the vapor had been beaten down once more by the rain the animal was out of sight behind the undergrowth. Both men sent several shots in the direction of the crackling bushes, but accomplished nothing except the felling of a tree or two and the starting of a bonfire which failed to make any headway against the rain.
Convinced that the Felodon had gone, the men ran to the pit. Lampert did not even take time out to glance at the wreckage of his equipment. There was just enough distance to cover to let each one realize that he had no idea how long the carnivore had been inside, and what the “scraping” sound might have been. Both slowed down as they approached the edge, not relishing what they expected to see. But this did not prove to be what they had expected. McLaughlin’s face, already grim, turned gray as he saw that his first shot had not merely missed the animal at which it was aimed.
