by James White
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…”
Chapter 16
No longer calm, her voice was tinged with the helpless, hopeless desperation of one with control of a mechanism with the power to alter planetary orbits, and who was incapable of moving a few hundred pounds of soil off his back. Martin did not answer her for two reasons-there was nothing she could do, and his air had been drastically reduced to the tiny quantity trapped inside his helmet and between the floor and his chest and armpits. He could not afford to waste it by talking.
The very worst that he could imagine had happened. He was buried alive without hope of rescue, his tiny store of air would last only minutes, and the only movement possible to him was to clench his fists.
But there was a small, rebellious, stupid part of his mind which refused to accept the situation as hopeless. It reminded him that one of his fists was full of soil while the other was clenched on air, and it ignored with contempt the rest of the mind which was surrendering to fear and panic.
“Martin, oh, Martin…” Beth said helplessly.
The pounding in his head, whether it was due to lack of air or sheer exertion, was so loud that the burrowers in the cavern should have heard it. He pressed his free hand down against the floor and strained to kit his arm against the weight of soil pressing down on it. He was trying to create a tiny passage under the arm from the airhose spigot at the base of his helmet and the tunnel beyond the fall. But he did not know if he was doing anything at all. He could not see and his arm was becoming a single, excruciating mass of cramp.
Surely he had made an airway to the tunnel, he thought desperately, because his original tiny pocket of air must long since have been used up. But he did not know.
Something heavy moved across his hand, stabbing at it gently with what felt like blunt knitting needles. The sensation moved past his wrist, becoming duller as it continued along the area covered by the fabric of his suit.
The burrower had arrived.
An area of gentle, stabbing pressure was covering Martin’s upper arm and shoulder, and he was aware of a weight pushing down on the back of his neck, then against the other shoulder. He tensed his neck muscles as it moved across the top of his helmet. The weight of soil had gone from his arm, he realized suddenly, and seconds later his visor and spotlight had been cleared and he could see again.
The burrower was only inches away, moving from side to side as it ingested and cleared the fallen soil from his other arm and the floor in front of his chest. Compared with his situation of a few minutes ago, Martin felt relief so intense that it verged on delirious happiness.
“You’re seeing this?” he whispered.
“Of course,” she replied, sheer relief at his escape making her angry. “Probably better than you are.”
His head, shoulders, and arms were projecting from a shallow cave which the burrower had eaten out of the fallen soil, which was stabilized by the creature’s organic cement, while his feet, legs, and hips were still pinned down. But he could see and breathe and his arms were free, and there was a chance that he could drag himself out. Scarcely feeling the pain of his fingers, he dug them into the soil of the floor and began to pull.
The burrower moved quickly on its under-stubble and landed heavily on top of both his hands.
“It doesn’t want you to do that,” Beth said.
She was right, he thought. But he did not want to discuss it just then because he was getting an idea and, in any case, her thinking seemed to be duplicating his own.
“Probably it feels safer with you pinned down like that,” she said. “I’d say that it is almost certainly non-hostile, but cautious.”
“Is the translation computer on line?” Martin asked quietly. “I’m going to try talking to it.”
Slowly he straightened and spread his fingers. The burrower immediately arched its body, taking most of its weight off the back of his hands. Very carefully he made loose fists, then rotated his wrists until the back of his hands lay against the floor, then he opened and closed his fingers. The burrower’s stubble prodded gently all around them, and continued doing so as he brought his hands together and began taking off one of the thin gloves. The stubble concentrated on the glove for a few seconds, helping him remove it, then returned to the hand. Its touch became incredibly delicate, and one of the stubby digits went unerringly to the pulse in his wrist.
He bent and straightened his thumb and fingers in turn, then all together. He took a deep, silent breath, trying hard not to cough as the creature’s pungent body odor invaded his helmet.
“Finger. Digit,” he said in his quietest voice. “Fingers. Digits.”
It jerked away from him at the first word. But the artificially attentuated voice emanating from the external speaker must have been bearable because it returned within a few seconds to re-cover his hands. He reminded himself again that its only sense was that of touch, but touch so delicate that it amounted to hypersensitive hearing. He rotated his wrists and opened and closed his hands while the stubble remained in contact without impeding the movements.
“Hand. Hands,” he said. “Feelers. Touchers.”
He laid the backs of his hands against the floor again and began speaking the language of mathematics using, as he had done when he was a very young child, his fingers.
“One,” he said, bending up a finger. He bent it again and repeated “One.” He brought up two fingers and said
“Two.” Patiently, and with many repetitions, he demonstrated the permutations of additions up to ten.
“It seems to be repeating everything you say by touching the forward stubble against its beak,” said Beth excitedly. “The computer says that it is a language similar to that used by the Kregsachi, who communicate by tapping and scraping media limbs against their chitonous body armor, although they are a lot noisier about it. Taken in conjunction with earlier observations of bur-rower activity and the associated sounds we recorded, together with the biological and sensory data available, you are bringing us to the point where instantaneous two-way translation will be possible.
“Oh, man,” she went on enthusiastically, “you don’t appreciate what a truly beautiful hunk of machinery this computer is.”
“It counts on its fingers,” Martin said dryly, “like me.”
“We need a little more data,” she continued. “A few more words, or an action and its associated verb that you both understand… Be careful!”
While she had been speaking he had withdrawn a hand from under the burrower and was extending it, very slowly, toward the mouth on the nearer side of its beak. The thick upper lip used in the soil ingestion process would, he hoped, be one of the least sensitive areas of its body. Gently he brought the tips of his fingers against the lip, which began to quiver.
“I touch you,” he said. “I feel you.”
He repeated the touch and the words several times, watching the stubble tapping against the beak. The lip was no longer quivering. Then he moved his hand to the beak and rested his bent fingers gently on the smooth, bony surface and he, too, began drumming just a few inche
s from where the stubble was doing the same. Hopefully he was indicating to the being that he understood that the beak was part of its system of speech production.
“I touch you gently,” he said several times. Fractionally increasing the pressure on his fingertips and raising his voice slightly, he added, “I am touching you harder…”
“Got it!” Beth called.
And suddenly there was a new voice in his headset, speaking with the clear, accentless tones of the translation computer, which said, “You feel me talking! But even when you touch softly, stranger, you are much too violent for comfort.”
“I’m sorry for causing you discomfort,” Martin whispered into his helmet microphone. “My feelers lack fine control and my equipment is crude and insensitive. My name is Martin.”
“Crude and insensitive, indeed…” Beth began.
“I must begin by thanking you,” he went on, “for rescuing me from a very dangerous, perhaps lethal, situation.”
“My personal touching is Cromonar,” the borrower replied. “I could feel your distress, stranger. There was great physical agitation, and your general feel was that of a freshly trapped predator. But your situation is still fraught with danger. Am 1 right in assuming that you cannot live by eating alone, but must also breathe air to assist with the metabolizing of your food as do the surface dwellers?”
“That is correct,” Martin said.
“Surely leaving your vehicle to crawl along this old and unstable pathway was not a sentient action,” Cromonar said. “Or perhaps there are circumstances which render it so?”
“When we discovered that there was intelligent life on your planet,” Martin replied, “we felt the need to investigate it and talk to you.”
“I understand,” the burrower said. “Curiosity can-outweigh risk with some people. On this world such beings are in the minority, and a number of them are gathered in this area. Were there reasons other than curiosity for investigating us?”
“We wanted to know why you were hiding,” Martin replied, “and to offer assistance if it was required.”
“We need help,” the burrower said, “even though the majority of us do not feel the need. But right now, stranger, your need for help is of greater urgency than ours. Can you remain absolutely still and refrain from violent touchings while I try to eat you out of there?”
The tunnel, Cromonar explained, enabled its people to move between the cavern and an area of edible root crops without having to ingest the tasteless and nutrition-lacking soil of the locality. Due to the excessively heavy touchings of Martin’s digger, the entire length of the tunnel was in danger of collapse. None of its colleagues were willing to risk physical contact with such a violent toucher, which meant that the rescue operation was likely to be a long one.
The soil had been removed from his back and the bur-rower’s weight was centered on his buttocks when it happened-a sudden renewal of pressure on his shoulders and a fall which partially covered one arm. Martin’s pulse rate skyrocketed again and sweat misted his visor so that the tunnel ahead became a bright, featureless blur,
“Do not move,” Cromonar said, and it began patiently eating and clearing the new fall from his back. The process of ingestion did not affect its ability to talk.
It was talking, Martin realized suddenly, to reassure him and take his mind off his present predicament. If he panicked and tried to pull himself out before Cromonar was ready, the entire tunnel would fall in and he would certainly die, and so the burrower was talking furiously about itself, its species, their world, and everything under its unseen sun.
They had evolved from a species of small, sightless flat worm which had burrowed in the primal ooze of their world, paralyzing larger life forms with their sting and ingesting them piecemeal. As their physical size, numbers, and food requirements increased, they became blind hunters whose sense of touch became specialized to the point where they did not need any other sensory channel. They could feel the movements of their surface prey, identify its vibrations, and lie in wait for it just below ground until it came within reach of their stings. Or they could feel out and identify surface tracks and follow their victim to its lair, and either burrow underground and sting it from below or attack it when its internal vibrations indicated that it was asleep.
Because of the strange, extra sense possessed by the creatures who roamed the surface and the air above it, they had. no success against conscious opponents aware of their presence, and very often they had become the prey rather than the hunters.
The surface animals, too, had become larger and stronger and less affected by the burrowers’ stings. They were forced to act together in setting up more and more complex ambushes and cooperation in the matter of food-gathering, storage, and distribution led to the formation of subsurface villages and towns. They already educated their young by touch, and methods were devised for feeling each other over long distances.
Martin had his eyes closed, the better to see the incredible mind-pictures the burrower was painting with its history lesson. His pulse was still racing, but with excitement now, and the threat of an unknown tonnage of soil falling on him seemed to have lost some of its urgency.
Amplifiers and transformers enabled them to refine their sense of touch to the point where they could feel light and radio frequencies. Their attempts at powered flight were still in progress. These had claimed the lives of a great many burrowers who could only gauge their position and altitude by feeling the touchings of air currents on their flying surfaces and trusting to a sense of balance which was woefully inadequate in the alien environment of the sky. These inadequacies had been overcome in part by using long touchings of the irregularities in the ground below.
Blind flying, Martin thought incredulously, with Doppler radar indications in Braille! He wanted to compliment the burrower on its species’ achievements in spite of the worst possible handicap. But the fallen soil had again been eaten clear of his back and Cromonar was still doing all the talking.
The increasing sophistication of their long-range touching systems made them aware of complex vibrations reaching them from beyond their own world. This knowledge had excited some people, but the majority had been made fearful and wanted to conceal themselves lest these faint touchings indicated the pressure of other beings with the strange extra sense, beings more powerful and dangerous than the predators of their own world.
All things considered, Martin thought, it was a good reason for hiding; good enough to satisfy a Federation which normally had no time at all for people who treated others with fear and distrust. More than any other race in his experience, these burrowers needed Federation help. He was not out of trouble himself yet, but already he was considering methods of assessing their suitability for citizenship.
“You have a most unusual and interesting feel,” said the burrower, who was working above his lower legs. “I assume, from earlier touchings felt while you were on the surface, that these are the limbs on which you balance when you move quickly over the ground. On that occasion you were accompanied by a lighter being whose presence I no longer feel.”
Martin kept quiet so that Beth could speak for herself.
“I am the being whose presence you felt earlier,” she said, and went on to give a brief, simplified description of the two-way translation system which was converting the burrower’s stubble touchings into sounds which the visitors could understand, and the visitors’ words into a form which the burrower could feel. She went on, “I thank you for your efforts to rescue my life-mate, and I apologize for the irritation caused by the devices we must use to touch you underground. Solid material is impassible to our extra sense, and your own species’ highly developed sense of touch is truly unique.”
“Uniquely unfortunate, I fear,” Cromonar replied, and even in translation the anger was apparent in its voice. “It seems that every sentient and non-sentient creature in existence has the ability to accurately navigate over long or short distances without needing to feel th
e touch of sun or wind or sea currents or vibrations bouncing off distant objects. We are cripples, beings lacking vital organs, and we know not what it is that we lack.
“The sensitivity of our long-range touching systems,” it went on more calmly, “made us aware of the many and complex vibrations reaching us from beyond our world. These touchings were not natural occurrences, and we hoped that, some day, beings much more advanced than ourselves would visit us and perhaps help us attain that ability which we alone lack. Your presence and actions here demonstrate that my people need no longer fear everyone and everything above the surface. More, it proves to us that there are other planetary surfaces and subsurfaces warmed by countless numbers of suns whose touchings we can barely detect, but whose soil and creatures we may one day like to feel around us. Believe me, your gratitude is appreciated, but it is we who are in your debt.”
Martin gave an involuntary shiver which caused the burrower to renew its warning against unnecessary movement. When Beth spoke she bypassed the translator so that only he could hear her.
“This Cromonar,” she said, “is giving me goose-bumps. It’s blind, dammit, and still it wants to go to the stars!”
“The ends of your rear limbs have awkward, angular projections,” the burrower went on, “which were responsible for the original cave-in. My body is arched across these limbs to support the tunnel, which is about to collapse again. Move forward carefully, but with speed.”
Straining to kept his toes pointed backward, Martin used his elbows and forearms to drag himself clear of the fall. But he had moved less than three yards when there was a sudden, heavy pressure on his feet. For a heart-stopping moment he imagined that the whole roof was collapsing on top of him, but he was able to pull his feet free without bringing down any more soil.
“Are you all right, Martin?” Cromonar said. Before he could reply it went on, “I can feel that you are. But there is instability in the whole tunnel. Keep moving.”
Martin kept moving and the burrower kept on talking. Maybe it liked talking, or perhaps it was still trying to take his mind off his present predicament.
