Close approach to Dreyfus-27 had confirmed the data suggested by the Summer Dreamboat’s remote sensors. The planetoid was a dark, craterd body only ten kilometers in diameter, swinging in low orbit around Gargantua. A thousand years before, traces of nickel and iron in the outer layers of Dreyfus-27 had encouraged prospectors to drill the interior. The rubble and tailings that still formed a meters-deep coat to the planetoid’s rugged surface showed that no deposits worth refining had been found, but the automated drilling equipment of the miners had not given up easily. Dreyfus-27 had been tunneled and retunneled, carved and bored and fractured and drilled until dozens of crisscrossing shafts and corridors and chambers riddled the inside.
Without air and appreciable gravity, those tunnels had not changed since the day they had been abandoned. The new arrivals could read the final frustration of the miners in the jumbled heaps of debris and half-completed living quarters. The prospectors had started out with high hopes, enough for them to plan a permanent base appropriate to extended mining operations. Those hopes had slowly evaporated. One day they had just downed tools and left. But although they had stopped halfway in making Dreyfus-27 fully habitable, their efforts were more than enough for the short-term needs of the crew of the Dreamboat.
“Seal it at the top, and this will do,” Darya said. She and J’merlia had found an almost empty cylindrical chamber with a narrow entrance, five meters below the surface, and had tested the walls to make sure that they could hold the pressure of an atmosphere. “The thermal insulation is as good as the day it was installed. Let’s go back up. Once we pump some air in here we can open our suits. That will be wonderful.”
She looked around her. The chamber was clear of major rock fragments, but powdery grit covered the passivine wall lining and flew up at every contact and vibration.
Wonderful? she thought. My God, I’m slipping down the ladder, rung by rung. A couple of months ago I’d have been appalled at the idea of spending ten minutes in a place like this. Now I can hardly wait to settle in.
J’merlia was already at home. The Lo’tfians were a burrow race, and the land surface of their home planet formed one vast, interconnected warren. He had been scuttling excitedly from one chamber and corridor to the next. Now he nodded his head and led the way back up the weak gravity gradient.
Darya, less nimble in free-fall, was left far behind. When she came close to the surface she was surprised to find the tunnel illuminated from outside. Dreyfus-27 was tumbling slowly around its long axis, with a period of a little more than one hour. When they had gone down into the interior of the planetoid, Gargantua had filled the sky above their entry tunnel; now the shaft was lit at its upper end by the fading and wintry sunlight of Mandel.
The ship hovered where they had left it, moored a hundred meters above the surface. Darya took the connecting cable and pulled herself easily along it. J’merlia was still in the tiny airlock when she got there, and she had to wait outside until the lock cycle was completed. She looked down. From this height she could see most of one irregular hemisphere of Dreyfus-27. The wan light made the surface more than ever into a jumbled wasteland of broken rocks. Harsh contours of light and dark were hardly softened by the microscopic dust particles and ice crystals thrown up by the arrival of the Summer Dreamboat. There were hundreds of other sizable fragments in orbit around Gargantua, all of them presumably much like this one. Was she crazy, to imagine that the secrets of the vanished Builders might be hidden in such a desert?
Hans Rebka was standing by the lock when she emerged from it. Darya switched her suit to full open and waited a couple of seconds for two-way transparency to be established.
“J’merlia says you found something good,” Rebka began. “He’s really excited.”
“I thought it was a mess — just a whole labyrinth of tunnels. But he loved it down there. I guess it’s like home for him. Look at them now.”
J’merlia had moved across to the ship’s control panel, where Kallik was sitting in a sprawl of extended legs, exactly as she had been when Darya left. For the past two days the Hymenopt had been painstakingly locating, tracking, and monitoring the minor satellites of Gargantua, never moving from her position at the controls. Now the Lo’tfian and the Hymenopt were chattering excitedly together, in the clicks and whistles of the latter’s own language that neither Darya nor Hans had mastered. The whistling and chittering grew louder and more intense, until Darya said, “Hey, stop that, you’ll deafen us,” and added to Rebka, “I sure didn’t see anything all that exciting in the interior.”
He nodded. “What’s with them? J’merlia! Kallik! Calm down.”
J’merlia gave one final, earsplitting whistle before he turned to the humans. “Apologies, our sincere apologies. But Kallik has wonderful news. She picked up a signal, two minutes ago — from the Have-It-All!”
“Louis Nenda’s ship? I don’t believe it.” Rebka moved across the cabin to stand by the control panel. “Darya said they were accelerated away from Quake at hundreds of gees. Any signal equipment inside that ship would have been crushed flat.”
The Hymenopt’s smooth black head turned to face the humans. “Not ss-so. I found a definite ss-signal, although a very weak one.”
“You mean the Have-It-All is there, but in trouble?”
“Not necessarily in trouble. It is not a distress beacon, it is intended only to aid location.”
“Then why didn’t we pick it up earlier, when you did a scan of the entire region?”
“Because it becomes activated by an input ss-signal. Our first s-scan was passive, using reflected stellar radiation. But now I am using active microwave, to scan the surface of rock fragments for composition and detailed images.”
The Hymenopt’s mandibles gaped with excitement and joy. “With apologies and respect, we cannot hide our pleasure. The sh-ship was not destroyed! It survives, it has power, it must be in good ck-ck-condition. Just as J’merlia and I hoped, our masters may not have died at Summertide. Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial may be alive — and just a few hours’ flight away!”
Entry 37: Lo’tfian
Distribution: The center of Lo’tfian civilization, and the only habitat of the species’ females, remains the minor planet Lo’tfi. Since these females are exclusively burrow dwellers, the planetary surface reveals no sign of their presence; the subterranean regions of the planet, however, are believed to have been extensively modified as breeding and metamorphosis warrens. There is no direct proof of this, since no non-Lo’tfian has ever entered the burrows.
Male Lo’tfians are to be found in large numbers roaming the surface of Lo’tfi, and in small numbers on every world of the Cecropia Federation and Fourth Alliance where Cecropians interact with other intelligences of the spiral arm.
Physical Characteristics: The physical form of Lo’tfian females is not known by direct examination, though they are certainly blind and exceed the males in size and probably in intelligence. The general physiology is believed to resemble that of the Lo’tfian males.
The males are thin-bodied, eight-legged arthropods, with excellent hearing and vision. They have an ability to communicate pheromonally, which makes them the preferred interpreters for Cecropians. Their two lidless compound eyes can be individually or jointly focused, enabling either stereo sight or simultaneous monocular viewing of two fields of vision. The eyes have spectral sensitivity from 0.29 to 0.91 micrometers, permitting them to see something of both ultraviolet and infrared radiation. (The Lo’tfian “rainbow” distinguishes eleven colors, compared with the conventional ROYGBIV seven of humans.)