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?
“They aren’t coming along the tunnel,” she said, answering the unasked question. “They seem to be digging new ones.”
Martin swore, not quite under his breath, and halted the digger. “I see them now,” he said. “But if they burrow up against the digger through the soil, I won’t be able to see them. We need to have a rough idea of then-sensory equipment, at least, to program the translator.”