With that horn or sting it could defend itself, Martin thought, from above, behind, and underneath and, with a small change in body position, from frontal attack.
“It couldn’t have taken the protector apart with that beak and horn,” Martin said, after he had studied the display for several minutes, “so the thinner stubble must act as digits specialized for fine work. But the stubble covers the entire body. Can you see any sensory organs?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “But there are two patches, one positioned on top and the other directly opposite it on the underside. I’m highlighting them now. The material is organic but not alive, fibrous, and foreign to the underlying stubble, which is compressed by it severely enough to confuse the X-ray scan.
“I need a clearer picture of the internal structure,” she went on. “Next time one of them is in clear sight, make a noise. For some reason those nearby freeze when you do that while the distant ones move about, perhaps in agitation or indecision. As soon as you can, stop a burrower and focus the X-ray scanner on it. The computer needs more physiological data for the translation program.”
He did as she asked a few minutes later, then returned his attention to the screen.
The patches on the burrower’s back and underside had an irregular, shredded look around the edges, Martin saw, and the individual threads were either tied or entangled with the underlying stubble securely enough for them to remain in position while the creature was burrowing.
“They might be decoration, or perform an identification function,” he said thoughtfully. “But I’ve a feeling they are more important than that. If we could get one of them to remove its patch we…”
He broke off because Beth was laughing.
“A being with pieces of material attached firmly, to its body suggests one thing to me,” she said, “that it normally keeps parts of its body covered up. If I had a nudity taboo and some off-worlder asked me to take off my…”
“Point taken,” Martin said, very quietly. “But I’ve had an idea. Increase your volume and I’ll explain…”
It had been apparent for some time that when Beth spoke to him via the headset there was no reaction from any of the nearby burrowers, so presumably they could not or were not carrying the equipment to receive radio frequencies. However, when he replied to her, even though he was using the headset only with the helmet external speaker switched off, the nearer burrowers showed a mild reaction and stopped moving, while the distant ones displayed something like agitation. Plainly they were hearing his voice, loudly if not clearly.
The sound was being transmitted through the air of his life-support module, the heavily insulated metal structure of the digger, and outward via the densely packed soil to the distant burrowers. For his voice to travel through such diverse media over a distance, the beings receiving it would have to possess hypersensitive hearing.
“…And I wouldn’t mind betting,” he ended, “that the distant burrowers are not wearing patches, and all of the nearby ones are.”
“I don’t follow you,” Beth said.
“They aren’t the burrower equivalent of a bikini,” he replied softly, “just simple, old-fashioned earmuffs.”
“You’re right,” she said excitedly, “and my omniscient computer friend here confirms it. The three distant burrowers are moving in, but at different rates of speed. A projection suggests that they will space themselves out into close, medium, and longer distances. The others haven’t moved and are probably awaiting instructions from their unprotected superiors. What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to be very, very quiet,” Martin said, “and turn my external mikes to maximum sensitivity. I should be able to hear something while instructions are being passed. But I’ll have to listen very hard because people with hypersensitive hearing will not have loud voices.”
“While you are being very, very quiet,” Beth asked, “what can I do?”
“You can keep on talking so I won’t go psycho from sensory deprivation,” he replied. “Keep showing me the overall picture from the lander’s sensors; they are more accurate than mine and fiddling about at my console might cause noise. And get your friend working on a translator program for the burrower language, as soon as we hear them using it.
“After that,” he added, “will come the difficult part.”
Martin began his long wait in the triply distilled silence of this unnaturally quiet world. There was the subterranean silence all around him, the silence of his vehicle’s inactive equipment, and his own personal silence which, to his straining ears, sounded positively noisy. His breathing was the biggest noise problem. Subjectively it had begun to sound like a gale blowing through high trees, but he experimented with it until he found that breathing very slowly through his nose was quietest. He increased the sensitivity of his external mikes once again, and listened.
But there was nothing to hear except an occasional trickle of soil falling from the tunnel roof with an over-amplified crash and rumble which made him wince. The sound of his suit rustling against the couch was even louder as he pointed to his ear.
“I can’t hear anything either,” Beth said. “But here is an update you’ll want to see.”
The picture on his screen was of a burrower viewed from the top and side, showing the positions of the being’s internal organs, connective ducting, and musculature, with close approximations of the circulatory and nervous systems.
“According to our mastermind here,” she went on, “the creature’s metabolism is not all that exotic. It is warm-blooded and oxygen-breathing, with the capability of metabolizing nutrient and oxidants from the soil and of breathing either water or air trapped in subsurface caves. The mouths have a triple valve arrangement which enables them to eat, drink, or breathe through the same orifices, and the longtitudinal flexibility of the body would allow it to undulate through water at a fairly high speed. In the hunting role it would be much more effective in water than on the ground, although the indications are that most of its evolutionary history was spent on or under the land.”
The physiological details were sharp and solidly colored where the functions and positions were known with certainty, fainter and with varying intensities of shading when they were based on data stored in the main computer covering other and.similar life forms encountered throughout the galaxy. But even then, the probabilities deemed worthy of display verged on certainties. Only in the area concerned with the nerve connections between the body surface and brain was there serious doubt.
The nerve linkages were so uniform and numerous that there was no way of telling where the organs of sight, hearing, smell, or touch were situated. The brain was housed behind and protected by a hollow in the wedge-shaped beak. For a creature which had less than one third the body mass of an Earth-human, the brain was exceptionally large. According to the computer, the possession of intelligence was a certainty.
Soon, Martin hoped, they would begin to show it.
As the computer had predicted, the three burrowers who were directing operations spaced themselves out so that any sounds emanating from the digger would be received by them in diminishing intensity. The nearest one had positioned itself inside die globe of subordinates, who had paired off and were taking turns to crawl onto each other’s backs.
“What are they doing?” Beth asked, in a carefully neutral voice.