Conway shook his head violently. He had the feeling that he had just said or thought of something important but he did not know what it was. He had to stay with his present train of thought if he expected to drag it out into the light again.
He went on, “The patient sees, experiences everything, by touch. So far our only area of common contact are the tools. They are thought controlled extensions of its sense of touch throughout and for a short distance above the patient’s body. Our own mental radiation and control are more concentrated and of strictly limited range. The situation has been that of two fencers trying to communicate only through the tips of their foils—”
He stopped abruptly because he was talking to an empty screen. All three repeaters glowed with power, but there was neither sound nor vision.
Harrison shouted, “I was afraid of this, Doctor. We strengthened the hull armor but had to cover the antenna housing with a plastic radome to allow two-way communications. The tools have found our weak spot. Now we are deaf, dumb and blind, too-and missing one leg because our port caterpillar tread won’t work.”
The digger had come to rest on a flat shelf of rock in a large cavern which angled steeply into the subsurface. Above and behind them hung a great mass of the creature’s body material from which there was suspended thousands of rootlets which joined and rejoined until they became thick, silvery cables writhing motionlessly across the cavern floor, walls and roof before disappearing into the depths. Each cable had at least one bud sprouting from it, like a leaf of wrinkled tinfoil. The more well developed buds quivered and were trying to take the shapes of the tools which were attacking the digger.
“This is one of the places where it makes the tools,” she said, using a spotlight as pointer, “or should I say grows them-I still can’t decide whether this is an animal or vegetable life-form basically. The nervous system seems to be centered in this area, so it is almost certainly part of the brain as well. And it is sensitive-do you see how carefully the tools avoid those silver cables while they are attacking?”
“We’ll do the same,” said Conway, then to Harrison, “That is, if you can move the digger on one track to that overhanging wall with the cables running along it, without crushing those two on the floor?”
Damage in this sensitive area could have serious effects on their patient.
The Lieutenant nodded and began rocking the digger forward and backward along the shelf until they were tight against the indicated wall. Protected by the sensitive cables above, the cavern floor below and the rocky wall on their starboard side, the tool attack was confined to their unprotected port side. They could once again hear themselves think, but Harrison pointed out firmly but apologetically that they could not climb the slope or dig their way out on one track, that they could not call for help and that they had air for only fourteen hours and then only if they sealed their suits to use their remaining tanked air.
“Let’s do that now,” said Conway briskly, “and move outside. Station yourselves at each end of the digger, under the cables and with your backs to the cavern wall. That way you will have to think off attacks from the front only-any tool trying to cut through the rock behind you will make too much noise to take you by surprise. I also want you far enough from my position amidships so that your mental radiation will not affect the tools which I will be trying to control …
“I know that smug, self-satisfied look,” said Murchison to the Lieutenant as she began sealing her helmet. “Our Doctor has had a sudden rush of brains to the head. I think he intends talking to the patient.”
“What language?” asked Harrison dryly.
“I suppose,” said Conway, smiling to show the confidence which he did not feel, “you could call it three-dimensional Braille.”
Quickly he explained what he hoped to do and a few minutes later they were in position outside the digger. Conway sat with his back to the port track housing a few feet from a water-filled depression in the cavern floor. There was a hole of unknown depth in the center of the depression where a cable or similar ore-extracting plant had eaten its way into the rock. To one side of him a group of seven or eight tools had merged together to encircle and squeeze the vehicle’s hull, and some of the armor was beginning to gape at the seams. Conway thought a break in the metal band and then he rolled it into the depression like a great lump of animated, silvery dough. Then he got down to work.
Conway made no attempt to protect himself against attacking tools. He intended concentrating so hard on one particular shape that anything which came within mental range would, he hoped, lose its dangerous edges or points.
Thought-shaping the creature’s outward aspect was easy. Within a few minutes there was a large, silvery pancake-a small-scale replica of the patient-lying in the center of the pool. But thinking three dimensionally of the mouths and their connecting tunnels and stomachs was not so easy. Even harder was the stage when he began thinking the tiny stomachs into expanding and contracting, sucking the gritty, algae-filled water into his scale model and expelling it again.
It was a crude, oversimplified model. The best he could manage at one time was eight mouths and connecting stomachs, and he was very much afraid that it bore the same relation to the patient that a doll did to a living baby. But then he began to add the creeping motions he had observed in smaller, younger strata creatures, keeping the area around the central depression motionless, however, and hoping that with the pumping motions of the stomachs he was giving the impression of a living organism. The sweat poured off his forehead and into his eyes, but by then it did not matter that he could not see properly, because the sections he was shaping were out of sight anyway. Then he began to think certain areas solid, motionless, dead. He extended these dead, motionless and detail-less areas until gradually the whole model was a solid, lifeless lump.
Then he blinked the sweat out of his eyes and started all over again, and then again, and suddenly the others were standing beside him.
“They aren’t attacking us anymore,” said Harrison quietly, “and before they change their minds I am going to try fixing that damaged track. At least, there is no shortage of tools.”
Murchison said, “Can I help-apart from keeping my mind blank to avoid warping your model?”
Without looking up Conway said, “Yes, please. I’m going to take it through the same sequence once again, but halt it at the point where the dead areas extend to at the present time. When I do that I would like you to think the positions of our incisions and extend and widen them while I seal the severed throat tunnels and think the feeding and transfusion shafts. You withdraw the excised material a short distance and think it solid-dead, that is-while I try to get across the idea that the remainder is alive and twitching and likely to stay that way.”
She caught on very quickly but Conway had no way of knowing if their patient had, or could, catch on. Behind them Harrison was at work on the damaged tread while before them their model of the patient and the effects of their present surgery became more and more detailed- right down to the miniature corrugated seals and what happened to the creature when one of them was collapsed. But still there was no indication from the patient that it understood what they were trying to tell it.
Suddenly Conway stood up and began climbing the sloping floor. He said, “I’m sorry, I have to move out of range for a minute to catch my mental breath.”
“Me, too,” she said a few minutes later. “I’ll join you … look!”
Conway had been staring at the darkness of the cavern roof to rest both his mind and his eyes. He looked down quickly, thinking they were him into the digger and, while Conway made contact with the surface, Murchison instinctively raised her hand in farewell to the cavern and the shapes of the tool models scattered across the shelf. She must have been thinking very hard about her good-bye because her last model raised its hand also and kept it there while the digger crawled slowly out of mental range.