Probably not, since the control access port was still closed. They had gone to sleep without unsealing it, she realized. Molly muttered something under her breath that she would not have said in Buzz’ hearing, went over to the machine, and got it open. Whether the surrounding air was far enough below saturation to do them any good could not be checked by any of her armor’s instruments, but at least it could now circulate inside the device. There was a fairly strong breeze; the feathery growths that had caught the Shervah’s attention before she had remembered about the robot, and caused her to unfasten her safety line and leave Molly to carry the machine unaided the last few meters, were nodding and waving as the air moved by them. Carol had not had time for much of an examination; like her companion, she had been too exhausted and had fallen asleep even before reporting the new life form to the others. Molly had refastened the rope to her small friend’s armor, stated only that they were ashore and perhaps drying off, and lost consciousness herself. She had made several thirty-kilometer swims, in reasonably warm water, in her time; she had twice done hundred-kilometer hikes carrying cooking and shelter equipment under the three-quarters-normal gravity of New Pembroke; but she had never in her life felt as exhausted as when she and Carol had emerged from the river. Armor made a difference that low gravity could not offset.
Sure that Carol’s translator would not let anything but vital messages through as long as she needed sleep, Molly reported the present situation, including the new life, to the other students. A close look, taken at Jenny’s insistence, revealed that there were several different organisms, or at least several different shapes. She tried to make sense out of their engineering, but had no real success. There were waving fronds, evidently maximum-area organs; they could hardly be intended to intercept light, like the leaves they resembled. Rootlike bases proved not to be roots—not only did they fail to penetrate the rock, they did not even cling to it. The things could be picked up easily and set down elsewhere without obvious effect. The “roots” hung limply even in Enigma’s gravity during the transfer, and made no effort to rearrange themselves when the organism was put down again. The stemlike parts connecting roots and fronds did bend back and forth, without apparent aid from the wind, both while they were being held and while they were standing where she first saw them. None of it made sense to the Human. She reported as much.
Joe was unusually silent, even for him. The confirmation of highly organized life on Enigma had been hard for him to accept. However firmly an intelligent being may claim that it bows to facts, no mind accepts casually the readjustment of its basic beliefs; and Enigma had to be too young for this. Life might conceivably have gotten started—this seems to happen pretty early in the existence of most planets—but it could not by any recognized process have evolved so far in the time available. He badly wanted some of these organisms in Jenny’s lab; they needed detailed explaining.
Molly’s troubles, and later Molly’s report, had done something Joe’s work on the mapping robots had never managed to do; it had driven his wind-charting project entirely out of his mind for a time. With Charley and Jenny back underground busily but slowly building a three-dimensional diagram of the sponge that was Enigma’s crust, Joe would ordinarily have been standing in the tent in front of his display to see how the wind map was getting on. Instead, he stood motionless in the boat’s conning room before the controls, buried in thought, but doing nothing.
Even Carol’s more detailed information, when she finally woke up and began to study the organisms, took little of the Nethneen’s attention. He was already convinced of the facts and needed more details than Carol could supply to make them fit his ideas properly. The Shervah’s deepish voice alternating with Rimmore gratings—or Joe’s translator’s equivalents for these identifying qualities—were merely background symbols, not information. It took a direct call from Molly to bring him out of the trance.
“Joe! I suppose you’re back at your maps. Don’t they make sense yet? It will be nice to hear about something that does!”
“Sorry, Molly. I was allowing myself to get distracted, I’m afraid. I’m not in the tent. I’ll let you know as soon as possible what’s developed.”
The small being headed for the shop, however, not the tent.
Molly was too versed in Nethneen courtesy to pursue the matter until Joe chose to continue it. She turned her attention back to their local problem.
“Do you think this machine is going to dry out in any decent time, Carrie?” she asked.
The Shervah had not given the robot a thought since she had awakened; the vegetation, if that’s what it was, was much more interesting. She looked up with one eye and thought for a moment.
“I suppose so,” she said. “The rock seems to be dry enough. Maybe you should sit on it, or lean against it, to provide a bit more heat from your armor and speed up the process, if you can bear to stay away from these things. They don’t look a bit like the ones I saw up above.”
“Or the metal whiskers I told you about, which are just as likely to have been alive, I’d say now. Of course we’re a lot deeper, and it’s a lot warmer, and there might be a whole different ecology. It’s a pity we can’t stay here long enough to study it carefully.”
“Why can’t we?” asked Carol in surprise.
“Because the moment this robot dries out, we’ve got to drive it along the river in the hope of meeting the others. If we don’t make contact with some part of this rock sponge that they have mapped, none of the beautiful specimens you’re collecting there will ever get to a lab. We may be able to come back, and I’m as curious as you are, but I want to keep on living, too. Come on, little friend, be sensible.”
“I suppose you’re right. All right, you turn your heat exhaust on the robot; I’ll keep working on these things and collecting what seems best, while you get the machine dried out. All right?”
“All right. But I suspect your armor is using its refrigerator now, too, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes; but yours is a lot bigger and working a lot harder with all the heat you generate. Find out from Charley and Jenny whether they’ve found any more quick ways down like ours.”
“There was one, I thought” came Charley’s voice. “It was a really terrific wind; but it led to a passage too narrow for my mapper. I didn’t report it because I didn’t want to disappoint you. I’m still going down wherever there’s a choice, and so is Jenny; and we’re working our way south.”
“Which may not be the right direction any more,” Molly couldn’t help remarking.
“Maybe, but we have nothing else to go by. After all, we needn’t worry; a lot of this planet seems to be open space, and the radars do a cavern very quickly. If it keeps the same average, we should be able to map the whole volume in barely two thirds of a million years—a good deal less if Joe will build another robot and join us.” Charley’s dead-pan remark completely silenced even Carol for a moment, and before cither she or Molly could think of anything to say, the Kantrick went on. “The real need, of course, is another river to follow down. The farther down, the fewer the branches, one would expect. I’m getting more and more convinced there must be a sort of ocean somewhere below, and your river and any other must lead to it. If nothing else, working our way in what was your direction should get us to your river or one of its tributaries.”