CHAPTER 21
A few minutes later the tunnel opened into a compartment whose wall-mounted lighting fixtures failed to illuminate the high and unsupported roof while showing the rock walls and sloping, uneven floor of a large, natural cavern. Plainly it had been utilized as an extension to the mine rather than a compartment hollowed out by Wem hands.
About two hundred yards ahead there was a wall, built from large, unfinished stones bound together by cement, sealing off the mouth of the cavern. The wall was pierced by ten large window openings, three of which still retained their glass while the others looked as if they had been boarded up for a very long time. Enough daylight came through the windows to bleach the artificial lighting to a dull, yellow glow and illuminate the rows of high, bench-like Wem tables that were separated by wide aisles into groups of twenty or more.
This was the communal dining area, Gurronsevas thought, then immediately corrected himself. Facing every rectangular group of tables there was a piece of equipment whose basic design, modified to suit the size and shape of its users, was common to virtually every intelligent species in the Federation — a blackboard and easel. Ranged against the cavern walls were side tables, some of them stacked with platters and eating utensils and others with books that looked as if they were disintegrating with age. Hanging from spikes driven into the rockface were a number of large, framed wall-charts which were cracked and faded almost to illegibility.
It was a school classroom as well as a dining area.
Fletcher was seeing everything that the team was seeing through their vision pick-ups, but the Captain kept talking about it anyway because the material was probably being recorded for onward transmission to Tremaar.“… The furniture and equipment is old,” Fletcher was saying. “You can see the corrosion stains where the original metal legs were attached, and the replacement wooden structure is not all that recent, either. The wall-frame supports are solid with rust, as well. They must be short of glass, too, otherwise they would not have boarded up the window frames in an area where daylight is available for classroom work.
“I missed seeing that wall on the cliff face,” Fletcher continued, a hint of apology creeping into its tone, “because it is built from local, weathered stone that is difficult to see because it is recessed and shaded by a rock overhang. I would say that the purpose of the wall is to protect rather than confine the younger inhabitants, because the cavern mouth opens onto a sheer cliff some five hundred feet above the valley floor. But we have the wall clearly in sight now. If an emergency withdrawal becomes necessary, Danalta and Gurronsevas can easily break through the boarded-up window frames. Doctor Prilicla can fly down and the rest of you can escape using the—”
“Not on the anti-gravity litter!” Naydrad broke in, its fur spiking in agitation. “That is primarily a ground-effect vehicle. At anything over fifty feet altitude it balances like a drunken Crrelyin!”
“—Using the tractor-beam,” Fletcher continued, “The ship is close enough for it to reach you and lift you down one at a time.”
“Captain,” said Prilicla, “the possibility of a life-threatening emergency occurring is very small. The emotional radiation of Tawsar and the other Wem in the mine we have not yet met was not hostile, and they are the beings with authority in this establishment. Our friend is radiating a mixture of shame, embarrassment and intense curiosity. It wants something from us, possibly only information. But it does not, as your colorful but anatomically inexact Earth saying has it, want our guts for garters. Please return to translation mode or Tawsar will think we are talking about it.”
Prilicla and Tawsar resumed talking, with occasional interjections from the other team members, but their conversation was becoming too medical to hold Gurronsevas’s interest. He moved over to the windows to look down on Rhabwar shimmering inside the dome of its meteor shield, and beyond it to the valley floor and the scattered groups of young Wem who were working there. The most distant group had formed into a line and was beginning to walk back towards the mine.
The ship had not yet reported the incident. Lacking Gurronsevas’s greater elevation, the watch-keeping officer would not have seen them.
He bent an eye to look behind him where Prilicla and Murchison were demonstrating the uses of the litter’s handheld scanner on Naydrad and each other, but not on Danalta whose internal organs were voluntarily mobile and far too confusing for a simple first lesson in other-species anatomy. Surprisingly, for a being of its advanced age and the inflexible habits of thought which usually accompanied that condition, Tawsar was quick to grasp the idea of making a non-invasive and painless internal investigation of a living body. It stared entranced at the internal organs, the beating hearts, the lungs in their different respiration cycles and the complex skeletal structures of the Cinrusskin Senior Physician, the Earth-human Pathologist and the Kelgian Charge Nurse.
It was inevitable that Tawsar became curious and wanted to look into its own internal workings, which gave Prilicla the opening it needed to ask more personal medical questions.“… If you look closely at the hip and knee, here and here,” the Senior Physician was saying, “you can see the layers of cartilage which separate the joints and which are supposed to form a thin, frictionless pad between them. In your case, however, the joint interfaces are no longer smooth. The bone structure has deteriorated and become uneven, and the movement of the limb, combined with the pressure of your body weight on surfaces which are no longer smooth, has torn and inflamed the cartilage and generally worsened the condition, making physical movement both restricted and painful …”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” said Tawsar.
“I will,” Prilicla replied gently. “But before I do that you must be told something that you do know, that your condition is due to the aging process that is common to all species. In time, in varying lengths of time, because our life-expectancies are not the same, all of the beings you see around you will age, our physical and sometimes mental capabilities will deteriorate until eventually we will die. None of us can reverse the natural aging process, but with the proper medication and treatment the symptoms can be reduced, or their onset delayed, and the physical discomfort removed.”
Tawsar did not respond for a moment, and Gurronsevas did not need to be an empath to feel the Wem’s disbelief, then it said, “Your medication would poison me, or give me some foul, off-world disease. My body must remain healthy and clean, despite its infirmities. No!”
“Friend Tawsar,” said Prilicla, “we would not even try to help if there was the slightest risk to yourself. You do not realize, because until now you had no way of knowing, that there are many similarities between the Wem and the off-worlders represented here. With minor differences in composition we breathe the same air and eat the same basic types of food …”
The Cinrusskin’s pipe-stem legs and slow-beating wings began quivering, but only for a moment. It did not stop talking.“… Because of this, the ways that our bodies work, the processes of respiration, ingestion and waste elimination, procreation, and physical growth are all very similar. But there is one important and unique difference: we cannot catch a disease from you or from each other, or you from one of us. This is because the pathogens, the germs, which have evolved on one world are powerless to affect life-forms from another. After centuries of close and continuous contact on many worlds, this is a rule to which we have found no exception.”
Prilicla bypassed the translator again and said quickly, “There was a strong emotional reaction to the mention of food. I detected the same feelings of shame, curiosity and intense hunger. Why should a native of a famine-stricken world be ashamed of feeling hungry?”