Kator allowed the Expedition a shift in which to celebrate. He did not join the celebration himself or swallow one of the short-lived bacterial cultures that temporarily manufactured ethyl alcohol in the Ruml stomachs from carbohydrates the Expedition Members had eaten. Intoxication was an indulgence he could not at the moment permit himself. He called the Captain into conference in the Keysman’s private quarters.
“The next stage,” Kator said, “is, of course, to send a man down to examine this underground area.”
“Of course, sir,” said the Captain. The Captain had swallowed one of the cultures, but because of the necessity of the conference had eaten nothing for the last six hours. He thought of the rest of the Expedition gorging themselves in the gathering room and his own hunger came sharply on him to reinforce the anticipation of intoxication.
“So far,” said Kator, “the Expedition has operated without mistakes. Perfection of operation must continue. The man who goes down on to the planet of the Muffled People must be someone whom I can be absolutely sure will carry the work through to success. There’s only one individual in this Expedition of whom I’m that sure.”
“Sir?” said the Captain, forgetting his hunger suddenly and experiencing an abrupt chilliness in the region of his liver. “You aren’t thinking of me, are you, Keysman? My job with the ship, here—”
“I am not thinking of you.”
“Oh,” said the Captain, breathing freely. “In that case… while I would be glad to serve…”
“I’m thinking of myself.”
“Keysman!”
It was almost an explosion from the Captain’s lips. His whiskers flattened back against his face.
Kator waited. The Captain’s whiskers slowly returned to normal position.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “Of course, you can select whom you wish. It’s rather unheard of, but… Do you wish me to act as Keysman while you’re down there?”
Kator smiled at him.
“No,” he said.
The Captain’s whiskers twitched slightly, involuntarily, but his face remained impassive.
“Who, then, sir?”
“No one.”
This time the Captain did not even explode with the word of Kator’s title. He merely stared, almost blindly at Kator.
“No one,” repeated Kator, slowly. “You understand me, Captain? I’ll be taking the keys of the ship with me.”
“But—” the Captain’s voice broke and stopped. He took a deep breath. “I must protest officially, Keysman,” he said. “It would be extremely difficult to get home safely if the keys were lost and the authority of a Keysman was lacking on the trip back.”
“It will be impossible,” said Kator, evenly. “Because I intend to lock ship before leaving.”
The Captain said nothing.
“Perfection, Captain,” remarked Kator in the silence, “can imply no less than utter effort and unanimity—otherwise it isn’t perfection. Since to fail of perfection is to fail of our objective here, and to fail of our objective is to render the Expedition worthless—I consider I am only doing my duty in making all Members of the Expedition involved in a successful effort down on the planet’s surface.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Captain woodenly.
“You’d better inform the Expedition of this decision of mine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go ahead then,” said Kator. The Captain turned toward the door. “And Captain—” The Captain halted with the door half open, and looked back. Kator was standing in the middle of the room, smiling at him. “Tell them I said for them to enjoy themselves—this shift.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Captain went out, closing the door behind him and cutting off his sight of Kator’s smile. Kator turned and walked over to the table holding his keys, his family badge, his papers and the cube containing the worm. He picked up the cube and for a moment held it almost tenderly.
None of them, he thought, would believe him if he told them that it was not himself he was thinking of, but of something greater. Gently, he replaced the cube among the other precious items on the table. Then he turned and walked across the room to squat at his desk. While the sounds of the celebration in the gathering room came faintly through the locked door of his quarters, he settled down to a long shift of work, planning and figuring the role of every Member of the Expedition in his own single assault upon the secret place of the Muffled People.
The shift after the celebration, Kator set most of the Expedition Members to work constructing mechanical burrowing devices which could dig down to, measure and report on the outside of the underground area he wished to enter. Meanwhile, he himself, with the help of the Captain and two specialists in such things, attacked the problem of making Kator himself into a passable resemblance of one of the Muffled People.
The first and most obvious change was the close-clipping of Kator’s catlike whiskers. There was no pain or discomfort involved in this operation, but so deeply involved were the whiskers in the sociological and psychological patterns of the adult male Ruml that having them trimmed down to the point of invisibility was a profound emotional shock. The fact that they would grow again in a matter of months—if not weeks—did not help. Kator suffered more than an adult male of the Muffled People would have suffered if the normal baritone of his voice had suddenly been altered to a musical soprano.
The fact that the whiskers had been clipped at his own order somehow made it worse instead of better.
The depilation that removed the rest of the fur on Kator’s head, bad as it was, was by contrast a minor operation. After the shock of losing the whiskers, Kator had been tempted briefly to simply dye the close gray fur covering the skull between his ears like a beanie. But to do so would have been too weak a solution to the fur problem. Even dyed, his natural head-covering bore no relationship to human hair.
Still, dewhiskered and bald, Kator’s reflection in a mirror presented him with an unlovely sight. Luckily, he did, now, look like one of the Muffled People after a fashion from the neck up. The effect was that of a pink-skinned oriental with puffy eyelids over unnaturally wide and narrow eyes. But it was undeniably native-like.
The rest of his disguise would have to be taken care of by the mufflings he would be wearing, after the native fashion. These complicated body-coverings, therefore, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, with pun intended. Without them it would have been almost impossible to conceal Kator’s body-differences from the natives.
As it was, foot-coverings with built-up undersurfaces helped to disguise the relative shortness of Kator’s legs, as the loose hanging skirt of the sleeved outside upper-garment hid the unnatural—by Muffled People physical standards—narrowness of his hips. Not a great deal could be done about the fact that the Ruml spine was so connected to the Ruml pelvis that Kator appeared to walk with his upper body at an angle leaning forward. But heavy padding widened the narrow Ruml shoulders and wide sleeves hid the fact that the Ruml arms, like the Ruml legs, were normally designed to be kept bent at knee and elbow-joint.
When it was done, Kator was a passable imitation of a Muffled Person—but these changes were only the beginning. It was now necessary for him to learn to move about in these hampering garments with some appearance of native naturalness.
The mufflings were hideously uncomfortable—like the clinging but lifeless skin of some loathsome creature. But Kator was as unyielding with himself as he was with the other Expedition Members. Shift after shift, as the rest of the Expedition made their burrowing scanners, sent them down and collected them back on the moon to digest the information they had discovered, Kator tramped up and down his own quarters, muffled and whiskerless—while the Captain and the two specialists compared his actions with tapes of the natives in comparable action, and criticized.