The greenling stretched its senses to a refinement it hadn’t known it possessed, sensing details of its world that it had never seen before. Before, it had studied the world with childlike curiosity. It felt different now, driven to learn of its surroundings. So the greenling instantly detected two sizable new things climbing over the fence in a comer of the home-ground.
“Hey Janko, you and I are running neck and neck in the Who Screwed Up the Bug Tally,” Ed greeted Jan when she got to her workstation. Ed could be lighthearted now, because he’d gotten the bug going again.
The image seemed jerkier than before, with slow progress across re-golith rougher than the surface on the first part of the traverse. The patch of light thrown by the bug’s headlight wiggled like an amoeba.
“Come on, baby, come on,” Man-deep cooed at Cocytus.
Without warning, the ragged regolith gleamed in Cocytus’ headlight.
“Look! There!” Jan exclaimed.
“Yes!” Ed said triumphantly.
Shadowed by the impact cone in the center of a deeply shadowed crater, a whitish-gray pocket lay cra-died in the depths of Aitken. It could only be frozen volatiles. Ed directed the bug that way, zigzagging around rocks bigger than itself. Each lurch of the image shot a needle of suspense into Jan; she feared that any zig or zag might be the bug’s last movement. It seemed like ages until it reached the white stuff, which looked so much like old and dirtied snow that hope took Jan’s breath away. “Sample,” Jan whispered. “Quick.”
Ed said, “We better grab the core and go. The bug’s got terminal arthritis.”
“Transition control to me.” Seconds later, Jan was operating the bug’s core drill from her own workstation keyboard. “The drill’s deployed,” she reported tensely. Peter leaned over her shoulder. “Contact.” She keyed in the force control. “Low force. Resistance.” In a window in her workstation, she had EGAD results coming in. Highly probable H2O! They were in the money. She’d trained for this in simulations. Now she knew exactly what to do. Fatigue and worry vanished in a laserlike intensity of concentration. “Make that mid force. We’ve got penetration of the surface. —Hey!” The drill had stopped responding to Jan’s commands. “I’m not getting response! Maybe I’ve got a glitch on my end—Ed??”
Ed, punching his own backup controls, made a choking sound. “The drill arm locked up.”
“It’s not in deep enough to do any good at all,” Jan said in despair. Nothing Jan did could make the drill penetrate the surface any further. She tried toggling it in and out. The result was that when the drill finally froze up unalterably, it was in the half-retracted position, out of the regolith and extending over the bug’s head. There might be a trace of ice sticking to the tube; no more of a sample than that.
Mandeep cursed each of the robot’s lubricants by trade name. Murray said savagely, “Looks like this’ll be an early night after all!”
Peter shook his head so energetically that his shaggy hair flew from side to side. “Not yet. Look where the bug is. Only fifty yards from the crater rim. It’s a steep fifty yards. But the rim is in sunlight. A little solar heating might warm the bug up well enough—and long enough—to run back in and get the sample.”
“We do it,” Jan decided.
The things vaulting over the fence around the greenling’s home-ground were somewhat larger than the hospitable thing that lived in the home-structure. But that thing was semirooted; she always kept at least one appendage on the ground, and had never once proceeded over a fence. Moreover, rain made the hospitable thing flee into the home-structure, whereas these two seemed busy and energetic even though water poured from the sky and pooled on the ground. These had to be a different kind of thing—possibly a kind that needed wet air moisturizing their breathing organs in order to be active.
The greenling suspiciously perceived the two things dash toward the box affixed to the wall of the home-structure. Because the greenling could sense electromagnetic fields and radiation, it knew that the box admitted electricity into the structure. The hospitable thing liked living in a bath of electromagnetic field, with electricity streaming through the walls of her home; the greenling thought she might need such surroundings in order to live. All organisms had to have the right environment.
The two strange things made themselves briefly active in the proximity of the box. Electricity abruptly ceased flowing into the house-structure.
The greenling stiffened all its needles in alarm. The thing that lived in the structure would not want to have no electricity all around her. The lack might even hurt the hospitable thing.
These new things had to be Enemies. Enemies, right here on the greenling’s own home-ground.
It had never met an Enemy before. But its reflexes had been distilled from a millennium of war. With the deep-rooted patience that only a predatory plant can muster, the greenling waited in the hope that the invaders would stray toward it.
To the greenling’s bloodless, clear joy, the enemy things approached the wall-opening that greenling stood near. Too slowly to catch a mobile organism’s attention, the greenling stretched itself closer, hardly stirring the molecules of the air as it parted them.
The two enemy things touched the wall-opening, which was tightly shut, as always when the hospitable thing wasn’t proceeding through the opening. The greenling now understood what the enemies wanted: to break into the home-structure, which was just as bad as their intruding onto the home-ground, because it was all the greenling’s very own territory.
The invading things paid the greenling no heed. And no wonder its presence didn’t matter to them: they were too far away for it to reach, and too interested in the wall-opening for the greenling to hope that they would blunder into its eager branches. The greenling’s frustration made the cluster in its core throb with strange, painful tension.
One of the things extended a long, sharp part. It touched the edge where the wall-opening met solid wall. Knowing that the edge was a relatively weak part of the home-structure, the greenling watched anxiously.
The enemy thing began boring into the structure.
Primed by a lifetime of instructive dreaming, the greenling recognized boring. The greenling instantly associated what it was perceiving with one, only one possible, galvanizing reality. Insects. Plant-borers. Destroyers.
A new feeling rushed through the greenling as though heated water had entered its roots and instantly traveled to the ends of its twigs. For the first time in its life, the greenling was outraged.
The cluster in its core pulsed with expectancy so intense that it hurt. In the instant before the greenling could not withstand the sensation any longer, it suddenly knew what the cluster existed for.
The greenling did not have to wait at all. The home-boring enemies were close enough already. The greenling had weapons of its very own.
The cold-racked robot slowly, painfully retreated up the crater wall. They had turned off the headlight to save the battery. The image showed nothing but a black bowl of landscape with bright untwinkling stars above it.
Go up and out: it was simple. It was also incredibly tedious to watch. Jan’s neck muscles tied themselves in a painful macrame of tension knots.