For a while the miners made good progress, despite the early-morning chill. As the morning passed and temperatures rose, the tricorns began to congregate around the mine. Two of them had to be shot before the rest got the idea and thereafter kept at a respectful distance from the ring of guards. There seemed to be more of them than usual, Kendal thought—the new bevy was getting into the spirit of this thing with remarkable speed.
"Of course they are," Jaker, the man standing guard to Kendal's right, said when Kendal commented on it. "They're at least as intelligent as dogs or wolves."
"No way," another man down the line called back.
Kendal sighed. That argument had been going on for months now, with Jaker and Welles the main participants. Kendal himself leaned toward Jaker's side—the tall miner's reasoning usually made sense to him—but he was getting sick of the whole debate. What he wanted to know was something no one here could even take a stab at: why were the Houses so intelligent? What possible reason was there for an unmoving pile of rock to develop the intelligence necessary to learn an alien language just by listening to communicator conversations? In addition, Kendal had proved—at least to his own satisfaction—that the Houses were capable of imagination and abstract thought. The how of it was reasonably straightforward: current theory implied that a sufficiently large brain would automatically develop sentence, and the Houses were certainly big enough to hold a brain that size. But the why of it still drove him crazy.
Jaker and Welles were still arguing when Kendal tuned his mind back to the conversation. "Look at how fast these new ones figured out the lasers—" Jaker was saying.
A motion to Kendal's right caught his eye. One of the tricorns was moving forward. "Jaker!" he snapped, yanking his laser from its holster.
Jaker had been half-turned to shout at Welles; whipping back around, he brought his own weapon to bear, firing a second after Kendal's shot grazed the massive skull near the leftmost of the three serrated horns. The creature thudded to the ground; two more shots and it was dead.
Kendal turned back quickly to see a tricorn directly in front of him take a couple of heavy steps forward. He raised his laser, and the animal stopped. Almost reluctantly, it backed up to its original position.
"See?" Jaker said, just the slightest tremor in his voice. "They know when it's not safe to attack."
"All right, can it," Cardman Tan called from the pit, where the sounds of work had ceased. "Jaker, you give your brain a vacation like that again and I'll have your hide—if one of the tricorns doesn't get it first. That goes for all the rest of you, too. Stay alert, damn it!"
There were muffled acknowledgments from the guard ring. Wiping a layer of sweat from his neck, Kendal reflected that the strain of the past eight months was starting to be felt. He wondered if they would be able to hold out for five more.
The huge bins that had been set up nearby to store the ore had been designed to handle over a hundred tons each. As a result they were almost, but not quite, strong enough to be proof against the nighttime tricorn rampages; and when it came time to load the day's production, it was found that one of the conveyors had taken one too many dents and was inoperable. Loading the gravel via the remaining two naturally took more time than had been allowed, and as a result it was already after sundown before Kendal started for home. Even then his luck almost held, and he was nearly to the House before a tricorn caught his scent and charged.
Kendal's instinctive urge was to make a dash for it, but he knew a tricorn in musth could outrun him. So instead he stood his ground, laser on full power, and waited until he couldn't miss before firing. The shot hit directly between the deep-set eyes. Dodging to one side, Kendal fired again and again into the creature as its headlong rush carried it past him to crash against the side of the House.
Keeping one eye on the motionless tricorn, Kendal quickly collected his equipment and went inside. "Hello, House."
"You killed it," the deep voice said accusingly.
"Uh, yeah. Sorry, but I didn't have much choice in the matter."
"You could have let me lure it to me."
Kendal didn't answer. Whether or not the House's odor lure could have distracted the tricorn was an academic question: Kendal couldn't have let the House eat it in any case. After crushing a victim, the House digested it by forming a thin film of rock under it, attaching it to the House's own ceiling, after which it could be absorbed. But until the film was completed, the ceiling had to remain down—and for an animal the size of a tricorn the process could take a half-hour. Kendal couldn't risk being outside that long at night.
"Again, I'm sorry," he said at last. "There were a lot of tricorns out by the mine today. Maybe one will come out here tomorrow."
The House remained silent. Feeling uncomfortably like a rich man having a picnic in a slum, Kendal fixed his dinner and ate. He tried three or four times to strike up a conversation with the House, but his questions elicited only monosyllabic responses, and eventually he gave up. Settling down instead with one of his handful of books, he read for a while and then turned in.
The tricorn he had shot was still lying against the House when Kendal cautiously emerged the next dawn. A quick check showed that the animal had probably been dead on impact; Kendal's head shot had fried its brains. A thought struck him, and when he had finished stowing his nighttime things, he assembled his rock-cutter plasma-jet torch and returned to the carcass. A typical tricorn weighed in at something near a ton, and for once Kendal was glad that the tricorns' nocturnal activities made it unsafe to leave tools at the mine. The torch sliced the rock-hard carcass in half with only a little trouble; and by using the shoring pole as a lever, he managed to roll the pieces to the House's orifice. "House?" he called "I've got some food here for you. Wait until I get both parts inside before closing up, okay?"
A minute later the job was done. "Thank you," the House said, a little too grudgingly for Kendal's taste. The orifice puckered closed, and Kendal heard the dull thud as the domed ceiling came down with the force of a rock crusher.
"Any time," Kendal muttered as he turned and headed off toward the mine. That altruistic act had cost him time, energy, and a fair amount of power, and he was annoyed that the House wasn't more appreciative. But it didn't really matter that much. If feeding it put the House back in a reasonably good mood, it would be worth the trouble.
—
The day's work was uneventful, and Kendal was in good spirits as he returned home. "Hello, House," he called his usual greeting as he set the pole snugly in place.
There was no answer. "House?" he tried again. "You all right?"
As if in response, the orifice closed, sealing Kendal in. He breathed a little easier, his worst fear assuaged: clearly, the House was still alive. But why wasn't it speaking to him? He searched the walls with his eyes, looking for some clue. Two bulges in the wall near the orifice were undoubtedly the remains of the tricorn he'd killed; otherwise everything seemed as usual.
No, not quite. Kendal felt a shiver go up his back as he felt the vibrations through the soles of his boots. The House was talking to his fellows scattered through the hills. It was a normal enough occurrence—except that he knew that the House could handle two conversations at once when it wanted to. Clearly—painfully clearly—Kendal was being ignored.
Determined not to let it throw him, he prepared his dinner and afterwards tried to read. But he found it impossible to concentrate in the increasingly hostile atmosphere he could feel around him. More than once he actually considered spending the night outside, but common sense and stubbornness killed that idea. The House was simply in a bad mood, he told himself firmly as he finally switched off his lantern for the night.