The ground trembled with the strain of pent-up pressures; Jary fell to his knees, not feeling the bruising impact. Behind him he heard the curses of the wardens and saw Orr struggle to keep his own balance up ahead. When his hands told him the tremor had passed, he began to crawl toward Orr, using his hands to feel his way, his palms cold with sweat. He could not compensate for unexpected motion; it was easier to crawl.
“Piper!” Orr jerked on the safety line. “Get up, you’re dragging the specimen box.”
Jary felt the wardens come up behind him, and heard one of them laugh. The goad of sudden sharp memory got him to his feet; he started on, not looking back at them. He had crawled after the first operation, the one that had killed his sense of touch - using his still-sensitive hands to lead his deadened body. The lab workers had laughed; and he had laughed too, until the fog of his re-personalization treatment began to lift, until he began to realize that they were laughing at him. Then he had taught himself, finally, to walk upright like a human being; to at least look like a human being.
Up ahead he saw Orr stop again, and realized that they must have reached the Split already. “Give me some more light up here.”
He moved forward to slacken the line between them and shined his lamp on the almost meter - wide crevice that opened across their path. The wardens joined him; Orr gathered himself in the pool of their light and made the jump easily. Jary moved to the lip of the cleft and threw the light of his headlamp down, down; saw its reflection on the oily, gleaming water surface ten meters below. He swayed.
“Don’t stand so close to the edge!”
“Just back up, and make the jump.”
“Don’t think about it - “
“Come on, Jary; we don’t have all day!”
Hyacin-Soong struck at his shoulder just as he started forward. With a choked cry of protest he lost his footing, and fell.
The safety line jerked taut, battering him against the tight walls of the cleft. Stunned and giddy, he dangled inside a kaleidoscope of spinning light and blackness. And then, incredulous, he felt the safety line begin to give…. Abruptly it let go, somewhere up above him, and he dropped six meters more to the bottom.
“Jary! Jary - ?”
“Can you hear us?”
Jary opened his eyes, dimly surprised that he could still see - that his headlamp still functioned, and the speakers in his suit, and his brain….
“Are you all right, Piper?”
Orr’s voice registered, and then the meaning of the words. A brief, astonished smile stretched Jary’s mouth. “Yes, Doctor, f - fine!” His voice was shaking. The absurdity of his answer hit him, and he began to laugh.
“Well? What happened?”
Jary noticed that his lunge for the box had driven him deeper into the mud; the water was up to his chest now. “I’ve g - got it. But I’m st - st - stuck in the mud; I’m sinking.” He glanced up at the external radiation meters inside his helmet. “Every dosimeter’s in the red; my suit’s going to overload f - fast.” He leaned back, trying to see Orr’s face past the convex curve of the cleft wall. He saw only a triple star, three headlamp beams far above him, shafting down between the vertical walls of the slit.
“Keep your head up so we can see you; we’ll throw you down a line.” He recognized Corouda’s voice, saw the rope come spiraling down into his piece of light. “Tie it around your waist.”
The end of the rope hung twisting half a meter above his head. He struggled upward, clinging to the wall, but his muddy gloves could not hold the slick fibers and he dropped back, sinking deeper. “It’s too short. I c - can’t do it.”
“Then tie on the specimen case, at least.”
“I can’t reach it!” He struck at the rock wall with his fist. “I’m sinking deeper, I’ll fry. G - get me out!”
“Don’t thrash,” Corouda said evenly, “you’ll sink faster. You’ll be all right for at least fifteen minutes in that suit. Find a handhold on the wall and keep it. We’ll be back soon with more equipment. You’ll be all right.”
“B - but - “
“Don’t let go of that case.”
“Yes, Doctor….” The triple star disappeared from his view, and he lost track of the cleft’s rim. He could touch both walls without stretching his arms; he found a low ledge protruding, got the specimen case and one elbow up onto it. Steam clouded his faceplate and he wiped it away, smearing the glass with water and mud instead. The trogs had grown quiet on the ledge, as if they were waiting with him. There was no sound but his own quick breathing; the trap of rock cut him off utterly from even the reassurance of another human voice. He was suddenly glad to have the trogs for company.
The minutes stretched. Huddled in his cup of light, he began to imagine what would happen if another earth tremor closed this tiny fracture of the rock … what would happen if his suit failed…. Sweat trickled down his face like tears; he shook his head, not knowing whether he was sweating with the heat of the mud or the strain of waiting. His suit could have torn when he fell; the radioactive mud could be seeping in, and he would never know it. He had been exposed to radiation in some of Orr’s experiments; it had made him sick to his stomach, and once all his hair had fallen out. But he had never had to see the flesh rot off of his bones, his body disintegrating in front of his eyes….
His numb hand slipped from the ledge, and he dropped back into the mud. He hauled himself out again, panting, sobered. He had too much imagination; that was what Orr had always told him. And Orr had taught him ways to control his panic during experimentation, as he had taught him to control his body’s biological functions. He should know enough by now not to lose his head. But there were still times when even everything he knew was not enough. And it was then that he came the closest to understanding what Piper Alvarian Jary had done, and why he deserved his punishment.
He relaxed his breathing, concentrating on what was tangible and reaclass="underline" the glaring moon-landscape of the mottled wall before his face, the bright flares of pain as he flexed the hand he had bruised against the stone. He savored the vivid sensory stimulation that was pain, that proved he was alive, with a guilty hunger heightened by fear. The gibbous, mirrorlike eyes of the trogs pooled at the view window of the box, reflecting light, still staring intently through him as if they saw into another world. He remembered that they could, and turned his head slightly, uneasily. He froze, as the small, beslimed face of another trog broke the water beside his chest; then two, and three … suddenly half a dozen.
Moving with a sense of purpose that he had never seen them show, they began to leap and struggle up the face of the wall - and up his own suit, as though he was nothing more than an extension of the stone. He stayed motionless, not able to do anything but stare as stupidly as his own captives. His captives … a trog dropped from his shoulder onto the ledge; they were all trying to reach the box. Had the captive ones called them here? But how? They were stupid, primitive; creatures with rudimentary brains. How could they work together?
But they were working together, clustered now around the box, some probing with long webbed fingers, the larger ones pushing and prying. They searched its surface with their bodies, oblivious to the light of his headlamp, as though the only way they could discover its nature was through their sense of touch. He remembered that they were blind to the segment of the EM spectrum that to him was visible light. He was only a part of the rock, in their darkness. And here in the darkness of the cave they were reasoning, intelligent creatures - when outside in the camp they had never shown any kind of intelligence or group activity; never anything at all. Why? Did they leave their brains behind them in the mud when they surfaced?