Part 6

"The attached borer," Lampert explained to the guide, "goes down to any depth I set, up to two hundred fifty meters. It can produce any of the three normal types of earthquake wave, singly or in any combination, with sufficient intensity to be detected at a range of over two kilometers in reasonably well-conducting rock. The small cylinders are detectors, equipped not only to receive and analyze the wave coming through the ground but to measure electronically their location with respect to each other and the main station. I can use as many of them as I please, up to the full dozen; but they can be planted only a little way below the surface. There exists equipment for getting readings at depths comparable to that of the transmitter, but I don't have it. As it stands, by spotting the receivers carefully I can get a pretty good picture of the formations for a radius of a kilometer and a depth even greater with ten minutes measuring--and ten hours computing."

"How far out do you plan to place these receivers?" the guide asked pointedly.

"Well--I hadn't made a detailed plan of that. I'd rather like to have them in radiating lines of three, the lines spreading about fifteen degrees, and the individual cylinders about two hundred meters apart."

"And just how were you going to place them? I gather that someone has to walk the best part of four kilometers--or do these things fly, in addition to their other abilities?"

"Er--someone walks. I thought perhaps, since you don't like the idea of my going alone through the jungle, that I might stand guard over Take in the pit while you set them out."

"Hmm." The guide did not explode, to Lampert's relief. It had not occurred to the scientist that the job of wandering around a hole in the ground waiting for animals which never came might get a little boring to a man of McLaughlin's background. "Let's go over first and see how Dr. Mitsuitei is getting along. I guess you could stand over him with a gun for half an hour. Of course, the cover runs dangerously close to the pit. Maybe we'd better burn it off to a safer distance--still, I guess that won't be necessary. You can stand out here where it's relatively clear, and see all the approaches to the pit. Something might jump in without your having time to hit it, and you'd at least see it and could get there fast enough to do any shooting necessary."

They approached the hole and looked in. Mitsuitei was working busily. A fair quantity of earth lay spread on the rock, and some two thirds of the length of the crack had been excavated to a depth of perhaps a quarter of a meter. The geophysicist attracted the little man's attention and told him of the plan; Mitsuitei nodded and bent once more to his work.

The Felodon was becoming restless. It could hardly be hungry as yet; but it was on its feet, snarling silently as it had when the helicopter first entered its ken. For perhaps a minute it stood; then, with the same air of determination it had shown days before and scores of kilometers away, it began to thread its way through the underbrush toward the river--and the digging site.

* * * * *

"I'll stand where you suggested, and never take my eyes off the pit," Lampert promised.

"Then I'll come back to find you missing," replied the guide. "You're guarding yourself too, remember. Don't keep your eyes on anything. Keep them moving."

He finished distributing the little cylinders in the various pockets of his outer clothing, and moved off in the direction Lampert had indicated. He looked back frequently, but each time saw the scientist alert. When the underbrush finally cut off the view, he refused to worry too much.

Actually, McLaughlin had gone to considerable pains to make the jungles of Viridis sound more dangerous than they really are. His conscious motive was to make the inexperienced members of the party alert enough for their own safety. It was quite true that a man could be killed in quite a variety of ways in those rain forests. There was a distinct possibility, however, that he also wanted to impress them with the importance of his services.

He did not, therefore, suffer much from anxiety during his walk, though on the other hand he wasted no time. He had, of course, only a rough idea of the distance he had traveled, though he was able to keep his direction with a small impulse-compass tuned to the seismic apparatus and forming part of its regular equipment.

He dropped three of the cylinders at the required intervals, as nearly as he could guess, forcing each a little way into the ground as Lampert had shown him; then he turned at right angles, walked what he hoped was the right distance and started back toward the site, planting equipment as he went. Out again, in again; and the last of the dozen tubes was in the ground.

Mitsuitei's shovel scraped deeper.

Lampert, glancing up and around every few seconds, made minute adjustments to the controls of his seismic apparatus. Its little mole robot had started on its downward trip.

The Felodon lurked thirty yards from the point where Lampert was standing, protected from his sight by the undergrowth and by one of the piles of dirt thrown up by the machine which had dug the pit. It seemed to be looking through the soil at the spot where the man was. The snarl was still on its face, but no muscle moved in its long body. It had been there for minutes without moving; it had frozen similarly when McLaughlin had passed it on his way out. Now it simply stood and waited.

On a cliffside kilometers away, Ndomi Sulewayo gave utterance to the first profanity Krendall had ever heard him use. They were on opposite sides of the block containing the fossil, so neither could see the other. Krendall, naturally, asked what was wrong.

"Don't tell me a bug got through one of these suits!"

"Worse, if possible. I told you this foreleg--" both had been carefully avoiding the use of such words as "arms"--"was sticking out sideways, so that I was afraid we might have cut off part of it in digging the tunnel."

Krendall nodded. "I remember. Did we?"

"I don't know."

"Eh? How come? I should think there'd be no doubt, one way or the other, if you have that much of the limb clear."

"Well, I haven't. I got as far as the bone goes--and right there I run out of tuff and into the limestone. If there's anything more, it's in an entirely different kind of rock, which is a trifle unlikely; but I'm going to have to check the blocks we cut from this part of the tunnel in order to make sure, and I don't look forward to the job at all." Krendall, properly sympathetic, came around to Sulewayo's side to look, and agreed that the search was necessary. The bone the younger man had been clearing ended in a joint of the type they had come to regard as typical of the creature's limbs; and this had occurred almost exactly at the surface they had left when first outlining the block with the saw.

Sulewayo, with a grunt of disgust, dropped his tools and went out into the rain, where the blocks cut from the cliff had been piled; Krendall, nobly sacrificing his personal inclinations, went along with him.

* * * * *

The search lasted for a long time; for a long time, in fact, after it became evident that it was going to be useless, for the chance of a perfect specimen is not easily thrown away. Finally, however, Krendall straightened up with a sigh.

"I guess we'll have to be satisfied with a restoration on one side," he said wearily. "I hope someone fifty years from now doesn't find another and discover that it's a sort of vertebrate fiddler crab, with one fore-limb ending in a paw or claw something like five times the size of the one on the other."

Sulewayo gave a gloomy assent, and the two went back to work in their respective tunnels.

Lampert saw McLaughlin the instant the underbrush made it possible, a fact which the guide later admitted was to the scientist's credit. He had, of course, been eagerly awaiting that return, for the transmitter was down to its first set depth and awaiting only the word that all receivers were in place. He called eagerly the moment the guide came within earshot.

"Everything down?" McLaughlin nodded.

"Everything down, as nearly as I could tell the way you said. How long will the readings take?"

"Only a few minutes. I'll take a couple of calibration shots from ten, fifteen and twenty meters' depth; then ones at fifty, a hundred and so on down as far as the mole will go. The shooting takes practically no time. It's the drilling that will hold us up."

"What then?"

"Well," Lampert smiled, "after that the usual procedure is to pick up the receivers and place them in a similar pattern in a new direction. If the field crew doesn't go on strike, we take the whole circle about the transmitter."

"I was afraid of that," grunted McLaughlin, as he stopped by the machine. "Well, let's go." The two men bent over the controls in a silence broken only by the scraping of Mitsuitei's shovel a dozen meters away. Lampert pressed his shot button, and a light on the panel flashed white momentarily. Below their feet, unfelt, the pulse of sound energy raced outward, echoing from the walls of deepstriking joints, from the boundaries between rocks of differing densities or elastic constants, from the walls of caverns deep in the limestone; some tiny portion of the energy from time to time encountering and affecting one of the tiny receivers McLaughlin had buried.

As each receiver gathered its bit of data, it retransmitted the information to the master unit; and everything was recorded on a single sheet as the milliseconds sped by. Long before a full second had passed, the first of the pulses had damped out as heat energy, and enough had been transmitted for the machine to obtain an adequate averaging record. The light blinked out again. Lampert nodded in satisfaction, and sent the mole downward once more.

"Look, good. Now the next set," he remarked.

* * * * *

As that pulse of seismic energy went forth, the Felodon rose to its full height, almost showing itself over the pile of dirt which was now its sole protection from the view of the men. The snarl on its face seemed to grow fiercer, if that were possible. For just an instant it seemed torn by conflicting desires. But that was for just an instant; any tendency to flee was smothered before it could take full form. There were two men now to worry about, and correspondingly less chance for the opportunity it had been awaiting. But the opportunity came. For just a moment the guide looked down at the panel which was absorbing Lampert's full attention. In that moment a green-and-lavender streak flowed over the heap of soil in a single leap and vanished into the pit. It must have been timed and guided by the mysterious sense McLaughlin had mentioned. It could see none of the men when it leaped, yet it timed the act for the moment none were looking, and landed directly on Mitsuitei.

The little archaeologist never knew what hit him. He died without a sound, and the killer, as though nothing lived anywhere in the neighborhood, settled down to its meal.

In this it must have been disappointed. The chemicals in the clothing designed to repel Viridian insects were equally obnoxious to the carnivore, and it made no serious attempt to get through them. However, not all of the body was protected in this way....

A second pulse went from the buried transmitter, and then a third, each from a point a few meters deeper than the last. Lampert's attention, of course, was centered on his controls. McLaughlin's eyes were once more sweeping restlessly over the surrounding landscape. Both heard the sounds coming from the pit, but neither interpreted them as anything more than the scraping of Mitsuitei's shovel. Neither, of course, considered them consciously. Their attention was finally attracted by something decidedly more noticeable.

The Felodon did not--or could not?--remain at its meal for more than a few moments. Its apparent indifference to the other men changed once more to what seemed like an internal struggle. An observer would have been sure, up to now, that it was using its peculiar sense to avoid the sight of men with guns; but that hypothesis failed now.

As Lampert started the mole robot downward once more, the Felodon leaped out of the pit toward the two men--regardless of the fact that McLaughlin was facing toward it.

VIII

McLaughlin saw the fanged head emerge, and his reflexes took over instantly. A streak of flame passed beside the leaping carnivore, exploding into a white-hot blossom of blazing gas as it contacted the pile of dirt on the far side of the pit. The guide ducked and rolled frantically sideward as another spring carried the creature toward him. Claws raked the air past his shoulder, and he fired again before the roll was complete and without any sort of aim.

Men and beast alike were spattered with white-hot droplets of metal from the seismic recorder as the second shot caught it squarely; and this seemed to be enough for the carnivore. Its next leap was away from the men instead of toward them. A geyser of steam and mud erupted beside it as Lampert finally got his weapon into action, and before the vapor had been beaten down once more by the rain the animal was out of sight behind the undergrowth. Both men sent several shots in the direction of the crackling bushes, but accomplished nothing except the felling of a tree or two and the starting of a bonfire which failed to make any headway against the rain.

Convinced that the Felodon had gone, the men ran to the pit. Lampert did not even take time out to glance at the wreckage of his equipment. There was just enough distance to cover to let each one realize that he had no idea how long the carnivore had been inside, and what the "scraping" sound might have been. Both slowed down as they approached the edge, not relishing what they expected to see. But this did not prove to be what they had expected. McLaughlin's face, already grim, turned gray as he saw that his first shot had not merely missed the animal at which it was aimed.

The bolt had struck the pile of dirt which had been left by the digging machinery at the far lip of the pit, and scattered most of it to the four winds. Perhaps half a ton had slid back into the hole from which it had originally been removed. There was no telling, from above, what the Felodon had done to Mitsuitei. The upper half of the archaeologist's body was buried completely, and the rest so liberally sprinkled with dirt that it was not at once identifiable.

The guide, using language strange even to the widely-traveled Lampert, leaped the three meters downward without bothering to use the ladder, seized a projecting leg and tried to draw the little man clear of the soil. Lampert, equally aware of the possible value of time but feeling that he would do little good with a broken leg, made the descent in the normal manner.

By the time he reached the bottom, McLaughlin had succeeded in dragging Mitsuitei almost completely clear. Lampert started forward to clear the mud from the still hidden face; then he stopped, and his stomach abruptly heaved, as he realized that the face was not hidden.

It was gone.

Mitsuitei had removed the head-gear and gloves from his protective suit for the normal reason--to see and manipulate better. The exposed head and hands had formed the Felodon's hasty meal.

* * * * *

The paleontologists saw the helicopter approaching this time, for they were working outside the tunnel. Between them on the ledge lay a block of stone some five feet long, two high and four wide--over two tons of material, all told, which had been worked out of the hole rather ingeniously by the men. Partial undercuts had been made, rollers worked out of stone by the cutter placed underneath, and the undercutting completed along a plane which sloped slightly upward into the tunnel. Of course the block had run off the rollers once it was out in the open, and the men could no more shift it another centimeter than they could return to Emeraude without the helicopter; but at least it was more or less accessible by air. They were chipping waste rock from the corners when the flyer appeared.

Sulewayo was first up the ladder, unburdened this time. They expected to have further use for the cutter. He noted that Lampert was alone in the machine, and promptly asked the question the geophysicist had been dreading.

"Where's Take? We've found something for him!"

"I'm afraid he won't appreciate it. He was killed a couple of hours ago by a Felodon." The news silenced even Sulewayo, and the expression on his junior's face actually startled Krendall when he climbed through the hatch.

"Ndomi! What in--" Lampert cut in with the same news he had given a moment before. Krendall reacted similarly; then slowly lowered himself into a seat.

He did not ask for details. Both men could see that this was not the time to put such a question to the pilot, though neither realized then the personal responsibility that Lampert felt over the incident. Krendall pulled a small fragment of tuff from his pocket, and looked at it thoughtfully.

Nothing further was said until the helicopter landed once more on the river near the "city." McLaughlin and the bundle which held what was left of Takehiko Mitsuitei were waiting on the bank, and were loaded aboard without a sound.

"It's early. Well take him back to Emeraude tonight, and come back for your work tomorrow," Lampert said, and lifted into the air without waiting for agreement.

"All right," replied Krendall, "as long as we come back. I don't think he'd have wanted us to stop. I'm going to find out about those green threads of his, too." Lampert nodded in approval. He had already formed a similar determination. For half an hour they flew on in silence.

The Felodon, half submerged in swamp water a kilometer downstream from the hill, heard the helicopter hum overhead. It seemed totally disinterested. For just a moment its fanged head pointed upward, then settled back again. There was a burn under its jaw, which had been inflicted by metal spraying from the ruined seismic apparatus. It was more comfortable to keep it under water....

"What was it you found, Ndomi, that you thought Take would want to see?" Lampert broke the long silence.

"It was when we were undercutting to get the block out of the tunnel," Sulewayo answered. "It's just some more of his green threads, in the tuff below the fossil. I brought a chunk of the rock showing them--here." Lampert nodded without taking his main attention from flying.

"Maybe that fossil of yours was intelligent after all, then," he said. "It seems to have died under very similar circumstances to Take--just above a set of those green threads. Maybe it was a member of a party like ours."

"Maybe. It certainly walked erect. The whole body structure shows that. If its brain were large enough and it had some sort of manipulating appendage I'd say it was virtually human--in capacity, that is. It was more of an amphibian anatomically."

"You have the block out in the open. Haven't you been able to study the head and limbs?"

"No, damn it." Krendall took over from his junior. "That was the big disappointment of the whole find. The specimen seems to be perfect except for missing skull and hands. Not a trace of either."

The helicopter wavered slightly in its path, then steadied as Lampert forced his attention back to his job. No one said anything for a long time, but everyone was thinking.

* * * * *

Someone else was thinking too, but wasn't keeping his thoughts to himself. They were being spoken, and virtually dripped with the thinker's fury.

"You sloppy, lazy parasites! I don't mind being stuck with a job and a deadline, even if it's a report that's due in only fifty years and needs about two hundred for a real conclusion. I'd sooner do it all myself than have some of you loose thinkers butting in! But if I'm to give my whole attention to it so I can produce something that won't be laughed at from here to the Magellanic Clouds, how about some of you watching what goes on on this planet? I didn't know those creatures were poking around until they began cutting sensor lines! Thirty, the protective life we've bred on the surface was your idea; why didn't you put it to work?"

The answering words tried to be soothing.

"Thirty was working--"

"Dreaming, you mean!"

"But I put one of the guardians on the job for him; it stopped the digging, didn't it?"

"Sure, after a lot of damage had been done. Do _you_ want to come out in the open and repair my wiring--with those space travelers poking around? If they find you at it, the Council won't just laugh at us; they'll excommunicate us and let this new species of intelligence clean us out. Why did it take so long for the guardian to do anything?"

"Well, I--"

"Well, you were dreaming too, weren't you. Blast it, you're here to do constructive thinking, not just to entertain yourself. Haven't you any self-respect? They actually dug out Sixteen!"

"What difference will that make? He's been dead too long to mind it himself, and anyway his brain and sensor connections were decently burned."

"But they wouldn't have had to dig much deeper to get someone who's _not_ dead, would they, Ninety-Five, my young friend? I suppose when they cut one or two of _your_ sensors you decided it was time to do something. Don't interrupt! I'm talking! This planet is supposed to be a quiet place where people can expect to spend a decent number of centuries at a time thinking, _without_ being disturbed. If you're too young or too lazy or just too stupid to do any real thinking yourself, at least you can devote a little time from your casual amusements to making sure that other people _can_. Shut up! You'll do some thinking now or find yourself in real trouble! Here's a problem for you to solve, and see that you solve it!

"You will get my sensors repaired, making sure not only that you're not caught at the job by these space travelers but also that they don't realize it's been done. In other words, don't just neatly fill in the hole they made after you've finished, so they can't help knowing they're not the only intelligences on this world. I don't know when they'll be back any better than you do, so you'll have to guess at your own time limit. You can booby-trap your canyon with landslides or anything else to keep yourself from being dug out, but if you fail in either problem and either of us looks likely to be found I personally guarantee you'll be found in the same shape as Sixteen. Now get to work, and let me think. If you think you can get help or sympathy from anyone else on the planet, good luck to you."

A wave of agreement spread along the countless miles of sensor wiring that extended through Viridis' crust, but Twenty-Five didn't feel or hear it. He had already taken the myriad of tendrils that terminated his arms away from the mosaic console that formed the end of the vast bundles of greenish threads coming through the walls of his cave, and had settled back in his lounging chair. That report--only fifty years to have it thought out--his full attention went back to it.