Major Operation sg-3

by James White

  “Not a slaughterhouse, Major, a battlefield,” said Conway smugly. “You expect to find doctors on a battlefield …

  But they could not wait for Camsaug to start its vacation-Thornnastor’s reports, the samples brought in by the scout ships and their own unaided eyes left no doubt about the urgency of the situation.

  Meatball was a very sick planet. Surreshun’s people had been much too free in the use of their newly discovered atomic energy. Their reason for this was that they were an expanding culture which could not afford to be hampered by the constant threat of the massive land beasts. By detonating a series of nuclear devices a few miles inland, taking good care that the wind would not blow the fallout onto their own living area, of course, they had killed large areas of the land beast. They were now able to establish bases on the dead land to further their scientific investigation in many fields.

  They did not care that they spread blight and cancer over vast areas far inland-the great carpets were their natural enemy. Hundreds of their people were stopped and eaten by the land beasts every year and now they were simply getting their own back.

  “Are these carpets alive and intelligent?” asked Conway angrily as their scout ship made a low-level run over an area which seemed to be afflicted with advanced gangrene. “Or are there small, intelligent organisms living in or under it? No matter which, Surreshun’s people will have to stop chucking their filthy bombs about!”

  “I agree,” said Edwards. “But we’ll have to tell them tactfully. We are their guests, you know.”

  “You shouldn’t have to tell a man tactfully to stop killing himself!”

  “You must have had unusually intelligent patients, Doctor,” said Edwards dryly. He went on, “If the carpets are intelligent and not just stomachs with the attachments for keeping them filled they should have eyes, ears and some kind of nervous system capable of reacting to outside stimuli—”

  “When Descartes landed first there was quite a reaction,” said Harrison from the pilot’s position. “The beastie tried to swallow us! We’ll be passing close to the original landing site in a few minutes. Do you want to look at it?”

  “Yes, please,” said Conway. Thoughtfully, he added, “Opening a mouth could be an instinctive reaction from a hungry and unintelligent beast. But intelligence of some kind was present because those thought controlled tools came aboard.”

  They cleared the diseased area and began to chase their shadow across large patches of vivid green vegetation. Unlike the types which recycled air and wastes these were tiny plants which served no apparent purpose. The specimens which Conway had examined in Descartes’ lab had had very long, thin roots and four wide leaves which rolled up tight to display their yellow undersides when they were shaded from the light. Their scout ship trailed a line of rolled-up leaves in the wake of its shadow as if the surface was a bright green oscilloscope screen and the ship’s shadow a high-persistency spot.

  Somewhere in the back of Conway’s mind an idea began to take shape, but it dissolved again as they reached the original landing site and began to circle.

  It was just a shallow crater with a lumpy bottom, Conway thought, and not at all like a mouth. Harrison asked if they wanted to land, in a tone which left no doubt that he expected the answer to be “No.”

  “Yes,” said Conway.

  They landed in the center of the crater. The doctors put on heavy duty suits as protection against the plants which, both on land and under sea, defended themselves by lashing out with poison-thorn branches or shooting lethal quills at anything that came too close. The ground gave no indication of opening up and swallowing them so they went outside, leaving Harrison ready to take off in a hurry should it decide to change its mind.

  Nothing happened while they explored the crater and immediate surroundings, so they set up the portable drilling rig to take back some local samples of skin and underlying tissue. All scout ships carried these rigs and specimens had been taken from hundreds of areas all over the planet. But here the specimen was far from typical-they had to drill through nearly fifty feet of dry, fibrous skin before they came to the pink, spongy, underlying tissue. They transferred the rig to a position outside the crater and tried again. Here the skin was only twenty feet thick, the planetary average.

  “This bothers me,” said Conway suddenly. “There was no oral cavity, no evidence of operating musculature, no sign of any kind of opening. It can’t be a mouth!”

  “It wasn’t an eye it opened,” said Harrison on the suit frequency. “I was there … here, I mean.”

  “It looks just like scar tissue,” said Conway. “But it’s too deep to have been formed only as a result of burning by Descartes’ tail flare. And why did it just happen to have a mouth here anyway, just where the ship decided to land? The chances against that happening are millions to one. And why haven’t other mouths been discovered inland? We’ve surveyed every square mile of the land mass, but the only surface mouth to appear was a few minutes after Descartes landed. Why?”

  “It saw us coming and …” began Harrison.

  “What with?” said Edwards.

  … Or fit us land, then, and decided to form a mouth …

  “A mouth,” said Conway, “with muscles to open and close it, with teeth, predigestive juices and an alimentary canal joining it to a stomach which, unless it decided to form that as well, could be many miles away- all within a few minutes of the ship landing? From what we know of carpet metabolism I can’t see all that happening so quickly, can you?”

  Edwards and Harrison were silent.

  “From our study of the carpet inhabiting that small island to the north,” said Conway, “we have a fair idea of how they function.”

  Since the day after their arrival the island had been kept under constant observation. Its inhabitant had an incredibly slow, almost vegetable, metabolism. The carpet’s upper surface appeared not to move, but it did in fact alter its contours so as to provide a supply of rainwater wherever needed for the plant life which recycled its air and wastes or served as an additional food supply. The only real activity occurred around the fringes of the carpet, where the great being had its mouths. But here again it was not the carpet itself which moved quickly but the hordes of predators who tried to eat it while it slowly and ponderously ate them in with the thick, food-rich sea water. The other big carpets unlucky enough not to have a fringe adjoining the sea ate vegetation and each other.

  The carpets did not possess hands or tentacles or manipulatory appendages of any kind-just mouths and eyes capable of tracking an arriving spaceship.

  “Eyes?” said Edwards. “Why didn’t they see our scout ship?”

  “There have been dozens of scout ships and copters flitting about recently,” said Conway, “and the beast may be confused. But what I’d like you to do now, Lieutenant, is take your ship up to, say, one thousand feet and do a series of figure-eight turns. Do them as tightly and quickly as possible, cover the same area of ground each time and make the crossover point directly above our heads. Got it?”

  “Yes, but …

  “This will let the beastie know that we aren’t just any scout ship but a very special one,” Conway explained, then added, “be ready to pick us up in a hurry if something goes wrong.

  A few minutes later Harrison took off, leaving the two doctors standing beside their drilling rig. Edwards said, “I see what you mean, Doctor. You want to attract attention to us. ‘X’ marks the spot and an 'X' with closed ends is a figure-eight. Persistency of vision will do the rest.”

  The scout ship was criss-crossing above them in the tightest turns Conway had ever seen. Even with the ship’s gravity compensators working at full capacity Harrison must have been taking at least four Gs. On the ground the ship’s shadow whipped past and around them, trailing a long, bright yellow line of rolled-up leaves. The ground shook to the thunder of the tiny vessel’s jet and then, very slightly, it began shaking by itself.

  “Harrison!”

  Th
e scout ship broke off the maneuver and roared into a landing behind them. By then the ground was already beginning to sag.

  Suddenly they appeared.

  Two large, flat metal disks embedded vertically in the ground, one about twenty feet in front of them and the other the same distance behind. As they watched each disk contracted suddenly into a shapeless blob of metal which crawled a few feet to the side and then suddenly became a large, razor-edged disk again, cutting a deep incision in the ground. The disks had each cut more than a quarter circle around them and the ground was sagging rapidly inside the incisions before Conway realized what was happening.

  “Think cubes at them!” he yelled. “Think something blunt! Harrison!”

  “Lock’s open. Come running.”

  But they could not run without taking their eyes and minds off the disks, and if they did that they could not run fast enough to clear the circular incision which was being made around them. Instead they sidled toward the scout ship, willing every inch of the way that the disks become cubes or spheres or horseshoes-anything but the great, circular scalpels which something had made them become.

  At Sector General Conway had watched his colleague Mannon perform incredible feats of surgery, using one of these thought-controlled tools, an all-purpose surgical instrument which became anything he wanted it to be instantly. Now two of the things were crawling and twisting like metallic nightmares as they tried to shape them one way and something else-which was their owner and as such had more expertise-tried to shape them another. It was a very one-sided struggle but they did, just barely, manage to hamper their opponent’s thinking enough to allow them to get clear before the circular plug of “skin” containing the drilling rig and other odds and ends of equipment dropped from sight.

  “They’re welcome to it,” said Major Edwards as the lock slammed shut and Harrison lifted off. “After all, we’ve been taking specimens for weeks and it may give them something to think about before we broaden contact with shadow diagrams.” He grew suddenly excited as he went on, “With high-acceleration radio-controlled missiles we can build up quite complex figures!”

  Conway said, “I was thinking more in terms of a tight beam of light projected onto the surface at night. The leaves should react by opening and the beam could be moved very quickly in a rectangular sweep pattern like old-fashioned TV. It might even be possible to project moving pictures.”

  “That’s it,” said Edwards enthusiastically. “But how a dirty great beast the size of a county, who doesn’t have arms, legs or anything else, will be able to answer our signals is another matter. Probably it will think of something.”

  Conway shook his head. “It is possible that despite their slow movements the carpets are capable of quick thinking, that they are in fact the tool users we are looking for and that their enormous bodies undergo voluntary surgery whenever they want to draw in and examine a specimen which is not within reach of a mouth. But I prefer the theory of a smaller, intelligent life-form inside or under the big one, an intelligent parasite perhaps which helps maintain the host in good health by the use of the tools and other abilities, and which makes use of the host being’s 'eyes’ as well as everything else. You can take your pick.”

  There was silence while the scout ship leveled off on a course which would take it back to the mother ship, then Harrison said, “We haven’t made direct contact, then-we’ve just put squiggles on a vegetable radar screen? But it is still a big step forward.”

  “As I see it,” said Conway, “if tools were being used to bring us to them, they must be a fair distance from the surface-perhaps they can’t exist on the surface. And don’t forget they would use the carpet exactly as we use vegetable and mineral resources. How would they analyze life samples? Would they be able to see them at all down there? They use plants for eyes but I can’t imagine a vegetable microscope. Perhaps they would use the big beastie’s digestive juices in certain stages of the analysis.

  Harrison was beginning to look a little green around the gills. He said, “Let’s send down a robot sensor first, to see what they do, eh?”

  Conway began, “This is all theory …

  He broke off as the ship’s radio hummed, cleared its throat and said

  briskly, “Scout ship Nine. Mother here. I have an urgent signal for Doctor

  Conway. The being Camsaug has gone on vacation wearing the tracer the

  Doctor gave it. It is heading for the active stretch of shore in area

  H-Twelve. Harrison, have you anything to report?”

  “Yes, indeed,” replied the Lieutenant, glancing at Conway. “But first I think the Doctor wants to speak to you.”

  Conway spoke briefly and a few minutes later the scout ship leaped ahead under emergency thrust, ripping through the sky too fast for even the leaves to react to its shadow and trailing an unending shock wave which would have deafened anything on the surface with ears to hear. But the great carpet slipping past them might well number deafness among its many other infirmities which now, Conway thought angrily, included a number of well-developed and extensive skin cancers and God alone knew what else.

  He wondered if a great, slow-moving creature like this could feel pain, and if so, how much? Was the condition he could see confined to hundreds of acres of “skin” or did it go much deeper? What would happen to the beings living in or under it if too many of the carpets died, decomposed? Even the rollers with their offshore culture would be affected-the ecology of the whole planet would be wrecked! Somebody was going to have to talk to the rollers, politely but very, very firmly, if it wasn’t already too late.

  All at once the horse-trading aspect of his assignment, the swapping of tools for medical assistance, was no longer important. Conway was beginning to think like a doctor again, a doctor with a desperately ill patient.

  At Descartes the copter he had requested was waiting. Conway changed into a lightweight suit with a propulsion motor strapped onto his back and extra air tanks on his chest. Camsaug had too great a lead for him to follow on foot, so Conway would fly out to the being’s present position by helicopter. Harrison was at the controls.

  “You again,” said Edwards.

  The Lieutenant smiled. “This is where the action is. Hold tight.”

  After the mad dash to the mother ship the helicopter trip seemed incredibly slow. Conway felt that he would fall flat on his face if it did not speed up and Edwards assured him that the feeling was mutual and that they would have made better time swimming. They watched Camsaug’s trace grow larger in the search screen while Harrison cursed the birds and flying lizards diving for fish and suiciding on his rotor blades.

  They flew low over the settled stretch of coast where the shallows were protected from the large predators of the sea by a string of offshore islands and reefs. To this natural protection the rollers had added a landward barrier of dead land-beast by detonating a series of low-power nuclear devices inside the vast creature’s body. The area was now so settled that doughnuts could roll with very little danger far inside the beast’s cavernous mouths and prestomachs and out again.

  But Camsaug was ignoring the safe area. It was rolling steadily toward the gap in the reef leading to the active stretch of coast where predators large, medium and small ate and eroded the living shore.

  “Put me down on the other side of the gap,” said Conway. “I’ll wait until Camsaug comes through, then follow it.”

  Harrison brought the copter down to a gentle landing on the spot indicated and Conway lowered himself onto a float. With his visor open and his head and shoulders projecting through the floor hatch he could see both the search screen and the half-mile distant shore. Something which looked like a flatfish grown to the dimensions of a whale hurled itself out of the water and flopped back again with a sound like an explosion. The wave reached them a few seconds later and tossed the copter about like a cork.

  “Frankly, Doctor,” said Edwards, “I don’t understand why you’re doing this. Is it scientifi
c curiosity regarding roller mating habits? A yen to look into the gaping gullet of a land beast? We have remote-controlled instruments which will let you do both without danger once we get a chance to set them up …

  Conway said, “I’m not a peeping Tom, scientific or otherwise, and your gadgetry might not tell me what I want to know. You see, I don’t know what exactly I’m looking for, but I’m pretty sure that this is where I can contact them—”

  “The tool users? But we can contact them visually, through the plants.”

  “That may be more difficult than we expect,” Conway said. “I hate to attack my own lovely theory, but let’s say that because of their vegetable vision they have difficulty in grasping concepts like astronomy and space travel or, as beings who live in or under their enormous host, of visualizing it from an outside viewpoint …

  This was just another theory, Conway went onto explain, but the way he saw it the tool users had gained a large measure of control over their environment. On a normal world environmental control included such items as reforestation, protection against soil erosion, efficient utilization of natural resources and so on. Perhaps on this world these things were not the concern of geologists and farmers but of people who, because their environment was a living organism, were specialists in keeping it healthy.

  He was fairly sure that these beings would be found in peripheral areas where the giant organism was under constant attack and in need of their assistance. He was also sure that they would do the work themselves rather than use their tools because these thought-controlled devices had the disadvantage of obeying and shaping themselves to the nearest thought source-this had been proved many times at the Hospital as well as earlier today. Probably the tools were valuable, too much so to risk them being swallowed and/or rendered useless by the savage and disorganized thinking of predators.