Major Operation sg-3

by James White

  When darkness fell they switched on the digger’s spotlights and played them around and watched thousands of eye plants open and close suddenly to this artificial sunshine, but still the strata creature refused the bait.

  “In the beginning the brute must have been curious about us,” said Conway, “and anxious to investigate any strange object or occurrence. Now it is simply frightened and hostile, and there are much better targets elsewhere.”

  The digger’s vision screens showed several transfusion and feeding sites under constant tool attack, and too many dark stains on the ground which were not of oil.

  “I still think,” said Conway seriously, “that if we could get close to its brain, or even into the area where the tools are produced, we would stand a better chance of communicating directly. If direct communication is impossible we might be able to artificially stimulate certain sections to make it think that large objects had landed on the surface, forcing it to draw off the tools attacking the transfusion installations. Or if we could gain an understanding of its technology that might give us a lever …”

  He broke off as Murchison shook her head. She produced a chart comprising thirty or more transparent overlays which showed the patient’s interior layout as accurately as six months’ hard work with insufficient facilities could make it. Her features fell into their lecturing expression, the one which said that she wanted attention but not admiration.

  She said, “We have already tried to find the patient’s brain location by backtracking along the nerve paths — that is, the network of rootlets containing metallic salts which are capable of carrying electrochemical impulses. Using test bores taken at random on the top surface and by direct observation from diggers, we found that they link up, not to a central brain, but to a flat layer of similar rootlets lying just above the subsurface. They do not join directly onto this new network, but lie alongside, paralleling it close enough for impulses to be passed across by induction.

  “Some of this network is probably responsible for the subsurface muscular contractions which gave the patient mobility before it took over this particular land mass and stopped climbing over and smothering its enemies, and it is natural to assume that the eye plants above and the muscles below has a direct connection since they would give the first warning of another strata creature attempting to slip over this one, and the subsequent muscular reaction would be almost involuntary.

  “But there are many other root networks in that layer,” she went on, “whose function we do not know. They are not color coded-they all look exactly the same except for minute variations in thickness. The type which apparently abstracts minerals from the subsurface rock can vary in thickness. So I would advise against artificial stimulation of any kind. You could very easily start a bunch of subsurface muscles to twitching, and the corpsmen up top would have localized earthquakes to contend with as well as everything else.”

  “All right,” said Conway irked for no other reason than that her objections were valid. “But I still want to get close to its brain or to the tool-producing area, and if it won’t pull us in we must go looking for it. But we’re running out of time. Where, in your opinion, is the best place to look?”

  She was thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Either the brain or the tool-producing area could be in a hollow or small valley in the subsurface where, presumably, the creature absorbs necessary minerals. There is a large, rocky hollow fifteen miles away, just here, which would give the necessary protection from below and from all sides while the mass of the overlaying body would save it from injury from above. But there are dozens of other sites just as good. Oh, yes, there would have to be a constant supply of nutriment and oxygen available, but as this is a quasi vegetable process in the patient with water instead of blood as the working fluid, there should be no problem in supplying a deeply buried brain …

  She broke off, her face and jaw stiffening in a successfully stifled yawn. Before she could go on, Conway said, “It’s quite a problem. Why don’t you sleep on it?”

  Suddenly she laughed. “I am. Hadn’t you noticed?”

  Conway smiled and said, “Seriously, I would like to call a copter to pick you up before we go under. I’ve no idea what to expect if we do find what we’re looking for-we might find ourselves caught in an underground blast furnace or paralyzed by the brain’s mental radiation. I realize that your curiosity is strong and entirely professional, but I would much prefer that you didn’t come. After all, scientific curiosity kills more cats than any other kind.”

  “With respect, Doctor,” said Murchison, showing very little of it, “you are talking rubbish. There have been no indications of unusually high temperatures on the subsurface, and we both know that while some e-ts communicate telepathically, they can only do so among their own species. The tools are an entirely different matter, an inert but thought-malleable fabrication which …” She broke off, took a deep breath and ended quietly, “There is another digger just like this one. I’m sure there would also be an officer and gentleman on Descartes willing to trail you in it.”

  Harrison sighed loudly and said, “Don’t be antisocial, Doctor. If you can’t beat 'em, let them join you.”

  “I’ll drive for a while,” said Conway, treating incipient mutiny in the only way he could in the circumstances, by ignoring it. “I’m hungry, and it’s your turn to dish up.”

  “I’ll help you, Lieutenant,” said Murchison.

  As Harrison turned over the driving position to Conway and headed for the galley, he muttered, “You know, Doctor, sometimes I enjoy drooling over a hot dish, especially yours.”

  It was shortly before midnight that they reached the area of the subsurface depression, nosed over and bored in. Murchison stared through the direct-vision port beside her, occasionally making notes about the tracery of fine roots which ran through the damp, cork-like material which was the flesh of the strata creature. There was no indication of a conventional blood supply, nothing to show that the creature had ever been alive in the animal rather than the vegetable sense.

  Suddenly they broke through the roof of a stomach and drifted down between the great vegetable pillars which raised and lowered the roof, drawing food-bearing water from the sea and expelling, many days later, the waste material not already absorbed by specialist plants. The vegetable stalactites stretched away to the limits of the spotlight in all directions, each one covered with the other specialized growths whose secretions caused the pillars to stiffen when the stomach had been empty for too long and relax when it was full. Other caverns, smaller and spaced closer together than the stomachs, simply kept the water flowing in the system without performing any digestive function.

  Just before they drifted to the floor Harrison angled the digger into diving position and spun the forward cutters to maximum speed. They struck the stomach floor softly and kept on going. Half an hour later they were thrown forward against their straps. The soft thudding of the cutter blades had risen to an ear-piercing shriek, which died into silence as Harrison switched them off.

  “Either we’ve reached the subsurface,” he said dryly, “or this beastie has a very hard heart.

  They withdrew a short distance, then flattened their angle of descent so that they could continue tunneling with their tracks rolling over the rocky subsurface and the cutters chewing through material which now had the appearance of heavily compressed and thickly veined cork. When they had gone a few hundred yards Conway signaled the Lieutenant to stop.

  “This doesn’t look like the stuff that brains are made of,” Conway said, “but I suppose we should take a closer look.”

  They were able to collect a few specimens and to look closely, but not for long. By the time they had sealed their suits and exited through the rear hatch, the tunnel they had made was already sagging dangerously and, where the wet, gritty floor met the tunnel sides, an oily black liquid oozed out and climbed steadily until it was over their ankles. Conway did not want to take too much of the stuff back with
them into the digger. From the earlier samples taken by drill they knew that it stank to high heaven.

  When they were back inside Murchison lifted one of the specimens. It looked a little like an Earthly onion which had been cut laterally in two. The flat underside was covered by a pad of stubby, worm-like growths and the single stalk divided and subdivided many times before joining the nerve network a short distance above them. She said, “I would say that the plant’s secretions dissolve and absorb minerals and/or chemicals from the subsurface rock and soil and, with the water which filters down here, provides the lubrication which allows the creature to change position if the mineral supply runs out. But there are no signs of unusual or concentrated nerve networks here, nor are there any traces of the scars which tools leave when they cut their way through this material. I’m afraid we’ll have to try again somewhere else.”

  Nearly an hour went by before they reached the second hollow and another three took them to the third. Conway had been a little doubtful from the beginning about the third site because it was too close to the periphery, in his opinion, to house a brain. But the possibility had still not been ruled out, on a creature this size, of multiple brains or at least a number of neural substations. She reminded him that the old-time brontosaurus had needed two, and it had been microscopic when compared with their patient.

  The third site was also very close to the beginning of the first incision line.

  “We could spend the rest of our lives searching hollows and still not find what we’re looking for,” said Conway angrily, “and we haven’t that much time.”

  His repeater screens showed the sky lightening far above them, with Monitor heavy cruisers already in position, floodlights being switched off at transfusion and feeding installations and occasionally glimpses of Edwards, who had been transferred to the flagship Vespasian as medical liaison chief for the duration. It was his job to translate Conway’s medical instructions into military maneuvers for the fleet’s executive officers.

  “Your test bores,” said Conway suddenly. “I assume they were spaced out at regular intervals and went right down to the subsurface? Was there any indication that the black goo which the patient uses as a lubricant is more prevalent in certain areas than in others? I’m trying to find a section of the creature which is virtually incapable of movement, because—”

  “Of course,” said Murchison excitedly, “that is the big factor which makes our intelligent patient different from all the smaller and nonintelligent strata creatures. For better protection the brain, and probably the tool-production centers, would almost certainly have to be in a stationary section. Offhand, I can only remember about a dozen test bores in which lubricant was absent or present in very small quantities, but I can look up the map references for you in a few minutes.”

  “You know,” said Conway with feeling, “I still don’t want you here but I’m glad you’ve come.

  “Thank you,” she said, then added, “I think.”

  Five minutes later she had all the available information. “The subsurface forms a small plain ringed by low mountains in that area. Aerial sensors tell us that it is unusually rich in minerals, but then so is most of the center of this land mass. Our test bores were very widely spaced, so that we could easily have missed picking up brain material, but I’m pretty sure now that it is there.”

  Conway nodded, then said, “Harrison, that will be the next stop. But it’s too far to go traveling on or under the surface. Take us topside and arrange for a transport copter to lift us to the spot. And on the way would you mind angling us toward Throat Tunnel Forty-three, as close to the incision line as you can manage, so that I can see how the patient reacts to the early stages of the operation. It is bound to have some natural defense against gross physical injury.

  He broke off, his mood swinging suddenly from high excitement to deepest gloom. He said, “Dammit, I wish I had concentrated on the tools from the very beginning, instead of getting sidetracked with the rollers, and then thinking that those overgrown leucocytes were the intelligent tool users. I’ve wasted far too much time.”

  “We’re not wasting time now,” said Harrison, and pointed toward his repeater screens.

  For better or for worse, major surgery had begun.

  The main screen showed a line of heavy cruisers playing ponderous follow-the-leader along the first section of the incision, rattlers probing deep while their pressers held the edges of the wound apart to allow deeper penetration by the next ship in line. Like all of the Emperor class ships they were capable of delivering a wide variety of frightfulness in very accurately metered doses, from putting a few streets full of rioters to sleep to dispensing atomic annihilation on a continental scale. The Monitor Corps rarely allowed any situation to deteriorate to the point where the use of mass destruction weapons became the only solution, but they kept them as a big and potent stick-like most policemen, the Federation’s law-enforcement arm knew that an undrawn baton had better and more long-lasting effects than one that was too busy cracking skulls. But their most effective and versatile close-range weapon-versatile because it served equally well either as a sword or a plowshare-was the rattler.

  A development of the artificial gravity system which compensated for the killing accelerations used by Federation spaceships, and of the repulsion screen which gave protection against meteorites or which allowed a vessel with sufficient power reserves to hover above a planetary surface like an old-time dirigible airship, the rattler beam simply pushed and pulled, violently, with a force of up to one hundred Gs, several times a minute.

  It was very rarely that the corps were forced to use their rattlers in anger-normally the fire-control officers had to be satisfied with using them to clear and cultivate rough ground for newly established colonies- and for the optimum effect the focus had to be really tight. But even a diffuse beam could be devastating, especially on a small target like a scout ship. Instead of tearing off large sections of hull plating and making metallic mincemeat of the underlying structure, it shook the whole ship until the men inside rattled.

  On this operation, however, the focus was very tight and the range known to the last inch.

  Visually it was not at all spectacular. Each cruiser had three rattler batteries which could be brought to bear, but they pushed and pulled so rapidly that the surface seemed hardly to be disturbed. Only the relatively gentle tractor beams positioned between the rattlers seemed to be doing anything-they pulled up the narrow wedge of material and shredded vegetation so that the next rattler in line could deepen the incision. It would not be until the incision had penetrated to the subsurface and extended for several miles that the other squadrons still hanging in orbit would come in to widen the cut into what they all hoped would be a trench wide enough to check the spread of vegetable infection from the excised and decomposing dead material.

  As a background to the pictures Conway could hear the clipped voices of the ordnance officers reporting in. There seemed to be hundreds of them, all saying the same things in the fewest possible words. At irregular intervals a quiet, unhurried voice would break in, directing, approving, coordinating the overall effort-the voice of God, sometimes known as Fleet Commander Dermod, the ranking Monitor Corps officer of Galactic Sector Twelve and as such the tactical director of more than three thousand major fleet units, supply and communications vessels, support bases, ship production lines and the vast number of beings, Earth-human and otherwise, who manned them.

  If the operation came unstuck, Conway certainly would not be able to complain about the quality of the help. He began to feel quietly pleased with the way thing were going.

  The feeling lasted for all of ten minutes, during which time the incision line passed through the tunnel-Number Forty-three-which they had just entered. Conway could actually see the inward end of the seal, a thick, corrugated sausage of tough plastic inflated to fifty pounds per square inch which pressed against the tunnel walls. Special arrangements had been needed to guard against
loss of working fluid because the strata creature’s healing processes were woefully slow. Its blood was quite literally water and one important quality which water did not have was the ability to coagulate.

  Two corpsmen and a Melfan medic were on guard beside the seal. They seemed to be agitated, but there were so many leucocytes moving about the tunnel that he could not see the reason for it. His screens showed the incision line crossing the throat tunnel. A few hundreds of gallons of water between the seal and the incision poured away-considering the size of the patient, it was scarcely a drop. The rattlers and tractors moved on, extending and deepening the cut while the great immaterial presser beams, the invisible stilts which supported the enormous weight of the cruisers, pushed the edges apart until the incision became a widening and deepening ravine. A small charge of chemical explosive brought down the roof of the emptied section of tunnel, reinforcing the plastic seal. Everything seemed to be working exactly as planned, until the immediate attention signal began flashing on his board and Major Edwards’ face filled the screen.

  “Conway,” said the Major urgently. “The seal in Tunnel Forty-three is under attack by tools.”

  “But that’s impossible,” said Murchison, in the scandalized tones of one who has caught a friend cheating at cards. “The patient has never interfered with our internal operations. There are no eye plants down here to give away our positions, no light to speak of, and the seal isn’t even metal. They never attack plastic material on the surface, just men and machines.”

  “And they attack men because we betray our presence by trying to take mental control of them,” Conway said quickly. Then to Edwards, “Major, get those people away from the seal and into the supply shaft. Quickly. I can’t talk to them directly. While they’re doing that tell them to try not to think—”