by James White
MAJOR OPERATION
On the whole weird and wonderful planet there were only thirty-seven patients requiring treatment, and they varied widely both in size and in their degree of physical distress. Naturally it was the patient who was in the greatest distress who was being treated first, even though it was also the largest—so large that at their scoutship’s suborbital velocity of six thousand plus miles per hour it took just over nine minutes to travel from one side of the patient to the other.
“It’s a large problem,” said Conway seriously, “and even altitude doesn’t make it look smaller. Neither does the shortage of skilled help.”
Pathologist Murchison, who was sharing the tiny observation blister with him, sounded cool and a little on the defensive as she replied, “I have been studying all the Drambon material long before and since my arrival two months ago, but I agree that seeing it like this for the first time really does bring the problem home to one. As for the shortage of help, you must realize, Doctor, that you can’t strip the hospital of its staff and facilities for just one patient even if it is the size of a subcontinent—there are thousands of smaller and more easily curable patients with equal demands on us.
“And if you are still suggesting that I, personally, took my time in getting here,” she ended hotly, “I came just as soon as my chief decided that you really did need me, as a pathologist.”
“I’ve been telling Thornnastor for six months that I needed a top pathologist here,” said Conway gently. Murchison looked beautiful when she was angry, but even better when she was not. “I thought everybody in the hospital knew why I wanted you, which is one reason why we are sharing this cramped observation blister, looking at a view we have both seen many times on tape and arguing when we could be enjoying some unprofessional behavior—”
“Pilot here,” said a tinny voice in the blister’s ’speaker. “We are losing height and circling back now and will land about five miles east of the terminator. The reaction of the eye plants to sunrise is worth seeing.”
“Thank you,” said Conway. To Murchison he added, “I had not planned on looking out the window.”
“I had,” she said, punching him with one softly clenched fist on the jaw. “You I can see anytime.”
She pointed suddenly and said, “Someone is drawing yellow triangles on your patient.”
Conway laughed. “I forgot, you haven’t been involved with our communications problems so far. Most of the surface vegetation is light-sensitive and, some of us thought, might act as the creature’s eyes. We produce geometrical and other figures by directing a narrow, intense beam of light from orbit into a dark or twilight area and moving it about quickly. The effect is something like that of drawing with a high-persistency spot on a vision screen. So far, there has been no detectable reaction.
“Probably,” he went on, “the creature can’t react even if it wanted to, because eyes are sensory receptors and not transmitters. After all, we can’t send messages with our eyes.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said.
“Seriously,” Conway said, “I’m beginning to wonder if the strata creature itself is highly intelligent …”
They landed shortly afterward and stepped carefully onto the springy ground, crushing several of the vegetable eyes with every few yards of progress. The fact that the patient had countless millions of other eyes did not make them feel any better about the damage inflicted by their feet.
When they were about fifty yards from the ship, she said suddenly, “If these plants are eyes—and it is a natural assumption, since they are sensitive to light—why should it have so many in an area where danger threatens so seldom? Peripheral vision to coordinate the activity of its feeding mouths would be much more useful.”
Conway nodded. They knelt carefully among the plants, their long shadows filled with the yellow of tightly closed leaves. He indicated their tracks from the entry lock of the ship, which were also bright yellow, and moved his arms about so as to partly obscure some of the plants from the light. Leaves partially in shade or suffering even minor damage reacted exactly as those completely cut off from the light. They rolled up tight to display their yellow undersides.
“The roots are thin and go on forever,” he said, excavating gently with his fingers to show a whitish root which narrowed to the diameter of thin string before disappearing from sight. “Even with mining equipment or during exploratories with diggers we haven’t been able to find the other end of one. Have you learned anything new from the internals?”
He covered the exposed root with soil, but kept the palms of both hands pressed lightly against the ground.
Watching him, she said, “Not very much. Light and darkness, as well as causing the leaves to open out or roll up tight, causes electrochemical changes in the sap, which is so heavily loaded with mineral salts that it makes a very good conductor. Electrical pulses produced by these changes could travel very quickly from the plant to the other end of the root. Er, what are you doing, dear, taking its pulse?”
Conway shook his head without speaking, and she went on. “The eye plants are evenly distributed over the patient’s top surface, including those areas containing dense growths of the air-renewal and waste-elimination types, so that a shadow or light stimulus received anywhere on its surface is transmitted quickly—almost instantaneously, in fact—to the central nervous system via this mineral-rich sap. But the thing which bothers me is what possible reason could the creature have for evolving an eyeball several hundred miles across?”
“Close your eyes,” said Conway, smiling. “I’m going to touch you. As accurately as you can, try to tell me where.”
“You’ve been too long in the company of men and e-ts, Doctor,” she began, then broke off, looking thoughtful.
Conway began by touching her lightly on the face, then he rested three fingers on top of her shoulder and went on from there.
“Left cheek about an inch from the left side of my mouth,” she said. “Now you’ve rested your hand on my shoulder. You seem to be rubbing an X onto my left bicep. Now you have a thumb and two, maybe three, fingers at the back of my neck just on the hairline … Are you enjoying this? I am.”
Conway laughed. “I might if it wasn’t for the thought of Lieutenant Harrison watching us and steaming up the pilot’s canopy with his hot little breath. But seriously, you see what I’m getting at, that the eye plants have nothing to do with the creature’s vision but are analogous to pressure- , pain- or temperature-sensitive nerve endings?”
She opened her eyes and nodded. “It’s a good theory, but you don’t look happy about it.”
“I’m not,” said Conway sourly, “and I’d like you to shoot as many holes in it as possible. You see, the complete success of this operation depends on us being able to communicate with the beings who produced the thought-controlled tools. Up until now I had assumed that these beings would be comparable in size to ourselves even if their physiological classification would be completely alien, and that they would possess the usual sensory equipment of sight, hearing, taste, touch and be capable of being reached through any or all of these channels. But now the evidence is piling up in favor of a single intelligent life-form, the strata creature itself, which is naturally deaf, dumb and blind so far as we can see. The problem of communicating even the simplest concepts to it is—”
He broke off, all his attention concentrated on the palm of one hand which was still pressed against the ground, then said urgently, “Run for the ship.”
They were much less careful about stepping on plants on the way back, and as the hatch slammed shut behind them Harrison’s voice rattled at them from the lock communicator.
“Are we expecting company?”
“Yes, but not for a few minutes,” said Conway breathlessly. “How much time do you need to get away, and can we observe the tools’ arrival through something bigger than this airlock port?”
“For an emergency liftoff, two minutes,” said the pilot, “and if yo
u come up to Control you can use the scanners, which check for external damage.
“But what were you doing, Doctor?” Harrison resumed as they entered his control position. “I mean, in my experience the front of the bicep is not considered to be a zone of erotic stimulation.”
When Conway did not answer he looked appealingly at Murchison.
“He was conducting an experiment,” she said quietly, “designed to prove that I cannot see with the nerve endings of my upper arm. When we were interrupted he was proving that I did not have eyes in the back of my neck, either.”
“Ask a silly question …” began Harrison.
“Here they come,” said Conway.
They were three semicircular disks of metal which seemed to flicker into and out of existence on the area of ground covered by the long morning shadow of the scoutship. Harrison stepped up the magnification of his scanners, which showed that the objects did not so much appear and disappear as shrink rhythmically into tiny metal blobs a few inches across, then expand again into flat, circular blades which knifed through the surface. There they lay flat for a few seconds among the shadowed eye plants, then suddenly the discs became shallow inverted bowls. The change was so abrupt that they bounced several yards into the air to land about twenty feet away. The process was repeated every few seconds, with one disc bouncing rapidly toward the distant tip of their shadow, the second zig-zagging to chart its width and the third heading directly for the ship.
“I’ve never seen them act like that before,” said the lieutenant.
“We’ve made a long, thin itch,” said Conway, “and they’ve come to scratch it. Can we stay put for a few minutes?”
Harrison nodded, but said, “Just remember that we’ll still be staying put for two minutes after you change your mind.”
The third disk was still coming at them in five-yard leaps along the center of their shadow. He had never before seen them display such mobility and coordination, even though he knew that they were capable of taking any shape their operators’ thought at them, and that the complexity of the shape and the speed of the change were controlled solely by the speed and clarity of thought of the user’s mind.
“Lieutenant Harrison has a point, Doctor,” said Murchison suddenly. “The early reports say that the tools were used to undercut grounded ships so that they would fall inside the strata creature, presumably for closer examination at its leisure. On those occasions they tried to undercut the object’s shadow, using the shaded eye plants as a guide to size and position. But now, to use your own analogy, they seem to have learned how to tell the itch from the object causing it.”
A loud clang reverberated along the hull, signaling the arrival of the first tool. Immediately the other two turned and headed after the first, and one after the other they bounced high into the air, higher even than the control position, to arch over and crash against the hull. The damage scanners showed them strike, cling for a few seconds while they spread over hull projections like thin, metallic pancakes, then fall away. An instant later they were clanging and clinging against a different section of hull. But a few seconds later they stopped clinging because, just before making contact, they grew needle points which scored bright, deep scratches in the plating.
“They must be blind,” said Conway excitedly. “The tools must be an extension of the creature’s sense of touch, used to augment the information supplied by the plants. They are feeling us for size and shape and consistency.”
“Before they discover that we have a soft center,” said Harrison firmly, “I suggest that we make a tactical withdrawal, or even get the hell out.”
Conway nodded. While Harrison played silent tunes on his control panels he explained that the tools were controllable by human minds up to a distance of about twenty feet and that beyond this distance the tool users had control. He told her to think blunt shapes at them as soon as they came into range, any shape so long as it did not have points or cutting edges …
“No, wait,” he said as a better idea struck him. “Think wide and flat at them, with an aerofoil section and some kind of vertical projection for stabilization and guidance. Hold the shape while it is falling and glide it as far away from the ship as possible. With luck it will need three or four jumps to get back.”
Their first attempt was not a success, although the shape which finally stuck the ship was too blunt and convoluted to do serious damage. But they concentrated hard on the next one, holding it to a triangle shape only a fraction of an inch thick and with a wide central fin. Murchison held the overall shape while Conway thought-warped the trailing edges and stabilizer so that it performed a balanced vertical bank just outside the direct-vision panel and headed away from the ship in a long, flat glide.
The glide continued long after it passed beyond their range of influence, banking and wobbling a little, then cutting a short swathe through the eye plants before touching down.
“Doctor, I could kiss you …” she began.
“I know you like playing with girls and model airplanes, Doctor,” Harrison broke in dryly, “but we lift in twenty seconds. Straps.”
“It held that shape right to the end,” Conway said, beginning to worry for some reason. “Could it have been learning from us, experimenting perhaps?”
He stopped. The tool melted, flowed into the inverted bowl shape and bounced high into the air. As it began to fall back it changed into glider configuration, picking up speed as it fell, then leveled out a few feet above the surface and came sweeping toward them. The leading edges of its wings were like razors. Its two companions were also aloft in glider form, slicing the air toward them from the other side of the ship.
“Straps.”
They hit their acceleration couches just as the three fast-gliding tools struck the hull, by accident or design, cutting off two of the external-vision pickups. The one which was still operating showed a three-foot gash torn in the thin plating with a glider embedded in the tear, changing shape, stretching and widening it. Probably it was a good thing that they could not see what the other two were doing.
Through the gash in the plating Conway could see brightly colored plumbing and cable runs which were also being pushed apart by the tool. Then that screen went dead as well just as takeoff boost rammed him deep into the couch.
“Doctor, check the stern for stowaways,” said Harrison harshly as the initial acceleration began to taper off. “If you find any, think safe shapes at them—something which won’t scramble anymore of my wiring. Quickly.”
Conway had not realized the full extent of the damage, only that there were more red lights than usual winking from the control board. The pilot’s fingers were moving over his panels with such an intensity of gentleness that the harshness in his voice made it sound as if it was coming from a completely different person.
“The aft pickup,” said Conway reassuringly, “shows all three tools gliding in pursuit of our shadow.”
For a time there was silence broken only by the tuneless whistling of air through torn plating and unretracted scanner supports. The surface wobbled past below them and the ship’s motion made Conway feel that it was at sea rather than in the air. Their problem was to maintain height at a very low flying speed, because to increase speed would cause damaged sections of the hull to peel off or heat up due to atmospheric friction, or increase the drag to such an extent that the ship would not fly at all. For a vessel which was classed as a supersonic glider for operations in atmosphere their present low speed was ridiculous. Harrison must be holding onto the sky with his fingernails.
Conway tried hard to forget the lieutenant’s problems by worrying aloud about his own.
“I think this proves conclusively that the strata creatures are our intelligent tool users,” he said. “The high degree of mobility and adaptability shown by the tools makes that very plain. They must be controlled by a diffuse and not very strong field of mental radiation conducted and transmitted by root networks and extending only a short distance
above the surface. It is so weak that an average Earth-human or e-t mind can take local control.
“If the tool users were beings of comparable size and mental ability to ourselves,” he went on, trying not to look at the landscape lurching past below them, “they would have to travel under and through the surface material as quickly as the tools were flying over it if they were to maintain control. To burrow at that speed would require them being encased in a self-propelled armor-piercing shell. But this does not explain why they have ignored our attempts at making wide-range contact through remote-control devices, other than by reducing the communication modules to their component pieces …”
“If the range of mental influence pervades its whole body,” Murchison broke in, “would that mean that the creature’s brain is also diffuse? Or, if it does have a localized brain, where is it?”
“I favor the idea of a centralized nervous system,” Conway replied, “in a safe and naturally well-protected area—probably close to the creature’s underside where there is a plentiful supply of minerals and possibly in a natural hollow in the subsurface rock. Eye plant and similar types of internal root networks which you’ve analyzed tend to become more complex and extensive the closer we go to the subsurface, which could mean that the pressure-sensitive network there is augmented by the electrovegetable system which causes muscular movement as well as the other types whose function and purpose are still unknown to us. Admittedly the nervous system is largely vegetable, but the mineral content of the root systems means that electrochemical reactions generated at any nerve ending will transmit impulses to the brain very quickly, so there is probably only one brain and it could be situated anywhere.”
She shook her head. “In a being the size of a subcontinent, with no detectable skeleton or osseous structure to form a protective casing and whose body, relative to its area, resembles a thin carpet, I think more than one would be needed—one central brain, anyway, plus a number of neural substations. But the thing which really worries me is what do we do if the brain happens to be in or dangerously close to the operative field.”