The Mind Pool tmp-1

by Charles Sheffield

  “Possibly, possibly.” There was a slow wave of mid-fronds, Angels equivalent of polite skepticism. “But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We must descend before we really know. In the words of the great Sherlock, it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”

  S’greela and Shikari had done their own analysis of Team Alpha’s descent into the surface shafts. They had concluded that in Travancore’s light gravity the tunnels would be navigable by Angel without assistance, provided that a lift pack could be strapped around the tubby mid-section. And S’greela, unhampered by Angel, would have far better mobility.

  That conclusion was the only positive result that Chan could see from two days of analysis from high orbit. He drew a conclusion — reluctantly: they could look down at Travancore from afar forever, and not know much more than they knew now. Like it or not, it was time to stick their necks out and get down to the surface.

  As they prepared to enter the landing capsule Chan gave the others one more warning. “Make sure you have everything that you’ll need on Travancore before we leave the Q-ship. We’ve had clear instructions from the Anabasis, we will not be allowed back on board unless we can prove that we’ve destroyed Nimrod. We won’t even be given drop shipments from orbit, unless it’s clear that they can’t be used by Nimrod if things go wrong. We’ll be on our own.”

  “Until we return triumphant to the Q-ship…” said S’greela.

  “…our team victorious, happy and glorious,” added Angel.

  “One for all, and all for one,” added Shikari.

  If the Tinker was starting that, too, Chan couldn’t stand it. He went across to the Q-ship communicator one last time and initiated a Link sequence to Anabasis Headquarters on Ceres. Mondrian was alone in the control room. He nodded a greeting, and did not speak.

  “A few more minutes, said Chan, “and well be on our way. Do you have any final instructions?”

  “Nothing that makes any practical difference to you, but there’s been a slight change at this end. The Stellar Group ambassadors are insisting that the Mattin Link to your Q-ship be made one-way all the time that you are down on the surface. Messages and materials can go from here, but nothing must come back this way. It’s the same worry as before, that somehow Nimrod might destroy the team and then find a way to Link out.”

  “But if we can’t send messages, how will you know we’ve done our job and are waiting to come home? How will you know anything of what’s happening?”

  “I’ve taken care of that. A monitor team will be shipped from here to the Q-ship, and you’ll be able to talk to the people there.”

  “How will the Ambassadors be any more sure of that team, than they are of my team?”

  “Because I’ll be on the monitor team, myself.” Mondrian smiled grimly at Chan. “You know what that means, don’t you? So long as Nimrod is still active, I’m going to be stuck on Travancore as much as you are. I’ll be in orbit, and you’ll be down on the ground, but neither one of us will be able to leave. Until Nimrod is out of the way, it’s a one-way trip for all of us. So you know I mean it when I wish you luck. It’s a long walk home.”

  A long, long walk. Fifty-six lightyears from Travancore to Earth. Six centuries of sub-lightspeed travel. Chan understood what Mondrian was saying: Destroy Nimrod — or your team will have vanished forever from the known worlds.

  And Chan understood more, things that Mondrian was not saying. The Stellar Group Ambassadors are insisting …

  What did the Angel or Pipe-Rilla or Tinker Ambassadors know of battles, and quarantines, and blockades? Not one thing. It was Mondrian who was deciding the rules and defining the actions. And there was nothing that Chan could do about it.

  “We will be on our way within an hour,” he said quietly. “Give us one Earth week, and I hope that we’ll have some results.”

  “Don’t set yourself deadlines, Chan. Nimrod will still be there if it takes two weeks. Just make sure you destroy the Morgan Construct. Festina lente.”

  Mondrian was still facing the camera, but the display began to exhibit the rainbow fringes of a fading Link communication.

  “Festina lente?” said Shikari.

  “It is a piece of advice given in an old Earth language. Mondrian took it as the motto for Boundary Security. I believe that it means, hasten slowly .”

  “I don’t see why he saw the need to warn us,” said S’greela indignantly. “I am sure that we will not be foolish enough to hurry into trouble.”

  “Fools rush in …” said Angel. “Hmm. Enough of that. We believe that we are ready, Chan, to begin our descent.”

  Chan’s analysis of Team Alpha data had led him to three conclusions. He explained to the others.

  First, and worst, the other team had made one huge mistake. They had been careless in checking the Morgan Constructs current location before they began their descent. Nimrod obviously was able to move about the planet, within or beneath the vegetation canopy, at high speed. Chan would not make the same blunder as Leah. There would be continuous monitoring of the Constructs position as soon as a definite location was confirmed. Second, Team Alpha had not made the best use of the native life forms. At least two of them might be valuable for either information or reconnaissance. There was the long, legless caterpillar-snake that lived in the upper shafts, and the nimble, nervous animal that had been encountered by Team Alpha in the deep jungle. If either one possessed intelligence and could be talked to, it might help to cancel one of Nimrod’s advantages. The Construct had been on Travancore for a long time, and must know it well. Chan’s team had vast numbers of useless facts, but all of them had been acquired from far, far away. What was needed now was knowledge of the planet below the shrouding canopy of vegetation.

  Third, the other team had stayed together too much. Chan knew how tempting it was to work as a unit, and how satisfying that could be; but there were some functions that still called for individual actions.

  Chan’s third statement produced strong protest from the other three. Shikari was particularly outraged.

  “It must not be. We are a team! As a team, we should always work together.”

  “Shikari, you haven’t learned anything. You saw how successful the Tinker component sub-assemblies were on Barchan. But you still don’t accept that some things are better done by individuals than groups.” Chan turned away from the Tinker. “As long as I’m in charge, we’ll do things the way I say. Of course, if anyone else wants to take over responsibility for running operations, I’ll be happy to step aside.”

  He was both worried and pleased by the horrified reaction, not just of Shikari but of Angel and S’greela. Their immediate acceptance stuck him with a job for which he felt unqualified. Now he had to get on with it.

  He took the landing capsule down to Travancore. It hovered at one position on the planet’s daylight side, while the team unloaded and inflated their tent and fitted it into the upper layers of vegetation. As soon as all the equipment was unloaded, the landing capsule took off again under automatic control for synchronous orbit. It would hover above the planet, monitoring the location that Chan had picked out as a probable location for Nimrod. The Q-ship was stationed much farther out, far from any possible danger of Construct weapons.

  Once they were settled in, Chan assigned S’greela to a solo mission. The Pipe-Rilla was easily the strongest of the team members. She was to descend the nearest shaft, seek a specimen of the long, snaky life form, and bring it back to the tent. According to Angel there should be considerable diurnal movement of Travancore’s mobile forms. Like- ocean life on Earth, they would take advantage of daylight to feed and sun themselves in the upper levels, and return to the depths at night. Now it was close to midday, and S’greela had a good chance of finding what she wanted close to the surface.

  She set off, unarmed at her insistence, on her mission. The others settled for a long, nervous wait.

  It was close to sunset when S’greela returned, empty-handed and exasperate
d. The other three were sitting in the tent, Angel close to Chan and Shikari spread like a thick cloak over both of them. S’greela joined them, and waited for the Tinker components to envelop her also. She sighed.

  “You couldn’t find one?” said Angel at last.

  The Pipe-Rilla shook her head. “It was not as simple as that. A most frustrating experience! Many times I saw one of the forms, but each time it crawled away through a gap in the wall of the shaft. Finally, I decided to lie in wait in one place. At last one came along. I caught it — but I could not bring it here!”

  “It was too strong for you?” asked Shikari. The voice funnel was down on the floor, next to Chan’s legs. These days the Tinker showed less and less interest in assuming any familiar form.

  “Not at all. I was stronger. But I was out-legged.” S’greela held up three pairs of wiry limbs. “It is not often that I meet a creature with more legs than I have.”

  “But I thought the animal you were after was legless,” said Shikari.

  “So did I. Perhaps we need to define a leg. I found that its body is in thirteen separate segments. And on each one there are two gripping attachments — twenty-six in all. When I took hold of its body, each of the twenty-six held tight to the ribs on the wall of the tunnel. I could detach any one of them easily enough. But I could not detach all of them, and I dared not use too much force for fear of harming it.”

  “Did it show signs of being intelligent?” asked Angel.

  “More perhaps than I did. I am here, and it is there, uncaptured. But the whole episode was most annoying. All the time that I was holding the creature, it made sounds. Very high-pitched, so that although I could hear most of them, I had no way to reproduce them. I suspect that they were in fact some kind of language. Finally I had to release the animal and return here before dare. It wriggled away only a few paces, quite unharmed. And then, as though to mock me, it stopped and calmly began feeding! It seemed to be saying to me, ‘This is my territory, and here I stay.’ I suggest that tomorrow morning Angel and I return to the same place. Angel has our best language ability, and the computer communicator can synthesize anything up to a hundred thousand cycles a second.” S’greela turned to Chan. “But of course, that is your decision. You are the leader for these things.”

  Called on for comment, Chan felt a sudden mood change. He had not spoken since S’greela’s return, but he had been following the conversation in a perplexing way, understanding almost without listening. He had been the one preaching the need for action by individuals. Now the proposal that Angel go off with S’greela made him feel uneasy. At his feet the Tinker stirred restlessly, as though Shikari could somehow sense his discomfort.

  “I agree, Angel ought to take a look at the animal,” said Chan. “But I think when that happens, I ought to go also. I wanted you to try it alone at first, S’greela, because you are the strongest. But strength does not seem important for what we want to do.”

  “Then we should all go?”

  “I don’t like that, either. Our communication equipment is here, and we need to be able to stay in contact with the landing capsule and the Q-ship. S’greela, do you feel confident that there was no trap? That the animals in the shafts have nothing to do with Nimrod?”

  “I feel sure that they do not — but do not ask me to prove that.”

  “Angel?”

  “We concur. S’greela is almost certainly correct. The probability of a connection between today’s events and the Morgan Construct is very low.”

  “And the animal seems harmless?”

  “Despite its size, I judged it to be harmless. All it seemed to want to do was eat. Even when I was trying to dislodge it from the tunnel walls, it kept on chewing at them. It has substantial mandibles, but it never once tried to bite me.”

  “Right.” Chan made his decision. “Tomorrow we will all go — except for Shikari.”

  “We do not wish to be left alone here!” The Tinker was outraged.

  “I know you don’t. Listen to me for a moment, Shikari, and see how this sounds. We must leave someone here, in case we need to communicate with the ship. So half of you goes with us. Half remains here. You’ll know which shaft we are in, and if you had to you could fly all your components down to join us in a couple of minutes. I know you don’t want to do this, but can you do it? Can you operate in two halves?”

  The Tinker said nothing, but there was a sudden tremble through the whole mass of the composite. Hundreds of components flew away to cling to the side of the tent. The voice funnel closed abruptly.

  “Come on, Shikari,” coaxed S’greela. “If you can do this, it will be wonderful. We can explore with you, and still know that you will have contact with the capsule if we need it. And it will only be for a little while.

  “Divide and conquer,” added Angel. “You alone can do this.”

  The voice funnel remained closed, but individual components slowly came back to join the assembly. Shikari gradually flattened to form a low and miserable heap around the other team members.

  It was agreement; or at least, acceptance.

  * * *

  Angel had used the mobility pack during training, but only for a few minutes. S’greela fixed it now around Angel’s tubby blue-green middle section, and tightened the straps.

  “All ready. If you would care to try it out …”

  Angel made a few tentative back-and-forth movements along the lip of the tent. Then suddenly it was darting off on a complex three-dimensional pattern of zig-zags, racing back and forth over the uneven uppermost layer of the vegetation like a water skier.

  “Stop playing around, Angel,” said Chan over his communications pack. “We have to be on our way.”

  He was beginning to feel like the disciplinarian of the group, the one who always had to say no. The others didn’t seem to worry at all! Maybe that was the real difference between humans and the rest of the Stellar Group — if history was anything to go by, humans had always had plenty to worry about.

  Angel came skimming and diving back to the side of the tent, executing a final mid-air roll and loop before landing. The others were ready and waiting. As they set out for the shaft one half of Shikari bade a solemn farewell to the part that would remain behind. Chan felt sure that the Tinker was doing it for his benefit. Shikari explained that although there were seldom more than a quarter of the total number of components clumped to form a single body at any one time, the point was that they were always there, always available to attach whenever they were needed. This physical separation into two major pieces would be a unique and unpleasant event.

  “Imagine going off on a journey without your legs or your arms,” said Shikari. “Or imagine Angel being separated into the Chassel-Rose and the Singer. Well, it’s just as bad for us to be split like this.”

  Chan was not persuaded, particularly since once they were on the way the Tinker seemed in excellent spirits. A steady two-way stream of individual components moved along the tunnel, providing a continuous link between the two halves of the composite. Chan began to wonder how long a connected chain of single components could be. With, say, ten thousand components, each ten centimeters long … that would stretch for a kilometer. But the neuronal inter-connections in such a linear array would be minimal. Chan doubted that a Tinker would actually be able to think much in such a mode.

  Angel was leading the way, gliding silently along the curved tunnel with all sensors operating. After about twenty minutes the green bulk stopped and turned back to the others. “Something moves in the tunnel ahead,” said Angel softly. “We are very close to the location that S’greela described.”

  A handful of Tinker components separated and winged their way down the tunnel past Angel. They returned a few seconds later, and attached to form a chain between Angel and Shikari.

  “It is the form,” said Angel. “The same form that S’greela saw. A long body and no real legs, feeding at the tunnel wall.”

  “Allow me,” said S’greela. The P
ipe-Rilla eased past Angel and went bounding forward down the spiral tunnel. The others heard a thresh of limbs and a high-pitched squeak. Chan led the way down the shaft, pointing his light ahead. He found S’greela holding something firmly around its middle section, while all the rest of the animal clung firmly to the tunnel wall.

  Chan walked forward along the full length of the body. It was enormous, a straw-colored multi-segment monster over a meter across and better than ten meters long. No wonder S’greela had not been able to bring it back to the tent!

  Despite its size the animal made no attempt to attack, or even to defend itself. The head was eyeless and dark-red, equipped with a broad slash of a mouth big enough to bite Chan in two. It was still eating steadily, chomping on vegetation that it clipped from sprouting sections of the tunnel walls. As Chan came close to it the big head turned slowly towards him. He heard a shrill series of squeaks and whistles, so high and loud that they hurt his ears. They came from a second broad slit set a few inches above the mouth.

  Angel advanced to Chan’s side, and the communicator attached to its mid-section gave out an experimental series of similar squawks and squeaks.

  “We are only imitating at the moment,” said Angel. “But we think that it is a language, even if a primitive one. We assume that it arises as a modulation of ultrasonic navigation signals employed within the deep tunnels — a natural development for creatures that live mostly in darkness. But before we can be sure we must have more samples of its sounds. Hold it tightly, S’greela. This may take some time.”

  Angel moved closer to the head, reached out a lower frond, and poked the creature gently. The monstrous caterpillar body struggled harder, and the head turned to face Angel. There was a longer series of squeaks, this time with a different emphasis and cadence. Angel responded with a succession of similar sounds. They gradually ascended in pitch until they were inaudible to Chan’s ears. The great body ceased to squirm in S’greela’s grasp, and the Pipe-Rilla leaned closer to follow the interaction. Chan knew that both Angel and S’greela could hear frequencies well outside the human range. He would have to let them work in peace now, and receive his briefing when the initial communication attempt was finished. He stepped away from the others and stared around him at the tunnel walls.