Alien Emergencies - James White [97]
He worked his hand carefully into the hole, feeling the warmth of the still-hot edges through his thin gauntlets, and withdrew a small handful of the stuff to examine it more closely. Then he moved to another section of the wall and tried again. And again.
Fletcher watched him but did not speak. All of the Captain’s attention was again concentrated in his fingertips. Conway began working on the opposite wall of the corridor, reducing the size of the test holes to speed up the process. When he had cut four widely separated fist-sized holes without uncovering anything but the powdery material, he called Murchison.
“We are finding large quantities of a coarse black powder,” he told her, “which has a faint odor suggesting an organic or partly organic composition. It could be a form of nutrient soil. Does that fit the crew’s physiology profile?”
“It fits,” said Murchison promptly. “From my preliminary examination of the two small cadavers I would say that the atmosphere in their ship is for the convenience of the larger FSOJ life-form. The blind ones do not possess lungs as such. They are burrowers who metabolize the organic constituents of their soil as well as any other plant or animal tissue that happens to be available. They ingest the soil via the large frontal mouth opening, but the larger upper lip is capable of being folded over the lower one so that the mouth is sealed shut when it needs to burrow without eating. We’ve noticed atrophy of the limbs, or to be more accurate, the movable pads on the underside that propel it, and of hypersensitivity in the upper-surface tactual sensors. This probably means that their culture has evolved to the stage where they inhabit artificially constructed tunnel systems with readily accessible food supplies, rather than having to burrow for it. The material you describe could be a special loosely packed nutrient soil that combines the ship’s food supply with a medium for physical exercise.”
“I see,” said Conway.
A blind, burrowing worm who somehow managed to reach the stars! Then Murchison’s next words reminded him that the blind ones were capable of seemingly petty and cruel activities as well as those that were great and glorious.
“Regarding the survivors,” she went on, “if the FSOJ laboratory animal, or whatever it is, is too close to the surviving crew-member and we cannot rescue both without endangering ourselves or the blind one, a large reduction in atmospheric pressure, provided it is carried out gradually so as to avoid decompression damage to the blind one’s tissues, would disable or more likely kill the FSOJ.”
“That would be the last thing we would try,” said Conway firmly. The rules were very strict in first-contact situations like this, where one could never be absolutely sure that an apparently senseless and ferocious beast was, in fact, a non-sentient creature.
“I know, I know,” Murchison replied. “And it will interest you to know that the FSOJ was in an advanced stage of pregnancy, a time during which most life-forms, regardless of their degree of intelligence, can feel overprotective, overemotional and overaggressive if they think their unborn is being threatened. That might be the reason why the FSOJ broke out of its cage. As well, the blind one would not have been able to kill it with its horn if the FSOJ’s underbody had not been locally weakened in preparation for the imminent birth.”
Conway considered that for a moment. “The female FSOJ’s condition and the beating and prodding it had to take in the—”
“I didn’t say it was female,” Murchison broke in, “though it may be. In many ways it is a far more interesting