“What are you doing?” Beth asked. “No, dammit, what are they doing?…”
The cone formation was breaking up. Every borrower had changed direction and increased speed to head him off, and within a few minutes there was a tight screen of them blocking his path.
“Plainly they don’t want you in that cavern,” Beth said. “Probably they have delicate equipment there, or maybe some of their young. You should stay out.”
“I realize that,” Martin said irritably. “Driving in there would be like taking a bulldozer into a china shop. But I have to show them that that is where I want to go.”
He fed a trickle of power to the cutting blades, just enough to inch the digger forward without endangering the burrowers ahead, then he brought the vehicle around until it was pointed in the direction they wanted him to go. Hopefully he was showing them that he was being a good little off-worlder and doing as he was told.
They were intelligent people and took only a few minutes to get the message. They reformed the cone and Martin and his escort were moving again.
Beth said, “They are leading you toward a tunnel which is one of several leading to their settlement. You should intersect it about one-eighty meters from the entrance.
“Your bio-sensors say that you are reasonably calm,” she went on. “This suggests that you’ve already made up your mind about something, something which, knowing you, carries an element of risk. I wish you were a bit more worried. When you don’t worry, I do.”
“Don’t worry,” Martin said dryly, “I’m worried.”
On his screen, the shadowy, gray tube which was the tunnel was growing larger. His escort was slowing and beginning to break up again, but without the prior urgency. Obviously this was the end of the line. Martin guided the vehicle into the tunnel at right angles and cut the power when his ports gave a view in both directions along it and his cargo hatch was free to open. Then he waited.
His external lighting showed burrowers emerging from the tunnel roof and floor. They did not approach the vehicle closely, other than to remove the small heaps of soil his arrival had brought down. When the tunnel was smooth and unobstructed they, too, settled on the floor to wait.
“I think,” Martin whispered, “they’re ready to talk,”
When she replied, Beth’s voice sounded embarrassed, defensive, and angry-the tone one used when making excuses for a friend. She said, “The computer isn’t getting anywhere with the translation. It’s still working on a combination of amplification and filtration, trying to reproduce the process whereby Earth-people in noisy jobs, riveters, workers in sheet steel, and such, are able to carry on a quiet conversation while a boiler shop din is going on all around them. But all we can hear behind the background noise is more background noise. Listen.”
Martin clenched his teeth as the hiss and static built up to what sounded like a continual barrage of sharp, irregular explosions. Then suddenly they were gone, converted into bursts of silence in a new and quieter background.
He was able to identify and isolate the regular, soft pulsing of the lander’s sonic probes, but there was something more. It was a steady bubbling sound which rose and fell at frequent but irregular intervals, varying in pitch so that it sounded as if someone were playing a wind instrument under water. Beth stepped up the volume until there could be no doubt that the sound was not a natural phenomenon.
“If it is a language,” Beth said, “then everyone is talking at once and the babble is untranslatable. If it isn’t a language, then the sound is probably produced continually as an aid to fixing position and distance between individuals. The computer says there is a high probability that the sound performs both functions, but that doesn’t help us with the translation.”
“But that computer,” Martin protested, “is supposed to be capable of instantly translating any intelligence-bearing sounds which…”
“This isn’t a species like the Teldins,” Beth said defensively, “whose words and the actions to which they referred were implicit in previously observed behavior patterns. These people are blind and the vibrations they produce are received as touches, which refer to the feel, not the sight, of objects and actions. We receive them as sounds, so translation is theoretically possible. But it may well be that in this case a successful contact will be just that, an actual physical contact.”
When Martin did not reply, she went on, “We need a long, careful think about this one. You should return to the ship at once.”
“No,” Martin said firmly. ‘This bunch wants to make contact, and I don’t want to have it all to do again with another group. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble and considerable personal discomfort to…”
“The computer,” Beth said, just as firmly, “was not programmed with Braille.”
“I want to give it another shot,” Martin said stubbornly. “They’ve been whispering at me and I’ve been shouting at them, from inside a vehicle which has to be distorting the word sounds. Can I modify the digger’s external address system to step down, attentuate, my voice instead of amplifying it?”
“No problem,” she replied. “But the system is integral with the vehicle’s structure, so you’ll have to return here to have the… Oh, oh, they’re moving out. I think they are breaking off contact, not you.”
Bitterly disappointed, he watched them go. Obviously, the communication problem was presently insoluble, and hopefully they, too, were going back to have a long think about it. They were undulating rapidly along the tunnel, not burrowing through the soil, in the direction of their cavern-all except one, who stopped about ten meters from the digger.
“One of them still wants to talk,” said Martin.
“Don’t get too excited about it,” said Beth, “they may simply have left a guard.”
But she had to be wrong because the bubbling sounds in his headphones had become quieter, yet more distinct. Only one burrower was talking, the one outside who was tapping its forward stubble gently against its beak.
“My helmet!” said Martin suddenly. “Can I step down its external speaker?”
When she replied a few minutes later, her voice sounded far from enthusiastic. “There is an on-the-spot modification you can make to the helmet comm system.
If you wrap the mike and your lower jaw and mouth in sound absorbent material-some of your couch padding would do it-you should be able to talk quietly without the distortion caused by you pitching your voice unnaturally low.
“But it would mean you leaving the digger,” she concluded warningly. “That suit you’re wearing is little more than an overall, and your backpack has air for less than…”
“The air down here is breathable,” Martin broke in, “and the backpack is too big and awkward to wear in that tunnel. I would be able to move more quietly and quickly without it. Don’t worry, I won’t move far from the digger.”
To these people his voice must sound like a continuous, modulated explosion, Martin thought as he worked on the helmet, and unintelligible because of its sheer volume. He wondered how beings who had only the sense of touch would think of an explosion, how they had learned chemistry without being able to observe chemical reactions, and ultimately develop the other sources of energy which enabled them to detect starships entering their system.
It could not have been easy.
A boyhood memory came to him of reading a book on the early days of exploration and navigation on Earth. Instances had been mentioned of unsighted people who had been able to find their way among the widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean by sniffing the air for the almost imperceptible land smells, feeling the winds, and gauging direction by the warmth of the sunlight on their faces; in short, using the enhanced senses they had developed to compensate for the fact that they were blind.