There was growing in Martin a curiosity so intense, coupled with a feeling of such awe, that any risk he might have to take while getting to know and understand these blind borrowers seemed of secondary importance.
“The bio-sensors say you are less tense,” Beth said hopefully. “Are you having second thoughts about coming back?”
“No,” Martin said, “just thoughts.”
Unavoidably there were a few clicks and thuds as he wriggled through the tiny hatch onto the tunnel floor. The noise must have bothered the being outside because, when he directed his helmet light along the tunnel, the burrower had backed away by nearly three meters.
He left the hatch open in case he needed to return in a hurry, knowing that if a burrower tried to enter, Beth could use the remotes to close it. Slowly, and as silently as possible, he began crawling toward what he hoped was the spokesperson.
The tunnel was just high enough for him to move on his hands and knees provided he kept his head down, which meant that only a small area of the floor in front of him was illuminated. To see where he was going he had to crawl on his stomach, using his elbows, forearms, and the inside edges of his boots to move himself forward.
Of necessity, his approach to the borrower was slow and, he hoped, reassuring. But when he had closed to within arm’s reach it backed off to lie with its stubble rubbing gently against its beak three meters away. Martin tried again with the same result, although this time it halted a little closer to him. Once again he moved toward it, speaking quietly and noting by its reactions that it was hearing his attentuated voice with visible distress.
How would he have felt, Martin wondered, if an out-sized extraterrestrial he could not see was crawling toward him. He could understand and sympathize with its timidity. Then suddenly the burrower was moving away at the same rate he was trying to approach it.
“Except for your timid friend,” Beth said, “there are no other burrowers in the area. I think it wants you to follow it to the cavern. Maybe they have special communication equipment there that they want to use on you.
“You are twenty-eight meters from the digger,” she added warningly.
Deliberately, Martin closed his eyes and crawled on. Not seeing where he was going for a while might put him more closely in tune with the burrowers, who could not see at all. But it also made it impossible for him to see the tunnel, which seemed to be growing lower and more constricting.
He tried to imagine that he was in reality crawling along a narrow trench, keeping low because it was necessary for him not to be seen, while above him stretched a black, limitless sky and all the damp, earth-scented air that he could breathe. But his ability to delude himself had never been great, and so he knew with a dreadful certainty that a few inches above his head there were countless tons of the soil waiting to collapse and bury him alive.
“The bio-sensors report elevated pulse, respiration, blood pressure, and perspiration unaccompanied by a rise in ambient temperature,” Beth said urgently. “Is the air becoming unbreathable?”
“It isn’t the air,” Martin said, trying to keep his voice down. It was impossible, he thought wildly, to have hysterics in a whisper. “This idea isn’t working. I have to get back to the digger, at once.”
“Right,” she said briskly. “Stay put, relax, and I’ll send it for you. You’ll be back on the surface in no time.”
Behind him the digger came noisily to life, and a sprinkling of loose, brightly lit soil fell like dry rain through his spotlight beam.
“No,” he said with quiet desperation. “Don’t move the digger! You’ll bring down the roof wherever you come through, and I’d have to clear a way to the hatch with my hands. The tunnel isn’t safe. It was made by people who eat dirt and don’t mind being buried in it. I have to go back the way I came.” · But moving backward along the tunnel was incredibly slow and awkward. He could not see where he was going and his boots kept digging into the walls, bringing down sizeable quantities of soil, raising the level of the floor, and making it harder to squeeze through.
The floor-! he thought suddenly.
If he dug downward, that would not affect the unstable condition of the walls and ceiling, and a hole just deep enough to take his legs and lower body would allow him to crouch down into it and turn himself around.
He knew that what he intended doing was dangerous, but he had to try it. He had to try it because he was not sure how long he could continue to function as a thinking and physically coordinated being. More and more of his mind was being swamped by the one all-pervading and irresistible urge.
To get out!
With fingers which were beginning to bleed inside the thin, tough membrane of his gloves, Martin tore at the loosely packed soil of the floor. As the hole slowly deepened he pushed the dirt to either side, packing it against the walls or throwing handfuls of it into the tunnel ahead. The burrower had edged a little closer, but the sweat running into Martin’s eyes made it impossible to see what, if anything, it was doing.
Abruptly, he stifled a cry of pain as his fingers scraped against solid rock.
When Beth spoke she did not mention the gloves, which Martin had insisted on wearing because they would give him maximum touch sensitivity while dealing with the burrowers, or the shelf of rock he was uncovering, or even his bio-sensor readings which must have been worrying her badly. Her voice was calm and unhurried, as if by a process of sympathetic magic she could transfer those qualities to Martin. And even though they both knew what she was doing, it seemed to work.
“A suggestion,” she said, “You have moved more than one-quarter of the distance between the digger and the cavern. Do you think it might be easier to go on instead of turning back? I can guide the digger to the cavern, which is protected by a rock overhang, without bringing the roof down on top of you…”
The bio-sensors were already telling her what he thought of that suggestion. He said, “The burrowers would try to stop you again and be chewed up by the digger. They seem to place a lot of value on that place. No. I’m going back, backward.”
He had wriggled and pushed himself backward by less than two meters when it happened. One of his boot heels dug deeply into the tunnel wall and suddenly the leg, then both legs, were covered by what felt like a large, heavy cushion.
Martin made a sound halfway between a scream and a muffled grunt and tried to pull his legs free. They moved a little, but the pressure on them increased and began moving up to the back of his thighs, into the small of his back and toward his shoulders. Desperately he stretched forward, trying to grasp the edge of the hole he had dug to pull himself forward as the pressure from the falling soil rolled inexorably over his shoulders and head.
“The sensors show a cave-in! And the burrower is moving toward you. What can I do…”
Chapter 16
No longer calm, her voice was tinged with the helpless, hopeless desperation of one with control of a mechanism with the power to alter planetary orbits, and who was incapable of moving a few hundred pounds of soil off his back. Martin did not answer her for two reasons-there was nothing she could do, and his air had been drastically reduced to the tiny quantity trapped inside his helmet and between the floor and his chest and armpits. He could not afford to waste it by talking.
The very worst that he could imagine had happened. He was buried alive without hope of rescue, his tiny store of air would last only minutes, and the only movement possible to him was to clench his fists.
But there was a small, rebellious, stupid part of his mind which refused to accept the situation as hopeless. It reminded him that one of his fists was full of soil while the other was clenched on air, and it ignored with contempt the rest of the mind which was surrendering to fear and panic.