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.
“Martin, oh, Martin…” Beth said helplessly.
The pounding in his head, whether it was due to lack of air or sheer exertion, was so loud that the burrowers in the cavern should have heard it. He pressed his free hand down against the floor and strained to kit his arm against the weight of soil pressing down on it. He was trying to create a tiny passage under the arm from the airhose spigot at the base of his helmet and the tunnel beyond the fall. But he did not know if he was doing anything at all. He could not see and his arm was becoming a single, excruciating mass of cramp.
Surely he had made an airway to the tunnel, he thought desperately, because his original tiny pocket of air must long since have been used up. But he did not know.
Something heavy moved across his hand, stabbing at it gently with what felt like blunt knitting needles. The sensation moved past his wrist, becoming duller as it continued along the area covered by the fabric of his suit.
The burrower had arrived.
An area of gentle, stabbing pressure was covering Martin’s upper arm and shoulder, and he was aware of a weight pushing down on the back of his neck, then against the other shoulder. He tensed his neck muscles as it moved across the top of his helmet. The weight of soil had gone from his arm, he realized suddenly, and seconds later his visor and spotlight had been cleared and he could see again.
The burrower was only inches away, moving from side to side as it ingested and cleared the fallen soil from his other arm and the floor in front of his chest. Compared with his situation of a few minutes ago, Martin felt relief so intense that it verged on delirious happiness.
“You’re seeing this?” he whispered.
“Of course,” she replied, sheer relief at his escape making her angry. “Probably better than you are.”
His head, shoulders, and arms were projecting from a shallow cave which the burrower had eaten out of the fallen soil, which was stabilized by the creature’s organic cement, while his feet, legs, and hips were still pinned down. But he could see and breathe and his arms were free, and there was a chance that he could drag himself out. Scarcely feeling the pain of his fingers, he dug them into the soil of the floor and began to pull.
The burrower moved quickly on its under-stubble and landed heavily on top of both his hands.
“It doesn’t want you to do that,” Beth said.
She was right, he thought. But he did not want to discuss it just then because he was getting an idea and, in any case, her thinking seemed to be duplicating his own.
“Probably it feels safer with you pinned down like that,” she said. “I’d say that it is almost certainly non- hostile, but cautious.”
“Is the translation computer on line?” Martin asked quietly. “I’m going to try talking to it.”
Slowly he straightened and spread his fingers. The burrower immediately arched its body, taking most of its weight off the back of his hands. Very carefully he made loose fists, then rotated his wrists until the back of his hands lay against the floor, then he opened and closed his fingers. The burrower’s stubble prodded gently all around them, and continued doing so as he brought his hands together and began taking off one of the thin gloves. The stubble concentrated on the glove for a few seconds, helping him remove it, then returned to the hand. Its touch became incredibly delicate, and one of the stubby digits went unerringly to the pulse in his wrist.
He bent and straightened his thumb and fingers in turn, then all together. He took a deep, silent breath, trying hard not to cough as the creature’s pungent body odor invaded his helmet.
“Finger. Digit,” he said in his quietest voice. “Fingers. Digits.”
It jerked away from him at the first word. But the artificially attentuated voice emanating from the external
