speaker must have been bearable because it returned within a few seconds to re-cover his hands. He reminded himself again that its only sense was that of touch, but touch so delicate that it amounted to hypersensitive hearing. He rotated his wrists and opened and closed his hands while the stubble remained in contact without impeding the movements.
“Hand. Hands,” he said. “Feelers. Touchers.”
He laid the backs of his hands against the floor again and began speaking the language of mathematics using, as he had done when he was a very young child, his fingers.
“One,” he said, bending up a finger. He bent it again and repeated “One.” He brought up two fingers and said
“Two.” Patiently, and with many repetitions, he demonstrated the permutations of additions up to ten.
“It seems to be repeating everything you say by touching the forward stubble against its beak,” said Beth excitedly. “The computer says that it is a language similar to that used by the Kregsachi, who communicate by tapping and scraping media limbs against their chitonous body armor, although they are a lot noisier about it. Taken in conjunction with earlier observations of bur-rower activity and the associated sounds we recorded, together with the biological and sensory data available, you are bringing us to the point where instantaneous two-way translation will be possible.
“Oh, man,” she went on enthusiastically, “you don’t appreciate what a truly beautiful hunk of machinery this computer is.”
“It counts on its fingers,” Martin said dryly, “like me.”
“We need a little more data,” she continued. “A few more words, or an action and its associated verb that you both understand… Be careful!”
While she had been speaking he had withdrawn a hand from under the burrower and was extending it, very slowly, toward the mouth on the nearer side of its beak. The thick upper lip used in the soil ingestion process would, he hoped, be one of the least sensitive areas of its body. Gently he brought the tips of his fingers against the lip, which began to quiver.
“I touch you,” he said. “I feel you.”
He repeated the touch and the words several times, watching the stubble tapping against the beak. The lip was no longer quivering. Then he moved his hand to the beak and rested his bent fingers gently on the smooth, bony surface and he, too, began drumming just a few inches from where the stubble was doing the same. Hopefully he was indicating to the being that he understood that the beak was part of its system of speech production.
“I touch you gently,” he said several times. Fractionally increasing the pressure on his fingertips and raising his voice slightly, he added, “I am touching you harder…”
“Got it!” Beth called.
And suddenly there was a new voice in his headset, speaking with the clear, accentless tones of the translation computer, which said, “You feel me talking! But even when you touch softly, stranger, you are much too violent for comfort.”
“I’m sorry for causing you discomfort,” Martin whispered into his helmet microphone. “My feelers lack fine control and my equipment is crude and insensitive. My name is Martin.”
“Crude and insensitive, indeed…” Beth began.
“I must begin by thanking you,” he went on, “for rescuing me from a very dangerous, perhaps lethal, situation.”
“My personal touching is Cromonar,” the borrower replied. “I could feel your distress, stranger. There was great physical agitation, and your general feel was that of a freshly trapped predator. But your situation is still fraught with danger. Am 1 right in assuming that you cannot live by eating alone, but must also breathe air to assist with the metabolizing of your food as do the surface dwellers?”
“That is correct,” Martin said.
“Surely leaving your vehicle to crawl along this old and unstable pathway was not a sentient action,” Cromonar said. “Or perhaps there are circumstances which render it so?”
“When we discovered that there was intelligent life on your planet,” Martin replied, “we felt the need to investigate it and talk to you.”
“I understand,” the burrower said. “Curiosity can-outweigh risk with some people. On this world such beings are in the minority, and a number of them are gathered in this area. Were there reasons other than curiosity for investigating us?”
“We wanted to know why you were hiding,” Martin replied, “and to offer assistance if it was required.”
“We need help,” the burrower said, “even though the majority of us do not feel the need. But right now, stranger, your need for help is of greater urgency than ours. Can you remain absolutely still and refrain from violent touchings while I try to eat you out of there?”
The tunnel, Cromonar explained, enabled its people to move between the cavern and an area of edible root crops without having to ingest the tasteless and nutrition-lacking soil of the locality. Due to the excessively heavy touchings of Martin’s digger, the entire length of the tunnel was in danger of collapse. None of its colleagues were willing to risk physical contact with such a violent toucher, which meant that the rescue operation was likely to be a long one.
The soil had been removed from his back and the bur-rower’s weight was centered on his buttocks when it happened-a sudden renewal of pressure on his shoulders and a fall which partially covered one arm. Martin’s pulse rate skyrocketed again and sweat misted his visor so that the tunnel ahead became a bright, featureless blur,
“Do not move,” Cromonar said, and it began patiently eating and clearing the new fall from his back. The process of ingestion did not affect its ability to talk.
It was talking, Martin realized suddenly, to reassure him and take his mind off his present predicament. If he panicked and tried to pull himself out before Cromonar was ready, the entire tunnel would fall in and he would certainly die, and so the burrower was talking furiously about itself, its species, their world, and everything under its unseen sun.
They had evolved from a species of small, sightless flat worm which had burrowed in the primal ooze of their world, paralyzing larger life forms with their sting and ingesting them piecemeal. As their physical size, numbers, and food requirements increased, they became blind hunters whose sense of touch became specialized to the point where they did not need any other sensory channel. They could feel the movements of their surface prey, identify its vibrations, and lie in wait for it just below ground until it came within reach of their stings. Or they could feel out and identify surface tracks and follow their victim to its lair, and either burrow underground and sting it from below or attack it when its internal vibrations indicated that it was asleep.
Because of the strange, extra sense possessed by the creatures who roamed the surface and the air above it, they had. no success against conscious opponents aware of their presence, and very often they had become the prey rather than the hunters.
The surface animals, too, had become larger and stronger and less affected by the burrowers’ stings. They were forced to act together in setting up more and more complex ambushes and cooperation in the matter of food- gathering, storage, and distribution led to the formation of subsurface villages and towns. They already educated their young by touch, and methods were devised for feeling each other over long distances.
Martin had his eyes closed, the better to see the incredible mind-pictures the burrower was painting with its history lesson. His pulse was still racing, but with excitement now, and the threat of an unknown tonnage of soil falling on him seemed to have lost some of its urgency.
Amplifiers and transformers enabled them to refine their sense of touch to the point where they could feel light and radio frequencies. Their attempts at powered flight were still in progress. These had claimed the lives of a great many burrowers who could only gauge their position and altitude by feeling the touchings of air currents on their flying surfaces and trusting to a sense of balance which was woefully inadequate in the alien environment of the sky. These inadequacies had been overcome in part by using long touchings of the irregularities in the ground below.
Blind flying, Martin thought incredulously, with Doppler radar indications in Braille! He wanted to compliment the burrower on its species’ achievements in spite of the worst possible handicap. But the fallen soil had again been eaten clear of his back and Cromonar was still doing all the talking.
The increasing sophistication of their long-range touching systems made them aware of complex vibrations reaching them from beyond their own world. This knowledge had excited some people, but the majority had been
