The Captain smiled. “Assuming that they group their controls together in sensible fashion, and the actuators for power, altitude control, life-support, communications and so on occupy their own specific areas on the control panels, I’d say that the blind one was touching its communications panel when it died. It managed to release a distress beacon, but that was probably the last thing it was able to do.
“Doctor,” he added, “could you give me your hand, please?”
Conway gave his hand to the Captain to steady him and help him to his feet while Fletcher carefully withdrew his other hand from the opening. Suddenly one of Fletcher’s foot magnets slipped along the deck. His arm jerked backwards instinctively to prevent him from falling, even though in the weightless condition he could not fall, sending the hand back inside the control area.
“I touched something.” He sounded worried.
“You certainly did,” said Conway, and pointed at the caged section of corridor.
“Sir!” said Haslam on the suit frequency. “We are detecting strong intermittent vibrations throughout the fabric of the ship. Also metallic sounds!”
Murchison came diving along the corridor from the airlock. She checked herself expertly against the wall. “What’s happening?” Then she, too, looked into the caged corridor. “What is happening?”
For as far as they could see along the curvature of the corridor there was violent and noisy mechanical activity. The long metal bars projecting from their slots in the walls were whipping back and forth or up and down to the limits of their angles of travel, while the rods with their pointed or mace-like ends were jabbing up and down like pistons from the ceiling. Several of the bars and pistons were badly warped and were striking one another, which caused the awful din. As they watched, a small flap opened in the inboard wall of the corridor a few meters inside the grill, and a mass of something resembling thick porridge was extruded, to drift like a misshapen football into the path of the nearest wildly swinging bar.
The material splattered in all directions, and the smaller pieces were batted about by the other bars and pistons until they moved about the corridor like a sticky hailstorm. Murchison captured some of it in a specimen bag.
“Obviously a food dispenser of some kind,” she observed. “An analysis of this stuff will tell us a lot about the large one’s metabolism. But those bars and pistons are not, to my mind, a means of restraining the FSOJ. Not unless restraint includes clubbing it unconscious.”
“With a physiological classification of FSOJ,” said Conway thoughtfully, “that might be the only way to do it, short of using a heavy-duty pressor beam.”
“All the same,” Murchison went on, “I am feeling a slight attenuation of sympathy for the blind ones. That corridor looks more like a torture chamber than a cage.”
Conway had been thinking the same thing and so, judging by his shocked and sickened expression, had the Captain. They had all been taught, and were themselves convinced, that there was no such thing as a completely evil and inimical intelligent race, and even the suggestion that they believed such a thing possible would have led to their dismissal from the Monitor Corps or from the Federation’s largest multienvironment hospital. Extraterrestrials were different, sometimes wildly and weirdly different, and during the early stages of contact a great deal of caution was necessary until a full understanding of their physiological, psychological and cultural background was available. But there was no such thing as an evil race. Evil or antisocial individuals, perhaps, but not an evil species.
Any species that had evolved to the point of social and technological cooperation necessary for them to travel between the stars had to be civilized. This was the considered opinion of the Federation’s most advanced minds, which were housed inside some sixtyodd different life-forms. Conway had never been the slightest bit xenophobic, but neither was he completely convinced that somewhere there wasn’t an exception that would prove the rule.
“I’m going back with the specimens now,” Murchison said. “I may be able to find some answers. The trouble is finding the right questions to ask.”
Fletcher was stretched out on the deck again with one hand inside the control area. “I’ll have to shut off that … whatever it is. But I don’t know where exactly my hand was when I switched it on, or if I switched on anything else at the same time.” He tripped his suit radio toggle. “Haslam, Chen. Will you chart the extent of the noise and vibrations, please, and is there evidence of any other unusual activity within the ship?” He turned to Conway. “Doctor, while I’m trying to find the right button to push, would you do something for me? Use my cutting torch on the corridor wall midway between the L-bend here and the airlock—”
He broke off as they were suddenly plunged into absolute darkness, which seemed to augment the clanging and metallic screeching sounds to such an extent that Conway fumbled for his helmet light switch in near panic. But before he could reach it the ship’s lighting came on again.
“That wasn’t it,” said the Captain, then he continued: “The reason I want you to do this, Doctor, is to find an easier path to the survivors than the one along the corridor. You probably noticed that the majority of the cable runs originating in the control pods go inboard towards the power generation area of the ship, with very few leading out to the periphery. From this I assume that the area of the vessel outboard of the corridor cage and control center is the storage or cargo sections, which should, if the blind ones follow basic design philosophy where their spaceships are concerned, be comprised of large compartments connected by simple doors rather than pressurized bulkheads and airlocks. If this is so, and the sensor readings seem to confirm it, we should have to move only some cargo or stores out of the way to be able to bypass the control pods and get to the survivors fairly quickly. We would not have to risk running through that corridor, or worry about accidentally depressurlzing the ship by cutting in from topside …
Before the Captain had finished speaking, Conway began cutting a narrow vertical rectangle in the wall plating, a shape that would enable both his eyes and the helmet light to be directed through the opening at the same time so that he could see into the adjoining compartment. But when he burned through the wall there was nothing to see except a black, powdery substance, which spilled out of the opening and hung in a weightless cloud until the movement of his cutter flame sent it spinning into tiny three-dimensional whirlpools.
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 uppersurface 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.”