The vines themselves form a virtually impenetrable covering. They lie side by side like the threads in some colossal tapestry, occasionally overlapping, each one stretching on and on for what may well be kilometers; there is not so much as a fingersbreadth of room between each one and its neighbor. Their greenish-purplish bark is sturdy and yet rubbery, yielding a little beneath the feet of the two explorers. It bears not just leaves but pulpy fungoid masses that sprout in random patches all over it, and also scabrous gray coatings of the local equivalent of lichen. These are soft as cheese, these parasites or saprophytes or symbiotes, whatever the case may be, creating a treacherously slippery surface, but it is difficult to avoid walking on them. Between these various excrescent outgrowths it is possible to see numerous large oval bodies, greenish in color and smooth in texture, set in the bark of the vines four or five meters apart from one another like a host of unblinking eyes: they appear to have a significant function for the vines, perhaps supplementary instruments that aid the strange leaves in conducting some kind of photosynthetic process in this dismal subaqueous light.
Everything here seems to be rotting, decaying, decomposing, and reconstituting itself all in the same process. This world would have made a good penal colony, maybe, in the fine old days when cruel and unusual punishment was a popular human pastime. But it doesn’t seem good for very much else.
“Have we seen enough, do you think?” Huw says.
The year-captain points straight ahead. There is a round dark place up there, like the mouth of a cave, set between two vine trunks. The entrance, it seems, to one of those long underground tunnels that had shown up on the sonar images. “Shall we take a look inside?” he asks.
“Ah. You want to go in there.”
“I want to go in there, yes,” says the year-captain in a quiet tone.
“Well, then, why not?” says Huw, not very enthusiastically. “Why not, indeed?”
The year-captain leads the way, without discussion of issues of precedence. The tunnel is wide and low-roofed, ten or twelve meters broad but scarcely higher than the tops of their heads in some places. It runs at a gently sloping downward angle right through the corpus of the vines, slicing casually from one to the next; its walls, which are the substance of the vines, are moist and pink, like intestines, and a kind of sickly phosphorescent illumination comes from them, a feeble glow that breaks the dense darkness but is of little help to vision. Huw and the year-captain activate their helmet lamps and step a little farther within, and then a little farther yet.
Huw says, “I wonder what could have constructed these—”
“Hush,” says the year-captain, pointing ahead once again. “Look.”
He walks forward another dozen meters or so and steps up the intensity of his beam. The tunnel appears to be blocked up ahead by a plug of some sort; but as they get closer to the blockage they can see that the “plug” is slowly retreating from them — that it is, in fact, some enormous sluggish, elongated flat-topped creature that not only is moving in wormlike fashion along the floor of the tunnel but is evidentlycreating the tunnel, or at least expanding it, by devouring the fabric of the vine through which the tunnel runs.
“Fabulous,” Huw murmurs. “What do you know, we’ve found extraterrestrial animal life at last, old brother! And what a beauty it is!”
There is no way for them to tell how long the tunnel worm is. Its front end is lost in the darkness far down the way. But they are able to see that its body is three times the width of a man’s, and rises nearly to their height. Its flesh is translucent and pink in color, a deeper pink than that of the tunnel itself, more in the direction of scarlet, and has a soft, buttery look about it. Black hairy fist-size pores are set low along the creature’s sides, every fifty centimeters or thereabouts, going forward on it as far as they can see. From these orifices comes a steady trickle of thin whitish slime that runs down the curving sides of the thing and lies puddled in rivulets and pools along the tunnel floor around it. An excretion product, no doubt. The worm seems to be nothing more than an eating machine, mindless, implacable. It is steadily munching its way through the vine and turning what it eats into a stream of slime.
Indeed they can hear the sounds of feeding coming from the other end of the creature: a snuffling noise and a harsh chomping noise, both above a constant sixty-cycle drone. All these sounds, which seem to be related, go on without letup. An eating machine, yes.
The two men creep a little nearer, taking care not to let their boots come in contact with the deposits of slime that the great worm has left in their path. When they are as close to the creature as they dare to get, it becomes possible for them to perceive curious glowing cystlike structures, dark and round and solid and about the size of a man’s head, distributed with seeming randomness within the flesh of the thing, scattered here and there at depths of a third of a meter or more. These cysts make their presence known by a bright gleam like yellow fire that emanates from them and rises up through the flesh of the worm to its pink puckered skin.
“Internal organs?” Huw asks. “Elements of its nervous system, could they be?”
“I don’t think so,” the year-captain says. “I think they may belong to this.”
Once more he points, jabbing his finger urgently forward two or three times into the pinkish gloom, and turns the beam of his helmet lamp up to its highest level.
Another creature has appeared from somewhere, a creature far smaller than the worm, and has taken up a perch atop the worm’s back just about at the farthest distance where they are able to see anything. It is a thing about the size of a large dog, vaguely insectoidal in form, with jointed pipe-stem legs, eight or maybe ten of them, and a narrow body made up of several segments. It has a savage-looking beak and a pair of huge glittering golden-green eyes like great jewels, which it turns on them for a moment in a long, baleful stare as the light of the year-captain’s lamp comes to rest on it. Then it returns to its work.
Its work consists of digging a hole deep down in the worm’s flesh and laying an egg in it.
The egg is waiting, glued to the creature’s underbelly: a many-faceted bluish-purple sphere of goodly size. The hole, it seems, is nearly finished. The insectoid-thing, standing upright and bracing itself by spreading its lowest pair of limbs, bends forward at a sharp angle until its head and the upper half of its thorax disappear within the worm. Rapid drilling movements are apparent, the visible half of the creature rocking in quick rhythms, the hidden head no doubt bobbing furiously below to send that terrible beak deeper and deeper into the soft vulnerable material that makes up the worm. The process goes on for an unpleasantly long time.
Then the creature straightens up. It appears to be satisfied with its labors. Once again it glowers warningly at the two watching humans; then it does an odd little strutting dance atop the worm, which, after a moment, can be seen not to be a dance at all, but simply a procedure by which the thing is pulling its huge egg free of its underbelly and laboriously shoving it downward, moving it from one pair of limbs to another, until the next-to-last pair is holding it. At that point the creature flops forward over its excavation, spearing the point of its beak into the skin of the worm as though to anchor itself, and the legs that grasp the egg plunge fiercely downward, jamming the egg deep into the hole that awaits it.
That is all. The creature extricates itself, throws one more huge-eyed glare at Huw and the year-captain, and goes scuttling off into the darkness beyond.