Ted turned abruptly toward Nigel. “You look yourself. Two men dead, I don’t take any more chances. Guidelines are, we fulfill the conventions on alien life-forms—big ones, anyway—unless human life is threatened.”
“True enough. But—”
“No buts, Nigel. Fritz”—Ted gestured to the red-haired man—”when it falls, give it five minutes before you go in. Then follow that prelim biopsy routine—the one they had as a fallback.”
“There’s no need to kill it,” Nigel said evenly. “I think we can understand what caused that—”
“I’m not risking it,” Ted said flatly. One side of his mouth twisted up in a humorless grin. “Keep back from it when you go in,” he called to the nearby squad. “No contact.”
Nigel stepped between Ted and other men. If he could simply deflect the man’s attention from the preparations, slip some thought in on top of the adrenaline—“I believe if you’ll allow me to go in, I can sort out what’s happened. The thing must have storage points, internal capacitors. From the X rays we can locate them. Then I can short out the remaining—”
“I’m not risking anybody for that thing. Particularly not you, Nigel.” A brittle smile.
“If you’ll belay that order for a simple blasted ten minutes.”
“No. Now pipe down and let me think.” Ted clenched his jaw and tightened his mouth, touching his teeth together. He rubbed them carefully back and forth, jaw muscles rippling.
Abrupt movement through the port. Nigel watched the EM creature stagger, head wobbling. It kicked over an array of electronics. The arms waved uselessly, clutching at phantom reflected images from the walls, unable to find the key which could unlock this scrambled world.
It fell.
Equipment scattered in all direction. The tall figure toppled slowly, trying to catch itself, hold itself aloft. It could not find the balance. Its hands convulsed and the sharp nails at the end of the six tapered, knobby fingers struck sparks from the stone. Soundless. It kicked once, twice, shattering a biostorage unit.
“Get ready,” Ted said, his voice thin and reedy.
Nigel looked at the men and their tight, concentrated faces. He turned and walked away, tired and disgusted.
Nigel thumbed the focus of the phase-contrast microscope. The bio folk had been over the tissue slices a thousand times and he had read their prelim report, but he wanted to see it for himself.
The creature had many organ systems in common with earthly species. A liver, with double-membrane cells, ribosome-studded and intricate. A wrinkled gray brain. And the chunky body used the same economical cradling, bundles of tubes and support rods and swiveled sockets, now fanning out, now joining up.
But evolution’s firm hand had brushed aside the inefficient chemical kindling that ran Earthside animals. The EMs stored electrical energy in big cylindrical capacitors and discharged it in bursts when needed. The capacitors were sheets of membrance with fine accordion pleats, all wrapped in a Turkish-towel texture, a pictorial tale of an epic struggle for surface. Each capacitor was a forest of smaller capacitors, all insulated and buffered so that a chance twist of the body could not discharge the precious hoard.
Nigel clicked off the miscroscope. Once you had a glimmer of the idea, it seemed natural. Oxygen was in short supply down on Isis, with all the sulfur belching out to scavenge the air. So nature had used an entirely nonchemical method of making a big, energy-squandering animal. Don’t lock up energy in chemical bonds and carry the mass around with the body. Instead, eat whatever food you can find, and then process the chemicals, keeping the energy in separated positive and negative charges. The silicon-platelet “nerves” did some of that, and the odd-looking stomach carried the rest of the job.
No one Earthside had ever anticipated an electrodynamic digestive cycle. Yet once you saw the logic …
Nigel scratched his nose, bemused. It was all well and good to know the innards, but how did the EMs actually live? How had they got this way? The only clues would lie down there, in the raw, dim landscape.
Bob Millard had set out new exploration-team schedules, in light of the discoveries from the EM death. Nigel had a secondary job in the exploration, teamed with a chap named Daffler. He scratched his nose again. Perhaps an opportunity would arise, he would glimpse some clue. Perhaps.
Six
Rasping, clanking, clicking, Nigel picks up speed. Behind him Daffler is having trouble getting his left loco-motor to rev up. If he can get a lead on the man maybe Daffler will never catch up and Nigel can operate with some freedom, follow his nose—
Hey wait up I said.
“There’s something over this way—”
I said wait up and I mean wait up. Look, Nigel, Millard made it pretty plain. You follow my on-site orders or else I shut you down.
Nigel slows. He knew it wouldn’t work, but something in him made the attempt worthwhile, something lofting and playful that erupted when he again felt his stabilizers and locomotors bite into the crust of Isis. He senses that this will be his best chance, perhaps his only chance, to see the EMs as they are, not through 3-D or in dry reports, all of which distance him from the real experience and by selecting spectrum, data, site, slivers of information must always skew the flat facts of perception, and rob him.
I’ve got this lateral housing secured now. Be with you.
Nigel grins lightly, thinking of the cool stone interior of an English cathedral, the services he had dutifully endured there so long ago, a small boy still awed by rising columns of granite and the heavy solemn weight of the service itself, and the Lord be with you, Amen, and with thy spirit, the wafer burning his tongue with its bland consuming bond, promising that in the end he would rise up, a blood knot brimming from an eroded body, ready to take in the night, take, eat, this is my body and blood, eat everything, swallow a universe of dark that seeps in under doors into the warm orange of the family living room, his father sitting in that bobbing rocker, chewing his lip as he listened, rocking, rocking, stern, his son talking, tones deliberately muted lie the long flat notes coming from the organ as they take up the collection, coins ringing in the plates, granite smooth cool climbing up the air, rocker he says will go into rocket, only a t for an r, Father, Father who art in heaven, Father art in heaven now—
Looks like they’re vectoring north again
rouses Nigel and he calls up his faceplate web. Red dots. Time sweep shows them drifting up the valley, away from the gusty Eye winds. They are moving quickly. Faster, Alex says, than he has ever seen the EMs travel anywhere, at rates demanding more energy than the low-oxy environment would allow. Alex noticed the activity in this valley over a week ago. But other surface spots had priority, and by the time the big dish had focused on the region a new storm had moved in from the Eye. The valley was pocked with streaming volcanic vents. The dust swirled into the rising columns of heat, into air rich in water and ammonia and carbon dioxide.
Nigel turns his opticals downward, to see his own hydrasteel carapace, where spatterings of brown mar the robot’s serial numbers, dribbling off in streaks toward the ground. It is raining mud. The sulfurous dust falls as it strikes the volcanic air. It seems odd that the EMs would prefer this slippery, rumbling valley of murk to the downslope valleys beyond where the water runs clear and the air carries only the fine mist of Eyedust that survives the moist volcanoes.
Scoot down to the east, Nigel, I pick up some spiky microwave from there.
He clatters over wet rocks and picks his way down a hillside. The illusion is getting better as the feedback loops lace him into the machine dynamicals better and better, the deft sure movement of the servos coming through to him as the broad feet smack down clump, clack, feeling to Nigel like striding over rough terrain in training boots, and even the stabilizers, whose ground grip translates into surges of calf muscles, thighs clenching and relaxing, spine riding on its disks, arms swinging to keep the pace steady, steady, as the hydrasteel clanks through a blurred world, peering at shifting sheets of life-flecked dust, the thick air here a chemical factory driven in the end by the tidal forces that rip the land, thrusting up the Eye mountains, sawing through the caked layers of rock, poking vents into the high mountain valleys, everywhere flinging wet and grime skyward, cloaking the sky forever so the EMs have never known the stars, except perhaps for one night in a thousand years, when the dusts would fall and the silvery points would glimmer in the vastness, but the EMs had no eyes to see.