"The next stage," Kator said, "is, of course, to send a man down to examine this underground area."
"Of course, sir," said the Captain. The Captain had swallowed one of the cultures, but because of the necessity of the conference had eaten nothing for the last six hours. He thought of the rest of the Expedition gorging themselves in the gathering room and his own hunger came sharply on him to reinforce the anticipation of intoxication.
"So far," said Kator, "the Expedition has operated without mistakes. Perfection of operation must continue. The man who goes down on to the planet of the Muffled People must be someone whom I can be absolutely sure will carry the work through to success. There's only one individual in this Expedition of whom I'm that sure."
"Sir?" said the Captain, forgetting his hunger suddenly and experiencing an abrupt chilliness in the region of his liver. "You aren't thinking of me, are you, Keysman? My job with the ship, here—"
"I am not thinking of you."
"Oh," said the Captain, breathing freely. "In that case . . . while I would be glad to serve . . ."
"I'm thinking of myself."
"Keysman!"
It was almost an explosion from the Captain's lips. His whiskers flattened back against his face.
Kator waited. The Captain's whiskers slowly returned to normal position.
"I beg your pardon, sir," he said. "Of course, you can select whom you wish. It's rather unheard of, but . . . Do you wish me to act as Keysman while you're down there?"
Kator smiled at him.
"No," he said.
The Captain's whiskers twitched slightly, involuntarily, but his face remained impassive.
"Who, then, sir?"
"No one."
This time the Captain did not even explode with the word of Kator's title. He merely stared, almost blindly at Kator.
"No one," repeated Kator, slowly. "You understand me, Captain? I'll be taking the keys of the ship with me."
"But—" the Captain's voice broke and stopped. He took a deep breath. "I must protest officially, Keysman," he said. "It would be extremely difficult to get home safely if the keys were lost and the authority of a Keysman was lacking on the trip back."
"It will be impossible," said Kator, evenly. "Because I intend to lock ship before leaving."
The Captain said nothing.
"Perfection, Captain," remarked Kator in the silence, "can imply no less than utter effort and unanimity—otherwise it isn't perfection. Since to fail of perfection is to fail of our objective here, and to fail of our objective is to render the Expedition worthless—I consider I am only doing my duty in making all Members of the Expedition involved in a successful effort down on the planet's surface."
"Yes, sir," said the Captain woodenly.
"You'd better inform the Expedition of this decision of mine."
"Yes, sir."
"Go ahead then," said Kator. The Captain turned toward the door. "And Captain—" The Captain halted with the door half open, and looked back. Kator was standing in the middle of the room, smiling at him. "Tell them I said for them to enjoy themselves—this shift."
"Yes, sir."
The Captain went out, closing the door behind him and cutting off his sight of Kator's smile. Kator turned and walked over to the table holding his keys, his family badge, his papers and the cube containing the worm. He picked up the cube and for a moment held it almost tenderly.
None of them, he thought, would believe him if he told them that it was not himself he was thinking of, but of something greater. Gently, he replaced the cube among the other precious items on the table. Then he turned and walked across the room to squat at his desk. While the sounds of the celebration in the gathering room came faintly through the locked door of his quarters, he settled down to a long shift of work, planning and figuring the role of every Member of the Expedition in his own single assault upon the secret place of the Muffled People.
* * *
The shift after the celebration, Kator set most of the Expedition Members to work constructing mechanical burrowing devices which could dig down to, measure and report on the outside of the underground area he wished to enter. Meanwhile, he himself, with the help of the Captain and two specialists in such things, attacked the problem of making Kator himself into a passable resemblance of one of the Muffled People.
The first and most obvious change was the close-clipping of Kator's catlike whiskers. There was no pain or discomfort involved in this operation, but so deeply involved were the whiskers in the sociological and psychological patterns of the adult male Ruml that having them trimmed down to the point of invisibility was a profound emotional shock. The fact that they would grow again in a matter of months—if not weeks—did not help. Kator suffered more than an adult male of the Muffled People would have suffered if the normal baritone of his voice had suddenly been altered to a musical soprano.
The fact that the whiskers had been clipped at his own order somehow made it worse instead of better.
The depilation that removed the rest of the fur on Kator's head, bad as it was, was by contrast a minor operation. After the shock of losing the whiskers, Kator had been tempted briefly to simply dye the close gray fur covering the skull between his ears like a beanie. But to do so would have been too weak a solution to the fur problem. Even dyed, his natural head-covering bore no relationship to human hair.
Still, dewhiskered and bald, Kator's reflection in a mirror presented him with an unlovely sight. Luckily, he did, now, look like one of the Muffled People after a fashion from the neck up. The effect was that of a pink-skinned oriental with puffy eyelids over unnaturally wide and narrow eyes. But it was undeniably native-like.
The rest of his disguise would have to be taken care of by the mufflings he would be wearing, after the native fashion. These complicated body-coverings, therefore, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, with pun intended. Without them it would have been almost impossible to conceal Kator's body-differences from the natives.
As it was, foot-coverings with built-up undersurfaces helped to disguise the relative shortness of Kator's legs, as the loose hanging skirt of the sleeved outside upper-garment hid the unnatural—by Muffled People physical standards—narrowness of his hips. Not a great deal could be done about the fact that the Ruml spine was so connected to the Ruml pelvis that Kator appeared to walk with his upper body at an angle leaning forward. But heavy padding widened the narrow Ruml shoulders and wide sleeves hid the fact that the Ruml arms, like the Ruml legs, were normally designed to be kept bent at knee and elbow-joint.
When it was done, Kator was a passable imitation of a Muffled Person—but these changes were only the beginning. It was now necessary for him to learn to move about in these hampering garments with some appearance of native naturalness.
The mufflings were hideously uncomfortable—like the clinging but lifeless skin of some loathsome creature. But Kator was as unyielding with himself as he was with the other Expedition Members. Shift after shift, as the rest of the Expedition made their burrowing scanners, sent them down and collected them back on the moon to digest the information they had discovered, Kator tramped up and down his own quarters, muffled and whiskerless—while the Captain and the two specialists compared his actions with tapes of the natives in comparable action, and criticized.
Intelligent life is inconceivably adaptable. There came a shift finally when the three watchers could offer no more criticisms, and Kator himself no longer felt the touch of the mufflings about his body for the unnatural thing it was.
* * *
Kator announced himself satisfied with himself, and went to the gathering room for a final briefing on the information the burrowing mechanisms had gathered about the Muffled People's secret place. He stood—a weird-looking Ruml figure in his wrappings while he was informed that the mechanisms had charted the underground area and found it to be immense—half a native mile in depth, twenty miles in extent and ten in breadth. Its ceiling was an eighth of a mile
below the surface and the whole underground area was walled in by an extremely thick casing of native concrete stiffened by steel rods.
The mechanisms had been unable to scan through the casing and, since Kator had given strict orders that no attempt was to be made to burrow or break through the casing for fear of alarming the natives, nothing was discovered about the interior.
What lay inside, therefore, was still a mystery. If Kator was to invade the secret place, therefore, he would have to do so blind—not knowing what in the way of defenders or defenses he might discover. The only open way in was down the elevator shaft where the food shipments disappeared.
Kator stood in thought, while the other Members of the Expedition waited around him.
"Very well," he said at last "I consider it most likely that this place has been set up to protect against invasion by others of the natives, themselves—rather than by someone like myself. At any rate, we will proceed on that assumption."
And he called them together to give them final orders for the actions they would have to take in his absence.
* * *
The face of the planet below them was still in night when Kator breached the moon surface just over the site of the Expedition Headquarters and took off planetward in a small, single-man ship. Behind him, the hole in the dust-covered rock filled itself in as if with a smooth magic.
His small ship lifted from the moon and dropped toward the darkness of the planet below.
He came to the planet's surface, just as the sun was beginning to break over the eastern horizon and the fresh chill of the post-dawn drop of temperature was in the air. He camouflaged his ship, giving it the appearance of some native alder bushes, and stepped from it for the first time onto the alien soil.
The strange, tasteless atmosphere of the planet filled his nostrils. He looked toward the rising sun and saw a line of trees and a ramshackle building blackly outlined against the redness of its half-disk. He turned a quarter-circle and began to walk toward the factory.
Not far from his ship, he hit the dirt road running past the scattered farms to the complex. He continued along it with the sun rising strongly on his left, and after a while he came to the wooden bridge over the creek. On this, as he crossed it, his footcoverings fell with a hollow sound. In the stillness of the dawn these seemed to echo through the whole sleeping world. He hurried to get off the planks back onto dirt road again; and it was with an internal lightening of tension that he stepped finally off the far end of the bridge.
"Up early, aren't you?" said a voice.
Kator checked like a swordsman, just denying in time the impulse that would have whirled him around like a discovered thief. He turned casually. On the grassy bank of the creek just a few feet below this end of the bridge, an adult male native sat.
A container of burning vegetation was in his mouth, and smoke trickled from his lips. He was muffled in blue leg-coverings and his upper body was encased in a worn, sleeved muffling of native leather. He held a long stick in his hands, projecting out over the waters of the creek, and as Kator faced him, his lips twisted upward in the native fashion.
Kator made an effort to copy the gesture. It did not come easily, for a smile did not mean humor among his people as much as triumph, and laughter was almost unknown except in individuals almost at the physical or mental breaking point. But it seemed to satisfy the native.
"Out for a hike?" said the native.
Kator's mind flickered over the meaning of the words. He had drilled himself, to the point of unconscious use, in the native language of this area. But this was the first time he had spoken native to a real native. Strangely, what caught at his throat just then was nothing less than embarrassment. Embarrassment at standing whiskerless before this native—who could know nothing of whiskers, and what they meant to a Ruml.
"Thought I'd tramp around a bit," Kator answered, the alien words sounding awkward in his mouth. "You fishing?"
The native waggled the pole slightly, and a small colored object floating on the water trembled with the vibration sent from the rod down the line attached to it.
"Bass," said the native.
Kator wet his nonexistent whiskers with a flicker of his tongue, and thought fast.
"Bass?" he said. "In a creek?"
"Never know what you'll catch," said the native. "Might as well fish for bass as anything else. You from around here?"
"Not close," said Kator. He felt on firmer ground now. While he knew something about the fishing habits and jargon of the local natives—the matter of who he was and where from had been rehearsed.
"City?" said the native.
"That's right," said Kator. He thought of the planet-wide city of the Ruml Homeworld.
"Headed where?"
"Oh," said Kator, "just thought I'd cut around the complex up there, see if I can't hit a main road beyond and catch a bus back to town."
"You can do that, all right," said the native. "I'd show you the way, but I've got fish to catch. You can't miss it, anyway. Ahead or back from here both brings you out on the same road."
"That so?" said Kator. He started to move off. "Well, thanks."
"Don't mention it, friend."
"Good luck with your bass."
"Bass or something—never tell what you'll catch."
Kator waved. The native waved and turned back to his contemplation of the creek Kator went on.
Only a little way down the dirt road, around a bend and through some trees, he came on the wide wire gate where the road disappeared into the complex. The gate was closed and locked Kator glanced about him, saw no one and took a small silver cone from his pocket. He touched the point of the cone to the lock. There was a small, upward puff of smoke and the gate sagged open. Kator pushed through, closed the gate behind him and headed for the building which the truck holding the Ruml collector had entered.
The door to the building also was locked. Kator used the cone-shaped object on the lock of a small door set into the big door and slipped inside. He found himself in a small open space, dim-lit by high windows in the building. Beyond the open space was the end of the conveyor belt on which the food boxes had been discharged, and a maze of machinery.
Kator listened, standing in the shadow of the door. He heard nothing. He put away the cone and drew his handgun. Lightly, he leaped up on to the still conveyor belt and began to follow it back into the clutter of machinery.
It was a strange, mechanical jungle through which he found himself traveling. The conveyor belt was not a short one. After he had been on it for some minutes, his listening ears caught sound from up ahead. He stopped and listened.
The sound was that of native voices talking.
He went on, cautiously. Gradually he approached the voices, which did not seem to be on the belt but off it to the right some little distance. Finally, he drew level with them. Kneeling down and peering through the shapes of the machinery he made out a clear area in the building about thirty feet off the belt. Behind the cleared area was a glassed-in cage in which five humans, wearing blue uniforms and weapon harnesses supporting handguns, could be seen—sitting at desks and standing about talking.
Kator lowered his head and crept past like a shadow on the belt. The voices faded a little behind him and in a little distance, he came to the shaft and the elevator platform on to which the conveyor belt discharged its cargo.
Kator examined the platform with an eye already briefed on its probable construction. It was evidently remotely controlled from below, but there should be some kind of controls for operating it from above—if only emergency controls.
Kator searched around the edge of the shaft, and discovered controls set under a plate at the end of the conveyor belt. Using a small magnetic power tool, he removed the plate covering the connections to the switches and spent a moment or two studying the wiring. It was not hard to figure it out from this end—but he had hoped to find some kind of locking device, such as would be standard on a Ruml apparatus of this sort
, which would allow him to prevent the elevator being used after he himself had gone down.
But there was no such lock.
He replaced the plate, got on to the platform and looked at the controls. From this point on it was a matter of calculated risk. There was no way of telling what in the way of guards or protective devices waited for him at the bottom of the shaft. He had had his choice of trying to find out with collectors previously and running the risk of alerting the natives—or of taking his chances now. And he had chosen to take his chances now.
He pressed the button. The platform dropped beneath him, and the darkness of the shaft closed over his head.
* * *
The platform fell with a rapidity that frightened him. He had a flashing mental picture of it being designed for only nonhuman materials—and then thought of the damageable fruits and vegetables among its food cargo came to mind and reassured him. Sure enough—after what seemed like a much longer drop than the burrowing scanners had reported the shaft to have—the platform slowed quickly but evenly to a gentle halt and emerged into light from an opening in one side of the shaft.
Kator was off the platform the second it emerged, and racing for the nearest cover—behind the door of the small room into which he had been discharged. And no sooner than necessary. A lacework of blue beams lanced across the space where he had been standing a tiny part of a second before.
The beams winked out. The smell of ozone filled the room. For a moment Kator stood frozen and poised, gun in hand. But no living creature showed itself. The beams had evidently been fired automatically from apertures in the wall. And, thought Kator with a cold feeling about his liver, the spot he had chosen to duck into was about the only spot in the room they had not covered.
He came out from behind the door, slipped through the entrance to which it belonged—and checked suddenly, catching his breath.