Gordon Dickson - The Human Edge

“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.