James White - Federation World

“Some sort of courtship dance, I expect,” Beth said doubtfully, “except that there isn’t another one of the beasties within detection range- Now, what!”

Without warning the predator had dropped from sight. It looked as if the ground had opened up and swallowed it.

“I’m absolutely sure there were no subsurface caves this close to the landing area,” she said, slipping into the control position and initiating the take off sequence. “We’ll take a closer look at what happened to that creature on the way to rescuing our protector, and before a subsurface cave opens suddenly under us.”

“Right,” Martin agreed.

A few minutes later the lander was hovering above the fresh subsidence. The cave-in was about thirty feet across and roughly the same depth, and the predator was in the exact center of it. Part of a leg and one trunk lay loosely on the fallen soil, looking as if they had been freshly and very crudely amputated, and they did not need the sensors to tell them that the creature was dead.

When they moved to the subsidence covering the protector robot, Beth signaled it again on the off chance that it had been able to repair its communicator. There was no response.

“I’ll work the tractor beam,” Martin said. “Hold us steady while I uncover your sick friend.”

“No,” Beth said, indicating the sensor displays. She sounded as if she herself did not believe what she was saying. “You can’t help my sick friend because it isn’t there anymore. Apart from a few sections of plating, something or somebody has taken our protector robot apart and gone off with the pieces.”

Martin looked over her shoulder, thinking that their lander could not be undermined and taken apart while it was five hundred feet in the air. But that did not mean that the agency which had dismantled their protector and killed one of the largest and most ferocious native predators had no other surprises up its sleeve.

Under emergency thrust, the lander was already climbing through the upper atmosphere when Martin said unnecessarily, “Let’s get out of here.”

Inside the orbiting mother ship they felt safe but very, very confused.

“At this range I can’t detect anything less massive than a heavy screwdriver,” Beth said, “that’s why I’m losing sensor contact with the components of the robot. Even the parts which do not normally break down, such as the power and gravity nullification generators, are being concealed by increasing depth or intervening aggregations of ore-bearing rock. To get a clearer picture I’d have to soft-land a probe and do a proper sonic scan.”

“I suppose we can afford to lose a probe,” Martin said dryly, “as well as a protector robot.”

“It will detect anything approaching from beneath the surface,” she replied irritably, “in plenty of time for me to Lift it clear.”

Considering the virtually limitless resources of the hypership, the loss would be of little importance-except to Beth, who had a very tidy mind.

“Is it possible,” he asked, “that the terrain conceals a life form large enough to ingest surface creatures at will? That predator was literally swallowed up and partially eaten. Maybe it thought our robot was edible, too.”

Beth shook her head. “That’s a bit fanciful. A single beast capable of opening mouths in any desired area of the surface would be large and extremely energy hungry, and the evidence of its presence would be hard to miss. Judging by the way that predator died, its killers are hunters and burrowers who operate as a team. For some reason they prefer to work below ground.”

“On the surface they might be at a disadvantage against the predators,” Martin said, “so they have to be sneaky.”

Which was synonymous, they both knew, with the use of intelligence.

“I’m thinking,” Beth said, “of the way the predator’s attack on the lander was diverted, and why. The presence of a large creature or object can be detected by its effect on the surface, but time is needed to undermine the target, during which it must not move away.

“The robot was easy,” she went on, “because it was damaged and motionless. The predator had to be immobilized in a different fashion. The proper scent would do it, released a few hundred yards upwind. Strong, olfactory indications of a female nearby would make it lose interest in attacking the lander, and once it stopped moving, our friends trapped it in their freshly dug pit. But were they the same group who dismantled the protector, or a different one?”

“Does it matter?” Martin asked.

“It matters,” Beth replied. “If there were two groups of hunters and burrowers who are used to trapping their prey in this fashion, the chances are significantly greater that we are dealing with another specialized form of predator. But if it was the same beings responsible for both attacks, they may have thought that our robot had not been able to defend itself against the predator and they may have diverted and destroyed the creature to save the lander from a similar fate. So it matters whether our friends were being guided by a highly evolved instinct pattern, or intelligence and, possibly, friendship.”

Martin was silent for a moment, then he said apologetically, “I should have thought of that. But suppose our friends, realizing that the predator had wrecked our other vehicle, wanted to protect the lander so that they would have an undamaged machine to take apart?”

“That would mean,” Beth replied worriedly, “that they were intelligent but not very friendly.”

“Maybe we are misreading the indications,” he said, switching sides in the argument. “Could there be a geological reason for the sudden appearance of those pits which…”

He broke off. Beth’s disagreement was silent, but plainly evident.

“All right then,” he went on. “We haven’t seen these creatures or found any trace of their existence. We have no idea how they live except that it is underground. The reason why they don’t show themselves is possibly because they are at a disadvantage on the surface. This suggests a small life form, a species of burrower which acts in concert to dismantle large predators and sophisticated robots alike. The latter capability suggests the possession of advanced technology, power sources and communications systems, none of which we have been able to detect. It is impossible to hide the radiation signature of a technologically advanced civilization unless they are hiding deliberately.”

“Deliberately!” Beth said, and laughed. “Living underground as they do, their communication system could be very basic, simply modulated sonics transmitted through a solid medium. When we land the probe I’ll have the answer to that one.”

“Caution where strangers are concerned,” Martin went on, feeling the hair at the back of his neck begin to prickle, “is also a sign of intelligence. The silence down there is complete, and the sound prints of indigenous life forms are already known to them, so that it would be easy to detect the presence of strangers.

“But they were hiding from us,” he ended quietly, “while we were still in space.”

For a long time Beth stared at the pastoral beauty which was pictured on the main screen, then she said, “I think it’s time we reviewed this whole assignment.”

“SOME vacation!” Beth said when the data had been reviewed. Her tone was one of angry disbelief. “If you remember,” Martin said, trying to be objective, “the supervisor did not actually lie to us when we were assigned Teldi. It did not tell, because it did not know, the whole truth. Maybe it knows even less of the truth this time. Run the searchship data again, please?”

The third and only life bearing planet of a gee-type sun, the world had a near-perfect circular orbit, no axial tilt, no major topological features or temperature variations, all of which explained the absence of seasonal changes and the undramatic weather. The world had a predisposition toward silence and, Martin knew, the ability to hunt or graze quietly would be an important survival characteristic among its fauna. A species which could burrow underground and trap and smother their prey, regardless of size, would have a considerable advantage over the surface dwellers and might well have become the dominant, and intelligent, life form.