James White - Ambulance Ship

The Blind Ones …

They had begun as small, sightless, flat worms, burrowing in the primal ooze of their world, scavenging for the most part, but often paralyzing larger life-forms with their sting and ingesting them piecemeal. As they grew in size and number their food requirements increased. They became blind hunters whose sense of touch was specialized to the point where they did not need any other sensory channel.

Specialized touch sensors enabled them to feel the movements of their prey on the surface and to identify its characteristic vibrations so that they could lie in wait for it just below ground until it came within reach of their sting. Other sensors were able to feel out and identify tracks on the surface. This enabled them to follow their prey over long distances to its lair and either burrow underground and sting it from below, or attack it while the sound vibrations it was making told them it was asleep. They could not, of course, achieve much against a sighted and conscious opponent on the surface, and very often they became the prey rather than the hunters, so their hunting strategy was concentrated on variations of the ambush tactic.

On the surface they “built” tracks and other markings of small animals, and these attracted larger beasts of prey into their traps. But the surface animals were steadily becoming larger and much too strong to be seriously affected by a single Blind One’s sting. They were forced to cooperate in setting up these ambushes, and cooperation in more ambitious food-gathering projects led in turn to contact on a widening scale, the formation of subsurface food stores and communities, towns, cities and interlinking systems of communication. They already “talked” to one another and educated their young by touch. Methods were even devised for augmenting and feeling vibrations over long distances.

The Blind Ones were capable of feeling vibrations in the ground and in the atmosphere, and eventually, with the use of amplifiers and transformers, they could “feel” light. They discovered fire and the wheel and the use of radio frequencies by transforming them into touch, and soon large areas of their planet were covered with radio beacons, which enabled them to undertake long journeys using mechanical transport. While they were aware of the advantages of powered flight, and a large number of Blind Ones had died experimenting with it, they preferred to stay in touch with the surface because they were, after all, completely unable to see.

This did not mean that they were unaware of their deficiency. Practically every non-sentient creature on their world had the strange ability to navigate accurately over short or long distances without the need of feeling the wind direction or the disturbances caused by vibrations bouncing off distant objects, but they had no real understanding of what the sense of sight could be. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of their long-range touching systems was making them aware that many and complex vibrations were reaching them from beyond their world, that there were sentient and probably more knowledgeable beings producing these faint touchings, and that these beings might be able to help them attain the sense that was possessed, seemingly, by all creatures except themselves.

Many, many more of the Blind Ones perished while feeling their way into space to their sister planets, but they learned eventually to travel between the stars they could not see. They sought with great difficulty and increasing hopelessness for intelligent life, feeling out world after world in vain, until finally they found the planet on which the Protectors of the Unborn lived.

The Protectors …

They had evolved on a world of shallow, steaming seas and swamps and jungles, where the line of demarcation between animal and vegetable life, so far as physical mobility and aggression were concerned, was unclear. To survive at all, a life-form had to move fast, and the dominant species on that world earned its place by fighting and moving and reproducing generations with a greater potential for survival than any of the others.

At a very early stage in their evolution the utter savagery of their environment had forced them into a physiological form that gave maximum protection to their vital organs-brain, heart, lungs, womb, all were deep inside the fantastically well muscled and armored body, and compressed into a relatively small volume. During gestation, the organic displacement was considerable because the embryo had to grow virtually to maturity before birth. It was rare that they were able to survive the reproduction of more than three of their kind; an aging parent was usually too weak to defend itself against attack by its last born.

But the principal reason why the Protectors rose to dominance on their world was because their young were well educated and already experienced in the techniques of survival before they were born. In the dawn of their evolution the process had begun simply as a transmission of a complex set of survival instincts at the genetic level, but the close juxtaposition of the brains of the parent and its developing embryo led to an effect analogous to induction of the electrochemical activity associated with thought. The embryos became short-range telepaths, receiving everything the parent saw or felt. And even before the growth of the embryo was complete, there was another embryo beginning to form within it that was also increasingly aware of the world outside its self-fertilizing grandparent. Then, gradually, the telepathic range increased, and communication became possible between embryos whose parents were close enough to see each other.

To minimize damage to the parent’s internal organs, the growing embryo was paralyzed while in the womb, and the prebirth deparalyzing process also caused loss of sentience and the telepathic faculty. A newborn Protector would not last very long in its incredibly savage world if it was hampered by the ability to think.

With nothing to do but receive impressions from the outside world, exchange thoughts and try to widen their telepathic range by making contact with various forms of non-sentient life around them, the embryos developed minds of great power and intelligence. But they could not build anything, or engage in any form of technical research, or do anything at all that would influence the activities of their parents and protectors, who had to fight and kill and eat unceasingly to maintain their unsleeping bodies and the unborn within them.

This was the situation when the first ship of the Blind Ones landed on the planet of the Protectors and made joyful mental and savage physical contact.

Immediately it became obvious that the two life-forms needed each other-the Blind Ones, technically advanced despite their sensory deprivation, and the highly intelligent race with two-way telepathy who were trapped inside the mindless organic killing machines that were their parents. A species who had just one sensory channel open, hyperdeveloped though it was, and with the capability of traveling between the stars; and another that was capable of experiencing all sensory impressions and of relaying those experiences, who had been confined to within a few square miles of its planetary surface.

Following the initial euphoria and heavy casualties among the Blind Ones, the short- and long-term plans were made for assimilating the Protectors into their culture. To begin with, the Blind Ones did not possess many starships, but a construction program for hyperships capable of transporting Protectors to the world of the Blind Ones was begun. There, although the environment was not as savage as that of their home planet, the surface was still untamed, because the Blind Ones preferred to live underground. There they would be positioned above the Blind Ones’ subsurface cities, hunting and killing the native animals while their telepathic embryos absorbed the knowledge of the citizens below them, showing the Blind Ones what it was like to see, for the first time, the animals and vegetation, the sky with its sun, stars and constantly changing meteorological effects.