Frederik Pohl - Jem

“Come on, Harriet,” said Morrissey, trying not to explode. “The rain’s almost stopped.”

“And if it has, there are a thousand more important things to do!”

“Will be fun, Gasha,” Kappelyushnikov chipped in. “Digging for foxholes like landed oil-rich English country gentlemen! Excellent sport.”

“And it isn’t just a few holes,” Morrissey added. “Look at the seismology traces. There are big things down there, chambers twenty meters long and more. Not just tunnels. Maybe cities.”

Harriet said cuttingly, “Morrissey, if you wonder why none of us have any confidence in you, that’s just the reason. You’ll say any stupid thing that comes into your head. Cities! There are some indications of shafts and chambers somewhat bigger than the tunnels directly under the surface, yes. But I would not call them—”

“All right, all right. They’re not cities. Maybe they aren’t even villages, but they’re something. At the least, they are something like breeding chambers where they keep their young. Or store their food. Or, Christ, I don’t know, maybe it’s where they have ballet performances or play bingo — what’s the difference? Just because they’re bigger, it follows that they’re probably more important. It will be less likely, or at least harder, for them to seal them off.”

He looked toward Alex Woodring, who coughed and said, “I think that’s reasonable, Harriet. Don’t you?”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Reasonable? No, I certainly wouldn’t call it reasonable. Of course, you’re our leader, at least nominally, and if you think it wise for us to depart from the—”

“I do think it’s a good idea, Harriet,” Woodring said boldly.

“If you’ll let me finish, please? I was saying, if you think we should depart from the agreement we all made that group decisions should be arrived at unanimously, not by a vote or some one person throwing his weight around, then I suppose I have nothing further to say.”

“Gasha, dear,” said Kappelyushnikov soothingly, “shut up, please? Tell us plan, Jim.”

“You bet! First thing we do is open up as big a hole as we can with the backhoe. All of us are out there with shovels, and we jump in. What we want is specimens. We grab what we see. We should take them pretty much by surprise, and besides,” he said, with some self-satisfaction, “two of us can carry these.” He held up his camera. “They’ve got good bright strobes. I got that idea from Boyne when we were drinking together; I think that’s what they do at the Greasies’. They go in with these things, partly to get pictures and mostly to dazzle them. While they’re temporarily blinded we can grab them easily.”

Dalehouse put in, “Temporarily, Jim?”

“Well,” Morrissey said reluctantly, “no, I’m not real sure about that part. Their eyes are probably pretty delicate — but hell, Danny, we don’t even know if they have any eyes in the first place!”

“Then how do they get dazzled?”

“All right. But still, that’s the way I want to do it. And we’ll take walkie-talkies. If anything, uh, goes wrong—” He hesitated and then started over. “If you should get disoriented or anything, you just dig up. You should be able to do that with your bare hands. If not, you just turn your walkie-talkie on. We might be unable to get voice communication from under the surface, but we know from the radio that was stolen that we can at least get carrier sound, so we’ll RDF you and dig you out. That’s if anything goes wrong.”

Kappelyushnikov leaned forward and placed his hand on the biologist’s mouth. “Dear Jim,” he said, “please don’t encourage us anymore, otherwise we all quit. Let’s do this; no more talk.”

Predictably, Harriet would have nothing to do with the venture, and she insisted that at least two of the men stay behind — “In case we have to dig you heroes out.” But Sparky Cerbo volunteered to go in, and Alicia Dair claimed she could run the backhoe better than anyone else in the camp. So they had half a dozen in coveralls, head lamps, goggles, and gloves, ready to jump in when Morrissey signaled the digging to start.

He had been right about the mud; there wasn’t any, except right around the main paths of the camp, where they had trodden the Klongan ground cover to death. But the soil was saturated, and the backhoe threw as much moisture as it did dirt. In less than a minute it had broken through.

Morrissey swallowed, crossed himself, and jumped into the hole. Alex Woodring followed, then Danny, then Kappelyushnikov, di Paolo, and Sparky Cerbo.

The plan was to break up into pairs, each couple to follow one tunnel. The trouble with the plan was that it was predicated on there being more than two directions to take. There weren’t. The pit they dropped into was not much more than a meter broad. It smelled damp and — and bad, Danny thought, like a stale cage of pet mice; and it was no more than a tunnel. Di Paolo jumped down onto Danny’s ankle, and Sparky Cerbo, following, got him square in the middle of the back. They were all tangled together, cursing and grumbling, and if there was a burrower within a kilometer that didn’t know they were coming, that burrower, Danny thought, would have to be dead.

“Quit screwing around!” yelled Morrissey over his shoulder. “Dalehouse! Sparky! You two follow me.”

Dalehouse got himself turned around in time to see Morrissey’s hips and knees, outlined against the glow from his head lamp, moving away. The cross-section of the tunnel was more oval than round, shallower than it was broad; they couldn’t quite move on hands and knees, but they could scramble well enough on thighs and elbows.

“See anything?” he called ahead.

“No. Shut up. Listen.” Morrissey’s voice was muffled, but Dalehouse could hear it well enough. Past it and through it he thought he heard something else. What? It was faint and hard to identify — squirrellike squeals and rustlings, perhaps, and larger, deeper sounds from farther away. His own breath, the rubbing of his gear, the sounds the others made all conspired to drown it out. But there was something.

A bright flare made him blink. It hurt his eyes. It came from Morrissey’s strobe, up ahead. All Dalehouse got of it was what trickled back, impeded by the rough dirt walls almost without reflectance. In the other direction it must have been startling. Now he was sure he heard the squirrel squeals, and they sounded anguished. As well they should, Danny realized, with a moment’s empathy for the burrowers. What could light have meant to them, ever, but some predator breaking in, and death and destruction following?

He bumped into Morrissey’s feet and stopped. Over his shoulder, Morrissey snarled, “The fuckers! They’ve blocked it.”

“The tunnel?”

“Christ, yes, the tunnel! It’s packed tight, too. How the hell could they do that so fast?”

Dalehouse had a moment’s atavistic fear. Blocked! And in the other direction? He rolled onto his side, extinguished his light, and peered back between his feet down the tunnel. Past Sparky’s crouching form he could see — he was sure he could see — the reassuring dim red glow from the Klongan sky. Even so, he could feel the muscles at the back of his neck tensed and painful with the ancient human terror of being buried alive, and he suddenly remembered that the direction they had taken was the one that went under the backhoe. What if its weight crushed the roof through and pinned them? “Ah, Jim,” he called. “What do you think? Should we get back to the barn?”

Pause. Then, angrily, “Might as well. We’re not doing any good here. Maybe the guys had better luck the other way.”