Mitsuitei had been almost right in his prediction that the pit would be
full of water. Only the fact that the land sloped a trifle--they were
not right on top of the little hill--had saved it. As it was, several
feet of water were in the bottom, and a good deal of mud had washed in
from the two sides facing the edges of the crack. The other two, much
better braced by deep-reaching roots, had held firm.
After some thought, Lampert used the little robot again. He started
it at the bottom of the pit on the downhill side and drove almost
horizontally toward the river. The two hundred meters of "neck"
permitted the mole to emerge from the slope farther down. When it was
withdrawn, a small drain hole was obtained. Several more of these were
drilled, and the pit lost its water fairly rapidly.
There was still the problem of getting into the crack itself, which
of course would involve digging below the level of the drain holes.
Lampert, using the same excavator which had made the pit itself,
finally provided a fair solution by digging a set of ditches around the
larger hole; and since the opening itself was quite well protected by
over-hanging trees, Mitsuitei had only drainage from the surrounding
soil to contend with.
Two hours after arriving, therefore, he had a relatively clear working
space. The bottom of the pit was limestone, exposed by the complete
removal of the overlying soil, some three meters square. Across it
ran the crack, a trifle less than a meter wide, still packed with
dirt. Everything was muddy--limestone, projecting roots, and Mitsuitei
himself. A slender log with branches cut to ten-centimeter stubs leaned
against one corner, forming a rough ladder and giving entrance and
egress to and from the site.
The machinery which had done the original digging was at one side.
Mitsuitei did not expect to need it again. He was now equipped with a
hand shovel, and seemed about to use it. Lampert, standing at the edge
of the pit, felt the incongruity, but managed not to laugh.
"Are you sure there's nothing I can do down there with you?" he asked.
"I'm afraid not. From now on I want every bit of dirt to pass under my
own eyes."
"Are you going to try to throw it all up here as you finish?"
"No. That's the purpose of the extra pit area down here. I can get a
long way down the joint, simply heaping the material on the rock. It's
damp enough to pile quite steeply, too."
"How far down do you think you can get? The crack's rather narrow to
work in, and you have three and a half meters to go before you hit
tuff. That's going to be rough shoveling. I still think you could use
the machine safely for a little way further, at least."
"No doubt I could, but I'm not going to. There's one thing I might use,
though. If you have another of those saws, such as the bonemen are
using up on the cliff, I could widen this crack as I go--cut steps, in
fact, to help get the mud up to this level when I'm further down."
"That's a good thought, but I don't have any other. If you really get
far enough down to need it, though, I could fly up to get it. They were
going to shift over to hand labor anyway."
"All right. Of course, it will be some time before I get that deep
anyway; maybe I won't need it today." He bent to his work.
"But what do I do?" asked Lampert. "I can't go off to attend to my own
projects, because String has to stay here to guard you. I can't get to
the site where the others are working because I can't land there. I
can't sit in the helicopter and twiddle my thumbs because I'll go crazy
before the day is over." Mitsuitei straightened once more, and thought
briefly.
"Is there nothing in the geophysical line you could do within sight of
this pit?" he asked finally. "The saw and digging machine are not the
only apparatus you brought."
"That's true. I brought some seismic gear, though I didn't plan to use
it quite like this. I might map the formations under this hill. The
information will be usable, I should think, and the joints will give
quite a calibrating job. It will keep me busy, anyway."
"Just a minute!" Mitsuitei looked a trifle perturbed. "Does that mean
you're going to set off explosives around here? I want the sides of
this pit held up by something better than roots, if you do."
* * * * *
Lampert chuckled. "No explosives," he said. "This is a nice little
gadget with a robot like the core sampler. It puts out waves of any
type desired from any depth down to two hundred fifty meters--a sort of
subterranean sonar. You'll never know it's working. The wave amplitude
isn't enough to feel." He turned toward the helicopter on the river
bank below, and was starting to walk toward it when McLaughlin
interrupted. The guide had heard the conversation, and his question was
purely rhetorical.
"You weren't planning to walk down to the flyer alone, were you,
Doctor?"
"Well, yes, as a matter of fact. After all, I won't be working; I can
keep my eyes open as I go. You can see me for the greater part of the
journey from here, too."
Rather to his surprise the guide approved this argument, after a
moment's thought.
"All right. But please keep your gun in your hand as well as your head
on a swivel. I'd prefer to have Dr. Mitsuitei come down with us so we
could stay together, but I know how he'd react to the interruption, and
I realize you're not a kid. Just be careful."
Lampert promised; and the guide's manner had impressed him to the point
where he was almost afraid to make the return journey, after reaching
the flyer and packing his new equipment. He was rather surprised to get
back to the site without being attacked, and McLaughlin's very evident
relief at seeing him did nothing to ease his feelings.
He began to set up the machinery. This consisted of an assembly very
similar to the drilling mole--a small delving robot drawing a slender
tail behind it, the tail wound on a drum which surrounded the control
unit. A dozen smaller cylinders reposed in attached clips.
"The attached borer," Lampert explained to the guide, "goes down
to any depth I set, up to two hundred fifty meters. It can produce
any of the three normal types of earthquake wave, singly or in any
combination, with sufficient intensity to be detected at a range of
over two kilometers in reasonably well-conducting rock. The small
cylinders are detectors, equipped not only to receive and analyze the
wave coming through the ground but to measure electronically their
location with respect to each other and the main station. I can use as
many of them as I please, up to the full dozen; but they can be planted
only a little way below the surface. There exists equipment for getting
readings at depths comparable to that of the transmitter, but I don't
have it. As it stands, by spotting the receivers carefully I can get a
pretty good picture of the formations for a radius of a kilometer and a
depth even greater with ten minutes measuring--and ten hours computing."
"How far out do you plan to place these receivers?" the guide asked
pointedly.
"Well--I hadn't made a detailed plan of that. I'd rather like to have
them in radiating lines of three, the lines spreading about fifteen
degrees, and the individual cylinders about two hundred meters apart."
"And just how were you going to place them? I gather that someone has
to walk the best part of four kilometers--or do these things fly, in
addition to their other abilities?"
"Er--someone walks. I thought perhaps, since you don't like the idea
of my going alone through the jungle, that I might stand guard over
Take in the pit while you set them out."
"Hmm." The guide did not explode, to Lampert's relief. It had not
occurred to the scientist that the job of wandering around a hole in
the ground waiting for animals which never came might get a little
boring to a man of McLaughlin's background. "Let's go over first
and see how Dr. Mitsuitei is getting along. I guess you could stand
over him with a gun for half an hour. Of course, the cover runs
dangerously close to the pit. Maybe we'd better burn it off to a
safer distance--still, I guess that won't be necessary. You can stand
out here where it's relatively clear, and see all the approaches to
the pit. Something might jump in without your having time to hit it,
and you'd at least see it and could get there fast enough to do any
shooting necessary."
They approached the hole and looked in. Mitsuitei was working busily.
A fair quantity of earth lay spread on the rock, and some two thirds
of the length of the crack had been excavated to a depth of perhaps
a quarter of a meter. The geophysicist attracted the little man's
attention and told him of the plan; Mitsuitei nodded and bent once more
to his work.
The Felodon was becoming restless. It could hardly be hungry as yet;
but it was on its feet, snarling silently as it had when the helicopter
first entered its ken. For perhaps a minute it stood; then, with
the same air of determination it had shown days before and scores of
kilometers away, it began to thread its way through the underbrush
toward the river--and the digging site.
* * * * *
"I'll stand where you suggested, and never take my eyes off the pit,"
Lampert promised.
"Then I'll come back to find you missing," replied the guide. "You're
guarding yourself too, remember. Don't keep your eyes on anything. Keep
them moving."
He finished distributing the little cylinders in the various pockets
of his outer clothing, and moved off in the direction Lampert had
indicated. He looked back frequently, but each time saw the scientist
alert. When the underbrush finally cut off the view, he refused to
worry too much.
Actually, McLaughlin had gone to considerable pains to make the jungles
of Viridis sound more dangerous than they really are. His conscious
motive was to make the inexperienced members of the party alert enough
for their own safety. It was quite true that a man could be killed in
quite a variety of ways in those rain forests. There was a distinct
possibility, however, that he also wanted to impress them with the
importance of his services.
He did not, therefore, suffer much from anxiety during his walk, though
on the other hand he wasted no time. He had, of course, only a rough
idea of the distance he had traveled, though he was able to keep his
direction with a small impulse-compass tuned to the seismic apparatus
and forming part of its regular equipment.
He dropped three of the cylinders at the required intervals, as nearly
as he could guess, forcing each a little way into the ground as Lampert
had shown him; then he turned at right angles, walked what he hoped was
the right distance and started back toward the site, planting equipment
as he went. Out again, in again; and the last of the dozen tubes was in
the ground.
Mitsuitei's shovel scraped deeper.
Lampert, glancing up and around every few seconds, made minute
adjustments to the controls of his seismic apparatus. Its little mole
robot had started on its downward trip.
The Felodon lurked thirty yards from the point where Lampert was
standing, protected from his sight by the undergrowth and by one of the
piles of dirt thrown up by the machine which had dug the pit. It seemed
to be looking through the soil at the spot where the man was. The snarl
was still on its face, but no muscle moved in its long body. It had
been there for minutes without moving; it had frozen similarly when
McLaughlin had passed it on his way out. Now it simply stood and waited.
On a cliffside kilometers away, Ndomi Sulewayo gave utterance to the
first profanity Krendall had ever heard him use. They were on opposite
sides of the block containing the fossil, so neither could see the
other. Krendall, naturally, asked what was wrong.
"Don't tell me a bug got through one of these suits!"
"Worse, if possible. I told you this foreleg--" both had been carefully
avoiding the use of such words as "arms"--"was sticking out sideways,
so that I was afraid we might have cut off part of it in digging the
tunnel."