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and swallowing them so they went outside, leaving Harrison ready to take off
in a hurry should it decide to change its mind.
Nothing happened while they explored the crater and immediate surroundings, so
they set up the portable drilling rig to take back some local samples of skin
and underlying tissue. All scout ships carried these rigs and specimens had
been taken from hundreds of areas all over the planet.
But here the specimen was far from typical-they had to drill through nearly
fifty feet of dry, fibrous skin before they came to the pink, spongy,
underlying tissue. They transferred the rig to a position outside the crater
and tried again. Here the skin was only twenty feet thick, the planetary
average.
"This bothers me," said Conway suddenly. "There was no oral cavity, no
evidence of operating musculature, no sign of any kind of opening. It can't be
a mouth!"
"It wasn't an eye it opened," said Harrison on the suit frequency. "I was
there.., here, I
mean."
"It looks just like scar tissue," said Conway. "But it's too deep to have been
formed only as a result of burning by Descartes' tail flare. And why did it
just happen to have a mouth here anyway, just where the ship decided to land?
The chances against that happening are millions to one. And why haven't other
mouths been discovered inland? We've surveyed every square mile of the land
mass, but the only surface mouth to appear was a few minutes after Descartes
landed. Why?"
"It saw us coming and.. ." began Harrison.
"What with?" said Edwards.
..... Or fit us land, then, and decided to form a mouth..
"A mouth," said Conway, "with muscles to open and close it, with teeth,
predigestive
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which, unless it decided to form that as well, could be many miles away- all
within a few minutes of the ship landing? From what we know of carpet
metabolism I can't see all that happening so quickly, can you?"
Edwards and Harrison were silent.
"From our study of the carpet inhabiting that small island to the north," said
Conway, "we have a fair idea of how they function."
Since the day after their arrival the island had been kept under constant
observation. Its inhabitant had an incredibly slow, almost vegetable,
metabolism. The carpet's upper surface appeared not to move, but it did in
fact alter its contours so as to provide a supply of rainwater wherever needed
for the plant life which recycled its air and wastes or served as an
additional food supply. The only real activity occurred around the fringes of
the carpet, where the great being had its mouths. But here again it was not
the carpet itself which moved quickly but the hordes of predators who tried to
eat it while it slowly and ponderously ate them in with the thick, food-rich
sea water. The other big carpets unlucky enough not to have a fringe adjoining
the sea ate vegetation and each other.
The carpets did not possess hands or tentacles or manipulatory appendages of
any kind-just mouths and eyes capable of tracking an arriving spaceship.
"Eyes?" said Edwards. "Why didn't they see our scout ship?"
"There have been dozens of scout ships and copters flitting about recently,"
said Conway, "and the beast may be confused. But what I'd like you to do now,
Lieutenant, is take your ship up to, say, one thousand feet and do a series of
figure-eight turns. Do them as tightly and quickly as possible, cover the same
area of ground each time and make the crossover point directly above our
heads. Got it?"
"Yes, but . .
"This will let the beastie know that we aren't just any scout ship but a very
special one," Conway explained, then added, "be ready to pick us up in a hurry
if something goes wrong.
A few minutes later Harrison took off, leaving the two doctors standing beside
their drilling rig. Edwards said, "I see what you mean, Doctor. You want to
attract attention to us. 'X'
marks the spot and an 'X' with closed ends is a figure-eight. Persistency of
vision will do the rest."
The scout ship was criss-crossing above them in the tightest turns Conway had
ever seen.
Even with the ship's gravity compensators working at full capacity Harrison
must have been taking at least four Gs. On the ground the ship's shadow
whipped past and around them, trailing a long, bright yellow line of rolled-up
leaves. The ground shook to the thunder of the tiny vessel's jet and then,
very slightly, it began shaking by itself.
"Harrison!"
The scout ship broke off the maneuver and roared into a landing behind them.
By then the ground was already beginning to sag.
Suddenly they appeared.
Two large, flat metal disks embedded vertically in the ground, one about
twenty feet in front of them and the other the same distance behind. As they
watched each disk contracted suddenly into a shapeless blob of metal which
crawled a few feet to the side and then suddenly became a large, razor-edged
disk again, cutting a deep incision in the ground. The disks had each cut more
than a quarter circle around them and the ground was sagging rapidly inside
the incisions before Conway realized what was happening.
"Think cubes at them!" he yelled. "Think something blunt! Harrison!"
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"Lock's open. Come running."
But they could not run without taking their eyes and minds off the disks, and
if they did that they could not run fast enough to clear the circular incision
which was being made around them. Instead they sidled toward the scout ship,
willing every inch of the way that the disks become cubes or spheres or
horseshoes-anything but the great, circular scalpels which something had made
them become.
At Sector General Conway had watched his colleague Mannon perform incredible
feats of surgery, using one of these thought-controlled tools, an all-purpose
surgical instrument which became anything he wanted it to be instantly. Now
two of the things were crawling and twisting like metallic nightmares as they
tried to shape them one way and something else-which was their owner and as
such had more expertise-tried to shape them another. It was a very one-sided
struggle but they did, just barely, manage to hamper their opponent's thinking
enough to allow them to get clear before the circular plug of "skin"
containing the drilling rig and other odds and ends of
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"They're welcome to it," said Major Edwards as the lock slammed shut and
Harrison lifted off. "After all, we've been taking specimens for weeks and it
may give them something to think about before we broaden contact with shadow
diagrams." He grew suddenly excited as he went on, "With high-acceleration
radio-controlled missiles we can build up quite complex figures!"
Conway said, "I was thinking more in terms of a tight beam of light projected
onto the surface at night. The leaves should react by opening and the beam
could be moved very quickly in a rectangular sweep pattern like old-fashioned
TV. It might even be possible to project moving pictures."
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