Somewhere in the back of Conway’s mind an idea began to take shape, but it dissolved again as they reached the original landing site and began to circle.
It was just a shallow crater with a lumpy bottom, Conway thought, and not at all like a mouth. Harrison asked if they wanted to land, in a tone which left no doubt that he expected the answer to be “No.”
“Yes,” said Conway.
They landed in the center of the crater. The doctors put on heavy duty suits as protection against the plants which, both on land and under sea, defended themselves by lashing out with poison-thorn branches or shooting lethal quills at anything that came too close. The ground gave no indication of opening up 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 juices and an alimentary canal joining it to a stomach 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?”