She broke off, her face and jaw stiffening in a successfully stifled yawn. Before she could go on, Conway said, “It’s quite a problem. Why don’t you sleep on it?”
Suddenly she laughed. “I am. Hadn’t you noticed?”
Conway smiled and said, “Seriously, I would like to call a copter to pick you up before we go under. I’ve no idea what to expect if we do find what we’re looking for-we might find ourselves caught in an underground blast furnace or paralyzed by the brain’s mental radiation. I realize that your curiosity is strong and entirely professional, but I would much prefer that you didn’t come. After all, scientific curiosity kills more cats than any other kind.”
“With respect, Doctor,” said Murchison, showing very little of it, “you are talking rubbish. There have been no indications of unusually high temperatures on the subsurface, and we both know that while some e-ts communicate telepathically, they can only do so among their own species. The tools are an entirely different matter, an inert but thought-malleable fabrication which. . .” She broke off, took a deep breath and ended quietly, “There is another digger just like this one. I’m sure there would also be an officer and gentleman on Descartes willing to trail you in it.”
Harrison sighed loudly and said, “Don’t be antisocial, Doctor. If you can’t beat ’em, let them join you.”
“I’ll drive for a while,” said Conway, treating incipient mutiny in the only way he could in the circumstances, by ignoring it. “I’m hungry, and it’s your turn to dish up.”
“I’ll help you, Lieutenant,” said Murchison.
As Harrison turned over the driving position to Conway and headed for the galley, he muttered, “You know, Doctor, sometimes I enjoy drooling over a hot dish, especially yours.”
It was shortly before midnight that they reached the area of the subsurface depression, nosed over and bored in. Murchison stared through the direct-vision port beside her, occasionally making notes about the tracery of fine roots which ran through the damp, cork-like material which was the flesh of the strata creature. There was no indication of a conventional blood supply, nothing to show that the creature had ever been alive in the animal rather than the vegetable sense.
Suddenly they broke through the roof of a stomach and drifted down between the great vegetable pillars which raised and lowered the roof, drawing food-bearing water from the sea and expelling, many days later, the waste material not already absorbed by specialist plants. The vegetable stalactites stretched away to the limits of the spotlight in all directions, each one covered with the other specialized growths whose secretions caused the pillars to stiffen when the stomach had been empty for too long and relax when it was full. Other caverns, smaller and spaced closer together than the stomachs, simply kept the water flowing in the system without performing any digestive function.
Just before they drifted to the floor Harrison angled the digger into diving position and spun the forward cutters to maximum speed. They struck the stomach floor softly and kept on going. Half an hour later they were thrown forward against their straps. The soft thudding of the cutter blades had risen to an ear-piercing shriek, which died into silence as Harrison switched them off.
“Either we’ve reached the subsurface,” he said dryly, “or this beastie has a very hard heart.
They withdrew a short distance, then flattened their angle of descent so that they could continue tunneling with their tracks rolling over the rocky subsurface and the cutters chewing through material which now had the appearance of heavily compressed and thickly veined cork. When they had gone a few hundred yards Conway signaled the Lieutenant to stop.
“This doesn’t look like the stuff that brains are made of,” Conway said, “but I suppose we should take a closer look.”
They were able to collect a few specimens and to look closely, but not for long. By the time they had sealed their suits and exited through the rear hatch, the tunnel they had made was already sagging dangerously and, where the wet, gritty floor met the tunnel sides, an oily black liquid oozed out and climbed steadily until it was over their ankles. Conway did not want to take too much of the stuff back with them into the digger. From the earlier samples taken by drill they knew that it stank to high heaven.