It took several minutes for Jacque to force his way onto solid ground, or at least relatively solid mud. The bush he had followed for a reference mark was the only vegetation around; there was nothing nearby resembling grass or moss or even algae. From his vantage point he could see that the “forest” yonder was simply a clump of bushes slightly larger than his own bush.
“Time for the floater,” Carol said. They had been on the planet seven minutes.
“Depends.” The floater had been launched a little over five minutes after the Tamer team. It was somewhere on the planet, probably in the same hemisphere. But it was impossible to say exactly where it had appeared.
The floater would home in on a signal from Tania’s suit, the same signal that would be the focus for the returning LMT field when their time was up. If Groom-bridge’s atmosphere had something like a Heaviside layer so that the signal could bounce over the horizon, then it would take only a few minutes for the floater to get to them. If not, the vehicle would have to lift into orbit and quarter the planet, searching for the signal.
A few minutes later, the floater did appear, with an impressive sonic boom. It sensed the positions of all five Tamers and landed a safe distance away-in deep mud, unfortunately.
So Jacque spent his first couple of hours on Groom-bridge helping the others drag the heavy machine out of the muck, then laboriously scraping it clean.
Tania walked around the glittering floater, inspecting it. “I don’t know. The nozzles look clear.” It was powered by superheated steam from a fusion mirror; one main jet and eight steering ports. “But I don’t have any idea how critical it is. Maybe they could be packed full of mud and still work. Just blast clear.”
“Or a small obstruction could start an eddy in the exhaust plasma,” Ch’ing said. “Shaking the floater to pieces in one instant.”
“Does anybody know for sure?”
Nobody did. “One thing sure,” Jacque said. “I want to be someplace else when we start it up. If it goes it’ll make a hole big enough to-“
“Oh, the mirror will not blow up,” Ch’ing said. “It might break up, but not explode. It has safeguards.”
“Okay, you stay here and watch the goddam thing. I’m going to-“
“Look, it’s not worth arguing about-“
“Who’s arguing?”
“Turn down the volume, Jacque!”
Tania continued. “We have to make a preliminary ground survey, anyhow. When we get a few kilometers away, I’ll call the floater. If it explodes, we give Jacque a medal. If it homes in, we give Ch’ing a medal.”
For the ground survey, the five of them functioned simply as specimen collectors. There was a little box on the front of the GPEM suits that automatically evaluated a specimen as to appearance, density, tensile strength, crystal structure if any, melting and boiling points, chemical composition, presence of microorganisms, and so forth. The data were automatically transmitted to the personnel recorder on Tania’s suit.
(The recorder also etched on its data crystals a running record of everybody’s body temperature, blood pressure and chemistry, brain waves, respiration, urine and stool analysis, conductivity of skin and mucous membranes, Kirlian field, and hat size. This was not to protect their health-the nearest medical treatment was fourteen light-years away-but to record what had happened in case they were suddenly to die. Which, though the recruiting brochures failed to mention it, was the way most Tamers retired.)
They synchronized their compasses, inertial rather than magnetic, then spread out in a hundred-meter line, east and west, and started plodding north. Anything that looked interesting they picked up and put in the analysis box. Every hundred or so steps they tossed in a handful of dirt or, more often, mud. In this way they formed a fairly complete profile of the geologic and biological properties of a strip of Groom-bridge one-tenth of a kilometer wide by five long. It wasn’t too impressive in the biological department: various kinds of gray plants that were similar enough to known forms not to be exciting, and dissimilar enough from earth plants to cause geoformy headaches.
After about five kilometers, they found a river. The current was sluggish and the water held a fine suspension of light-colored mud. It looked like dirty milk. Along the bank was a jumble of sticky gossamer, pinkish, that turned out to be a form of plant life.
The other side of the river was lost in the fog; it must have been well over a hundred meters away. “Good time to call the floater,” Tania said. One thing you couldn’t do in a GPEM suit was swim.
A few seconds later she said, “Should be here any-“ and the noise of the explosion and the shock wave hit them at the same time. Jacque saw the milky water flying by under his feet-the stabilizer working overtime, buzzing loudly, to keep him upright-and then he touched the surface and skied backwards for a short distance before the water closed over him.
“See, Ch’ing?” he shouted. “What the fuck did I tell you?”
“What?” Ch’ing said. He had forgotten their difference of opinion about the floater. “What you say, please?”
“You, uh, never mind.” Jacque realized he’d been brooding, like a stubborn boy. And that sneaking spy tapping his bloodstream, ticking off hormones, recording every second of anger and, now, embarrassment.
“Is everybody underwater?” Tania said. There was a jumble of responses. “Wait. Is anybody not underwater?” Everybody was. “Well, let’s take a sample of the water and go back.”
“God. . . damned sample box is under the mud,” Jacque grumbled.
“Then take a sample of the mud,” someone said. Jacque did, tight-lipped, then turned on his headlamp and started working his way due south. He couldn’t see anything, but it was better to move through bright opaque soup than blackness.
His head broke out of the water and he waited for the lenses to clear. Ch’ing’s voice crackled in his ear-plugs, excited for once:
“I think I have found an animal.”
“An animal? How big?”
“Not very big. Fist-sized. It swam in front of me and I caught it.” He laughed. “I thought it was a plant, but it wiggles.”
Some plants wiggle, Jacque thought. Thanotropism.
Ch’ing surfaced a few meters away, the creature gently cradled in both hands. It looked like a sea urchin, or some such creature, black and spiny. Rippling.
The two of them were on the bank before any of the others came out. “Can I see it, Ch’ing?”
“Of course. Just be careful.”
“I’ll be careful.” Ch’ing handed it to him and there was perhaps one-twentieth of a second when the sensors in both of their suits’ “hands” were simultaneously in contact with the animal. During that instant, they heard:
CH’ING JACQUE
“-goddam Chinaman “-everywhere life even
thinks I’ll break his toy, here floating in filth
serve him right, if I in sterile filth
crush, like in diving, like crush? and feed,
crush and feed to the-“ is life, yes.”
“What?” He almost did drop it.
“Did you say something, please?”
“Hmn.” He turned the animal over in his hands. In visible light it was shiny purple, and what had looked like spines were neither stiff nor sharp. They waved with an eery grace that did not suggest panic. “Cilia,” Jacque said. “Some kind of cilia. It probably swims with them.”
“Perhaps,” Ch’ing said. “It does not seem very practical, for locomotion.”
“Maybe it’s not actually a water animal. It doesn’t seem to mind being out of the water.”
“You may be right.” He took the creature back and when they touched they heard:
CH’ING JACQUE
“-but it could be dying “-but maybe it dies
now wiggling like this, this way, graceful
like the caterpillar in slow poem of death like
the fire, caterpillar? wiggle in
Mum said, Jacque, you fire? Bad picture,
get-are you reading my splitting, yes, I see
mind, you are my God your thoughts and-“
reading my mind-“
They stared at each other.
The Groombridge “bridge”:
A Preliminary Statistical Analysis
30 Aug 51
One remarkable property of the ESP-inducing creature Tania Jeeves’s team brought back from Groom-bridge 1618 is that the creature “tunes” itself to individuals. It seems to be most sensitive, or most efficient, with the first person who comes into contact with it, and less sensitive with each subsequent contact.
Further, the sensitivity does not seem to decrease with time.
The effect seems to be the same whether the subject contacts the animal on Groombridge itself, or on Earth. The effect seems to pass through the tactile sensors of the General Purpose Exploration Module without attenuation.
Statistical analysis was done with a standard Rhine test: a deck of fifty cards, ten each of five easily visualized symbols. Each subject “read” the deck ten times through, on three different occasions. The statistical expectation of correct answers, out of 500 trials, would be 100. As the following table shows, the results were compelling:
26 August 27 August 28 August
Subject partner Trial partner Trial partner Trial Control
1. Lefavre 2 397 3 412 7 388 98
2. Wachal 1 295 3 302 8 270 113
3. Jeeves 1 243 2 257 7 219 104
4. Herrick 1 207 3 228 8 195 133
5. Simone 1 182 2 189 7 170 90
6. Chandler1 161 3 167 8 156 105
7. Tobias 1 143 2 135 8 140 76
8. Fong 1 131 3 135 7 119 115
The control figure is the individual’s score without the Groombridge “bridge,” administered by Dr. Chandler or Dr. Fong.
Unfortunately the Tamer who first contacted the bridge (Tamer 1 Hsi Ch’ing) did not survive the mission. The surviving subjects are of the opinion that Ch’ing would have consistently scored 500, as he could literally read their thoughts, word for word.
There seems to be little or no relation between Rhine scores and the identity of the passive partner, the “reader.” Lefavre says that he occasionally notices a feedback condition with Wachal: in reading her mind he often “hears” his own thoughts, as interpreted by Wachal. This effect was even stronger with Ch’ing, but Lefavre hasn’t noticed it with any of the other Tamers.
Further testing, some of it in a more subjective vein, is being done, mostly on subjects Lefavre and Wachal.
This committee recommends most strongly that another mission be translated to Groombridge 1618, as soon as possible and for as long as possible.
(signed)
Lewis Chandler, Ph.D.
For the Mathematics Committee
General Research Group
AED Colorado Springs