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explanations. Slowly, and thinking hard about the words as he spoke them, he
said, We made contact with it once at long range. Now it is close to us and
we must try again. There is so little time left to this being-
The entity Conway is correct, came a soundless voice inside their heads. I
have very little time.
We mustn t waste it, said Conway urgently. He looked appealingly at
Murchison and the Captain. I think I know some of the answers, but we have to
know more if we are to be able to help it. Think hard. What are the blind
ones?
Who and what are the Protectors? Why are they so valuable...
Suddenly, they knew.
It was not the slow, steady trickle of data that comes through the medium of
the spoken word, but a great, clear river of information that filled their
minds with everything that was known about the species from its prehistory to
the present time.
The Blind Ones...
They had begun as small, sightless, flat worms, burrowing in the primal ooze
of their world, scavenging for the most part, but often paralyzing larger
life-forms with their sting and ingesting them piecemeal. As they grew in size
and number their food requirements increased. They became blind hunters whose
sense of touch was specialized to the point where they did not need any other
sensory channel.
Specialized touch sensors enabled them to feel the movements of their prey on
the surface and to identify its characteristic vibrations so that they could
lie in wait for it just below ground until it came within reach of their
sting.
Other sensors were able to feel out and identify tracks on the surface. This
enabled them to follow their prey over long distances to its lair and either
burrow underground and sting it from below, or attack it while the sound
vibrations it was making told them it was asleep. They could not, of course,
achieve much against a sighted and conscious opponent on the surface, and very
often they became the prey rather than the hunters, so their hunting strategy
was concentrated on variations of the ambush tactic.
On the surface they built tracks and other markings of small animals, and
these attracted larger beasts of prey into their traps. But the surface
animals were steadily becoming larger and much too strong to be seriously
affected by a single Blind One s sting. They were forced to cooperate in
setting up these ambushes, and cooperation in more ambitious food-gathering
projects led in turn to contact on a widening scale, the formation of
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subsurface food stores and communities, towns, cities and interlinking systems
of communication. They already talked to one another and educated their
young by touch. Methods were even devised for augmenting and feeling
vibrations over long distances.
The Blind Ones were capable of feeling vibrations in the ground and in the
atmosphere, and eventually, with the use of amplifiers and transformers, they
could feel light. They discovered fire and the wheel and the use of radio
frequencies by transforming them into touch, and soon large areas of their
planet were covered with radio beacons, which enabled them to undertake long
journeys using mechanical transport. While they were aware of the advantages
of powered flight, and a large number of Blind Ones had died experimenting
with it, they preferred to stay in touch with the surface because they were,
after all, completely unable to see.
This did not mean that they were unaware of their deficiency. Practically
every non-sentient creature on their world had the strange ability to navigate
accurately over short or long distances without the need of feeling the wind
direction or the disturbances caused by vibrations bouncing off distant
objects, but they had no real understanding of what the sense of sight could
be. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of their long-range
touching systems was making them aware that many and complex vibrations were
reaching them from beyond their world, that there were sentient and probably
more knowledgeable beings producing these faint touchings, and that these
beings might be able to help them attain the sense that was possessed,
seemingly, by all creatures except themselves.
Many, many more of the Blind Ones perished while feeling their way into space
to their sister planets, but they learned eventually to travel between the
stars they could not see. They sought with great difficulty and increasing
hopelessness for intelligent life, feeling out world after world in vain,
until finally they found the planet on which the Protectors of the Unborn
lived.
The Protectors...
They had evolved on a world of shallow, steaming seas and swamps and jungles,
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