The search lasted for a long time; for a long time, in fact, after it became evident that it was going to be useless, for the chance of a perfect specimen is not easily thrown away. Finally, however, Krendall straightened up with a sigh.
"I guess we'll have to be satisfied with a restoration on one side," he said wearily. "I hope someone fifty years from now doesn't find another and discover that it's a sort of vertebrate fiddler crab, with one fore-limb ending in a paw or claw something like five times the size of the one on the other."
Sulewayo gave a gloomy assent, and the two went back to work in their respective tunnels.
Lampert saw McLaughlin the instant the underbrush made it possible, a fact which the guide later admitted was to the scientist's credit. He had, of course, been eagerly awaiting that return, for the transmitter was down to its first set depth and awaiting only the word that all receivers were in place. He called eagerly the moment the guide came within earshot.
"Everything down?" McLaughlin nodded.
"Everything down, as nearly as I could tell the way you said. How long will the readings take?"
"Only a few minutes. I'll take a couple of calibration shots from ten, fifteen and twenty meters' depth; then ones at fifty, a hundred and so on down as far as the mole will go. The shooting takes practically no time. It's the drilling that will hold us up."
"What then?"
"Well," Lampert smiled, "after that the usual procedure is to pick up the receivers and place them in a similar pattern in a new direction. If the field crew doesn't go on strike, we take the whole circle about the transmitter."
"I was afraid of that," grunted McLaughlin, as he stopped by the machine. "Well, let's go." The two men bent over the controls in a silence broken only by the scraping of Mitsuitei's shovel a dozen meters away. Lampert pressed his shot button, and a light on the panel flashed white momentarily. Below their feet, unfelt, the pulse of sound energy raced outward, echoing from the walls of deepstriking joints, from the boundaries between rocks of differing densities or elastic constants, from the walls of caverns deep in the limestone; some tiny portion of the energy from time to time encountering and affecting one of the tiny receivers McLaughlin had buried.