Eden (24 page)

Reluctant to shoot, the Engineer made for the spot where the vehicle had previously carved a way for itself. But the mirrorlike wall had filled in the gap from both sides; the only sign of passage was a patch of fused sand at the base of the structure.

With the full force of its sixteen tons, Defender pushed at the wall until the hull complained. The wall did not yield.

The Engineer backed away slowly to six hundred feet, aimed the cross hairs as low as possible, and touched the pedal. Not waiting for the seething rim of the opening to cool, he moved forward. The turret grazed it, but the material, softened by the heat, gave. Defender glared one-eyed through the empty ring and with a low murmur rode up to the ship.

Only Blackie was there to greet them, and it turned immediately and left. Then there was the inevitable delay of having to clean the hull and take radiation readings before they could leave the cramped interior of the machine.

The blinker came on. The Captain, the first to emerge from the tunnel, looked at the black patches on Defender's front, the two broken headlights, and the grim faces of the returning crew, and said, "You were in a fight."

"Yes," the Doctor replied.

"Come below. It's still 0.9 roentgen per minute up here. Blackie can stay."

Without another word, they descended. In the passage to the engine room the Engineer noticed a second, smaller robot connecting leads, but he didn't even stop to have a look at it. There were lights on in the library; a small table had been set with aluminum plates and cups and a bottle of wine in the center.

The Captain said: "This was supposed to be a … celebration, since the gravimetric distributor was found to be intact, and the main pile is working. If we can raise the ship, we'll be able to take off. Now … it's your turn."

There was silence. "Well, you were right," said the Doctor, looking at the Engineer. "It's desert to the west. We did almost a hundred and twenty miles, then turned southwest." He told about the inhabited place by the lake, how they had filmed it, and how on their way back they had come upon a group of statues. Here he hesitated.

"It looked like a cemetery, or perhaps a temple. It's hard to describe what happened next, because I'm not sure what it meant—but that's nothing new here. A pack of doublers appeared, running in panic; it looked as though they had been hiding, or had perhaps been driven there as part of a roundup. That's just my impression. About a quarter of a mile farther down—this all happened on a slope—there was a small woods, and other doublers hiding there, doublers like the one in silver that we killed. Behind them, possibly camouflaged, was one of those gyrating machines, a huge top. But before we saw that, there was a tube, a flexible tube at ground level, giving off a foam that converted into a poison suspension or gas. I assume we can analyze it; it must have left a deposit in the filters, don't you think?" He turned to the Engineer, who nodded. "Anyway, the Chemist and I got out to have a look at the statues, the turret was open, and we were gassed, Henry the worst of all, because the first wave of gas made straight for Defender. When we had got back in and pumped oxygen into the turret, Henry fired at the tube—or, rather, at where we thought it was, because you couldn't see much in that mist."

"You used antimatter?" the Captain asked quietly.

"Yes," replied the Engineer.

"Couldn't you have used the small thrower?"

"I could have, but I didn't."

"We were all…" The Doctor searched for the right word. "…shaken. Those doublers were not naked. They wore rags—as if, perhaps, their clothes had been torn in a struggle. They died, were dying, right before our eyes. And, as I said, before that we had very nearly been poisoned ourselves. That was the situation. Then Henry tried to find the continuation of the tube, if I remember correctly. Is that right?"

The Engineer nodded.

"So we rode down toward the woods, and saw those silvery creatures. They were wearing masks. Maybe gas masks. They shot at us—I don't know what they were using—and we lost a headlight. At the same time, the huge top started moving. It attacked us from the side, out of the bushes. Then … Henry fired."

"At the woods?

"Yes."

"At the silvery creatures?"

"Yes."

"And at the top?"

"No, the top hit us and broke against Defender. There was a fire, of course. The scrub burned like paper."

"Did they try to establish contact?"

"No."

"Did they pursue you?"

"I don't know. Probably not. The disks could have caught up with us."

The Engineer disagreed. "Not in that terrain. There are a lot of ravines, gullies, a little like the Jura back on Earth."

"I see. And then you came directly here?"

"We backtracked, went east."

They sat in silence.

The Captain raised his head. "Did you kill … many of them?"

The Doctor glanced at the Engineer, saw that he was not going to answer, and said, "It was dark. They were in the woods. I think I saw … maybe twenty. But farther back something else was shining. There could have been more of them."

"The ones that shot at you, they were definitely doublers? Nothing else?"

"I saw no smaller torsos on them, only those helmets. But, judging by their shape, size, and way of moving, they were doublers."

"What did they use to fire at you?"

The Doctor was at a loss.

"Projectiles, probably nonmetallic," said the Engineer. "That's only a guess. I didn't inspect the damage—I didn't even look. Not of much force, that was my impression."

"Yes," the Physicist agreed. "The two headlights—I took a quick look at them—are dented, not punctured."

"One was smashed in the collision with the top," the Chemist said.

"And the statues, what did they look like?" asked the Captain.

The Doctor described them as best he could. When he came to the white statues, he paused and smiled. "Again, unfortunately, we can only speak in metaphors…"

"Four eyes? Prominent foreheads?" the Captain prompted.

"Yes."

"Were they stone carvings? Metal? From molds?"

"I can't say. But definitely not from molds. The main thing, there was a certain … alteration of the proportions. A kind of, almost…" He hesitated.

"Yes?"

"Idealization," the Doctor said, not without embarrassment. "Though we saw them only briefly, and so much happened afterward… It is too easy to make analogies. A cemetery. Escaped prisoners. A police roundup. Genocide, using gas. But we know nothing. Yes, some of the planet's inhabitants killed others before our eyes. That cannot be disputed. But who killed whom—and whether the killed and the killers were really the same…"

"And if they were not the same, does that explain anything?" asked the Cyberneticist.

"Well … I've thought about one possibility. A macabre one, I admit. For mankind, as we know, cannibalism is taboo. Yet moralists find nothing terrible about eating roast monkey. My point is, what if biological evolution here has developed in such a way that the external differences between beings of human intelligence and beings that have remained at the animal level are much less than those between man and monkey? What we witnessed, then, might have been a hunt."

"And what about that ditch toward the city?" said the Engineer. "Were those trophies of the hunt, Doctor?"

"But we can't be certain…"

"In any case, we have the film," said the Chemist, interrupting. "I don't know why, but until now we really haven't seen any normal, everyday existence on this planet. The film shows normality—at least that's the impression I got."

"Impression?" the Physicist asked, surprised. "But didn't you see…?"

"We were in too much of a hurry trying to take advantage of the remaining light. And the distance was considerable, more than twenty-five hundred feet. But we have two spools of film taken with a telescopic lens. What time is it? Not yet twelve! We can develop them now."

"Give them to Blackie," said the Captain. "Gentlemen, I can see you're upset. It's true, we've got ourselves in a god-awful mess here, but…"

"Do contacts between higher civilizations inevitably come to this?" asked the Doctor.

The Captain shook his head, stood up, and took the bottle of wine from the table. "We'll put this away," he said, "for another occasion…"

When the Engineer and the Physicist left to examine Defender, and the Chemist went to supervise the development of the film, the Captain took the Doctor by the arm and brought him over to the library shelves, where he asked in a lowered voice, "Listen, is it possible that it was your unexpected appearance that caused the doublers to flee, and that it was only you, and not the doublers, who were the object of attack?"

The Doctor's eyes widened. "You know, that never even occurred to me," he admitted, then was lost in thought for a while.

"I don't know," he said at last. "I would say not … unless it was an attack that failed and then turned against … some of them. But there's another explanation," he added, straightening. "Suppose we rode into an area that was off limits. The ones fleeing were trespassers, say, a group of pilgrims, who knows? The sentries guarding the place brought out their weapon—that tube—just as Defender came on the scene. An unfortunate coincidence. Yes, it might have been like that."

"You really think so?"

"Well, such an explanation is as valid as our first one. They could have put guards or sentries in the area when the news about us spread. Before, when we were in that valley, they had no knowledge of us, and that's why we encountered no weapons…"

"We have yet to come across even a trace of their information network," the Cyberneticist remarked from the depths of his cabin. "Writing, radio, recordings… Every civilization creates a technology of some kind to pool and save its experience. This one must as well. If only we could go to their city!"

"With Defender we could," said the Captain, turning to him. "But that would precipitate a battle, whose outcome and consequences we cannot predict."

"Then, if only we could sit down with one of their scientists or engineers…"

"And how do we do that?" asked the Doctor. "Put an ad in the paper?"

"If I only knew! It shouldn't be that difficult. We arrive on the planet with a computer translator, we draw a couple of Pythagorean triangles in the sand, exchange gifts…"

"Stop that babbling." It was the Engineer, standing in the doorway. "Come on. The film's been developed."

They went to the laboratory to see it, since that was the largest room on the ship. The Captain sat behind the projector. Everyone took a seat, and the robot switched off the light.

The first length of film was completely scorched. The lake flashed several times; then its shoreline came into view. There were ramps, and towers linked by struts, fretwork, over the water. The image blurred, came into focus again, and they could see that on the top of each tower were two five-bladed propellers turning in opposite directions. Turning very slowly. Objects slid down the ramps into the lake and submerged. It was impossible to distinguish their shapes, though they, too, moved very slowly. The Captain reran this part at a higher speed, but the only new thing they saw were the rings the objects made on the surface of the water. A doubler stood at the shore, its back to them. Only the upper part of its huge torso was visible above a barrel-shaped machine from which jutted a slender whip that terminated in windblown wisps.

The shore was replaced by flat, boxlike objects set on pylons. Moving across the screen, the objects carried various barrels like the one at the harbor containing the doubler. But they were empty.

There were flashes, blotches, blurs. The film had been overexposed. Between the blotches, small foreshortened figures, doublers, were moving about in pairs, in different directions, and their smaller torsos were covered with fluff, so that only the little heads showed, but the picture was not sharp enough for the men to see the individual faces.

Now a large mass, rhythmically rising and falling, filled the screen. It spread toward one of the bottom corners like syrup. Dozens of doublers walked across it, and it looked as if they were holding something in their tiny hands, and touching, stroking, or brushing the mass into clumps. Occasionally it gathered into a peak, from which emerged a gray calyx. The picture shifted, but the moving mass continued to fill it. The detail was very sharp. In the center was a bunch of willowy calyxes, and over each calyx stood two or three doublers, lowering their faces to it, taking turns. The Captain reran this part slowly: now the doublers appeared to be kissing the calyxes. While one kissed, the others, their smaller torsos extended halfway, watched.

The picture shifted again. Now the men could see the edge of the mass, which was marked by a dark line, and near the line moved whirling spheres, much smaller than the disks the men knew. Their gyration was slow and jerky; one could see the strutted arms swinging. But this was an effect of the film, of the speed of the frames.

Slowly the screen filled with activity, but everything, in slow motion, seemed to take place in a liquid. What the men had taken to be the "center of the town" was a dense network of grooves, along which ran curious half-barrels, rounded only on one side. From two to five doublers, usually three, sat in each one. Their small torsos seemed to be encircled by a belt connected to the outside of the "barrel," but that might have been only a reflection. The long shadows thrown by the setting sun confused the picture in places.

Above the grooves ran elegant openwork bridges. Here and there on the bridges huge tops spun, and again the gyration appeared as a series of complex movements, as though jointed limbs were pulling something invisible from the air. One top came to a stop, and doublers covered with a shiny material emerged from it. Just as the third doubler was getting out, pulling something hazy behind him, the image shifted.

Through the center ran a thick line, much closer to the lens than the rest of the picture. This line—or pipe—swayed gently; connected to it was a cigar-shaped object that spilled what looked like a cloud of leaves, though they were heavier than leaves, because they did not flutter but fell like weights. Below, on a concave surface, stood many rows of doublers, and sparks flew from their outstretched hands to the ground. But the rain of objects disappeared before it reached them.