Eden (25 page)

The image shifted. Two doublers were lying motionless at the very edge. As a third approached them, they slowly got up. One of them swayed; with its small torso concealed, it looked like a sugarloaf. The Captain reran that segment. When the recumbent bodies appeared, he stopped the film, sharpened the image, then went up to the screen with a large magnifying glass. But all he saw were dots.

It went dark: the end of the first spool. The beginning of the second showed the same picture, but at a slightly different angle and darker. The sun was setting. The two doublers slowly walked away; now the third was on the ground. Streaks shot across the screen; the camera was moving too fast. They were looking at a large grid with pentagonal openings. In each opening stood a doubler. In a few there were two doublers. Beneath the grid quivered another grid, blurry. Then they realized that the grid below was a shadow on the ground. The ground was smooth, slick, like wet concrete.

The doublers in the grid openings wore dark-colored, bulky clothing and were all performing the same movements: their smaller torsos, veiled by something semi-transparent, bent to one side, then the other, as if in a peculiarly slow gymnastics. The picture flickered and tilted; for a while it was difficult to see anything. It was also growing darker. They saw the edge of the grid of lines. One line terminated in a large disk, motionless, resting at an angle. More "traffic"—bulging objects full of doublers going in different directions.

Again the grid, this time from directly above. Doublers, foreshortened, waddled along in pairs; a whole herd of them, divided in two, like two lanes in a street. A cable extending beyond the picture moved down the center, pulling on blurred wheels something that emitted sharp flashes, oblong crystal or a block covered with mirrors. It rocked from side to side, throwing licks of light on the pedestrians it passed. Suddenly it halted and grew transparent, revealing a recumbent figure inside.

The Captain reversed the spool, rewound it, and, after the oblong object again approached, rocking, and displayed its contents, stopped the film. Everyone went up to the screen. There, between the two lanes, the two rows of doublers, lay a man.

"I think I'm going mad," someone said in the darkness.

"Well, let's watch it through to the end," said the Captain.

They went back to their seats, the spool turned, the picture flickered and brightened. One by one, long objects moved through the crowd, but now they were covered with some bright fabric that hung down and trailed on the ground. The picture shifted to a desolate area bordered on one side by a slanting wall. There were clumps of scrub along the wall. A lone doubler walked in a groove that ran the whole length of the screen. The doubler leaped from the groove, as though in panic, and a gyrating top passed; there was a bright flash, then a mist. After the mist cleared, the doubler was lying motionless. Everything became darker, almost black. The doubler seemed to twitch, or perhaps began to crawl away, until stripes shot across the screen, and the screen went white. The film was finished.

When the lights were turned back on, the Chemist took the spools to the darkroom to make some enlargements of selected frames. The others remained in the laboratory.

"Well, now, what do we make of all this?" said the Doctor. "Without trying, I could give two, even three different explanations."

This angered the Engineer. "If you had done a proper study of the doubler's physiology," he said, "we'd know a great deal more than we do now!"

"And when was I supposed to do that?" inquired the Doctor.

"Gentlemen!" cried the Captain. "This is beginning to sound like a scientific convention! All right, that figure shocked us. A dummy, undoubtedly, made in some sort of modeling material. Probably, through their information network, they've sent pictures of us to every settlement on the planet, and from the pictures they fashioned human effigies."

"But why would they want to make such portraits?" asked the Doctor.

"For scientific or religious purposes, who knows? We won't solve that one, no matter how long we discuss it. Still, it's not all that strange. What we've seen is a rather small center where things are being manufactured. We may also have observed their … recreation, perhaps their art, a street scene—though what they were doing in the harbor, that pouring of objects, was none too clear."

"None too clear," the Doctor said. "Well put."

"And there were what looked like scenes from army life—the ones dressed in silver, as we've seen before, serve a military function. As for the episode at the end … it may have been the punishment of an individual who broke a law, perhaps by using a groove reserved for the tops."

"Summary execution for jaywalking seems a bit severe, don't you think?" said the Doctor.

"Does anyone else have something to say?" asked the Captain, nettled.

The Physicist spoke. "The doublers appear to travel on foot only in exceptional circumstances. That might be because of their size and weight—and the disproportion in their limbs, particularly between the hands and the trunk of the body. It would be interesting to try to draw an evolutionary tree that could produce such a shape. You've all noticed how they gesticulate—but none of them use their hands to lift loads, to pull or carry. Perhaps their hands serve another purpose."

"Such as?" the Doctor asked, interested.

"I don't know, that's your field. I just think that, instead of attempting to understand the structure of their society, we ought to study, first, the individual, the building block of that society."

"You're right," said the Doctor. "The hands, yes, that's a problem … the evolutionary tree. We don't even know if the doublers are mammals. That question I could answer in a few days—but it's not the thing that impressed me the most in this film."

"And what's that?" asked the Engineer.

"The fact that, among the pedestrians, I saw not one who was solitary. Did you notice that?"

"Except at the very end," said the Physicist.

"Precisely."

No one said anything for a while.

"We'll have to look at the film again," said the Captain at last. "The Doctor is right: there were no solitary doublers. They went at least in pairs. Though, at the beginning—yes!—one of them was by itself in the harbor."

"It was sitting in that cone-shaped thing," said the Doctor. "In the disks, too, they sit individually. I was talking only about pedestrians."

"There weren't many of them."

"There were several hundred. Imagine a bird's-eye view of a street in a town on Earth. The percentage of solitary pedestrians would be considerable. At some hours they would even be in the majority. But here there were none at all."

"What does that mean?" asked the Engineer.

The Doctor shook his head. "I have no idea."

"But the one that came with us … he was by himself."

"Consider the circumstances that led to that."

The Engineer made no reply.

"Listen," said the Captain, "this is getting us nowhere. We didn't gather information systematically, because we're not a research team. We had other worries, of the 'struggle-for-survival' variety. Now we must decide on a course of action. Tomorrow Digger will be working. We'll have a total of two robots, two semiautomata, Digger and Defender, who may also help in the unearthing of the ship. I don't know if you're familiar with the plan the Engineer and I worked out. The basic idea is to lower the ship first to the horizontal, then stand it upright by packing soil under the hull. That's the method the ancient pyramid-builders used. We'll cut our 'glass wall' into pieces we can use to build a scaffold. There's enough material, and we already know that the substance can be melted and welded at high temperatures. Using the wall that the inhabitants of Eden have so thoughtfully provided us with will shorten the task dramatically. We may be able to take off in three days." He paused, seeing the men stir. "Therefore I wanted to ask you: do we take off?"

"Yes," said the Physicist.

"No," said the Chemist, almost at the same time.

"Not just yet," the Cyberneticist said.

A silence. Neither the Engineer nor the Doctor had voted.

"I think we should leave," the Engineer said at last. Everyone looked at him with astonishment. He went on:

"I felt differently before. It's a question of the price. Just the price. Undoubtedly we could learn much more, but the cost of obtaining that knowledge … it might be too great. For both sides. After what has happened, the possibility of peaceful contact, of coming to an understanding, is, it seems to me, extremely remote. Each of us, whether we like it or not, has his own concept of this world. Mine was that terrible things were going on here, and that we should intervene. As long as we were Robinson Crusoes going through our wreckage and making repairs, I said nothing. I wanted to wait until I knew more, and until we could make use of our machines. But I see now that each intervention on behalf of what we hold to be good and right will end the way our last excursion did: with the use of the annihilator. We can always justify ourselves, of course, argue self-defense, and so on—but instead of helping, we're destroying."

"If we only had better knowledge…" said the Chemist.

The Engineer shook his head.

"With better knowledge we'd see that each side was right in its own way…"

"Whether the murderers are right or wrong," the Chemist objected, "someone should give thought to their victims."

"But what can we offer them besides Defender's annihilator? Suppose we reduce half the planet to ashes in order to stop these incomprehensible roundups and exterminations. What then?"

"It's not a simple matter of right and wrong," said the Captain, joining the argument. "Everything that's happening here is part of an ongoing historical process. Your impulse to help is based on the assumption that the society is divided into heroes and villains."

"Into oppressors and oppressed," said the Chemist. "That's not the same thing."

"All right. Let's imagine that a highly developed race, arriving on Earth during our religious wars several hundred years ago, had decided to enter the conflict—on the side of the weak. Wielding its power, it forbids the burning of heretics, the persecution of dissenters, et cetera. Do you honestly think it would be able to make its humanitarian rationalism accepted throughout the planet? Remember: almost the whole of mankind were believers then. The aliens would have to pound us down to the last man, in which case there would be no one left to benefit from their idealism!"

"Then you think it's impossible for us to help!" said the Chemist with vehemence.

The Captain looked at him a long time before replying.

"Help, my God. What do you mean by help? What's taking place here, what we're witnessing, is the product of a specific civilization, and we would have to destroy that civilization and create a new one—and how are we supposed to do that? These are beings with a physiology, psychology, and history different from ours. You can't transplant a model of our civilization here. And you would have to construct one, too, that would continue to function after our departure… I suspected, for quite some time, that you had ideas similar to those of the Engineer. And that the Doctor agreed with me, which is why he kept discouraging us from making analogies to Earth. Am I right?"

"Yes," said the Doctor. "I was afraid that through an access of noble-mindedness you would all want to establish 'order' here, which in practice would mean a reign of terror."

"Maybe the oppressed would like a different life … but are too weak," said the Chemist. "And if we saved some who were condemned…"

"We saved one," the Captain retorted. "Now perhaps you can tell us what to do with him."

The Chemist had no reply.

"The Doctor is also in favor of leaving?" said the Captain. "Good. Including me, that makes a majority."

He broke off. His eyes grew round. He had been sitting facing the door—the half-open door. In the silence they heard only a faint lapping of water, and turned to follow the Captain's stare.

In the doorway stood the doubler.

"How did he get out…?" But the Physicist's words died on his lips. He saw his mistake. This was not their doubler. Theirs was locked in the first-aid room.

On the threshold was an enormous dark-skinned doubler, its smaller torso bent low and the head almost touching the lintel. The creature was dressed in a brown material that hung straight and encircled the small torso like a collar. Wound around the collar was a thick tangle of green wire. Through a slit on the side gleamed a broad metallic belt. The doubler did not move. Its flat, wrinkled face and two large blue eyes were covered by a transparent, funnel-shaped shield. From the shield ran thin gray strands that coiled around the smaller torso several times and crisscrossed in front, forming a kind of pocket, in which rested its hands, similarly bandaged. Only the knobby tips of the fingers protruded.

Everyone sat in amazement at the sight. The doubler bent over even more and with a cough moved slowly forward.

"How did it get in?… Blackie is in the tunnel…" whispered the Chemist.

Then the doubler slowly withdrew. It went out, stood in the dark corridor for a moment, and entered a second time—or, rather, only stuck its head in just beneath the lintel.

"It's asking if it can enter," the Engineer said in a whisper. Then he shouted, "Come in! Come in!"

He got up and backed away along the opposite wall, and the others followed him. The doubler regarded the empty center of the cabin blankly. It entered and slowly looked around.

The Captain went to the screen, tugged at it to make it whir upward, which uncovered the blackboard. He asked the men to step aside, took a piece of chalk, and drew a small circle, then drew an ellipse around the circle, and a larger ellipse outside that, and another, and another—four in all. On each ellipse he placed a small circle. Then he approached the giant in the center of the room and stuck the chalk in its little fingers.

The doubler accepted the chalk awkwardly, looked at it, looked at the blackboard, then slowly went toward it. It had to incline its smaller torso, which stuck out at an angle from the collar, in order to touch the board with a bandaged hand. The men watched with bated breath. Clumsily, with effort, the doubler tapped the circle on the third ellipse several times; it nearly filled the circle with crushed chalk.