Eden Page 11

  "Maybe it was maimed," muttered the Captain without conviction.

  They stopped again, at the last mound before the ramp. The well looked recent—bits of clay were still dropping from the walls, as though the shoveling machine had emerged from the rectangular pit only moments before.

  "Good God…" exclaimed the Chemist, jumping back and off the mound, and nearly falling in the process.

  The Doctor faced the Captain. "If I go in there, will you give me a hand to get out?" he asked.

  "Yes. What do you intend to do?"

  The Doctor knelt, clutched the edge of the hole, and carefully lowered himself, trying to keep his feet clear of the large body at the bottom. He bent over it, instinctively holding his breath. From above, it had looked as though a metal bar had been thrust into the carcass, under the chest, in the place where, among coils of folded flesh, the large torso had produced another. But up close, he saw that this was not so.

  Something like a protruding navel, thin-skinned, bluish, came from the body, from beneath a fold of skin, and the metal tube fit into it. The Doctor touched it delicately, then tugged at it more firmly. Bending closer, he discovered that the metal tube, visible through the stretched skin, was joined to it by a row of minute pearls, like a continuous seam. For a moment he considered severing this connection of metal and skin, and was reaching into his pocket for a knife, still undecided, when he happened to look at the face of the little head that was propped against the wall of the well—and froze.

  Where the creature they had dissected in the ship had had nostrils, this creature had one wide-open blue eye, which seemed to be watching him with silent intensity. The Doctor looked up. "What is it?" He heard the Captain's voice and saw his head, dark against the clouds, and understood why they had not noticed this from above: to see the face, one had to stand where he was standing now.

  "Help me out," he said, and the Captain reached down, grasped his outstretched hand, and pulled him up. The Chemist helped, catching him by the collar of his suit, and he emerged from the well, covered with clay.

  The Doctor blinked. "We understand nothing," he said. "Nothing!" And added, as if to himself, "Incredible, that a reasoning man should be in a situation in which he comprehends nothing whatsoever!"

  "What did you find?" asked the Chemist.

  "They vary," said the Doctor as they went back to the jeep. "Some have fingers, some don't. Some have noses but no eyes, while some have an eye but no nose. Some are larger and darker, and some paler, with a shorter trunk."

  "So what?" said the Chemist, impatient. "There are different races of people, too. People have different features, come in different colors. Why does variation bother you so much? The real question here is, who committed this horrible slaughter, and why?"

  "I'm not so sure there was a slaughter," the Doctor answered softly, his head bowed.

  The Chemist looked at him with amazement. "What are you suggesting?"

  "I don't know…" the Doctor said with effort. Mechanically, not consciously, he was wiping the clay from his hands with a handkerchief. "But one thing I do know," he added, straightening. "These differences are not the differences between races of the same species. The eyes and the nose, the senses of sight and smell, are too important."

  "On Earth there are ants even more specialized. Some have eyes, some do not. Some can fly, some cannot. Some are food-gatherers and some are warriors. Do I have to teach you biology?"

  The Doctor shook his head. "For everything that happens you import a concept, ready-made, from Earth. If a detail or fact doesn't fit that concept, you simply ignore it. I can't prove it to you now, but I know—I simply know—that this has nothing to do with races or with specialization. You remember that needle I found during the dissection?

  "Just now everyone assumed, as I assumed, that this creature was murdered. But it has an appendage there—a kind of sucker or sleeve—and the metal tube was inserted into it. As one would insert a tube into a man's windpipe during a tracheotomy. Of course, this has nothing to do with a tracheotomy; the creature has no windpipe there. I don't know what it's for, but at least I'm aware of my ignorance!"

  He got into the jeep and asked the Captain, "And what do you think?"

  "That we should be moving on," said the Captain, his hands on the steering wheel.

  VII

  It was growing dark. They went around the ramp, which was not a ramp at all, and not metal, they now saw, but the flattened, farthest-reaching arm of a river of lava, whose size only now did they appreciate. The river had flowed from the upper level of the valley and hardened into dozens of fissured pools and cascades. It covered the lower part of the slope with humps of slag, but at the top, where the angle became precipitous, bare ribs of rock protruded through this inert flood. On the opposite slope a pass half a mile wide, with a dried-up, cracked clay bottom, went through a high ridge of mountain that appeared to be covered with vegetation.

  The valley was much bigger than one would have guessed, looking at it from above. It branched into flat plains among loaflike outcroppings of magma. To the right the ground rose in terraces, almost bare, to gray clouds. Still higher they could hear the geyser, now blocked by a shelf of rock, and with each eruption a long hollow hiss filled the valley.

  The scene slowly lost color, and shapes blurred, as though submerged in water. Ahead of the jeep, in the distance, they saw either walls or hillsides, reddish, whose complex pattern was bathed in what seemed the rays of the setting sun, though the sun was covered by clouds.

  Closer, on both sides of the pass, stood rows of dark, vertical, club-shaped, giant structures resembling elongated balloons. The men rode between them, and the twilight was made darker by the shadows that these massive pillars cast. The Captain turned on the headlights, and outside their triple beam it suddenly became night.

  The wheels rolled across layers of slag, cracking it like glass into fragments. The pillars glittered with a mercury sheen when the headlights touched them. The clay disappeared; the ground now was a bulging surface of hardened lava, with puddles in its hollows, which splashed beneath the wheels of the jeep. Against the clouds the men could see black, gossamer-thin lines connecting two pillars roughly three hundred feet apart. Then the headlights revealed several machines overturned, their undersides full of ragged openings from which decayed wisps of something dangled. The men pulled over. The machines had been abandoned long ago; they were rusted through.

  The air was growing more and more humid, and gusts of a sickly odor and the stench of burning came from the pillars. The Captain steered toward the nearest pillar, driving over a smooth slab that crumbled at the edges and was flanked on either side by slanting surfaces that bore a series of notches. At the base of the structure, pitch-black, was an entrance. Above this the cylindrical wall rose, bulged, and blocked out the sky with a mushroom-shaped hood that was wrinkled, amorphous, as though the builder had left it unfinished.

  Reaching the immense hood, the Captain took his foot off the accelerator. The entrance gaped; the headlights were lost in it. Two broad, shallow troughs ran to the left and right and spiraled upward. The jeep came to a stop, then slowly began to drive up the right trough.

  They were plunged in darkness. In the beam of the headlights, telescopically half-open masts appeared and disappeared along the rims of the trough. Then something began to flash above these, and when they looked up, they saw rows of pale ghosts. The Captain directed one of the lights there and widened its beam. The beam climbed from one white cellular creature to another. Plucked from the darkness, each shone, then disappeared. At the same time thousands of tiny reflections dazzled the men.

  "That's no help." The Captain's voice was distorted by echoes. "But wait, we have flares!"

  He got out, and in the light in front of the jeep leaned over the edge of the trough. Something clanged; he called out, "Don't look here, look up!"—and jumped back into the jeep. Almost simultaneously the magnesium caught fire with an ear-piercing hiss, and a g
reat glare rolled aside the darkness.

  The trough in which they were standing ended, a little higher up, in a transparent corridor or shaft that climbed steeply and penetrated, like a tube of silver, a glowing jungle of bubbles that hung overhead, a dome filled with a multitude of cells, a glass hive. The flare was multiplied in the cells, and inside them the men could see skeletons, bones snowy white, almost sparkling, spatulate limbs, a fan of ribs radiating from a long oval disk of bone, and each thorax in the front, open, contained a small, slender, half-recumbent skeleton, a thing that was like a cross between a bird and a monkey, with a toothless, spherical skull. There were countless rows of such glass eggs, and they circled and spiraled higher and higher. But the cells mirrored and remirrored the light, so that it was impossible to tell real shapes from reflections.

  The men sat glued to their seats for six seconds; then the flare went out, and in the darkness the bones continued to glow yellow. After a few minutes they saw that the headlights were still on, throwing dim light on the undersides of the glassy spheres.

  The Captain drove to the shaft, the place where the trough became a funnel, and parked the jeep sideways, so it wouldn't roll back down if the brakes failed, and they all got out.

  The transparent tube went sharply upward, but they could ascend by foot. They detached one of the headlights from its mounting and entered the shaft, trailing a cable behind them.

  The shaft spiraled up through the interior of the dome, and the cells were located on either side of it, slightly above the concave floor on which they climbed. It was tiring, but the shaft soon became less steep. Each cell was flattened on the sides, where it abutted other cells, and into the shaft from each stuck a snoutlike piece that was capped tightly by a round, cloudy lens. The men walked on, and the grotesque gallery of skeletons filed past them. The skeletons varied. The men did not realize this at first, because the ones adjacent were virtually identical. Differences became apparent only if one compared examples from distant sections on the long spiral.

  As the men climbed higher, the thorax openings grew smaller, and the limbs, too, as though they were being absorbed by the oval disk of bone, but the heads of the little chest monstrosities grew large, their skulls strangely distended on the sides.

  Advancing single-file, the men made their way up one and a half loops of the spiral, then were stopped by a sudden jerk: the cable that connected the light to the jeep had reached the end of its reel. The Doctor wanted to go on, using the flashlight, but the Captain shook his head. From the main shaft other tunnels branched off every dozen feet or so, and it would be easy to get lost in this labyrinth of glass. They turned back. On the way they attempted to open one, then a second, then a third cap, but the lenses were all fused to the rims of the transparent containers.

  The bottoms of the cells were covered with a layer of fine white dust that had thin dark marks in places, but the marks—or numbers—were unintelligible. The Doctor, who was in the rear, paused at every cell: he still had no idea how the skeletons were suspended, or what supported them. Also, he wanted to inspect one of the "clusters" in a side corridor. The Captain hurried him on, so with a sigh he followed, particularly since the Chemist, who was carrying the headlight, was now some distance away, leaving them in darkness.

  They descended quickly and at last were back at the jeep, taking deep breaths of air: the air in the glass tunnel had been stale and hot.

  "To the ship now?" asked the Chemist.

  "Not yet," replied the Captain as he turned the jeep around, the trough being wide enough to allow this. The headlights made a sweeping arc through the darkness as they rode down the steep incline toward the entrance, which held the last light of day like a long, low screen.

  Outside, the Captain decided to drive around the base of the pillar, which was a cone-shaped flange of cast metal. They were less than halfway around when their path was barred by oblong blocks with razor-sharp edges, all wedged together. The Captain raised a headlight.

  A brown-black mass of lava rose behind the pillar. Descending from a height invisible in the darkness, the magma overhung the area in a crescent-shaped wall whose progress had been checked by a thick forest of masts and buttresses barring any closer approach. The intricate tangle of these constructions had pressed a network of interlocking shields into the inert flood of rock. Here and there huge dull blocks with broken pieces shining like black glass had split off above the barrier and fallen, covering the metal palisade with rubble. And the front of the magma, swelling, had pulled apart the shields in places and bent the masts, or uprooted both them and the wedge-shaped blocks that anchored them.

  This picture of struggle, doomed to failure but heroic, against the natural forces of the planet was so familiar and so comprehensible to the men that they left the place heartened. The jeep backed into an open space between two giant pillars and proceeded down the straight, bizarre avenue into the valley.

  They came upon calyxes growing in long rectangular patches, like cornfields, calyxes identical to the ones growing on the plain near the ship. Hit by the glare, the snakelike plants, showing pink beneath the gray of their skin, tried to contract, as though wakened, but their movement was too torpid to be converted into decisive action; it was only a wave of helpless twitches thirty feet ahead of them, in the headlights.

  The men stopped again, this time at the next-to-last pillar. The entrance was cluttered by a pile of fragments. They tried to see the interior with their flashlights, but the flashlights were too weak, so they removed a headlight from the jeep again and went inside.

  The darkness was filled with an acrid stench, like that of organic matter eaten by chemicals. They were up to their knees in broken glass. The Chemist got caught in a snarl of wire. As he pulled himself loose, yellow fragments appeared from beneath the debris. The headlight, directed upward, revealed a yawning gap in the dome, with clusters of cells dangling from it, some of which were cracked open and empty. Bits of bone lay everywhere. Picking their way through the rubble, the men returned to the jeep; they rode on.

  They passed a group of gray ruins in a hollow, where the headlights swept over another mass of rock resisted by angular props broadening to shields at the top and anchored to the ground by hooks. The jeep stopped rocking and bouncing as the surface beneath it became smooth, like concrete. Up ahead the men saw something blocking the way. It turned out to be a row of columns, and another row behind that. There was a whole forest of them, all supporting arches, making a curious building open on all sides. Below the spot where each arch left its column, they could see what appeared to be the embryos, or buds, of future arches, coiled up leaflike, unhatched.

  The jeep went up a flight of steps as small as teeth and entered between the columns. There was a remarkable quality to their shape; it was botanical rather than geometrical, for although the columns were similar, no two were exactly alike; there were small variations in proportion, differences in the location of the nodes or swellings where the winged arches nestled.

  The jeep rolled noiselessly over the stone surface, and left the columns behind, with their forest of moving shadows. When the last row disappeared, there was a wide-open space before them, and a low, faint glow. They advanced more slowly across solid rock, braking, coming to a stop at last three feet from an unexpected ravine.

  Below them were dark ramparts reminiscent of old forts on Earth. The tops of the ramparts were level with where the men were standing, and they could see into the interiors, into narrow, crooked streets. The walls along the streets contained rows of rectangular openings that had rounded corners and were tilted back, as though aimed at the sky. Farther, behind the next series of walls, something they couldn't see gave off a faint light that bathed the stones in a golden haze.

  The Captain pointed a headlight down into the nearest passageway. The beam revealed, a hundred feet away, a solitary spindle-shaped column standing among arched walls. Water flowed silently down its sides, sparkling. Around the column, on triangular ti
les, was river sand, and at the edge of the light a container lay overturned and open on one side. They could feel the night breeze and heard, in the streets below, the sound of dead leaves drifting over stone.

  "A settlement…" the Captain said slowly, moving the headlight farther. From the small square with the well, small streets radiated, gorges framed by vertical walls that curved outward at the top like the prows of ships. One wall, curved back to the horizontal, had openings from which ran black streaks, like marks from a past fire. The beam wandered over pointed corners, passed a gaping black cellar entrance, followed turning alleys.

  "Turn it off!" the Doctor said.

  The Captain did so, and only now noticed, in the darkness, the change taking place in the scene before them.

  The spectral light that had touched the tops of the more distant walls, outlining the silhouettes of pipes or vents of some kind, was growing fainter, breaking up into separate islands of light, which in turn were extinguished as a wave of darkness advanced from the center outward, engulfing one sector after another, until the night was without a single spark or glimmer.

  "They know we're here…" said the Chemist.

  "Maybe," said the Doctor. "But, then, why were the lights only over there? And … did you notice how they went out? From the center."

  The Captain took his seat in the jeep and turned off the other two lights. The darkness covered them like a black lid. "We can't drive down there. And if we go on foot, someone will have to stay here with the jeep."

  They could not see one another's faces, and all they could hear was the wind. Then, behind them, from the direction of the columns, came a faint sound, as though someone were stepping carefully. The Captain barely caught it; he turned the headlight around slowly, aimed it, and turned it on.

  There was nothing there.

  "Who will it be?" he asked.

  Nobody spoke.

  "It'll have to be me, then," he decided. He started the jeep and drove along the edge of the wall. After a few hundred feet they saw, in the rock, stairs leading down. Each step was small and shallow.