Eden Page 16

  "There were hundreds of them," said the Engineer, who had come back up and was now standing beside the ship and looking toward the glow, his face gray in the light.

  "Those huge tops?"

  "No, doublers. You could see their silhouettes against the liquid. They were working quickly—evidently the stuff thickens—and were shoring it up with gratings of some sort, on the sides, in the back. But the front, the part facing us, was left open."

  "What do we do? Sit and wait, twiddling our thumbs?" the Chemist asked, his voice shrill.

  "No," said the Captain. "Let's check Defender's systems."

  For a moment they watched the glow in silence. At times it seemed to intensify.

  "Do you want to release the water?" the Engineer asked doubtfully.

  "For the time being, no. I've been thinking about that. We'll try the hatch. If the lock mechanism is working and the hatch opens, we'll shut it immediately. At worst, a few dozen gallons will spill out, but that won't present a problem—we can clear that up. And we'll know that in an emergency we can use Defender."

  "What good will Defender be if there's a nuclear attack?" asked the Chemist.

  "Ceramite can withstand a blast at a thousand feet from ground zero."

  "And at three hundred feet?"

  "Defender can withstand a blast at three hundred feet."

  "Only in earthwork," the Physicist corrected him.

  "If we have to, we'll dig ourselves in."

  "But even at fifteen hundred feet the hatch will melt shut, we won't be able to get out. We'll cook like lobsters!"

  "This is silly. At the moment there are no bombs falling. Besides, let's admit it, we can't abandon ship. If the ship is destroyed, what do we make another one out of?" The Engineer's question was greeted by silence.

  A thought came to the Physicist. "But wait—Defender isn't complete. The Cyberneticist removed its diodes."

  "Only from the sighting system. We can aim without them. Anyway, if antiprotons are used, you don't need a direct hit…"

  "I'd like to ask something," the Doctor said. Everyone turned to him. "It's not important. I just wanted to know how the doubler's doing…"

  There was silence, then laughter, as if suddenly all danger had disappeared.

  "He's sleeping," said the Captain. "Or at least he was sleeping at eight, when I looked in on him. Almost all he seems to do is sleep. Does he ever eat?" he asked the Doctor.

  "Not anything here. He hasn't touched a thing I offered him."

  "Yes, we all have our problems," mock-sighed the Engineer, grinning in the darkness.

  "Hello!" The voice came from below. "Attention, please!"

  They turned around quickly as a large dark form crawled from the tunnel and with a slight grating sound stood erect. The Cyberneticist appeared behind it with a glowing light on his chest.

  "Our first universal!" he said proudly. But then he looked at his colleagues' faces. "Something's happened?"

  "Not yet," replied the Chemist. "But more might happen than we've bargained for."

  "Well … we have this robot," said the Cyberneticist, somewhat lamely.

  "Wonderful. You can tell it to get to work right away."

  "Doing what?"

  "Digging our graves!" And the Chemist pushed his colleagues aside and walked off. The Captain stood watching him, then went in the same direction.

  "What's wrong with him?" asked the Cyberneticist, stupefied.

  The Engineer explained. "They're making preparations against us in the valleys east of here. We discovered this on our excursion to the brook. They'll probably attack, but we don't know what form it will take."

  "Attack?"

  The Cyberneticist had been so absorbed in his work that he seemed not to understand what the Engineer was saying. He stared at the men, then turned toward the plain. Two figures silhouetted against the glow were slowly making their way back. The Cyberneticist looked up at his robot, which was motionless, as though hewn from stone.

  "We must do something…" he whispered.

  "We're activating Defender," said the Physicist. "Whether that helps or not, at least it gives us something to do. Tell the Captain to send the Chemist down. We'll be repairing the filters. The robot can do the electrical work. Let's go, gentlemen."

  The Physicist and the Cyberneticist entered the tunnel, and the universal robot turned and followed them.

  The Engineer looked with admiration at the machine and said to the Doctor, "You know, Blackie will come in handy. It can work underwater."

  "But how will you give it orders? Sound won't carry," the Doctor asked abstractedly, speaking only to keep the conversation going. He was watching the two men in the night. They were turning away again. It looked like a pleasant stroll beneath the stars.

  "With a microtransmitter. You know that," said the Engineer, following the Doctor's gaze. Then he continued in a different tone: "It's because he knew we'd succeed…"

  "Yes," the Doctor said, nodding. "That's why he didn't want to leave Eden too soon…"

  "It doesn't matter." The Engineer was already making for the tunnel. "I know him. It'll pass when the action starts."

  "Yes," agreed the Doctor, following him.

  After about a quarter of an hour, the Captain and the Chemist returned to the ship. Before the work began, Blackie was sent up to erect a six-foot embankment around the tunnel entrance, packing down the earth, and then to bring everything below—except for the entrenched thrower and the jeep. Dismantling the jeep would have taken too much time; anyway, they needed the robot.

  At midnight they got down to work in earnest. The Cyberneticist inspected all Defender's circuits, the Physicist and the Engineer repaired and adjusted the radiation niters, and the Captain, in protective clothing, monitored the well in the lower level of the engine room. The robot was at the bottom, six feet underwater, working on the cables.

  It turned out that the filters, even after they were repaired, did not work at full capacity, because several of the units were not functioning; the men solved this problem by accelerating the pumps. The purification proceeded under fairly primitive conditions: every ten minutes the Chemist took samples from the tank for analysis, because the automatic radiation gauge was broken, and its repair would have required time they did not have.

  At three in the morning the water was almost completely clean. They didn't bother to weld the tank from which it had burst when the front plate struck one of the main ribs. Instead, they simply pumped the water into an empty reserve tank on the side. In normal circumstances, such an unbalanced load would have been unthinkable, but for the moment the ship was not going anywhere. After pumping the water out, they blew compressed air through the lower chamber. A little radiation remained on the walls, but no one had any reason to go in there for the time being. Next they worked on the hatch. According to the indicators, the mechanism was in perfect order, but on the first try the hatch refused to open. After they debated whether or not to use the hydraulics, the Engineer decided finally that it would be safer to inspect the hatch from outside, so they went out to the surface.

  It was not easy to reach the hatch, which, located near the bottom of the hull, was now more than twelve feet in the air. Hurriedly they threw up a scaffold and a platform, using scrap metal (this was no problem now, with the robot doing the welding), and brought their lights to bear on the place.

  The sky in the east had become gray; the glow was no longer visible. Above, the stars were slowly going out. Large drops of dew trickled down the ceramite plates of the hull.

  "Curious," said the Physicist. "The mechanism is working. Nothing wrong with the hatch, except that it won't open."

  "I don't like things that are curious," remarked the Cyberneticist.

  "Well," said the Captain, "what about applying an age-old method?" And he raised a twenty-pound hammer.

  "You can tap the rim, but not too hard," agreed the Engineer reluctantly. He disliked that "method."

  The Captain,
with a look at the black robot, which stood like a square statue in the gray dawn as it steadied the scaffold with its chest, hefted the hammer in his hands, swung it a little—not too much—and struck. He struck again, steadily, and again, each time a few inches higher, which was awkward at the angle he stood, but the physical activity felt good. The rhythm of the tapping was broken by a different sound, a groaning that seemed to come from the very ground beneath them. Then they heard a piercing, rising whistle, and the scaffold began to shake.

  "Down!" cried the Physicist. They leaped off the platform one by one; only the robot didn't move. Dawn was already breaking; both the plain and the sky were the color of ash. The groaning increased, and so did the whistle, and the men instinctively crouched and covered their heads with their arms as they took cover under the ship. A quarter of a mile away, soil shot up like a geyser. The sound that accompanied it was strangely faint and muffled.

  They ran for the tunnel, and the robot followed. The Captain and the Engineer stopped behind the protection of the embankment and looked east, where the thunder was. The whole plain shook. The whistling intensified, and the sky filled with organlike squeals, as though squadrons of invisible aircraft were diving straight at them. In the foreground, jets of sand and earth rose black against the lead sky.

  "A normal civilization, wouldn't you say?" said the Physicist from below, in the tunnel.

  "They're flying overhead, but I don't see them," muttered the Engineer. The Captain couldn't hear him: the squealing continued and the ground went on spouting, though the spouting came no nearer the ship. The two men watched: nothing changed. The thunder on the horizon merged into a single, protracted, unvarying bass rumble, and now the missiles fell without explosion, almost silently. The earth thrown up by the impacts lay in low mounds, like molehills, surrounding the strikes.

  "The binoculars," the Captain shouted into the tunnel.

  A moment later he had them in his hand. As he looked, his astonishment grew. At first he thought that the attacking artillery was finding the range, but no, the invisible missiles kept falling in the same way. Sweeping the landscape with his binoculars, he saw spurts in all directions. Some were nearer, some farther, but none closer to the ship than six hundred feet.

  "What is it?! They're not atomic, are they?!" came the muffled cries from the tunnel.

  "No! Not atomic!" he shouted back, straining his voice. The Engineer put his mouth to the Captain's ear.

  "Did you see? They keep missing!"

  "I can see!"

  "We're surrounded on all sides!"

  He nodded yes. The Engineer took the binoculars and looked.

  Any minute now it would be sunrise. The pale sky, looking washed, filled with a diluted blue. On the plain nothing moved, except for the spouts of earth, which, like a bizarre, flickering hedge that kept vanishing and then rising from the ground anew, surrounded the small hill where the ship was embedded.

  Suddenly the Captain made a decision. He crawled out from behind the embankment and in three leaps reached the crest of the hill. There he dropped flat on the ground and looked in the opposite direction, which he had been unable to do at the tunnel entrance. The scene was the same: a wide crescent of strikes, a quivering, smoking hedge of explosions.

  Someone hit the parched ground beside him: it was the Engineer. They lay shoulder to shoulder, watching, now almost unaware of the thunder at the horizon, which came in waves and at times seemed to recede—that was the effect of the morning wind, the air heated by the first rays of the sun.

  "Those aren't misses!" shouted the Engineer.

  "Then what are they?"

  "I don't know. Let's wait…"

  "No, let's go!"

  They ran down the slope—although the missiles were not falling nearby, the howling and whistling were not pleasant—and jumped into the tunnel, one after the other. They left the robot in the passage and entered the ship, pulling the others in with them. They headed for the library, where it was quiet. Here even the ground tremors were almost imperceptible.

  "Now what? Do they want to hold us here? To starve us?" asked the Physicist, when they told what they had seen.

  "Who knows? I'd like to have a closer look at one of those missiles," said the Engineer. "If the barrage lets up, it might be a good idea to go out and…"

  "The robot can go," the Captain said.

  "The robot?" asked the Cyberneticist, almost in a groan.

  "Nothing will happen to it, don't worry."

  They felt a thud, faint but unmistakable. They looked at one another.

  "We've been hit!" cried the Chemist, jumping up.

  The Captain ran to the tunnel. Up on the surface, nothing appeared to have changed. The sky still thundered—but on the sunlit sand beneath the stern of the ship lay something black and speckled, like a burst bag of shot. He tried to find the place where the strange missile had hit the hull, but the ceramite bore no marks. Before the men behind him could stop him, the Captain began picking up the fragments and putting them into his empty binoculars case. They were still warm.

  The Chemist shouted at him. "You're crazy! That could be radioactive!"

  They ran back inside. The fragments were not radioactive; the counter, brought near them, was silent. Curiously, they were not cased in any kind of metal. In the hand they crumbled into glistening grains.

  The Physicist examined the grains with a magnifying glass, then quickly took them to a microscope. Peering, he whistled.

  "Well? Well?" They literally had to pull him from the eyepiece.

  "They're sending us watches…" the Chemist said softly, looking up from the microscope after his turn.

  There in the field of vision lay hundreds of tiny cogs, wheels, springs, and spindles. The men put a different sample under the lens and saw the same thing.

  "What in the hell is it?" said the Engineer.

  The Physicist paced—they were in the library—from one wall to another, his hair ruffled. He stopped and stared at them with a wild look, then continued pacing.

  "An extremely complicated mechanism of some kind," mused the Engineer, holding a pile of grains in his hand. "There must be millions, if not billions, of these little gears and wheels here! Let's go up," he said, "and see what's happening."

  The attack was still going on. The robot, standing guard in the tunnel, had counted 1,109 hits.

  "Let's try the hatch now," said the Chemist when they returned to the ship.

  The Cyberneticist was hunched over the microscope, looking at the grains. He did not answer when they spoke to him.

  In the engine room, the indicator light for the lock was still on. When the Engineer flicked the switch, the light obediently blinked: the hatch was opening. He closed it immediately and announced, "We can ride Defender out anytime."

  "Even with the hatch twelve feet off the ground?" asked the Physicist.

  "For Defender that's no problem."

  At the moment, however, there was no urgent need to leave, so they returned to the library. The Cyberneticist was still at the microscope.

  "Let him be. Maybe he'll come up with something," said the Doctor. "And now … we shouldn't just sit here. I suggest we get back to repairing the ship."

  With a sigh they rose from their seats. Indeed, what else was there to do? The five descended to the engine room, where the damage was the greatest. The distributor required hours of painstaking work: each circuit had to be tested twice, first with the current off, then on. Every so often the Captain would go out on top and return, saying nothing. In the control room, which was buried forty-five feet underground, they could feel a slight vibration. Noon passed. Their work would have gone much faster with the help of the robot, but they needed it in the tunnel. By one o'clock it had counted more than eight thousand hits.

  Although no one was hungry, they ate lunch, to keep up their strength, as the Doctor said. At twelve past two the vibration stopped. Everyone immediately made for the tunnel. On the surface, a small cloud covered
the sun, and the whole plain lay shimmering in the heat. There was still dust in the air, from the explosions, but silence reigned.

  "Is it over?" the Physicist asked in a voice that sounded strangely loud: over the last few hours they had grown accustomed to the barrage.

  Total hits, according to the robot: 10,604.

  About eight hundred feet from the ship, all around it, there was a strip of pulverized soil. In places individual craters ran together to form a ditch.

  The Doctor began climbing over the embankment at the mouth of the tunnel.

  "Not yet," said the Engineer, holding him back. "Let's wait."

  "How long?"

  "Half an hour or, better, an hour."

  "Delayed charges? But there are no explosives there!"

  "We don't know that."

  The cloud moved away from the sun. It grew brighter.

  The Captain heard the rustling first. "What's that?" he whispered.

  The others listened. Yes, they could hear it, too. The sound was like the wind moving through leaves or bushes. But there were no leaves or bushes in sight, only the furrowed ring in the sand. The air was still. But the rustling continued.

  "Where is it coming from?"

  "There?"

  They spoke in whispers. The sound seemed to come from all sides now. Could it be the sand shifting?

  "But there's no wind…" the Chemist said.

  "It's coming from where the missiles hit…"

  "I'll have a look."

  "Are you crazy? What if those are timed devices?"

  The Chemist paled, drew back. And yet the day was so bright, and everything so quiet… He clenched his fists. This was a hundred times worse than the barrage!

  The sun was at its zenith. Shadows of cumulus clouds slowly swept across the plain. The clouds, layered and with flat bases, resembled white islands. There was no movement on the horizon; the land everywhere was empty. Even the gray calyxes, whose indistinct silhouettes before had stood above the distant dunes, were gone! It was only now that the men noticed this.

  "Look!" cried the Physicist, pointing. But it didn't matter in which direction they looked. The same thing was happening everywhere.

  The cratered ground began to tremble. Something shiny was emerging from it. Each place a missile had fallen, there were sprouts. They rose in even rows, almost like the teeth of a comb.