Eden Page 17

  Someone rushed out from the tunnel and ran toward the curved line of glimmering sprouts. It was the Cyberneticist. Everyone shouted and chased after him.

  "I know what they are!" he cried, dropping to his knees before the glassy rows of sprouts.

  They were finger-length now, and at the base thick as a fist. The sand swirled gently around each one; something was at work below.

  "Mechanical seeds!" the Cyberneticist said. With his hands he tried digging up the nearest sprout, but the sand was too hot.

  Someone ran and brought shovels, and then the sand and soil flew, revealing long, segmented, tangled strands of a lustrous material. The material was so hard, it rang like metal against the shovels. When the hole was more than three feet deep, the men tried to pull the strange growth out, but couldn't—it was too tightly connected to its neighbors.

  "Blackie!" cried a chorus of voices. The robot approached. "Pull it out!"

  Steel pincers closed on a shiny shoot as thick as a man's arm. The robot's torso stiffened, and the men watched as its feet began sinking slowly into the ground. There was a high hum, as of a string stretched to its limit.

  "Let go!" commanded the Engineer. Blackie stepped awkwardly out of the ground and stood unmoving.

  The sprouts, a hedge now, were almost a foot and a half high. At their base they began filling slowly with a darker, milky blue color.

  "So," said the Captain calmly. "It seems they want to fence us in."

  No one spoke for a while.

  "But isn't this rather primitive? I mean, we can still leave," said the Chemist.

  The Captain said, "That scouting party of theirs must have done their job well. Look, it's an almost perfect circle around us."

  "Mechanical seeds," said the Cyberneticist. He was calmer now, brushing the sand from his hands. "Inorganic spores sown by artillery."

  "But the stuff is not metal," observed the Chemist. "Blackie would have bent it. It must be something like supranite."

  "No, it's sand, only sand!" said the Cyberneticist. "Don't you see? This is the product of an inorganic metabolism! Sand is converted catalytically into some macromolecule based on silicon. Those shoots are made of that—just as plants extract salts from the soil."

  The Chemist knelt and touched the shiny substance. He looked up. "And what if they had landed on a different kind of soil?" he asked.

  "They would have adapted. Of that I'm certain! That's why they're so hellishly complex: designed and programmed to produce the most resistant material possible from what they have at their disposal."

  "If it's just silicon, Defender should have no problem getting through it," said the Engineer with a smile.

  "I wonder if this was really an attack," the Doctor said thoughtfully. The others looked at him in surprise.

  "How would you describe it?"

  "Perhaps … an attempt at defense. To isolate us."

  "And then? Are we supposed to sit here and wait like worms under a bell jar?"

  "Why do you need Defender?"

  The question made them hesitate. The Doctor went on: "We're no longer short of water. The ship will be repaired—in all likelihood—in a week, in ten days. The nuclear synthesizers should be functioning in a few hours. I don't see this as a bell jar. A high wall, rather. An impassable barrier for them, and therefore they assume for us as well. With the synthesizers, we'll have food. We require nothing from them, and they could hardly have been clearer in telling us that we're not welcome here…"

  They listened, frowning. The Engineer looked and saw that the tips were almost knee-level, and that they were joining, fusing. The rustling was now so loud that it sounded like a hundred beehives. The bluish roots at the base of the wall had swollen almost as thick as tree trunks.

  "Could you bring the doubler here?" the Captain asked unexpectedly.

  The Doctor looked at him strangely. "Now? Here? For what reason?"

  "I don't know. Just bring him. Please."

  The Doctor nodded and left. The others stood silent in the sun until he reappeared. With difficulty the naked giant crawled out of the tunnel behind him. It seemed animated, almost satisfied, following the Doctor and gurgling softly. Then its flat little face tensed, its blue eye widened, it wheezed. It turned around and began to wail. It ran toward the shiny wall with great leaps, as though intending to hurl itself at it, but instead, hopping grotesquely, the creature ran along the entire circle, whining and coughing. Then it ran to the Doctor and began plucking at the chest of his suit with its stubby fingers and peering into his eyes. Sweat poured off it. It pushed at the Doctor, jumped back, looked around again, and, drawing its small torso into its trunk with an unpleasant noise, fled into the dark tunnel. They could see the flat, twitching soles of its feet as it crawled inside.

  "Were you expecting that?" the Doctor finally asked the Captain.

  "No … not really. I just thought that the wall wouldn't be strange to him. I expected a reaction. Some kind of recognition. But nothing like this…"

  "It was recognition, all right," the Physicist muttered.

  "Yes," said the Doctor. "He's seen this before. Something similar, in any case. And he's petrified by it."

  "Execution, Eden-style?" the Chemist murmured.

  "I don't know. In any case, this indicates that they use the 'living wall' not only against invaders from space."

  "Maybe he's simply afraid of anything that shines," suggested the Physicist. "That would also explain the incident with the mirror strip."

  "No. I showed him a mirror in the ship, and he was not interested," said the Doctor.

  "Then he's not that stupid," said the Physicist. He was standing by the glassy hedge, which was now up to his waist.

  "Once bitten, twice shy."

  "Listen," said the Captain. "This is getting us nowhere. What do we do now? Repairs? Yes, of course, but I was thinking…"

  "Of another expedition?" said the Doctor.

  The Engineer smiled ruefully. "I'm always game. Where? To the city?"

  "That will mean war," the Doctor said. "Because the only way you'll get there is with Defender. And with its antiproton launcher, before you know it, you won't be gathering information, you'll be blasting away."

  "I wasn't thinking of an encounter," the Captain replied. "Everything we've seen indicates that the population of Eden is highly stratified. So far we have not been able to establish contact with the stratum responsible for intelligent activity. Yes, I can see that they would regard an advance toward the city as an attack. However, the west is still unexplored. With Defender, two men will be enough crew. The rest can work on the ship."

  "You and the Engineer?"

  "Not necessarily."

  "It would be better with three," said the Engineer.

  "Who wants to go?"

  They all did.

  The Captain smiled. "Hardly have the guns ceased to roar than curiosity begins to consume them."

  "Let it be the Chemist and me," the Engineer said. "And the Doctor can accompany us as a representative of reason and virtue. You stay," he said to the Captain. "You know the procedures. Set Blackie to work immediately on the lifters, but don't start digging under the ship until we return. I'll want to check the statics."

  "As a representative of reason and virtue, I want to know the purpose of this expedition," said the Doctor. "The moment we open the hatch, we're entering the stage of confrontation, like it or not."

  "Make a counterproposal," the Engineer said.

  Behind them hummed, almost melodiously, the hedge, rising over their heads. The sunlight was broken into rainbows by its tangle of glassy veins.

  "I don't have one," the Doctor admitted. "Events are happening too fast, and so far all our plans have led to surprises. The most rational thing, I think, would be not to make any more expeditions. In a week or two the ship will be ready for flight, and we can circle the planet at low altitude and possibly learn more than we can now, and more easily, too."

  "You can't believe
that," the Engineer said. "If we learn nothing here at close quarters, what will a flight above the atmosphere tell us? And as for 'rational' … if people were rational, we wouldn't be here in the first place. What's rational about flying to the stars?"

  "I didn't think I'd convince you," muttered the Doctor. He turned and walked along the wall of glass.

  The others went back to the ship.

  The Captain said to the Engineer, "Don't count on making any sensational discovery. The terrain to the west will probably be similar to what we have here."

  "What makes you think that?"

  "It's unlikely that we landed in the center of a small barren area. To the north there's a factory, to the east a city, to the south a 'settlement.' Chances are, we're sitting on the edge of a desert that's to our west."

  "We'll see."

  X

  A few minutes past four, the loading-bay hatch slowly opened downward, like the jaw of a shark. It came to a stop, making a platform more than four feet off the ground.

  The men who were assembled near the ship stood on both sides of the hatch, looking up. First appeared two tractor tracks, wide apart, sliding forward with a roar, as though the huge machine were going to dive wildly into the air. They could see its grayish-yellow underside. Then it rocked and lurched forward, hitting the platform flat, and so hard that there was a great clang. Moving on its tracks, it drove-fell across the gap to the ground, catching the ground at a sharp angle and biting into it. In the next second, Defender's flattened head was level, and after about forty feet it came to a halt with a pleasant rumble.

  "Well, now, friends"—the Engineer stuck his head out the small rear door—"go in the ship, because it's going to get hot, and stay there for at least half an hour. Better yet, send Blackie out first and let him check for radioactivity."

  The door closed. The three men entered the tunnel, taking the robot with them. Shortly afterward a metal piece appeared in the tunnel mouth, filling the opening entirely. Inside Defender, the Engineer wiped the screens, checked the dials, and said, "Let's get started."

  Defender's nose—short and slender, and encircled by little cylinders—turned westward.

  The Engineer, centering the hedge in his cross hairs, glanced to the side at the dials and stepped on the pedal.

  For a second the screen went dark, and Defender was rocked by a blast of air and a noise as if a giant had pressed his mouth to the ground and said, "Oof!" The screen cleared.

  A fiery cloud rose, and the air blurred around it like a liquid. A thirty-foot section of hedge had disappeared, and steam billowed from a depression with an incandescent red rim. Farther on, molten glass glittered in the sun.

  "Too much power," thought the Engineer, but all he said was, "All right, let's go." The hulk moved toward the crater with a strange lightness; the crew hardly shook at all as they rode through it. At the bottom, some of the glowing glass had begun to solidify. "We're barbarians," the Doctor thought. "What am I doing here?"

  The Engineer made a slight correction for direction and accelerated. Defender rode as though on a highway, the tracks turning smoothly and softly. They were doing almost forty miles an hour without even noticing it.

  "Can we open the top?" asked the Doctor, who was sitting in a low seat. Over his shoulder there was a small convex screen, like a porthole.

  "Of course," the Engineer said and pushed a button.

  From the rim of the turret a fluid squirted in needle-sharp streams, washing the bits of radioactive ash off the armor plates. Then everything became bright—the head opened, the top slid back, and the sides collapsed into the body—and they rode on, now protected only by a thick windshield that curved around them. The air ruffled their hair.

  "I'm afraid the Captain was right," the Chemist muttered some time later. The landscape was unchanging. They sailed over a sea of sand, the heavy vehicle swaying gently as it crossed fin-shaped dunes in the same uninterrupted rhythm. The Engineer increased speed, the ride became much rougher, and the tracks threw up clouds of sand, some of which got inside.

  At thirty miles the excessive rocking stopped. They traveled in this fashion for more than two hours.

  "Yes, I guess he was," said the Engineer, changing course from west to southwest.

  The next hour brought no change, and they turned again, heading in a more southerly direction. By now they had gone ninety miles.

  The sand changed. From white and very fine, trailing behind them like a long sweeping tail, it became reddish, coarser, and didn't rise in clouds when the tracks churned it up. The dunes became fewer and lower. From time to time they passed the protruding stalks of buried bushes. Blurry patches appeared in the distance, slightly off course. The Engineer steered toward them. They grew quickly in size, and a few minutes later the men saw vertical slabs rising from the sand, resembling fragments of walls.

  Entering a narrow passage, on either side of which stood slanting quoins eaten by erosion, they slowed down. A huge stone blocked their way. Defender raised its head and rode over that obstacle easily; they found themselves in a long alley. Through the gaps between the slabs they could see other ruins, all worn and pitted. Then they drove out into an open space, dunes appeared again, but small, packed, producing no dust, and the terrain began to slope downward. In the distance, below, they could see truncated club-shaped rocks and more ruins.

  The bottom was littered with speckled stones. They crossed it and went up another slope. The ground grew harder; the tracks no longer sank into it. The first clumps of scrub appeared. They were almost black, but appeared deep red in the low sun, as though their podlike leaves were filled with blood. Farther on, the scrub rose higher, blocking their way in places. Defender pushed through it, not slowing down. This produced an unpleasant hollow crackling, the sound of thousands of small blisters bursting, squirting a dark sticky substance that stained the ceramite plates. Soon the whole vehicle, up to the turret, was reddish brown.

  They had gone 120 miles. The sun now touched the western horizon, and the shadow of the vehicle lengthened more and more. Suddenly there was a terrible grating under them, a crunching. The Engineer braked, but it took Defender about forty feet to come to a stop. In the wide trail that they had beaten down behind them lay, among the mangled bushes, pieces of a rusted metal frame. They rode on—and again hit metal, twisted grillwork, sheets riddled with holes, curved ribs. Smashed beneath Defender's tracks, this scrap was covered with the substance that oozed from the broken plants.

  The wall of scrub grew still higher before them, but the awful grating and squealing of rusted metal stopped. Unexpectedly, the black stalks that had been battering them parted, and the crew entered a glade fifty to sixty feet wide and hemmed in, at the other end, by the same dark thicket. The Engineer turned, and they went down a long sloping clearing that resembled a forest path. The surface was clayey, covered with loamy patches, which indicated that water occasionally flowed there.

  The clearing did not run straight. Sometimes the red sun, half sunk in the horizon and enormous, appeared in front of the machine, dazzling them. Sometimes the sun was hidden and sent blood-red flashes through the dense thicket that now was nine feet high. Then they saw the whole sunset, and a vast multicolored expanse before it. The land was about two thousand feet below them.

  A sheet of water sparkled in the distance, reflecting the sun. On the shore of this lake, which was uneven and covered with patches of dark scrub, stood buildings, machines on splayed legs, and nearer the cliff where Defender had halted was a mosaic of structures, rows of vertical masts, bright avenues. There was considerable animation below: gray, brown, and white dots crept along the avenues, intermingling, forming clusters, spreading out in long strings. This entire scene of habitation was filled with tiny flashes, as though the people were continually opening and closing the windows of their houses and the sunlight played in the panes.

  The Doctor gave a cry of delight. "Henry, you've done it! At last, something normal. Everyday life, and what
a great observation post!" And he began to climb out of the open turret.

  The Engineer stopped him. "Hold on. Don't you see the sun? In five minutes it'll be down, and we won't be able to see a thing. We ought to put this entire panorama on film, and quickly, too."

  The Chemist had already pulled the cameras out from under the seat, and together they set up the largest, which looked like a blunderbuss. The tripod they threw to the ground. The Engineer took a coil of nylon line, tied one end of it to the turret, tossed the rest of it over Defender's front end, and jumped down. The other two had already raised the tripod and were running to the cliff edge. He caught up with them and fastened the line to a snap-hook on each man's belt.

  "In case you fall," he said.

  The sun was sinking into the fiery waters of the lake. There was a hasty murmur of machinery, and the enormous lens tilted downward. The Doctor knelt to support the front legs of the tripod, and the Chemist put his eye to the finder and grimaced.

  "Too much glare," he said. "I need the diaphragm!"

  The Engineer ran back and returned a moment later with the attachment, and the shooting began. Holding the bar with both hands, the Engineer slowly moved the camera from left to right. Now and then the Chemist stopped it, increasing the resolution on places where the finder showed a greater concentration of detail. The Doctor went on kneeling as the camera purred. The film flew, and the spools were changed almost without a pause. Barely a sliver of the solar disk remained above the water as the lens pointed at the movement directly below. The Doctor had to lean over the edge now with the camera, hanging on to the taut line, and beneath him he saw the folds of the clay wall bathed in a crimson that grew dimmer and dimmer. Near the end of the second spool, the red disk disappeared. The sky still glowed, but a gray-blue shadow fell over the plain and the lake, and apart from the flashes there was nothing more to be seen.

  The three men carried the camera back carefully, as though it were a treasure.