Eden Read online

  "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 th
ing 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.

  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."