Eden Read online

"Which happens to be underneath us. The ship must have cut one hell of a trench, and I'm not even sure the outer hatch is above ground."

  "We have tools. We can dig a tunnel."

  "And the loading bay?" asked the Cyberneticist.

  "Submerged," the Engineer said. "I looked into the shaft. One of the main tanks must have burst. There's at least six feet of water there. And probably radioactive."

  "How do you know?"

  "The reactor cooling system always gives out first—you didn't know that? Forget the loading bay. We'll have to get out this way, unless—"

  "Unless we dig a tunnel," the Captain said softly.

  "Yes, that is possible," the Engineer agreed, and fell silent. There was the sound of footsteps; sudden light in the corridor beneath them made them blink.

  "Ham, crackers, tongue, whatever you like. Everything in cans! There's chocolate, too, and we have thermoses," the Doctor shouted, clambering up first. He shined the flashlight for the others as they entered the chamber and passed out cans and aluminum plates.

  "The thermoses are intact," the Cyberneticist observed, pouring coffee into his mug.

  "Yes, and the cans held up well, too. But the refrigeration units, the ovens, the small molecular synthesizer, the water filters—they're all smashed."

  "And the purifier?"

  "That, too. We could repair it if we had the tools. But it's a vicious circle—to get a repair robot going you need current, but you can't get current unless you fix the generator, and to fix the generator you need a repair robot."

  "So you've been deliberating, my scientific colleagues? What ray of hope have you to offer us?" asked the Doctor, spreading crackers with butter and laying slices of ham on top. Not waiting for a reply, he continued:

  "The science-fiction books I read as a kid must outweigh this poor wreck of ours, yet not once did I come across a story anything like what has happened to us."

  "Because it's so prosaic," the Cyberneticist said, grimacing.

  "Yes, this is something original—a kind of interplanetary Robinson Crusoe," said the Doctor. He sealed the thermos. "When I get back, I must try to write it, to the best of my ability."

  They began gathering the cans. The Physicist suggested throwing them into the lockers with the suits. The men had to press against the wall so the doors—on the floor—could be shut.

  "You know, we heard a strange noise while we were rummaging in the storeroom," said the Chemist.

  "What kind of noise?"

  "As though something were crushing the ship."

  "A rock?" asked the Cyberneticist.

  "It's something quite different," the Engineer said. "When we hit the atmosphere, the external shield reached a very high temperature. The prow may have begun to melt. And now parts of the frame are cooling and shifting, and internal pressures will develop. Hence the noise. You can hear it even now. Listen…"

  They heard a groan in the interior of the craft—then a series of short, diminishing cracks—then silence.

  "One of the robots, do you think?" said the Cyberneticist, hope in his voice.

  "You saw how it was with the robots."

  "But we didn't look into the reserve hold." The Cyberneticist leaned out over the edge of the platform and shouted into the dark corridor, "Reserve robots!"

  His voice echoed. Silence was the only reply.

  "Come, let's take a good look at this hatch," said the Engineer. He knelt at the slightly concave plate, shone the light along its rim, inch by inch. In the same way he checked the seals, which were covered with a network of tiny cracks.

  "Nothing melted from the inside, which isn't surprising, since ceramite conducts heat poorly."

  "Maybe we should try once more?" suggested the Doctor, touching the wheel of the outer hatch.

  "There's no point," said the Chemist.

  The Engineer placed his hand on the hatch, then jumped to his feet.

  "We need water! Lots of cold water!"

  "Why?"

  "Touch the hatch!"

  Several outstretched hands felt it simultaneously.

  "Very hot," said someone.

  "Fortunately for us!"

  "How's that?"

  "The hull, heated, has expanded, and the hatch, too. If we cool the hatch, it will contract, and we might be able to open it."

  "Water won't do it. There might still be some ice—in the refrigeration units," said the Captain.

  One after another, they dropped into the corridor, which began to echo with their steps. The Captain remained in the chamber with the Engineer.

  "It will open," he said softly, as if to himself.

  "If it hasn't fused," the Engineer murmured. He ran a finger along the rim to check its temperature. "Ceramite starts melting over three thousand seven hundred degrees. You didn't notice what the shield registered at the end?"

  "At the end the dials were useless. When we threw on the brakes, it was over two and a half, if I'm not mistaken."

  "Two and a half thousand degrees is still not much."

  "Yes, but later on!"

  The Chemist's flushed face appeared over the edge of the platform. He had tied the flashlight around his neck. In its swaying light the pieces of ice in his bucket gleamed. He handed the bucket to the Captain.

  "Just a minute. How are we supposed to—" The Engineer broke off. "I'll be back." And he disappeared into the darkness.

  More steps could be heard. The Doctor arrived with two buckets of water, ice floating on the top. The Chemist held the light while the Doctor and the Physicist poured water on the hatch. The water flowed across the floor and into the corridor. After dousing the hatch for the tenth time, they heard a faint sound coming from it—a squeaking. They cheered. The Engineer appeared, wearing a reflector (from a suit) taped to his chest. Its glare made everything brighter. He threw an armful of plastic pieces taken from the control room onto the floor. The men began packing the hatch with chunks of ice, keeping them in place with the plastic, with air cushions, and with books that the Physicist kept bringing in. Finally, when their backs ached and little remained of the ice—the hot metal melted it very quickly—the Cyberneticist grabbed the wheel with both hands.

  "Not yet!" shouted the Engineer. But the wheel turned with astonishing ease. Everyone jumped up. The wheel rotated more and more rapidly. The Engineer grabbed the center handle of the triple bolt securing the hatch and pulled. There was a sound like thick glass cracking, and the door fell inward, gradually at first, then suddenly striking those who stood closest. A black avalanche rushed in, covering them up to the knees. The Chemist was thrown; the hatch pinned him to the side wall but left him unharmed. The Captain, barely managing to jump free at the last moment, practically knocked the Doctor over. They all froze. The Doctor's flashlight had been hit and went out; the only light came from the reflector on the Engineer's chest.

  "What is it?" asked the Cyberneticist in an unsteady voice. He stood behind the others, near the edge of the platform.

  "A sample of planet Eden," the Captain replied. He was helping to extricate the Chemist from behind the door that had been pushed open.

  "Yes," said the Engineer. "The whole hatchway is underground!"

  "Then this must be the first landing beneath the surface of an unknown planet," observed the Doctor.

  Everyone began to laugh. The Cyberneticist laughed so hard, tears came to his eyes.

  "Enough!" said the Captain. "We can't carry on like this until morning. Get your tools, men, we have digging to do."

  The Chemist bent down and picked up a heavy, compact lump from the mound on the floor. Earth protruded through the oval opening. Now and then blackish bits trickled down the surface of the heap as far as the corridor. The men withdrew to the corridor; there was no longer room enough on the platform. The Captain and the Engineer were the last to jump down.

  "How deep are we, do you think?" the Captain asked the Engineer in a whisper. In the corridor, a patch of light moved far ahead of them. The Engineer h
ad given the reflector to the Chemist.

  "It depends on many things. Tagerssen penetrated two hundred and fifty feet."

  "Yes, but what remained of him and his ship!"

  "Or take the Moon probe. They had to tunnel into rock to get it out. Into rock!"

  "On the Moon you have pumice…"

  "But who knows what we have here?"

  "It looks like marl."

  "At the hatchway, yes—but beyond?"

  The instruments were a problem. Like all long-range craft, the ship carried a duplicate set of robots and remote-controlled semiautomata for every sort of task, including ground-surface tasks under various planetary conditions. But the machines were dead, and without current there was no chance of repairing them. The only large-scale unit they had, an excavator powered by a micro-reactor, also required electricity to be started. So they would have to make do with primitive tools: shovels and pickaxes. This, too, presented problems. After several hours of toil, the crew went back and got three hoes, flattened and curved at the end, two steel poles, and large sheets of metal—to reinforce the walls of the tunnel. They carried the earth in buckets as well as in large plastic boxes supported litter-fashion by short aluminum tubing.

  Approximately eighteen hours had passed since the crash, and the men were exhausted. The Doctor felt that they should have at least a few hours' sleep. But first they needed to improvise beds of some sort, since the bunks in their sleeping quarters, bolted to the floor, were now vertical. It would have taken too much effort to detach them, so the men lugged air mattresses to the library (now almost half empty) and lay down side by side.

  But, except for the Chemist and the Engineer, no one could sleep. So the Doctor got up again, took his flashlight, and went in search of sleeping pills. For almost an hour he cleared a path to the first-aid room through a hallway filled with broken equipment and instruments that had tumbled from the wall compartments. At last—his watch showed four in the morning, ship time—the pills were dispensed, the light was extinguished, and fitful breathing soon filled the dark room.

  They awoke unexpectedly quickly—all except the Cyberneticist, who had taken too large a dose and was like one drunk. The Engineer complained of a sharp pain in the back of his neck. The Doctor discovered a swelling there: the Engineer had probably got a sprain when they were grappling with the hatch wheels.

  Spirits were low. Even the Doctor was not talkative. The food supplies in the air lock were inaccessible now, buried beneath a heap of dirt, so once again the Physicist and the Chemist trudged off to the storeroom for cans of food. It was nine when work resumed on the tunnel.

  They went at a snail's pace. There was little room to move about in the oval opening. The men in front broke the packed earth with their hoes, and those behind them removed it to the corridor. Then it was decided to pile the earth in the navigation room, which was closer and contained nothing that might be needed in the immediate future.

  Four hours later, the soil in the cabin was knee-high but the tunnel was only six feet long. Though the marl, compact, was not that hard, the poles and hoe blades kept getting stuck in it, and the iron handles bent as the men labored frantically. The steel hoe that the Captain used worked the best. The Engineer, afraid that the ceiling might cave in on them, took care that it was always well propped. By nightfall, when, smeared with clay, they sat down to supper, the tunnel, which led up from the hatch at a steep, almost seventy-degree angle, extended no more than twenty feet.

  The Engineer looked into the shaft that led to the lower level, where the loading-bay hatch, steel-plated, lay a hundred feet astern of the main hatch, but all he could see was black water. The level was higher than on the previous day; one of the tanks must still be leaking. The water was contaminated, radioactive. He verified this with his small Geiger counter, closed the shaft, and returned to his comrades without mentioning his discovery.

  "If all goes well, we'll be out tomorrow. If not, it'll take us two days," the Cyberneticist declared, drinking his third mug of coffee from the thermos. They were all drinking coffee.

  "How do you know?" the Engineer asked with surprise.

  "Just a feeling."

  "He has the intuition his robots lack," said the Doctor, laughing. As the day progressed, the Doctor was in increasingly good humor. When relieved of the digging, he would run back to the ship's quarters, scavenging. He added two magneto lanterns, a portable shaver, vitamin-enriched chocolate, and a stack of towels to their supplies. The men were filthy, their suits were covered with stains. No one had shaved, of course, given the lack of electricity.

  The whole of the following day was spent digging the tunnel. The navigation room was now so full, it became difficult to dump the soil through the door. Next they used the library. The Doctor had misgivings here, but the Chemist, with whom he was carrying the improvised handbarrow, tipped a heap of marl onto the books without hesitation.

  The tunnel opened up unexpectedly. The soil had been getting drier and less compact for a while now, and though the Physicist had noted this, the others did not agree: the soil they carried into the ship seemed to them no different. The Engineer and the Captain, beginning their shift, had just taken up the tools still warm from previous hands, and were hacking at the irregular wall, when a section suddenly disappeared and air poured in through the opening. They could feel the draft: the pressure of the atmosphere outside was a little higher than in the tunnel or the rocket. The hoes and steel poles worked feverishly. No one any longer carried away the soil. The rest of the crew, unable to help those in front because there was no room, formed a tight group at the rear. After a few final blows, the Engineer was about to crawl outside, but the Captain stopped him. The Captain wanted to widen the exit first. He also gave orders for the last chunks of soil to be carried into the ship, so that nothing would obstruct the tunnel. Another ten or twenty minutes passed, therefore, before the six men crawled out onto the planet's surface.

  II

  It was dusk. The tunnel opened near the base of a gently sloping knoll about forty feet high. Beyond, a vast plain stretched to the horizon, over which the first stars twinkled. There were vague, slender treelike forms in the distance, but the light of the setting sun was now so dim that everything merged into a uniform gray. The men stood silently. To their left, the huge hull of the ship jutted at an angle into the air. One hundred twenty of its two hundred feet, the Engineer estimated, were embedded in the knoll. But no one was interested any more in the silhouette of the tube ending in useless vanes and exhaust cones. The men inhaled the cool air, with its faint, unfamiliar odor that no one could give a name to, and a strong feeling of helplessness came over them. The hoes and pipes dropped from their hands. They stood gazing at the plain, its horizons in darkness, and at the stars shining overhead.

  "The Pole Star?" the Chemist asked in a hushed voice, pointing to a low star flickering in the east.

  "It wouldn't be visible from here. We're now … yes, we're directly under the Galactic South Pole. The Southern Cross ought to be over there somewhere…"

  They craned their necks. The black sky was bright with constellations. The men pointed them out to one another, naming them. This raised their spirits for a while. The stars were the only things familiar on the empty plain.

  "It's getting colder, like the desert," said the Captain.

  "We'll accomplish nothing today. We'd better go back inside."

  "What, back in that grave?" the Cyberneticist exclaimed, indignant.

  "Without that grave we'd perish in two days here," the Captain said. "Don't be childish." He turned around, walked steadily to the opening, which was barely visible from several feet higher on the slope, lowered his legs, and pulled himself inside. For a moment his head was still visible; then it disappeared. The others looked at one another.

  "Come on," muttered the Physicist. They followed him reluctantly.

  As they began crawling into the narrow opening, the Engineer said to the Cyberneticist, who was last
in line, "Did you notice the smell in the air?"

  "Yes. Strange, pungent… Do you know its composition?"

  "Like Earth's, with something added, I forget what. Nothing harmful. The data are in a small green volume on the second shelf in the—" Then he remembered that he himself had filled the library with soil. "Damn," he said, and squeezed himself through the hole.

  The Cyberneticist, now alone, suddenly felt uneasy. It wasn't fear but an overwhelming sense of being lost, of the strangeness of the landscape. And, too, there was something humiliating, he thought, about returning to the ground like worms. He ducked his head and crawled into the tunnel behind the Engineer.

  The following day, some of the men wanted to carry their rations to the surface and have breakfast there, but the Captain was against this. It would cause, he maintained, unnecessary trouble. So they ate by the light of two lanterns, in the air lock, and drank coffee that had grown cold. Out of the blue, the Cyberneticist said, "Wait a minute. How did we have good air the whole time?"

  The Captain smiled. There was gray stubble on his hollow cheeks.

  "The oxygen cylinders are intact. But purification is a problem: only one of the automatic filters is functioning—the emergency one, on batteries. The electricals, of course, are worthless. In six or seven days we would have begun to suffocate."

  "You knew that?" the Cyberneticist asked slowly. The Captain said nothing.

  "Now what do we do?" asked the Physicist.

  They washed their utensils in a bucket of water, and the Doctor dried them with one of his towels.

  "The atmosphere has oxygen," said the Doctor, tossing his aluminum plate on top of the others. "That means there's life here. What information do we have?"

  "Next to nothing. The space probe took a sample of the atmosphere, that's all."

  "You mean it didn't land?"

  "It didn't land."

  "That's loads of information," said the Cyberneticist. He was trying to clean his face, using alcohol from a small bottle and a piece of cotton. With very little water fit for use, they had not washed for two days. The Physicist examined his face in the polished surface of an air-conditioning unit.