Eden Page 21

  "Because background radiation here is almost twice that of Earth. To some degree they must have adapted to it. And I don't suppose your antibiotics…?"

  "Of no use. The bacteria here are altogether different."

  "In that case … we should try to communicate with him on as broad a range of subjects as possible. The reaction, the apathy, if he behaves like a human being, won't begin for another several hours…"

  The Doctor looked quickly at the Physicist. They were standing five feet from the doubler, who did not take its blue eyes off them. "In other words, to pump as much information as we can out of him before he dies."

  "I wasn't thinking of it quite like that," said the Physicist, turning red in the face. "But any one of us, in his place … our first thought would be to complete the mission!"

  The Doctor smiled bitterly. "Perhaps, knowing the score. But we gave him no choice. He was injured by us! It was our fault."

  "And now what? You want to expiate your sin? Don't be ridiculous!"

  "You don't understand. That"—he pointed at the recumbent figure—"is a patient, and this"—he slapped himself on the chest—"is a doctor. And, except for a doctor, no one has any business here."

  "But … this is our only chance. We won't be doing him any harm. It wasn't our fault that…"

  "It was! The doubler was injured because he followed Defender! But that's enough. I have to take blood from him."

  He approached the creature with a syringe, hesitated, went back to the table for a second syringe. "I'll need your help," he said, turning to the Cyberneticist.

  He approached the doubler now with both syringes and bared his arm. As the doubler watched, the Cyberneticist took a syringe, extracted a little of the Doctor's blood, and stepped back. The Doctor took the second needle, touched the doubler's skin with it, found a vein, inserted it. The doubler did not move. Its light-red blood filled the plastic cylinder. The Doctor deftly removed the needle, pressed the puncture with a cotton ball, and left the room.

  The Cyberneticist, still holding the syringe containing the Doctor's blood, asked the Physicist, "And now what? Should we wake the others?"

  "The Doctor will only make the same argument. No … the doubler must decide for himself. If he agrees, the Doctor will have to go along."

  The Cyberneticist gave him a look of surprise. "But how will the doubler decide? He doesn't know—and we can't tell him!"

  "Of course we can," the Physicist said, regarding the plastic cylinder containing the Doctor's blood. "We have fifteen minutes while the Doctor counts corpuscles. Bring the blackboard here!"

  "The blackboard!" And the Physicist began gathering bits of chalk.

  The Cyberneticist took the blackboard off the wall, and together they set it up opposite the doubler.

  "Not enough chalk! Bring some from the library, colored pieces!"

  As the Cyberneticist went out, the Physicist took a stick of chalk and quickly sketched a hemisphere with the ship inside it. He felt the creature's pale-blue eyes on him. When he was finished, he turned to the doubler, tapped the blackboard with his finger, wiped it with a wet sponge, and went on drawing.

  The wall intact. Before the wall, Defender. Defender's nose, the nuclear beam. The Physicist went over to the creature, touched it, returned to the blackboard, and tapped the chalk on the sketched figure. Then, quickly, he erased the picture, put the wall up again, rubbed another gap in it, surrounded the gap heavily with violet, and placed the doubler there, erased everything except the doubler, replaced the doubler with a larger doubler. Standing so that the doubler could see his every move, the Physicist began rubbing crushed violet chalk onto the feet of the figure. He turned around.

  The doubler's small torso, which had been resting on a rubber pillow that the Doctor had inflated, slowly rose, and the wrinkled monkey face and intelligent eyes turned from the blackboard to the Physicist, as though asking him what all this meant.

  The Physicist nodded, grabbed a can and a pair of protective gloves, and dashed out of the laboratory. In the tunnel he almost ran into a robot, which, recognizing him, stepped aside. Outside, on the surface, the Physicist put the gloves on and ran to the gap in the crystal wall. At the shallow crater there he dropped to his knees and as quickly as possible took a few pieces of sand-turned-to-glass and threw them into the can. Then he ran back to the ship and through the tunnel. There was someone standing in the laboratory, waiting: the Cyberneticist.

  "The Doctor?" the Physicist asked.

  "He hasn't returned yet."

  "Move back. Sit over there, by the wall." And he emptied the contents of the can, pale-violet pieces of vitrified sand, on the floor in front of the blackboard.

  "You're crazy!" hissed the Cyberneticist, jumping to his feet. At the other end of the table, the Geiger came to life and began clicking rapidly.

  "Quiet! Don't interfere!" The Physicist's voice shook with such ferocity that the Cyberneticist sat down again.

  The Physicist glanced at his watch. Twelve minutes had passed. The Doctor might return at any moment. The Physicist leaned forward, pointed to the violet pieces, picked up a handful of them, held them in the palm of his hand, and brought them to the sketched figure, to its feet, smeared with violet chalk. He rubbed one of the fragments on the drawing, looked into the doubler's eyes, dropped the rest on the floor, and backed away.

  Then he approached again, with a determined step, as though he had a great distance to cover, and walked into the patch of violet pieces. He stood there for a while, closed his eyes, and slowly fell. His body thudded on the floor. He lay there for a moment, got up, went over to the table, grabbed the Geiger, and went back to the blackboard. When the cylinder was brought near the chalk-drawn feet, it burst into a loud staccato. The Physicist passed the counter by the blackboard several times, repeating the effect as the doubler watched intently, turned to the doubler and began moving the counter toward the bare soles of its feet.

  The instrument began to chatter.

  The doubler made a small noise, as if it were choking. For several seconds—which seemed an eternity—it looked into the Physicist's eyes. Drops of sweat trickled down the Physicist's brow. The doubler suddenly went limp, shut its eyes, and sank back on its cushion, strangely tensing the fingers of both hands. After lying still for a moment, it opened its eyes, sat up again, and gave the Physicist a long look.

  The Physicist nodded, put the counter on the table, nudged the blackboard with his foot, and said quietly to the Cyberneticist, "He knows now."

  "Knows what?" muttered the other, shaken by this pantomime.

  "That he's going to die."

  The Doctor entered, saw the blackboard and the scattered pieces of violet glass. "What's this?" he asked angrily. "What does it mean?"

  "It means you have two patients now," the Physicist said. And as the Doctor watched in amazement, he calmly took up the Geiger again and pointed it at his own body. The instrument chattered. Radioactive dust had penetrated the Physicist's suit.

  The Doctor paled, clutched the syringe he was holding, almost as if it were a weapon. Then slowly he relaxed. "All right," he said. "Let's clean you up."

  As soon as the two of them left, the Cyberneticist threw on a protective suit and hurriedly disposed of the radioactive fragments. Then he vacuumed the whole area carefully. The doubler lay still, watching, coughing quietly a few times. After about ten minutes the Physicist returned with the Doctor; he was now wearing a white canvas suit and had thick bandages on his neck and hands.

  "Well, that's taken care of," he said almost cheerfully. "Nothing serious. A first-degree burn, maybe not even that."

  The Doctor and the Cyberneticist began helping the doubler up. The doubler, understanding, got up and followed the Doctor submissively.

  "And what was the point of all that?" asked the Cyberneticist. He was pacing the room nervously, poking the Geiger's black muzzle into every nook and cranny. Now and then the clicking would accelerate slightly.

  "You'
ll see," the Physicist said.

  "Why didn't you put on a protective suit? It would have taken only a minute."

  "I had to keep it simple," said the Physicist. "And as natural as possible. A special suit might have confused him."

  They fell silent. The hand on the wall clock slowly shifted. The Cyberneticist began to feel sleepy. The Physicist yawned.

  Then the Doctor, in a smock, burst in and yelled at the Physicist. "It was you, wasn't it? What did you do to him?!"

  "What's wrong?" asked the Physicist.

  "He won't lie down! He barely let me examine him, then got up and headed for the door."

  Behind him, the doubler entered, hobbling. The loose end of a bandage dragged along the floor behind it.

  "You can't treat him against his will," the Physicist said coolly. He stood. "I suggest we take the computer from the navigation room. It has the greatest range of extrapolation." This he said to the Cyberneticist, who got to his feet with a start, blinked stupidly for a moment, and walked out, leaving the door open.

  The Doctor stood in the middle of the laboratory, his fists in the pockets of his smock. At the sound of soft shuffling, he turned around and looked at the giant alien.

  "You know, don't you?" he said with a sigh.

  The doubler coughed.

  The other three of the crew slept the entire day. When they woke, night was falling. They went straight to the library, which they found in chaos. The tables, the floor, every chair was buried under piles of books, atlases, scattered pages with sketches, hundreds of them. Mixed in with the books and paper were machine parts, photographs, cans of food, plates, lenses, calculators, and cassettes. The blackboard, propped against a wall, dripped water and chalk dust, and chalk dust covered the fingers, sleeves, and even the knees of the Physicist, Doctor, and Cyberneticist. Unshaven and with bloodshot eyes, they were sitting opposite the doubler and drinking coffee from mugs. In the middle of the room, where the table had been, stood a large computer.

  "How is it going?" asked the Captain, in the doorway.

  "Beautifully. We've analogized sixteen hundred concepts," said the Cyberneticist.

  The Doctor got up. He was still in his smock. "This was against my advice," he said, and pointed at the doubler. "He's been seriously wounded."

  "Wounded!?" The Captain entered the room.

  "He walked through the radioactive area at the gap in the wall," explained the Physicist, leaving his coffee and kneeling by the computer.

  "He has ten percent fewer white corpuscles than seven hours ago," said the Doctor. "And there's hyaline degeneration, exactly as you would expect in a human. I wanted to isolate him—he needs rest—but he won't let me treat him, because the Physicist told him that he is beyond help."

  "Is that true?" asked the Captain, turning to the Physicist. The latter nodded without looking up from the whirring machine.

  "And is he … beyond help?" asked the Engineer.

  The Doctor shrugged. "I don't know! If he were human, I'd say he had a thirty percent chance. But he's not human. He's growing apathetic, but that could be due to exhaustion, lack of sleep. If I could isolate him…"

  "You can still do that," said the Physicist as he fiddled with some knobs, using his bandaged hands.

  "And what happened to you?" asked the Captain.

  "I showed the doubler how it had exposed itself to radiation."

  "And for that you had to expose yourself, too?!" exclaimed the Engineer.

  "That's right."

  No one spoke for a while.

  "What's happened, has happened," the Captain said at last, slowly. "Whether for good or for bad. And now what? What have you learned?"

  "Plenty."

  It was the Cyberneticist who answered.

  "He's already mastered hundreds of our symbols—the mathematical ones especially. In fact, we're well into information theory. The biggest problem is his electrical writing: we can't learn it without special equipment, and there's no time to construct that. Remember those fragments of tubing leading into the body in the pit? A writing instrument! When a doubler comes into the world, a tube is immediately implanted, just as baby girls on Earth once had their ears pierced in some societies… On either side of the body—the larger body, I mean—they have electrical organs. They're like plasma batteries that transmit charges directly to the 'writing tube.' In this doubler, the tube terminates in those wires on the 'collar.' It varies from individual to individual. But apparently writing is something they have to learn. The tube surgery, which has been carried out for thousands of years, is only a preliminary step."

  "So he doesn't speak?" asked the Chemist.

  "He does. That coughing you heard—that's actually speech. A single cough is an entire sentence, articulated at great speed. We taped it—it resolves into a whole spectrum of frequencies."

  "Ah! So it's speech based on modulated sound!"

  "But voiceless sound. Their voices are used solely to express states of emotion."

  "And do these electrical organs also serve as defenses?"

  "I don't know. Let's ask him."

  He leaned over and from a pile of papers pulled out a board containing a diagram of a doubler. He pointed to two oblong segmented shapes inside the body and asked, putting his mouth to a microphone, "Defense?"

  A speaker near the recumbent creature squawked. The doubler, who had raised his small torso a little when the other men entered, froze for a moment, then coughed.

  "Defense. No," croaked the loudspeaker. "Many planetary revolutions. Ago. Defense."

  The doubler coughed again.

  "Organ. Rudimentary. Biology evolved. Secondary adaptation. By technology," the speaker said in a lifeless monotone.

  "Well, well," murmured the Engineer with pleasure. The Chemist stood rapt, his eyes narrowed.

  "Genetic engineering!" the Captain exclaimed. "And their physics?" he asked.

  "From our point of view, peculiar," said the Physicist. He got up off his knees. "I can't eliminate that static," he said to the Cyberneticist. "In classical physics," he went on, "they're very knowledgeable. Optics, electricity, mechanics, and especially molecular mechanics—a kind of chemical physics. There they've made some interesting discoveries."

  "Such as?!" The Chemist pushed forward.

  "Details later. We recorded everything, don't worry. They arrived at information theory by a completely different route. But the study of it is forbidden to them, outside certain special areas. In atomic science they're weakest, particularly nuclear chemistry."

  "Wait—what do you mean, forbidden?" asked the Engineer.

  "They're not allowed to pursue research in information theory."

  "Who forbids it?"

  "That's a complicated business," the Doctor said. "We're still at sea when it comes to their social dynamics."

  "There's no incentive, probably, for nuclear research." said the Physicist, "because they have no shortage of energy."

  "One thing at a time! What about this forbidden research?"

  "Pull up a chair. We'll be asking him more questions," said the Cyberneticist.

  The Captain put his face to the microphone, but the Cyberneticist stopped him. "Wait. The more complex the structure of a sentence, the more difficulty the computer has with grammar. And the sound analyzer is inadequate. So the answers don't always make sense. But you'll see for yourselves."

  "There are many of you on the planet," said the Physicist into the microphone, enunciating carefully. "What is the organizational system of you on the planet?"

  The speaker squawked twice, went silent. For some time the doubler made no reply. Then he coughed hoarsely.

  "Our organizational system. Binary. Our relations. Binary," said the speaker. "Society. Central control. The whole planet."

  "Perfect!" cried the Engineer, excited. The three new participants in the questioning were all excited, but their colleagues sat quietly, weariness—indifference, almost—in their faces.

  "Who rules your
society? Who is at the top, an individual or a group?" the Captain said into the microphone. The speaker crackled, there was a buzz, and a red light flashed on the instrument panel.

  "You can't ask that way," the Cyberneticist explained. "'At the top' is imprecise and figurative. Let me." He leaned forward. "How many of you make the decisions at central control? One? Several? A large number?"

  The speaker squawked. "One. Several. Large number. Control. Do not know. Do not know," it repeated.

  "What is that supposed to mean?" asked the Captain, surprised.

  "Let's ask."

  "You do not know, or no one on the planet knows?" the Cyberneticist said into the microphone.

  The doubler coughed, and the computer translated:

  "Binary relations. One thing. Known. Other thing. Unknown."

  "I don't—" the Captain began.

  "Wait," said the Cyberneticist, because the doubler slowly moved his face again to his own microphone and coughed twice.

  The computer continued:

  "Many planetary revolutions. Ago. Central control. Divided. Pause. One doubler. Pause. One hundred and thirteen planetary revolutions. Pause. Planetary revolution one hundred and eleven. One doubler. Death. Pause. Other doubler. Death. One. One. Death. Death. Pause. Then. One doubler. Who unknown. Central control known. Unknown who."

  "And what do you make of that?" asked the Captain.

  The Cyberneticist replied: "He says that up to the year one hundred and thirteen, counting back from today—this would be year zero—they had a multimember central government. Then followed reigns of individuals. In the years one hundred and twelve and one hundred and eleven there were violent palace coups. Four rules succeeded one another within two years. Their deaths obviously were not natural. Then a new ruler appeared, whose existence was known but not his identity."

  "You mean, an anonymous ruler?" the Engineer asked.

  "It would seem. Let's try to find out more."

  He turned to the microphone. "It is known that one individual makes decisions at central control, but it is not known who that individual is?"

  The doubler coughed, hesitated, coughed again, and the speaker said, "No. Pause. Sixty planetary revolutions. Known. One doubler decides. Pause. Then known that no doubler. Pause. No one at central control. Known."