Eden Page 7

  "It's a good start," said the Captain.

  "Yes, but we've only done about a hundredth of what has to be done in order for the…"

  "I know," the Captain replied calmly.

  "And we still don't know if…"

  "Yes, the steering nozzles, the whole lower deck."

  "But we'll do it."

  "Yes."

  The Engineer's eyes stopped on a long mound at the top of the knoll: the place where they had buried the creature. "I completely forgot…" he said in amazement. "It's as if it happened a year ago."

  "I haven't. I've been thinking about it—about the creature—the whole time. Because of what the Doctor found in its lungs."

  "What did he find?"

  "A needle."

  "A needle?!"

  "Or not a needle—you can see for yourself. It's in a jar in the library. A piece of thin tubing, broken, with a sharp end, almost like something used to give injections."

  The Engineer stood up. "It's curious, but somehow I don't find that interesting. I feel now like someone at a foreign airport, at a stopover of a few minutes, who mixes with the local crowd and sees strange, incomprehensible things but knows that he doesn't belong to the place and that soon he will be flying away. So to him it's all distant, indifferent."

  "It won't be that soon…"

  "I know, but that's how I feel."

  "Let's go back. We have to replace the stopgaps before we turn in. And install proper fuses. Then the pile can be put on idle."

  "All right, let's go."

  They spent the night in the ship, leaving the small lights on. Every so often one of the men would wake up, check with sleepy eyes to see if the bulbs were glowing, and fall asleep again, reassured.

  In the morning, the first piece of equipment to be mobilized was the cleaning robot. Every quarter of an hour or so, it became helplessly stuck in the wreckage that obstructed everything. The Cyberneticist, armed with tools, would run after it, extricate it from the rubbish, removing pieces that had proved too large for the neck of the grasper, then start the thing up again. The robot shuffled forward, took on the next heap of wreckage, and soon got stuck again. After breakfast the Doctor tried out his shaver. The result was a man in a bronze mask: the forehead and skin around the eyes were tanned, but the lower part of the face was white. Everyone followed his example.

  "We should feed ourselves better," concluded the Chemist, surprised by his gaunt reflection in the mirror.

  "What do you say to fresh game?" proposed the Cyberneticist.

  The Chemist shuddered.

  "No, thank you. Don't even mention it. I had nightmares about that … that…"

  "That animal?"

  "Animal or…"

  "What else could it have been?"

  "Can an animal start a generator?"

  Everyone was listening to the conversation.

  "All things at a higher level of development wear clothing of one form or another," said the Engineer, "and that doubler was naked."

  "Interesting. You said 'naked,'" observed the Doctor.

  "So?"

  "You wouldn't say that a cow or an ape was naked, would you?"

  "That's because they have hair."

  "A hippopotamus or a crocodile has no hair, yet you don't call them naked."

  "So? It just seemed the right thing to say."

  "Precisely."

  They fell silent for a while.

  "It's almost ten," said the Captain. "We've had a rest, so I think we should make another excursion now. In a different direction this time. The Engineer was supposed to prepare the jectors—how is that coming along?"

  "We have five, and all are charged."

  "Good. We went north before, let's try east now. And don't use the jectors unless you have to. Especially if we come across those … doublers, as the Engineer called them."

  "Doublers," the Doctor muttered to himself, as if trying out the name and not liking it.

  "Shall we go?" asked the Physicist.

  "All right. But let's secure the hatch first, to avoid new surprises."

  "Shouldn't we take the jeep?" asked the Cyberneticist.

  "I'll need at least five hours to get it working," said the Engineer. "Unless we postpone the excursion until tomorrow?"

  But no one wanted to postpone it, so they set off around eleven, after preparing their equipment. As if by arrangement—though no one had suggested it—they went in pairs and kept close together; the only man without a weapon, the Doctor, was in the middle pair. Whether the terrain was more walkable or they simply walked faster, they lost sight of the rocket in less than an hour. The landscape changed. There were more and more slender gray "calyxes," which they avoided, and in the distance, in the north, they saw hills that appeared domed and met the plain in steep crags. But the hills ahead of them, as they marched, were covered with patches of vegetation darker than the soil.

  The vegetation rustled underfoot and was the color of ashes. The young shoots, however, were whitish veinlike tubes with small beads growing out of them.

  "Do you know what I miss the most here?" said the Physicist. "Grass, ordinary grass. I would never have thought that grass would be so…" He groped for the word. "…necessary…"

  The sun was brutal. As they approached the hills, they could hear a soughing sound.

  "Strange. There's no wind, but there's the sound of a wind," remarked the Chemist, who was in the first pair.

  "It's coming from higher up," the Captain said, behind him. "Look, those are Earth trees!"

  "They're a different color…"

  "They're two colors," said the Doctor, who had sharp eyes. "They alternate—now they're violet, now blue with yellow highlights."

  The men left the plain and entered a broad canyon with clay walls that were covered with a delicate mist. On closer inspection the mist turned out to be a kind of lichen that resembled loose fiberglass insulation.

  They looked up as they passed the first clump of trees, growing at the edge of a precipice about forty feet above their heads.

  "But those aren't trees at all!" cried the Cyberneticist with disappointment, at the end of the line.

  The "trees" had thick, extremely shiny trunks, as though they had been greased, and multilayered crowns that pulsed rhythmically, darkening, then expanding and paling, letting the sunlight through in a hundred tiny places. This was accompanied by a sound, as though a chorus were whispering, over and over again, "fsss … hhaaa … fsss … hhaaa…" Then they noticed, on the nearest tree, growing out of its twisting branches, blisters as long as bananas and swollen with grapelike excrescences that puffed and darkened, collapsed and paled, puffed and darkened, collapsed and paled.

  "It's breathing," the Engineer murmured. He listened raptly to the sounds that drifted down and filled the canyon.

  "But observe that each has a rhythm of its own," the Doctor cried, excited. "The shorter it is, the faster it breathes! They are … lung-trees!"

  "Let's keep moving!" called the Captain, who was a dozen or so paces ahead of the standing group.

  They followed him. The canyon narrowed, and its floor led gradually uphill, bringing them to a domed rise between two clumps of trees.

  "When you shut your eyes, it's like being at the seashore. Try it!" the Physicist said to the Engineer.

  "I'll keep my eyes open, thanks," muttered the Engineer in reply. He left their line of march and made for the highest point on the rise.

  Before them now lay a rolling landscape with copses of breathing trees here and there, olive and russet. There were hillocks with clay slopes the color of honey and patches of moss that were silver in the sun and gray-green in the shade. The whole expanse was crisscrossed by thin, narrow lines that went in different directions. They ran through the valleys but avoided the hills. Some were reddish, some white, as though strewn with sand, and some were black as coal.

  "Roads!" exclaimed the Engineer, but corrected himself immediately. "No, they're too narrow for roads… Wh
at could they be?"

  "We found something similar beyond the spider grove," said the Chemist, raising binoculars to his eyes.

  "No, that was different," the Cyberneticist began.

  "Look! Look!" The Doctor's shouts made them all jump.

  Something transparent was gliding along a yellow line that passed, descending, between two hillocks half a mile away. The thing shone pale in the sunlight; it was like a semitransparent wheel with spokes, rotating. When it appeared against the sky, it became almost invisible, but farther down, at the foot of a clay escarpment, it gleamed more clearly, a spinning cloud, and shot off in a straight line past a clump of breathing trees—and vanished into the mouth of a distant canyon.

  The Doctor turned to his colleagues, his eyes bright, his teeth bared, as if smiling, but there was no gaiety in his face. "Interesting, no?"

  "Damn, I forgot my binoculars. Give me yours," said the Engineer, turning to the Cyberneticist. "Never mind," he added, because it was too late.

  The Cyberneticist hefted his jector. "We're not well armed," he mumbled.

  "Why, do you think we're going to be attacked?" asked the Chemist, glaring at him.

  They said nothing for a while, staring at the scene around them.

  "Well, let's move on," the Cyberneticist suggested.

  "Yes," said the Captain. "Wait! There's another!"

  A second cloud, moving much faster than the first, snaked in and out of the hills. It kept low to the ground. When it came straight in their direction, they lost sight of it altogether; it was only when it turned that the blurred, revolving disk again became visible.

  "Some kind of vehicle…" muttered the Physicist, putting his hand on the Engineer's shoulder but not taking his eyes off the gleaming cloud, which grew smaller and smaller as it retreated among the copses.

  "I have a Ph.D.," said the Engineer, as if to himself, "but this… Anyway, there is something inside there, convex, like the hub of a propeller."

  "Yes, and it's brighter than the rest," said the Captain. "How big do you think the craft is?"

  "If the trees down there are the same height as the ones above the canyon, then I would say at least thirty feet in diameter."

  The Doctor pointed to a line of hills. "Both of them disappeared there. So we should head in that direction, agreed?" And he began to descend the slope. The others hurried after him.

  "We'd better prepare ourselves for contact," said the Cyberneticist, nervously licking his lips.

  "We have no idea what form it will take. The best thing is to remain calm, to exercise self-control," said the Captain. "But we should change formation. One man in front, one in the rear, and let's spread out a bit more."

  "Do we have to stay in the open?" asked the Physicist. "It might be better if we were less visible."

  "We don't want to conceal ourselves too much. That will look suspicious. But, true, the more we observe without being observed, the better…"

  After descending a few hundred feet, they came to the first of the lines.

  It resembled a furrow made by an old-fashioned plow; the soil, crumbly, had been thrown up on both sides of a groove no more than two hands wide. The sunken, moss-covered strips that they had encountered on their first expedition had been of similar dimensions, but here there was no moss, only bare, broken ground that ran through a uniform cover of whitish overgrowth.

  "Strange," grumbled the Engineer, rising from his haunches. He wiped his hands on his suit.

  "The grooves to the north, I think, are older," said the Doctor, "and haven't been used for a long time. While these…"

  "That's possible," agreed the Physicist. "But what made this? Not a wheel—the track of a wheel would be totally different."

  "Some sort of agricultural machine?" the Cyberneticist suggested.

  "Why would they plow to a depth of four inches?"

  They stepped across the line and walked on. As they passed a wooded copse, whose noise made it difficult even to carry on a conversation, they heard a piercing whistle from behind and instinctively dived behind some trees. From their concealment they saw, high above the meadow, a luminous perpendicular vortex traveling at the velocity of an express train. Its rim was darker, and the bright center shone violet, orange, violet, orange. The diameter of the center was from six to eight feet.

  The craft rushed past and was gone. They continued in the same direction. When the copse came to an end, they were obliged to cross open country, which made them uncomfortable. They kept looking over their shoulders. The chain of hills was already quite close when they heard another piercing whistle. There being no cover whatsoever, they dropped to the ground. A gyrating disk hurtled by, its center a deep blue.

  "That one must have been more than fifty feet high!" the Engineer hissed excitedly. They got up and dusted themselves off. Between them and the hills lay a hollow that was exactly bisected by a strangely colored ribbon: a brook with a bright, sandy bottom visible through the water. The flowing water was bordered on both sides by a strip of iridescent blue vegetation, followed by another strip of pale rose and, after that, thin silver plants that were interspersed with fluffy spheres as big as a man's head; above each sphere rose the three-lobed chalice of an enormous flower white as snow.

  The men approached this unusual collection of colors. When they reached the fluffy spheres, the nearest flowers suddenly started quivering and slowly lifted into the air. They floated overhead for a while in a flock, emitting a soft hum, then soared upward, whirling and gleaming in the sun, and alighted in a thicket of spheres on the other side of the brook. Where the brook intersected the furrow, its banks were lined by an arch of a glassy substance perforated at regular intervals by circular openings. The Engineer tested the strength of this bridge with his foot and gingerly crossed to the other side. As soon as he got there, a host of white flowers flew up from under his feet and circled above him anxiously like startled pigeons.

  At the brook the men stopped to fill their canteens with water. Not for drinking, obviously, but to run tests on it later. The Doctor plucked one of the small plants that formed the rose strip and put it in his buttonhole, like a flower. Its stem was covered with tiny translucent flesh-colored nodes whose fragrance was exquisite. No one said so, but they were sorry to leave such a beautiful spot.

  The hillside they ascended was overgrown with mosses that rustled underfoot.

  "There's something at the top!" the Captain said. Against the sky, a vague shape moved. There were blinding flashes of light. Several hundred feet from the summit, they saw the object, a low revolving dome. On its surface were mirrors that reflected now the sun, now fragments of the landscape.

  Running their eyes along the ridge, they noticed another, similar dome—or, rather, guessed its presence by its regular flashing. And there were more and more such points, sparkling along the ridge as far as the horizon.

  From the top of the hill, they were finally able to gaze into the interior of a region hitherto unseen. The gentle slopes became fields crisscrossed by rows of pointed masts. The farthest masts blurred at the foot of a blue edifice made indistinct by the intervening atmosphere. Above the nearest masts the air roiled in vertical columns, as if from intense heat. Between their rows went dozens of grooves, all leading in the same direction, to the east. There, on the horizon, in a hazy mosaic of irregular angles, towers, and gold and silver spires, lay a multitude of buildings which, because of the distance, merged into a glimmering bluish mass. The sky was not as bright there, and in some places milky vapor poured into it and spread mushroom-like into a thin layer of cloud, in which, when they strained their eyes to the limit, they could see tiny black points appearing and disappearing.

  "A city…" whispered the Engineer.

  "I saw it, before we crashed…" said the Captain, at his side.

  They began the descent. The first row of masts or pylons lay across their path at the bottom of the slope. These were pitch-black cones at the base, which, about ten feet above the ground
, continued as semitransparent poles each with a central pin of some kind of metal. The air shimmered overhead, and they could hear a hollow, steady droning.

  "Vents?" the Physicist asked.

  They touched the cone bases, cautiously at first, then more boldly. There was no vibration.

  "I feel no air current," said the Engineer. "Perhaps these are emitters…"

  They proceeded across gently undulating fields. The city was no longer in view, but there was no way they could get lost: the masts and the grooves both indicated the direction. Occasionally a luminous, spinning vehicle flew by, but always so far away that they made no attempt to conceal themselves.

  A copse appeared up ahead, an olive-yellow patch of trees. At first they thought to go around it, as the row of masts did, but since it extended so far on both sides, they decided to cut through it instead.

  Breathing trees surrounded them. Dry leaves crunched underfoot at every step, and the soil beneath them was covered with little tube plants and white moss. Pale, spiked flowers protruded here and there from among thick roots. Droplets of aromatic resin trickled down rough trunks.

  The Engineer, at the head of the column, slowed down and said, "Damn! We shouldn't have come this way."

  A deep hollow opened up between the trees; on its loamy walls were festoons of long, snakelike vines. The men had gone too far to turn back now, so they climbed down, using the vines, to the bottom of the hollow, where a thread of water flowed. The opposite wall was too steep, so they followed the bottom, looking for a place to climb up. After about a hundred feet, the sides became lower, and the light improved.

  "What's that?" the Engineer asked suddenly. A breeze brought a sweetish, unpleasant smell, as of something burning. They halted. Speckles of sunlight moved across them; then it grew darker again. The canopy of trees rustled high overhead.

  "There's something nearby," whispered the Engineer.

  By now they could climb the other side, but instead, keeping close together and crouching slightly, they continued toward the thicket at the end of the hollow, through which they saw, when occasionally the breeze moved stalks aside, a pale, elongated mass. The ground grew muddy and squished, but they paid no attention to that. When the stalks, covered with racemose gnarls, were parted, the men beheld a sunny clearing. Through the clearing ran a single groove, which terminated in a ditch at a right angle to it and lined with upturned clay. They stood stock-still at the edge of the thicket. The stalks rustled as they rubbed against the men's suits, touching them lazily with their gnarls and then withdrawing, as if repelled. The crew stared.