Eden (17 page)

Again there was silence, although in the distance they could hear a soft hum.

"Those were huge—did you see them?!" said the Chemist.

The Captain waited a good while longer before he finally turned on the headlights and released the brakes. Going downhill, the jeep picked up speed. It would have been easier to travel along the grooves, since the ground there was more level, but the Captain preferred not to risk it—one of those blurry monsters might overtake them from behind. Steering carefully, he went in the same direction as the disks they had encountered, eastward, though the disks might well have turned again and changed course. He said nothing, but he was uneasy.

It was after two when a shiny band flashed up ahead. The doubler, who had not moved a muscle during the passage of the disks, had been peering out and examining its surroundings for some time now. But when the jeep reached the mirrorlike strip, the huge creature suddenly started wheezing and groaning, and it worked its way to one side, as though preparing to jump out.

"Stop! Stop!" cried the Doctor. The Captain stopped three feet from the strip.

"What's wrong?"

"He wants to escape!"

"Why?"

"I don't know. Maybe because of that strip. Turn off the headlights!"

The Captain did so. The moment it was dark, the doubler sank back heavily into its seat. They crossed the strip with the lights off, and for a moment the reflection of the stars sparkled in the blackness on both sides of the jeep.

Then they were on the plain, the headlights beating against the night as the jeep sped along, its whole frame vibrating. Small stones and sand kicked up behind them, and the cold wind buffeted their faces, which made the Chemist lower his head behind the windshield. They went faster and faster, expecting the ship to come into view at any moment.

The arrangement was that a blinker would be hung from one of the fins of the ship, so they looked for a blinking light. Minutes passed and there was no light, so they turned and headed northeast, but all around them was darkness. They drove now with only their sidelights on, then the Captain turned off even those, despite the risk of hitting something. At one point they saw a flickering and went toward it as fast as possible, but soon realized that it was just a star.

"Maybe the blinker is broken," ventured the Chemist.

Nobody replied. They covered another three miles and turned again. The Doctor stood up and strained to see into the darkness. The jeep bounced, first in the front, then in the rear: they had crossed a ditch.

"Bear left," said the Doctor.

They crossed a second ditch one and a half feet deep. A faint light appeared and, rising up through it, a long, slanting shadow, the top of which was momentarily surrounded by an aureole. The light disappeared, but the jeep accelerated straight ahead, and when the light came on again, it revealed the ship's stern and three figures. The Captain turned on the headlights, and the figures ran toward them with their arms raised.

The ship was near now. They had approached it at such an angle that the stern had concealed the blinker.

"Is that you?! All of you?!" cried the Engineer. He rushed over to the jeep, but stopped short at the sight of the fourth, headless figure.

The Captain embraced the Engineer with one arm and the Physicist with the other, and stood there for a moment, as if requiring their support. The five men formed a group near one of the sidelights, while the Doctor, not joining them, spoke quietly to the doubler, which had become restless.

"We're all right," said the Chemist. "And you?"

"In one piece," the Cyberneticist replied.

The men looked at one another for quite a while in silence.

"Do we discuss what happened, or do we go to sleep?" asked the Chemist.

"You can sleep? That's great," exclaimed the Physicist. "Sleep! Good God! They were here, did you know that?"

"I thought as much," said the Captain. "Was … was there a fight?"

"No. And for you…?"

"No, we didn't have one, either. I … think the fact that they've discovered the ship may prove to be more important than anything we found."

"Did you capture that?" asked the Engineer.

"Actually … he captured us. That is, he came voluntarily. But it's a long story, and complicated, and one we don't really understand."

"It's the same with us!" said the Cyberneticist. "They showed up about an hour after you left! I thought … well, I thought it was the end."

"You must be starving," said the Engineer.

"I completely forgot about food. Doctor!" called the Captain. "Come here!"

"Are we having a meeting?" The Doctor stepped from the jeep and came over, but he kept his eyes on the doubler, who unexpectedly jumped to the ground with a surprisingly light movement and shuffled over to the crew. At the edge of the ring of light the huge creature became motionless. As they watched silently, its muscles moved and made a gap; in the diffused glow of the lights the men saw part of a head and a blue eye regarding them.

"So they were here?" asked the Doctor, who at that moment was the only one not looking at the doubler.

"Yes. Twenty-five disks, of the kind we rode, and four much larger machines, like blurred tops."

"We saw them too!" said the Chemist.

"When? Where?"

"Maybe an hour ago, on our way back. We very nearly ran into them. What did they do here?"

"Not much," replied the Engineer. "The disks appeared in a row, we don't know from which direction, because when we came up to the surface—we had been in the ship for no more than five minutes—they were already flying around, circling us. They didn't approach. We figured this was a scouting party, a reconnaissance patrol, so we set up the thrower near the ship and waited. But they just kept circling, always at the same distance, not moving away, not coming closer. That went on for about an hour and a half. Then the larger things appeared, the tops—one of them a hundred feet high! They're a lot slower. It seems the tops can travel only along the grooves that the other ones dig. The disks, anyway, made room for them in their circle, so that the larger and smaller machines alternated. While they were whirling around, one or two of them almost collided; their rims touched with an awful crash, but nothing happened, and they went on whirling."

"And what did you do?"

"We were sweating it out by the thrower. It wasn't pleasant."

"I'm sure it wasn't," the Doctor said seriously. "And then what?"

"Well, at first I thought that at any second they would attack. Then that they were only observing us. But their formation was odd, and the fact that they never stopped; we know that the disks can spin in place… Anyway, after seven o'clock I asked the Physicist to get the blinker, because we had to hang it outside for you, except that it wouldn't have been possible for you to get through that flying wall—and then it dawned on me that this was intentional, a blockade! So I thought we had better try to communicate—while we could. Still sitting behind the thrower, we began to flash a signal, two flashes, then three, then four."

"A series?" asked the Doctor, and the Engineer was unable to tell whether he was making fun of him.

"A normal arithmetic progression," he said at last.

"And what did they do?" asked the Chemist, who had been listening carefully.

"Basically, nothing…"

"What do you mean,
basically?
"

"They did different things the whole time, before, during, and after the flashing, but nothing that resembled an attempt to respond or establish contact."

"What did they do?"

"They spun faster, slower, approached one another, and there was movement in the gondolas."

"Do the tops—the big machines—also have gondolas?"

"Didn't you say you saw them?"

"It was dark."

"They have no gondolas. In their center there's nothing at all. An empty space. But there is a large container of some kind that moves—floats—around the circumference. Convex on the outside, concave on the inside, and it assumes various positions and has a row of horns, conical swellings, which serve no purpose that I can see. The tops also left the circle sometimes and changed places with the disks."

"How often?"

"It varied. In any case, we couldn't make out a pattern in it. Not that we didn't try. I took note of everything, looking for some sort of response from them. They performed complex maneuvers. For example, during the second hour the tops slowed down, and in front of each one a disk positioned itself, then moved slowly toward us, though no closer than fifty feet, with the top behind it. Then they formed circles again, but now two: an inner circle with four tops and four disks, and an outer circle with the rest of the disks. I was beginning to think that I had better do something, so you could get through, when lo and behold they lined up in single file and left, in a spiral first, then straight south."

"When was this?"

"A few minutes past eleven."

"That means we probably encountered other ones," the Chemist said to the Captain.

"Not necessarily. They might have stopped on the way."

"Now tell us what happened to you," said the Physicist.

"Let's hear from the Doctor," said the Captain.

The Doctor summarized the whole expedition in a few minutes. "It's curious that everything we find here is reminiscent of things we know on Earth," he concluded, "but only partly. There are always pieces that don't fit. These vehicles of theirs, for example, showed up here like war machines. Was it reconnaissance, was it a blockade? But ultimately nothing happened, and we are left in the dark. Those wells in the clay—they were terrible, of course, but what in fact were they? Graves? We don't know. Then that settlement, or whatever it was. An incredible place, like a nightmare. And the skeletons inside the 'clubs'? Were they museums? Slaughterhouses? Chapels? Factories turning out biological specimens? Prisons? Anything is possible, even a concentration camp!

"And no one stopped us or tried to establish contact with us. That's surely the most incomprehensible thing of all. Without question, the planet's civilization is highly developed. The architecture, the construction of domes like the ones we've seen—and yet, nearby, the stone settlement, like a medieval stronghold—an astonishing mixture of levels of civilization! Their signaling system must be sophisticated, since they extinguished the lights of the stronghold less than a minute after our arrival, and we were traveling fast and saw no one along the way. They are undoubtedly intelligent, but the crowd that descended on us behaved like a panic-stricken herd of sheep. It was chaos, totally senseless, mad! And that's how it's been throughout.

"The individual we killed was covered with a kind of foil, while these others were naked. The corpse in the well had a tube in its umbilicus, and it had an eye, an eye like the one you're looking at now, while the other corpses had no eyes… I'm beginning to think that even this doubler we brought with us won't help us much. We'll try to communicate with it, of course, but I doubt that we'll have much success…"

The Cyberneticist said: "All the information we've collected so far should be written down, classified, or we'll get confused. The Doctor's probably right, but… Those skeletons, were they definitely skeletons? And the crowd of doublers that surrounded you and then fled…"

"I saw the skeletons as clearly as I see you. As for the crowd…" And he spread his arms.

"That was absolute madness," the Chemist put in.

"Maybe you woke up the settlement, and they were surprised. Imagine a hotel on Earth, and one of these gyrating disks suddenly appearing. Of course people will panic!"

The Chemist shook his head, and the Doctor smiled.

"You weren't there, so it's difficult to explain it to you. Panic, you say… And when all the people have hidden themselves or fled, one of them, naked as a jaybird, runs after the disk and asks for a ride."

"But it didn't ask you…"

"He didn't? And what happened when I pushed him away to make him go back?"

"Gentlemen, it's a quarter to four," said the Captain, "and tomorrow—I should say today—they could pay us a new visit, at any time. Nothing would surprise me! What did you do in the ship?" he asked the Engineer.

"Very little, since we were sitting by the thrower for four hours! One microbrain has been checked, and the remote is almost working—the Cyberneticist can give you the details. There's quite a mess, unfortunately."

"I need sixteen niobium-tantalum diodes," said the Cyberneticist. "The cryotrons are intact, but I can't do anything with the brain without the diodes."

"Can't you cannibalize?"

"I did, I took over seven hundred."

"There aren't any more?"

"Maybe in Defender—I couldn't reach it. It's lying at the very bottom."

"Listen, do we have to stand out here all night?"

"You're right, let's go. But wait—what about the doubler?"

"And what about the jeep?"

"You're not going to like this, gentlemen, but from now on we'll have to stand watch around the clock," said the Captain. "It was crazy of us not to have done that before. Who will volunteer for the first two hours, until dawn…?"

"I will," said the Doctor.

"You? Don't be ridiculous. It has to be one of us," said the Engineer. "After all, we were just sitting here."

"And I was sitting in the jeep. I'm no more tired than you are."

"Enough. First the Engineer, then the Doctor," the Captain decided. He stretched, rubbed his numb hands, went over to the jeep, turned off the lights, and wheeled it around slowly, pushing it under the hull of the ship.

"And the doubler?" The Cyberneticist was standing over the recumbent creature.

"He'll stay here. He's sleeping. If he were going to run away, he wouldn't have come here in the first place," observed the Physicist.

"We can't just leave him like this. We have to secure him somehow," said the Chemist.

But the others were entering the tunnel one by one. He looked around, shrugged, and followed them. The Engineer meanwhile put an air cushion beside the thrower and sat down. But, afraid of falling asleep, he got up and began to pace back and forth.