Eden (26 page)

The Captain nodded. Everyone breathed freely. "Eden," he said, pointing at the circle. "Eden," he repeated.

The doubler watched his mouth with interest. It coughed.

"Eden," said the Captain slowly, enunciating clearly.

The doubler coughed several times.

"It can't speak," said the Captain, turning to his colleagues. "That's for sure."

They stood, not knowing what to do. The doubler moved. It dropped the chalk. There was a sound like that of a lock being opened. The brown material parted, as though ripped from top to bottom, and they saw a broad gold belt.

The belt unwound, rustling like metal foil. The doubler's smaller torso leaned far over, as if to step from its body; bending almost in two, it grabbed the end of the foil with its fingers. The belt had uncoiled into a long sheet, which it held out, apparently offering it to them. The Captain and the Engineer reached out simultaneously, and both jumped. The Engineer gave a little cry. The doubler, apparently surprised, coughed several times, and the transparent shield wavered on its face.

"An electrical charge, but not very strong," the Captain explained to the others, then reached for the foil a second time. The doubler released it. They examined the gold surface in the light: it was completely smooth, featureless. The Captain touched it at random and once again felt a mild electric shock.

"What is it?!" growled the Physicist, and began to run his hand over the foil. Electric shocks made his fingers quiver. "Give me some powdered graphite!" he said. "It's there in the cabinet!"

He spread out the foil on the table, paying no attention to the twitching of his hand, sprinkled the foil with the graphite that the Cyberneticist had given him, and blew off the excess.

On the gold surface were tiny black dots scattered seemingly at random.

"Lacerta!" the Captain cried suddenly.

"Alpha Cygni!"

"Lyra!"

"Cepheus!"

They turned to the doubler, who was watching them calmly. Triumph gleamed in its eyes.

"A star map!" exclaimed the Engineer.

"Well, now we feel at home." The Captain grinned.

The doubler coughed.

"Is it electrical writing?"

"Apparently."

"How are the charges maintained?"

"Perhaps they have an electric sense!"

"Gentlemen, please! Let's proceed logically," said the Captain. "What now?"

"Show it where we're from."

"Right."

The Captain quickly erased the board and drew the constellation of the Centaur. He hesitated, calculating in his head how that region of the Galaxy would be seen from Eden. He made a thick dot to indicate Sirius, added a dozen lesser stars, and on top of the Great Bear drew a small cross indicating the Sun. Then he touched his own chest and that of all his men in turn, swept his arm around the room, and again tapped the cross with his chalk.

The doubler coughed, took the chalk from him, pushed its small torso over to the board, and filled in the Captain's sketch with three dots: Alpha Aquilae and the binary system of Procyon.

"An astronomer!" whispered the Physicist. "A colleague…"

"Very likely!" replied the Captain. "Now let's go on!" What followed was a great amount of drawing. The planet Eden, the ship's path, its entry into the gaseous tail, and the collision. Then the ship embedded in the ground—a cross-section of the hill and the ship.

The doubler looked at the drawings on the blackboard and coughed. It went to the table. From the green convolutions of its collar it extracted a thin, flexible wire, leaned over, and began moving the wire across the foil with extraordinary speed. This continued for some time. It stepped back, and the men sprinkled the foil with graphite, whereupon something strange occurred. Even as they were blowing away the excess powder, the emerging lines began to move.

First they saw a hemisphere with an oblique column inside. Then a small spot appeared and crept over the edge of the hemisphere. It grew larger and larger. They recognized the outline of Defender, though the sketch was inexact. Part of the curve of the hemisphere disappeared, and Defender entered through that gap. At that point everything disappeared, and the graphite on the foil was even. Suddenly it gathered to form the star map. Through the map emerged the figure of a doubler, sketched in long strokes. The doubler standing behind them coughed.

"That's him," said the Captain.

The map disappeared, leaving only the doubler. Then the doubler disappeared, and the map replaced it. This was repeated four times. Spread as though by an invisible breath, the graphite once again arranged itself into an outline of the hemisphere with the broken curve. The doubler's silhouette appeared, much smaller, crawled toward the gap, and made its way in. The hemisphere disappeared. The oblique cylinder of the ship became larger. In front, beneath the hull, there was an opening. Through it the doubler entered the ship. The graphite scattered in random clumps: end of message.

"That's how it got here, through the loading hatch!" said the Engineer. "We left the damn thing open!"

"Wait—do you know what occurred to me?" the Doctor said. "Maybe they wanted, with that wall, not so much to shut us in as to prevent their—their scientists from contacting us!"

They turned to the doubler. It coughed.

"Well, enough of this," said the Captain. "It's been a very pleasant social gathering, but we have more important business before us! As for guerrilla warfare—forget it. We must go about this systematically. I suppose we ought to start with mathematics. The Physicist can handle that. Mathematics, and metamathematics, of course. The theory of matter, field theory. And then information theory, programming languages, semantics. Grammar, logic, vocabulary. All that belongs to you," he said to the Cyberneticist. "And once we've set up that bridge, there's biology, metabolism, economics, social forms, group behavior, and so on. There we won't have to be in such a hurry. Meanwhile"—he turned to the Cyberneticist and the Physicist—"you two get started. You have the films to help you, the computer, the library. Use whatever you need."

"To start with, we could take him around the ship," said the Engineer. "What do you think? That might tell him a few things. And he'll see that we're hiding nothing from him."

"Yes, that's important," the Captain agreed. "But—until we're able to communicate with him properly—don't let him into the first-aid room. That might cause some sort of misunderstanding. Now, let's make a tour of the ship. What time is it?"

It was three in the morning.

The tour of the ship took quite a while. The doubler was especially interested in the atomic pile and the robots. The Engineer drew sketch after sketch for it, filling four notebooks in the engine room alone. The guest made a detailed inspection of the microgrid, was amazed to find it entirely submerged in a tank of liquid helium—a cryotronic brain, superconductive for quick reactions—but soon grasped the purpose of the cooling. It coughed for a long time and looked with approval at the diagram the Cyberneticist drew for it. Evidently they could communicate much more easily by diagrams than by trying to represent basic words through gestures or symbols.

At five in the morning the Chemist, the Captain, and the Engineer went off to bed. Blackie, after closing the loading hatch, stood guard in the tunnel, while the other three men took the doubler to the library.

"Wait," said the Physicist as they passed the laboratory. "Let's show it the periodic table. There are illustrations of the electron orbitals of the atoms."

They went in. The Physicist was rummaging through a pile of papers in the cabinet when they heard a ticking.

"What's that?" the Doctor asked.

The Physicist looked up, heard the ticking, too. His eyes widened. "It's the Geiger. There must be a leak…"

He ran to the counter. The doubler, looking at the different instruments, now approached the table, and the counter began rattling like the roll of a drum.

"It's the doubler!" said the Physicist, aiming the metal cylinder with both hands at the huge alien. The counter whirred louder.

"He's radioactive? What does that mean?" asked the Cyberneticist.

The Doctor, pale, took the cylinder from the Physicist and swept the air with it in the direction of the doubler. The higher he raised it, the weaker the sound. Near the creature's clumsy, stout legs, the counter whirred and its red light went on.

The doubler moved its eyes from one man to another, surprised but not alarmed by what they were doing. It clearly didn't understand.

"He came through the opening Defender made in the wall," the Doctor said softly. "There's a radioactive patch there…"

"Keep your distance!" the Physicist said. "He's giving off more than a milliroentgen a second! Unless we wrap him in ceramite foil; then perhaps we could risk it…"

"I'm more concerned about him!" the Doctor said, raising his voice. "How long do you think he was exposed? What kind of dosage did he get?"

"I—I have no idea…" the Physicist said. "You should do something! An acetate bath… Look at him—he doesn't know!"

The Doctor rushed out of the laboratory without saying a word. He returned a moment later with the first-aid radiation kit. At first the doubler resisted their gestures for telling it to lie down, but eventually it submitted.

"Gloves!" the Physicist shouted, because the Doctor was touching the doublet's skin with his bare hands.

"Should we wake the others?" asked the Cyberneticist, standing off to the side.

"No need," muttered the Doctor, pulling on thick gloves. He leaned over the doubler. "So far, nothing… There'll be a rash in ten, twelve hours, assuming…"

"If we could only communicate," the Physicist said, half to himself.

"A transfusion … but how?" The Doctor closed his eyes. "The other one!" Then added, more softly, "No, I can't. First I would have to type both bloods, test for agglutination…"

"Listen." The Physicist pulled him aside. "It's probably bad. He must have crossed the radioactive area the second the temperature dropped, and there would have been plenty of isotopes there, rubidium, strontium, rare earths. Are there white corpuscles in his blood?"

"Yes, but they're not like human ones."

"All rapidly multiplying cells are hit in the same way, regardless of the species. Though he probably has more resistance than man…"

"What makes you say that?"

"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.