The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel (7 page)

“Not really,” I confirmed. “We either play along with Harmall, or we don’t. There’s no possible payoff in the second.”

“I suppose that calculating mind is what got you where you are today?” she observed, not without a trace of sarcasm. “And at such a tender age, too.”

I wished that she wouldn’t keep remarking on my age.

“It pays to be single-minded,” I told her. “It’s the only way to achieve anything in this world. You must know that—you may have had ten or twelve years’ start, but your list of achievements is hardly unimpressive when set beside mine. All my work has been in collaboration—and when you’re working on paratellurian biology, collaboration with a paratellurian can give you quite an advantage.”

“I meant to ask about that,” she said, seeming glad enough of the opening which let her change the course of the conversation. “How did that come about?”

“Pure blind chance,” I replied. “Zeno was one of a group of Calicoi students who came to Earth to study. We met at college—I suppose we gravitated together because we were both foreigners. From the point of-view of most Midwestern Americans, England is at least as far away as Calicos. We shared space in the labs. It just got to be a habit.”

“I’ve worked with Calicoi on Mars,” she said. “Not as closely as you with Zeno, of course, but well enough to get to know them...if that’s possible. Don’t you find them a little...distant?”

“I daresay they vary as much as we do,” I replied. “Zeno’s gloomy—he makes a fetish out of finding no joy in the contemplation of Creation—and his lifestyle is somewhat ascetic, but he’s not unfriendly. We get along together.”

“Maybe you’re a little on the gloomy side yourself?”

“I wouldn’t say so. Ascetic, perhaps. Maybe distant—but not gloomy. Every day in every way life is getting better and better. Maybe. Mother always told me to look on the bright side. I promised her that I would, if I ever found it. A man can’t break a promise to his mother, now can he?”

“Was it your mother who told you that you have to be single-minded to achieve anything in this world?”

“It was.”

“I thought it might have been. She didn’t, by any chance, tell you not to take presents from strange men?”

She held up her little spy device. I reached out to touch hers with mine, as if we were clinking glasses before drinking a toast.

“Touché,” I said.

She laughed, consummating the witty exchange in an appropriate manner—or perhaps giving it a blessing it didn’t deserve.

“We’d better get some sleep,” she said, giving herself a slight shove that was just sufficient to float her to the door. “We have a hard day tomorrow.”

I watched her go, giving her an ironic salute by way of signing off.

I fastened the safety-harness around the bunk, making sure that whatever happened during the night, I wouldn’t fly into any metal walls. Dreaming can be dangerous, in free fall.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The next day was strictly business, and consisted almost entirely—at least so far as those of us whose job it was to solve the mystery were concerned—of examining data brought back by the various probes sent into Naxos’ atmosphere. There was a good deal of photographic material relayed up from soft-landed modules, but it suffered from the age-old handicap. You get a very narrow view of a single spot, and you know full well that the local fauna is likely to have taken one look at the monstrous black metal thing that came whizzing out of nowhere and pulled a disappearing act.

I paid particular attention to the pictures sent back by the probes that landed in the marshland. My reasoning was simple. By all accounts, there was a
lot
of marshland on Naxos. Large masses of dry land were comparatively rare, and oceanic expanses of open water were similarly atypical. Most of the planet’s water was spread fairly evenly over the surface. Its marshes were no doubt very various—maybe we’d have to invent fifty new near-synonyms for the word “swamp” even to begin the job of appreciating their subtle variations—but insofar as anything on Naxos was normal, it was some kind of marsh.
Ariadne
’s ground-crew, therefore, had landed somewhere rather exceptional; the fact that they hadn’t found very much in the way of animal life wasn’t entirely surprising. Charles Darwin didn’t find much on his journey into the interior of Patagonia. The real richness of Naxos’ life-system would only be revealed by a close inspection of the marshland.

By comparison with Earth, it seemed, Naxos was a real billiard ball of a planet. No great tectonic plates crunching together to raise mountains and produce earthquakes. No vast ranges of volcanic cones. No deep trenches beneath the ocean where the continental masses were literally tearing themselves apart in their ceaseless drift-and-jostle. A placid world, whose waters were hardly stirred by the gentle tidal pull of the little moon. Life here had had it easy by comparison with life on Earth.

What the implications of that fact were, in evolutionary terms, I wasn’t entirely certain. The fact that the
Ariadne
’s resources had so far managed to turn up no evidence of any vertebrate creature more “advanced” than a frog didn’t for one moment convince me that there was no such creature. There was a temptation to embrace the line of argument that because Naxos was a more peaceful world than Earth, natural selection would not have been as powerful an agent of change, and that one would therefore expect its life-system to retain many supposedly primitive features. That could easily give one an excuse for believing that life on Naxos had only just learned to operate on land as well as on water, and that boring, unspecialized amphibians were the order of the day. I didn’t like that line of argument much, though, despite its superficial plausibility.

There were two reasons I didn’t like it. The first was to do with the assumption that the pace of evolution on Earth had been quickened by the tendency of the surface to undergo constant and sometimes catastrophic change. Evolution may well be the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, but that doesn’t mean that the harder creatures have to struggle against the vicissitudes of nature the more progress they’ll make. Environmental catastrophes aren’t necessarily inclined toward eugenics—they’re too indiscriminate. One could argue that rapid environmental change is bad for evolutionary progress because it causes too many species to become extinct, resulting in frequent massive gene-loss from the system. We tend to assume that what happened on Earth is the “natural progression,” especially now we know that what happened on Calicos was virtually a carbon copy. But what about all the other Earthlike worlds, where the hostility of the environment is such that life can only eke out the most miserable of existences, as organic glop, or primeval soup, or whatever you care to call it?

It’s arguable that the really
progressive
changes in evolution—toward greater organization and complexity, toward greater individual adaptability and all the range of behavioral abilities up to and including intelligence—come not from the testing of a hostile environment but from intraspecific competition and selection. My theory, at least, was that the really vital changes in Earth’s evolutionary past happened not as a result of catastrophes and waves of extinction, but during the geologically quiet times, when species had things relatively easy, when mutations weren’t penalized so heavily and gene pools could diversify—when there was time, in fact, for nature to conduct her experiments.

On
that
logic, there was no need to expect Naxos to be “primitive” relative to Earth. There was reason enough, no doubt, to expect it to be different, but to jump to the conclusion that it was on the same evolutionary path but merely happened to have got stuck at the amphibian “stage” seemed to me to be unjustified. Maybe all life on Naxos—all complex animal life, anyhow—
was
amphibious...but if so, I reasoned, it needn’t be because there was nothing there more complex than a frog. It might, instead, be because there was so much water on Naxos, so abundantly distributed, that there was no great advantage in not being amphibious.

The second reason that I didn’t like the evolutionary-arrest hypothesis was the fact that (as far as I could interpret the data) it didn’t seem to hold for the plants.
They
weren’t stuck in a rut to the extent that they provided a convincing analogue of the vegetation of the Devonian. There were lots of flowering plants, many kinds of trees, and—most significant—lots of different kinds of grass. The insects, too, were very various. Maybe there were no reptiles, which had learned to lay hard-shelled eggs that could survive desiccation. Maybe there were no birds. But to me, that only implied that the complexity of vertebrate life must be expressed some other way. On Earth, the amphibians had been “superseded”; on Naxos they had held their own—maybe by doing things that the amphibians of Earth never had a chance to do.

I nursed these ideas while I looked most carefully at the woefully inadequate information the
Ariadne
’s eager resources had managed to harvest. I didn’t voice them too loudly to my companions, though; there were reasons for being discreet. (Reasons, I hasten to add, which had nothing to do with Jason Harmall’s passion for secrecy, but with more mundane concerns like the inability to defend my prejudices against skeptical criticism, and the fact that any scientist always wants to have a little theory up his sleeve, in case it helps him to be first to the answer to a puzzle. Intraspecific competition isn’t just a feature of gene pools.)

After a couple of hours of studying the photographs and related data I began to feel that the law of diminishing returns was definitely taking its toll, and that there wasn’t much more to be learned without actually going into the field. Caution, though, demanded that I soldier on, in case vital clues to the puzzle concerning the deaths of
Ariadne
’s advance guard might somehow turn up. Zeno and Angelina Hesse likewise accepted their burden with good grace. Not so Vesenkov, however, who—as a pathologist—had little or no interest in ecological analysis.

“Time wastes,” he pronounced, in his inimitable style. “Plain bloody stupid. Answer in corpses. Rotting away.”

He repeated this opinion to Captain d’Orsay, who promised that we would all be under way just as soon as the equipment transferred from the
Earth Spirit
was properly stowed in the capsules we’d be riding down to the surface.

“It’s not an easy job,” she pointed out. “Falling through atmosphere isn’t nearly as smooth as gliding through hyperspace. Even with the best parachutes there’s quite a bump when you hit the ground.”

“Should use shuttle,” growled the Russian.

“Wasteful,” she said. “One shuttle would carry ten times as much weight as the four capsules you’ll be riding down in. We want the shuttle to drop a whole crew, if there is no danger...if you can give us a way to stop what happened once happening again.”

“You’d have to use the shuttle anyway, to lift us off,” I pointed out.

“If you have proved that there is no danger,” replied the captain, “the shuttle which takes down our second crew can bring you back. If you prove that the danger is too great—perhaps there will be no need to bring you back at all.”

I could see the economics of the argument, but I didn’t have to like it. The simple fact was that using a shuttle which could set us down and then take off again was very much more energy-expensive than dropping us in heat-shielded capsules, but I would have thought that the special circumstances would have permitted a little less parsimony. In the least likely eventuality, we might prove the world uninhabitable and still need lifting off...and there was also a chance that our survival might depend on the ability to make a quick getaway.

“I heard that Juhasz wanted to send a whole crew down with us,” I observed.

“Even had we done so,” she replied evenly, “they would have gone down the same way that the first crew went down. We would not have used the shuttle.”

To make allowances for her, I guess that spending ten generations and more cooped up in a big tin can with a closed ecology would make one rather oversensitive to questions of energy economics.

“Are you sure that you can put the capsules down on the right spot?” I asked.

She dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “The computers will calculate the trajectories, and will operate the controls by radio. There will be no problems.”

I went back to looking at pictures. Later, we all progressed to endless tables which had been collated out of the biochemical data transmitted back by the research team prior to their demise. Again, there wasn’t nearly enough of it to tell us what we needed to know. There may have been clues there, but the possibility of picking them up was minimal. Knowing the composition of alien biomolecules isn’t much good unless you also know about their activity and functions.

“Well,” I said to Zeno, at the end of it all, “any ideas?”

“Something’s missing,” he said. “The dry-land ecosystem doesn’t make sense. The ground vegetation is waist-high—a tremendous biomass. Nothing eats it except insects. If there are enough insects to crowd out herbivores, what eats the insects? In the marshes, anything might be lurking under the water—but on the land, where do they hide?”

“Perhaps they’re just discreet,” I said.

He shook his horny head. “There must be more to it than that.”

I wasn’t so sure. Herbivores don’t have to be the size of cows. They might still be under the surface—if one reckoned the level to which the grasses grew as the “surface”. They might be any size from field mice to pigs. I pointed this out.

“Something,” he insisted, “is missing. Not from the world, but from this picture of it. There is something the men and the robots alike have failed to see.”

“Maybe they’re too well camouflaged,” I suggested.

“Maybe,” he said. I could tell that he wasn’t convinced.

We could have continued the discussion for a long time, no doubt, without getting anywhere, but as it happened, we didn’t get the chance. We were invited—perhaps summoned would be a better word—to have dinner with Captain Juhasz himself, and we dispersed in order to make ready for the occasion. I took a shower and changed my skinsuit; no doubt if there’d been any way to dress formally for dinner I’d have found it, but shipboard life isn’t geared to such intricacies of habit.

He received us in what I supposed to be his cabin.

The bunk was partitioned off, though, and the space we occupied was mostly occupied by a conference table whose screens had been covered with plastic sheets in order to make it resemble a dining table. The chairs had harnesses by which we could secure ourselves but the food was in the same old tubes.

I was faintly surprised to find that neither Harmall nor Alanberg was included in the invitation. Apparently, Juhasz had already spoken to them at great enough length. There were only six at table—the five of us who were scheduled to make the drop and the great man himself.

All through the meal, I was uncomfortable. Juhasz didn’t say much while we were actually eating, but he kept looking at us, one by one, and I got the impression that he wasn’t much liking what he saw. Indeed, it seemed almost as if he would rather that we didn’t exist. I couldn’t quite figure that, until he finally opened up and started talking. Then I realized that it hadn’t quite been the way Harmall implied, when he had first briefed us on Sule. Juhasz hadn’t
decided
to wait for help from Earth at all.

“You may find this difficult to believe,” he said, “but we did not expect the
Earth Spirit
to come to us in response to our lighting of the Hyper-Spatial Beacon. We looked upon the lighting of the beacon more as a ritual—hoisting the flag to signal our success. We expected messages of congratulation, perhaps, or silence. It may seem foolish, but we did not expect that we would have made a unique discovery. Indeed, we had anticipated our small and long-delayed triumph as a rather ordinary event. The actual situation regarding the exploration of the galaxy comes as a surprise. Of course, when Captain Alanberg learned of our problem, he was quick to claim that it could be solved more easily with Earth’s resources than our own. There seemed to be no way that we could decline his offer of help...but you may understand why I was—and am—a little reluctant to accept it.”