Eden

VIII

At noon five half-naked men with tanned faces and necks were lying near the ship. Around them were utensils, pieces of equipment, and a square of canvas covered with suits, boots, and towels. The smell of freshly brewed coffee came from an open thermos. Shadows of clouds moved silently across the plain. Had it not been for the creature sitting motionless several feet farther beneath the hull, the scene might have resembled a picnic on Earth.

“Where’s the Engineer?” asked the Physicist. He propped himself up lazily on his elbows.

“Writing his book.”

“You mean, on how to repair one’s spaceship?”

“Yes, it should make for interesting reading. A thick volume!”

The Physicist looked at the speaker. “You’re in a good mood. That’s important. And your wound is almost healed. I don’t think the cut would have closed so fast on Earth.”

The Captain touched the scab on his forehead and raised his brows. “That’s possible. The ship was sterile, and the bacteria here are harmless to us. And there don’t seem to be any insects. I haven’t seen any, have you?”

“The Doctor’s white butterflies,” the Physicist said quietly, reluctant to talk in the heat.

“Well, that’s only a hypothesis.”

“And what isn’t a hypothesis here?” asked the Doctor.

“Our presence,” the Chemist said, turning over on his back. “You know, I wouldn’t mind a change of scenery…”

“Nor would I,” agreed the Doctor.

“Did you notice how red the doubler’s skin became after only a few minutes in the sun?” the Captain said.

The Doctor nodded. “Yes. That means either that he has never been in the sun before, or that normally he wears some sort of clothing. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“I don’t know what…”

“Things aren’t too bad,” said the Cyberneticist, looking up from a sheet of paper covered with writing. “Henry tells me he can get the diodes from Defender. If everything checks out tomorrow, by evening we’ll have the first robot working. I’ll put it in charge of the rest, and if it can patch together three units, our troubles are over. We’ll get the hoists going, the shovel, and in a week the ship will be up, and…”

“And what?” asked the Chemist. “We climb in and take off?”

The Doctor grinned. “Space travel is the purest expression of man’s curiosity,” he said. “Did you hear? The Chemist doesn’t want to leave now!”

“No, but seriously, Doctor, what about the doubler? You’ve been with him all day!”

“That’s true.”

“Well? Don’t get mysterious! We’ve had enough mystery!”

“I wish I had something to be mysterious about! He’s behaving… like a child. A retarded child.

He recognizes me. When I call him, he comes. When I push him away, he sits.”

“You took him to the engine room. How did he react?”

“Like a baby. It didn’t interest him at all. When I went behind the generator and he couldn’t see me, he began to sweat with fear. If it is sweat, and if the sweat does signify fear…”

“Can he speak? I could hear him gurgling to you.”

“He doesn’t produce articulate sounds. I made tape recordings and analyzed the frequencies. Yet he can hear speech… He’s timid, fearful, as docile as a cow, but the whole community seems to be like that…”

“Maybe he’s young; maybe their young are large.”

“He’s not young. You can tell by the skin, its wrinkles and folds. And the soles of his feet are callused, hard, hornlike. In any case, he isn’t a child in our sense of the word. On our return that night, he noticed certain things before we did, and reacted strangely, for example, to that mirage in the air, as I told you. He was afraid. Afraid, also, of that settlement. Otherwise why would he have fled it?”

“But they have built factories, the disks — they must be intelligent,” said the Physicist.

“This one isn’t.”

“Wait,” said the Chemist, sitting up and brushing the sand off his elbows. “Suppose he’s… handicapped, or…”

“You’re suggesting that was an insane asylum back there?” asked the Doctor. “Or an isolated place where they keep their sick?”

“And perform experiments on them,” suggested the Chemist.

“What you saw you call experiments?” asked the Captain, who had been silent until now.

“I’m not judging it morally. How can I? We understand nothing, really,” the Chemist replied. “The Doctor found a tube in one of them, a tube not unlike the one that was in the body we dissected…”

“Aha. In other words, the doubler that got into the ship at night also came from there, escaped from there?”

“Why not? Is it impossible?”

“And the skeletons?” said the Physicist, obviously not convinced by the Chemist’s argument.

“Well, I don’t know, maybe they’re exhibits. Or perhaps they show them as… as a kind of shock treatment.”

“Sure, and they have their own Freud, too,” said the Doctor. “No, you’d better drop your asylum theory, my friend. And don’t tell us that those skeletons are some sort of house of horrors in an amusement park. It’s an enormous installation, and a lot of technology was needed to get the skeletons into those glass cells. Could it be a factory? But manufacturing what?”

“The fact that you can’t get information out of this doubler doesn’t prove anything,” the Physicist said. “You might just as well try to learn about Earth’s civilization from a janitor at my university.”

Everyone laughed. Suddenly the laughter stopped. The doubler was standing over them, waving his little knotted fingers in the air, and his small flat face was dangling, twitching.

“What’s he doing?!” exclaimed the Chemist.

“Laughing,” said the Captain.

And, indeed, the torso appeared to be hiccuping in mirth, and the big clumsy feet were stamping.

But, seeing five pairs of human eyes fixed on him, the creature froze, then drew itself in, retracting the small hands and head, which peered out once more from its slit of muscle. The creature hobbled back to its place and sank to the ground with a soft wheeze.

“If that was laughter,” whispered the Physicist.

“Laughter doesn’t prove anything, either. Apes laugh.”

“Wait,” said the Captain. His eyes sparkled in his lean, sunburned face. “Suppose they have a much wider genetic range of ability than we do. That there exist classes — castes — of creative workers and builders, and on the other hand a great number of individuals who are basically fit for no work — for nothing at all. And that these useless ones…”

“Are killed. Or experimented on. Or eaten. Don’t be afraid, say whatever comes to mind,” the Doctor replied. “No one will laugh at you, because anything is possible. Unfortunately not everything that is possible makes sense to us.”

“And what about the skeletons?” the Chemist asked.

“They serve as teaching aids after lunch,” the Cyberneticist said with a grimace.

“If I were to tell you all the theories that have occurred to me since yesterday,” said the Doctor.

“it would make a book five times larger than the one Henry is writing, though certainly not so edifying. As a boy I knew an old astronaut. The man had seen more planets than he had hairs on his head, and he was still far from bald… He wanted to describe to me the landscape of a particular moon — I don’t remember which. ‘There are these… large… you know,’ he said, spreading his arms. ‘And they have these… It’s sort of like… But the sky is different… although…’ Finally he laughed and gave up. You can’t tell someone who has never been in space what it’s like to hang in the void with the stars at your feet. And we’re only talking about differences in physical environments! Here we have a civilization that is at least five thousand years old. At least! And we’re trying to understand it after a few days!”

“But try we must, because if we fail, the price we have to pay may be… too high,” said the Captain. After a pause, he added, “What, then, do you think we should do?”

“What we’ve been doing up to now,” said the Doctor, “though I think our chances of success are about one in five thousand, or however long Eden’s civilization has been around…”

The Engineer emerged from the tunnel and, seeing his comrades lying in the shade as though they were on the beach, got out of his suit and joined them. The Chemist greeted him with a nod.

“How is it going?” asked the Captain.

“Well, I’m three-quarters done… But I haven’t been working on it the whole time, because I was thinking about that first factory, the one to the north, which we theorized was abandoned and out of control… What’s funny? Why are you laughing?”

“I’ll tell you something,” said the Doctor, who was the only one to remain serious. “When the ship is ready to take off, there will be a mutiny. No one will want to leave until we find out… Because if, even now, instead of sweating over your nuts and bolts…”

“Ah, you’re theorizing, too?” said the Engineer. “And what have you come up with?”

“Nothing. And you?”

“Also nothing, but… I was trying to find common elements, a more general pattern to what we encountered there, and it struck me that at the factory — the automated factory — even though it worked in cycles, seemingly repeating the process, its ‘finished products’ varied… Remember?”

There was a murmur of assent.

“And yesterday the Doctor noted that the doublers varied — that some had no eyes, some no nose, or the number of fingers was different, or the color of the skin. Everything here differs within certain limits, and the variation seems to be the result of flaws in the process, both the biological and the technological…”

“Now, that’s interesting!” said the Physicist, who had been listening with increasing attention.

“Yes, you have something there. Go on,” the Doctor said, turning to the Engineer, who was shaking his head doubtfully.

“No, really, it’s a silly idea. When a man sits and thinks on his own, all sorts of things…”

“Tell us the idea!” the Chemist shouted, almost indignant.

“Now that you’ve started,” said the Cyberneticist.

“Well, I thought: In the factory we were looking at a circular process of production and destruction, and then yesterday you discovered something that resembled a factory. If it was a factory, it had to produce something.”

“But there was nothing there,” said the Chemist, “except for the skeletons. Of course we didn’t look everywhere…” he added hesitantly.

“And what if that factory produces… doublers?” the Engineer asked softly. In the general silence, he went on: “The system is analogous: mass production, an assembly line, except that the variation is caused not so much by a lack of supervision as by the very nature of the process, because of its complexity. The skeletons did vary.”

“And you think… they kill the ones that don’t ‘pass inspection’?” the Chemist asked in a changed voice.

“Not at all! My thought was that those bodies you found… never lived at all! That the system creates organisms equipped with all the muscles and every internal organ, but whose deviation from the norm is so great that they are unable to function… so they are never animated, they are removed from the production line…”

“And that ditch with the bodies, what was that? More ‘defective merchandise’?” asked the Cyberneticist.

“I don’t know, but the possibility can’t be ruled out…”

“No, it can’t,” said the Doctor, looking toward the bluish haze on the horizon. “In what you’re saying… that broken tube…”

“Maybe they introduced nutrients through it during the synthesis.”

“That would also explain why the doubler you brought back appears to be retarded,” the Cyberneticist observed. “If he was produced full-grown, he has no experience…”

“No,” the Chemist disagreed. “That doubler of ours does know things. He was afraid to return to his stone asylum — for which he might have good reason — and he was afraid, too, of that strip of mirror.

And he knew something about the curious border we crossed, with the mirage…”

“I don’t know. The picture we get, from Henry’s hypothesis, doesn’t make sense,” said the Captain, contemplating the sand at his feet. “The first factory produces parts that aren’t used. And the second factory living beings? Why? And are you suggesting that they, too, are thrown back into the hopper?”

“What an awful thought!” said the Cyberneticist with a shudder.

“But if living beings are put back into the hopper,” said the Chemist, “then disposal of individuals too defective for animation would be unnecessary. Besides, we saw no evidence of such recycling…”

In the ensuing silence, the Doctor got up and swept his eyes over the group.

“We’ve taken the Engineer’s idea,” he said, “and now we’re all trying to fit the facts to it, to his.

’biological factory’ hypothesis. Which proves only one thing, that we are very noble-minded and very naïve…”

As they looked at him with surprise, he continued: “A moment ago you were attempting to imagine the most horrible possibility — and you came up with a picture a child might have drawn: a factory producing people in order to grind them up again… The reality, my friends, may be much worse.”

“Really!” the Cyberneticist sputtered.

“Wait, let him speak,” the Engineer said.

“The more I think about what happened in that settlement, the more I am convinced that we were seeing something totally different from what we thought we were seeing.”

“What, then, according to you, happened?” asked the Physicist.

“What happened I don’t know, but I know what didn’t happen.”

“Talk clearly! No riddles!”

“After wandering through that stone labyrinth, we were suddenly charged by a crowd that then dispersed and fled. Having seen the lights go out as we approached the settlement, we concluded that the inhabitants were hiding from us, and that we had been trampled by a mob rushing for cover — or something like that. Now, in my mind I’ve gone over the whole sequence of events as thoroughly as I can, and I’ll tell you this: one resists the truth as one fights madness.”

“Get to the point!”

“The point is this. We have the following situation. Strangers from space land on a planet inhabited by intelligent beings. In what possible ways do the inhabitants react?”

Nobody replied, so the Doctor went on: “Even if the beings of this planet were created in test tubes or made in some stranger manner, I see only three possible types of behavior: to attempt to communicate with the strangers, to attack them, or to flee. It turns out, however, that a fourth type is possible — total indifference!”

“You told us that they nearly broke your ribs. That’s indifference?!” the Cyberneticist sneered.

But the Chemist nodded; there was a light in his eyes.

The Doctor replied: “If you were to find yourself in the path of a herd of cattle running from a fire, you might fare worse than we did. But that wouldn’t mean that the herd had noticed you. I tell you, the crowd of doublers didn’t see us at all. They took no interest in us. There was fear, yes, but not of us. We were merely in the way.”

Then the Chemist spoke. “Yes,” he said slowly. “All this time, it’s been bothering me, like reading a text where the sentences are out of order. Now it falls into place. Yes, he’s right. They didn’t see me.

Except for the closest ones, but they were the only ones who weren’t in panic — almost as if seeing me had a sobering effect on them. While they were looking at me, they were simply inhabitants of a planet amazed to see an alien creature. They had no wish to harm me. In fact, if I recall correctly, they even helped me extricate myself from the herd…”

“And what if someone set that herd on you, to drive you into the open?” asked the Engineer.

The Chemist shook his head. “There was no one there like that, no flying disks, no guards, no organization — there was chaos, confusion. Yes,” he added, “it’s odd that I see that only now! That those who noticed me appeared to regain their senses, while all the others were berserk with fear!”

“But in that case,” said the Captain, “why were the lights extinguished at precisely the moment of our arrival?”

“What puzzles me,” said the Doctor, “is the panic itself.”

“Yes, what could have caused it?”

“Perhaps a decline in the planet’s civilization,” suggested the Cyberneticist after a moment’s silence. “A period of regression, disintegration, or a kind of cancer of society.”

“Unconvincing,” said the Captain. “On our Earth, which is an average planet, there have been periods of regression, and many civilizations have risen and fallen, but, taking our history as a whole, you get a picture of ever-increasing complexity, and of life’s growing value. We call this ‘progress.’ Progress is a normal phenomenon. Yet, by the law of large numbers, there will be statistical deviations from the norm, in both positive and negative directions. We may have landed on a world at the far negative end of that distributional curve…”

“Mathematical mysticism,” muttered the Engineer.

“But that factory exists,” the Physicist said.

“The first factory, yes. The existence of the second is a hypothesis only.”

“In other words, we need another expedition,” said the Chemist.

The Engineer looked around. The sun was sinking in the west; the shadows on the sand were growing longer. A light wind blew.

“Today…?” he asked, looking at the Captain.

“Today we should go for water — nothing more.” The Captain stood up. “An interesting discussion,” he said, though obviously thinking about something else. He picked up his suit.

“This evening,” he continued, “we’ll drive to the stream, for water. We shouldn’t be diverted from that by anything short of a direct threat.” He turned to the men sitting on the sand, considered them for a while, then said, “I don’t like this.”

“What don’t you like?”

“Their leaving us in peace after that visit two days ago. No community acts like that when an alien spaceship drops out of the sky.”

“Such indifference would support what I said,” said the Cyberneticist.

“About a ‘cancer’ affecting Eden? Well, from our point of view that wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen. Except…”

“Except what?”

“Nothing. Listen, let’s have a look at Defender. Let’s dig it out. Its diodes ought to be intact.”