Eden (3 page)

Approximately eighteen hours had passed since the crash, and the men were exhausted. The Doctor felt that they should have at least a few hours' sleep. But first they needed to improvise beds of some sort, since the bunks in their sleeping quarters, bolted to the floor, were now vertical. It would have taken too much effort to detach them, so the men lugged air mattresses to the library (now almost half empty) and lay down side by side.

But, except for the Chemist and the Engineer, no one could sleep. So the Doctor got up again, took his flashlight, and went in search of sleeping pills. For almost an hour he cleared a path to the first-aid room through a hallway filled with broken equipment and instruments that had tumbled from the wall compartments. At last—his watch showed four in the morning, ship time—the pills were dispensed, the light was extinguished, and fitful breathing soon filled the dark room.

They awoke unexpectedly quickly—all except the Cyberneticist, who had taken too large a dose and was like one drunk. The Engineer complained of a sharp pain in the back of his neck. The Doctor discovered a swelling there: the Engineer had probably got a sprain when they were grappling with the hatch wheels.

Spirits were low. Even the Doctor was not talkative. The food supplies in the air lock were inaccessible now, buried beneath a heap of dirt, so once again the Physicist and the Chemist trudged off to the storeroom for cans of food. It was nine when work resumed on the tunnel.

They went at a snail's pace. There was little room to move about in the oval opening. The men in front broke the packed earth with their hoes, and those behind them removed it to the corridor. Then it was decided to pile the earth in the navigation room, which was closer and contained nothing that might be needed in the immediate future.

Four hours later, the soil in the cabin was knee-high but the tunnel was only six feet long. Though the marl, compact, was not that hard, the poles and hoe blades kept getting stuck in it, and the iron handles bent as the men labored frantically. The steel hoe that the Captain used worked the best. The Engineer, afraid that the ceiling might cave in on them, took care that it was always well propped. By nightfall, when, smeared with clay, they sat down to supper, the tunnel, which led up from the hatch at a steep, almost seventy-degree angle, extended no more than twenty feet.

The Engineer looked into the shaft that led to the lower level, where the loading-bay hatch, steel-plated, lay a hundred feet astern of the main hatch, but all he could see was black water. The level was higher than on the previous day; one of the tanks must still be leaking. The water was contaminated, radioactive. He verified this with his small Geiger counter, closed the shaft, and returned to his comrades without mentioning his discovery.

"If all goes well, we'll be out tomorrow. If not, it'll take us two days," the Cyberneticist declared, drinking his third mug of coffee from the thermos. They were all drinking coffee.

"How do you know?" the Engineer asked with surprise.

"Just a feeling."

"He has the intuition his robots lack," said the Doctor, laughing. As the day progressed, the Doctor was in increasingly good humor. When relieved of the digging, he would run back to the ship's quarters, scavenging. He added two magneto lanterns, a portable shaver, vitamin-enriched chocolate, and a stack of towels to their supplies. The men were filthy, their suits were covered with stains. No one had shaved, of course, given the lack of electricity.

The whole of the following day was spent digging the tunnel. The navigation room was now so full, it became difficult to dump the soil through the door. Next they used the library. The Doctor had misgivings here, but the Chemist, with whom he was carrying the improvised handbarrow, tipped a heap of marl onto the books without hesitation.

The tunnel opened up unexpectedly. The soil had been getting drier and less compact for a while now, and though the Physicist had noted this, the others did not agree: the soil they carried into the ship seemed to them no different. The Engineer and the Captain, beginning their shift, had just taken up the tools still warm from previous hands, and were hacking at the irregular wall, when a section suddenly disappeared and air poured in through the opening. They could feel the draft: the pressure of the atmosphere outside was a little higher than in the tunnel or the rocket. The hoes and steel poles worked feverishly. No one any longer carried away the soil. The rest of the crew, unable to help those in front because there was no room, formed a tight group at the rear. After a few final blows, the Engineer was about to crawl outside, but the Captain stopped him. The Captain wanted to widen the exit first. He also gave orders for the last chunks of soil to be carried into the ship, so that nothing would obstruct the tunnel. Another ten or twenty minutes passed, therefore, before the six men crawled out onto the planet's surface.

It was dusk. The tunnel opened near the base of a gently sloping knoll about forty feet high. Beyond, a vast plain stretched to the horizon, over which the first stars twinkled. There were vague, slender treelike forms in the distance, but the light of the setting sun was now so dim that everything merged into a uniform gray. The men stood silently. To their left, the huge hull of the ship jutted at an angle into the air. One hundred twenty of its two hundred feet, the Engineer estimated, were embedded in the knoll. But no one was interested any more in the silhouette of the tube ending in useless vanes and exhaust cones. The men inhaled the cool air, with its faint, unfamiliar odor that no one could give a name to, and a strong feeling of helplessness came over them. The hoes and pipes dropped from their hands. They stood gazing at the plain, its horizons in darkness, and at the stars shining overhead.

"The Pole Star?" the Chemist asked in a hushed voice, pointing to a low star flickering in the east.

"It wouldn't be visible from here. We're now … yes, we're directly under the Galactic South Pole. The Southern Cross ought to be over there somewhere…"

They craned their necks. The black sky was bright with constellations. The men pointed them out to one another, naming them. This raised their spirits for a while. The stars were the only things familiar on the empty plain.

"It's getting colder, like the desert," said the Captain.

"We'll accomplish nothing today. We'd better go back inside."

"What, back in that grave?" the Cyberneticist exclaimed, indignant.

"Without that grave we'd perish in two days here," the Captain said. "Don't be childish." He turned around, walked steadily to the opening, which was barely visible from several feet higher on the slope, lowered his legs, and pulled himself inside. For a moment his head was still visible; then it disappeared. The others looked at one another.

"Come on," muttered the Physicist. They followed him reluctantly.

As they began crawling into the narrow opening, the Engineer said to the Cyberneticist, who was last in line, "Did you notice the smell in the air?"

"Yes. Strange, pungent… Do you know its composition?"

"Like Earth's, with something added, I forget what. Nothing harmful. The data are in a small green volume on the second shelf in the—" Then he remembered that he himself had filled the library with soil. "Damn," he said, and squeezed himself through the hole.

The Cyberneticist, now alone, suddenly felt uneasy. It wasn't fear but an overwhelming sense of being lost, of the strangeness of the landscape. And, too, there was something humiliating, he thought, about returning to the ground like worms. He ducked his head and crawled into the tunnel behind the Engineer.

The following day, some of the men wanted to carry their rations to the surface and have breakfast there, but the Captain was against this. It would cause, he maintained, unnecessary trouble. So they ate by the light of two lanterns, in the air lock, and drank coffee that had grown cold. Out of the blue, the Cyberneticist said, "Wait a minute. How did we have good air the whole time?"

The Captain smiled. There was gray stubble on his hollow cheeks.

"The oxygen cylinders are intact. But purification is a problem: only one of the automatic filters is functioning—the emergency one, on batteries. The electricals, of course, are worthless. In six or seven days we would have begun to suffocate."

"You knew that?" the Cyberneticist asked slowly. The Captain said nothing.

"Now what do we do?" asked the Physicist.

They washed their utensils in a bucket of water, and the Doctor dried them with one of his towels.

"The atmosphere has oxygen," said the Doctor, tossing his aluminum plate on top of the others. "That means there's life here. What information do we have?"

"Next to nothing. The space probe took a sample of the atmosphere, that's all."

"You mean it didn't land?"

"It didn't land."

"That's loads of information," said the Cyberneticist. He was trying to clean his face, using alcohol from a small bottle and a piece of cotton. With very little water fit for use, they had not washed for two days. The Physicist examined his face in the polished surface of an air-conditioning unit.

"It's something," the Captain replied softly. "Had the composition of the air been different—without oxygen—my mistake would have killed all of you."

"What?" The Cyberneticist almost dropped his cup.

"And myself as well. We wouldn't have had one chance in a billion. Now we have."

There was silence.

"Does the presence of oxygen mean plants and animals?" asked the Engineer.

"Not necessarily," said the Chemist. "On the Alpha planets of Canis Minor there is oxygen but no plants or animals."

"What is there, then?"

"Photoids."

"Luminescent bacteria?"

"No, they're not bacteria."

"It's not important," the Doctor said. He put the utensils and cans of food away. "We have other worries now. We can't activate the defenses—am I right?"

"We can't even get to them," the Cyberneticist acknowledged. "All the robots came loose from their moorings. We'd need the two-ton hoist to clear away all the scrap, and it's lying at the very bottom."

"But what do we do for weapons?" asked the Doctor.

"There are the jectors," said the Cyberneticist.

"And what are you going to charge them with?"

"There's no current in the control room? We had current before!"

"There must have been a short circuit in the accumulator," said the Engineer.

"Why aren't the jectors already charged?"

"Orders. We can't carry them charged," the Engineer muttered.

"Orders! Damn—"

"Cut it out!"

Hearing the Captain's voice, the Cyberneticist shrugged in exasperation. The Doctor walked out. The Engineer had taken a light nylon knapsack from his cabin, and was stuffing K rations into the pockets when the Doctor reappeared, holding a short oxidized cylinder that ended in a valve.

"And what is that?" the Engineer asked with interest.

"A weapon."

"What does it shoot?"

"Sleeping gas."

The Engineer burst out laughing.

"What makes you think that your gas can put to sleep anything living on this planet?"

"If you were attacked, you could always anesthetize yourself," said the Chemist. Everyone laughed, including the Doctor.

"This should knock out any oxygen-breathing creature," he said. "And if there's an attack—watch!"

He pulled a trigger at the base of the cylinder. A needle-thin stream of vapor shot into the darkness of the corridor.

"Well, for lack of anything better…" said the Engineer doubtfully.

"Shall we go?" asked the Doctor, slipping the cylinder into one of the pockets of his suit.

"Let's go."

The sun was high overhead—small and distant, yet hotter than the Earth's. But what struck them most was that the sun was not completely circular. They observed it through the cracks of their fingers and through the semitransparent red paper used for wrapping the individual antiradiation packs.

"It's flattened because of the velocity of its revolution around its axis, is that right?" the Chemist asked the Captain.

"Yes. The flattening was more noticeable during the flight. You don't remember?"

"But, you see, I wasn't paying attention then…"

They turned away from the sun and looked at their ship. The white cylindrical hull jutted obliquely from the low hill in which it was embedded, resembling a gigantic cannon. Its surface—milky white in shadow and silvery in sunlight—appeared undamaged. The Engineer approached the spot where the ship had entered the ground, stepped over the rim of upthrown soil that surrounded the hull like a collar, and ran his hand along the plating.

"Not bad material, this ceramite," he said, not turning around. "If I could just have a look at the funnels…" He looked wistfully up at the jets suspended above the plain.

"We'll do that later," said the Physicist. "But now let's reconnoiter."

The Captain had reached the top of the elevation. The others hurried after him. Smooth and buff-colored, the sun-drenched plain stretched unvaryingly in all directions. The slender silhouettes that they had observed the day before rose in the distance, but in the bright sunlight it was clear that these were not trees. The sky, overhead as blue as Earth's, took on a distinctly greenish tinge at the horizon. To the north, faint cirrus clouds moved slowly. The Captain was checking directions on the small compass strapped to his wrist. The Doctor bent over and began poking at the soil with his foot.

"Why isn't anything growing here?" he asked, amazed.

They were all struck by that. The plain was bare as far as the eye could see.

"It seems to be a region subject to increasingly steppe-like conditions," said the Chemist uncertainly. "Farther on, there to the west—see those patches?—it gets yellower. That must be desert. And the wind blows the sand here. Because this knoll is clay."

"That we certainly know," said the Doctor.

"We need a plan of some sort for our expedition," the Captain began. "The supplies we're taking with us will last two days."