Eden (30 page)

Other cables, winding across the sand, brought current to the ducts inside the tunnel. From its mouth, visible directly below the place where the hull entered the slope, came smoke. Yellow-gray clouds marched slowly across the still-wet plain. The ship sank, inch by inch; whenever it began to fall more rapidly, the Engineer flicked a switch at hand, valves opened, and liquid nitrogen coursed into the tunnel ducts. There was a rumbling, and dirty-white clouds were belched out.

Suddenly the hull shuddered and, before the Engineer could open the valves, the ship, more than three hundred feet long, gave a groan, and the stern fell twelve feet. At the same time the nose of the ship burst free of the ground, throwing up sand and marl. The ceramite colossus came to rest. The cables and ducts lay beneath it; one of them, torn open, spewed a roaring geyser of condensed air.

"We did it! We did it!" yelled the Engineer. Then he saw, in front of him, the Doctor. The Doctor was saying something, but he couldn't understand it.

"It looks as if we're going … home," said the Doctor. "He'll live."

"What? What?"

"He's pulled through."

Then the Engineer understood. He looked again to reassure himself that the ship was free. "Is he going with us?" he asked, moving away, anxious to examine the hull for damage.

"No," the Doctor answered, following. But then, after several steps, he stopped.

It was cooler, because of the fountain of condensed gas that continued to pour out of the broken pipe. Small figures climbed up on the hull, one disappeared, and after a few minutes the seething column fell; for a moment it still spouted foam that froze the air; then it, too, stopped, and everything became strangely quiet. The Doctor looked around, as though wondering how he had got there, and slowly walked on.

The ship stood upright, white, whiter than the clouds, among which its sharp, distant peak already appeared to be moving. There had been three days of hard work. The loading was completed. The huge parabolic ramp built from the pieces of the wall that had been meant to imprison them lay abandoned on the hillside. Two hundred and forty feet above the ground, four men stood in the open hatchway, looking down. On the flat, dun-yellow surface they could see two tiny figures, one slightly lighter in color than the other. The men watched. The doublers, standing no more than 150 feet from the slightly flared exhaust funnels, did not move.

"Why don't they leave?" the Physicist asked, impatient. "We can't take off."

"They won't leave," said the Doctor.

"What is that supposed to mean? He doesn't want us to go?"

The Doctor said nothing.

The sun was high in the sky. Banks of clouds were drifting in out of the west. From the open hatchway, as though from the window of a soaring spire, they could see the hills in the south, the blue summits mingled with the clouds, and the great western desert that extended for hundreds of miles in strips of sunlit dunes, and the violet mantle of forest on the eastern plateau. Below them, the circle of the wall resembled a lacy skeleton. The ship's shadow moved across it like the style of a giant sundial, and now the shadow approached the two small figures.

There was thunder in the east, followed by a long-drawn-out whistle, and flame flashed in the black sphere of the explosion.

"Something new," said the Engineer.

Another clap of thunder. An unseen projectile howled nearer; an unearthly whistling, it seemed to make for the ship. The ground shook, dirt flew a few hundred feet away. They could feel the ship sway.

"Crew," said the Captain. "To your seats!"

"What about them?" the Chemist asked, peering down.

The hatch closed.

In the control room they heard no thunder. But the aft screens showed bushes of flame jumping across the sand. Two figures remained motionless at the base of the rockets.

"Fasten your belts!" said the Captain. "Ready?"

"Ready," came the murmured reply.

"Twelve zero seven hours. Prepare for takeoff. All systems!"

"The pile on," said the Engineer.

"Critical mass," said the Physicist.

"Circulation normal," said the Chemist.

"The grav axis okay," said the Cyberneticist.

Suspended midway between the concave ceiling and the foam-padded floor, the Doctor was watching the screen.

"Still there?" asked the Captain, and everyone glanced at him: the question was not part of the takeoff ritual.

"Still there," said the Doctor. An explosion closer than the others made the ship rock.

"Blast off!" the Captain cried. With a hard face the Engineer engaged the drive. There was a small, muffled roar; it seemed to be taking place in another world. Gradually it intensified; then everything seemed to dissolve into it. Swaying, they fell gently into the embrace of an irresistible power.

The ship lifted.

"On the normal," said the Captain.

"Now over," said the Cyberneticist, and all the nylon cords tautened. The shock absorbers began to hum.

"Oxygen masks," the Doctor said, as though awakening, and bit down on his own plastic mouthpiece.

Twelve minutes later they left the atmosphere. Maintaining velocity, they set off into the starry void along an expanding spiral. Seven hundred and forty lights and dials pulsed soundlessly on the panels. The men unsnapped their belts and went up to the controls, fingered the buttons and switches as if in doubt—were any leads overheating, was there the faint crackle of a short circuit? They sniffed the air for the smell of burning, tapped the dials on the astrodesic computers. But everything was as it should be: the air was pure, the temperature correct; the distributor worked as if it had never been a pile of broken pieces.

In the navigation room, the Engineer and the Captain were bending over maps. The star charts, larger than the table, hung over it, torn at the edges. The men had said, a long time ago, that they needed a larger table in the navigation room, because they kept stepping on the maps. The table was still the same.

"Have you seen Eden?" asked the Engineer.

The Captain looked at him, not understanding. "What do you mean?"

"Now."

The Captain turned around. On the screen was a glowing opal sphere that made the neighboring stars pale.

"Beautiful," said the Engineer. "It drew our attention because it was so beautiful. We wanted only to fly by it."

"Yes," said the Captain, "only to fly by it…"

"All those colors. None of the other planets are like that. The Earth is merely a blue marble."

They watched the screen together.

"And the doubler stayed?" the Captain asked softly.

'That's what he wanted."

"You think."

"I'm sure. He preferred it to be us—and not them. That was all that we could do for him."

Neither of them spoke for a while. Eden grew smaller.

"Beautiful," said the Captain. "But, you know, going by the probability curve, there must be others even more beautiful."