Eden (5 page)

"Iron?!" the Captain called out.

"No!" the Engineer shouted back. He disappeared behind an object that resembled a shattered cone, then emerged from a clump of stalks, which snapped as he pushed through them. He returned frowning. Several hands reached out to help him as he clambered up. Seeing the expectant faces of the others, he shrugged. "I don't know what it is. Ruins of some kind. Erosion is far advanced. They're a hundred, maybe three hundred years old…"

The men filed past the crater in silence and headed for where the vegetation was lowest. Then it ceased—or, rather, it parted to form a narrow trench, a kind of corridor, perfectly straight. The stalks here seemed to have been cut and trampled, the large abdomens pushed aside onto other plants. These other plants were flat, dry, with husks that cracked underfoot like sloughed-off tree bark. The men decided to take the path. Though they had to wade through the dead stalks, they made better progress than before. The path arced northward. They left the dead vegetation and found themselves on a plain on the other side of the copse.

An indistinct line met the path at the point where it emerged from the forest, a continuation of the path, though not paved. In the barren soil there was a rut or groove about six inches deep and six inches wide, covered with a green-gray growth silky to the touch. This curious "moss," as the Doctor called it, went straight as an arrow, terminating at a bright strip that went like a wall from one end of the horizon to the other.

Above this wall—it
was
a wall—glimmered peaks resembling Gothic spires covered with silvery metal. As the men walked quickly, more and more detail emerged. Above the wall was a surface that stretched for miles in both directions; it rose in regular arches, like the roofs of giant hangars. Between the arches were downward bulges, from which something grayish fell in a fine dust or mist. Drawing closer, the men smelled a strange, bitter, but pleasant odor, as of unfamiliar flowers. The arched roofs loomed higher as the men approached, like an enormous suspension bridge inverted. Against the clouds, at a point where two arches joined, something shone brightly, as if mirrors had been placed there to direct the sun's rays downward. The wall opposite them was in motion. Grayish brown, it moved like a peristalsis; convex waves ran across it from left to right, as if, behind a curtain, elephants—or animals larger than elephants—were passing at regular intervals, brushing the material with their sides.

Where the narrow, moss-covered groove came to an end, the bitter odor grew intense, unbearable. The Cyberneticist, coughing, said, "It may be poisonous." Despite the odor, fascinated by the rhythm of the waves, the men moved closer, until only a few steps separated them from the "curtain." It looked like a thick mat of interwoven fibers. The Doctor picked up a pebble from the ground and tossed it at the wall. The pebble vanished, as if it had dissolved or evaporated before touching the moving surface.

"Did it go inside?" the Cyberneticist asked hesitantly.

"Impossible!" said the Chemist. "It never reached that … that…"

The Doctor picked up a whole fistful of pebbles and threw them in quick succession; they all disappeared a few inches away from the wall. The Engineer removed a key from a small key ring and threw it at the surface, which just then happened to be swollen. The key clinked, as if striking metal, then disappeared.

"What now?" asked the Cyberneticist, looking at the Captain. The latter said nothing. The Doctor put his knapsack on the ground, took out a can of food, with his knife cut from it a cube of jellied meat, and threw it at the "curtain." The piece of food stuck to the surface, hung there for a while, then began to disappear, as if melting.

"It's a kind of filter," said the Doctor, his eyes sparkling. "A selective membrane … something like that…"

In the buckle of one of his knapsack straps the Chemist found a withered tendril of the "spider" plant; it must have got caught there while they were pushing their way through the thicket. Without thinking, he tossed the tendril at the undulating wall. It bounced and fell at his feet.

"A selector…" he said uncertainly.

The Doctor went up to the wall, so close that his shadow touched it, aimed his sleeping-gas weapon, and pulled the trigger. The needle-thin stream instantly produced a hole in the wall, revealing a large dark space with sparks scudding along high and low, and a multitude of tiny white and pink lights glimmering deep inside. The Doctor pulled back, choking; the bitter odor had burned his nostrils and throat.

The aperture contracted like an iris. The waves in the wall slowed as they approached it, went around it, above or below, then picked up speed again. The hole grew smaller. All of a sudden a black fingerlike thing emerged from it and quickly touched all around the rim. The hole closed, and once more the men found themselves in front of a rhythmically rising and falling surface.

The Engineer suggested they stop and deliberate. The Doctor disagreed, feeling that that would be a sign of indecision. Finally they decided to continue along the wall, picked up their knapsacks, and moved on. They went about two miles, crossing more than a dozen moss-grooves that led out to the plain. They discussed what the grooves might be. The hypothesis of irrigation was rejected as unlikely. The Doctor attempted to examine a few plants plucked from the dark-green ruts. They did resemble moss, but their rootlets had beadlike swellings that contained tiny, hard black grains.

It was long past noon. Hungry, they stopped to eat. There was no shade anywhere, but they preferred not to return to the copse, which lay three thousand feet to their right, because the spider plants had made them uneasy.

"According to the stories I read as a boy," said the Doctor, his mouth full, "a hole belching fire ought to open up in this damned wall now, and out come a being with three arms and one leg. Under his arm he has an interstellar telecommunicator, or he's telepathic and tells us that he represents a highly developed but deranged civilization that—"

"Stop that jabbering," said the Captain. He poured some water from his thermos into his mug, which was immediately covered with condensation. "We'd better decide what to do."

"I think we should go in there," said the Doctor, and he got up as if intending to do just that.

"Go in where?" the Physicist asked lazily.

"You must be crazy!" the Cyberneticist exclaimed in a high-pitched voice.

"Not at all. Of course, we could keep on walking like this, hoping the aliens will toss us something to eat."

"Let's be serious," said the Engineer.

"I am serious, and do you know why? Because, quite simply, I've had enough of this." The Doctor turned on his heel.

"Stop!" shouted the Captain.

The Doctor walked straight toward the wall and was only a few feet from it when they jumped up and ran after him. Hearing their pursuit, he stretched out his hand and touched the wall. His hand disappeared. The Doctor stood motionless for a second, then stepped forward and was gone. The other five stopped, gasping, and knelt at the spot where his left boot print was still visible. Suddenly the Doctor's head appeared above them, his neck disembodied, as if severed by a knife; tears streamed from his eyes, and he sneezed loudly, repeatedly.

"It's stifling in here," he said, "and it stings your nose like the devil, but for a few minutes it's bearable. It's a little like tear gas. Come on in. It doesn't hurt—you don't feel anything at all."

And at the level of his shoulder an arm appeared in midair. "Damn you!" muttered the Engineer with a mixture of fear and admiration, and he clutched the Doctor's hand, which pulled him in, so that the Engineer, too, disappeared from sight. One by one the others entered the undulating wall. The Cyberneticist was the last. He hesitated. Then, his heart pounding like a hammer, he closed his eyes and took a step forward.

After a moment of darkness, everything brightened. He found himself with the others, inside a vast place full of puffing and throbbing. Diagonally, vertically, and from side to side, enormous tubes moved, crisscrossing. Of varying thicknesses, bulging here and thinning there, they turned and vibrated, and from the depths of this vast, ceaselessly moving forest of glistening bodies a splashing noise could be heard. It accelerated, stopped, was followed by gurgling; then the sequence was repeated.

From the bitter air they began sneezing, one after another, and their eyes ran. Holding handkerchiefs to their faces, they backed away from the wall, which from the inside looked like a cascade of black syrup.

"Well, we're home at last—this is a factory, an automated factory!" cried the Engineer between two sneezes.

Gradually they got used to the smell, and the sneezing ceased. Blinking and watery-eyed, they looked about.

A dozen or so paces ahead, in the ground, which was as springy as rubber, they came to black wells; glowing objects the size of a man's head shot up out of them so quickly it was impossible to see their shape. As they flew up, one of the tubes sucked them in while continuing to turn. The objects did not completely disappear, because their pinkish glow showed faintly through the tube's quivering walls, as through tinted glass, so that it was possible to watch them travel inside the tube to somewhere farther on.

"A conveyor belt," the Engineer said through his handkerchief. "Mass production."

He walked around the wells, stepping carefully. What was the source of the light here? The ceiling was semi-transparent, but its monotonous gray was dissipated in the sea of objects that flowed nimbly by on invisible currents. All this movement appeared to be orchestrated, to have the same tempo. Fountains of hot material gushed into the air, and the same thing was happening high above, where just beneath the ceiling they could see red arms in the air.

"We must find where the finished product is stored," the Engineer concluded.

The Captain tapped him on the shoulder. "What kind of energy do you think this is?"

The Engineer shrugged. "I have no idea."

"It would take you a year to locate the finished product—this room is miles long," the Physicist said.

It was curious, but the deeper they went into the hall, the easier it was for them to breathe—as if the bitter smell came only from the wall.

"Are we lost?" the Cyberneticist asked anxiously.

The Captain checked his compass.

"No. The reading is good… There's probably no iron here, and no electromagnetism."

For more than an hour they wandered through the pulsing forest of this unusual factory, until the area around them became more open. They felt a cool, almost refrigerated gust of air. The network of tubes parted, and they found themselves near the mouth of an enormous helical funnel. Boughs from above descended to it, flapping like whips, each ending in a nodule, and from the nodules came a sudden hail of somersaulting objects, black and shiny, that dropped into the funnel in a place the men could not see, since it was twenty feet above their heads.

The dark-gray wall of the funnel now began to expand: something was pushing it from within. They stepped back instinctively, so ominous was the appearance of the swelling bubble. Then, without a sound, it burst, and a stream of black things poured from the opening at the top. At the same moment, lower down, a trough with outward-turned edges emerged from a wide well, and the objects dropped into it with a drumming sound. The trough shook in such a way that in a few seconds the black objects were resting in a neat quadrangle on its shallow bottom.

"The finished product!" cried the Engineer. He rushed to the edge and without a moment's hesitation bent over and grabbed the nearest black object. The Captain caught him by the belt of his suit at the last moment, and this was all that kept the Engineer from falling headfirst into the trough, because he refused to let go of the heavy object but was unable to lift it himself. The Physicist and the Doctor had to give him a hand, and together they hauled the thing out.

It was as large as a man's torso and had semitransparent segments, inside which were rows of small crystals, metallic, sparkling, and there were apertures surrounded by earlike swellings, and, at the top, an uneven mosaic of projections made of an exceptionally hard substance that did not reflect the light. In a word, the object was extremely complex. The Engineer knelt in front of it, fingered and tapped it, examined the apertures from various angles in an attempt to discover any moving parts.

Meanwhile the Doctor was observing the trough. After forming a geometric quadrangle of the black objects, it rose a little, pivoted, and suddenly softened, but only on one side. Changing shape, it turned into an enormous spoon. Then a large snout protruded and opened, giving off a hot, bitter stench; the opening sucked in all the objects with a loud smack and closed again, whereupon the snout began to glow in the middle. The Doctor could see the objects melting inside, fusing to form a fiery orange slurry. Then the glow dimmed; the snout went dark.

Forgetting his colleagues, the Doctor walked around two great soaring columns, inside which lumps of the molten material now flowed, as through a monstrous esophagus. Craning his neck and wiping his teary eyes from time to time, he attempted to trace the path of the incandescent slurry through the labyrinth of tubes. At times it disappeared from view, but he would come upon its trail again as it glowed in the depths of the tortuous black conduits. Finally he stopped at a spot that seemed familiar, and saw red-hot objects, already partly formed, flying into a pit, while nearby others shot out of one of the open wells—only to be swallowed up by a row of thick tubes dangling overhead like elephant trunks. Cooling, now pink, the objects traveled up through the tubes. The Doctor walked on, head back, oblivious to everything, then suddenly almost fell and uttered a strangled cry.

He had returned to the open space; before him the helical funnel was larger than ever as the volley of black objects, which had cooled completely after their travels, fell into it. The Doctor examined the sides of the funnel, now knowing in which direction the "delivery" would take place—and found himself back among the others gathered around the Engineer, who was still examining the black object. Again a huge bubble burst and spurted out more "finished product," and again a trough emerged.