Eden (6 page)

"I've figured the whole thing out! I can tell you!" he shouted.

"Where were you? I was beginning to worry," the Captain said. "Have you really discovered something? Because the Engineer has drawn a blank."

"A blank wouldn't be so bad!" growled the Engineer. He got to his feet, kicked the object furiously, and glared at the Doctor. "Well, what's the big discovery?"

The Doctor smiled. "These things are drawn in here"—he pointed to the snout, which just then happened to open. "Now it's warming up inside, see? And now they're melting, fusing, being carried to the top in portions, where they're treated. Then, still red-hot, they drop to the bottom, underground—there must be another level there—and something else happens to them, and they come back up, by the same well, pale but still glowing. They journey up to the ceiling, fall into this"—he indicated the funnel—"and from there go into the trough, then the snout, melt, and so on and so on, forming, melting, forming."

"Have you gone mad?" whispered the Engineer. On his forehead were large drops of sweat.

"You don't believe it? See for yourself."

The Engineer did, twice, which took him a good hour. By the time they returned to the trough, which was filling up with a new quadrangle of the "finished product," it was growing dark; the light was turning gray.

The Engineer looked demented; his face twitched. The others, though astounded, were less shaken than he by this mystery.

"We'd better leave now," said the Captain. "It may be difficult once it's dark." He took the Engineer by the arm. The Engineer first let himself be pulled away, but then suddenly tore free, ran back to the black object which they had left behind, and lifted it with difficulty.

"You want to take that with you?" asked the Captain. "All right. Someone give him a hand."

The Physicist grasped the earlike swellings and helped the Engineer with his burden. In this way they reached the concave wall. The Doctor quietly moved through the glistening, syruplike "waterfall" and found himself back on the plain, in the cool evening air. With joy he took a deep breath, filling his lungs. The others emerged behind him; the Engineer and the Physicist lugged the black object to the spot where they had left their knapsacks and dropped it on the ground.

The portable stove was lit, some water was heated, and meat concentrate dissolved in it. The men ate in silence, ravenous. It was now completely dark. The stars had come out, and their brilliance increased minute by minute as the murky brushwood of the distant copse disappeared into the night. Only the stove's bluish flames swaying gently in the breeze provided light. The high wall of the "factory" behind them made no sound, and it was impossible to see, in the darkness, whether the horizontal waves were still rippling across it.

"It gets dark here as in the tropics back home," said the Chemist. "Is this the equatorial zone?"

"I guess," said the Captain. "Though I don't even know the planet's angle with respect to the ecliptic."

"But that must be known."

"Yes, but the data are on the ship."

Silence. The cold was beginning to bite, so they wrapped themselves in blankets, and the Physicist began to pitch their tent, inflating the canvas until it was a taut hemisphere with a small entrance at the ground. He walked around looking for rocks to hold down the edges of the tent—they had pegs, but nothing to drive them with. All he could find were small chips, so he returned empty-handed and rejoined the others sitting around the blue glimmer. Then his gaze fell on the heavy object that they had brought with them from the "factory." He anchored the tent with that.

"At least it's useful for something," said the Doctor, watching.

The Engineer sat hunched over, his head in his hands, a picture of dejection. He said nothing, and even when receiving his plate of food only grunted. Then, unexpectedly, he stood up and asked, "Well, and what now?"

"We go to sleep, of course." The Doctor solemnly took a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and inhaled with obvious pleasure.

"And tomorrow?" asked the Engineer.

"Henry, you're acting like a child," said the Captain, cleaning the saucepan with a handful of sandy earth. "Tomorrow we'll investigate more of the factory. Today we must have covered a quarter of a mile."

"And you think we'll find something different?"

"I don't know. We'll have the whole morning. In the afternoon we return to the ship."

"Wonderful," grumbled the Engineer. He stretched, groaned. "I feel as if I've been beaten."

"So do we," the Doctor assured him good-humoredly. "But listen, you really can't tell us anything about this?" He pointed the glowing tip of his cigarette at the barely visible shape holding down the tent.

"Of course. Isn't it obvious? It's a device to—"

"No, seriously. After all, the thing has so many parts. But this is not my line."

"And you think it's mine?!" the Engineer exploded. "It's the work of a lunatic, or, rather"—he pointed in the direction of the factory—"lunatics. A civilization of lunatics, that's what this damned Eden is!" Then he added calmly: "The object we hauled here was manufactured by a whole series of processes—compression, segmentation, thermal treatment, polishing. It's made of polymers, inorganic crystals. What it's for, I have no idea. It's a part, not a whole. But even as a part, taken out of this crack-brained mill, it looks crazy to me."

"What do you mean?" asked the Captain. The Chemist, having put away the utensils, was spreading out his blanket. The Doctor extinguished his cigarette and carefully put the unsmoked half back in his pocket.

"I have no proof. There are power cells, units of some kind, in there—not connected to anything. Like a closed circuit, but crisscrossed by a strange insulating substance. This thing … cannot function. That's how it looks to me. After a number of years a man develops a kind of professional intuition. I could be mistaken, but … no, I'd rather not talk about that."

The Captain got up. The others followed his example. When they extinguished the stove, they were plunged into total darkness. The stars above sparkled intensely in what seemed a peculiarly low sky.

"Deneb," said the Physicist softly. The men looked up.

"Where? There?" asked the Doctor. Unconsciously they lowered their voices.

"Yes. And the smaller star nearby is Gamma Cygni. Very bright!"

"About three times brighter than on Earth," said the Captain.

"We're a long way from home," muttered the Doctor. Nobody said anything more. One by one they crawled into the round tent. They were so tired that, when the Doctor said his customary "Good night," deep breathing was the only reply.

He lay awake, thinking. Were they being careless? What if something nasty crawled out of the neighboring scrub during the night? They should have posted a sentry. For a while the Doctor considered getting up and standing guard, but then he smiled his ironic smile in the darkness, turned over with a sigh, and fell sound asleep.

The morning greeted them with sunshine. There were more white cumulus clouds in the sky than before. The men ate little breakfast, saving the rest of their food for a final meal before returning to the ship.

"If only I could wash!" the Cyberneticist complained. "I stink. There must be water here somewhere!"

"Where there's water, there must be a barber," the Doctor added, peering into a small mirror and grimacing. "Only I'm afraid that on this planet a barber, after shaving you, would put all the hairs back."

"You'll joke on your deathbed," the Engineer said.

"Well," replied the Doctor, "that's not a bad way to go."

They gathered their things, deflated and packed the tent, and set off along the undulating screen, until they were almost a mile from their campsite.

"Maybe I'm mistaken, but the wall seems a bit higher here," said the Physicist, squinting at the ripples going in both directions. Higher up, they shimmered, like silver.

The men put their packs down in one pile and entered the factory without incident, as on the previous day. The Physicist and the Cyberneticist were the last to enter.

"How does that disappearing work?" asked the Cyberneticist. "So much happened yesterday, I forgot all about it."

"Something to do with refraction," the Physicist replied, without conviction.

"And what supports the roof? It can't be that." He pointed to the rippling curtain before them.

"I don't know. Maybe the supports are inside somewhere, or on the other side."

"Alice in Wonderland,"
the Doctor's voice greeted them. "Shall we begin? I seem to be sneezing less today. Perhaps we're adapting. Which way do we go first?"

The place was similar to what they had seen the day before. They walked through it now with greater confidence and speed. At first it seemed that everything was the same: the columns, the wells, the forest of pulsing tubes, the incandescence, the whole flickering confusion of processes taking place at different tempos. But the "finished products," whose troughlike receptacle it took them a while to discover, were not the same; they were larger and shaped differently from those of yesterday. And that was not all.

These "products," which were also being reclaimed and recycled, were not identical. They all resembled half of an egg, each notched at the top and with various details that indicated it was to be joined to other things. The half-egg also had protruding pipes, in the mouths of which were lens-shaped pieces that moved like valves. But some of the objects had two pipes, and others three or four. The additional pipes were smaller and often seemed unfinished, as though work on them had been interrupted. Sometimes a lens filled the entire bore of a pipe, sometimes only part of it, and sometimes there was no lens, or only the "bud" of one, a particle hardly bigger than a pea. The surface of the half-egg was smooth, polished.

And the pipes varied in other ways: in one half-egg the men found two pipes fused together and communicating through a small opening, their lenses forming something in the nature of a figure eight. The Doctor called this "Siamese Twins." And the mouths of some small pipes were closed.

"What do you say to this?" asked the Captain, kneeling as the Engineer worked his way through an entire collection fished out of the trough.

"For the time being, nothing. Let's move on," said the Engineer, getting up. But it was obvious that his spirits were improved.

They now saw that the hall was divided into sections, according to the process being performed in the cycle. The production mechanisms themselves—such as the forest of esophaguslike tubes—were everywhere the same. Half a mile farther on, the men came to a section that, while going through the same motions as the one before, carried nothing in its tubes, deposited nothing into its wells, and absorbed, treated, and melted nothing. Thinking at first that the product was so transparent as to be invisible, the Engineer leaned over to a chute and put out his hand to catch what should have been dropping out, but there was indeed nothing.

"This is crazy," said the Chemist.

But somehow the Engineer was not that surprised. "Interesting," he said, and they walked on.

They approached an area of increasing noise. It was a dull noise, but deafening—as of millions of heavy, wet pieces of leather dropping on a huge untightened drum. Then the noise became more distinct.

From dozens of club-shaped, quivering stalactites hanging from the ceiling overhead, a veritable hail of black objects fell, and were deflected, now on one side, now on the other, by inflated gray membranes, like bladders, then were snatched in midair by fast arms and arranged neatly at the bottom, side by side, in quadrangles and straight rows. Every so often a huge thing, the size of a whale's head, would emerge and with a long sigh suck in several rows of "finished product" at a time.

"The storehouse," the Engineer explained. "They arrive from above—that's a kind of conveyor—and are collected and returned to the cycle."

"How do you know they're returned?" asked the Physicist.

"Because the storehouse is full."

Nobody really understood this, but they said nothing and continued on.

It was almost four o'clock when the Captain gave the order to leave. They were in a section consisting of two parts. The first part produced rough disks equipped with handles; the second cut off the handles and attached elliptical rings in their place, whereupon the disks journeyed underground and returned smooth—"clean-shaven," as the Doctor said—in order to have ear-shaped handles affixed to them again.

When the men came out on the plain, the sun was strong, still high overhead. As they walked to the spot where they had left their tent and packs, the Engineer said, "Well, it's beginning to make sense."

"Really?" the Chemist sneered.

The Captain nodded and turned to the Doctor. "How would you describe it?" he asked.

"A corpse," the Doctor said.

"What do you mean, a corpse?" asked the Chemist, who was still in the dark.

"An animated corpse," the Doctor added. They went on a bit farther in silence.

"Is someone going to explain or not?" asked the Chemist, irritated.

"It's an automated complex for the production of miscellaneous parts, which eventually, in the course of time, went completely out of kilter, because it was left unsupervised," the Engineer said.

"Ah! And how long ago, do you think…?"

"That I don't know."

"A rough guess … several decades," said the Cyberneticist.

"Or even longer. I wouldn't be surprised if the complex was abandoned two hundred years ago."

"Or a thousand years ago," the Captain said.

"Management computing systems fail at a rate corresponding to the coefficient—" the Cyberneticist began, but was interrupted by the Engineer:

"Their systems may operate on different lines from ours; they may not even be electronic. Personally, I don't think they are. The elements are nonmetallic, semifluid."

"Never mind that," said the Doctor. "What do you think the prospects are? Myself, I'd say they're poor."

"You mean the planet's inhabitants?" asked the Chemist.