The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel (10 page)

“Big?” she queried.

I nodded. “The big ones only come out to play when it’s dark,” I said. “That’s why we never saw them on the film. It had big eyes, though—it doesn’t hunt by sense of smell.”

She looked out at the pitch-black night, and said: “It must eat a lot of carrots.” It was an esoteric reference to some ancient piece of folklore.

“It didn’t look
very
dangerous,” I said. “A small mouth. One thing does bother me, though.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Spitting is a very peculiar defensive reflex to be equipped with if you spend most of your time lurking underwater. It implies that the fellow he
usually
spits at attacks him on land. He may not be the only monster who rears his ugly head by night.”

She considered the thought for a moment, then commented that the sooner we got out of the swamp, the better.

I had to agree.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It is, they say, always darkest before the dawn.

This, like most of the things “they” say, is a damn lie. Before dawn, the sky begins to get gradually lighter because of light refracted through the atmosphere. The hours before our first dawn on Naxos were rendered even lighter by the fact that there was a break in the clouds. The rain abated once more, and the stars came out.

The fact that I was awake to see it owes much to the habit of clean living and punctilious routine. I had been so very ready to doze off when night fell because of the marginal desynchronization between the natural event and the artificial day/night cycle aboard the
Earth Spirit
, which I had kept to even on the
Ariadne
. Night, on Naxos, was a fraction over ten Earthly hours long. My habit has always been to sleep for seven. (I could have gotten by on five were it not for the loss of benefit on nightmare nights.) Ergo, I woke up about an hour before dawn, and looked up at the bright stars, whose light was filtered through the raindrop-spattered canopy of the boat’s makeshift “cabin.”

It seemed the most natural thing in the world to unstrip the seam so that I could see properly.

As I moved, the boat rocked, and Angelina woke up. I could tell that she was on edge by the way she shot into an uptight sitting position, her hands reflexively groping for the rifle. She didn’t find it. It was laid across my lap.

“What are you doing?” she whispered. At least, it sounded like a whisper—I could barely hear the words and it was inference rather than delicacy of hearing that conveyed their content.

I didn’t switch on the flashlight, but laid a hand on her barely visible arm to reassure her.

“Nothing wrong,” I said quietly. “Look around. Stay here.” I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that I sounded like Vesenkov. She got the message.

After a moment’s thought, in which I reflected on matters of practicality and mankind’s long-standing but almost-forgotten traditions of gallantry, I passed the rifle back to her, butt first. I picked up the flare pistol instead. It only had two shots in its locker, but rumor has it that really
monstrous
things aren’t much intimidated by rifle bullets, whereas a faceful of flaming phosphorus is enough to see off anything up to and including
Tyrannosaurus rex
.

I was careful not to put my foot in the water as I stepped ashore. There was no sign of my long-necked friend, who would probably have crossed this particular location off his social calendar. I stood in the shadow of the nearest tree, quite still, waiting until I was one hundred percent sure of my poise and alertness. The stars were bright—much brighter than the stars seen from Earth—and testified to the benefits of being part of a relatively dense cluster. The network of branches which extended out from the bole of the tree just above my head cast a curious web of star-shadows on the ground, like a halo surrounding a region of darkness.

After six or seven minutes, I stepped across the web of latticed shadows, and began to move through the thick undergrowth, as quietly as I could.

Something the size of a small pig, bloated and long-legged, squirmed out of my path, heading for the water. I put it down as a big frog, though I couldn’t see
that
clearly. Something else squirmed under my foot, and I experienced a momentary vision of teeth sinking into the leathery plastic of the suit’s shoe. But the legless thing only wanted to get out of my way.

I tried to tread more carefully, just in case.

In the middle of a patch of open ground, with the vegetation up to my knees, I paused, looking around for a better place to walk. I could see the stems and flower heads moving, stirred by feeding things—guided, no doubt, by sense of smell. In a world of amphibians, I recalled, the sun is an enemy, threatening desiccation. The easy way to cope with it would be simply to avoid it.

In the middle of the open space there was an area of ground where the vegetation was not so coarse and tangled. Indeed, it looked almost flat. I made straight for it, thus demonstrating the perils of overlooking the obvious. I didn’t bother to ask myself
why
it looked flat. I got the answer, though, when I reached forward with my right leg to step out on to it, and the foot just kept on going. It wasn’t ground at all; it was a pool of water.

I yelped, and tried to draw back, but I was off balance. If the pool had been deep I’d have cartwheeled forward and gone under with all limbs flailing. As was, my foot hit bottom and I merely batted the raft-concealed surface with my right arm. My left leg came clear of the tangled grass, and in order to stay upright I had to put it down in the water close to its partner.

Then something wound itself around my ankles, tying them together, and I realized that I was in trouble. I tried to break its grip, but I couldn’t get my feet to move. Then it began to pull, and I was faced with the undignified prospect of shuffling along in the mud, desperately trying to keep my balance, while it brought me to wherever it wanted me.

I couldn’t fire the pistol downward, for fear that it would do far more damage to me than to the beastie, so I pointed at the sky and pressed the trigger. The flare went up as a little yellow spark, then burst into a giant flower of red flames, bathing the whole island with the glow of hellfire.

At least, you would have thought it was hellfire the way the local populace responded. My mind was on other things, and the circumstances weren’t right for the taking of a census, but I saw half a dozen hulking things that were a cross between a bullfrog and a turtle squirming over the grass, flattening it as they went with ungainly flipper-feet. I saw something else, too, out of the corner of my eye—something that moved much faster and much more easily. I couldn’t even say for sure whether it had two legs or four, but it wasn’t squirming—it was
running.
I could hear the splashes as the overlords of this little hunting range returned to their castles beneath the curtain of surface vegetation. Metaphorical castles, of course.

There was nothing metaphorical, though, about the thing which had my feet. Worst of all, it didn’t seem impressed by the blaze of red light—from which it was shadowed, of course, by the rafts sitting atop its pool.

Having run out of good ideas of my own, I yelled for help. Angelina appeared at the poolside, rifle at the ready.

I pointed at the surface about a meter in front of me, in the direction that the thing was trying to pull me.

“Put a couple bullets
there,”
I said.

She did, and the effect was startling. The grip on my ankles relaxed, and the water was churned up by what seemed to be a dozen thrashing tentacles. I hauled myself clear, and switched on the flashlight, which I still held in my left hand. As the writhing arms cut the floating leaves to pieces, we could see the water growing turbid.

“Dead center,” I commented. The operative word, of course, being
dead.

“Are you coming back now?” she asked, her tone implying that I should never have set out.

“We scientists must not allow ourselves to be intimidated by trivial risks,” I told her.

“No,” she said, “but are you coming back to the boat?”

“Damn right,” I answered. “We’ll come back in the morning to see what it was.”

By the dawn’s early light, we came back to see what there was to see. The pool was still turbid, and colored a most peculiar milky pink. I used the tooth-marked paddle to bring the thing out. It had twelve tentacles, each about one and a half meters long, and a complex body that was very soft and apparently protean.

“Shall we call it a squid or an overgrown sea anemone?” I asked. It was plainly neither.

“These things have red blood, just like you or me,” she said contemplatively.

“That’s right,” I said. “Invertebrates and vertebrates alike. Not hemoglobin, but something like it. Remarkable chemical consistency, if I remember rightly.”

She dipped a hand into the milky pink soup. It seemed to have the texture of unset jelly.

“Then what’s all this stuff with the blood? Fluid protoplasm?”

I didn’t know, and turned away in search of anything else of interest that the night’s dramatic events might have left behind. I spotted it, about twenty meters away. One of the big bloated creatures that didn’t move too well. It was, of course, dead. I went over, wondering whether it had died of shock, or whether it had been caught by some falling part of the expended flare.

As it happened, the cause of death was quite obvious and very much more remarkable. It was stuck the ground, impaled upon the shaft of a long, thin piece of cane which certainly hadn’t grown up overnight. I pulled out the shaft, and saw that the business end, which had been thrust through the frog-thing’s body below the neck, had been shaped to a point.

It wasn’t much of a spear, but it was very definitely a spear. I called Angelina over.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the hapless, and somewhat shrunken corpse. “When these things bleed, they don’t just bleed—they leak all over the place.” True enough, beneath the body there was more of the milky goo.

“Very messy,” I agreed. “But what I am holding in my hands is rather more significant.”

She examined the spear, and then looked at me. Her expression was more eloquent than words could ever have been.

“Frogmen,” she said, with a halfhearted giggle.

“When I fired the flare,” I said quietly, “something ran away. I couldn’t see what it was—just the motion. Nothing like
these
misshapen things.” I pointed down at the murdered creature. It was more toad-like than turtle-like, but it was obviously not built for jumping. Its limbs seemed not to have made up their minds whether to be legs or flippers. They were triple-jointed, but showed no evidence of boned fingers; they ended in fleshy fans of tissue. The eyes were small, rounded and black, and the snout was rounded like a pig’s.

“This changes things,” Angelina observed.

“Yes,” I said. “This changes everything.”

We walked slowly back to the boat.

I picked up the radio mike and called to attention anyone who might be listening. The
Ariadne
’s duty officer acknowledged immediately, but I had to wait for Zeno. Eventually, he came in.

“This world isn’t as primitive as it looks,” I said. “There’s evidence here of intelligent life.”

“What evidence?” asked the man in orbit.

I told him.

“Hold,” he said. “I’m contacting the captain.”

“How did he come to leave his supper behind?” asked Zeno, who didn’t sound particularly surprised by the unexpected turn of events.

“I frightened him by letting off a flare,” I said. “Our arrival here seems to be having a traumatic effect on all and sundry.”

“How was the spear sharpened?”

“Nothing complicated,” I answered. “It seems to have been honed down by scraping it on a rock. The cane is common enough—it grows in clumps in the mud. It’s not what one might describe as high technology. This isn’t the kind of terrain where you’d expect the early development of the flint axe.”

“Maybe not intelligent at all, then,” said Zeno. “Animals use tools.”

“Sharpening suggests patience and forethought,” I pointed out. It wasn’t conclusive, of course. Lots of animals think, after a fashion. Whether or not mice lay plans, dogs do.

“What’s this about a spear?” asked a new voice, with more than a hint of aggression. It was Juhasz, of course, and I could tell that he wasn’t pleased.

I repeated the story.

“You’re lying, Caretta,” he said. “This is some kind of trick.”

I was genuinely astonished.

“Why would we do that?” I asked.

“You know damn well why,” be told me. “You’re trying to sabotage this mission.”

He’s flipped,
I thought.
The paranoid streak has really cut loose.

“Are you sure you’ve got the right man here?” I asked him. “I’m not much of a mechanic, you know—tampering with attitude jets isn’t my line.”

“You’re crazy, Caretta.”

“Now I
know
you have the wrong man,” I snapped back.

“There is nothing,” he said, “in all the data transmitted back by our probes or by our landing party to suggest that there is intelligent life on Naxos. It’s impossible! There’s nothing more advanced than an amphibian—no reptiles, let alone mammals.”

“Well,” I said steadily, “there’s evidence
now.
And you don’t need fur in order to have a brain. The landing party found nothing because they landed in the wrong bloody place.
Here
is where the action is—in the swamps by starlight. And your malfunction dropped us right on the spot. Chance plays little tricks, no?”

“You’re the one who’s playing little tricks!” said Juhasz. “But it won’t work. You can’t abort the mission this way. In fact, you can’t abort it at all.”

I shook my head wearily, and handed the mike to Angelina.

“Captain Juhasz,” she said—sweetly enough, considering the circumstances—“this is Angelina Hesse. The artifact is real. It has clearly been shaped to serve a particular purpose, and used. That signifies intelligence, of a kind. It doesn’t mean that we have some alternative human race down here—just that there’s something which can think ahead well enough to make a weapon. Until we know more, we can’t say much about these creatures. Even birds and monkeys back home on Earth pick up quite complicated tricks and communicate them to one another by example. This may be nothing more. But it’s not a hoax, and Lee Caretta and I are not part of some conspiracy against you and your mission. I beg you to believe that.”