The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel (11 page)

“I wish I could, Dr. Hesse,” said Juhasz. “Indeed, I wish it were so.” He said no more.

“Zeno?” she said.

“I heard everything,” confirmed Zeno. “What can I say?”

“The only person who’s going to convince him is Catherine d’Orsay,” she said. “And the only person who seems to be in a position to convince
her
is you. You’re the only one who can testify to Lee’s reliability.”

“I’ll try,” he promised.

Angelina switched off, and looked at me. I’d taken Harmall’s little device out of my pocket, and was contemplating it ruefully.

“It never occurred to me,” I said. “I think I loused it up.”

“Put it away,” she said, tired. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

Every step we took seemed to make it longer and more difficult. More complicated, at any rate.

“And to think,” I said, “that Schumann offered me the opportunity to say no. Never for a moment did I contemplate it. Why is it nothing ever turns out the way you expect it to?”

“I don’t know,” she said grimly.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“We’re entering the living quarters now,” said Zeno. His voice, even over the radio, was crystal clear and as steady as a rock. I didn’t make any acknowledgment. He knew that we were listening, and he and Vesenkov didn’t need any trivial interruptions. Angelina was busy unclogging the propeller. It was only the first time of that day, and we’d made good headway before it happened.

“Most of the bodies are in sleeping bags,” commented Zeno. “One is by the radio. One was trying to get into a sterile suit, but didn’t make it. Whatever hit them was fast. The bodies seem well-preserved. No immediately obvious outward signs to offer any clues. I’m putting the set down now—Vesenkov needs my hands. I’ll report anything that happens as we go.”

I turned away from the radio to look out through the open flap of the cupola, across the carpet of floating leaves.

“Don’t let it worry you,” I said, “but we’re being watched.”

Angelina didn’t even look up. “Where?” she asked.

“Away to starboard. Twenty meters. A pair of eyes, peeping above the surface.” I was looking in another direction now, trying to give no indication that I’d noticed. Her glance was equally casual.

“You’re right,” she said. “Which one of our nocturnal visitors might it be?”

“The eyes are the right size for the one that spat in my face,” I said, “but the position is wrong. Those are carried right on top of the head, just right for peeping.”

“You want to take a shot at him?”

“No. Anyhow, it might be a her. Do you think he or she is taking an
intelligent
interest?”

“Can’t tell,” she said. She turned the propeller experimentally with her finger, then began to set the motor back in operating position. “Shall we head in his direction?” she asked.

“He’d only duck under,” I said. “I’d rather see if he follows us. He might even get to like us eventually. Maybe we should throw him something to eat.”

“All we’ve got is some tissue-samples from the dead things on the islet,” she observed. “I’d rather not lose them, if you don’t mind.”

She started the motor, and guided us away in the direction we wanted to go. When I glanced back at the watcher, he’d vanished.

“Can we be out of this watery wilderness by tonight?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “We can get another fix on our position soon. Are you that keen to start walking?”

I don’t like walking much, but I liked wading even less. I said so.

A small creature like a basilisk lizard darted across the leaf-rafts away to port, steadying itself as it ran with a supple horizontally frilled tail. Colored insects settled briefly on the cupola, hitching a free ride for a little way. The sun was shining, but there were big cloudbanks gathering in the west and moving slowly toward us. It was obvious that we weren’t going to outrun them, and that we were in for more rain.

Angelina had picked up one of her sealed plastic bags and was looking intently at its contents.

“This milky white stuff that oozes out with the blood,” she said. “It’s strange.”

“It looks like the gel that oozes out of dead slugs in killing solution,” I observed.

“That thing you trod on was an invertebrate, wasn’t it?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“But the other was a glorified toad. No relation at all.”

“Apparently not.”

“Invertebrates use turgor pressure to maintain their shape,” she said. “You expect them to ooze. You don’t expect the
same
ooze from vertebrates.”

“Not much we can do until we have some idea of its biochemistry,” I pointed out.

“There’s something fundamentally
peculiar
about the animal kingdom in this life system,” she opined. I wasn’t going to disagree with her.

“Intelligent amphibians aren’t impossible,” I said. “Look at the fingers of Earthly frogs. It’s not difficult to imagine them being modified into hands with opposable thumbs. Some kinds of toad are very good at gripping, in fact. Living mostly underwater, they have the potential to develop big heads, relatively speaking. Looking at it objectively, one might wonder why the frogs didn’t make it on Earth. How wasteful to have to invent reptiles and mammals before turning out a really tip-top model. If conditions had been
right
for Earth’s amphibians, the way they clearly were
here...
we might be descended from toads ourselves.”

“Warts and all,” she added.

“Wasn’t there some old saw about newts?” I asked her.

“Not that I recall.”

“It’s a pity we drove all the eccentric ones to extinction,” I observed. “It would have been interesting to have seen newts and axolotls in the flesh.”

“More eyes,” she said. “Starboard again, same distance. Two pairs.”

I looked. They were there all right. Not moving. Just watching us chug along past them.

“They’re not the spear-users,” I said. “They can’t be.” I didn’t like to sound too confident in saying so, though.

“The probes never picked up anything like them,” she pointed out.

We both knew that meant nothing. There are a million places on Earth where you could dump a probe which could sit there for years and not catch sight of anything more interesting than a cockroach. You could put one down in the middle of a zoo or a national park and
still
see nothing.

I called
Ariadne
in order to get a new precise fix on our position. The duty officer read the figures back to me, and reassured me that we were getting to the edges of the sticky region and that dry land shouldn’t be too far away.

“If I were you, though,” he said, “I’d try to find a river. It’s all pretty flat, so the waterways are moderately deep and slow-flowing.”

“You wouldn’t know, I suppose, whether there is a handy river?” I asked.

“I don’t know that there is,” he reported helpfully. “But that doesn’t mean to say that there definitely isn’t.”

I thanked him kindly. As he signed off, another voice chipped in.

“Hello,” it said. “This Vesenkov. Was definitely wrong. Not allergy. Is open and shut. Not virus either. Died of poison.”

“Poison!” I said. “What kind of poison?”

“One test,” he said. “I know, but need proof. Easy. Few minutes. Wait.”

I lowered the mike slowly.

“Hold on,” the duty officer was saying. “I’ll inform Captain Juhasz right away.”

Vesenkov wasn’t holding, though—he’d already gone.

“Zeno?” I said.

There was no reply.

I was still waiting when Juhasz came in. “What’s this about poison?” he wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I told him. Then he started asking Zeno and Vesenkov to come in. Nobody took any notice. Vesenkov’s few minutes began to drag by.

The propeller caught up in some kind of vine, and the boat began to swing. I hauled it out of the water just as the rain began to fall. By the time I’d untangled it, Vesenkov
still
hadn’t reported back. When he did, the best part of an hour had gone by.

“Had to use lab,” he said. “Sorry. Two pair hands. Anyway, was right. Poison in water. Drank it with coffee.”

“You mean that their water supply became contaminated?” This from Juhasz.

“Yes,” replied Vesenkov. “Poison is nerve poison. Like some Earthly snake venom. Also like some Earthly chemical weapon. Quick paralysis. Low dose. No doubt at all.”

“How did it happen?” the captain wanted to know.

“Easy,” said Vesenkov. “Plain bloody murder.”

There was a moment of absolute silence.

“Say that again,” I said.

“Is murder,” he said. “No doubt at all. One more thing. Nineteen dead.”

“So?”

“Ought to be twenty. One gone. No trace.”

“Are you telling me,” said the captain, slowly, “that one of my crew members murdered the other nineteen, and then left the dome?”

“Is likely hypothesis,” said the Russian. There was a charming finality about the way he framed his sentences.

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Juhasz.

“Poison in water is fact,” said Vesenkov. “Supply is sealed and recycled.”

“It’s impossible,” said Juhasz.

“Is bloody obvious,” retorted the Russian.

“But
why?”

“Your problem,” replied Vesenkov vindictively. “Not mine. My bit done.”

It couldn’t have cheered Juhasz up to realize that if what Vesenkov said was true, then he didn’t need us at all. If there was no fearsomely subtle alien plague, then one of his own people could have cracked the problem easily enough.

Fate seemed to be treating him just as harshly as it was treating us.

But Juhasz was by now well on the way to discovering another point of view.

“In that case,” he said, “the world is safe. I could send another crew down tomorrow.”

“Wouldn’t say so,” said Vesenkov, laconically. “People didn’t die of disease. Murderer may be sick. How else explain murder?”

I glanced at Angelina. If
that
line of thinking was correct, it might be our problem after all.

“In that case,” said the captain, “you’d better find him, hadn’t you?”

“Not him,” said Vesenkov. “Her. Is needle in haystack.
Your
problem, not mine.”

Juhasz switched off in exasperation. I sat back, replacing the mike in its cradle without having uttered a word since my single request for clarification.

“Crazy,” I said to Angelina quietly.

“It hadn’t occurred to me as the probable outcome,” she admitted.

“There isn’t any other way the water supply could have been contaminated, is there?”

“Who knows?” she said. “Cheer up. It looks at though there might still be mysteries left for us when we get there.”

“Sure,” I said. “As long as we don’t get murdered in our sleep on the way.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

With stops and starts and a couple of awkward detours, we didn’t manage to reach the edge of the marshland before nightfall, as I’d hoped we might. We decided against any further nocturnal excursions—the clouds, in any case, remained massed above us all night, and the rain never stopped. One of us sat up on guard at all times; I slept first, then took over from Angelina with rifle and flashlight at the ready. The night passed without incident.

We knew that we’d come just about as far as the waterways would take us when the trees began to bunch up and the rather scattered growth of the islets gave way to dense forest. We had to abandon the boat, though, long before we reached what
I’d
call dry land. For several hours we were squelching our way through ponds and reed beds, tiring ourselves out while making all of two kilometers an hours. Even when we were done with the bog, it didn’t get much easier. All that happened was that the undergrowth grew lusher and higher, so that instead of wading through water we were wading through matted grass and thorny vines. The only relief we got was in areas where the canopy formed by overlapping trees starved the ground of sunlight, so that we could stride out across a flat bed of humus. Such areas were surprisingly few and far between, considering that the forest seemed so dense. Our average speed increased, but it was obvious that sixty kilometers overland wasn’t going to be the nice brisk walk that it sounded. There seemed to be no escaping the fact that just as we’d been two nights in the swamp, so we’d be two nights in the forest. My embittered comment about our suits being just about ready to give up if and when we finally reached the dome seemed less of an exaggeration than when I’d made it.

Zeno, Vesenkov and Catherine d’Orsay seemed to be having a much easier time of it, now they’d got the bodies buried. Zeno gave us a report on how easy it would have been for anyone so inclined to poison the drinking water. The supply tank was beside the inner airlock, and the cover could be removed simply by lifting. It wasn’t sabotage-proof because it had never occurred to the designers that anyone would dream of sabotaging it. It wasn’t sealed because it was in an area which was itself supposedly sterile and fully protected. All the assassin had had to do was lift the cover momentarily, and tip the stuff in.

The only difficulty was in trying to imagine a reason why anyone would do such a thing. What motive could there possibly be? And what future for the murderer, who had apparently fled the scene of her crime in a sterile suit that would keep her fit and healthy for a couple of days and no more? Even if the environment was safe, and she’d shed the suit, what kind of life was she looking forward to, alone in an alien wilderness?

The possible presence on Naxos of intelligent—maybe humanoid—indigenes didn’t really add much to the imaginative resources out of which we tried to build an explanation. Unless, of course, you figured that the aliens had obtained some weird kind of control over the girl and
compelled
her to commit the murder; or, alternatively, that it was one of the aliens that had perpetrated the dire deed—either of which notions seemed a little far-fetched.

Inevitably, things got worse. That evening, as Angelina and I were trying to rig up some kind of makeshift tent using the cupola from the lifecraft and the membranes that had covered the fore and aft sections, we were hailed by the
Ariadne
.

“Dr. Caretta,” said a voice that I hadn’t heard over the link before, though it was one I recognized. “Come in Dr. Caretta.” There was something conspiratorial about the tone of the voice.

“I’m here,” I said.

“Dr. Caretta, this is Simon Norton. You remember me?”

“I remember.”

“I thought you ought to know,” he said. “Captain Ifere and some of the officers tried to seize control of the
Earth Spirit
an hour ago. They failed, but Jason Harmall and Captain Alanberg are under restraint aboard the
Ariadne
. The HSB is out. Captain Juhasz thought that ships from Earth were trying to reach us—I don’t know whether that’s true. Some of our own scientific officers have been confined. I don’t know what the captain intends to do. I’ve got to go now—I only took over while the tech answered the call of nature.”

I heard the click of the
transmit
button, before I could thank him. I didn’t like to ask if anyone at the dome was listening. If they were, they said nothing.

“Well,” I said to Angelina, “where the hell does
that
leave us?”

“It depends on what Juhasz has in mind,” she replied reasonably.

“What’s in Juhasz’s mind,” I said, “is a lot of empty space where the marbles once were. All we need now is for
Earth Spirit
and
Ariadne
to start exchanging shots. They could flame down together, leaving us all to play Robinson Crusoe. Then Vesenkov and Captain d’Orsay could shoot it out to decide who gets to be emperor. And the mute HSB that could have been the big stepping stone can wheel around the world forever, waiting until the natives achieve space travel in eighty thousand years or so. Won’t
they
be surprised?”

“I take it you aren’t going to compete?” she said.

“For what?”

“The job of emperor.”

“Hell, no,” I said. “I’m not old enough, remember?”

“I don’t think w have too much to worry about,” she said, after weighing it up. “We don’t figure in his grand plans, whatever they finally amount to. I think he’ll pass all undesirables back to the
Earth Spirit
. There’s no harm in letting us all go home. It’ll take three hundred years for anyone to get back here without the kindly guiding light.”

“First,” I said, “we have to get back to the
Ariadne.”

“I’ll lay even money,” she offered, “that by the time we reach the dome, the first shuttlecraft will be down. Now that the plague warning is off, Juhasz wants to go right ahead with plan A. That’s probably why he fell out with Harmall and precipitated the small war. We’ll arrive to find our deportation papers all signed and ready. We’ll be missing a great scientific opportunity, of course, and we won’t be very popular at home. Bearers of bad news never are. On the other hand, Harmall is the officially designated can-carrier. We played our part, so far as we’ve been allowed to.”

She was a monumental fountainhead of common sense when she was on form. At moments like that she almost reminded me of my mother.

“It would be nice not to have to leave so many loose ends,” I observed.

“There are always loose ends,” she observed. “We could work here half our lives, and there’d be loose ends all over the place. We could tie up some of the ones we have now, but loose ends are like the Hydra’s heads.”

“Hercules coped,” I pointed out.

“Hercules was a hero. But then,” she added with a grin, “Leander was some kind of hero too, wasn’t he?”

I grinned back. “Not exactly,” I said. “Hero was the other one.”

She didn’t know what I was talking about. All she knew was that Leander was a Greek name with vaguely classical connection.

“Hero and Leander were lovers,” I told her. “She used to put a light in her window at night so he could swim across the Hellespont to meet her. She was a priestess, and the meetings were illicit. He drowned one stormy night, and she cast herself from her window in despair. There are poems about it, but I never looked them up.”

“Sweet,” she said. “Do you go swimming a lot?”

“About as often as little angels fly.”

“I quite like flying,” she remarked, subverting the joke. I let it go.

“Speaking of stormy nights,” I said, “we’d better finish getting the shelter secured. The rain’s getting heavier and the wind is blowing.”

We had nothing much in the way of tent-pegs, so we finally decided to secure the canopy by weighting the flaps that once had secured it to the hull of the boat with big, rounded stones. We found half a dozen such stones lurking in the undergrowth; they were hard but not as heavy as they looked. They had the bulk of basketballs, but they weighed less than twenty kilos.

It had rained more or less solidly all day, and the weather showed no sign of improvement. The cycle of evaporation and precipitation seemed to be fairly constant on Naxos. The complex factors which result in such an unfair redistribution of the Earth’s watery wealth were mostly inapplicable on Naxos, which looked like the ideal posting for a lazy meteorologist.

As usual, Angelina took the first watch. Once we had established the custom, we didn’t like to vary it. Irregular habits, my uncle said (fearlessly facing up to the possibility of self-contradiction), are the bane of a well-ordered life.

It was even more cramped in the “tent” than it had been on the boat, despite the fact that we’d been able to discard several powerpacks before arranging the loads we’d have to carry overland to the dome. There was barely enough room to lie down. Exhaustion, though, is a great sedative, and I soon drifted off to sleep. The dream I was having when I woke up wasn’t particularly pleasant, but it was by no means one of my five-star nightmares. It mostly concerned getting wet and trying to attract the attention of passing spaceships with fires that wouldn’t produce enough smoke.

The reason I woke up was that Angelina was kicking me, and shouting something about the tent blowing away. I had to get to my feet and help her shift power-packs outside into the rainstorm in order to anchor the canopy more securely.

We’d just about completed this task when it occurred to me that it shouldn’t have been necessary.

“What happened to the goddam stones?” I asked, once we were back inside, dripping liberally all over the groundsheet.

“They went for a walk,” she said humorlessly.

“What did they use for legs?” I asked sarcastically.

“It’s not a joke,” she said, showing the first hint of intolerance I’d seen in her. “They weren’t stones—they were animals. They grew heads and legs and they stalked away about their business. They can change shape, and also—it seems—the structure and properties of their tissues. Tortoise-strategy, taken to its logical conclusion.”

I began to wish I’d seen it.

“It must have been a shock when you switched on the light,” I said.

“Revelation, dear boy. Remember the pink stuff? Liquid protoplasm. The thing which lived in the pool, and the things which came out of the water to feed both had some limited power to modify their form. It’s a good trick to be able to turn, if you’re an amphibian. As you move from one environment to another, you adapt. It makes so much sense, I wonder the amphibians back on Earth didn’t go in for it. Why stick to one metamorphosis when the talent is so useful to retain?”

“They didn’t have a chance,” I muttered. “Life was too tough for them. They got booted into touch in the evolutionary game. The wrong mutational heritage, and no time to catch up before the violence of the environment shoved them aside. I wonder how they do it?”

“No miracle,” she said. “Embryos can do it. It’s just a matter of maintaining infantile talents into adulthood, and learning to apply them more widely. Facultative metamorphosis. Must be easy when your soma knows how.”

“Axolotls could metamorphose more than once,” I recalled. “And they could hold off metamorphosis, too, if they wanted—they could breed as juveniles or adults. I
said
it was a pity we drove them to extinction. Hell!”

“What’s up?”

“The indigenes. They might be a race of bloody werewolves.”

“Werefrogs,” she corrected.

“No,” I said, sitting down and trying to think. “It’s serious. If this faculty
is
widespread in the life-system—your fundamental peculiarity of the animal kingdom—then the most advanced members are likely to be the ones which use it best.”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “Intelligence is a different kind of adaptability altogether. You may find that it’s the ones who couldn’t master shape changing that had to invest in cleverness instead. Cows have three stomachs and bats have sonar, but people don’t even have claws—their tricks are a different kind.”

“But it’s different!” I said. “This whole system is different—not a carbon copy of Earth’s, the way Calicos is. It is possible for evolution to transcend biochemical destiny. We always knew that it was, but until now there was no
instance.
We can’t lose this to Juhasz’s paranoia. We
can’t.”

“You might convince your young friend Norton of that,” she said, “but you might still find yourself outvoted—unless you want to stay here under Juhasz’s authority.”

I shook my head, and then rested it briefly on the palm of my hand.

“Better get back to sleep,” she said. “You still have two hours. Tomorrow will be a
hard
day. Save your speculations for the hours when we’ll need the distraction.”

It was good advice, if only it could be followed. I wasn’t up to it. Tired though I was, I couldn’t get back to the real state of inertia. I dozed, no doubt, but the slightest sound penetrated to my dream-led thoughts, and when it was my turn to stand guard I was anything but refreshed. Nevertheless, I stood my turn, and though we were not threatened, I would have been ready if we had been. Nothing of any considerable size came near the tent all night, and the only things I shone the light upon were the crazy toad-like creatures I’d taken for stones. Active, they didn’t look very different from the creatures on the islet, to which they were no doubt related.