Eden

IX

For two hours they cleared the lower bay of robot pieces, of almost impossibly interlocked parts that covered Defender’s casing like rubble from an avalanche. The heavier objects they lifted with a small hoist, and the Engineer and the Captain took apart whatever wouldn’t fit through the door. Two metal plates, which were wedged between Defender’s turret and a case of lead weights, finally had to be cut up with an electric arc, for which cables were lowered from the instrument panel in the engine room. The Cyberneticist and the Physicist sorted out the pieces pulled from the heap. What couldn’t be repaired was scrapped. The Chemist, in turn, divided up the scrap into metal and plastic. Sometimes they had to drop what they were doing to help move some particularly massive piece. By six o’clock they had gained sufficient access to Defender’s flattened head to open its upper hatch.

The Cyberneticist was the first to jump into the dark interior. A light was lowered to him on a wire. They could hear his shout, muffled as if coming from a well.

“They’re all here!” he cried triumphantly. “Everything’s working! You could get in and drive off!”

“Well, Defender was built to take punishment,” said the Engineer, beaming. He had bleeding scratches on his forearms.

“Gentlemen, it’s six. If we’re going to get water, we’d better do it now,” said the Captain. “The Cyberneticist and the Engineer have their hands full, so I think we should use the same crew as yesterday.”

“I don’t agree!”

“Look…” the Captain began, but the Engineer said, “You can manage here as well as I can. I’m going this time.”

They argued for a while, but finally the Captain gave in. The expedition would consist of the Engineer, the Physicist, and the Doctor. The Doctor insisted on going again.

“The canisters are ready,” said the Captain. “It’s about twelve miles to the brook.”

“If we can, we’ll make two trips,” said the Engineer. “That would give us a hundred gallons.”

“We’ll see.”

The Chemist and the Cyberneticist wanted to accompany them out, but the Engineer put up his hand. “We don’t need an escort. That’s silly.”

“I have to be outside anyway,” said the Chemist.

They went up the steel ladder.

The sun was low in the sky. After checking the suspension, the steering, and the fuel supply, the Engineer took the driver’s seat. But the moment the Doctor got in, the doubler, who had been lying in the shade of the ship, stood up, straightened to its full height, and shuffled toward him. When the jeep began moving, the huge creature whined and set off after it at a speed that amazed the Chemist. The Doctor shouted to the Engineer, and the jeep came to a halt.

“Now what?” grumbled the Engineer. “We’re certainly not taking him with us!”

The Doctor, not knowing what to do, looked with embarrassment at the head and shoulders towering above him as the doubler, shifting its weight from one foot to the other and making wheezing sounds, stared down into his face.

“Lock him up in the ship. He’ll follow you otherwise,” advised the Engineer.

“Or put him to sleep,” said the Chemist. “If he runs after us, he might attract something else.”

That was enough to persuade the Doctor. The jeep turned back to the ship, and the doubler rushed after them, making its peculiar leaps. Then the Doctor coaxed the giant into the tunnel, which was no easy task. He returned a quarter of an hour later, angry and upset.

“I put him in the first-aid room,” he said, “where there’s no glass or anything sharp. But he might panic.”

“You sound like a mother hen,” said the Engineer.

The Doctor bit his lip, but said nothing in reply.

They set off again, circling the ship in a wide arc. The Chemist went on waving even when all that was visible was a high, thinning cloud of dust. Then he paced back and forth near the shallow trench that contained the thrower.

Two hours later he was still pacing there when a cloud of dust reappeared among the slender calyxes and their long shadows. The red, swollen, egg-shaped solar orb had just touched the horizon, and now there was a bank of bluish clouds in the north. But the coolness that usually came at that time of day was missing; it was still stifling.

The jeep approached, bouncing over disk-grooves. It was lower to the ground, and the tires were flatter. The Chemist could hear water splashing in all the canisters. There was even a full can on the empty seat. “How was it?” he asked.

The Engineer removed his dark glasses and wiped the sweat and dust from his face with a handkerchief.

“Very pleasant.”

“You didn’t meet anyone?”

“There were disks, as usual, but we passed them at a distance. We came out on the other side of that copse with the hollow in it — you know the one. The only problem was filling the canisters. A pump would have come in handy.”

“We’re going back,” the Physicist said.

“But first you’ll have to put the water into —”

“Oh, there’s no point,” said the Physicist. “We have so many empty canisters, we’ll take some of them. Afterward we can carry the whole lot down at once.”

He and the Engineer exchanged a look, as though they shared some secret thought. The Chemist failed to notice this, though he was surprised at the haste with which they unloaded the canisters and threw the new ones on the rack. A moment later they were off in a cloud of dust, which, in the light of the setting sun, made a long crimson wall across the plain.

The Captain stepped out of the tunnel. “Still not here,” he said.

“They were here, exchanged their canisters for empty ones, and left.”

The Captain was more puzzled by this than angry. “That quickly?” He told the Chemist that he would replace him on watch in a moment, then went down to report to the Cyberneticist, who was working on the master robot.

The Cyberneticist nodded abstractedly, having some twenty transistors in his mouth, which he spat into his hand like pits. Wrapped around his neck and smoothed out over his chest were hundreds of wires of different colors, which had spilled from the robot’s entrails. These he was now connecting at such speed that his fingers seemed to be flying. Sometimes he would stop suddenly and, for a full minute or longer, stare in amazement at the diagram spread out before him.

The Captain returned to the surface, replaced the Chemist (who went off to prepare supper for the crew), and sat down beside the thrower. To kill time, he made notes in the margins of the assembly manual that the Engineer had prepared.

For two days now they had been racking their brains over what to do with the twenty-five thousand gallons of radioactively contaminated water in the loading bay. In order to purify the water, they needed to get the filters working, but the cable that supplied the filters with power and had to be repaired lay in the flooded area. The ship was equipped with diving gear, though not the type that was radiation-shielded. Nor was there much point in jury-rigging a shield with lead; it would be easier now to wait for the robots to be repaired and have them do the job.

The Captain sat in the night under the ship’s stern, under the blinking light. He made his notes as quickly as possible, because the light, each time, lasted no more than three seconds. Later he would laugh, seeing the scrawl this had made of his handwriting. He glanced at his watch: almost ten.

He stood up, paced, looked for the jeep’s headlights, but could see nothing. He began to walk in the direction from which the jeep would be returning.

As usual when he was alone, he looked up at the stars. The Milky Way was climbing steeply through the blackness. From Scorpio the Captain moved his eyes left, and suddenly held his breath.

Capricorn’s brightest stars were barely visible, lost in a pale glow, as though the Milky Way had expanded and absorbed them. Then he understood: it was a reflection in the sky directly above the eastern horizon. His heart began to pound, and he could feel a pressure in his throat. He clenched his teeth. The reflection was whitish, dim, but later brightened, flaring several times in succession. The Captain closed his eyes, listened with the utmost concentration, but all he could hear was the pulsing of his own blood. The constellations were now almost invisible. He stood stock-still, staring at the horizon, which was filling with misty light.

His first thought was to return to the ship and tell the others. They could bring the thrower to the battle. But on foot that would take at least three hours. Besides the jeep, they had a small helicopter, but it was sitting in radioactive water, wedged between cases. All they had been able to see of it was its broken blade, and the cabin was probably in worse condition. That left Defender. They might simply climb inside Defender, open the loading hatch by remote — there was a transmitter in the engine room — and ride down through the water, which in any case would pour out as soon as the hatch was open. In Defender they would be shielded. But could the hatch be opened? And what would they do later with all the radioactive soil around the ship? It would cover an enormous area…

He decided to wait ten minutes. If he didn’t see the headlights by then, they would go. He looked at his watch: thirteen minutes after ten. The reflection — no, he was not mistaken — was spreading slowly along the horizon, approaching Alpha Phoenix, a strip of pink on top and dull white below. He looked at his watch again. Four minutes to go. He saw the headlights.

At first they were like a twinkling star; then they divided in two, jumped up and down, and finally grew dazzling. The Captain could now hear the sound of tires. The men were traveling fast, but not at breakneck speed, and the fact that they were in no great hurry set his mind completely at rest. As usual in such circumstances, he now felt anger.

Without realizing it, he had walked a good three hundred feet from the ship. The jeep braked sharply, and the Doctor shouted, “Get in!”

The Captain jumped into an empty seat, pushing a canister aside, which he found to be empty.

He looked at the men — they appeared to be unhurt — and then leaned over and touched the barrel of the thrower. It was cold.

A questioning look at the Physicist yielded no response, so the Captain waited, saying nothing.

At the ship the Engineer veered sharply, which pushed the Captain back into his seat and made the empty canisters clatter. The jeep came to a halt in front of the tunnel entrance.

“The water all evaporated?” the Captain asked with irony.

“We couldn’t get the water,” said the Engineer. He swung around on his swivel seat. “We couldn’t get to the brook.”

No one stepped out of the jeep. The Captain searched the Engineer’s face, then the Physicist’s.

“On our first trip we saw something different,” said the Physicist, “but we didn’t know what it meant. We wanted to check it again.”

“And if you didn’t return, what good to us would your circumspection have been?” asked the Captain, no longer able to hide his anger. “I want to hear everything. Now!”

“They’re doing something there, by the brook, on this side of it and beyond it, and in the hills and all the hollows, along the grooves. In a radius of several miles,” said the Doctor. The Engineer nodded.

’The first time, when it was still daylight, we saw a group of those huge tops. They were in a V formation, throwing up earth as if doing some kind of excavation. We only noticed them from the top of the hill on our way back. But I didn’t like what I saw.”

“What didn’t you like?” the Captain asked.

“That the vertex of their wedge pointed in our direction.”

“And you went back there without saying a word about this?”

“All right, it was foolish,” said the Engineer. “But we thought that, well, there would be arguments about who should go, who should risk his life, et cetera, so we decided it would be simpler and quicker to go ourselves. I figured that when night fell, the tops would have to light up their workplace.”

“They didn’t see you?”

“No. At least, there was no indication that they did. We weren’t attacked.”

“How did you go?”

“Along the ridges of the hills, not on the ridges themselves but a little lower, so we wouldn’t be seen against the sky. Our headlights off, of course. That’s why it took so long.”

“So you had no intention of getting water? You took the canisters only to deceive the Chemist?”

“It wasn’t like that,” said the Doctor. They sat in the jeep, in the light of the blinker going on, going off. “We wanted to approach the brook farther up, from the other direction. But we couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“They were doing the same thing there. And now, since nightfall, they’ve been pouring some kind of luminescent liquid into the trenches. It gives off enough light for us to see perfectly.”

“What is it?” the Captain asked the Engineer.

The Engineer shrugged. “Maybe the trenches are molds. Though the liquid appears too thin to be metallic.”

“How do they carry it?”

“They don’t. They laid something along the grooves — a pipeline, maybe, but I can’t say for sure.”

“They run molten metal through pipes?!”

“I’m telling you what I saw in the darkness, through binoculars. The lighting was poor — the middle of each excavation glowed like a mercury lamp, there was a lot of glare — and we were at least half a mile away.”

The blinker went off; for a moment they sat unable to see one another; then it came on again.

“We ought to disconnect that damn thing,” said the Captain.

They saw the Chemist emerging from the tunnel. “Now what?” said the Captain. The Chemist came over to the jeep, and there was a hurried exchange of questions and answers. Meanwhile the Engineer went below and switched off the current to the blinker. In the ensuing darkness, the glow on the horizon was much brighter. It had moved more to the south.

“There were hundreds of them,” said the Engineer, who had come back up and was now standing beside the ship and looking toward the glow, his face gray in the light.

“Those huge tops?”

“No, doublers. You could see their silhouettes against the liquid. They were working quickly — evidently the stuff thickens — and were shoring it up with gratings of some sort, on the sides, in the back.

But the front, the part facing us, was left open.”

“What do we do? Sit and wait, twiddling our thumbs?” the Chemist asked, his voice shrill.

“No,” said the Captain. “Let’s check Defender’s systems.”

For a moment they watched the glow in silence. At times it seemed to intensify.

“Do you want to release the water?” the Engineer asked doubtfully.

“For the time being, no. I’ve been thinking about that. We’ll try the hatch. If the lock mechanism is working and the hatch opens, we’ll shut it immediately. At worst, a few dozen gallons will spill out, but that won’t present a problem — we can clear that up. And we’ll know that in an emergency we can use Defender.”

“What good will Defender be if there’s a nuclear attack?” asked the Chemist.

“Ceramite can withstand a blast at a thousand feet from ground zero.”

“And at three hundred feet?”

“Defender can withstand a blast at three hundred feet.”

“Only in earthwork,” the Physicist corrected him.

“If we have to, we’ll dig ourselves in.”

“But even at fifteen hundred feet the hatch will melt shut, we won’t be able to get out. We’ll cook like lobsters!”

“This is silly. At the moment there are no bombs falling. Besides, let’s admit it, we can’t abandon ship. If the ship is destroyed, what do we make another one out of?” The Engineer’s question was greeted by silence.

A thought came to the Physicist. “But wait — Defender isn’t complete. The Cyberneticist removed its diodes.”

“Only from the sighting system. We can aim without them. Anyway, if antiprotons are used, you don’t need a direct hit…”

“I’d like to ask something,” the Doctor said. Everyone turned to him. “It’s not important. I just wanted to know how the doubler’s doing…”

There was silence, then laughter, as if suddenly all danger had disappeared.

“He’s sleeping,” said the Captain. “Or at least he was sleeping at eight, when I looked in on him.

Almost all he seems to do is sleep. Does he ever eat?” he asked the Doctor.

“Not anything here. He hasn’t touched a thing I offered him.”

“Yes, we all have our problems,” mock-sighed the Engineer, grinning in the darkness.

“Hello!” The voice came from below. “Attention, please!”

They turned around quickly as a large dark form crawled from the tunnel and with a slight grating sound stood erect. The Cyberneticist appeared behind it with a glowing light on his chest.

“Our first universal!” he said proudly. But then he looked at his colleagues’ faces. “Something’s happened?”

“Not yet,” replied the Chemist. “But more might happen than we’ve bargained for.”

“Well… we have this robot,” said the Cyberneticist, somewhat lamely.

“Wonderful. You can tell it to get to work right away.”

“Doing what?”

“Digging our graves!” And the Chemist pushed his colleagues aside and walked off. The Captain stood watching him, then went in the same direction.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked the Cyberneticist, stupefied.

The Engineer explained. “They’re making preparations against us in the valleys east of here. We discovered this on our excursion to the brook. They’ll probably attack, but we don’t know what form it will take.”

“Attack?”

The Cyberneticist had been so absorbed in his work that he seemed not to understand what the Engineer was saying. He stared at the men, then turned toward the plain. Two figures silhouetted against the glow were slowly making their way back. The Cyberneticist looked up at his robot, which was motionless, as though hewn from stone.

“We must do something…” he whispered.

“We’re activating Defender,” said the Physicist. “Whether that helps or not, at least it gives us something to do. Tell the Captain to send the Chemist down. We’ll be repairing the filters. The robot can do the electrical work. Let’s go, gentlemen.”

The Physicist and the Cyberneticist entered the tunnel, and the universal robot turned and followed them.

The Engineer looked with admiration at the machine and said to the Doctor, “You know, Blackie will come in handy. It can work underwater.”

“But how will you give it orders? Sound won’t carry,” the Doctor asked abstractedly, speaking only to keep the conversation going. He was watching the two men in the night. They were turning away again. It looked like a pleasant stroll beneath the stars.

“With a microtransmitter. You know that,” said the Engineer, following the Doctor’s gaze. Then he continued in a different tone: “It’s because he knew we’d succeed…”

“Yes,” the Doctor said, nodding. “That’s why he didn’t want to leave Eden too soon…”

“It doesn’t matter.” The Engineer was already making for the tunnel. “I know him. It’ll pass when the action starts.”

“Yes,” agreed the Doctor, following him.

After about a quarter of an hour, the Captain and the Chemist returned to the ship. Before the work began, Blackie was sent up to erect a six-foot embankment around the tunnel entrance, packing down the earth, and then to bring everything below — except for the entrenched thrower and the jeep.

Dismantling the jeep would have taken too much time; anyway, they needed the robot.

At midnight they got down to work in earnest. The Cyberneticist inspected all Defender’s circuits, the Physicist and the Engineer repaired and adjusted the radiation niters, and the Captain, in protective clothing, monitored the well in the lower level of the engine room. The robot was at the bottom, six feet underwater, working on the cables.

It turned out that the filters, even after they were repaired, did not work at full capacity, because several of the units were not functioning; the men solved this problem by accelerating the pumps. The purification proceeded under fairly primitive conditions: every ten minutes the Chemist took samples from the tank for analysis, because the automatic radiation gauge was broken, and its repair would have required time they did not have.

At three in the morning the water was almost completely clean. They didn’t bother to weld the tank from which it had burst when the front plate struck one of the main ribs. Instead, they simply pumped the water into an empty reserve tank on the side. In normal circumstances, such an unbalanced load would have been unthinkable, but for the moment the ship was not going anywhere. After pumping the water out, they blew compressed air through the lower chamber. A little radiation remained on the walls, but no one had any reason to go in there for the time being. Next they worked on the hatch.

According to the indicators, the mechanism was in perfect order, but on the first try the hatch refused to open. After they debated whether or not to use the hydraulics, the Engineer decided finally that it would be safer to inspect the hatch from outside, so they went out to the surface.

It was not easy to reach the hatch, which, located near the bottom of the hull, was now more than twelve feet in the air. Hurriedly they threw up a scaffold and a platform, using scrap metal (this was no problem now, with the robot doing the welding), and brought their lights to bear on the place.

The sky in the east had become gray; the glow was no longer visible. Above, the stars were slowly going out. Large drops of dew trickled down the ceramite plates of the hull.

“Curious,” said the Physicist. “The mechanism is working. Nothing wrong with the hatch, except that it won’t open.”

“I don’t like things that are curious,” remarked the Cyberneticist.

“Well,” said the Captain, “what about applying an age-old method?” And he raised a twenty-pound hammer.

“You can tap the rim, but not too hard,” agreed the Engineer reluctantly. He disliked that “method.”

The Captain, with a look at the black robot, which stood like a square statue in the gray dawn as it steadied the scaffold with its chest, hefted the hammer in his hands, swung it a little — not too much — and struck. He struck again, steadily, and again, each time a few inches higher, which was awkward at the angle he stood, but the physical activity felt good. The rhythm of the tapping was broken by a different sound, a groaning that seemed to come from the very ground beneath them. Then they heard a piercing, rising whistle, and the scaffold began to shake.

“Down!” cried the Physicist. They leaped off the platform one by one; only the robot didn’t move.

Dawn was already breaking; both the plain and the sky were the color of ash. The groaning increased, and so did the whistle, and the men instinctively crouched and covered their heads with their arms as they took cover under the ship. A quarter of a mile away, soil shot up like a geyser. The sound that accompanied it was strangely faint and muffled. They ran for the tunnel, and the robot followed. The Captain and the Engineer stopped behind the protection of the embankment and looked east, where the thunder was. The whole plain shook. The whistling intensified, and the sky filled with organlike squeals, as though squadrons of invisible aircraft were diving straight at them. In the foreground, jets of sand and earth rose black against the lead sky.

“A normal civilization, wouldn’t you say?” said the Physicist from below, in the tunnel.

“They’re flying overhead, but I don’t see them,” muttered the Engineer. The Captain couldn’t hear him: the squealing continued and the ground went on spouting, though the spouting came no nearer the ship. The two men watched: nothing changed. The thunder on the horizon merged into a single, protracted, unvarying bass rumble, and now the missiles fell without explosion, almost silently. The earth thrown up by the impacts lay in low mounds, like molehills, surrounding the strikes.

“The binoculars,” the Captain shouted into the tunnel.

A moment later he had them in his hand. As he looked, his astonishment grew. At first he thought that the attacking artillery was finding the range, but no, the invisible missiles kept falling in the same way.

Sweeping the landscape with his binoculars, he saw spurts in all directions. Some were nearer, some farther, but none closer to the ship than six hundred feet.

“What is it?! They’re not atomic, are they?!” came the muffled cries from the tunnel.

“No! Not atomic!” he shouted back, straining his voice. The Engineer put his mouth to the Captain’s ear.

“Did you see? They keep missing!”

“I can see!”

“We’re surrounded on all sides!”

He nodded yes. The Engineer took the binoculars and looked.

Any minute now it would be sunrise. The pale sky, looking washed, filled with a diluted blue. On the plain nothing moved, except for the spouts of earth, which, like a bizarre, flickering hedge that kept vanishing and then rising from the ground anew, surrounded the small hill where the ship was embedded.

Suddenly the Captain made a decision. He crawled out from behind the embankment and in three leaps reached the crest of the hill. There he dropped flat on the ground and looked in the opposite direction, which he had been unable to do at the tunnel entrance. The scene was the same: a wide crescent of strikes, a quivering, smoking hedge of explosions.

Someone hit the parched ground beside him: it was the Engineer. They lay shoulder to shoulder, watching, now almost unaware of the thunder at the horizon, which came in waves and at times seemed to recede — that was the effect of the morning wind, the air heated by the first rays of the sun.

“Those aren’t misses!” shouted the Engineer.

“Then what are they?”

“I don’t know. Let’s wait…”

“No, let’s go!”

They ran down the slope — although the missiles were not falling nearby, the howling and whistling were not pleasant — and jumped into the tunnel, one after the other. They left the robot in the passage and entered the ship, pulling the others in with them. They headed for the library, where it was quiet. Here even the ground tremors were almost imperceptible.

“Now what? Do they want to hold us here? To starve us?” asked the Physicist, when they told what they had seen.

“Who knows? I’d like to have a closer look at one of those missiles,” said the Engineer. “If the barrage lets up, it might be a good idea to go out and…”

“The robot can go,” the Captain said.

“The robot?” asked the Cyberneticist, almost in a groan.

“Nothing will happen to it, don’t worry.”

They felt a thud, faint but unmistakable. They looked at one another.

“We’ve been hit!” cried the Chemist, jumping up.

The Captain ran to the tunnel. Up on the surface, nothing appeared to have changed. The sky still thundered — but on the sunlit sand beneath the stern of the ship lay something black and speckled, like a burst bag of shot. He tried to find the place where the strange missile had hit the hull, but the ceramite bore no marks. Before the men behind him could stop him, the Captain began picking up the fragments and putting them into his empty binoculars case. They were still warm.

The Chemist shouted at him. “You’re crazy! That could be radioactive!”

They ran back inside. The fragments were not radioactive; the counter, brought near them, was silent. Curiously, they were not cased in any kind of metal. In the hand they crumbled into glistening grains.

The Physicist examined the grains with a magnifying glass, then quickly took them to a microscope. Peering, he whistled.

“Well? Well?” They literally had to pull him from the eyepiece.

“They’re sending us watches…” the Chemist said softly, looking up from the microscope after his turn.

There in the field of vision lay hundreds of tiny cogs, wheels, springs, and spindles. The men put a different sample under the lens and saw the same thing.

“What in the hell is it?” said the Engineer.

The Physicist paced — they were in the library — from one wall to another, his hair ruffled. He stopped and stared at them with a wild look, then continued pacing.

“An extremely complicated mechanism of some kind,” mused the Engineer, holding a pile of grains in his hand. “There must be millions, if not billions, of these little gears and wheels here! Let’s go up,” he said, “and see what’s happening.”

The attack was still going on. The robot, standing guard in the tunnel, had counted 1,109 hits.

“Let’s try the hatch now,” said the Chemist when they returned to the ship.

The Cyberneticist was hunched over the microscope, looking at the grains. He did not answer when they spoke to him.

In the engine room, the indicator light for the lock was still on. When the Engineer flicked the switch, the light obediently blinked: the hatch was opening. He closed it immediately and announced, “We can ride Defender out anytime.”

“Even with the hatch twelve feet off the ground?” asked the Physicist.

“For Defender that’s no problem.”

At the moment, however, there was no urgent need to leave, so they returned to the library. The Cyberneticist was still at the microscope.

“Let him be. Maybe he’ll come up with something,” said the Doctor. “And now… we shouldn’t just sit here. I suggest we get back to repairing the ship.”

With a sigh they rose from their seats. Indeed, what else was there to do? The five descended to the engine room, where the damage was the greatest. The distributor required hours of painstaking work: each circuit had to be tested twice, first with the current off, then on. Every so often the Captain would go out on top and return, saying nothing. In the control room, which was buried forty-five feet underground, they could feel a slight vibration. Noon passed. Their work would have gone much faster with the help of the robot, but they needed it in the tunnel. By one o’clock it had counted more than eight thousand hits.

Although no one was hungry, they ate lunch, to keep up their strength, as the Doctor said. At twelve past two the vibration stopped. Everyone immediately made for the tunnel. On the surface, a small cloud covered the sun, and the whole plain lay shimmering in the heat. There was still dust in the air, from the explosions, but silence reigned.

“Is it over?” the Physicist asked in a voice that sounded strangely loud: over the last few hours they had grown accustomed to the barrage.

Total hits, according to the robot: 10,604.

About eight hundred feet from the ship, all around it, there was a strip of pulverized soil. In places individual craters ran together to form a ditch.

The Doctor began climbing over the embankment at the mouth of the tunnel.

“Not yet,” said the Engineer, holding him back. “Let’s wait.”

“How long?”

“Half an hour or, better, an hour.”

“Delayed charges? But there are no explosives there!”

“We don’t know that.”

The cloud moved away from the sun. It grew brighter.

The Captain heard the rustling first. “What’s that?” he whispered.

The others listened. Yes, they could hear it, too. The sound was like the wind moving through leaves or bushes.

But there were no leaves or bushes in sight, only the furrowed ring in the sand. The air was still.

But the rustling continued.

“Where is it coming from?”

“There?”

They spoke in whispers. The sound seemed to come from all sides now. Could it be the sand shifting?

“But there’s no wind…” the Chemist said.

“It’s coming from where the missiles hit…”

“I’ll have a look.”

“Are you crazy? What if those are timed devices?”

The Chemist paled, drew back. And yet the day was so bright, and everything so quiet… He clenched his fists. This was a hundred times worse than the barrage!

The sun was at its zenith. Shadows of cumulus clouds slowly swept across the plain. The clouds, layered and with flat bases, resembled white islands. There was no movement on the horizon; the land everywhere was empty. Even the gray calyxes, whose indistinct silhouettes before had stood above the distant dunes, were gone! It was only now that the men noticed this.

“Look!” cried the Physicist, pointing. But it didn’t matter in which direction they looked. The same thing was happening everywhere.

The cratered ground began to tremble. Something shiny was emerging from it. Each place a missile had fallen, there were sprouts. They rose in even rows, almost like the teeth of a comb.

Someone rushed out from the tunnel and ran toward the curved line of glimmering sprouts. It was the Cyberneticist. Everyone shouted and chased after him.

“I know what they are!” he cried, dropping to his knees before the glassy rows of sprouts.

They were finger-length now, and at the base thick as a fist. The sand swirled gently around each one; something was at work below.

“Mechanical seeds!” the Cyberneticist said. With his hands he tried digging up the nearest sprout, but the sand was too hot.

Someone ran and brought shovels, and then the sand and soil flew, revealing long, segmented, tangled strands of a lustrous material. The material was so hard, it rang like metal against the shovels.

When the hole was more than three feet deep, the men tried to pull the strange growth out, but couldn’t — it was too tightly connected to its neighbors.

“Blackie!” cried a chorus of voices. The robot approached. “Pull it out!”

Steel pincers closed on a shiny shoot as thick as a man’s arm. The robot’s torso stiffened, and the men watched as its feet began sinking slowly into the ground. There was a high hum, as of a string stretched to its limit.

“Let go!” commanded the Engineer. Blackie stepped awkwardly out of the ground and stood unmoving.

The sprouts, a hedge now, were almost a foot and a half high. At their base they began filling slowly with a darker, milky blue color.

“So,” said the Captain calmly. “It seems they want to fence us in.”

No one spoke for a while.

“But isn’t this rather primitive? I mean, we can still leave,” said the Chemist.

The Captain said, “That scouting party of theirs must have done their job well. Look, it’s an almost perfect circle around us.”

“Mechanical seeds,” said the Cyberneticist. He was calmer now, brushing the sand from his hands. “Inorganic spores sown by artillery.”

“But the stuff is not metal,” observed the Chemist. “Blackie would have bent it. It must be something like supranite.”

“No, it’s sand, only sand!” said the Cyberneticist. “Don’t you see? This is the product of an inorganic metabolism! Sand is converted catalytically into some macromolecule based on silicon. Those shoots are made of that — just as plants extract salts from the soil.”

The Chemist knelt and touched the shiny substance. He looked up. “And what if they had landed on a different kind of soil?” he asked.

“They would have adapted. Of that I’m certain! That’s why they’re so hellishly complex: designed and programmed to produce the most resistant material possible from what they have at their disposal.”

“If it’s just silicon, Defender should have no problem getting through it,” said the Engineer with a smile.

“I wonder if this was really an attack,” the Doctor said thoughtfully. The others looked at him in surprise.

“How would you describe it?”

“Perhaps… an attempt at defense. To isolate us.”

“And then? Are we supposed to sit here and wait like worms under a bell jar?”

“Why do you need Defender?”

The question made them hesitate. The Doctor went on: “We’re no longer short of water. The ship will be repaired — in all likelihood — in a week, in ten days. The nuclear synthesizers should be functioning in a few hours. I don’t see this as a bell jar. A high wall, rather. An impassable barrier for them, and therefore they assume for us as well. With the synthesizers, we’ll have food. We require nothing from them, and they could hardly have been clearer in telling us that we’re not welcome here…”

They listened, frowning. The Engineer looked and saw that the tips were almost knee-level, and that they were joining, fusing. The rustling was now so loud that it sounded like a hundred beehives. The bluish roots at the base of the wall had swollen almost as thick as tree trunks.

“Could you bring the doubler here?” the Captain asked unexpectedly.

The Doctor looked at him strangely. “Now? Here? For what reason?”

“I don’t know. Just bring him. Please.”

The Doctor nodded and left. The others stood silent in the sun until he reappeared. With difficulty the naked giant crawled out of the tunnel behind him. It seemed animated, almost satisfied, following the Doctor and gurgling softly. Then its flat little face tensed, its blue eye widened, it wheezed. It turned around and began to wail. It ran toward the shiny wall with great leaps, as though intending to hurl itself at it, but instead, hopping grotesquely, the creature ran along the entire circle, whining and coughing. Then it ran to the Doctor and began plucking at the chest of his suit with its stubby fingers and peering into his eyes. Sweat poured off it. It pushed at the Doctor, jumped back, looked around again, and, drawing its small torso into its trunk with an unpleasant noise, fled into the dark tunnel. They could see the flat, twitching soles of its feet as it crawled inside.

“Were you expecting that?” the Doctor finally asked the Captain.

“No… not really. I just thought that the wall wouldn’t be strange to him. I expected a reaction.

Some kind of recognition. But nothing like this…”

“It was recognition, all right,” the Physicist muttered.

“Yes,” said the Doctor. “He’s seen this before. Something similar, in any case. And he’s petrified by it.”

“Execution, Eden-style?” the Chemist murmured.

“I don’t know. In any case, this indicates that they use the ‘living wall’ not only against invaders from space.”

“Maybe he’s simply afraid of anything that shines,” suggested the Physicist. “That would also explain the incident with the mirror strip.”

“No. I showed him a mirror in the ship, and he was not interested,” said the Doctor.

“Then he’s not that stupid,” said the Physicist. He was standing by the glassy hedge, which was now up to his waist.

“Once bitten, twice shy.”

“Listen,” said the Captain. “This is getting us nowhere. What do we do now? Repairs? Yes, of course, but I was thinking…”

“Of another expedition?” said the Doctor.

The Engineer smiled ruefully. “I’m always game. Where? To the city?”

“That will mean war,” the Doctor said. “Because the only way you’ll get there is with Defender.

And with its antiproton launcher, before you know it, you won’t be gathering information, you’ll be blasting away.”

“I wasn’t thinking of an encounter,” the Captain replied. “Everything we’ve seen indicates that the population of Eden is highly stratified. So far we have not been able to establish contact with the stratum responsible for intelligent activity. Yes, I can see that they would regard an advance toward the city as an attack. However, the west is still unexplored. With Defender, two men will be enough crew. The rest can work on the ship.”

“You and the Engineer?”

“Not necessarily.”

“It would be better with three,” said the Engineer.

“Who wants to go?”

They all did.

The Captain smiled. “Hardly have the guns ceased to roar than curiosity begins to consume them.”

“Let it be the Chemist and me,” the Engineer said. “And the Doctor can accompany us as a representative of reason and virtue. You stay,” he said to the Captain. “You know the procedures. Set Blackie to work immediately on the lifters, but don’t start digging under the ship until we return. I’ll want to check the statics.”

“As a representative of reason and virtue, I want to know the purpose of this expedition,” said the Doctor. “The moment we open the hatch, we’re entering the stage of confrontation, like it or not.”

“Make a counterproposal,” the Engineer said.

Behind them hummed, almost melodiously, the hedge, rising over their heads. The sunlight was broken into rainbows by its tangle of glassy veins.

“I don’t have one,” the Doctor admitted. “Events are happening too fast, and so far all our plans have led to surprises. The most rational thing, I think, would be not to make any more expeditions. In a week or two the ship will be ready for flight, and we can circle the planet at low altitude and possibly learn more than we can now, and more easily, too.”

“You can’t believe that,” the Engineer said. “If we learn nothing here at close quarters, what will a flight above the atmosphere tell us? And as for ‘rational’… if people were rational, we wouldn’t be here in the first place. What’s rational about flying to the stars?”

“I didn’t think I’d convince you,” muttered the Doctor. He turned and walked along the wall of glass.

The others went back to the ship.

The Captain said to the Engineer, “Don’t count on making any sensational discovery. The terrain to the west will probably be similar to what we have here.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s unlikely that we landed in the center of a small barren area. To the north there’s a factory, to the east a city, to the south a ‘settlement.’ Chances are, we’re sitting on the edge of a desert that’s to our west.”

“We’ll see.”