Eden

XII

An hour later they were on the plain. The night was full of stars. The bushes were few and far between, then disappeared altogether, and there was nothing but dunes, which undulated in the single headlight. Defender took them quickly, as though impatient. The seats rocked, the tracks whistled. The lights on the control panel shone pink, orange, green. The Engineer had his face to the screen, looking for the ship.

What before had been accepted matter-of-factly — that they had gone off without radio contact.

— now seemed madness to him. As though the extra hour or two it would have taken to modify the transmitter was too much. When he was almost certain that he had passed the ship in the dark and was now to the north of it, he sighted it — not the ship, that is, but a strangely luminous bubble. Defender slowed down. The slanting walls gleamed like silver and fire in its headlight. When the blinker inside went on, the effect was extraordinary: a high dome, open at the top, erupted in tangled rainbows.

Reluctant to shoot, the Engineer made for the spot where the vehicle had previously carved a way for itself. But the mirrorlike wall had filled in the gap from both sides; the only sign of passage was a patch of fused sand at the base of the structure.

With the full force of its sixteen tons, Defender pushed at the wall until the hull complained. The wall did not yield.

The Engineer backed away slowly to six hundred feet, aimed the cross hairs as low as possible, and touched the pedal. Not waiting for the seething rim of the opening to cool, he moved forward. The turret grazed it, but the material, softened by the heat, gave. Defender glared one-eyed through the empty ring and with a low murmur rode up to the ship.

Only Blackie was there to greet them, and it turned immediately and left. Then there was the inevitable delay of having to clean the hull and take radiation readings before they could leave the cramped interior of the machine.

The blinker came on. The Captain, the first to emerge from the tunnel, looked at the black patches on Defender’s front, the two broken headlights, and the grim faces of the returning crew, and said, “You were in a fight.”

“Yes,” the Doctor replied.

“Come below. It’s still 0.9 roentgen per minute up here. Blackie can stay.”

Without another word, they descended. In the passage to the engine room the Engineer noticed a second, smaller robot connecting leads, but he didn’t even stop to have a look at it. There were lights on in the library; a small table had been set with aluminum plates and cups and a bottle of wine in the center.

The Captain said: “This was supposed to be a… celebration, since the gravimetric distributor was found to be intact, and the main pile is working. If we can raise the ship, we’ll be able to take off.

Now… it’s your turn.”

There was silence. “Well, you were right,” said the Doctor, looking at the Engineer. “It’s desert to the west. We did almost a hundred and twenty miles, then turned southwest.” He told about the inhabited place by the lake, how they had filmed it, and how on their way back they had come upon a group of statues. Here he hesitated.

“It looked like a cemetery, or perhaps a temple. It’s hard to describe what happened next, because I’m not sure what it meant — but that’s nothing new here. A pack of doublers appeared, running in panic; it looked as though they had been hiding, or had perhaps been driven there as part of a roundup. That’s just my impression. About a quarter of a mile farther down — this all happened on a slope — there was a small woods, and other doublers hiding there, doublers like the one in silver that we killed. Behind them, possibly camouflaged, was one of those gyrating machines, a huge top. But before we saw that, there was a tube, a flexible tube at ground level, giving off a foam that converted into a poison suspension or gas. I assume we can analyze it; it must have left a deposit in the filters, don’t you think?” He turned to the Engineer, who nodded. “Anyway, the Chemist and I got out to have a look at the statues, the turret was open, and we were gassed, Henry the worst of all, because the first wave of gas made straight for Defender. When we had got back in and pumped oxygen into the turret, Henry fired at the tube — or, rather, at where we thought it was, because you couldn’t see much in that mist.”

“You used antimatter?” the Captain asked quietly.

“Yes,” replied the Engineer.

“Couldn’t you have used the small thrower?”

“I could have, but I didn’t.”

“We were all…” The Doctor searched for the right word. “… shaken. Those doublers were not naked. They wore rags — as if, perhaps, their clothes had been torn in a struggle. They died, were dying, right before our eyes. And, as I said, before that we had very nearly been poisoned ourselves. That was the situation. Then Henry tried to find the continuation of the tube, if I remember correctly. Is that right?”

The Engineer nodded.

“So we rode down toward the woods, and saw those silvery creatures. They were wearing masks. Maybe gas masks. They shot at us — I don’t know what they were using — and we lost a headlight. At the same time, the huge top started moving. It attacked us from the side, out of the bushes.

Then… Henry fired.”

“At the woods?

“Yes.”

“At the silvery creatures?”

“Yes.”

“And at the top?”

“No, the top hit us and broke against Defender. There was a fire, of course. The scrub burned like paper.”

“Did they try to establish contact?”

“No.”

“Did they pursue you?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. The disks could have caught up with us.”

The Engineer disagreed. “Not in that terrain. There are a lot of ravines, gullies, a little like the Jura back on Earth.”

“I see. And then you came directly here?”

“We backtracked, went east.”

They sat in silence.

The Captain raised his head. “Did you kill… many of them?”

The Doctor glanced at the Engineer, saw that he was not going to answer, and said, “It was dark.

They were in the woods. I think I saw… maybe twenty. But farther back something else was shining.

There could have been more of them.”

“The ones that shot at you, they were definitely doublers? Nothing else?”

“I saw no smaller torsos on them, only those helmets. But, judging by their shape, size, and way of moving, they were doublers.”

“What did they use to fire at you?”

The Doctor was at a loss.

“Projectiles, probably nonmetallic,” said the Engineer. “That’s only a guess. I didn’t inspect the damage — I didn’t even look. Not of much force, that was my impression.”

“Yes,” the Physicist agreed. “The two headlights — I took a quick look at them — are dented, not punctured.”

“One was smashed in the collision with the top,” the Chemist said.

“And the statues, what did they look like?” asked the Captain.

The Doctor described them as best he could. When he came to the white statues, he paused and smiled. “Again, unfortunately, we can only speak in metaphors…”

“Four eyes? Prominent foreheads?” the Captain prompted.

“Yes.”

“Were they stone carvings? Metal? From molds?”

“I can’t say. But definitely not from molds. The main thing, there was a certain… alteration of the proportions. A kind of, almost…” He hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Idealization,” the Doctor said, not without embarrassment. “Though we saw them only briefly, and so much happened afterward… It is too easy to make analogies. A cemetery. Escaped prisoners. A police roundup. Genocide, using gas. But we know nothing. Yes, some of the planet’s inhabitants killed others before our eyes. That cannot be disputed. But who killed whom — and whether the killed and the killers were really the same…”

“And if they were not the same, does that explain anything?” asked the Cyberneticist.

“Well… I’ve thought about one possibility. A macabre one, I admit. For mankind, as we know, cannibalism is taboo. Yet moralists find nothing terrible about eating roast monkey. My point is, what if biological evolution here has developed in such a way that the external differences between beings of human intelligence and beings that have remained at the animal level are much less than those between man and monkey? What we witnessed, then, might have been a hunt.”

“And what about that ditch toward the city?” said the Engineer. “Were those trophies of the hunt, Doctor?”

“But we can’t be certain…”

“In any case, we have the film,” said the Chemist, interrupting. “I don’t know why, but until now we really haven’t seen any normal, everyday existence on this planet. The film shows normality — at least that’s the impression I got.”

“Impression?” the Physicist asked, surprised. “But didn’t you see…?”

“We were in too much of a hurry trying to take advantage of the remaining light. And the distance was considerable, more than twenty-five hundred feet. But we have two spools of film taken with a telescopic lens. What time is it? Not yet twelve! We can develop them now.”

“Give them to Blackie,” said the Captain. “Gentlemen, I can see you’re upset. It’s true, we’ve got ourselves in a god-awful mess here, but…”

“Do contacts between higher civilizations inevitably come to this?” asked the Doctor.

The Captain shook his head, stood up, and took the bottle of wine from the table. “We’ll put this away,” he said, “for another occasion…”

When the Engineer and the Physicist left to examine Defender, and the Chemist went to supervise the development of the film, the Captain took the Doctor by the arm and brought him over to the library shelves, where he asked in a lowered voice, “Listen, is it possible that it was your unexpected appearance that caused the doublers to flee, and that it was only you, and not the doublers, who were the object of attack?”

The Doctor’s eyes widened. “You know, that never even occurred to me,” he admitted, then was lost in thought for a while.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I would say not… unless it was an attack that failed and then turned against… some of them. But there’s another explanation,” he added, straightening. “Suppose we rode into an area that was off limits. The ones fleeing were trespassers, say, a group of pilgrims, who knows? The sentries guarding the place brought out their weapon — that tube — just as Defender came on the scene. An unfortunate coincidence. Yes, it might have been like that.”

“You really think so?”

“Well, such an explanation is as valid as our first one. They could have put guards or sentries in the area when the news about us spread. Before, when we were in that valley, they had no knowledge of us, and that’s why we encountered no weapons…”

“We have yet to come across even a trace of their information network,” the Cyberneticist remarked from the depths of his cabin. “Writing, radio, recordings… Every civilization creates a technology of some kind to pool and save its experience. This one must as well. If only we could go to their city!”

“With Defender we could,” said the Captain, turning to him. “But that would precipitate a battle, whose outcome and consequences we cannot predict.”

“Then, if only we could sit down with one of their scientists or engineers…”

“And how do we do that?” asked the Doctor. “Put an ad in the paper?”

“If I only knew! It shouldn’t be that difficult. We arrive on the planet with a computer translator, we draw a couple of Pythagorean triangles in the sand, exchange gifts…”

“Stop that babbling.” It was the Engineer, standing in the doorway. “Come on. The film’s been developed.”

They went to the laboratory to see it, since that was the largest room on the ship. The Captain sat behind the projector. Everyone took a seat, and the robot switched off the light.

The first length of film was completely scorched. The lake flashed several times; then its shoreline came into view. There were ramps, and towers linked by struts, fretwork, over the water. The image blurred, came into focus again, and they could see that on the top of each tower were two five-bladed propellers turning in opposite directions. Turning very slowly. Objects slid down the ramps into the lake and submerged. It was impossible to distinguish their shapes, though they, too, moved very slowly. The Captain reran this part at a higher speed, but the only new thing they saw were the rings the objects made on the surface of the water. A doubler stood at the shore, its back to them. Only the upper part of its huge torso was visible above a barrel-shaped machine from which jutted a slender whip that terminated in windblown wisps.

The shore was replaced by flat, boxlike objects set on pylons. Moving across the screen, the objects carried various barrels like the one at the harbor containing the doubler. But they were empty.

There were flashes, blotches, blurs. The film had been overexposed. Between the blotches, small foreshortened figures, doublers, were moving about in pairs, in different directions, and their smaller torsos were covered with fluff, so that only the little heads showed, but the picture was not sharp enough for the men to see the individual faces.

Now a large mass, rhythmically rising and falling, filled the screen. It spread toward one of the bottom corners like syrup. Dozens of doublers walked atross it, and it looked as if they were holding something in their tiny hands, and touching, stroking, or brushing the mass into clumps. Occasionally it gathered into a peak, from which emerged a gray calyx. The picture shifted, but the moving mass continued to fill it. The detail was very sharp. In the center was a bunch of willowy calyxes, and over each calyx stood two or three doublers, lowering their faces to it, taking turns. The Captain reran this part slowly: now the doublers appeared to be kissing the calyxes. While one kissed, the others, their smaller torsos extended halfway, watched.

The picture shifted again. Now the men could see the edge of the mass, which was marked by a dark line, and near the line moved whirling spheres, much smaller than the disks the men knew. Their gyration was slow and jerky; one could see the strutted arms swinging. But this was an effect of the film, of the speed of the frames.

Slowly the screen filled with activity, but everything, in slow motion, seemed to take place in a liquid. What the men had taken to be the “center of the town” was a dense network of grooves, along which ran curious half-barrels, rounded only on one side. From two to five doublers, usually three, sat in each one. Their small torsos seemed to be encircled by a belt connected to the outside of the “barrel,”

but that might have been only a reflection. The long shadows thrown by the setting sun confused the picture in places.

Above the grooves ran elegant openwork bridges. Here and there on the bridges huge tops spun, and again the gyration appeared as a series of complex movements, as though jointed limbs were pulling something invisible from the air. One top came to a stop, and doublers covered with a shiny material emerged from it. Just as the third doubler was getting out, pulling something hazy behind him, the image shifted.

Through the center ran a thick line, much closer to the lens than the rest of the picture. This line — or pipe — swayed gently; connected to it was a cigar-shaped object that spilled what looked like a cloud of leaves, though they were heavier than leaves, because they did not flutter but fell like weights. Below, on a concave surface, stood many rows of doublers, and sparks flew from their outstretched hands to the ground. But the rain of objects disappeared before it reached them.

The image shifted. Two doublers were lying motionless at the very edge. As a third approached them, they slowly got up. One of them swayed; with its small torso concealed, it looked like a sugarloaf.

The Captain reran that segment. When the recumbent bodies appeared, he stopped the film, sharpened the image, then went up to the screen with a large magnifying glass. But all he saw were dots.

It went dark: the end of the first spool. The beginning of the second showed the same picture, but at a slightly different angle and darker. The sun was setting. The two doublers slowly walked away; now the third was on the ground. Streaks shot across the screen; the camera was moving too fast. They were looking at a large grid with pentagonal openings. In each opening stood a doubler. In a few there were two doublers. Beneath the grid quivered another grid, blurry. Then they realized that the grid below was a shadow on the ground. The ground was smooth, slick, like wet concrete.

The doublers in the grid openings wore dark-colored, bulky clothing and were all performing the same movements: their smaller torsos, veiled by something semi-transparent, bent to one side, then the other, as if in a peculiarly slow gymnastics. The picture flickered and tilted; for a while it was difficult to see anything. It was also growing darker. They saw the edge of the grid of lines. One line terminated in a large disk, motionless, resting at an angle. More “traffic” — bulging objects full of doublers going in different directions.

Again the grid, this time from directly above. Doublers, foreshortened, waddled along in pairs; a whole herd of them, divided in two, like two lanes in a street. A cable extending beyond the picture moved down the center, pulling on blurred wheels something that emitted sharp flashes, oblong crystal or a block covered with mirrors. It rocked from side to side, throwing licks of light on the pedestrians it passed. Suddenly it halted and grew transparent, revealing a recumbent figure inside.

The Captain reversed the spool, rewound it, and, after the oblong object again approached, rocking, and displayed its contents, stopped the film. Everyone went up to the screen. There, between the two lanes, the two rows of doublers, lay a man.

“I think I’m going mad,” someone said in the darkness.

“Well, let’s watch it through to the end,” said the Captain.

They went back to their seats, the spool turned, the picture flickered and brightened. One by one, long objects moved through the crowd, but now they were covered with some bright fabric that hung down and trailed on the ground. The picture shifted to a desolate area bordered on one side by a slanting wall. There were clumps of scrub along the wall. A lone doubler walked in a groove that ran the whole length of the screen. The doubler leaped from the groove, as though in panic, and a gyrating top passed; there was a bright flash, then a mist. After the mist cleared, the doubler was lying motionless.

Everything became darker, almost black. The doubler seemed to twitch, or perhaps began to crawl away, until stripes shot across the screen, and the screen went white. The film was finished.

When the lights were turned back on, the Chemist took the spools to the darkroom to make some enlargements of selected frames. The others remained in the laboratory.

“Well, now, what do we make of all this?” said the Doctor. “Without trying, I could give two, even three different explanations.”

This angered the Engineer. “If you had done a proper study of the doubler’s physiology,” he said.

“we’d know a great deal more than we do now!”

“And when was I supposed to do that?” inquired the Doctor.

“Gentlemen!” cried the Captain. “This is beginning to sound like a scientific convention! All right, that figure shocked us. A dummy, undoubtedly, made in some sort of modeling material. Probably, through their information network, they’ve sent pictures of us to every settlement on the planet, and from the pictures they fashioned human effigies.”

“But why would they want to make such portraits?” asked the Doctor.

“For scientific or religious purposes, who knows? We won’t solve that one, no matter how long we discuss it. Still, it’s not all that strange. What we’ve seen is a rather small center where things are being manufactured. We may also have observed their… recreation, perhaps their art, a street scene — though what they were doing in the harbor, that pouring of objects, was none too clear.”

“None too clear,” the Doctor said. “Well put.”

“And there were what looked like scenes from army life — the ones dressed in silver, as we’ve seen before, serve a military function. As for the episode at the end… it may have been the punishment of an individual who broke a law, perhaps by using a groove reserved for the tops.”

“Summary execution for jaywalking seems a bit severe, don’t you think?” said the Doctor.

“Does anyone else have something to say?” asked the Captain, nettled.

The Physicist spoke. “The doublers appear to travel on foot only in exceptional circumstances.

That might be because of their size and weight — and the disproportion in their limbs, particularly between the hands and the trunk of the body. It would be interesting to try to draw an evolutionary tree that could produce such a shape. You’ve all noticed how they gesticulate — but none of them use their hands to lift loads, to pull or carry. Perhaps their hands serve another purpose.”

“Such as?” the Doctor asked, interested.

“I don’t know, that’s your field. I just think that, instead of attempting to understand the structure of their society, we ought to study, first, the individual, the building block of that society.”

“You’re right,” said the Doctor. “The hands, yes, that’s a problem… the evolutionary tree. We don’t even know if the doublers are mammals. That question I could answer in a few days — but it’s not the thing that impressed me the most in this film.”

“And what’s that?” asked the Engineer.

“The fact that, among the pedestrians, I saw not one who was solitary. Did you notice that?”

“Except at the very end,” said the Physicist.

“Precisely.”

No one said anything for a while.

“We’ll have to look at the film again,” said the Captain at last. “The Doctor is right: there were no solitary doublers. They went at least in pairs. Though, at the beginning — yes! — one of them was by itself in the harbor.”

“It was sitting in that cone-shaped thing,” said the Doctor. “In the disks, too, they sit individually. I was talking only about pedestrians.”

“There weren’t many of them.”

“There were several hundred. Imagine a bird’s-eye view of a street in a town on Earth. The percentage of solitary pedestrians would be considerable. At some hours they would even be in the majority. But here there were none at all.”

“What does that mean?” asked the Engineer.

The Doctor shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“But the one that came with us… he was by himself.”

“Consider the circumstances that led to that.”

The Engineer made no reply.

“Listen,” said the Captain, “this is getting us nowhere. We didn’t gather information systematically, because we’re not a research team. We had other worries, of the ‘struggle-for-survival’ variety. Now we must decide on a course of action. Tomorrow Digger will be working. We’ll have a total of two robots, two semiautomata, Digger and Defender, who may also help in the unearthing of the ship. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the plan the Engineer and I worked out. The basic idea is to lower the ship first to the horizontal, then stand it upright by packing soil under the hull. That’s the method the ancient pyramid-builders used. We’ll cut our ‘glass wall’ into pieces we can use to build a scaffold. There’s enough material, and we already know that the substance can be melted and welded at high temperatures. Using the wall that the inhabitants of Eden have so thoughtfully provided us with will shorten the task dramatically. We may be able to take off in three days.” He paused, seeing the men stir.

“Therefore I wanted to ask you: do we take off?”

“Yes,” said the Physicist.

“No,” said the Chemist, almost at the same time.

“Not just yet,” the Cyberneticist said.

A silence. Neither the Engineer nor the Doctor had voted.

“I think we should leave,” the Engineer said at last. Everyone looked at him with astonishment.

He went on:

“I felt differently before. It’s a question of the price. Just the price. Undoubtedly we could learn much more, but the cost of obtaining that knowledge… it might be too great. For both sides. After what has happened, the possibility of peaceful contact, of coming to an understanding, is, it seems to me, extremely remote. Each of us, whether we like it or not, has his own concept of this world. Mine was that terrible things were going on here, and that we should intervene. As long as we were Robinson Crusoes going through our wreckage and making repairs, I said nothing. I wanted to wait until I knew more, and until we could make use of our machines. But I see now that each intervention on behalf of what we hold to be good and right will end the way our last excursion did: with the use of the annihilator. We can always justify ourselves, of course, argue self-defense, and so on — but instead of helping, we’re destroying.”

“If we only had better knowledge…” said the Chemist.

The Engineer shook his head.

“With better knowledge we’d see that each side was right in its own way…”

“Whether the murderers are right or wrong,” the Chemist objected, “someone should give thought to their victims.”

“But what can we offer them besides Defender’s annihilator? Suppose we reduce half the planet to ashes in order to stop these incomprehensible roundups and exterminations. What then?”

“It’s not a simple matter of right and wrong,” said the Captain, joining the argument. “Everything that’s happening here is part of an ongoing historical process. Your impulse to help is based on the assumption that the society is divided into heroes and villains.”

“Into oppressors and oppressed,” said the Chemist. “That’s not the same thing.”

“All right. Let’s imagine that a highly developed race, arriving on Earth during our religious wars several hundred years ago, had decided to enter the conflict — on the side of the weak. Wielding its power, it forbids the burning of heretics, the persecution of dissenters, et cetera. Do you honestly think it would be able to make its humanitarian rationalism accepted throughout the planet? Remember: almost the whole of mankind were believers then. The aliens would have to pound us down to the last man, in which case there would be no one left to benefit from their idealism!”

“Then you think it’s impossible for us to help!” said the Chemist with vehemence.

The Captain looked at him a long time before replying.

“Help, my God. What do you mean by help? What’s taking place here, what we’re witnessing, is the product of a specific civilization, and we would have to destroy that civilization and create a new one.

— and how are we supposed to do that? These are beings with a physiology, psychology, and history different from ours. You can’t transplant a model of our civilization here. And you would have to construct one, too, that would continue to function after our departure… I suspected, for quite some time, that you had ideas similar to those of the Engineer. And that the Doctor agreed with me, which is why he kept discouraging us from making analogies to Earth. Am I right?”

“Yes,” said the Doctor. “I was afraid that through an access of noble-mindedness you would all want to establish ‘order’ here, which in practice would mean a reign of terror.”

“Maybe the oppressed would like a different life… but are too weak,” said the Chemist. “And if we saved some who were condemned…”

“We saved one,” the Captain retorted. “Now perhaps you can tell us what to do with him.”

The Chemist had no reply.

“The Doctor is also in favor of leaving?” said the Captain. “Good. Including me, that makes a majority.”

He broke off. His eyes grew round. He had been sitting facing the door — the half-open door. In the silence they heard only a faint lapping of water, and turned to follow the Captain’s stare.

In the doorway stood the doubler.

“How did he get out…?” But the Physicist’s words died on his lips. He saw his mistake. This was not their doubler. Theirs was locked in the first-aid room.

On the threshold was an enormous dark-skinned doubler, its smaller torso bent low and the head almost touching the lintel. The creature was dressed in a brown material that hung straight and encircled the small torso like a collar. Wound around the collar was a thick tangle of green wire. Through a slit on the side gleamed a broad metallic belt. The doubler did not move. Its flat, wrinkled face and two large blue eyes were covered by a transparent, funnel-shaped shield. From the shield ran thin gray strands that coiled around the smaller torso several times and crisscrossed in front, forming a kind of pocket, in which rested its hands, similarly bandaged. Only the knobby tips of the fingers protruded.

Everyone sat in amazement at the sight. The doubler bent over even more and with a cough moved slowly forward.

“How did it get in?… Blackie is in the tunnel…” whispered the Chemist.

Then the doubler slowly withdrew. It went out, stood in the dark corridor for a moment, and entered a second time — or, rather, only stuck its head in just beneath the lintel.

“It’s asking if it can enter,” the Engineer said in a whisper. Then he shouted, “Come in! Come in!”

He got up and backed away along the opposite wall, and the others followed him. The doubler regarded the empty center of the cabin blankly. It entered and slowly looked around.

The Captain went to the screen, tugged at it to make it whir upward, which uncovered the blackboard. He asked the men to step aside, took a piece of chalk, and drew a small circle, then drew an ellipse around the circle, and a larger ellipse outside that, and another, and another — four in all. On each ellipse he placed a small circle. Then he approached the giant in the center of the room and stuck the chalk in its little fingers.

The doubler accepted the chalk awkwardly, looked at it, looked at the blackboard, then slowly went toward it. It had to incline its smaller torso, which stuck out at an angle from the collar, in order to touch the board with a bandaged hand. The men watched with bated breath. Clumsily, with effort, the doubler tapped the circle on the third ellipse several times; it nearly filled the circle with crushed chalk.

The Captain nodded. Everyone breathed freely. “Eden,” he said, pointing at the circle. “Eden,” he repeated.

The doubler watched his mouth with interest. It coughed.

“Eden,” said the Captain slowly, enunciating clearly.

The doubler coughed several times.

“It can’t speak,” said the Captain, turning to his colleagues. “That’s for sure.”

They stood, not knowing what to do. The doubler moved. It dropped the chalk. There was a sound like that of a lock being opened. The brown material parted, as though ripped from top to bottom, and they saw a broad gold belt.

The belt unwound, rustling like metal foil. The doubler’s smaller torso leaned far over, as if to step from its body; bending almost in two, it grabbed the end of the foil with its fingers. The belt had uncoiled into a long sheet, which it held out, apparently offering it to them. The Captain and the Engineer reached out simultaneously, and both jumped. The Engineer gave a little cry. The doubler, apparently surprised, coughed several times, and the transparent shield wavered on its face.

“An electrical charge, but not very strong,” the Captain explained to the others, then reached for the foil a second time. The doubler released it. They examined the gold surface in the light: it was completely smooth, featureless. The Captain touched it at random and once again felt a mild electric shock.

“What is it?!” growled the Physicist, and began to run his hand over the foil. Electric shocks made his fingers quiver. “Give me some powdered graphite!” he said. “It’s there in the cabinet!”

He spread out the foil on the table, paying no attention to the twitching of his hand, sprinkled the foil with the graphite that the Cyberneticist had given him, and blew off the excess.

On the gold surface were tiny black dots scattered seemingly at random.

“Lacerta!” the Captain cried suddenly.

“Alpha Cygni!”

“Lyra!”

“Cepheus!”

They turned to the doubler, who was watching them calmly. Triumph gleamed in its eyes.

“A star map!” exclaimed the Engineer.

“Well, now we feel at home.” The Captain grinned.

The doubler coughed.

“Is it electrical writing?”

“Apparently.”

“How are the charges maintained?”

“Perhaps they have an electric sense!”

“Gentlemen, please! Let’s proceed logically,” said the Captain. “What now?”

“Show it where we’re from.”

“Right.”

The Captain quickly erased the board and drew the constellation of the Centaur. He hesitated, calculating in his head how that region of the Galaxy would be seen from Eden. He made a thick dot to indicate Sirius, added a dozen lesser stars, and on top of the Great Bear drew a small cross indicating the Sun. Then he touched his own chest and that of all his men in turn, swept his arm around the room, and again tapped the cross with his chalk.

The doubler coughed, took the chalk from him, pushed its small torso over to the board, and filled in the Captain’s sketch with three dots: Alpha Aquilae and the binary system of Procyon.

“An astronomer!” whispered the Physicist. “A colleague…”

“Very likely!” replied the Captain. “Now let’s go on!” What followed was a great amount of drawing. The planet Eden, the ship’s path, its entry into the gaseous tail, and the collision. Then the ship embedded in the ground — a cross-section of the hill and the ship.

The doubler looked at the drawings on the blackboard and coughed. It went to the table. From the green convolutions of its collar it extracted a thin, flexible wire, leaned over, and began moving the wire across the foil with extraordinary speed. This continued for some time. It stepped back, and the men sprinkled the foil with graphite, whereupon something strange occurred. Even as they were blowing away the excess powder, the emerging lines began to move.

First they saw a hemisphere with an oblique column inside. Then a small spot appeared and crept over the edge of the hemisphere. It grew larger and larger. They recognized the outline of Defender, though the sketch was inexact. Part of the curve of the hemisphere disappeared, and Defender entered through that gap. At that point everything disappeared, and the graphite on the foil was even. Suddenly it gathered to form the star map. Through the map emerged the figure of a doubler, sketched in long strokes. The doubler standing behind them coughed.

“That’s him,” said the Captain.

The map disappeared, leaving only the doubler. Then the doubler disappeared, and the map replaced it. This was repeated four times. Spread as though by an invisible breath, the graphite once again arranged itself into an outline of the hemisphere with the broken curve. The doubler’s silhouette appeared, much smaller, crawled toward the gap, and made its way in. The hemisphere disappeared.

The oblique cylinder of the ship became larger. In front, beneath the hull, there was an opening. Through it the doubler entered the ship. The graphite scattered in random clumps: end of message.

“That’s how it got here, through the loading hatch!” said the Engineer. “We left the damn thing open!”

“Wait — do you know what occurred to me?” the Doctor said. “Maybe they wanted, with that wall, not so much to shut us in as to prevent their — their scientists from contacting us!”

They turned to the doubler. It coughed.

“Well, enough of this,” said the Captain. “It’s been a very pleasant social gathering, but we have more important business before us! As for guerrilla warfare — forget it. We must go about this systematically. I suppose we ought to start with mathematics. The Physicist can handle that. Mathematics, and metamathematics, of course. The theory of matter, field theory. And then information theory, programming languages, semantics. Grammar, logic, vocabulary. All that belongs to you,” he said to the Cyberneticist. “And once we’ve set up that bridge, there’s biology, metabolism, economics, social forms, group behavior, and so on. There we won’t have to be in such a hurry. Meanwhile” — he turned to the Cyberneticist and the Physicist — “you two get started. You have the films to help you, the computer, the library. Use whatever you need.”

“To start with, we could take him around the ship,” said the Engineer. “What do you think? That might tell him a few things. And he’ll see that we’re hiding nothing from him.”

“Yes, that’s important,” the Captain agreed. “But — until we’re able to communicate with him properly — don’t let him into the first-aid room. That might cause some sort of misunderstanding. Now, let’s make a tour of the ship. What time is it?”

It was three in the morning.