Eden

XIII

The tour of the ship took quite a while. The doubler was especially interested in the atomic pile and the robots. The Engineer drew sketch after sketch for it, filling four notebooks in the engine room alone. The guest made a detailed inspection of the microgrid, was amazed to find it entirely submerged in a tank of liquid helium — a cryotronic brain, superconductive for quick reactions — but soon grasped the purpose of the cooling. It coughed for a long time and looked with approval at the diagram the Cyberneticist drew for it. Evidently they could communicate much more easily by diagrams than by trying to represent basic words through gestures or symbols.

At five in the morning the Chemist, the Captain, and the Engineer went off to bed. Blackie, after closing the loading hatch, stood guard in the tunnel, while the other three men took the doubler to the library.

“Wait,” said the Physicist as they passed the laboratory. “Let’s show it the periodic table. There are illustrations of the electron orbitals of the atoms.”

They went in. The Physicist was rummaging through a pile of papers in the cabinet when they heard a ticking.

“What’s that?” the Doctor asked.

The Physicist looked up, heard the ticking, too. His eyes widened. “It’s the Geiger. There must be a leak…”

He ran to the counter. The doubler, looking at the different instruments, now approached the table, and the counter began rattling like the roll of a drum.

“It’s the doubler!” said the Physicist, aiming the metal cylinder with both hands at the huge alien.

The counter whirred louder.

“He’s radioactive? What does that mean?” asked the Cyberneticist.

The Doctor, pale, took the cylinder from the Physicist and swept the air with it in the direction of the doubler. The higher he raised it, the weaker the sound. Near the creature’s clumsy, stout legs, the counter whirred and its red light went on.

The doubler moved its eyes from one man to another, surprised but not alarmed by what they were doing. It clearly didn’t understand.

“He came through the opening Defender made in the wall,” the Doctor said softly. “There’s a radioactive patch there…”

“Keep your distance!” the Physicist said. “He’s giving off more than a milliroentgen a second!

Unless we wrap him in ceramite foil; then perhaps we could risk it…”

“I’m more concerned about him!” the Doctor said, raising his voice. “How long do you think he was exposed? What kind of dosage did he get?”

“I–I have no idea…” the Physicist said. “You should do something! An acetate bath… Look at him — he doesn’t know!”

The Doctor rushed out of the laboratory without saying a word. He returned a moment later with the first-aid radiation kit. At first the doubler resisted their gestures for telling it to lie down, but eventually it submitted.

“Gloves!” the Physicist shouted, because the Doctor was touching the doublet’s skin with his bare hands.

“Should we wake the others?” asked the Cyberneticist, standing off to the side.

“No need,” muttered the Doctor, pulling on thick gloves. He leaned over the doubler. “So far, nothing… There’ll be a rash in ten, twelve hours, assuming…”

“If we could only communicate,” the Physicist said, half to himself.

“A transfusion… but how?” The Doctor closed his eyes. “The other one!” Then added, more softly, “No, I can’t. First I would have to type both bloods, test for agglutination…”

“Listen.” The Physicist pulled him aside. “It’s probably bad. He must have crossed the radioactive area the second the temperature dropped, and there would have been plenty of isotopes there, rubidium, strontium, rare earths. Are there white corpuscles in his blood?”

“Yes, but they’re not like human ones.”

“All rapidly multiplying cells are hit in the same way, regardless of the species. Though he probably has more resistance than man…”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because background radiation here is almost twice that of Earth. To some degree they must have adapted to it. And I don’t suppose your antibiotics…?”

“Of no use. The bacteria here are altogether different.”

“In that case… we should try to communicate with him on as broad a range of subjects as possible. The reaction, the apathy, if he behaves like a human being, won’t begin for another several hours…”

The Doctor looked quickly at the Physicist. They were standing five feet from the doubler, who did not take its blue eyes off them. “In other words, to pump as much information as we can out of him before he dies.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it quite like that,” said the Physicist, turning red in the face. “But any one of us, in his place… our first thought would be to complete the mission!”

The Doctor smiled bitterly. “Perhaps, knowing the score. But we gave him no choice. He was injured by us! It was our fault.”

“And now what? You want to expiate your sin? Don’t be ridiculous!”

“You don’t understand. That” — he pointed at the recumbent figure — “is a patient, and this” — he slapped himself on the chest — “is a doctor. And, except for a doctor, no one has any business here.”

“But… this is our only chance. We won’t be doing him any harm. It wasn’t our fault that…”

“It was! The doubler was injured because he followed Defender! But that’s enough. I have to take blood from him.”

He approached the creature with a syringe, hesitated, went back to the table for a second syringe. “I’ll need your help,” he said, turning to the Cyberneticist.

He approached the doubler now with both syringes and bared his arm. As the doubler watched, the Cyberneticist took a syringe, extracted a little of the Doctor’s blood, and stepped back. The Doctor took the second needle, touched the doubler’s skin with it, found a vein, inserted it. The doubler did not move. Its light-red blood filled the plastic cylinder. The Doctor deftly removed the needle, pressed the puncture with a cotton ball, and left the room.

The Cyberneticist, still holding the syringe containing the Doctor’s blood, asked the Physicist.

“And now what? Should we wake the others?”

“The Doctor will only make the same argument. No… the doubler must decide for himself. If he agrees, the Doctor will have to go along.”

The Cyberneticist gave him a look of surprise. “But how will the doubler decide? He doesn’t know — and we can’t tell him!”

“Of course we can,” the Physicist said, regarding the plastic cylinder containing the Doctor’s blood. “We have fifteen minutes while the Doctor counts corpuscles. Bring the blackboard here!”

“The blackboard!” And the Physicist began gathering bits of chalk.

The Cyberneticist took the blackboard off the wall, and together they set it up opposite the doubler.

“Not enough chalk! Bring some from the library, colored pieces!”

As the Cyberneticist went out, the Physicist took a stick of chalk and quickly sketched a hemisphere with the ship inside it. He felt the creature’s pale-blue eyes on him. When he was finished, he turned to the doubler, tapped the blackboard with his finger, wiped it with a wet sponge, and went on drawing.

The wall intact. Before the wall, Defender. Defender’s nose, the nuclear beam. The Physicist went over to the creature, touched it, returned to the blackboard, and tapped the chalk on the sketched figure. Then, quickly, he erased the picture, put the wall up again, rubbed another gap in it, surrounded the gap heavily with violet, and placed the doubler there, erased everything except the doubler, replaced the doubler with a larger doubler. Standing so that the doubler could see his every move, the Physicist began rubbing crushed violet chalk onto the feet of the figure. He turned around.

The doubler’s small torso, which had been resting on a rubber pillow that the Doctor had inflated, slowly rose, and the wrinkled monkey face and intelligent eyes turned from the blackboard to the Physicist, as though asking him what all this meant.

The Physicist nodded, grabbed a can and a pair of protective gloves, and dashed out of the laboratory. In the tunnel he almost ran into a robot, which, recognizing him, stepped aside. Outside, on the surface, the Physicist put the gloves on and ran to the gap in the crystal wall. At the shallow crater there he dropped to his knees and as quickly as possible took a few pieces of sand-turned-to-glass and threw them into the can. Then he ran back to the ship and through the tunnel. There was someone standing in the laboratory, waiting: the Cyberneticist.

“The Doctor?” the Physicist asked.

“He hasn’t returned yet.”

“Move back. Sit over there, by the wall.” And he emptied the contents of the can, pale-violet pieces of vitrified sand, on the floor in front of the blackboard.

“You’re crazy!” hissed the Cyberneticist, jumping to his feet. At the other end of the table, the Geiger came to life and began clicking rapidly.

“Quiet! Don’t interfere!” The Physicist’s voice shook with such ferocity that the Cyberneticist sat down again.

The Physicist glanced at his watch. Twelve minutes had passed. The Doctor might return at any moment. The Physicist leaned forward, pointed to the violet pieces, picked up a handful of them, held them in the palm of his hand, and brought them to the sketched figure, to its feet, smeared with violet chalk. He rubbed one of the fragments on the drawing, looked into the doubler’s eyes, dropped the rest on the floor, and backed away.

Then he approached again, with a determined step, as though he had a great distance to cover, and walked into the patch of violet pieces. He stood there for a while, closed his eyes, and slowly fell.

His body thudded on the floor. He lay there for a moment, got up, went over to the table, grabbed the Geiger, and went back to the blackboard. When the cylinder was brought near the chalk-drawn feet, it burst into a loud staccato. The Physicist passed the counter by the blackboard several times, repeating the effect as the doubler watched intently, turned to the doubler and began moving the counter toward the bare soles of its feet.

The instrument began to chatter.

The doubler made a small noise, as if it were choking. For several seconds — which seemed an eternity — it looked into the Physicist’s eyes. Drops of sweat trickled down the Physicist’s brow. The doubler suddenly went limp, shut its eyes, and sank back on its cushion, strangely tensing the fingers of both hands. After lying still for a moment, it opened its eyes, sat up again, and gave the Physicist a long look.

The Physicist nodded, put the counter on the table, nudged the blackboard with his foot, and said quietly to the Cyberneticist, “He knows now.”

“Knows what?” muttered the other, shaken by this pantomime.

“That he’s going to die.”

The Doctor entered, saw the blackboard and the scattered pieces of violet glass. “What’s this?”

he asked angrily. “What does it mean?”

“It means you have two patients now,” the Physicist said. And as the Doctor watched in amazement, he calmly took up the Geiger again and pointed it at his own body. The instrument chattered.

Radioactive dust had penetrated the Physicist’s suit.

The Doctor paled, clutched the syringe he was holding, almost as if it were a weapon. Then slowly he relaxed. “All right,” he said. “Let’s clean you up.”

As soon as the two of them left, the Cyberneticist threw on a protective suit and hurriedly disposed of the radioactive fragments. Then he vacuumed the whole area carefully. The doubler lay still, watching, coughing quietly a few times. After about ten minutes the Physicist returned with the Doctor; he was now wearing a white canvas suit and had thick bandages on his neck and hands.

“Well, that’s taken care of,” he said almost cheerfully. “Nothing serious. A first-degree burn, maybe not even that.”

The Doctor and the Cyberneticist began helping the doubler up. The doubler, understanding, got up and followed the Doctor submissively.

“And what was the point of all that?” asked the Cyberneticist. He was pacing the room nervously, poking the Geiger’s black muzzle into every nook and cranny. Now and then the clicking would accelerate slightly.

“You’ll see,” the Physicist said.

“Why didn’t you put on a protective suit? It would have taken only a minute.”

“I had to keep it simple,” said the Physicist. “And as natural as possible. A special suit might have confused him.”

They fell silent. The hand on the wall clock slowly shifted. The Cyberneticist began to feel sleepy.

The Physicist yawned.

Then the Doctor, in a smock, burst in and yelled at the Physicist. “It was you, wasn’t it? What did you do to him?!”

“What’s wrong?” asked the Physicist.

“He won’t lie down! He barely let me examine him, then got up and headed for the door.”

Behind him, the doubler entered, hobbling. The loose end of a bandage dragged along the floor behind it.

“You can’t treat him against his will,” the Physicist said coolly. He stood. “I suggest we take the computer from the navigation room. It has the greatest range of extrapolation.” This he said to the Cyberneticist, who got to his feet with a start, blinked stupidly for a moment, and walked out, leaving the door open.

The Doctor stood in the middle of the laboratory, his fists in the pockets of his smock. At the sound of soft shuffling, he turned around and looked at the giant alien.

“You know, don’t you?” he said with a sigh.

The doubler coughed.

The other three of the crew slept the entire day. When they woke, night was falling. They went straight to the library, which they found in chaos. The tables, the floor, every chair was buried under piles of books, atlases, scattered pages with sketches, hundreds of them. Mixed in with the books and paper were machine parts, photographs, cans of food, plates, lenses, calculators, and cassettes. The blackboard, propped against a wall, dripped water and chalk dust, and chalk dust covered the fingers, sleeves, and even the knees of the Physicist, Doctor, and Cyberneticist. Unshaven and with bloodshot eyes, they were sitting opposite the doubler and drinking coffee from mugs. In the middle of the room, where the table had been, stood a large computer.

“How is it going?” asked the Captain, in the doorway.

“Beautifully. We’ve analogized sixteen hundred concepts,” said the Cyberneticist.

The Doctor got up. He was still in his smock. “This was against my advice,” he said, and pointed at the doubler. “He’s been seriously wounded.”

“Wounded!?” The Captain entered the room.

“He walked through the radioactive area at the gap in the wall,” explained the Physicist, leaving his coffee and kneeling by the computer.

“He has ten percent fewer white corpuscles than seven hours ago,” said the Doctor. “And there’s hyaline degeneration, exactly as you would expect in a human. I wanted to isolate him — he needs rest — but he won’t let me treat him, because the Physicist told him that he is beyond help.”

“Is that true?” asked the Captain, turning to the Physicist. The latter nodded without looking up from the whirring machine.

“And is he… beyond help?” asked the Engineer.

The Doctor shrugged. “I don’t know! If he were human, I’d say he had a thirty percent chance.

But he’s not human. He’s growing apathetic, but that could be due to exhaustion, lack of sleep. If I could isolate him…”

“You can still do that,” said the Physicist as he fiddled with some knobs, using his bandaged hands.

“And what happened to you?” asked the Captain.

“I showed the doubler how it had exposed itself to radiation.”

“And for that you had to expose yourself, too?!” exclaimed the Engineer.

“That’s right.”

No one spoke for a while.

“What’s happened, has happened,” the Captain said at last, slowly. “Whether for good or for bad. And now what? What have you learned?”

“Plenty.”

It was the Cyberneticist who answered.

“He’s already mastered hundreds of our symbols — the mathematical ones especially. In fact, we’re well into information theory. The biggest problem is his electrical writing: we can’t learn it without special equipment, and there’s no time to construct that. Remember those fragments of tubing leading into the body in the pit? A writing instrument! When a doubler comes into the world, a tube is immediately implanted, just as baby girls on Earth once had their ears pierced in some societies… On either side of the body — the larger body, I mean — they have electrical organs. They’re like plasma batteries that transmit charges directly to the ‘writing tube.’ In this doubler, the tube terminates in those wires on the ‘collar.’ It varies from individual to individual. But apparently writing is something they have to learn. The tube surgery, which has been carried out for thousands of years, is only a preliminary step.”

“So he doesn’t speak?” asked the Chemist.

“He does. That coughing you heard — that’s actually speech. A single cough is an entire sentence, articulated at great speed. We taped it — it resolves into a whole spectrum of frequencies.”

“Ah! So it’s speech based on modulated sound!”

“But voiceless sound. Their voices are used solely to express states of emotion.”

“And do these electrical organs also serve as defenses?”

“I don’t know. Let’s ask him.”

He leaned over and from a pile of papers pulled out a board containing a diagram of a doubler.

He pointed to two oblong segmented shapes inside the body and asked, putting his mouth to a microphone, “Defense?”

A speaker near the recumbent creature squawked. The doubler, who had raised his small torso a little when the other men entered, froze for a moment, then coughed.

“Defense. No,” croaked the loudspeaker. “Many planetary revolutions. Ago. Defense.”

The doubler coughed again.

“Organ. Rudimentary. Biology evolved. Secondary adaptation. By technology,” the speaker said in a lifeless monotone.

“Well, well,” murmured the Engineer with pleasure. The Chemist stood rapt, his eyes narrowed.

“Genetic engineering!” the Captain exclaimed. “And their physics?” he asked.

“From our point of view, peculiar,” said the Physicist. He got up off his knees. “I can’t eliminate that static,” he said to the Cyberneticist. “In classical physics,” he went on, “they’re very knowledgeable.

Optics, electricity, mechanics, and especially molecular mechanics — a kind of chemical physics. There they’ve made some interesting discoveries.”

“Such as?!” The Chemist pushed forward.

“Details later. We recorded everything, don’t worry. They arrived at information theory by a completely different route. But the study of it is forbidden to them, outside certain special areas. In atomic science they’re weakest, particularly nuclear chemistry.”

“Wait — what do you mean, forbidden?” asked the Engineer.

“They’re not allowed to pursue research in information theory.”

“Who forbids it?”

“That’s a complicated business,” the Doctor said. “We’re still at sea when it comes to their social dynamics.”

“There’s no incentive, probably, for nuclear research.” said the Physicist, “because they have no shortage of energy.”

“One thing at a time! What about this forbidden research?”

“Pull up a chair. We’ll be asking him more questions,” said the Cyberneticist.

The Captain put his face to the microphone, but the Cyberneticist stopped him. “Wait. The more complex the structure of a sentence, the more difficulty the computer has with grammar. And the sound analyzer is inadequate. So the answers don’t always make sense. But you’ll see for yourselves.”

“There are many of you on the planet,” said the Physicist into the microphone, enunciating carefully. “What is the organizational system of you on the planet?”

The speaker squawked twice, went silent. For some time the doubler made no reply. Then he coughed hoarsely.

“Our organizational system. Binary. Our relations. Binary,” said the speaker. “Society. Central control. The whole planet.”

“Perfect!” cried the Engineer, excited. The three new participants in the questioning were all excited, but their colleagues sat quietly, weariness — indifference, almost — in their faces.

“Who rules your society? Who is at the top, an individual or a group?” the Captain said into the microphone. The speaker crackled, there was a buzz, and a red light flashed on the instrument panel.

“You can’t ask that way,” the Cyberneticist explained. " ‘At the top’ is imprecise and figurative.

Let me.” He leaned forward. “How many of you make the decisions at central control? One? Several? A large number?”

The speaker squawked. “One. Several. Large number. Control. Do not know. Do not know,” it repeated.

“What is that supposed to mean?” asked the Captain, surprised.

“Let’s ask.”

“You do not know, or no one on the planet knows?” the Cyberneticist said into the microphone.

The doubler coughed, and the computer translated:

“Binary relations. One thing. Known. Other thing. Unknown.”

“I don’t —” the Captain began.

“Wait,” said the Cyberneticist, because the doubler slowly moved his face again to his own microphone and coughed twice.

The computer continued:

“Many planetary revolutions. Ago. Central control. Divided. Pause. One doubler. Pause. One hundred and thirteen planetary revolutions. Pause. Planetary revolution one hundred and eleven. One doubler. Death. Pause. Other doubler. Death. One. One. Death. Death. Pause. Then. One doubler. Who unknown. Central control known. Unknown who.”

“And what do you make of that?” asked the Captain.

The Cyberneticist replied: “He says that up to the year one hundred and thirteen, counting back from today — this would be year zero — they had a multimember central government. Then followed reigns of individuals. In the years one hundred and twelve and one hundred and eleven there were violent palace coups. Four rules succeeded one another within two years. Their deaths obviously were not natural. Then a new ruler appeared, whose existence was known but not his identity.”

“You mean, an anonymous ruler?” the Engineer asked.

“It would seem. Let’s try to find out more.”

He turned to the microphone. “It is known that one individual makes decisions at central control, but it is not known who that individual is?”

The doubler coughed, hesitated, coughed again, and the speaker said, “No. Pause. Sixty planetary revolutions. Known. One doubler decides. Pause. Then known that no doubler. Pause. No one at central control. Known.”

“Now I’m in the dark,” said the Physicist.

The Cyberneticist sat hunched toward the computer, chewing his lips.

“The general information is that there is no central government?” he asked. “But in reality there is a central government?”

The computer conferred with the doubler, exchanging noises. The men waited, their heads near the speaker.

“True. Yes. Pause. The information that there is a central government. Who has it, is. Is not. Who has this information. Is, then is not.”

They looked at one another.

“Whoever says that the government exists ceases to exist?” the Engineer asked in a half-whisper.

The Cyberneticist slowly nodded.

“But that doesn’t make sense!” said the Engineer. “The government must have a headquarters, after all, must issue directives, laws, and have bodies that implement them, a hierarchy, an arm. Didn’t we encounter soldiers?” The Physicist put a hand on his shoulder. The Engineer fell silent.

The doubler began coughing, and the computer’s green eye flickered rapidly. The speaker said.

“Information binary. Pause. One information. Who has it, is. Pause. Other information. Who has it, is, then is not.”

“There is information that is secret?” the Physicist asked. “Whoever has this secret information is killed?”

Again the speaker squawked, and the doubler coughed on the other side of the computer.

“No. Who is, then is not. Not death.”

The men took a deep breath.

“Ask what happens to such individuals,” said the Engineer.

“I don’t think I can,” said the Cyberneticist. But the Captain and the Engineer insisted, so he muttered, “All right, but I’m not promising anything in the way of an answer.”

“What is the future of one who spreads secret information?” he said into the microphone.

The dialogue of noises between the computer and the doubler went on for a while; then the speaker replied:

“Who. Such information. In a self-controlling group. Unknown degree of probability.

Degeneration. Pause. The cumulative effect. Nonexistent term. The necessity of adaptation. Conflict. And the weakening of the force potential. Nonexistent term. Pause. A small number of planetary revolutions.

Death.”

“What did he say?” asked the Chemist, and they all turned to the Cyberneticist, who shrugged.

“I have no idea. I told you. The question is too complex. We have to proceed gradually. My guess is that the fate of such an individual is unenviable. He can expect an untimely death — the last sentence was clear — but as to the mechanics of the whole process, I don’t know. The self-controlling group is interesting, but we already have plenty to speculate on.”

“Ask him about that factory to the north,” said the Engineer.

“We did,” said the Physicist. “That’s another complex question. We have a theory about it…”

“What do you mean, a theory? Didn’t he give you an answer?” the Captain interrupted.

“After a fashion. The factory was abandoned before it went into operation. That we know. But the reason is not so clear. About fifty years ago a plan of biological reconstruction was inaugurated among them. The remodeling of bodily functions — and forms. It’s a confusing story. Virtually the entire population of the planet underwent a series of surgical procedures. But this apparently was not so much a matter of changing the present generation as future ones, through the engineered mutation of hereditary material. That, at least, is how we interpret it. In the area of biology communication becomes difficult.”

“What kind of remodeling was it? In what direction?” asked the Captain.

“That we haven’t learned,” said the Physicist.

“Well, we’ve learned some things,” the Cyberneticist said. “Biology — physiology in particular — has a special, almost doctrinal significance for them, distinct from the other fields of science.”

“It could be religious,” said the Doctor. “Though their beliefs are more a system of prohibitions and rules than a transcendental theology.”

“They’ve never believed in a creator?” asked the Captain.

“We don’t know. Remember, such abstractions as faith, god, and the soul cannot be analogized in a computer. We have to ask a multitude of factual questions, and from the answers and half-answers attempt to construct a reasonable theory. What the Doctor calls religion I think may be simply tradition, historically stratified customs and rituals.”

“But what can either religion or tradition have to do with biological research?” asked the Engineer.

“We don’t know. But a connection seems to exist.”

“Maybe it was a matter of their trying to make certain biological facts conform to their beliefs or prejudices.”

“No, it’s much more complicated than that.”

“To return to the subject,” said the Captain, “what were the consequences of this biological program?”

“Individuals came into the world with no eyes or a varying number of eyes, or unfit for life, deformed, noseless. And there were a significant number of mental defectives.”

“Ah! Our doubler, and the others!”

“Yes. Evidently the theory on which they relied was wrong. Over a period of a dozen years, tens of thousands of deformed mutants appeared. They are still reaping today the tragic fruits of that experiment.”

“The plan was abandoned?”

“We didn’t even ask him that,” the Cyberneticist admitted. He turned to the microphone.

“The plan of biological remodeling, does it still exist? What is its future?”

The computer seemed to be arguing with the doubler, who made feeble hawking sounds.

“Is he in a bad way?” the Captain asked the Doctor in a low voice.

“No, better than I expected. He’s exhausted, but refused to leave before. And I couldn’t give him a transfusion, either, because our doubler’s blood appears to be incompatible…”

“Shh!” hissed the Physicist. The speaker was beginning to crackle.

“The plan. Is, is not. Pause. First was, now was not. Now mutations, disease. Pause. Information correct. Plan was, now was not.”

“I’m lost,” confessed the Engineer. “I think he’s saying that now the existence of the plan is denied, as though there had never been such a plan, and the mutations are attributed to a disease. The disaster, in other words, was not acknowledged to the community.”

“Acknowledged by whom?”

“Their allegedly nonexistent government.”

“Wait,” said the Engineer. “If, since the passing of the last anonymous ruler, there has been a kind of ‘epoch of anarchy,’ who introduced the plan?”

“But you heard. No one introduced it. There was no plan. That’s what they say today.”

“Yes, but what did they say fifty years ago?”

“Something else.”

“That’s absurd!”

“Not at all. Even on Earth there are certain things not admitted publicly, though everyone knows them. In the area of social life, for example, a certain amount of hypocrisy is indispensable. But what for us is a limited phenomenon is central, universal, here.”

“I find it hard to believe,” said the Engineer. “And what does it have to do with the factory to the north?”

“The factory was supposed to produce something necessary for the plan. Perhaps an object of use only to the future, ‘reconstructed’ generations.”

“Surely there were other factories?”

“The factories connected with the biological plan — were there many of them, or few?” asked the Cyberneticist.

The doubler cleared his throat, and the computer answered almost immediately: “Unknown.

Factories. The probability, many. Information. No factories.”

“What a society — it’s horrifying!” said the Engineer.

“Why? You never heard of military secrets, or other kinds of classified information?”

“What type of energy runs these factories?” the Engineer asked the Cyberneticist, but he spoke so close to the microphone that the computer immediately translated the question. The speaker buzzed, then said:

“Inorganic. Nonexistent term. Bio bio. Pause. Entropy. Constant. Bio. System.” The red light flashed on the panel.

“The computer doesn’t have the vocabulary,” explained the Cyberneticist.

“Why don’t we remove the semantic filters?” the Physicist suggested.

“You want it to start babbling like a schizophrenic?”

“We might understand more.”

“What are you talking about?” asked the Doctor.

“He wants to reduce the computer’s selectivity,” explained the Cyberneticist. “When the conceptual spectrum of a word, its semantic distribution, is blurred, the computer says that no corresponding term exists. If I remove the filters, it will start contaminating linguistic fields, producing words found in no human language.”

“That way we’ll get nearer the doubler’s language,” said the Physicist.

“All right. We can try it.”

The Cyberneticist threw a few switches. The Captain looked at the doubler, who now lay with his eyes closed. The Doctor went over to him, examined him for a moment, and returned to his seat without a word.

The Captain said into the microphone, “To the south of this place is a valley. There are large buildings there. The buildings contain skeletons, and in the earth, all around, are graves.”

“Wait, you can’t say graves.” The Cyberneticist pulled the flexible arm of the microphone closer to himself. “To the south are architectural constructions, and near them, in holes in the earth, are dead bodies. The bodies of doublers. What does that mean?”

On this occasion the computer exchanged a long series of coughs and squawks with the doubler.

The men noticed that for the first time the machine appeared to be asking, and repeating, a question of its own. Finally the speaker spoke in a monotone.

“Doubler. Physical work, no. Pause. Electrical organ. Organ work, yes, but acceleration involution degeneration overload. Pause. South is exemplification of self-directed procrustics. Bio- and socio-occlusion deathavoid. Pause. Social isolation not with force, not by compulsion. Voluntary. Pause.

Group microadaptation autocentroat-traction. Production, yes. No.”

“Brilliant suggestion,” the Cyberneticist said to the Physicist. “Autocentroattraction, deathavoid, bio- and socio-occlusion. I warned you.”

“Just a minute,” said the Physicist. “This has something to do with forced labor.”

“Just the opposite. He said ‘not with force, not by compulsion.’ It was voluntary.”

“Well, we’ll ask again.” The Physicist bent over the microphone. “Not clear,” he said. “Tell us, very simply, what is in the valley to the south? A penal colony? A labor camp? What do they produce? And why?”

The computer had another discussion with the doubler. After almost five minutes it replied:

“Microgroup voluntary. Interadhesion by compulsion, no. Pause. Each doubler against the microgroup. Chief relationship centripetal. The binding agent is anger. Pause. Who transgresses is punished. Punishment is microgroup voluntary identification. What is the microgroup? Feedback interrelations polyindividualized. Anger is the selfaim. Anger is the selfaim. Pause. Circulation socio-psychointernal. Deathavoid.”

“Wait, what does ‘selfaim’ mean?” asked the Cyberneticist, seeing that the others were growing impatient.

“Selfaim, selfsave,” said the computer, this time not even consulting the doubler.

“The instinct of self-preservation?” asked the Physicist.

“Yes, yes, self-preservation,” said the computer.

“You mean to say you understand that?” cried the Engineer, jumping up from his seat.

“Understand it, no, but I think he’s talking about a prison system. You have small groups within that community, and they keep one another under control.”

“Without guards? Without surveillance?”

“He said there was no compulsion.”

“Impossible!”

“Not at all. Imagine two people: one has matches, the other has a matchbox. They hate each other, but can strike a light only together. Anger, he said. Cooperation results from feedback. The compulsion somehow is a product of the internal dynamics of the group.”

“But what are they doing? What are they making? Who is lying in those graves? And why?”

“You heard what the computer said? ‘Procrustics.’ That’s obviously from ‘Procrustean bed.’

Assuring conformity by violent means.”

“Ridiculous! How would the doubler know Greek mythology?”

“It’s the computer, not the doubler! It finds the nearest equivalent on the conceptual spectrum!

There’s a work camp there, but the work may have no purpose or meaning. He said both yes and no after ‘production.’ The work is their punishment.”

“But how are they forced to work if there are no guards?”

“The compulsion, as I said, arises from the situation itself. On a sinking ship, for example, one has few choices. Perhaps they’re on the deck of that kind of ship all their lives… Since hard physical labor might be harmful to them, perhaps this ‘bio-occlusion’ operates through their electrical organs.”

“He said ‘bio- and socio-occlusion.’ "

“Well, there is adhesion, interadhesion, within the group, a mutual pull that separates the group from society.”

“That doesn’t say much.”

“I know no more than you do. We’re communicating, remember, at a double remove, the computer between us, displacing the meaning in both directions! Maybe they have a special scientific discipline, maybe procrustics is the theory of the dynamics of such groups, the planning of activities, conflicts, and attractions to produce a special equilibrium based on anger, an equilibrium that unites them and at the same time cuts them off from the outside…”

“Those are your personal variations on the theme of the computer’s schizophrenic babble — not an explanation,” growled the Chemist.

“He’s exhausted,” said the Doctor. “One or two more questions, no more. Who wants to ask them?”

“I pass. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“I have a question,” said the Captain. “How did you learn of our existence?” he asked into the microphone.

“Information. Meteorite. Ship,” the computer replied after a brief exchange with the doubler.

“Ship from another planet. Cosmic rays. Death rays. Degeneration. Pause. Glass encapsulation to destroy. Pause. Observation from observatory. Explosions. I took bearings. Direction of sound, source.

Target of rockets. Pause. I went at night. Waited. Defender opened encapsulation. I entered, am.”

“They told you that a ship had landed, with monsters in it?” asked the Engineer.

“With monsters. Degenerated. From cosmic rays. And that we are protected. With this glass. I took sound bearings. The target. Calculated. Found.”

“You weren’t afraid of the monsters?” the Captain asked. “You weren’t… deathavoid?”

“Yes,” replied the speaker almost immediately. “But the chance. One in a million planetary revolutions.”

The Physicist nodded. “Each one of us would have tried to come here for that reason.”

“Do you wish to stay with us? We will cure you. There will be no death,” the Doctor said.

“No,” answered the speaker.

“You wish to leave? To return to your people?”

“Return, no,” said the speaker.

The men looked at one another.

“We can cure you! You won’t die!” said the Doctor. “Tell us, what will you do when you’re cured?”

The computer squawked, and the doubler made a sound so brief that it was barely audible.

“Zero,” said the speaker, and repeated, as though not sure the men had understood correctly.

“zero.”

“He doesn’t want to stay and doesn’t want to go back,” muttered the Chemist. “Could he be delirious?”

They looked at the doubler. His pale-blue eyes were fixed on them. The men could hear his slow, shallow breathing.

“That’s enough,” said the Doctor, getting up. “Everyone out.”

“And you?”

“I’ll join you soon. I took two psychedrins — I can sit with him a while longer.”

When the men made for the door, the doubler’s smaller torso fell back and his eyes closed.

In the corridor, the Engineer said, “We asked him all those questions — why didn’t he ask us any?”

“Oh, but he did, earlier,” said the Cyberneticist. “About conditions on Earth, our history, the development of space travel. A half-hour before you arrived, he was much more talkative.”

“He must be weak now.”

“He received a heavy dose of radiation. And his trek through the desert probably tired him, too, since he is old.”

“How long do they live?”

“About sixty revolutions of the planet, slightly less than sixty of our years. Eden’s year is shorter.”

“What do they eat?”

“That was a surprise. It appears that evolution here has taken a different path from the one on Earth. They can assimilate certain inorganic substances directly.”

“Ah,” said the Chemist, “the soil that first one brought in!”

“Yes, but that was thousands of years ago. Now they’ve modernized, using those plants, the calyxes on the plain, as food accumulators. The calyxes extract from the soil and store compounds that serve the doublers as nourishment. There are different calyxes for different compounds.”

“Of course, they cultivate them,” said the Chemist. “To the south we saw whole fields of them.

But the doubler who got into the ship, why was he digging about in the clay?”

“The calyxes retract below ground level after dark.”

“Even so, there was plenty of soil available…”

“Gentlemen, to bed with you,” the Captain said to the Physicist and the Cyberneticist. “We’ll take over. It’s almost twelve.”

“Twelve midnight?”

“We’ve lost all sense of time.”

They heard footsteps behind them. It was the Doctor coming from the library. They looked at him questioningly.

“He’s sleeping,” he said. “He’s not well. When you went out, I had the impression, even, that…”

He didn’t finish.

“Did you say anything to him?”

“I did. I asked him — I thought, you see, it was all over — if we could do anything for them. For all of them.”

“And what did he say?”

" ‘Zero.’ " When the Doctor said this, it was like the computer’s lifeless voice.

“Go lie down, all of you,” said the Captain. “But first, since we’re all together, let me ask you: Do we leave?”

“Yes,” said the Engineer.

“Yes,” said the Physicist and the Chemist at the same time.

“Yes,” said the Cyberneticist.

“And you? Why are you silent?” the Captain asked the Doctor.

“I’m thinking. You know, I was never that interested in…”

“Yes, you were more concerned about how we could help them. But now you know that that’s impossible.”

“No. I don’t know,” the Doctor said softly.