Eden

XIV

An hour later Defender was riding down the lowered loading hatch. The Engineer drove it the six hundred feet to the wall of glass, which was curved inward above like unfinished vaulting, and set to work. Darkness fled in gigantic leaps into the depths of the desert, as lines brighter than the sun, thundering, cut the wall. Slabs tumbled to the ground, half molten, and overhead white smoke rose, shimmering. The Engineer left the fragments to cool and went on cutting with the annihilator, hewing out windows from which dripped fiery icicles. In rows of rectangular holes now appeared wells of starry sky.

Smoke coiled across the sand. The vitreous mass groaned, creaked, glowed.

Defender finally returned to the ship. From a safe distance the Engineer checked the radiation level of the chunks. The counter chattered.

“Ideally, we should wait at least four days,” said the Captain. “But let’s send out Blackie and the cleaning robots.”

“Yes, only the surface is really hot. A jet of sand will take care of that. And the smaller pieces can be buried.”

“We’ll put them in the empty tank in the stern.” The Captain looked thoughtfully at the cherry-red rubble.

“Why?” said the Engineer. “It’s of no use to us, just unnecessary ballast.”

“I’d rather not leave radioactive traces… They know nothing of atomic energy, and it’s better that they don’t.”

“Maybe you’re right,” murmured the Engineer. “Eden… You know, the picture I get, based on what the astronomer-doubler told us… it’s terrifying.”

The Captain nodded slowly. “An abuse — so total, so thorough, as to arouse one’s admiration —

of information theory. It shows that it can be an instrument of torture far worse than anything physical.

Isolating, repressing, compelling without compelling — they’ve made a ghastly science of it, their.

’procrustics,’ as the computer called it.”

“Do you think they realize… he realizes…?”

“You mean, does he consider such a state normal? Well, I suppose he does. He knows nothing different. Though he did refer to their earlier history — tyrants of the ordinary type, and then those.

’anonymous’ ones. So he is able to make comparisons.”

“If to him tyranny means the good old days, I shudder to think…”

“And yet there’s a logic in it. One of a series of tyrants hits upon the idea that anonymity may be advantageous. Society, unable to focus its resentment on one person, becomes, as it were, disarmed…”

“In other words, a tyrant without a face!”

“And after a certain time, when the theoretical foundation of this procrustics has been established, a successor goes one step further and does away even with his ‘incognito,’ abolishing himself and the whole system of government — only in words, of course, in public communications.”

“But why is there no liberation movement here? That I can’t understand! If they punish their.

’offenders’ by putting them in these isolated groups, and there are no guards, no surveillance, no external force, then individual escape, even organized resistance, should be possible.”

“For organization to take place, there must first be a means of communication.”

The Captain held the Geiger outside the turret hatch: the chatter was slower.

“It’s not that they do not have names for things, and for the relations between things, but that the names they have are in fact false, are masks. The monstrous mutations among them are called a disease, a plague. It must be that way with everything. In order to control the world, one must first name it.

Without knowledge, weapons, and organization, and in isolated groups, there is little they can do.”

“Yes,” said the Engineer. “But that scene at the cemetery… and in that ditch in the direction of the city suggest that the system may not be running as smoothly as our unknown ruler would like. And the fear the doubler showed when he saw the wall of glass — remember that?”

The Geiger, put outside again, ticked sluggishly. The rubble by the wall no longer glowed, but the ground around the ship still smoked, and the air shimmered, making the stars high above appear to weave.

“We’re going,” the Engineer went on. “If only we had learned their language better. And figured out how that damned government of theirs, which pretends not to exist, operates. And given them weapons…”

“Weapons for poor wretches like our doubler? Would you put an antimatter gun into his hands?”

“In that case we ourselves could have —”

“Destroyed the government?” the Captain said calmly. “Liberated the population by force?”

“If there was no other way.”

“In the first place, these are not human beings. Remember, you spoke only with the computer, and therefore understand the doubler no better than it does. Second, no one imposed all this upon them.

No one, at least, from space. They themselves…”

“If you use that argument, then there’s nothing, nothing that should be done!” shouted the Engineer.

“How else can it be? Is the population of this planet a child that has got itself into a blind alley and can be led out by the hand? If things were only that simple! Liberating them, Henry, would have to begin with killing, and the fiercer the struggle, the less idealistic the killing becomes. In the end we would be killing merely to beat a retreat, to counterattack; then we would kill everything that stood in Defender’s way. You know how easily that can happen!”

The Engineer nodded. “Anyway,” he said, “they’re undoubtedly observing us now, and those windows that we just opened in their wall, I doubt that they like that. There could be another attack.”

“There could,” the Captain agreed. “Maybe it would be worthwhile to post some remote-control sentries. Electronic eyes and ears.”

“That would take time and require parts we can ill afford.”

“True…”

“Two roentgens per second. We can send out the robots now.”

“All right. Let’s park Defender close to the ship, just in case.”

That afternoon the sky clouded over and, for the first time since they arrived on the planet, a light, warm rain began to fall. The wall of glass darkened, and thin, pale streams of water trickled down it. The robots worked tirelessly. The sand thrown by the pulsomotors hissed over the surface of the piled slabs.

Bits of glass shot into the air. The sand and rain formed a watery mud.

Blackie hauled containers filled with radioactive fragments into the ship after the other robot checked their seals with the Geiger. Next the two robots dragged the cleaned slabs to positions designated by the Engineer. Then, throwing fountains of sparks, the welding machines went to work, and the slabs softened and fused together, forming the frame of the future platform.

It soon became evident that there would not be enough slabs, so at dusk, after a whole day of work, Defender again rolled forth and faced the wall. It was a strange sight as, through the heavy rain, rectangular suns blazed and boomed, and glowing chunks of glass plunged to the ground. Thick clouds of smoke billowed, and puddles of rainwater boiled with an earsplitting hiss. Even the rain in the air boiled.

High above, motionless, rainbows in pink, green, and yellow reflected the bolts of light below. Defender, black as if hewn from coal, turned amid the lightning, pointed its nose, and spat more lightning, and again the area shook with thunder.

“This could be a good thing!” the Engineer shouted into the Captain’s ear. “With these fireworks, maybe they’ll leave us in peace! We need at least two more days!” His face, bathed in sweat — the turret was as hot as an oven — looked like a mercury mask.

After the men retired for the night, the robots emerged again and worked until morning, dragging sand pump hoses after them, moving the slabs of glass. The rain sparkled, a dazzling azure, around the welding machines; the loading hatch swallowed up more containers. Slowly, behind the stern of the ship, a parabolic structure rose, and meanwhile the robot diggers excavated the hill beneath the belly of the ship, gnawing fiercely.

At daybreak, when the men got up, some of the glass slabs had been used to shore up the tunnel.

“That was a good idea,” said the Captain. They were sitting in the navigation room, rolls of blueprints before them on the tables. “Had we removed the beams without them the roof would probably have collapsed and crushed the daggers, or trapped them.”

“Do we have enough power to take off?” asked the Cyberneticist, standing in the doorway.

“Enough for ten takeoffs. If we had to — though it won’t be necessary — we could always jettison the radioactive debris we’re taking with us in the stern tank. We’ll introduce heat ducts into the tunnel and raise the temperature to the point at which the glass begins to melt. The props will slowly sink. If they sink too quickly, we pump liquid nitrogen into the ducts. We should be able to free the ship by evening.

And then the job of standing it up…”

“That’s chapter two,” said the Engineer.

By eight the clouds had dispersed and the sun was shining. The enormous cylinder of the ship, which until now had been embedded fast in the hillside, began to move. The Engineer, using a transit, monitored the slowly diminishing angle of the stern. He stood at a distance, near the wall, which now resembled, with its square holes, the ruins of some ancient glass coliseum.

The men and the two doublers had been evacuated from the ship. The Engineer saw the small figure of the Doctor; it was approaching, going around the hull in a wide arc; but he paid no attention to it, too absorbed in his instruments. Only a thin layer of earth and, beneath that, the melting props now bore the weight of the ship. Eighteen cables ran from the funnels to anchors set in the massive chunks cut from the wall. The Engineer thanked heaven for the wall: without it, it would have taken them four times longer to right the ship.

Other cables, winding across the sand, brought current to the ducts inside the tunnel. From its mouth, visible directly below the place where the hull entered the slope, came smoke. Yellow-gray clouds marched slowly across the still-wet plain. The ship sank, inch by inch; whenever it began to fall more rapidly, the Engineer flicked a switch at hand, valves opened, and liquid nitrogen coursed into the tunnel ducts. There was a rumbling, and dirty-white clouds were belched out.

Suddenly the hull shuddered and, before the Engineer could open the valves, the ship, more than three hundred feet long, gave a groan, and the stern fell twelve feet. At the same time the nose of the ship burst free of the ground, throwing up sand and marl. The ceramite colossus came to rest. The cables and ducts lay beneath it; one of them, torn open, spewed a roaring geyser of condensed air.

“We did it! We did it!” yelled the Engineer. Then he saw, in front of him, the Doctor. The Doctor was saying something, but he couldn’t understand it.

“It looks as if we’re going… home,” said the Doctor. “He’ll live.”

“What? What?”

“He’s pulled through.”

Then the Engineer understood. He looked again to reassure himself that the ship was free. “Is he going with us?” he asked, moving away, anxious to examine the hull for damage.

“No,” the Doctor answered, following. But then, after several steps, he stopped.

It was cooler, because of the fountain of condensed gas that continued to pour out of the broken pipe. Small figures climbed up on the hull, one disappeared, and after a few minutes the seething column fell; for a moment it still spouted foam that froze the air; then it, too, stopped, and everything became strangely quiet. The Doctor looked around, as though wondering how he had got there, and slowly walked on.

The ship stood upright, white, whiter than the clouds, among which its sharp, distant peak already appeared to be moving. There had been three days of hard work. The loading was completed. The huge parabolic ramp built from the pieces of the wall that had been meant to imprison them lay abandoned on the hillside. Two hundred and forty feet above the ground, four men stood in the open hatchway, looking down. On the flat, dun-yellow surface they could see two tiny figures, one slightly lighter in color than the other. The men watched. The doublers, standing no more than 150 feet from the slightly flared exhaust funnels, did not move.

“Why don’t they leave?” the Physicist asked, impatient. “We can’t take off.”

“They won’t leave,” said the Doctor.

“What is that supposed to mean? He doesn’t want us to go?”

The Doctor said nothing.

The sun was high in the sky. Banks of clouds were drifting in out of the west. From the open hatchway, as though from the window of a soaring spire, they could see the hills in the south, the blue summits mingled with the clouds, and the great western desert that extended for hundreds of miles in strips of sunlit dunes, and the violet mantle of forest on the eastern plateau. Below them, the circle of the wall resembled a lacy skeleton. The ship’s shadow moved across it like the style of a giant sundial, and now the shadow approached the two small figures.

There was thunder in the east, followed by a long-drawn-out whistle, and flame flashed in the black sphere of the explosion.

“Something new,” said the Engineer.

Another clap of thunder. An unseen projectile howled nearer; an unearthly whistling, it seemed to make for the ship. The ground shook, dirt flew a few hundred feet away. They could feel the ship sway.

“Crew,” said the Captain. “To your seats!”

“What about them?” the Chemist asked, peering down.

The hatch closed.

In the control room they heard no thunder. But the aft screens showed bushes of flame jumping across the sand. Two figures remained motionless at the base of the rockets.

“Fasten your belts!” said the Captain. “Ready?”

“Ready,” came the murmured reply.

“Twelve zero seven hours. Prepare for takeoff. All systems!”

“The pile on,” said the Engineer.

“Critical mass,” said the Physicist.

“Circulation normal,” said the Chemist.

“The grav axis okay,” said the Cyberneticist.

Suspended midway between the concave ceiling and the foam-padded floor, the Doctor was watching the screen.

“Still there?” asked the Captain, and everyone glanced at him: the question was not part of the takeoff ritual.

“Still there,” said the Doctor. An explosion closer than the others made the ship rock.

“Blast off!” the Captain cried. With a hard face the Engineer engaged the drive. There was a small, muffled roar; it seemed to be taking place in another world. Gradually it intensified; then everything seemed to dissolve into it. Swaying, they fell gently into the embrace of an irresistible power.

The ship lifted.

“On the normal,” said the Captain.

“Now over,” said the Cyberneticist, and all the nylon cords tautened. The shock absorbers began to hum.

“Oxygen masks,” the Doctor said, as though awakening, and bit down on his own plastic mouthpiece.

Twelve minutes later they left the atmosphere. Maintaining velocity, they set off into the starry void along an expanding spiral. Seven hundred and forty lights and dials pulsed soundlessly on the panels.

The men unsnapped their belts and went up to the controls, fingered the buttons and switches as if in doubt — were any leads overheating, was there the faint crackle of a short circuit? They sniffed the air for the smell of burning, tapped the dials on the astrodesic computers. But everything was as it should be: the air was pure, the temperature correct; the distributor worked as if it had never been a pile of broken pieces.

In the navigation room, the Engineer and the Captain were bending over maps. The star charts, larger than the table, hung over it, torn at the edges. The men had said, a long time ago, that they needed a larger table in the navigation room, because they kept stepping on the maps. The table was still the same.

“Have you seen Eden?” asked the Engineer.

The Captain looked at him, not understanding. “What do you mean?”

“Now.”

The Captain turned around. On the screen was a glowing opal sphere that made the neighboring stars pale.

“Beautiful,” said the Engineer. “It drew our attention because it was so beautiful. We wanted only to fly by it.”

“Yes,” said the Captain, “only to fly by it…”

“All those colors. None of the other planets are like that. The Earth is merely a blue marble.”

They watched the screen together.

“And the doubler stayed?” the Captain asked softly.

’That’s what he wanted.”

“You think.”

“I’m sure. He preferred it to be us — and not them. That was all that we could do for him.”

Neither of them spoke for a while. Eden grew smaller.

“Beautiful,” said the Captain. “But, you know, going by the probability curve, there must be others even more beautiful.”