Eden

III

It was late at night when they reached the knoll where their ship was. To travel faster, and also to avoid meeting any denizens of the copse, they went by way of an area where the vegetation parted to form a lane about sixty feet wide, as though an enormous plow had gone through. Nothing grew here but a velvety lichen and moss.

Hungry, tired, with only one flashlight, they decided to pitch their tent outside the ship. The Physicist had such a terrible thirst — their water supply had run out on the trek back — that he entered the tunnel and went into the ship. He was gone a long time. They were inflating the tent when they heard him shouting in the tunnel. They hurried over and helped him out. He was trembling, so upset that he couldn’t speak.

“What happened? Calm down!” they shouted. The Captain grabbed him firmly by the shoulders.

The Physicist pointed to the hull looming above them. “There was something in there.”

“What was it?”

“I have no idea.”

“How do you know something was there?”

“I entered the navigation room by mistake. It was full of soil before, and now the soil is gone.”

“Gone? Where is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You looked into the other rooms?”

“Yes. I… wasn’t sure that the navigation room had been full of soil, so at first I dismissed the thought, and went to the storeroom, where I found some drinking water, but I didn’t have a cup, so I tried your cabin” — he glanced at the Cyberneticist — “and there…”

“What was it, damn it?!”

“Everything was covered with mucus.”

“Mucus?”

“Sticky, transparent mucus — I must still have some of it on my boots!”

“But that could have been something leaking from the tanks, a chemical reaction. Remember, half our instruments in the laboratory were smashed.”

“Ridiculous! Look at my boots!”

The Doctor’s flashlight wandered down to the boots in question, which in places gleamed, as though coated with polyurethane.

“But that doesn’t mean we had a visitor,” said the Chemist lamely.

“It didn’t sink in at first,” the Physicist went on. “I took a cup and returned to the storeroom. I felt my soles sticking, but paid no attention. I had a drink of water, and on my way back suddenly decided to check the library — I don’t know why. I was uneasy. I opened the door and — no soil, not a trace! But I had dumped that soil myself! And then I knew that the soil had disappeared in the navigation room, too.”

“And then?” asked the Captain.

“I ran back here.”

The flashlight illuminated the patch of ground where the men stood around the Physicist, who was still out of breath.

“Do we go in, or what?” asked the Chemist, though it was obvious that he was not volunteering.

“Let me see those boots again,” said the Captain.

He almost banged his head against the Doctor’s when the latter bent over simultaneously. They exchanged glances. Neither said a word.

“We have to do something,” the Cyberneticist said desperately, as the Captain carefully examined the shiny layer that clung to the leather.

“All that happened was that a specimen of local fauna entered the ship and, finding nothing of interest, left,” said the Captain at last.

“Some worm, perhaps, the size of a shark or two,” the Cyberneticist babbled. “But what about the soil?”

“Yes, that is strange…”

The Doctor began to pace, then walked away. The beam of his flashlight swept the ground, then went higher, into the darkness.

Suddenly he shouted, “Here, I’ve found it!”

They ran over to him. He was standing near a furrow about thirty feet long that in places was covered by bits of shiny membrane.

“It looks as if it really was a worm,” said the Physicist in a low voice.

“In that case we’ll have to spend the night in the ship,” the Captain decided.

“But we’ll have to search the ship thoroughly before we can close the hatch.”

“That will take all night!” groaned the Chemist.

“It can’t be helped.”

They left the tent to the mercy of whatever might be out there and went into the tunnel.

Every nook and cranny of the ship was inspected. The Physicist thought that pieces of broken panel in the control room had been moved, but no one was sure. Then the Engineer began to wonder if the tools used to dig the tunnel were in the same position in which they had left them.

“Look,” said the Doctor impatiently, “we can’t start playing detective now — it’s almost two!”

At three they lay down on mattresses removed from the bunks, and it would have been even later had the Engineer not decided to forgo checking both levels of the engine room and simply to bolt from inside the doors leading to it in the steel bulkhead. The air was close, with an unpleasant lingering odor, but they were dropping with fatigue, and no sooner did they take off their boots and suits and extinguish the light than they fell into a heavy sleep.

The Doctor woke in total darkness. He raised his watch to his eyes — and was confused for a moment, because the time did not correspond to the darkness, but then he remembered that he was underground in the ship. The green dial said it was almost eight. Why did he wake so early? He grumbled to himself and was about to turn over when he froze.

Something was happening in the depths of the ship. He could feel it more than hear it: the floor throbbed. There was a distant thrumming, barely audible. He sat up, his heart pounding.

“It’s come back!” he thought, imagining the creature whose slimy trail the Physicist had discovered. “It’s trying to force open the entrance hatch.”

The ship suddenly shuddered, as though some huge hand were trying to push it still deeper into the ground. One member of the crew groaned in his sleep. For a moment the Doctor felt his hair stand on end: the ship weighed sixteen thousand tons! The floor started shaking in a rapid, irregular rhythm. Then he understood. It was one of the drive units! Someone had got it going!

“Everybody up!” he shouted, groping for the flashlight.

The crew sprang to their feet, stumbling into one another in the dark and shouting, until the Doctor finally found the flashlight and turned it on. In a few words he explained.

The Engineer, still groggy, listened to the sound. The ship began to shake, and a mounting groan filled the air. “The air compressors in the port nozzles!” he cried.

The Captain said nothing as he zipped up his suit, and the others dressed hurriedly, but the Ehgineer ran out into the corridor as he was, in an undershirt and shorts, snatching the flashlight from the Doctor’s hand on the way.

“What are you going to do?”

They hurried after him as he ran to the navigation room. The floor shook more and more violently. “Any moment now it’ll snap the blades,” he muttered, bursting into the room that had been cleared by the intruder. He rushed over to the main terminals and threw the switch.

A light went on in the corner. The Engineer and the Captain, now together, took the jector from the locker, removed it from its case, and connected it to the terminals as quickly as they could. The dials were broken, but the tube on the barrel showed bright blue. There was current; the jector was charging!

The floor shook so much that the metal tools on the shelves rattled, and a glass object fell off and shattered. Then suddenly all was still, and the light went out.

“Is it charged?” asked the Physicist.

“For two rounds at most. We’re lucky to have even that,” answered the Engineer, and tore the jector from the terminals, pointed its aluminum barrel toward the ground, and, clasping the handle, went out into the corridor and made for the engine room. They were halfway there, near the library, when there was an ungodly grating, and two or three convulsive jerks rocked the ship. Something in the engine room raised an ear-piercing din, and then another silence followed.

The Engineer and the Captain reached the armored door together. The Captain slid aside the peephole cover and looked in.

“Let me have the flashlight,” he said.

The Doctor immediately put it in his hand, but it was difficult to direct light through the narrow aperture and see at the same time. The Engineer opened a second peephole, put his eye to it — and gasped.

“It’s lying there,” he said after a long pause.

“What?”

“Our visitor. Give me more light, lower, that’s it! It’s not moving.” Then: “The thing’s as big as an elephant.”

“Has it touched the manifold track?” asked the Captain, who could see nothing.

“It appears to have got into the power lines instead. I can see… ends jutting out from under it.”

“Ends of what?” The Physicist, behind them, was growing impatient.

“High-tension cables. It’s still not moving. Shall we open the door?”

“We have to,” the Doctor said, and shoved the main bolt aside.

“Maybe it’s playing dead,” suggested someone in back.

The other bolts slid smoothly in their mounts, and the door opened. No one crossed the threshold — the Physicist and the Cyberneticist looked over the shoulders of the men in front of them.

Inside, on fragments of the shattered screen, squeezed between partition walls that had been forced aside, lay a naked humpbacked mass, glistening. Now and then a tremor ran across its surface.

“It’s alive,” whispered the Physicist.

There was a sharp, foul stench like that of burning horsehair, and wisps of bluish smoke curled in the beam of the flashlight.

“Just in case,” said the Engineer, and raised the jector, pressing the stock to his hip and aiming at the shapeless mass. With a hiss the shot hit the steeply arched hulk right below its hump. The huge body stiffened, swelled, and seemed to cave in a little, to flatten. The partition walls shuddered, buckling on either side under the body’s weight.

“Finis,” declared the Engineer, crossing the steel threshold.

They went in. They tried — unsuccessfully — to locate the creature’s legs and head. It lay on a detached part of the transformer, an inert, shapeless mass, its hump to one side, like a sack filled with jelly. The Doctor touched the side of the dead body, then brought his hand to his nose.

“Smell this,” he said, holding out his hand to them; something like a white glue glistened on his fingertips. The Chemist was the first to sniff it. He cried out in surprise.

“You recognize it?” asked the Doctor.

They all smelled the glue — and recognized the acrid stink that had filled the “factory.”

In a corner the Doctor found a bar he could use as a lever, slipped one end of it under the creature, and tried to turn the thing over. But the bar, instead, went almost halfway into the flesh.

“Wait,” said the Engineer. “How could an animal like this have got the unit going?”

Everyone looked at him in dismay.

“You’re right…” muttered the Physicist.

“We have to turn this thing over,” the Doctor insisted.. “Come on, everyone together, on the same side. That’s it, don’t be squeamish! Now what?”

“Hold on,” said the Engineer. He went out, and returned a moment later with the steel poles they had used to dig the tunnel. These were slipped under the body and, at the Doctor’s command, all lifted.

The Cyberneticist shuddered when his hand slid down the slippery metal and touched the skin. With a dreadful smack the creature was rolled over on its side. Everyone jumped back. Someone shouted.

As from a gigantic, elongated oyster, a small two-armed trunk emerged between the thick, fleshy folds that closed winglike around it; dangling, its knotty fingers touched the floor. The thing, no bigger than a child’s head, swayed back and forth, slower and slower, suspended from pale-yellow ligament membranes, until finally it came to rest. The Doctor was the first to pluck up the courage to approach it.

He grasped the end of a limp, multijointed arm, and the small veined torso turned, revealing a flat, eyeless face with gaping nostrils and something jagged, like a tongue bitten in two, in the place where a man’s mouth would be.

“An inhabitant of Eden…” whispered the Chemist.

The Engineer, too shaken to speak, sat down on the generator shaft and began wiping his hands unconsciously on his suit, over and over again.

“So is this one creature or two?” asked the Physicist, who was watching closely as the Doctor carefully touched the chest of the lifeless “man.”

“Two in one or one in two — or maybe they’re symbionts. It could even be that they separate at times.”

“Like that horror with that single hanging black hair?” suggested the Physicist. The Doctor nodded and continued his examination.

“But this monster has no legs, no eyes, not even a head!” said the Engineer. He lit a cigarette — something he never did.

“That remains to be seen,” replied the Doctor. “I suppose you won’t mind if I dissect it? We’ll have to cut up the thing anyway to get it out of here. I’d be grateful for an assistant, though this might be unpleasant. Any volunteers?”

The Captain and the Cyberneticist stepped forward.

The Doctor stood up. “Good. I’ll look for instruments — which will take a while. I must say, if the plot keeps thickening like this, a man will need a week to polish his shoes. We can’t seem to finish anything we start.”

The Engineer and the Physicist went out into the corridor. The Captain, returning from the first-aid room in a rubber apron and with his sleeves rolled up, carrying a nickel-plated tray full of surgical instruments, stopped and frowned at them.

“You know about the purifier. If you want to smoke, go outside.”

So they made for the tunnel, and the Chemist joined them. Just to be safe, he took along the jector, which the Engineer had left in the engine room.

“How could that weird animal have set the generator going?” wondered the Engineer. He rubbed his cheeks: the stubble was so long that it didn’t feel prickly. Everyone was growing a beard. They didn’t seem to have the time to shave.

“At least the generator produced some current. That means the windings are sound.”

“What about the short circuit?”

“It blew a fuse, that’s all. The mechanical components are completely broken, but we’ll get around that. As for the sockets, we have spares — it’s only a matter of finding them. Theoretically we could repair the cylinder, too, but without the proper tools that would take forever. I think the reason I didn’t make a thorough inspection at first was that I feared everything had been pulverized. You know what our position would have been.”

“The reactor…” the Chemist began, but the Engineer grimaced.

“The reactor is another matter. We’ll get to the reactor. First we need current. Without current we can do nothing. The leak in the cooling system can be fixed in five minutes, by spot-welding. But for that, too, I need current.”

“You’re going to work on the machinery… now?” asked the Physicist, hope in his voice.

“Yes. We’ll decide on the sequence of repairs — I’ve already spoken to the Captain about that.

First we need at least one working unit. Of course, we’ll have to risk reactivating the unit without atomic energy. God knows how! With a capstan arrangement, perhaps… I have no idea how long the electronic controls were out, or what’s going on in the pile.”

“The neutron irises can function independently,” said the Physicist. “The pile automatically went into idle. Of course, too high a temperature, if the cooling system went, may have…”

“Wonderful! The neutron irises are fine, but the pile may have melted!”

They argued, drawing diagrams in the sand with their fingers, until the Doctor stuck his head out of the tunnel entrance and called to them. They jumped to their feet.

“Well, what did you learn?”

“Not very much in one respect, but in another quite a lot,” replied the Doctor, who looked peculiar, only his head showing above the ground as he spoke. “I’m still not sure whether it’s one creature or two. In any case it’s an animal. It possesses two circulatory systems, but they’re not entirely separate.

The big creature — the carrier — seems to have traveled by hopping or striding.”

“There’s a big difference,” said the Engineer.

“True,” the Doctor agreed. “As for the hump, it turned out to contain the digestive tract.”

“A stomach on its back?”

“That wasn’t its back. When the current hit it, it fell belly-up.”

“Then the smaller creature was like a rider,” the Engineer said.

“Yes, in a sense it rode the carrier piggyback. Or not piggyback,” the Doctor corrected himself.

“More likely, it sat inside the larger body — there’s a pouchlike nest there. The only thing to which I can compare it is a kangaroo’s pouch, but the similarity is very slight and nonfunctional.”

“And you’re assuming that this was an intelligent creature?” said the Physicist.

“It had to be intelligent to open and shut doors, not to mention starting the generator,” said the Doctor, for some reason remaining in the tunnel. “The only problem is that it has no nervous system in our sense of the word.”

“How’s that?!” The Cyberneticist jumped up.

“There are organs there,” the Doctor went on, “whose purpose I can’t even begin to fathom.

There’s a spinal cord, but in the cranium — a tiny cranium — there’s no brain. There is something there, but any anatomist would laugh at me if I told him it was a brain… A few glands, but they appear to be lymphatic — while near the lungs, and the creature has three lungs, I discovered the damnedest thing.

Something I didn’t like at all. I put it in alcohol — you can see it later.

“But now we have more urgent work. The engine room looks like a slaughterhouse. Everything will have to be taken out and buried, and since it’s warm in the ship, haste is definitely advisable. You can cover your faces; the smell is not that bad, but with so much raw flesh…”

“You’re joking?” the Physicist said.

“No.”

Only now did the Doctor step out of the tunnel. His rubber apron and white smock were completely soaked in red.

“I’m sorry, the job might make you sick, but it has to be done. Come.”

The gravedigging, as the Chemist referred to it, took them until the late afternoon. Working half naked to avoid staining their suits, they carried the dreadful stuff with whatever was at hand — buckets, litters — and buried the remains two hundred paces from the ship, at the top of the knoll; notwithstanding the Captain’s plea to conserve water, they used five pails of it to wash themselves afterward. The creature’s blood, before it coagulated, resembled that of humans, but then it turned orange and became powdery.

The weary crew stretched themselves out beside the ship in the setting sun. No one had an appetite, so they only drank a little coffee or water, then dozed off, one by one, without discussing how to begin the repair work. When they awoke, it was already dark. Again they had to go down to the storeroom for provisions, open cans, light a stove, cook, eat, and wash dishes. At midnight they decided, since everyone felt sufficiently rested, not to sleep but to begin tackling the repairs.

Their hearts beat faster as they removed the plastic and metal debris from the generator cover, using crowbars when necessary. They spent hours digging through rubble in search of missing parts, until finally the auxiliary generator was put in working order; they replaced the shattered socket with a new one, and the Engineer fixed the air compressor, resorting to a trick as simple as it was primitive: since there were not enough spare blades, he simply removed every other blade. The motor would operate with reduced efficiency, but it would operate. At three in the morning the Captain told them to stop.

“We’ll have to go on more expeditions,” he said, “to replenish our water supply, and for other reasons as well. So we should maintain our normal sleeping pattern. Let’s sleep until dawn and then get to work again.”

The rest of the night passed uneventfully. In the morning nobody expressed any desire to go up outside; everyone was anxious to get on with the repairs. The Engineer had by now put together a basic tool set, so there was no need to go running off to all the cabins in search of a wrench.

First they checked the distributor, which was so full of short circuits that they practically had to rebuild it from scratch, cannibalizing other broken units for parts. Then they set about getting the generator to start properly. The plan that the Engineer had decided on was risky: to turn the dynamos using as a turbine an air compressor driven by an oxygen cylinder. Under normal conditions the emergency unit would have been activated by high-pressure water vapor from the reactor, since the reactor, as the heart of the ship, was the most protected part. But that, with the total destruction of the circuits, was now entirely out of the question. So they would have to use their reserve oxygen. But this was not the desperate measure it might seem to be, because they were counting on being able to fill the tanks with atmospheric oxygen once the engine room was working. There was no other way: to activate the atomic pile without electricity would have been madness. But the Engineer, though he mentioned it to no one, was prepared to take even this step, if the oxygen plan failed — because it was possible that the compressed gas would run out before the pile was activated.

The Doctor, standing in a tiny gallery directly beneath the engine-room platform, called out the falling pressure readings on the oxygen manometers, while the other five men worked above him feverishly. The Physicist was stationed at a control board so makeshift that any Earth-based technician would have gasped in horror. The Engineer hung upside down beneath the generator ring, black with grease, fastening the contact brushes. And the Captain and the Cyberneticist watched the dial of the neutron counter, while the Chemist rushed back and forth like a messenger boy, delivering tools.

The oxygen hissed, and the air compressor made angry noises, rattling, because the rotor the Engineer had jury-rigged was poorly balanced. The RPM of the generator increased, and its wail went up in pitch. The lights suspended by cables from the ceiling now emitted a powerful white glare.

“Two hundred and eighteen, two hundred and two, one hundred and ninety-five,” came the muffled voice of the invisible Doctor.

The Engineer crawled out from under the dynamo, wiping the grease and sweat from his unshaven face. “Ready,” he panted. His hands trembled from exertion.

“I’m switching on the first one,” the Physicist said.

“One hundred and seventy, one hundred and sixty-three, one hundred and sixty,” the Doctor continued, raising his voice to be heard over the whine. The dynamo was now producing current for the reactor and with each second required more oxygen to maintain its RPM.

“Full load!” groaned the Engineer, watching the dials.

“All right!” said the Physicist in a strangled voice, and, crouching as if in anticipation of a blow, he pressed the black handles with both hands.

The Captain was gripping his arm harder, without realizing it. They stared as all the pointers rapidly rose toward the vertical: the one indicating neutron flux, the one indicating isotope contamination, and the thermopile. The dynamo howled, sparks flew from under the rings, but inside the pile, behind the thick walls of steel, there was silence. Those indicators did not move. Suddenly the Physicist saw them blur. He squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them saw that they were in working position.

“We did it!” he shouted, and began to sob, still clutching both handles. Suddenly he felt very weak. He had been expecting an explosion the whole time.

“The indicators must have jammed,” the Captain said calmly, apparently unaware of the Physicist’s emotion. But he spoke with difficulty — his jaws were still tightly clenched.

“Ninety, eighty-one, seventy-two…” the Doctor intoned.

“Now!” cried the Engineer, and with a gloved hand pulled the main switch. The generator groaned, slowed. The Engineer rushed to the air compressor and closed both intake valves.

“Forty-six, forty-six, forty-six,” the Doctor repeated.

The turbine was no longer taking oxygen from the tank. The lights dimmed; it grew darker in the room.

“Forty-six, forty-six…” the Doctor intoned from under the platform. Suddenly the lights blazed.

The dynamo now barely turned, but there was current; all the dials showed current.

“Forty-six… forty six…” repeated the Doctor, who, in the steel well of the gallery, knew nothing of what was going on. The Physicist sat down on the floor and covered his face with his hands.

There was now almost total silence. The generator rumbled slightly as it ground slowly to a halt; that was all.

“The leakage?” asked the Captain.

“Normal,” replied the Cyberneticist. “The robot must have managed to seal the pile before it shorted.” He spoke dryly, but everyone knew how proud he was of the robot. He clasped his hands to keep them from trembling.

“Forty-six…” intoned the Doctor.

“Enough!” the Captain shouted into the steel well. “It’s no longer necessary. The pile is producing current!”

After a moment the Doctor’s pale face and dark beard appeared below them. “Really?” he asked, then broke into a noiseless laugh. As the men stared at the dials, he clambered up from the gallery and sat down next to the Physicist. Like the others, he watched the pointers all in working position. “Do you know what?” he said finally, in a youthful voice. Everybody looked at him, as if waking up. “I’ve never been so happy,” he whispered and turned away.