Eden

VII

It was growing dark. They went around the ramp, which was not a ramp at all, and not metal, they now saw, but the flattened, farthest-reaching arm of a river of lava, whose size only now did they appreciate. The river had flowed from the upper level of the valley and hardened into dozens of fissured pools and cascades. It covered the lower part of the slope with humps of slag, but at the top, where the angle became precipitous, bare ribs of rock protruded through this inert flood. On the opposite slope a pass half a mile wide, with a dried-up, cracked clay bottom, went through a high ridge of mountain that appeared to be covered with vegetation.

The valley was much bigger than one would have guessed, looking at it from above. It branched into flat plains among loaflike outcroppings of magma. To the right the ground rose in terraces, almost bare, to gray clouds. Still higher they could hear the geyser, now blocked by a shelf of rock, and with each eruption a long hollow hiss filled the valley.

The scene slowly lost color, and shapes blurred, as though submerged in water. Ahead of the jeep, in the distance, they saw either walls or hillsides, reddish, whose complex pattern was bathed in what seemed the rays of the setting sun, though the sun was covered by clouds.

Closer, on both sides of the pass, stood rows of dark, vertical, club-shaped, giant structures resembling elongated balloons. The men rode between them, and the twilight was made darker by the shadows that these massive pillars cast. The Captain turned on the headlights, and outside their triple beam it suddenly became night.

The wheels rolled across layers of slag, cracking it like glass into fragments. The pillars glittered with a mercury sheen when the headlights touched them. The clay disappeared; the ground now was a bulging surface of hardened lava, with puddles in its hollows, which splashed beneath the wheels of the jeep. Against the clouds the men could see black, gossamer-thin lines connecting two pillars roughly three hundred feet apart. Then the headlights revealed several machines overturned, their undersides full of ragged openings from which decayed wisps of something dangled. The men pulled over. The machines had been abandoned long ago; they were rusted through.

The air was growing more and more humid, and gusts of a sickly odor and the stench of burning came from the pillars. The Captain steered toward the nearest pillar, driving over a smooth slab that crumbled at the edges and was flanked on either side by slanting surfaces that bore a series of notches.

At the base of the structure, pitch-black, was an entrance. Above this the cylindrical wall rose, bulged, and blocked out the sky with a mushroom-shaped hood that was wrinkled, amorphous, as though the builder had left it unfinished.

Reaching the immense hood, the Captain took his foot off the accelerator. The entrance gaped; the headlights were lost in it. Two broad, shallow troughs ran to the left and right and spiraled upward.

The jeep came to a stop, then slowly began to drive up the right trough.

They were plunged in darkness. In the beam of the headlights, telescopically half-open masts appeared and disappeared along the rims of the trough. Then something began to flash above these, and when they looked up, they saw rows of pale ghosts. The Captain directed one of the lights there and widened its beam. The beam climbed from one white cellular creature to another. Plucked from the darkness, each shone, then disappeared. At the same time thousands of tiny reflections dazzled the men.

“That’s no help.” The Captain’s voice was distorted by echoes. “But wait, we have flares!”

He got out, and in the light in front of the jeep leaned over the edge of the trough. Something clanged; he called out, “Don’t look here, look up!” — and jumped back into the jeep. Almost simultaneously the magnesium caught fire with an ear-piercing hiss, and a great glare rolled aside the darkness.

The trough in which they were standing ended, a little higher up, in a transparent corridor or shaft that climbed steeply and penetrated, like a tube of silver, a glowing jungle of bubbles that hung overhead, a dome filled with a multitude of cells, a glass hive. The flare was multiplied in the cells, and inside them the men could see skeletons, bones snowy white, almost sparkling, spatulate limbs, a fan of ribs radiating from a long oval disk of bone, and each thorax in the front, open, contained a small, slender, half-recumbent skeleton, a thing that was like a cross between a bird and a monkey, with a toothless, spherical skull. There were countless rows of such glass eggs, and they circled and spiraled higher and higher. But the cells mirrored and remirrored the light, so that it was impossible to tell real shapes from reflections.

The men sat glued to their seats for six seconds; then the flare went out, and in the darkness the bones continued to glow yellow. After a few minutes they saw that the headlights were still on, throwing dim light on the undersides of the glassy spheres.

The Captain drove to the shaft, the place where the trough became a funnel, and parked the jeep sideways, so it wouldn’t roll back down if the brakes failed, and they all got out.

The transparent tube went sharply upward, but they could ascend by foot. They detached one of the headlights from its mounting and entered the shaft, trailing a cable behind them.

The shaft spiraled up through the interior of the dome, and the cells were located on either side of it, slightly above the concave floor on which they climbed. It was tiring, but the shaft soon became less steep. Each cell was flattened on the sides, where it abutted other cells, and into the shaft from each stuck a snoutlike piece that was capped tightly by a round, cloudy lens. The men walked on, and the grotesque gallery of skeletons filed past them. The skeletons varied. The men did not realize this at first, because the ones adjacent were virtually identical. Differences became apparent only if one compared examples from distant sections on the long spiral.

As the men climbed higher, the thorax openings grew smaller, and the limbs, too, as though they were being absorbed by the oval disk of bone, but the heads of the little chest monstrosities grew large, their skulls strangely distended on the sides.

Advancing single-file, the men made their way up one and a half loops of the spiral, then were stopped by a sudden jerk: the cable that connected the light to the jeep had reached the end of its reel.

The Doctor wanted to go on, using the flashlight, but the Captain shook his head. From the main shaft other tunnels branched off every dozen feet or so, and it would be easy to get lost in this labyrinth of glass. They turned back. On the way they attempted to open one, then a second, then a third cap, but the lenses were all fused to the rims of the transparent containers.

The bottoms of the cells were covered with a layer of fine white dust that had thin dark marks in places, but the marks — or numbers — were unintelligible. The Doctor, who was in the rear, paused at every cell: he still had no idea how the skeletons were suspended, or what supported them. Also, he wanted to inspect one of the “clusters” in a side corridor. The Captain hurried him on, so with a sigh he followed, particularly since the Chemist, who was carrying the headlight, was now some distance away, leaving them in darkness.

They descended quickly and at last were back at the jeep, taking deep breaths of air: the air in the glass tunnel had been stale and hot.

“To the ship now?” asked the Chemist.

“Not yet,” replied the Captain as he turned the jeep around, the trough being wide enough to allow this. The headlights made a sweeping arc through the darkness as they rode down the steep incline toward the entrance, which held the last light of day like a long, low screen.

Outside, the Captain decided to drive around the base of the pillar, which was a cone-shaped flange of cast metal. They were less than halfway around when their path was barred by oblong blocks with razor-sharp edges, all wedged together. The Captain raised a headlight.

A brown-black mass of lava rose behind the pillar. Descending from a height invisible in the darkness, the magma overhung the area in a crescent-shaped wall whose progress had been checked by a thick forest of masts and buttresses barring any closer approach. The intricate tangle of these constructions had pressed a network of interlocking shields into the inert flood of rock. Here and there huge dull blocks with broken pieces shining like black glass had split off above the barrier and fallen, covering the metal palisade with rubble. And the front of the magma, swelling, had pulled apart the shields in places and bent the masts, or uprooted both them and the wedge-shaped blocks that anchored them.

This picture of struggle, doomed to failure but heroic, against the natural forces of the planet was so familiar and so comprehensible to the men that they left the place heartened. The jeep backed into an open space between two giant pillars and proceeded down the straight, bizarre avenue into the valley.

They came upon calyxes growing in long rectangular patches, like cornfields, calyxes identical to the ones growing on the plain near the ship. Hit by the glare, the snakelike plants, showing pink beneath the gray of their skin, tried to contract, as though wakened, but their movement was too torpid to be converted into decisive action; it was only a wave of helpless twitches thirty feet ahead of them, in the headlights.

The men stopped again, this time at the next-to-last pillar. The entrance was cluttered by a pile of fragments. They tried to see the interior with their flashlights, but the flashlights were too weak, so they removed a headlight from the jeep again and went inside.

The darkness was filled with an acrid stench, like that of organic matter eaten by chemicals. They were up to their knees in broken glass. The Chemist got caught in a snarl of wire. As he pulled himself loose, yellow fragments appeared from beneath the debris. The headlight, directed upward, revealed a yawning gap in the dome, with clusters of cells dangling from it, some of which were cracked open and empty. Bits of bone lay everywhere. Picking their way through the rubble, the men returned to the jeep; they rode on.

They passed a group of gray ruins in a hollow, where the headlights swept over another mass of rock resisted by angular props broadening to shields at the top and anchored to the ground by hooks.

The jeep stopped rocking and bouncing as the surface beneath it became smooth, like concrete. Up ahead the men saw something blocking the way. It turned out to be a row of columns, and another row behind that. There was a whole forest of them, all supporting arches, making a curious building open on all sides. Below the spot where each arch left its column, they could see what appeared to be the embryos, or buds, of future arches, coiled up leaflike, unhatched.

The jeep went up a flight of steps as small as teeth and entered between the columns. There was a remarkable quality to their shape; it was botanical rather than geometrical, for although the columns were similar, no two were exactly alike; there were small variations in proportion, differences in the location of the nodes or swellings where the winged arches nestled.

The jeep rolled noiselessly over the stone surface, and left the columns behind, with their forest of moving shadows. When the last row disappeared, there was a wide-open space before them, and a low, faint glow. They advanced more slowly across solid rock, braking, coming to a stop at last three feet from an unexpected ravine.

Below them were dark ramparts reminiscent of old forts on Earth. The tops of the ramparts were level with where the men were standing, and they could see into the interiors, into narrow, crooked streets. The walls along the streets contained rows of rectangular openings that had rounded corners and were tilted back, as though aimed at the sky. Farther, behind the next series of walls, something they couldn’t see gave off a faint light that bathed the stones in a golden haze.

The Captain pointed a headlight down into the nearest passageway. The beam revealed, a hundred feet away, a solitary spindle-shaped column standing among arched walls. Water flowed silently down its sides, sparkling. Around the column, on triangular tiles, was river sand, and at the edge of the light a container lay overturned and open on one side. They could feel the night breeze and heard, in the streets below, the sound of dead leaves drifting over stone.

“A settlement…” the Captain said slowly, moving the headlight farther. From the small square with the well, small streets radiated, gorges framed by vertical walls that curved outward at the top like the prows of ships. One wall, curved back to the horizontal, had openings from which ran black streaks, like marks from a past fire. The beam wandered over pointed corners, passed a gaping black cellar entrance, followed turning alleys.

“Turn it off!” the Doctor said.

The Captain did so, and only now noticed, in the darkness, the change taking place in the scene before them.

The spectral light that had touched the tops of the more distant walls, outlining the silhouettes of pipes or vents of some kind, was growing fainter, breaking up into separate islands of light, which in turn were extinguished as a wave of darkness advanced from the center outward, engulfing one sector after another, until the night was without a single spark or glimmer.

“They know we’re here…” said the Chemist.

“Maybe,” said the Doctor. “But, then, why were the lights only over there? And… did you notice how they went out? From the center.”

The Captain took his seat in the jeep and turned off the other two lights. The darkness covered them like a black lid. “We can’t drive down there. And if we go on foot, someone will have to stay here with the jeep.”

They could not see one another’s faces, and all they could hear was the wind. Then, behind them, from the direction of the columns, came a faint sound, as though someone were stepping carefully. The Captain barely caught it; he turned the headlight around slowly, aimed it, and turned it on.

There was nothing there.

“Who will it be?” he asked.

Nobody spoke.

“It’ll have to be me, then,” he decided. He started the jeep and drove along the edge of the wall.

After a few hundred feet they saw, in the rock, stairs leading down. Each step was small and shallow.

“I’ll be here,” he said.

“How much time do we have?” asked the Chemist.

“It’s nine. Be back in an hour. You may have trouble getting your bearings, so forty minutes from now I’ll light a flare, and ten minutes after that, another, and five minutes after that, a third. Try to get to some sort of elevation by then, though you should see the light from below. Now let’s set our watches.”

They did so in silence, listening to the wind. The air was growing colder.

“Don’t take the thrower — there’s too little space to use it here anyway,” said the Captain, unconsciously lowering his voice. “The jectors ought to be enough. Besides, we want to make contact — but not at any price. Agreed?” This to the Doctor, who nodded. The Captain went on: “Night is not the best time. Perhaps you should only reconnoiter. That would be the most sensible thing. After all, we can come here again. Make sure you keep together. Guard your rear, and avoid dead ends.”

“How long will you wait?” asked the Chemist.

The Captain’s face, in the reflection of the headlights, looked ashen. He smiled.

“As long as I have to. And now on your way.”

The Chemist slung the jector strap over his shoulder, to have both hands free. He turned on his flashlight and made for the stairs. The Doctor was already on his way down. Suddenly a bright light came from above — the Captain was lighting the way for them — and they followed the beam along the wall until they came to a large entrance flanked on either side by columns that emerged halfway up, as though growing from the, wall. The lintel was covered with stone buds in high relief. The jeep’s headlights here produced only a semicircular glow against the black of the doorway, the threshold of which was worn, as if by an endless procession of feet. They entered slowly. The doorway was enormous, built for giants, and on the inside walls and ceiling there were no signs of joints, as if the entire structure had been carved out of solid rock. The hall terminated in a blind, concave wall. On either side was a row of niches, each containing a depression at the bottom, like a place to kneel, and above that a triangular, glazed vent in the wall.

They went back outside. Several dozen feet farther on was a passageway in the wall surrounded by regular but mysterious multifaceted shapes. As they turned and entered it, the half-light behind them went out. The Chemist looked around — they were in total darkness. The Captain had turned off the headlights.

The Chemist looked up. He could not see the sky, but thought he could feel its distant, cold presence.

Their footsteps reverberated. The stone walls echoed.

Without saying a word, both men put out their left hands and touched the wall near them. It was almost as smooth as glass.

The Doctor turned on his flashlight, and they found themselves in a small open space like the bottom of a well. The walls, parting narrowly for street entrances, had double rows of windows all tilted skyward and therefore difficult to see from below. In the narrowest street were steps going steeply up and, before them, a horizontal stone beam flush between the walls. A dark cask shaped like an hourglass hung from it. The men chose the widest street. Soon the air around them seemed to change. Their flashlights showed, above them, vaulting riddled like a sieve, as if someone had punched a thousand triangular holes in the stone.

They walked on, past roofed side streets like high galleries. They walked beneath domes hung with misshapen bells or casks, and gossamer strips blew in the wind from lintels covered with ornamentation in the shape of plants. They peered into spacious but empty halls that had barrel-vaulted ceilings with large round openings at the top, which were plugged with boulders. Strange corrugated gutters angled upward from the streets like dough-covered ladders. A warm gust of air sometimes hit them in the face.

Several hundred feet from the square, the street divided; they went right and began to descend.

Massive buttresses filled the street, and at each was a niche containing dead leaves. The dust they raised, walking, swirled in the beams of their flashlights. Crypts gaped on either side, exuding stale air, and inside them were meaningless shapes, seemingly abandoned. The street bottomed, then rose, and the air grew fresher.

The men passed more side streets, galleries, squares. As their flashlights moved, shadows appeared to take wing or scurry away in dark packs, or crouch at entrances guarded by columns that grew out of the wall and leaned toward one another. Everywhere, the men were accompanied by the barking echo of their footsteps.

At times they sensed the presence of someone else. Then they would stop by a wall, their flashlights turned off, their hearts pounding, and hear rustling, shuffling noise, a clumsy echo, a murmur like an underground stream. Or, from a well opening in an alcove, a moan might come, accompanied by a musty smell, but it was impossible to say whether it was a creature’s voice or only the sound of the air in a hollow place. They had the impression that shapes were moving around them. Then they saw a small face peering out of an alley. It was pale and furrowed. But when they went to the place, all they found was a shred of paper-thin gold foil.

The Doctor said nothing. He knew that this excursion — dangerous, mad under such conditions, at night — was being undertaken because of him, that the Captain was risking it because, though time was pressing, the Doctor, alone of the crew, had insisted that an attempt at communication be made. He told himself that as soon as they reached the next corner, the next street, they would turn back — but they went on. In a high gallery framed by circular plates of opaque glass, which also formed the ceiling, with curious underslung, gondolalike balconies, a plant pod dropped in front of them. They picked it up: it was warm, as though a hand had held it.

What most perplexed them was the darkness. Surely the inhabitants of the planet had eyes and had observed their arrival. One would have expected to encounter guards, activity of some sort, not this emptiness. The lights that the men had observed from above were evidence that the area was inhabited.

.

This reconnaissance became more and more like a bad dream. They longed for light — their flashlights only seemed to intensify the surrounding gloom, and all they saw were fragments, incomprehensible parts of things.

There was a shuffling, so distinct that they rushed toward it. The rhythm of flight and pursuit filled the narrow street, the echoes broken between the close walls. As they ran, their flashlights in front of them, gray reflections moved along the vaulting overhead, which lowered until it was quite near. The shuffling noise stopped — then started again. The ceiling went up and down in waves as dark side-street entrances flew past. The men came to a halt, exhausted.

“Listen… do you think they… are drawing us into a trap?” the Chemist panted.

“Don’t be silly!” the Doctor said, angry. They were standing near a well whose walls were perforated with black openings. A pale, flattened face showed in one of them, but when they pointed their flashlights there, the opening was empty.

They went on. The presence of others was no longer a matter of conjecture, they could feel it everywhere, and the Doctor found himself thinking that even an attack or a struggle in the dark would be preferable to this pointless search that led nowhere. He looked at his watch. Almost half an hour had passed; they would have to head back soon.

Several feet ahead, at a bend in the wall, was a doorway crowned by a sharply pointed arch, with bulbous stone trunks rising on either side of the threshold. The Chemist swept the dark interior with his flashlight. The beam moved across a row of niches and fell upon a cluster of naked bodies crouching and motionless.

“They’re there!” he gasped, shrinking back. The Doctor entered, while the Chemist shone his light from behind. The naked group clung to the wall, huddled, frozen in place. At first he thought they were dead. Drops of water glistened, trickling down their backs.

“Hey!” the Doctor called weakly, feeling the absurdity of the situation. From outside and above came a long, penetrating whistle; then a groan of many voices resounded in the stone room. None of the creatures moved, they only groaned. But there was movement in the street; the men could hear steps, the sound of running, and several dark forms went past in great bounds. When the echoes died, the Doctor peered out — there was nothing in the street. His bewilderment turned to anger. Standing in the doorway, he switched off his flashlight and listened.

More steps in the darkness. “They’re coming!”

The Doctor felt rather than saw the Chemist clutch his weapon. “Don’t shoot!” he cried.

The street was suddenly filled, humps leaped up and sideways in the beam of the Chemist’s flashlight, there were soft thuds of bodies hitting bodies, and huge shadows shot out and flapped like wings. A rattling cough broke into a wail of several hoarse voices, and something heavy fell at the Chemist’s feet, knocking him down. For a second he glimpsed a small face with white eyes staring at him; his flashlight hit the ground, and the darkness was total. He groped for the flashlight desperately, like a blind man running his hands over the stone of the street.

He called to the Doctor, but his voice didn’t carry. Dozens of bodies passed, bumping into one another.

The Chemist grabbed the metal cylinder of his flashlight and jumped to his feet, but a powerful blow threw him against a wall. A whistle sounded from high up, and the bodies stopped. He felt the heat coming from them.

He was shoved, he staggered and cried out, feeling slippery flesh and breaths on him from all sides. He pressed the contact, and there was light again.

A row of enormous humps, and dazed eyes in miniature faces. Then, from behind, naked creatures pushing toward him. Wedged between hot, wet bodies, he made no attempt to defend himself, but let himself be pushed and pulled along. The stink of flesh was asphyxiating. The creatures near him looked at him with apprehension and tried to back away, but there was no room. The hoarse howling went on and on. Small torsos drenched in a liquid like sweat nestled in bulges of pectoral muscle.

Suddenly the group surrounding him was pushed toward the doorway. Through a jungle of intertwined limbs he could make out, for a second, a glimmer of light and the Doctor’s face, the mouth wide open in a shout. The Chemist’s flashlight bobbed up and down, clutched to his chest, and it showed tiny faces, eyeless, noseless, mouthless, all drooping and drenched. For a moment the pressure slackened; then another push, and his shoulders were slammed against the wall, against a column, which he caught hold of and tried to cling to, resisting with all his might the wave of shoving creatures. He had to stay on his feet; if he fell, he would be trampled to death. He felt, in the stone, a step — no, a ledge. He climbed up on it and shone his flashlight outward.

It was a terrifying sight: a river of heads surging from wall to wall. They stared at him wide-eyed as he stood in a niche and watched their desperate, convulsive efforts to avoid him. But they could not move away, helpless in the crowd that pushed down the street, that squeezed the outermost creatures into the walls. The Chemist saw the Doctor — he was caught in the crowd, like a floating chip, surrounded by huge bodies. The Chemist’s flashlight fell again, went out. In the darkness, the noise continued, the thuds and groaning. He propped his back against the cold stone and tried to catch his breath. But now he could hear individual footsteps, individual leaps, which meant that the hellish crowd was thinning. Weak in the knees, he wanted to call to the Doctor but was unable to utter a sound.

Suddenly a burst of white revealed the top of the opposite wall, and the Chemist realized, after a few moments, that it must be the Captain showing them the way back with a magnesium flare.

He bent down and began feeling around for his flashlight, but the air along the ground smelled so bad it made him sick, so he quickly got back to his feet. Then he heard a distant shout, a man’s voice.

“Doctor! Over here!” the Chemist called. Another shout, closer now, and a tongue of light appealed between the black walls. The Doctor was heading toward him, but not in a straight line; it was as though he were drunk…

“Ah,” he said, “you’re here. Good…” And he grabbed the Chemist by the arm. “They had me for a while, but I managed to move aside… Did you lose your flashlight?”

“Yes.”

The Doctor still held his arm. “Dizziness,” he explained, trying to catch his breath. “It’s nothing…

It’ll pass…”

“What was that?” the Chemist asked in a whisper.

The Doctor said nothing.

Together they listened to the darkness, to distant footsteps, to an occasional moan. The sky lit up a second time above them, showing horizontal ledges, and the glow drifted downward, yellowing, like a brief sunrise and sunset.

“Let’s go,” they said together.

Without the flares they probably would not have made it back before daybreak. The summoning bursts of light, which twice more filled the ravines of the streets, kept them in the right direction. Along the way they encountered several creatures, who fled in panic, and once they came across a body lying at the bottom of a steep flight of steps, already cold. They passed it without a word. A few minutes before eleven, they found themselves back in the open square with the column and the well. No sooner did the beam of the Doctor’s flashlight hit it than the triple headlights of the jeep began shining from above.

The Captain was standing at the top of the steps as the Doctor and the Chemist ran up. At the jeep, when they sat, panting, on one of the running boards, he turned off the lights and paced in the darkness, waiting for them to speak.

When they had told him everything, he said, “Interesting. A good thing it ended like that. There’s one of them here, by the way…”

They did not understand, but when he put a light back on and aimed it at the rear, they jumped to their feet. About thirty feet from the jeep lay a doubler.

The Doctor went to look at it. The thing was naked, half reclining, the upper part of its huge torso not on the ground. A pale-blue eye gazed at them from between heaving pectoral muscles. The men could see only the edge of a flattened little face, as though they were looking at someone through a door open just a crack.

“How did it get here?” the Doctor asked softly.

“It came from below, not long before you. When I lit the last flare, it ran away, but then it came back.”

“It came back?!”

“Yes.”

They stood over it, not knowing what to do. The creature was breathing heavily, as if after a long race. The Doctor bent down to stroke the hulk, but it started quivering, and large drops of liquid appeared on its pale flesh.

“He’s… afraid of us,” the Doctor murmured.

“Let’s leave him, let’s go. It’s late,” the Chemist said.

The Doctor hesitated. “No, wait, listen… Let’s sit down.”

The doubler did not move.

The Captain and the Chemist followed the Doctor’s example and sat down on the flat, stony ground near the creature. In the distance they heard the sound of the geyser, and then the wind moving in unseen thickets. The settlement was invisible in the night. Threads of mist floated by. Sharply outlined in the glare of the headlight, the jeep stood motionless, like a flat on an abandoned stage. After more than ten minutes of this sitting, they began to grow impatient, but suddenly the little head looked out at them. A clumsy movement on the Chemist’s part made it retreat back into its pouch of muscle.

Finally, after almost half an hour of waiting, the huge creature got up. It was six feet tall, but would have been taller if it weren’t bent forward. When it moved, the lower half of its body seemed to extend or retract legs at will from a shapeless base, but this was only muscle swelling and contracting around its limbs as it walked.

No one knew how the Doctor did it — and he himself admitted later that he had no idea — but, after a variety of gentle gestures and coaxing pats, the doubler, which by now had emerged completely from its nest of flesh, allowed the Doctor to lead it by its tiny hand to the jeep. The head drooped forward and stared at them as though incredulous as they assembled in front of the headlight.

“What now?” asked the Chemist. “You’re not going to start a dialogue here.”

“We’ll take him with us,” said the Doctor.

“Are you in your right mind?”

“A good idea,” said the Captain. “But he must weigh half a ton!”

“So? The jeep can handle more than that.”

“Add the three of us, and the torsion bars might break.”

“Really?” said the Doctor. “Then we should let him go.” And he pushed the doubler in the direction of the steps.

At that point the big creature curled up, its skin covered with opalescent drops.

“What? I… No, I was only joking,” the Doctor stammered. They were amazed by the thing’s reaction. The Doctor managed to calm the creature.

Finding room for the new passenger was not going to be easy. The Captain let almost all the air out of the tires, so that the jeep was practically touching the rocks. He removed the two back seats and strapped them to the luggage rack, and the thrower was tied to the top of the pile. But the doubler was reluctant to get into the vehicle. The Doctor patted it on the back, talked to it, got in himself, and sat down. This would have made an amusing scene if it hadn’t been so late, way past eleven, and if they hadn’t had more than sixty miles to cover — in the darkness, over difficult terrain, and most of it uphill — to get back to the ship. Finally the Doctor lost patience. He grabbed one of the arms dangling from the small torso and cried, “Push him from behind!”

The Chemist hesitated, but the Captain shoved hard against the doubler’s bulging back. The doubler made a whimpering sound and, losing its balance, found itself in the jeep. Everything moved quickly now. The Captain inflated the tires, and the jeep had no problem moving, though it listed a bit.

The Doctor occupied the seat in front of the new passenger, while the Chemist, not comfortable in its proximity, chose to stand behind the Captain instead.

They drove past rows of columns, then entered the avenue of the club-shaped structures. The jeep gathered speed on the flat terrain, but slowed when they climbed the slope of magma at the pass.

About ten minutes later they reached the clay mounds and the square wells with their terrible contents.

They drove through thick, loose mud for a long time, then came to the tracks that their own tires had made going the other way, and followed them back to the valley.

Throwing up fountains of mud from beneath its wheels, the jeep picked its way between the clay mounds. A blurred light flared up in the darkness and came toward them, growing larger, until they could distinguish three separate lights. But the Captain maintained speed, knowing it was a reflection. The doubler began to show signs of uneasiness; it moved, it grunted, it even shifted its weight dangerously, making the jeep tilt more to the left. The Doctor tried to calm the creature with his voice, though without much success. Glancing back, he saw that it now resembled a rounded sugarloaf on top — the doubler had pulled in its small torso and appeared to be holding its breath. It was only when the momentary ripple of heat and the disappearance of their reflection announced that they had crossed the mysterious line that the huge passenger relaxed, stopped fidgeting, and even seemed to enjoy the night ride.

The jeep was now climbing a steep slope. It pitched and reeled as its bulging tires lumbered over large rocks. The engine, straining, whined. Once or twice they began rolling backward, the wheels spinning in a spray of loose soil. The Captain turned the steering wheel sharply, and they stopped.

Cautiously, he turned the jeep around, and they went back down the slope along a diagonal, into the valley.

“Where are we going?” asked the Chemist nervously. Gusts of night air carried tiny droplets of water, almost like rain.

“We’ll try somewhere else,” said the Captain.

They halted and looked uphill, using one of the headlights, but there was not much to see, so they tried again at random. The slope soon became as steep as it had been before, but here the ground was dry, and the jeep could proceed. Every time the Captain steered to keep to compass north, however, the jeep fell back on its rear tires, forcing him westward, which meant that they would run into the thicket. As far as he could remember, the thicket covered most of the edge of the plateau toward which they were climbing. But there was nothing to be done. The headlights struck a row of white figures swaying in the gloom — no, it was only mist. Drops of condensation formed and ran down the windshield and the metal tubing of the seat frames. The cold mist thickened, then thinned, and they had no idea where they were going. The Captain tried only to go uphill.

Suddenly the mist dispersed, and the headlights, now bright, revealed the top of the slope. The black sky above was filled with stars. Everyone began to feel better.

“How’s our passenger?” asked the Captain, not turning around.

“All right. He appears to be sleeping,” said the Doctor.

The slope became steeper, and the jeep’s center of gravity, shifting to the rear, made it impossible to steer with the front wheels. They skidded several feet to the side. Then the Doctor suggested, “Maybe I should sit up front, between the headlights, on the bumper.”

“Not yet,” the Captain said. He released air from the tires, and the jeep, sinking, held the ground better.

They crossed a large loamy area, and the ragged line of scrub above them came closer and closer, like an over-hanging black brush. Going through it was out of the question, but they couldn’t turn to look for a better place to enter, so they continued upward — and came to an abrupt halt about forty feet from a wall six feet high. The headlights showed yellow clay filled with threadlike roots.

The Chemist cursed.

The Captain got out, took a shovel, and dug at the clay, which he then put under the jeep’s rear tires. Digging, he moved higher. The Chemist hurried after him. The Doctor could hear them working their way into the thicket, could hear the snap and crackle of dry branches. The Captain’s flashlight flickered, went out, went on again in another place.

“What awful stuff!” growled the Chemist. “This is risky.”

“We are hardly strangers to risk,” responded the Captain. Raising his voice, he called to the Doctor, “We’re going to start a little landslide. It should clear a path for us. Try to keep our passenger from getting frightened!”

“All right!” the Doctor shouted back. He turned around in his seat to face the doubler, who was curled up and still.

Then came the sound of moving clay, and a stream of clods rolled down the slope. Lumps thudded against the jeep. The landslide stopped, though bits of soil kept trickling from the wall. The Doctor checked the creature; it showed no reaction. In front of the jeep there was now a wide, funnel-shaped breach in the overhanging lip of clay. The Captain was standing in it, working energetically with his shovel.

It was past twelve by the time they took the towline, the reel, and the grappling hook from the luggage carrier, fastened one end of the line to the jeep, and pulled the other through the breach and up into the thicket, where it was anchored. The Doctor and the Chemist got out, and the Captain turned on all the wheel motors and the front winch, which drew the vehicle forward bit by bit. Further widening of the passage was required, but half an hour later the jeep was on the plateau, plowing noisily through the dry and brittle thicket. For another hour their progress was very slow; only when the vegetation came to an end were they able to pick up speed.

“Halfway!” the Chemist shouted to the Doctor after looking over the Captain’s shoulder at the odometer. The Captain didn’t think that they were halfway, considering the detour they had been forced to take on the slope. He was bent forward, his face close to the windshield, his eyes on the terrain. He was trying to avoid the larger boulders and ruts and take the smaller ones between the wheels. The jeep shook and lunged until the fuel can clattered, and sometimes the jeep even bounced into the air and fell, making the shock absorbers hiss. But the visibility was not bad, and so far there were no surprises.

Where the headlight beams ended in a gray haze, something flashed by — a mast, then another, then another, and the men passed through the line of them. Craning his neck, the Doctor tried to see if there were columns of vibrating air at the tops of the masts, but it was too dark. The stars twinkled peacefully.

Behind him, the huge creature was still. Only once did it shift slightly, as if, tired of sitting in the same position, it was making itself more comfortable, and this very human movement strangely touched the Doctor.

They were going downhill now, crossing grooves on a plateau with a lengthwise ridge. The Captain slowed when more grooves showed in the headlights, beyond a tongue-like projection of limestone; he heard a whizzing noise to the left that rose terribly to a hollow roar. A mass crossed their path, flashed in their headlights, a glittering colossus, and disappeared. The brakes squealed, and as the men pitched forward, they felt a blast of hot, bitter air on their faces. Another whizzing approached, and the Captain turned off the headlights. In the darkness, several feet ahead of them, phosphorescent gondolas flew by, one after another, enveloped by the blur of its gyrating disk. Each turned, performing the same banking maneuver, and the men began to count them: eight, nine, ten… The fifteenth seemed to be the last, so the men started moving again.

“Well, that we haven’t seen before,” the Doctor said.

But then came a different noise, much slower and closer to the ground, and the Captain quickly put the jeep in reverse and backed away, the tires crunching the limestone debris, and they waited. A shape passed before them in the darkness, making a deep rumble, and the stars above the trees were blotted out. The ground shook. Another phantom went by like a heavy top, and another. There was no gondola visible, only the silhouette of a thing radial, jagged, glowing red and rotating slowly in the direction opposite to its motion.

Again there was silence, although in the distance they could hear a soft hum.

“Those were huge — did you see them?!” said the Chemist.

The Captain waited a good while longer before he finally turned on the headlights and released the brakes. Going downhill, the jeep picked up speed. It would have been easier to travel along the grooves, since the ground there was more level, but the Captain preferred not to risk it — one of those blurry monsters might overtake them from behind. Steering carefully, he went in the same direction as the disks they had encountered, eastward, though the disks might well have turned again and changed course. He said nothing, but he was uneasy.

It was after two when a shiny band flashed up ahead. The doubler, who had not moved a muscle during the passage of the disks, had been peering out and examining its surroundings for some time now.

But when the jeep reached the mirrorlike strip, the huge creature suddenly started wheezing and groaning, and it worked its way to one side, as though preparing to jump out.

“Stop! Stop!” cried the Doctor. The Captain stopped three feet from the strip.

“What’s wrong?”

“He wants to escape!”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because of that strip. Turn off the headlights!”

The Captain did so. The moment it was dark, the doubler sank back heavily into its seat. They crossed the strip with the lights off, and for a moment the reflection of the stars sparkled in the blackness on both sides of the jeep.

Then they were on the plain, the headlights beating against the night as the jeep sped along, its whole frame vibrating. Small stones and sand kicked up behind them, and the cold wind buffeted their faces, which made the Chemist lower his head behind the windshield. They went faster and faster, expecting the ship to come into view at any moment.

The arrangement was that a blinker would be hung from one of the fins of the ship, so they looked for a blinking light. Minutes passed and there was no light, so they turned and headed northeast, but all around them was darkness. They drove now with only their sidelights on, then the Captain turned off even those, despite the risk of hitting something. At one point they saw a flickering and went toward it as fast as possible, but soon realized that it was just a star.

“Maybe the blinker is broken,” ventured the Chemist.

Nobody replied. They covered another three miles and turned again. The Doctor stood up and strained to see into the darkness. The jeep bounced, first in the front, then in the rear: they had crossed a ditch.

“Bear left,” said the Doctor.

They crossed a second ditch one and a half feet deep. A faint light appeared and, rising up through it, a long, slanting shadow, the top of which was momentarily surrounded by an aureole. The light disappeared, but the jeep accelerated straight ahead, and when the light came on again, it revealed the ship’s stern and three figures. The Captain turned on the headlights, and the figures ran toward them with their arms raised.

The ship was near now. They had approached it at such an angle that the stern had concealed the’blinker.

“Is that you?! All of you?!” cried the Engineer. He rushed over to the jeep, but stopped short at the sight of the fourth, headless figure.

The Captain embraced the Engineer with one arm and the Physicist with the other, and stood there for a moment, as if requiring their support. The five men formed a group near one of the sidelights, while the Doctor, not joining them, spoke quietly to the doubler, which had become restless.

“We’re all right,” said the Chemist. “And you?”

“In one piece,” the Cyberneticist replied.

The men looked at one another for quite a while in silence.

“Do we discuss what happened, or do we go to sleep?” asked the Chemist.

“You can sleep? That’s great,” exclaimed the Physicist. “Sleep! Good God! They were here, did you know that?”

“I thought as much,” said the Captain. “Was… was there a fight?”

“No. And for you…?”

“No, we didn’t have one, either. I… think the fact that they’ve discovered the ship may prove to be more important than anything we found.”

“Did you capture that?” asked the Engineer.

“Actually… he captured us. That is, he came voluntarily. But it’s a long story, and complicated, and one we don’t really understand.”

“It’s the same with us!” said the Cyberneticist. “They showed up about an hour after you left! I thought… well, I thought it was the end.”

“You must be starving,” said the Engineer.

“I completely forgot about food. Doctor!” called the Captain. “Come here!”

“Are we having a meeting?” The Doctor stepped from the jeep and came over, but he kept his eyes on the doubler, who unexpectedly jumped to the ground with a surprisingly light movement and shuffled over to the crew. At the edge of the ring of light the huge creature became motionless. As they watched silently, its muscles moved and made a gap; in the diffused glow of the lights the men saw part of a head and a blue eye regarding them.

“So they were here?” asked the Doctor, who at that moment was the only one not looking at the doubler.

“Yes. Twenty-five disks, of the kind we rode, and four much larger machines, like blurred tops.”

“We saw them too!” said the Chemist.

“When? Where?”

“Maybe an hour ago, on our way back. We very nearly ran into them. What did they do here?”

“Not much,” replied the Engineer. “The disks appeared in a row, we don’t know from which direction, because when we came up to the surface — we had been in the ship for no more than five minutes — they were already flying around, circling us. They didn’t approach. We figured this was a scouting party, a reconnaissance patrol, so we set up the thrower near the ship and waited. But they just kept circling, always at the same distance, not moving away, not coming closer. That went on for about an hour and a half. Then the larger things appeared, the tops — one of them a hundred feet high! They’re a lot slower. It seems the tops can travel only along the grooves that the other ones dig. The disks, anyway, made room for them in their circle, so that the larger and smaller machines alternated. While they were whirling around, one or two of them almost collided; their rims touched with an awful crash, but nothing happened, and they went on whirling.”

“And what did you do?”

“We were sweating it out by the thrower. It wasn’t pleasant.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” the Doctor said seriously. “And then what?”

“Well, at first I thought that at any second they would attack. Then that they were only observing us. But their formation was odd, and the fact that they never stopped; we know that the disks can spin in place… Anyway, after seven o’clock I asked the Physicist to get the blinker, because we had to hang it outside for you, except that it wouldn’t have been possible for you to get through that flying wall — and then it dawned on me that this was intentional, a blockade! So I thought we had better try to communicate — while we could. Still sitting behind the thrower, we began to flash a signal, two flashes, then three, then four.”

“A series?” asked the Doctor, and the Engineer was unable to tell whether he was making fun of him.

“A normal arithmetic progression,” he said at last.

“And what did they do?” asked the Chemist, who had been listening carefully.

“Basically, nothing…”

“What do you mean, basically?”

“They did different things the whole time, before, during, and after the flashing, but nothing that resembled an attempt to respond or establish contact.”

“What did they do?”

“They spun faster, slower, approached one another, and there was movement in the gondolas.”

“Do the tops — the big machines — also have gondolas?”

“Didn’t you say you saw them?”

“It was dark.”

“They have no gondolas. In their center there’s nothing at all. An empty space. But there is a large container of some kind that moves — floats — around the circumference. Convex on the outside, concave on the inside, and it assumes various positions and has a row of horns, conical swellings, which serve no purpose that I can see. The tops also left the circle sometimes and changed places with the disks.”

“How often?”

“It varied. In any case, we couldn’t make out a pattern in it. Not that we didn’t try. I took note of everything, looking for some sort of response from them. They performed complex maneuvers. For example, during the second hour the tops slowed down, and in front of each one a disk positioned itself, then moved slowly toward us, though no closer than fifty feet, with the top behind it. Then they formed circles again, but now two: an inner circle with four tops and four disks, and an outer circle with the rest of the disks. I was beginning to think that I had better do something, so you could get through, when lo and behold they lined up in single file and left, in a spiral first, then straight south.”

“When was this?”

“A few minutes past eleven.”

“That means we probably encountered other ones,” the Chemist said to the Captain.

“Not necessarily. They might have stopped on the way.”

“Now tell us what happened to you,” said the Physicist.

“Let’s hear from the Doctor,” said the Captain.

The Doctor summarized the whole expedition in a few minutes. “It’s curious that everything we find here is reminiscent of things we know on Earth,” he concluded, “but only partly. There are always pieces that don’t fit. These vehicles of theirs, for example, showed up here like war machines. Was it reconnaissance, was it a blockade? But ultimately nothing happened, and we are left in the dark. Those wells in the clay — they were terrible, of course, but what in fact were they? Graves? We don’t know.

Then that settlement, or whatever it was. An incredible place, like a nightmare. And the skeletons inside the ‘clubs’? Were they museums? Slaughterhouses? Chapels? Factories turning out biological specimens?

Prisons? Anything is possible, even a concentration camp!

“And no one stopped us or tried to establish contact with us. That’s surely the most incomprehensible thing of all. Without question, the planet’s civilization is highly developed. The architecture, the construction of domes like the ones we’ve seen — and yet, nearby, the stone settlement, like a medieval stronghold — an astonishing mixture of levels of civilization! Their signaling system must be sophisticated, since they extinguished the lights of the stronghold less than a minute after our arrival, and we were traveling fast and saw no one along the way. They are undoubtedly intelligent, but the crowd that descended on us behaved like a panic-stricken herd of sheep. It was chaos, totally senseless, mad!

And that’s how it’s been throughout.

“The individual we killed was covered with a kind of foil, while these others were naked. The corpse in the well had a tube in its umbilicus, and it had an eye, an eye like the one you’re looking at now, while the other corpses had no eyes… I’m beginning to think that even this doubler we brought with us won’t help us much. We’ll try to communicate with it, of course, but I doubt that we’ll have much success.

. ”

The Cyberneticist said: “All the information we’ve collected so far should be written down, classified, or we’ll get confused. The Doctor’s probably right, but… Those skeletons, were they definitely skeletons? And the crowd of doublers that surrounded you and then fled…”

“I saw the skeletons as clearly as I see you. As for the crowd…” And he spread his arms.

“That was absolute madness,” the Chemist put in.

“Maybe you woke up the settlement, and they were surprised. Imagine a hotel on Earth, and one of these gyrating disks suddenly appearing. Of course people will panic!”

The Chemist shook his head, and the Doctor smiled.

“You weren’t there, so it’s difficult to explain it to you. Panic, you say… And when all the people have hidden themselves or fled, one of them, naked as a jaybird, runs after the disk and asks for a ride.”

“But it didn’t ask you…”

“He didn’t? And what happened when I pushed him away to make him go back?”

“Gentlemen, it’s a quarter to four,” said the Captain, “and tomorrow — I should say today — they could pay us a new visit, at any time. Nothing would surprise me! What did you do in the ship?” he asked the Engineer.

“Very little, since we were sitting by the thrower for four hours! One microbrain has been checked, and the remote is almost working — the Cyberneticist can give you the details. There’s quite a mess, unfortunately.”

“I need sixteen niobium-tantalum diodes,” said the Cyberneticist. “The cryotrons are intact, but I can’t do anything with the brain without the diodes.”

“Can’t you cannibalize?”

“I did, I took over seven hundred.”

“There aren’t any more?”

“Maybe in Defender — I couldn’t reach it. It’s lying at the very bottom.”

“Listen, do we have to stand out here all night?”

“You’re right, let’s go. But wait — what about the doubler?”

“And what about the jeep?”

“You’re not going to like this, gentlemen, but from now on we’ll have to stand watch around the clock,” said the Captain. “It was crazy of us not to have done that before. Who will volunteer for the first two hours, until dawn…?”

“I will,” said the Doctor.

“You? Don’t be ridiculous. It has to be one of us,” said the Engineer. “After all, we were just sitting here.”

“And I was sitting in the jeep. I’m no more tired than you are.”

“Enough. First the Engineer, then the Doctor,” the Captain decided. He stretched, rubbed his numb hands, went over to the jeep, turned off the lights, and wheeled it around slowly, pushing it under the hull of the ship.

“And the doubler?” The Cyberneticist was standing over the recumbent creature.

“He’ll stay here. He’s sleeping. If he were going to run away, he wouldn’t have come here in the first place,” observed the Physicist.

“We can’t just leave him like this. We have to secure him somehow,” said the Chemist.

But the others were entering the tunnel one by one. He looked around, shrugged, and followed them. The Engineer meanwhile put an air cushion beside the thrower and sat down. But, afraid of falling asleep, he got up and began to pace back and forth.

The sand crunched softly under his boots. The first gray light appeared in the east, and the stars gradually went out. The air, cold and fresh, filled his lungs. He tried to pick out the strange odor that he recalled from the first time they had set foot on the planet, but he could no longer detect it. The side of the creature lying nearby rose and fell rhythmically. Long thin tentacles emerged from its chest and grabbed the Engineer by the leg. He struggled, stumbled, almost fell over — and opened his eyes. He had been asleep on his feet. It was brighter now. In the east, cirrus clouds had formed into a long, slanting line, the end of which was beginning to glow as the gray of the sky turned azure. The last star disappeared.

The Engineer faced the horizon. The clouds turned from dark gray to golden bronze; fire blazed at their edges; a streak of rose now lay on the horizon. This could have been Earth.

He was pierced with despair.

“My turn!” a strong voice rang out behind him. The Engineer gave a start. The Doctor was smiling at him. The Engineer suddenly wanted to thank him, to say something, he didn’t know what — something very important — but he had no words for it, so he shook his head, answered the smile with a smile, and went into the dark tunnel.