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EIGHT KEYS TO EDEN
BY MARK CLIFTON
NOVELS
Eight Keys To Eden
They'd Rather Be Right*
The Forever Machine*
NON-FICTION BOOK
Opportunity Unlimited
NOVELETTES
Remembrance and Reflection
How Allied
What Thin Partitions**
Sense From Thought Divide
Star, Bright
Hide! Hide! Witch!
A Woman's Place
Clerical Error
What Now, Little Man?
Do Unto Others
SHORT STORIES
What Have I Done?
The Conqueror
Kenzie Report
Bow Down To Them
Reward For Valour
Progress Report**
Crazy Joey**
We're Civilized**
Solution Delayed**
ARTICLES
It Can't Be Done
The Dread Tomato Affliction
* _In collaboration with Frank Riley_
** _In collaboration with Alex Apostolides_
EIGHT KEYS
TO EDEN
by
Mark Clifton
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York
1960
_All of the characters in this book
are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental._
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-9470
Copyright (C) 1960 by Mark Clifton
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
Transcriber's Note:
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. Variant and
dialect spellings remain as printed. Superscript text is preceded by
the ^ symbol, bold text is shown as =bold=, and {d} represents the
Greek letter _delta_.
To
Charles Steinberg
who made writing possible for me
EIGHT KEYS TO EDEN
SEVEN DOORS TO SEVEN ROOMS OF THOUGHT
=1= Accept the statement of Eminent Authority without basis, without
question.
=2= Disagree with the statement without basis, out of general
contrariness.
=3= Perhaps the statement is true, but what if it isn't? How then to
account for the phenomenon?
=4= How much of the statement rationalizes to suit man's purpose that
he and his shall be ascendant at the center of things?
=5= What if the minor should become major, the recessive dominant, the
obscure prevalent?
=6= What if the statement were reversible, that which is considered
effect is really cause?
=7= What if the natural law perceived in one field also operates
unperceived in all other phases of science? What if there be only
one natural law manifesting itself, as yet, to us in many facets
because we cannot apperceive the whole, of which we have gained
only the most elementary glimpses, with which we can cope only at
the crudest level?
=And are those still other doors, yet undefined, on down the corridor?=
1
One minute after the regular report call from the planet Eden was
overdue, the communications operator summoned his supervisor. His finger
hesitated over the key reluctantly, then he gritted his teeth and
pressed it down. The supervisor came boiling out of his cubicle,
half-running down the long aisle between the forty operators hunched
over their panels.
"What is it? What is it?" he quarreled, even before he came to a stop.
"Eden's due. Overdue." The operator tried to make it laconic, but it
came out sullen.
The supervisor rubbed his forehead with his knuckles and punched
irritably at some buttons on an astrocalculator. An up-to-the-second
star map lit up the big screen at the end of the room. He didn't expect
there to be any occlusions to interfere with the communications channel.
The astrophysicists didn't set up reporting schedules to include such
blunders. But he had to check.
There weren't.
He heaved a sigh of exasperation. Trouble always had to come on his
shift, never anybody else's.
"Lazy colonists probably neglecting to check in on time," he
rationalized cynically to the operator. He rubbed his long nose and
hoped the operator would agree that's all it was.
The operator looked skeptical instead.
Eden was still under the first five-year test. Five-year experimental
colonists were arrogant, they were zany, they were a lot of things, some
unprintable, which qualified them for being test colonizers and nothing
else apparently. They were almost as much of a problem as the
Extrapolators.
But they weren't lazy. They didn't forget.
"Some fool ship captain has probably messed up communications by
inserting a jump band of his own." The supervisor hopefully tried out
another idea. Even to him it sounded weak. A jump band didn't last more
than an instant, and no ship captain would risk his license by using the
E frequency, anyway.
He looked hopefully down the long room at the bent heads of the other
operators at their panels. None was signaling an emergency to draw him
away from this; give him an excuse to leave in the hope the problem
would have solved itself by the time he could get back to it. He chewed
on a knuckle and stared angrily at the operator who was sitting back,
relaxed, looking at him, waiting.
"You sure you're tuned to the right frequency for Eden?" the supervisor
asked irritably. "You sure your equipment is working?"
The operator pulled a wry mouth, shrugged, and didn't bother to answer
with more than a nod. He allowed a slight expression of contempt for
supervisors who asked silly questions to show. He caught the
surreptitious wink of the operator at the next panel, behind the
supervisor's back. The disturbance was beginning to attract attention.
In response to the wink he pulled the dogged expression of the unjustly
nagged employee over his features.
"Well, why don't you give Eden an alert, then!" the supervisor muttered
savagely. "Blast them out of their seats. Make 'em get off their--their
pants out there!"
The operator showed an expression which plainly said it was about time,
and reached over to press down the emergency key. He held it down.
Eleven light-years away, if one had to depend upon impossibly slow
three-dimensional space time, a siren which could be heard for ten
miles in Eden's atmosphere should be blaring.
The supervisor stood and watched while he transferred the gnawing at his
knuckles to his fingernails.
He waited, with apprehensive satisfaction, for some angry colonist to
come through and scream at them to turn off that unprintable-phrases
siren. He braced himself and worked up some choice phrases of his own to
scream back at the colonist for neglecting his duty--getting
Extrapolation Headquarters here on Earth all worked up over nothing. He
wondered if he dared threaten to send an Extrapolator out there to check
them over.
He decided the threat would have no punch. An E would pay no attention
to his recommendation. He knew it, and the colonist would know it too.
He began to wonder what excuse the colonist would have.
"Just wanted to see if you home-office boys were on your toes," the
insolent colonist would drawl. Probably something like that.
He hoped the right words wouldn't fail him.
But there was no response to the siren.
"Lock the key down," he told the operator. "Keep it blasting until they
wake up."
He looked down the room and saw that a couple of the near operators were
now frankly listening.
"Get on with your work," he said loudly. "Pay attention to what you're
recording."
It was enough to cause several more heads to raise.
"Now, now, now!" he chattered to the room at large. "This is nothing to
concern the rest of you. Just a delayed report, that's all. Haven't you
ever heard of a delayed report before?"
He shouldn't have asked that, because of course they had. It was like
asking a mountain climber if he had ever felt a taut rope over the razor
edge of a precipice suddenly go slack.
"But there's nothing any of you can do," he said. He tried to cover the
plaintive note by adding, "And if you louse up your own messages ..."
But he had threatened them so often that there was no longer any menace.
He spent the next ten minutes hauling out the logs of Eden to see if
they'd ever been tardy before. The logs covered two and a fraction
years, two years and four months. The midgit-idgit scanner didn't pick
up a single symbol to show that Eden had been even two seconds off
schedule. The first year daily, the second year weekly, and now monthly.
There wasn't a single hiccough from the machine to kick out an
Extrapolator's signal to watch for anything unusual.
Eden heretofore had presented about as much of an _outre_ problem as an
Iowa cornfield.
"You're really sure your equipment is working?" he asked again as he
came back to stand behind the operator's chair. "They haven't answered
yet."
The operator shrugged again. It was pretty obvious the colonists hadn't
answered. And what should he do about it? Go out there personally and
shake his finger at them--naughty, naughty?
"Well why don't you bounce a beam on the planet's surface, to see?" the
supervisor grumbled. "I want to see an echo. I want to see for myself
that you haven't let your equipment go sour. Or maybe there's a space
hurricane between here and there. Or maybe a booster has blown. Or maybe
some star has exploded and warped things. Maybe ... Well, bounce it,
man. Bounce it! What are you waiting for?"
"Okay, okay!" the operator grumbled back. "I was waiting for you to give
the order." He grimaced at the operator behind the supervisor. "I can't
just go bouncing beams on planets if I happen to be in the mood."
"Now, now. Now, now. No insubordination, if you please," the supervisor
cautioned.
Together they waited, in growing dread, for the automatic relays strung
out through space to take hold, automatically calculating the route, set
up the required space-jump bands. It was called instantaneous
communication, but that was only relative. It took time.
The supervisor was frowning deeply now. He hated to report to the sector
chief that an emergency had come up which he couldn't handle. He hated
the thought of Extrapolators poking around in his department, upsetting
the routines, asking questions he'd already asked. He hated the
forethought of the admiration he'd see in the eyes of his operators when
an E walked into the room, the eagerness with which they'd respond to
questions, the thrill of merely being in the same room.
He hated the operators, in advance, for giving freely of admiration to
an E that they withheld from him. He allowed himself the momentary
secret luxury of hating all Extrapolators. Once upon a time, when he was
a kid, he had dreamed of becoming an E. What kid hadn't? He'd gone
farther than the wish. He'd tried. And had been rebuffed.
"Clinging to established scientific beliefs," the tester had told him
with the inherent, inescapable superiority of a man trying to be kind to
a lesser intelligence, "is like being afraid to jump off a precipice in
full confidence that you'll think of something to save yourself before
you hit bottom."
It might or might not have been figurative, but he had allowed himself
the pleasure of wishing the tester would try it.
"To accept what Eminent Authority says as true," the tester had
continued kindly, "wouldn't even qualify you for being a scientist.
Although," he added hopefully, "this would not bar you from an excellent
career in engineering."
It was a bitter memory of failure. For if you disbelieved what science
said was true, where were you? And if it might not be true, why was it
said? Even now he shuddered at the chaos he would have to face, live
with. No certainties on which to stand.
He washed the memory out of his thought, and concentrated on the
flashing pips that chased themselves over the operator's screen. There
was nothing wrong with the equipment. Nothing wrong with the
communication channels between Eden and Earth.
"Blasted colonists," the supervisor muttered. "Instead of a beam on
their planet, I'd like to bounce a rock on their heads. I'll bet they've
let all the sets at their end get out of order."
He knew it was a foolish statement, even if the operator's face hadn't
told him so. Any emergency colonist, man or woman--and there were fifty
of them on Eden--could build a communicator. That was regulation.
"You sure there haven't been any emergency calls from them?" he asked
the operator with sudden suspicion. "You're not covering up some neglect
in not notifying me? If you're covering up, you'd better tell me now.
I'll find out. It'll all come out in the investigation, and ..."
The operator turned around and looked at him levelly. He looked him
over, with open contempt, from bald head to splayed feet. Then he coolly
turned his back. There was a limit to just how much a man could stand,
even to hold a job at E Headquarters.
It was about time the supervisor got somebody with brains onto the job.
The sector chief should be called immediately. Supervisors were supposed
to have enough brains to think of something so obvious as that. That
much brains at least.
2
The first reaction of the sector chief to the dreaded words "delayed
report" was a shocked negation, an illusory belief that it couldn't
happen to him.
To the intense annoyance of the communications supervisor, his first act
was to rush down to communications and go through all the routines for
rousing the colonists the supervisor had tried. His worry was mounting
so rapidly that he hardly noticed the resigned expression of the
operator who knew he would have to go through all these useless motions
again and again before it was all over, and somebody did something.
"Well," the chief said to the supervisor. "It's my problem now." He
sighed, and unconsciously squared his shoulders.
"Yes, Chief Hayes," the supervisor agreed quickly. Perhaps too quickly,
with too much relief? "Well, that is, I mean ..." his voice trailed off.
After all, it was.
"You understand my check of your routines was no reflection on you or
your department," Hayes said diplomatically. "It's a heavy
responsibility to alert E.H.Q., pull the scientists off who knows what
delicate, critical work--maybe even hope to get the attention of an
E--all that. I had to make sure, you know."
"Of course, Chief Hayes," the supervisor said, and relaxed some of his
resentment. "Serious matter," he chattered. "Disgrace if an E, without
half trying, put his finger on our oversight. We all understand that."
He tried to include the nearby operators, his boys, in his eager
agreement, but they were all busy showing how intensely they had to
concentrate on their work.
"That's probably all it is--an oversight," Hayes said with unconvincing
reassurance; then, at the hurt look on the supervisor's face, added,
"Beyond our control here, of course. Something it would take at least a
scientist to spot, something we couldn't be expected ... What I mean is,
we shouldn't get alarmed until we know, for sure. And--ah--keep it
confidential."
"Of course, Chief Hayes," the supervisor said in a near whisper. He
looked meaningfully around at the room of operators, but did manage not
to put his finger to his lips. Those who were observing out of the
corners of their eyes were grateful for at least that.
On his way back to his own office Chief William Hayes reflected that the
bit about keeping it confidential was on the corny side. Within fifteen
minutes he'd start spreading it all over E.H.Q., himself. Every
scientist, every lab assistant would know it. Every clerk, every janitor
would know it. E.H.Q. would have to work full blast all night long, and
some of the lesser personnel had homes down in Yellow Sands at the foot
of the mountain.
These would be calling their husbands and wives, telling them not to fix
dinner, not to worry if they didn't come home all night. No matter how
guarded, the news would leak out, the word spread, and the newscast
reporters would pick it up for the delectation of the public. Eden
colony cut off from communication. Nobody knows ... Wonder ... Fear ...
Delicious ... Exciting....
Or was this the kind of thinking that had kept him from qualifying as an
E? What was it the examiner had asked? "Mr. Hayes, why do you feel it is
all right for you to view, to read, to know--but that others should be
protected from seeing, reading, knowing? What are these sterling
qualities you have that make it all right for you to censor what would
not be right for others?"
He abruptly brought his mind back to the present. Perhaps he'd first
better prepare a news statement before he did anything else, something
noncommittal, reassuring. No point in getting the populace stirred up.
As he sat down behind his desk, a big man in a brown suit, natural
iron-gray hair, a calm and administrative face, he began to realize that
for the next twenty-four hours, at least, he would be in the spotlight.
Well, he'd give a good account of himself. Demonstrate that he had an
executive capacity beyond the needs of his present job. More than a mere
requisition signer, interoffice memo initialer.
For one thing the scientists would give him trouble. If he had been
deeply hurt that they thought he couldn't open up his mind enough to
become an E, what about scientists whose limits were reached still
farther along? He must remember to keep his temper, use persuasion,
maybe kid them a little. The blasted experts were almost as bad as
E's--worse, in a way, because the E didn't have to remind anybody of his
dignity, or how important the work was he was doing.
But then, you never asked an E to drop what he was doing, and listen.
You never asked an E to do anything. He either noticed and was
interested, or he didn't notice, or wasn't interested.
But nobody ever told an E that he must apply himself to a problem. Once
a man became a full-fledged Extrapolator he was outside all law, all
frameworks, all duty, all social mores. That was the essence of E
science, that any requirement outside of his own making didn't exist. It
had to be that way. That kind of mind could not tolerate barriers, but
spent itself constantly in destroying them. Erect barriers of
triviality, and it would waste its substance upon trivial matters. The
only answer was to remove all possible barriers for the E, lest
immersion in something trivial prevent that mind from seeking out a
barrier to knowledge, a problem of significance.
But the scientists! Hayes sighed. If only the scientists wouldn't keep
thinking they were cut from the same cloth as the E. They had to have
restrictions, organization imposed upon them. Yes indeed!
They'd grumble at being taken away from their work to assemble a review
of all the known facts about Eden--a dead issue as far as their own work
was concerned, for Eden had been assayed and filed away as solved.
They'd moan and groan about having to drag up the facts that had been
analyzed and settled long ago.
He saw himself compared with the producer of a show, and theatrical
performers didn't come any more temperamental than scientists. He'd be
hearing about how much of their time he'd wasted for months to come.
Every time any administrator asked why they hadn't produced whatever it
was they were working on, it would be because Chief Hayes had
interrupted them at the most crucial moment and they'd had to begin all
over again.
Oh, they'd drag their heels, all right, and he'd have to remind them,
tactfully, that their prime duty was to serve the Extrapolators; that
they were employed here only because someday, in some co-ordinate
system, somebody might be able to supply a key fact that some E might
want to know.
They'd ask him, slyly, what guarantee he had that any E would be
listening if they did produce a review of the Eden complex, knowing he
could give no such guarantee.
They'd drag their heels because, deep down, they carried a basic
resentment against the E--because, experts though they were, each of
them, somewhere along the line, had learned the bitter limits in his
mind that prevented him from going on to become an E.
They'd drag their heels because the E's, each blasted one of them, would
regard the absolutely true facts proved beyond question by science with
an attitude of skepticism, temporarily accepting the uncontestably
immutable as only provisionary, and probably quite wrong.
Oh, they'd grumble, and they'd drag their heels at first; but they would
get into it. They'd get into it, not because the sector chief had babied
them along, kidded them, coaxed them, but because, as surely as his
name was Bill Hayes, some unprintable E would ask a question for which
they had no answer. Or even worse, some question that made no sense, but
left the scientist feeling that perhaps it should have!
That was the E brand of thinking which gave everybody trouble--and
without which man could never have gone on creeping outward and outward
among the stars. Every new planet, or subplanet, or sun or blasted
asteroid seemed to call for some revision of known laws. Sometimes an
entirely new co-ordinate system had to be resolved. Oh, science was
easy, a veritable snap, while man crawled around on the muddy bottom of
his ocean of air and concluded that throughout all the universe things
must conform to his then notion of what they must be. As ignorant as a
damned halibut must be of the works and thoughts of man.
And often the E was unable to resolve the co-ordinate system--which was
simply a euphemistic way of saying that he didn't come back. And without
him, man could go no farther. An E, therefore, was the rarest and most
valuable piece of property in the universe. Whatever else man might be,
he will go to any lengths to protect the value of his property.
All right, Bill, perhaps a part of that is true. But give the scientists
their full due. They'd work with a will once they grew aware of the need
of it, because they were just as concerned as anybody else with what
might have happened to those colonists.
But first they would argue.
His secretary interrupted his thought by coming in from her own office.
She had an inch-thick stack of midgit-idgit cards in her hand.
"Here's that batch of scientists who worked on the original Eden
survey," she said.
"So many?" Hayes asked ruefully. "Maybe I'd better send an all-points
bulletin."
"You're the boss," she said easily. "But if I know scientists, they
don't read bulletins."
"Yeah, sure," he agreed. "You made sure this is everybody? Nobody is
slighted? They'll scream like stuck pigs when I ask them, but they'll be
even worse if I slight anybody by not asking."
"Double checked with Personnel's own midgit-idgit," she replied. "The
machine says if anybody is left out, it's not its fault, that it would
only be because we stupid humans forgot to inform it in the first
place."
"Sometimes I think that machine complains more than people do," he
answered. "Certainly it is a lot more insolent."
"Gets more work done, though," she said comfortably. "You want anything
more?"
"Not right now."
"Buzz if you do. The idgit is working out the supply list for that new
exploration ship, and it wants service, too," she reminded him. "It's
worse than you are," she added.
He looked up at her familiarity with a twinkle.
"It can't fire you," he said softly.
"Oh?" she asked. "You think not? Just let me feed it a few wrong data
and watch what happens to your li'l ol' lovin' secretary." She winked at
him, laughed, and went back to her office.
Sector Chief Hayes sighed, and pulled the stack of cards toward him.
First he must sort them out according to protocol because his diplomacy
wouldn't be worth the breath used in it if he called the wrong man
first. At a glance he saw that the idgit had already sorted them
correctly according to status.
"If you're so smart," he muttered to the absent machine, "why didn't you
call them too?"
He picked up the first card, and dialed the man's intercom number. It
would be like opening the lid of Pandora's box....
At that instant the red light of the E intercom flashed on. Hayes
dropped the ordinary key back into its slot, and pushed the E key to
open. He did not recognize the voice that came through.
"How soon," the voice asked, "will we be able to get into this Eden
matter?"
"I'm setting it up now," he said quickly. "By tomorrow morning, surely.
That is, if we haven't solved it ourselves. Something minor that
wouldn't require an E."
"Morning will be fine. Two, possibly three Seniors will be available."
The red light flashed off, showing the connection had been broken. He
sat back in his chair, suddenly conscious that his forehead was wet with
sweat, that his shirt was sticking to his body. Not conscious that he
was grinning joyfully.
Now let those pesty scientists challenge him with the question of
whether any E's would be listening to their review. Two of 'em. Maybe
three. Besides, of course, all the Juniors, the apprentices, the
students.
He dialed the first scientist again. But this time he didn't mind it
being Pandora's box. It was a terrible thing for a man to realize he
could never be an E. The scientists had to take it out on somebody. He
understood.
"Hello, Dr. Mille," he said cordially in answer to a gruff grunt. "This
is Bill Hayes, of Sector Administration."
"All right! All right!" the voice answered testily. "What is it now?"
3
In the early dawn, out at the hangar, away from the main E buildings and
the endless discussions going on inside them, Thomas R. Lynwood moved
methodically through his preflight inspection.
Speculative thinking was none of his concern. His job was to pilot an E
wherever he might want to go, and bring him back again--if possible. To
Lynwood reality was a physical thing--the feel of controls beneath his
broad, square hands; the hum of machinery responsive to his will. He
liked mathematics not for its own sake but because it best described the
substance of things, the weight, the size, the properties of things, how
they behaved. He was too intelligent not to realize mathematics could
also communicate speculative unrealities, but he was content to wait
until the theorists had turned such equations into machines, controls,
forces before he got excited.
He was one who, even in childhood, had never wanted to be an E. He
didn't want to be one now. Somebody had once told him in Personnel that
was why he was a favorite pilot of the E's, but he discounted that. They
didn't try to tell him how to run his ship--well, most of them
didn't--and he didn't try to tell them how to solve their problems.
The men around the hangar had another version of why the E's liked him
to pilot them around--he was lucky. Somehow he always managed to come
back, and bring the E with him. Well, sure. He didn't want to get stuck
somewhere, wind up in a gulio's gullet, gassed by an atmosphere that
turned from oxygen-nitrogen into pure methane without warning or reason,
and against all known chemical laws, or whiffed out in the lash of a
dead star suddenly gone nova.
But sometimes a pilot couldn't help himself. These E's would fiddle
around in places where human beings shouldn't have gone. Most of the
time they weren't allowed even one mistake. He was lucky, sure, but part
of it might be because he'd never been sent out with the wrong E.
There could be a first time. Luck ran out if you kept piling your bets
higher and higher. But until then ...
He was square-jawed, a freckled man with red hair. Contrary to
superstition, he didn't have a fiery temper. He was forty and had
already built up a seniority of twenty years in deep space. He was
captain of his ship and wanted nothing more. Sure, it was only a
three-man crew--himself, a flight engineer, an astronavigator. But it
was an E ship, which meant that he outranked even the captains of the
great luxury liners.
There was a time when the realization caused him to strut a little, but
he'd got over it. He was single, had no ties, wanted none. He had a good
job which he took seriously, was doing significant work which he also
took seriously, was paid premium wages even for a space captain, which
didn't matter except in terms of recognition. He didn't mind going
anywhere in the known universe, or how long he would be away. He hoped
he would get back someday, but he wasn't fanatic about it.
In a routine so well-practiced that it had become ritual, he checked
over the cruiser point by point. Of course the maintenance men had
checked each item when they had, after his last trip, dismantled,
cleaned, oiled, polished, tested, and reassembled one part after
another. Then maintenance supervisors had checked over the ship with a
gimlet-eyed attitude of hoping to find some flaw, just one tiny flub, so
they could turn some luckless mechanic inside out. The Inspection
Department, traditionally an enemy of Maintenance, took over from there
and inspected every part as if it had been slapped together by a bunch
of army goof-offs who knew that pilots were expendable in peace or war
and, unconsciously at least, aided in expending them.
Both departments had certified, with formal preflight papers, that the
ship was in readiness for deep space. But Lynwood considered such papers
as so much garbage, and went over the entire ship himself. This might
have had something to do with his so-called luck.
He wondered if Frank and Louie had checked into the ship this morning.
Probably had; last night's outing wasn't much to hang over about. A
steak at the Eagle Cafe down in Yellow Sands, a couple of drinks at
Smitty's, a game of pool at Smiley's, a few dances at the Stars and
Moons. Big night out for his crew before they left for deep space.
Yellow Sands was strictly for young families, where bright-boy hubby
worked up on the hill at E.H.Q., and wifey raised super-bright kids who
already considered Dad to be behind the times. Their idea of sin in that
town was to snub the wrong matron at a cocktail party; or not snub, as
the case might be. Not that it mattered much, neither Frank nor Louie
was dedicated to hell-raising.
When he at last opened the door to the generator room, he saw his flight
engineer, Frank Norton, had a couple of student E's on his hands.
It was one of the nuisances of being stationed here at E.H.Q. that you'd
have swarms of these super-bright youngsters hanging around, asking
questions, disputing your answers, arguing with each other, and, if you
didn't watch them carefully, taking things apart and putting them back
together in different hookups to see what would happen.
The first thing these kids were taught was to disregard everything
everybody had ever said; to start out from scratch as if nobody had ever
had the sense to think about the problem before; to doubt most of all
the opinions of experts, for, obviously, if the experts were right then
there would be no problem. Most of them didn't have to be taught it,
they seemed to have been born with it. Time was you batted a young smart
aleck down, told him to go get dry behind the ears before he shot off
his mouth. But not these days. These days you looked at him hopefully,
and crossed your fingers. He might grow up to be an E.
Tom wondered what it would be like to doubt the realities, the very
machinery under his hands, to assume that although it had always worked
it might not work this time. He could not conceive that state of mind,
or how a man could live in it without going insane. Every time he saw
these tortured kids saying, "Well, maybe, but what if ..." he was glad
to be nothing more than a ship captain who knew his machinery was
exactly what it was supposed to be and nothing else.
But, in a way, it was nice for the lads too. After thousands of years of
man's almost rabid determination to destroy the brightest and best of
his young, the world had finally found a place for the bright boy.
This morning, probably because of the early dawn hour, there were only
two of them in the generator room. As expected, they were arguing over
the space-jump band. Frank was standing over to one side, observing but
not participating. His cap was pushed back on his blond head, his big
face expressionless. It was common gossip throughout flight crews
everywhere that Frank, blindfolded, could take a cruiser apart and put
it back together without missing a motion.
"The jump band is founded on the basic of the Moebius strip," one
student E was saying heatedly. "This little gadget sends out a field in
the shape of such a strip, a band with a half twist before rejoined. Its
width is as variable as we need it, up to a light-year."
"Only it hasn't any width at all," the other student argued. "That's the
whole point. The Moebius strip has only one edge, so it can't have
width. We enter that edge, go through a line that doesn't exist, and
come out a light-year away, without taking any longer than the time to
pass a point."
"But that's _what_ happens, not _how_," the other shouted angrily.
"Everybody knows _what_ happens. Tell me _how_ and maybe I'll listen."
Tom caught his flight engineer's eye and signaled with his head that it
might be a good idea to get rid of the students. Any other time it would
be all right, a part of their stand-by job, but they'd got word last
night to have the ship in readiness from six o'clock on. They might have
to wait all day, but then again, some E might get an idea and want to go
shooting out to Eden right off.
Frank caught the signal, grinned, and began to herd the two students
toward the door. They were in such heated argument now, accusing one
another of parrot repetition instead of thinking for himself, that they
didn't realize that they were being nudged out of the ship, down its
ramp, and out on the field.
"Don't think it hasn't been educational, and all," Frank murmured to
them as he got them off the ramp. "You get the how of it figured out,
you let me know."
The two looked at him as if he might be an interesting phenomenon,
decided he wasn't, and wandered away, back toward the school
dormitories, still arguing.
"Sometimes I think a quiet milk run out to Saturn would have its
brighter side," Frank muttered to Tom when he came back inside the ship.
Tom grinned at him in wordless understanding.
There was no tension between them. They had worked together so long that
they had got over all the attraction-repulsion conflicts which operate
far beneath the surface mind to cause likes and dislikes. Now they
accepted one another in the way a man accepts his own hands--proud of
them when they do something with extra skill, making allowances when
they fumble; but never considering doing without them.
"Wonder who the E will be this time?" Frank asked, without too much
concern. It didn't really matter. An E was an E, for better or for
worse.
"Haven't heard," Tom answered. "Probably not decided yet. If the Senior
E's think it isn't much of a problem, they might send a Junior. Or if
they don't want to be bothered, they might send a Junior who's up for
his solo problem."
"Whoever, or whatever, I'm sure it will be interesting," Frank commented
with a grin. Tom returned the grin. There wasn't any malice in it, nor
any of the basic enmity and destructiveness of the stupid toward the
bright, just a recognition that an E was an E. They had a vast respect
for an E, but you couldn't get around it that some of them were--well,
maybe eccentric was the word.
"I hear there's trouble on that planet we're going to--Eden, isn't it?"
Frank commented.
"You think we'd be hauling an E out there if there weren't?" Tom
countered wryly.
They continued to check over each item in the generator room, their
flying fingers making sharp contrast to their slow, idle conversation.
They gave the room extra care this time because there had been some
quick-fingered students around who just might have got it into their
heads to improve the machinery. Satisfied at last that there had been no
subtle meddling, they snapped the cowl of the generator back into
position. They took one more sharp look around, then walked, single
file, up the narrow passage to the control room. Louie LeBeau was
sitting in the astronavigator's seat, checking over his star charts and
instruments. He glanced up at them as they came level with his cubicle.
He was the third man of the team, as used to them as they were to him.
"Fourteen hop adjustments to get us past Pluto and out of the heavy
traffic," he grumbled sourly. His round face and liquid brown eyes were
perpetually disgusted. "They keep saying over at Traffic that they're
going to provide a freeway out of the solar system so we can take it in
one hop, but they don't do it. Wonder when we'll ever go modern, start
doing things scientific?"
They paid no attention to his grumbling. That was just Louie.
"Then how many hops to Eden, after Pluto?" Tom asked.
"I figure twenty," Louie answered. "Can't take full light-year leaps
every time. There's stuff in the way. There's always stuff in the way to
louse up a good flight plan. Universe is too crowded. There'll be no
trouble getting _to_ Eden, no trouble _getting_ there. Make it in about
fourteen hours. Fourteen hours to go eleven lousy little light-years.
Fourteen hours I got to work in one stretch. Wait'll the union agent
hears you're working me fourteen hours without a relief. And are you
letting me get my rest now, so I can work fourteen hours? Or are you
stopping me from resting with a lot of questions?"
"But you think there may be trouble _after_ we get to Eden?" Tom asked.
Louie looked at him. There was no fear in the soft, brown eyes; just an
enormous indignation that life should always treat him so dirty.
"Don't you?" he asked.
4
Calvin Gray, Junior Extrapolator, stood nude before his bathroom mirror
and played a no-beard light over his chin and thin cheeks. That should
take care of the beard problem for the next six months or so. He leaned
forward and examined the fine lines beginning to appear at the corners
of his eyes. Well, that was one of the signs he'd reached the thirty
mark. One couldn't stay forever at the peak of youth--not yet, anyway.
Perhaps he should think about that sometime.
Trouble was, there was always something more urgent....
He became conscious that Linda was standing in the bathroom door
watching him. He hadn't heard her get out of bed.
"You used the no-beard just last month, Cal," she said. There was a
questioning note in her voice.
"Want to keep handsome," he said lightly. "Never know when I might have
to run out to some other world. Wouldn't want one of my other wives to
catch me with stubble on my face."
It was a stale joke, a childish one, but it served to introduce the
topic foremost in his mind.
"This Eden problem. I can't plan on it, but I hope it's my solo to
qualify me for my big E. I'm due, you know."
Linda chose to avoid coming directly to grips with it.
"Yehudi is already at the door," she said, and made a face of
exasperation. "Someday I'm going to turn off the gadget that signals the
orderly room the minute you get out of bed, so I can have you all to
myself."
"It's better if you get used to him," Cal cautioned. "Turn off the
signal and that turns on an alarm. Instead of one Yehudi, you'd have
twenty rushing in to see what was wrong."
"Well, it seems to me a grown man ought to be able to take his morning
shower without an observer standing by to see that he doesn't drown
himself or swallow the soap," she commented with a touch of acid.
"Get used to it, woman," he commanded. "There's only one observer now.
When--if I get my Senior rating, there'll be three."
She didn't say anything. Instead she stepped over to him, pressed her
nude body against his, and tenderly nuzzled his arm.
"Maybe if we go back to bed, he'll go away," she said, and glittered her
eyes at him wickedly.
"He won't, but it's a good idea," Cal grinned at her.
"You could tell him to go away," she whispered with a little pout.
She was fighting. She was fighting with the only weapon she had to hold
him, to keep him from going away, to face an unknown. He knew it, and
the bitterness in her eyes, back of her teasing, showed she knew he knew
it.
He took her tenderly in his arms, held her close to him, stroked her
hair, kissed her mouth. She pulled her face away, buried it in his
chest. He felt her sobbing.
He picked her up, lightly, carried her back into the bedroom, laid her
gently on the bed, and, oblivious to the attendant who stood
expressionless inside the door, knelt down beside the bed and held her
head in his arms.
"Don't fight it," he said softly. "It isn't the first time a man has had
to go."
"It's the first time it ever happened to me," she sobbed.
"You knew when you married me.... You agreed...."
"It was easy to agree, then. There was the glamor of being known as the
wife of an E. Now that doesn't matter. There's just you, and the thought
of losing you, never seeing you again."
"I haven't gone yet," he reminded her. "I don't know that I'll get the
job. There are three Seniors at base right now. One of them might want
it. Even if I do get the problem, who says I won't be back? You take old
McGinnis. He's eighty if he's a day. He's been an E for nigh on to fifty
years. He's still around, you'll notice."
She was quieter now. She lay, looking at him, drinking in his dark hair,
blue eyes, handsome face, the shape of his intelligent head, the slope
of his neck and shoulders, the tapering waist, all the masculine grace
and beauty. She pressed her closed fist into her mouth. All the beauty
she might never see again, feel enfolded around her, enfold with
herself.
"I'm a little fool," she said through clenched teeth. "Of course you'll
be back. And you'd better make it quick, or I'll come after you."
He kissed her, rumpled her short hair, straightened her crumpled body on
the bed, pulled the sheet over her.
"Why don't you go back to sleep," he suggested. "Rest. I'll have
breakfast in the E club room. That's where we'll be watching the Eden
briefing. Sleep. Sleep all morning."
Gently he closed her eyes with the tip of his forefinger. Gently he
kissed her once more. This time she didn't cling to him, try to hold
him.
He tucked the sheet in around her throat. Dutifully, she kept her eyes
closed. He stood up then, and signaled the orderly.
"I'll take my shower now," he said.
The orderly didn't speak, just followed him into the bathroom to stand
in the doorway and watch him through the shower glass. He was rigidly
obeying the cardinal rule of E.H.Q.
Unless his life is in danger, never interrupt the thinking of an E. The
whole course of man's destiny in the universe may depend on it.
How much of the future of the universe depended upon his not
interrupting the scene he had just witnessed wasn't for him to say. He
sighed. He thought of his own wife--shrewish, fat, coarse, always
complaining. He wondered what she would do if he picked her up, carried
her to bed, closed her eyes with his fingers. For once, he'd bet, she'd
be speechless.
He must try it sometime. But first, she'd have to lose about fifty
pounds.
* * * * *
When Cal got to the E club room two Seniors were already there--McGinnis
and Wong. He thought their greeting was a shade more cordial, a shade
more interested than usual. They seemed, this time, to be looking at him
as if he were a person, not merely a Junior E. When he turned away from
them to greet the three Juniors, who, along with himself, ranked the
club-room privileges, he became certain of his impressions. Their faces
were frankly envious.
Eden was to be his problem!
He'd hoped for it. Even half expected it. Yet all the way through his
shower, dressing, coming down the elevator from his apartment, he'd been
nagged with the fear he might not be considered; that the grief of Linda
and her rise above it would lead only to anticlimax. By the time he'd
got to the club-room door, followed by his orderly, he had already
conditioned himself to disappointment.
Now he subdued his elation while he told his orderly what he wanted for
breakfast.
"You fellows join me in something?" he asked both Juniors and Seniors.
"A second cup of coffee," Wong agreed.
"A second bourbon," old McGinnis said drily.
The Juniors shook their heads negatively. Yesterday they had been his
constant companions, only a few degrees below him in accomplishment,
pushing rapidly to become his equal competitors for the next solo.
Today, this morning, there was already a gap between them and him, a
chasm they would make no move to bridge until they had earned the
right. They seated themselves at another table, apart.
"Of course we haven't asked you if you want this Eden problem," McGinnis
commented while orderlies placed food and drink in front of them. "We
ought to ask him, hadn't we, Wong?"
"First I should ask if either of you want it?" Cal said quickly. "Or
perhaps Malinkoff, if he shows up."
"Malinkoff is too deep in something to come to the briefing," Wong said.
"Wong and I came only to help on your first solo, if we can," McGinnis
said. "Always think a young fellow needs a little send-off. I remember,
about fifty years ago, more or less ..."
"Worst thing to guard against," Wong interrupted, "is disappointment.
This whole thing might add up to nothing. Might not turn out to be a
genuine solo at all, just something any errand boy could do. In that
case it wouldn't qualify you. You know that."
"Sure," Cal said. Naturally the problem would have to give real
challenge. You didn't just go out and knock a home run to become an E.
You tackled something outside the normal frame of reference, something
that required original thinking, the E kind of thinking. You brought it
off successfully. A given number of Seniors reviewed what you'd done. If
they thought it was worth something, you got your big E. If they didn't,
you tried again. And you didn't get it by default, just because somebody
thought there should be a given quota of Seniors on the list.
"Little or big," he added, "I'd like the problem."
They said no more. He knew the score. He'd had twelve years of the most
intensive training the E's themselves could devise. He knew that
sometimes a Junior spent another ten or twelve years chasing down jobs
which anybody on the spot could have solved if they'd used their heads a
little before they ran on to something that challenged that training.
He'd be lucky if this was big enough--but not too big.
That was in their minds, too.
5
On ordinary days there were only the usual few science reporters in the
press room of E.H.Q. These held their jobs by the difficult compromise
between the scientists' insistence upon accuracy and their publishers'
equal insistence upon sensationalism.
Since the publisher paid the salary; since rewrite men, like television
writers, maintained their own feeling of superiority to the mass by
writing down to the level of a not very bright twelve-year-old; since
the facts had to be trimmed and altered to fit the open space or time
slot; even these reporters had a difficult time of maintaining the usual
odds--that there is only a twenty-to-one chance that anything said in
the newspapers or on the air may be accurate.
But on this morning the press room was crowded. In spite of all efforts
of journalism to stir up old animosities to make news, or to force
factional leaders into rashness which could not be settled without
violence; the various states of world government insisted upon
negotiating ethnical differences amicably, and factional leaders
persisted in keeping their heads. There had been no world-shaking
discoveries made in the last week or so; the public no longer believed
that changing a screw thread was exactly a scientific "break-through";
no real or imagined scandals seemed of such journalistic stature as to
work the public into a frenzy of intolerance for one another's
aberrations.
In such a dry spell, when advertisers were beginning to question
circulation figures, and editors were racking their brains for a strong
hate symbol to create interest, the delayed report from Eden came as a
summer shower, that might be magnified into a flood.
EDEN SILENT quickly became COLONY FEARED LOST and progressed normally to
COLONY WIPED OUT.
That there was no proof of loss or destruction bothered no one in
journalism. If it did turn out this way, they'd have been on top of the
news; and if it didn't, well, who remembers yesterday's headlines in the
press of today's new hate and panic.
The public, with an established addiction to ever increasing daily doses
of sensationalism, and deprived of its shots through this dry spell,
snapped out of its apathy to greet this new thrill with vociferous calls
to editors, wires to congressmen, telegrams to the Administration.
What are we doing about this colony that has been wiped out? Where is
our space battle fleet? Who is going to be punished?
It was an overnight sensation, and on this morning following the news
leak there could even be seen some secretaries to the writers for top
commentators and columnists in the crowded press room.