each other to maintain the literary tradition of proper insulation from
the realities of what was going on in the rest of the world. Obviously
no first-rate writer could have afforded to appear in person not only
because of damage to his stature lest it be noted he was doing his own
spadework; but, more important, first-hand observation might limit his
capacity for rationalizing the situation into the mold demanded by the
bias of his commentator or columnist. It was always difficult to
maintain author integrity when the facts did not support the
sensationalism required by the employers, and best not to put oneself in
such a position.
Now two of these secretaries could be seen over in a corner of the press
room exchanging their views, probing one another for information. No
one thought it curious they weren't trying to get the information from
source for everyone in journalism understands the importance lies in
what the competition is going to say, not in what happened.
"How long has it been since the first message came through, or didn't?"
"Fourteen hours, about."
"We could have had a rescue fleet out there by now."
"To rescue 'em from what?"
"Whatever's wrong."
"I understand an assistant attorney general is checking into it."
"So Gunderson's still gunning for the E's, eh?"
"Has he ever let up since he became attorney general? Gripes his soul he
can't arrest them for not doing what he wants, or for doing what he
doesn't want."
"How'd they ever get immune, anyhow?"
"Skip class that day in history?"
"Must've."
"Vague, myself. Right after the insurrection. Seems there were two
powers, Russia and America. The people of the world got fed up, gave a
pox to both their houses, boiled over, formed a world government.
Somehow the scientists got in their licks in the turmoil, pointed out
that scientists who have to confine their discoveries to what suits the
ideology of the non-scientists can only find limited solutions."
"Quite a deal."
"Could only happen in a world turmoil, when everything was fluid.
Anyhow, they got away with it, for a certain group, Extrapolators, had
to be free to extrapolate without fear of reprisal."
"Boy, something. Imagine. Take any dame you want. Nobody can squawk.
Take any money, riches you want. Nobody can stop it."
"Funny thing. Nothing like that happens. Idea seems to be that when you
don't have to fight against restrictions, they aren't important any
more. At least not to an E."
"Guess that's why one of 'em pointed out that police are the major cause
of crime."
"Whether he was right or wrong, that's what sent Gunderson into a tail
spin. I wouldn't be surprised but what he's a little hipped on that
subject. He'll get 'em one of these days. Even an E can make a mistake,
and when one of 'em does, he'll be there."
"I dunno, the public has a lot of hero-worship for the E. Pretty tough
for any politician to buck that."
"The public! You know as well as I do--they think what we tell 'em to
think, you and me."
"You think that's why he's got a man out here on this Eden thing?
Looking for a mistake?"
"Maybe. Maybe not. He just never passes up the chance that maybe this
time he can grab something."
"Between Gunderson and the E's, I'll take the E's."
"Your boss feel the same way?"
"Far as I know."
"But if your boss changed his mind, you would have an agonizing
reappraisal."
"Well, sure. A guy's got to eat."
6
The west wall of the E club room began to glow, lose its appearance of
solidity. Cal signaled his orderly to lift away his table. Now, where
the west wall had been, another room seemed to join this one, an office.
A large man in a brown suit made an entrance through the door of the
office and sat down back of the desk. His face was drawn with weariness.
"I am Bill Hayes," he said. "Sector administration chief of the Eden
area. I am acting moderator of this review. We follow the usual rules of
procedure. I just want to say, as an aside, that the scientists involved
in this problem have been up all night reviewing every known fact about
Eden. We ask the indulgence of the E's not only for the kind of
knowledge that may prove too little, but for any strain caused by trying
to assemble such massive data into order in so short a time.
"For the press, let me say we are aware of some questions of why we
didn't immediately send out a fleet of ships as soon as the call failed
to come through. A military man does not rush troops into battle until
he has some idea of what he must oppose; even a plumber needs to get
some idea of the problem before he knows what tools to take with him. It
would serve no constructive purpose to rush an unprepared fleet out to
rescue, and might prove the highest folly."
All over E.H.Q., in the various buildings where anybody was directly
concerned, the same effect would be taking place as appeared here in the
club room. The tri-di screen wall would seem to join the room of the
person speaking. A pressed button signaled the desire to speak, and like
the chairman of a meeting, Bill Hayes decided whom to recognize. It was
a way to conduct a meeting of two or three thousand people as intimately
as a small conference.
"The E's have signaled they are ready for the Eden briefing," Hayes
continued formally. He faded out his own office, and was immediately
replaced by an astrophysics laboratory. The review of Eden was under
way.
With sky charts, pointers, math formulae and many references to
documentation, the astrophysicist established the celestial position of
Ceti relative to Earth, and its second planet Ceti II--popularly called,
he had heard, Eden. For his part, bitterly, he preferred a little less
popularizing of scientific data, a little more exactitude. He would,
therefore, continue to call it Ceti II.
He reminded Cal of certain teachers in schools he had been asked to
leave back in his ugly duckling days. How didactically, positively, they
clung to their exactitudes--like frightened little children in a chaotic
world too big for them to face, hanging on to mother's skirts, something
safe, sure, dependable.
The astrophysicist continued, at considerable length, to establish the
position of Ceti II to his own complete satisfaction.
In his own mind Cal willingly conceded that, at least in terms of
third-dimensional space-time continuum, Eden could be found where the
man said it was. Then he reminded himself, sternly, that the essence
might be that Eden was there no longer; that he'd better pay closest
attention to everything said, however positive and didactic, lest he
find his own mind closed to a solution. He reminded himself that, after
all, these people had worked all night for his benefit, while he lay
peacefully in Linda's arms.
He reminded himself that one little bit of datum, one little phrase,
carelessly heard now, might mean his success or failure. Didactic
pedantry has its place in science, and these were scientists, not
vaudeville performers. Silently, he apologized to the lot of them.
A geophysicist took over the review. He quickly got down out of space to
the surface of Eden. Personally he didn't mind calling it Eden, just so
all the purists knew he was referring to Ceti II. This was supposed to
be humorous, and he waited until all the viewers had had a chance to
chuckle with him.
If the astrophysicist signaled his demand for a retraction and apology
for this public ridicule, Bill Hayes apparently didn't feel it worth
breaking up the review to oblige him.
After he had enjoyed his own humor, the geophysicist did present his
capsule of knowledge with excellent brevity.
There were no large continents. Instead, there were thousands of
islands, so many that the land mass roughly equaled the sea surface. The
islands had not been counted, he admitted, and then needlessly explained
that Eden had been discovered only ten years ago. Since universe
exploration was expanding much faster than properly qualified scientists
could follow to catalogue conditions, details such as this had been left
for future colonists to complete.
He took time out to complain that the younger generation was too dazzled
by glamor and wanted to become entertainment stars, sports stars, jet
jockeys exploring space, and there weren't enough going into the solid
sciences to keep up with the work to be done.
A biophysicist interposed here and stated that his research with the
injection of uric acid into rats caused a marked rise in intelligence,
and if the Administration would just pay attention and let him have the
grant he was asking, he felt confident that research in how to change
the human kidney structure would take us a long mutant leap ahead toward
humans with super-intelligence.
Bill Hayes cut him off as tactfully as possible and suggested that the
Eden problem was here and now, and perhaps we should get that one out
of the way first. Both scientists, by their expressions, indicated that
they did not appreciate being frustrated, hampered, driven--but they did
comply.
Back to Eden they went.
The climate was something like that of the Hawaiian area. Partly this
was due to the variable plane rotation that heated all parts evenly,
partly due to favorable flow of ocean currents. It had been noted that
there was such an interweaving of cool and warm currents all over the
globe that a relatively even temperature was maintained throughout. Some
differential in spots, of course, enough to cause rainfall, but no real
violence of storms, not as we classified hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes
here on Earth.
"Probably no sudden storm to wipe out the colony before they could send
news, then," Wong suggested in an aside to Cal.
"Or a freak one did occur and they weren't prepared because it wasn't
supposed to happen," Cal said.
Wong and McGinnis exchanged a quick glance, and Cal knew Wong had laid a
little trap to see how easily he might be lulled into a premature
conclusion.
The gravity was slightly less, the geophysicist was saying, but only to
the extent that man, newly arrived from Earth, walked with a springier
step, didn't tire as quickly. Not enough to cause nausea, even to the
inexperienced. The oxygen content of the air, in fact the whole make-up
of the air, was so close to Earth quality there were no breathing
adaptations necessary.
So much for generalities. He went on to document them with exactitudes.
He teamed up with a meteorologist to explain the distribution of
rainfall in spite of lack of frigid and torrid air masses. Cal's doubt
was not appeased. Weather prediction was about on a par with race-horse
handicapping, and easy to explain after it happened.
Eventually the geophysicist and the meteorologist completed their duet
to the accompaniment of oceanographers and geologists.
A chorus of botanists replaced them on the tri-di screen, the major
theme of their epic being that an astonishing proportion of the plant
forms bore edible fruit, nuts, seeds, leaves, stems, roots, flowers. A
choir of zoologists joined their voices here to point out the large
number of small meat animals, fish, and crustaceans--with the whole
thing sounding like a pean of thanksgiving.
After two hours, the condensed information added up to a most
interesting fact. In essence, due to quite _natural_ conditions--odd how
much the scientists seemed to need stressing the word "natural"--Eden
was more favorable to easy human life than Earth!
Cal leaned forward. Here was the spot where some student or apprentice
might distinguish himself by asking an embarrassing question or so. Say
the range of easily possible conditions on any given planet was a scale
ten miles in length. Then that area on the scale where man could exist
without artificial aids would still be less than a hair's breadth. And
now to find a planet more nearly perfect for man than the one on which
he evolved....
Or were the students considering this too obvious to mention? He decided
to nudge them a little. Sometimes a discussion of the too obvious
brought out things not obvious at all.
"How frequently," he asked, when Hayes had cut him in, "do we find a
mass revolving in such a manner that its poles revolve at right angles
to its forward revolution, so there is no real pole?"
"It requires near-perfect roundness, and an even distribution of land
and water masses, such as we have on Ceti II," the first astrophysicist
answered.
"How frequently do we find that?" Cal repeated.
"I know of no other," the astrophysicist replied shortly.
"Any evidence of tampering with those ocean currents to get them flowing
so beneficially?" Cal asked.
"None yet discovered," an oceanographer cut in.
Well, at least he hadn't stated with positiveness that there hadn't been
and couldn't be. But an anthropaleontologist inserted himself and
spoiled the effect of open-mindedness.
"There is definitely no life form on Eden with sufficient intelligence
for that," the man said, "nor has there ever been. Such a feat would
require enormous engineering works. Such works under the ocean would be
matched by comparable works on land, and would therefore show up in our
aerial surveys, however ancient and overgrown."
Cal sighed softly to himself. The human kind of civilization, yes, that
would have left traces. But what of some other kind? Perhaps a deep-sea
kind that had never come out upon the land? Never mind the arguments
that such a civilization could not have developed--that was looking at
it from the human point of view again. Had man grown so accustomed to
not finding comparable intelligence anywhere in the universe he had
begun to discount, or forget, there could be?
The review went on and on. The zoologist sketched in the prevalent
animals and fish forms, showed there was nothing in land animals higher
than a large rodent, no sea mammals at all, no fish larger than the
tarpon. Nothing at all to hint at a line of primates.
A bacteriologist exclaimed at length over the similarity of minute life
forms to those on Earth, and used the occasion to again expound the old
theory of space-floating life spores to seed all favorable matter, and
thus develop similar forms through evolution, wherever found. Quickly
and tactfully Bill Hayes nudged him back on the track before the
expected storm of controversy could break out.
Then there was a short lunch time, but not a leisurely one. Quite aside
from the emergency of what might be happening to the colonists, there
was growing clamor from the people and pressure from various
governmental bodies to get off the dime and get going--rescue those
people, or, cynically, at least make a show of action to quell the flood
of telegrams. E.H.Q. resisted the pressures in favor of doing a
workmanlike job in preparation for a genuine rescue instead of a
haphazard show, but was mindful of them nevertheless.
7
Anyone who has witnessed even so much as a traffic-court trial cannot
help but realize that "government by law instead of man" is a mere
political phrase without meaning in reality. The ascendancy of
me-and-mine over you-and-yours runs so deep in the human psyche that
abstract idealisms must always take second place where such ascendancy
is threatened. Thus we see that the belly-crawler, meek and subservient
to the judge, comes off with a token sentence while the man who attempts
to maintain his pride, his rights, his self-respect gets the book thrown
at him.
No practical attorney is unaware that the judgment of his case depends
largely upon who presides, the whims, the prejudices, the moods, the
viewpoint of the judge; and that the law merely provides justification
for the imposition of those whims, moods, prejudices, and viewpoints.
And ambitions.
The announcement at E.H.Q. that a Junior E would be given this problem
gave Gunderson's man the opening he had hoped to find. A hurried call to
the capitol and a brief conversation with Gunderson himself confirmed
his conclusions. Perhaps the E was above all law, and it might not be
expedient to challenge that right now, but immunity did not necessarily
extend to the Junior E.
In view of the known ambitions of certain judges, it should not be
difficult to make a test case of this--whether the E's had a right to
jeopardize a colony of human beings by assigning an unqualified man to
the problem.
A question, too, of who had jurisdiction over the Juniors, the
apprentices, the students. How far down the line did the mantle of the E
extend to protect those not yet qualified? How far out did the
Administration of E.H.Q. extend to substitute for government? How much
of a state within a state had E.H.Q. become?
Now, while the public was clamoring for action, and E.H.Q. was, instead,
droning on through a mass of inconsequential detail, now while public
sentiment was crystallizing, or could be crystallized into placing human
welfare over science procedures, now was the time.
It was not difficult to find a judge who was predisposed to favor the
request of the attorney general.
8
After lunch at E.H.Q., the colonizing administrator took over the
review.
The precolonizing scientists had not been trapped by the obviously
favorable aspects of Eden into neglecting their full duties. No indeed
they had given the full routine of tests and had come up with exactly
nothing that might be unfavorable to man, at least not more so than on
Earth.
Colonization had followed the usual plan. Fifty professional colonists
had been sent out to Eden. They knew their jobs. They were
temperamentally suited to the work.
As usual, they were to live there for five years, leaning as lightly as
possible on Earth supplement. Their prime purpose was to adapt primitive
ecology to human needs, how it could be done. It was not the job of this
first colony to explore, to catalogue. They were expected to do only
what any pioneer does--endure, exist, and prove it possible.
In honesty the colonizing administrator had to point out there had been
more than the usual dissatisfaction from this colony. The burden of
their complaint was that they found living too easy. They were
professionals, accustomed to challenge.
They had first recommended, then demanded, that they be transferred and
the planet given over to the second-phase colonists.
They complained they were dying on the vine, that easy living was making
farmers and storekeepers out of them, that they were getting soft,
ruined by disuse of their talents for meeting and coping with hostile
conditions. There had even been threats that one of these days they
would all pile into their ship and come back home. So far he had stopped
them by threats of his own, that he would personally see they never got
another assignment.
He had resisted their demands. Five years was a short enough time. Some
organisms took longer than that to develop in the human body or mind, to
make their inimical presence known. Some did not show up until the
second or third generation; which was the reason for the second-phase
colonists, to live there for three generations, before the planet could
be opened to young John Smith and his wife Mary who dreamed of owning a
little chicken ranch out away from it all. He had argued that boredom
might be just the very inimical condition they were having to test.
Cal felt a twinge of disappointment here. Perhaps the dissatisfied
colonists had merely gone on strike! Unable to get satisfaction from
their administrator, they chose not to communicate as a means of drawing
attention, getting an investigation of their plight. Drastic, perhaps,
but man had been known to do drastic things before when he felt treated
unfairly.
This seemed such a likely solution that for a moment he let his
disappointment override his interest. Such would be an administrative
hassle, nothing to challenge an E at all, not even a Junior.
Still, it might not be the solution. He had better listen to the whole
of the problem.
The colonists had chosen a large island for their first settlement. In
the center was a small mountain. It had been given the name of Crystal
Palace Mountain because it was crested with an outcropping of
amethystine quartz-crystal structures in _natural_ pillars, domes,
arches, spires.
Like spokes of a wheel radiating out from the hub, ridges fell away
from this mountain, and in between the ridges there lay fertile valleys
watered by perpetual streams.
It was in one of these valleys, about halfway between the mountain and
the sea, that the colonists settled. Some bucolic wit had named the
first settlement Appletree, because there they would gain knowledge, and
everybody knows that the apple was the Garden of Eden's fruit of
knowledge. No one quite knew when the name Eden was first applied to the
planet. Suddenly, during the first scientific expedition, everyone was
referring to it that way.
"For exactitude," the administrator said diplomatically. "Of course we
still designate it as Ceti II."
As was customary, the colony had communicated multitudes of progress
pictures over the space-jump band. Here was the valley before they had
started to fell trees. Here it was in progress of clearing. Here they
were converting the trees into lumber for houses. Here were the first
houses so that some could move out of the living quarters in the ship.
Here they were uprooting the stumps, turning the sod, planting Earth
seed. These were barns for the cattle and horses sent with them from
Earth.
A collection of community buildings came next in the series of
photographs, and finally there was the whole village of Appletree, with
a collection of small farms surrounding it. The pictures showed it all
as ideal for man as a distant view of a rural valley in Ohio.
Productive, progressive, and peaceful--from a distance.
But back of the post-card scene, human psychology progressed normally
also.
The reporting psychologist was most emphatic on this issue. His
department would have been most alarmed had differences and schisms
_not_ developed. _That_ would have been an abnormality calling for
investigation.
Differences in outlook became apparent in spite of the common
temperament and experience of the group. Little personal enmities
developed and grew. Sympathizers drew together in little groups, each
group considering its stand to be the right one, and therefore all who
disagreed wrong.
The psychologist said he was sure all viewing would remember the
classical picture of primitive Earth man at first awareness. He stands
upon a hill and looks about him. There comes the astonishing realization
that he can see about the same distance in all directions.
"Why," he exclaims to himself, "I must be at the very center of
creation!"
His awe and wonder was to grow. Wherever he went, he found he was still
at the center of things. There could be only one conclusion.
"Because I am always at the center of things, I must be the most
important event in all creation!"
Still later comes another realization.
"Those who are with me, and are therefore a part of me-and-mine, are
also at the center of things and share my importance. Those who are not
with me, and not a part of me-and-mine, are not at the center of things,
and are therefore of an inferior nature!"
It could readily be seen--the psychologist was allowing a note of
dryness to enter his comments--that the bulk of man's philosophy,
religion, politics, social values, and yes, too often even his
scientific conclusions, was based upon this egocentric notion; the
supreme importance and rightness of me-and-mine ascendant at the center
of things, opposed to those who are not a part of me-and-mine, on the
outside, and therefore inferior.
There must have been a signal from Bill Hayes, for the psychologist left
the generalities behind and came back to the issue.
The very ease of living on Eden fostered the growth of schisms, for
there was no common enemy to band the group into one solid me-and-mine
organism--the audience would recall that when Earth was divided into
nations it had always been imperative to find a common enemy in some
other nation; that this was the only cohesive force man had been able
to find to keep the nation from disintegrating.
Another nudge.