expected, some dissident individuals and family groups could no longer
tolerate the irritation of living in the same neighborhood with the
rest. These broke off from the main colony, and migrated across the near
ridge to settle in an adjacent valley.
Psychologically, it was a most satisfactory development, playing out in
classical microcosm the massive behavior of total man. For, as everyone
knew, had men ever been able to settle their differences, had man been
able to get along peacefully with himself, he might have developed no
civilization at all.
Man's inability to stand the stench of his own kind was the most potent
of all forces in driving him out to the stars.
Bill Hayes, a weary and red-eyed moderator now, apparently decided he
could no longer stand the stench of the psychologist and abruptly cut
him off. He himself took over the summation. It boiled down to a simple
statement.
The colonists had reported everything that happened, of significance or
not. These reports had all been thoroughly sifted in the normal course
of E.H.Q.'s daily work as they were received. They had been collated and
extended both by human and machine minds to detect any subtle trends
away from norm.
There had been nothing, absolutely nothing. The reports might as well
have originated somewhere near Eugene, Oregon. They were about as
unusual as a Saturday night bath back on the farm.
Then silence. Sudden, inexplicable silence.
9
"It bothers me, it bothers me a lot," Cal said to the two E's, following
the review, "that Eden should be more favorable to effortless human
existence than Earth."
He snapped on the communicator and asked the ship be in readiness for
take-off.
McGinnis and Wong looked at one another.
"You think it might have been the original Garden of Eden?" Wong asked.
His face was impassive. "It fits, you know. Man was banished from an
ideal condition and forced to live by the sweat of his brow."
"Not that so much," Cal said. "Not unless the whole concept of evolution
is haywire, and we're reasonably sure it isn't that far off. Probably
the colonists have gone on strike, but I still keep thinking that when
we want to catch rats we set a trap with a better food than they can get
normally."
There was a twinkle in McGinnis's eye.
"You think Eden is an alluring trap, especially baited to catch human
beings?" he asked.
"I don't exactly think that. I just keep wondering," Cal answered.
They were interrupted by a diffident yet insistent knock on the door.
This in itself was such a violation of E.H.Q. rules, never to interrupt
the thinking of an E, that all three stopped talking. The three Juniors,
who had been sitting by, listening, arose from their seats and stood
facing the door. The orderlies looked to the E's for instruction. At a
nod from McGinnis, one of them walked over to the door and opened it.
Bill Hayes was standing there, flushed with embarrassment.
"Your pardon, E's," he said hurriedly. "I'm just an errand boy, under
instruction from General Administration. We have been served with a
court injunction to prevent assignment of a Junior to the Eden matter."
Cal froze in alarm and disappointment. At the last moment to have his
chance snatched away from him. He should have gone immediately the
review was over, without waiting for any advice McGinnis and Wong might
care to give. Now ...
McGinnis caught his eye and gave a slight nod toward a door that opened
on another hallway. He flashed a command with his eyes to get going,
then turned back to Hayes.
"I was unaware that the E's must heed court orders," he said frostily.
"It's a question of where civil jurisdiction stops and E jurisdiction
takes over," Hayes explained nervously. "While the colonists are
employed by E.H.Q., and under their direction, it is held they are also
Earth citizens, with citizen rights. Civil authority feels it must
answer for their welfare."
"I thought restrictions upon the E were removed by act of World Congress
some seventy years ago," Wong said mildly.
"The injunction makes it clear there is no restriction upon the Senior
E; just the Junior, who really isn't an E yet."
"It is the decision of the E's that a Junior will handle this problem,"
McGinnis said, and turned his back as if that settled the matter.
Hayes cleared his throat nervously.
"I'm sorry," he said. "If it were up to me ... Well, the argument before
the court ran this way: That where there is no restriction upon the E in
arriving at a solution, there is also no compulsion upon civil
authority to adopt that solution. They cited instances ... Well, any
number of instances. It seems ..."
Cal heard no more. He had been pacing the room, and now, while Hayes's
perspiring attention was focused imploringly on Wong and McGinnis, he
slipped out the door.
The orderly at that door raised a finger in salute, and at Cal's request
quickly wheeled a hall-car from a storage closet.
"Take me out to the Eden ship," Cal said quietly. "You know where it
is?"
"Yes," the orderly answered. He took his place at the controls and Cal
slipped into the seat beside him.
They sped through the halls at maximum speed, out the rear exit of the E
building, down the maze of ramps and out across the landing field to the
entrance of the ship.
Cal expected to see guards posted there to enforce the injunction, but
none were in evidence. As they drew up to the open door, he saw Lynwood
and Norton, pilot and engineer, standing just inside waiting for him.
There was no strain in their faces to show they had received orders not
to take off with him.
He climbed out of the car, and with another nod the orderly drove it
back to the E building. Henceforward the ship's crew would be the E's
orderlies.
Cal climbed the short ramp and entered the ship.
"You have clearance to take off at once?" he asked Lynwood.
Lynwood nodded. "Since early morning," he answered.
"Fine. Let's get going," Cal said. "I'm in a hurry, of course," he added
with a grin.
"Of course," the two men answered, then seeing his grin, relaxed and
returned it. Apparently this E was human.
It took only a minute for them to reach the control room, where Louie
sat in his navigator's cubby; and only ten more seconds for the ship to
lift clear. And still no command came over the radio to halt them.
Someone in civil authority had slipped. Had Gunderson really felt that a
simple injunction would stop everything, that the E's would not
challenge this encroachment? Was he playing some deeper game, allowing
the Junior to slip through his fingers in the hope he would louse up the
Eden rescue, add strength to the campaign to bring the E's back under
civil control--his control?
Or had someone genuinely slipped?
The command to halt, turn around, and return to base did not come until
their second hop had brought them into the Mars orbit. Then it came from
space police in charge of shipping traffic at that point.
"I am under orders from E.H.Q. to proceed," Tom answered, after a quick,
questioning look at Cal.
"The attorney general's office orders you to halt," the voice commanded.
Tom looked at Cal again, questioning. This was bucking the federal
government, his license wouldn't be worth the paper it was written on if
he ignored the order. To say nothing of any other punishment they might
choose to hand him.
"Keep going," Cal answered shortly. "And make your next jump as quickly
as you can."
"I am under orders to keep going," Tom answered the police. If he
refused the request of an E, a lifetime of work would go down the drain.
Over in his seat, Frank Norton's fingers were speeding through the
intricate pattern of setting up the next jump. He and Louie were working
as one man.
"I am under orders to disable you if you refuse," the police warned.
"We have an E on board," Tom answered. "You'd be risking a lot."
"I am advised he is a Junior E," the voice said in clipped speech. "Not
such a risk."
"Far as I'm concerned," Tom answered laconically, "he's an E. I have to
follow his orders."
He nodded to Frank who touched the jump switch. There was an instant
silence. They were at the approach to the asteroid belt.
"They can get us here," Louie spoke up. "We have to give over controls
so they can take us through. No chart can keep up to the microsecond on
these asteroid movements. They have to calculate a path in short hops,
and take us through a step at a time. I keep saying there ought to be an
expressway out of the solar system, but ..."
"What about a good long jump at right angles?" Cal asked. "Get over it
instead of through it?"
"It's illegal," Louie complained.
"Our necks are already out," Tom said quietly.
"Okay, you're the boss. But I'll have to figure it. It takes time to
figure it."
"Well, get going on it."
"There's stuff all over," Louie explained. "Not just a band, like most
people think. The asteroids have moved at right angles, too. Not so
thick, but there's a globe of stuff, not just a belt. Maybe a bunch of
little jumps."
"We can't start making them until you figure them, Louie," Frank
reminded him.
The radio gave its hum of life, and a voice came through.
"We have orders from space police not to escort you through, to turn you
back."
"This is an E ship, with an E on board. His command is to come through,"
Tom said.
"I just work here," the voice answered as if it were bored and tired. "I
take my orders from Space Control."
Tom looked over at Louie. Louie apparently caught the look out of a
corner of his eye, and impatiently waved a finger not to bother him. His
other hand was speeding through the movements of manipulating the
astrocalculator. Then he nodded his head, still not looking up, and the
co-ordinates flashed in front of Frank. Now, as rapidly as Louie, Frank
set up the pattern of the jump band.
"I take my orders from the E's," Tom answered in a voice that matched
the boredom, tiredness. Then with a nod from Frank, "Now!" he said.
There was silence again.
"It's going to add at least an hour," Louie complained. "I've got to
pick my way through this muck."
"We've got time now," Tom answered easily. "Not likely they can find us
out here, away from the regular lanes."
"Not unless we run across a prowl ship," Louie said. "You know there's
some smuggling, and now and then a shipping company thinks it can beat
the rap, not pay the toll, by doing the same thing we're doing. The
prowl patrol is on to all the tricks. We're not the first ones to try
it."
"Just keep figuring, Louie," Tom said.
"All right, all right!" Louie quarreled back.
Tom looked at Cal and grimaced.
"Louie's all right," he said. "Just has to complain."
"I'm sure of it," Cal answered with a grin.
It took closer to two hours. They had no way of knowing how many times
the space police had made a fix on their position only too late to catch
them hovering there. There must have been some fix made and a pretty
careful calculation of where they could go next, for as they neared the
outer moons of Jupiter the radio crackled into life again.
"This is your last warning. We intend to board you and take over. We
will disintegrate your ship if you resist."
Cal took the microphone in his own hand to answer.
"We intend to keep going," he said. "This is a jurisdictional dispute
between the attorney general's office and E.H.Q. We will not allow you
to board us, and I suggest you get confirmation of orders to
disintegrate us directly from the attorney general in person. Meanwhile
you can pass the buck to your Saturn patrol if those orders are
confirmed."
Tom nodded to Frank, and the next jump key was pressed.
In the Saturn field, still another voice came through. "Orders from the
attorney general himself are to allow you to proceed. Say, Lynwood, what
is this all about?"
"Some sort of petty squabble over who gives orders to who," Lynwood
answered. "I just work here," he added tiredly.
"Well," said the voice. "So do I. Guess they'll fight it out in the
courts now. You understand, we had our orders."
"You understand, so did I." Tom answered.
"Sure," the voice answered, and cut out.
Cal wondered whether the orders to disintegrate had been a bluff. Would
the attorney general have dared disintegrate a ship with even a Junior E
on board? Maybe it had been just a threat of the local police, one they
didn't expect to have called.
Or maybe he had played directly into the attorney general's hands by
defying him, and getting that defiance on record was what the man had
wanted.
Whatever it was, the Eden matter had become bigger than merely finding
out what had happened to some colonists. Whatever it was, he'd better
find a successful solution, because the attorney general was counting on
him to fail. And if he did fail, certainly the position of the Junior E
would be altered, and possibly a deep thrust into the very heart of the
Senior E position, as well.
10
Louie was right. After they cleared the solar system there was no
trouble getting _to_ Eden. And there was no trouble circumnavigating the
globe while still in space.
Closer, but still outside the atmosphere in their surveying spiral, they
had no trouble in locating the island with Crystal Palace Mountain at
its center. There was only one such spot on Eden, and in their telescope
viewer its crystalline spires and minarets sparkled back at them like a
diamond set in jade.
The trouble began when they hovered over the location, when they
amplified their magnification to get a close look at the Appletree
village before dropping down to land.
Louie found the right valley. He said it was the right valley, and he
stuck to his claim stubbornly.
But there was no settlement there. No sign there had ever been.
Louie could see that for himself, they told him. There was nothing but
virgin land. The trees were undisturbed, and old. There were splashes of
rolling meadows spotted here and there by other trees, untilled meadows
sloping downward from the ridges to the river. And not a blemish nor
scar to show that man had ever landed there.
"Fine thing," Norton chaffed him. "Fine navigation, Louie. Get us clear
across the universe in great shape, and then you can't even find the
landing field."
But Louie was in no mood for banter. He wished Tom would go back and
hold the manual controls of the ship instead of letting it hover on
automatic. He wished Cal would go back to his stateroom and think. He
wished Frank Norton would shut up. He wished they wouldn't all stand
over him, reading his charts over his shoulder.
In irritated silence he reduced the viewscope dimensions to scale, and
snapped a picture of the whole island. He took the fresh picture, still
moist from its self-developing camera, and laid it beside the chart.
Wordlessly, for the benefit of them all, he traced his pencil over the
outlines of the chart and their duplicates in the picture. As in
comparing fingerprints, he flicked his pencil at the points of identity.
There were far too many to ignore. He poked the point of his pencil at
Appletree where it was located on the chart. Then he picked out the same
location in the picture.
It was not the science of navigation that was wrong.
"It's just one of those dirty tricks life plays on a fellow," Tom said
over Cal's shoulder. "You got us in the right place, Louie, but probably
in the wrong time slot. You've warped us right out of our own time, and
Eden hasn't been discovered yet. Maybe won't be for another million
years. Maybe, back on Earth, man is just discovering fire."
"Yeah," Norton agreed. "Or maybe in the wrong dimension. You and your
fancy navigation. Now you take a midgit-idgit navigating machine. It
wouldn't know how to pull such fancy short cuts. Take a little longer,
maybe, but when we got there we'd be there."
They were both talking nonsense and knew it. Time and dimensional travel
were still purely theoretical. Louie ignored the ribbing with elaborate
patience.
"You know what I think," he asked seriously. "I think the whole thing's
a hoax. I'll betcha there never was any settlement there. I'll betcha
the colonists have pulled a whingding all the way through."
"There's a whole raft of pictures to show they were there," Frank
reminded him.
"Pictures!" Louie answered scornfully. "You think they couldn't fake
pictures?" He thought for a moment. "And where's their ship, their
escape ship?" he asked as a clincher. "They didn't like it here and have
gone off somewhere else, and then covered up by sending reports and
pictures on how things would have developed if they'd stayed."
There was a sense of unreality in the whole conversation. Cal let the
talk flow on, knowing it was a reaction to shock. What if a modern ocean
liner pulled into the harbor of New York--to find an untouched Manhattan
Island in its virgin state?
It couldn't happen, therefore it wasn't to be treated seriously.
"Better set up communication with Earth," Cal said quietly.
In E science the unpredictable, the incredible, the illogical could
happen at any time. With a mind more open to acceptance of this, he had
felt the run of shock sooner. For them, the shock impact was delayed
since their minds rejected the illogical as unreal. For him the human
shock came at once, and then, as E thinking took over, passed off.
"Sure, Cal," Lynwood agreed. It was a measure of their acceptance that
they had quite normally fallen into using his first name.
On the emergency signal it took less than three minutes to clear through
eleven light-years to E.H.Q.--and then sixteen minutes for the operator
at base to find Bill Hayes.
"Sector Chief Hayes here," the voice said at last through the speaker.
"Gray here, on the Eden matter," Cal answered. "Any other E's
available?"
"Hm-m," Hayes answered. "Wong has picked up on a problem in the Pleiades
sector, and left this morning. Malinkoff has given out word not to
disturb him if the whole universe falls apart. That leaves McGinnis,
who, I believe, is spending his time working on the defense against the
injunction by Gunderson. An example of the way petty restrictions can
bring a fine mind down to trivial problems. But he said call him if you
need him."
"Please," Cal said. "And you might stay on while I talk to him, if
you're not busy."
"Sure, E Gray, sure," Hayes answered. "I'm flashing the operator to
locate McGinnis. Seen anything of the police ship, yet? I understand one
is following to observe what you do."
"I'm sure it will be a big help," Cal said drily. "Not that it matters,
so long as it doesn't get in the way."
McGinnis came on at that point.
"I'm not yelling for help, yet," Cal told him. "But here's what it is
like at this end." He sketched in the details, and heard a sharp gasp at
the other end from Hayes.
"Now I'd like to stay on this problem," he concluded his brief summary.
"But somewhere there's fifty colonists in trouble because this whole
thing is out of focus. I'm not a full E, and maybe their lives are more
important than my ambition to do a solo job. Certainly more important.
Then, trivial as it is, we'd be playing right into Gunderson's hands if
we've sent out a boy to do a man's job."
"Dismiss the Gunderson side of it," McGinnis said drily. "It's
inconsequential to the main issue. As for that, I don't know any more
than you do. There's never been anything like this. Colonists have been
wiped out on other planets, sure; but what happened left traces. This
one is an oddball, and I'd say you're as well equipped to handle it as
anybody else."
"I don't--I don't understand this at all," Hayes said in a worried
voice.
"Who does?" Cal asked. "I'd say set up for continuous communication.
I'll leave it wide open here, so that everything we say will come
through. Then, if anything should happen to us, you'll have the record
up to that point."
"It's the only thing we can do," Hayes agreed.
"If you think I should come out there to stand by, I'll do it," McGinnis
said. But the tone of his voice said he hoped Cal would shoulder the
full responsibility, not weaken out of a chance at a real solo.
"I'm not crying uncle, yet," Cal said. "But I may have to take you up on
the offer. I hope not."
"But do you _know_ anything is wrong?" Hayes asked incredulously. He was
having the same trouble facing the reality as the ship's crew.
"If you were flying to Los Angeles and found only desert where the city
is supposed to be, you might assume something was wrong," Cal answered
drily. "But I don't know what it is. Do you have a recorder set up, so I
can begin trying to find out?"
"Yes, yes, E Gray," Hayes said hurriedly. He was suddenly conscious that
he had been interrupting an E conversation, not once but several times.
"Pardon the intrusions. It was just that ..."
"I understand," Cal reassured him.
When Cal stood up from the communicator, the eyes of the crew were on
him. Overhearing his conversation with Earth had sobered them, made
reality come closer.
"You think it might be a mirage?" Tom asked. "Some freak air current
reflecting from another island and superimposing over this one?" Then he
answered himself. "No. I guess it isn't. There aren't enough
discrepancies."
"Let's pan down to the ground with the scanner," Cal said. "Take it slow
over the area where the village is supposed to be."
Glad to be doing something with his hands, Lynwood twisted the controls
to take them instantly, in magnification, to a distance slightly above
the tops of the trees. The automatic pilot caused the ship to drift with
the rotation of the planet, keeping them in fixed relative position.
They scanned the ground rod by rod. There were expanses of heavy tree
and bush growth that they could not penetrate. Some of these trees grew
where the pictures showed cleared fields, buildings, truck gardens,
cattle pastures.
"Those big trees didn't grow up in a month, since the last colonist
report," Louie said positively. He still clung to his belief that it was
all a hoax.
Cal made no comment. He was intent on the scanner screen. There were
heavy foliage spots, but there were also bare areas covered by a soft,
springy turf and patches of wild flowers. But there was no sign of man
or his works. There was not so much as a board, the glint of a nail, not
a furrow, not even the scar of a campfire. And no indication that there
had ever been.
In the sandy patches along the banks of the small meandering river,
there was not even a footprint.
They swept the scanner down the valley.
"Wait a minute," Cal said. "There are some cows and horses." He held the
scanner fixed while they studied the animals. In two small herds, the
animals grazed contentedly near a patch of woods.
"We're in the right time slot, then," Tom said, with an attempt to pick
up the spirit of treating it lightly. "They've been here. Else the cows
and horses wouldn't be."
"Funny thing about those horses," Frank commented in a puzzled voice. "I
grew up on a farm. Those are work horses, but field horses always have
harness marks on them where the hair gets rubbed off or the skin gets
calloused. If they used these horses for work, there ought to be collar
and hames rubs on their necks. There ought to be worn streaks left by
the traces on their sides. There isn't. Far as the evidence shows, they
might have been wild all their lives."
"Whatever happened didn't seem to hurt them any," Cal agreed.
He swept the scanner on down the valley to the sandy shore of the sea.
They were close enough to pick up the brown streaks of beached seaweed.
A flock of shore birds were busy running up the sand away from the
gentle, beaching waves, then following the water line back down to dig
their beaks into the soft, wet sand for food. The birds showed no alarm,
no sign of lurking presence near them.
Cal brought the scanner back up the valley and over to one of the
ridges bordering it. High on the crest of the ridge, the undergrowth was
less luxuriant than down in the valley.
And it was here they caught their first glimpse of a human being.
He was hunkered down behind some rocks at the crest, peering over them
at the valley below. From the shape of his shoulders and back, the set
of his head, they knew it to be a man. As far as they could tell, he had
no clothes on. Apparently they had caught him at the moment of his
arrival at the crest.
They watched him turn his head as he looked quickly, then searchingly,
up and down the valley. They watched his hand come up to shade his eyes
against the light from Ceti as he attempted to see into the dark patches
of foliage where the village ought to be.