the woods to come greet you, lead you to us. They wouldn't come
themselves, being naked and all. They told us, first thing was to get
some clothes for them from the ship.
"We was countin' on the arrival of your ship to bring the rest of the
colonists back to their senses. Some ain't been found yet, not since the
footprint thing. If they were watchin' you from hidin' places, if they
also saw your ship disappear--well now, I just don't know."
"There'll be another ship from Earth," Cal said. "In a matter of fifteen
or twenty hours at most. We were communicating at the time. They'll know
we didn't cut out through choice."
"Yes," Tom Lynwood confirmed. "As I remember, I got cut off in the
middle of a sentence. They'll know something was wrong."
"There's another ship out there right now," Cal added. "Not an E.H.Q.
ship, but one that would have seen what happened. We'll not count on
anything from them, but an E.H.Q. ship will be here soon, probably with
an E on board--McGinnis."
"Don't know what good it would do," Jed said despondently. "That ship
might disappear, too, soon as it landed. And the next, and the next."
"I don't plan to let it land," Cal told them. "You'll notice nothing
happened to us until we touched ground. I'll find a way to talk to the
ship, keep it from landing until we've got a line on whatever this is."
"You figger to solve this one?" Jed asked curiously, unbelieving.
"I'm going to try," Cal said with more confidence than he felt. "It's
what I'm here for. Maybe I can't solve it, but I can try."
"I don't know how you're going to start," Dirk spoke up. "We're just
like animals here. We can't use tools."
"But animals do use tools," Cal answered after a moment. "Materials,
anyway. Birds build nests using sticks, grass, clay. Monkeys and apes
throw sticks and stones. Even insects use materials. Basic difference
between man and the rest is that man gives special shapes to tools,
where mainly the rest use whatever falls to hand. But all higher,
organized protoplasmic life uses tools in one form or another."
"We ain't allowed to," Jed said emphatically. "Not even what's at hand.
Somebody, or somethin', is bound and determined we ain't goin' to."
At that moment Cal felt close to a solution, or at least an
understanding of the nature of the problem, which is the first step
toward solution. But like the specter seen in twilight from the corner
of the eye, as soon as he tried to focus on the problem, the concept
disappeared. Something about protoplasmic life using materials.
Non-protoplasmic life? Could there be, and still meet the definitions of
what constitute life? As compared with our evolution, from its earliest
beginning finding some other approach to the manipulation of the
physical universe? A totally alien kind of science? Come to think of it,
the use of material to affect other material was a cumbersome, indirect,
awkward way of going about it, as compared with ...
Compared with what?
The concept would not yet allow him full focus upon it. He filed it away
for future contemplation.
He saw Dawkins and the other colonists looking at him defiantly, as if
interpreting his silence to be doubt of their veracity about the taboo
on tools. Their eyes challenged him to disbelieve them, to find out for
himself.
"Other than the feeling of being watched," he said carefully, "have you
had any sign, any other evidence or indication of somebody, or
something? I know about the feeling, because I feel it too. And very
strongly, right now. But any specific evidence?"
Jed Dawkins looked relieved at the confession.
"Everything's the evidence. Everything that's happened. What more
evidence would you want?" he said.
"One of the strongest arguments in favor of something, or some kind of
intelligence," Cal said slowly, "is that nobody's been hurt. All natural
law hasn't been canceled. We still have light radiation, heat radiation,
gravity, water still flows, the planet still turns. Trees still grow and
fruit still ripens. We can talk and be understood, using our tongues and
minds as tools. We can still eat and drink. We can still know.
"This is no chaotic co-ordinate system that defies all natural law. This
is a deliberate manipulation of some natural laws to get a result. Man
manipulates natural laws by the use of tools and materials, but he
doesn't suspend them. Here, apparently without tools, at least tools we
can perceive, natural law is manipulated, but not suspended.
"When the village disappeared, no one was hurt. A lot of people were
caught in awkward positions and fell, some of them several feet. There
should have been at least a few broken bones, pulled ligaments. There
weren't. Our ship landed safely. We were a long time in the atmosphere
of Eden, and for a few minutes there on the ground we were still using
tools of a high order. It was only when danger of real harm to us was
past that the ship disappeared."
"I reckon it's comfortin' to know we ain't meant to be hurt," Jed said,
and looked at his two companions. "I guess it is," he repeated
doubtfully. "Maybe it ain't something as nice and familiar as a cyclone,
or a den of rattlesnakes, something you could understand, but you got
to admit we ain't been hurt yet." It was as if he were arguing the point
with his companions.
"Something I've been noting, Jed," Ahmed spoke up. "A discrepancy of a
sort that has me puzzled. Sun reckoning, we've been able to keep our
minds on this subject for over two hours now. As if, whatever this is
manipulating natural laws can also manipulate the way our minds work."
"Yeah," Jed admitted slowly, his face thoughtful. He turned to Cal.
"Like I said at the start. Our minds have sort of wandered of late.
Start to do something, and first thing y'know, we're doin' something
else. Can't keep our minds on one thing very long--like animals."
"That might be no more than the aftermath of deep shock," Cal said.
"It's for a purpose!"
Startled at the outburst, they all turned and looked at Louie.
"It's for a purpose," Louie repeated in a kind of rapture. "They want us
to understand we are being watched over, cared for. That colonist you
all laughed at was right. This is the first Garden of Eden, where man
lived in complete innocence. Now man has been returned to it, to live
again in complete innocence. You do not think straight because there is
no reason. You will be cared for. Woe unto him who seeks to despoil it
again by seeking vain knowledge!"
His eyes were wild, his face contorted with a mixture of exaltation and
condemnation.
"Shut up, Louie," Tom said in a low, firm voice.
"We understand," Jed said tolerantly. "Some of the colonists are talkin'
the same way. He's got plenty of company."
18
All the rest of that day, and throughout the following, Cal and Tom
worked with Jed in trying to round up the colonists, get them living
together again.
By agreement, Ahmed and Dirk stayed with the small band of colonists
that had overcome their fears enough to mingle together again. Louie
frankly deserted his shipmates, and spent all his time with the
colonists. Frank, as if reverting to his childhood farming days,
occupied himself with trying to round up the stock. He tried to keep the
cows separated from their calves so the colonists would have milk to
drink, but without ropes or corrals it was hopeless. He finally gave up
his attempt to husband the stock, and he too seemed content then to
mingle with the colonists.
The marked change in Louie could not be ignored, for he was not idling
away his time in lazy feeding and sleeping. He had dropped his lifelong
pose of superficial complaint that the fates always gave him the dirty
end of the stick, and now he spent his time preaching to the little band
of colonists. Or wandering through the forests and undergrowth calling,
praying, comforting.
Cal felt no condemnation for him. He was not the first man, seemingly
dedicated to science, who, confronted with mysteries beyond his power to
comprehend, reverted to childlike superstitious awe for an explanation.
In the face of mystery or catastrophe, it takes a faith beyond the
capacity of most to continue believing that the universe has a rational
order to its laws that can be comprehended if man persists. It is
temptingly easy for man to revert back to the irresponsibility of
childhood, assuming that the control of phenomena is in the hands of
those stronger, wiser than he. It takes a strength, in the face of this
temptation, to go on believing that man _can_ know, that it is not
morally wrong for him to know.
No blame then for Louie.
Tom was torn in his loyalties. He frequently remembered that away from
E.H.Q. the crew become the E's attendants, and that their first duty is
always to the E. But separation from the other two men of his crew was
like the loss of a part of himself. To these also he had a duty. He
tried to solve his problem by alternating his time, spending part of it
with Cal, the remainder with his crew.
Cal and Jed made a trip the following morning across the ridge, and
found the dissident group huddled together in abject terror. They had
seen the ship coming down through the atmosphere and, all together, they
had climbed the ridge, where one of their scouts had recently gone, to
watch the ship's landing--and its disappearance.
Once they were found, it took little persuasion to convince them they
should return to the other colonists, that differences of opinion meant
nothing now as against the need of human beings to cling together in the
face of catastrophe.
But they too were having trouble thinking in a straight line, and even
though they first appeared eager to join the other colonists, it took
some doing to keep them all together and moving forward to cross the
ridge, to come down the other side, to assemble again at the site of the
village with the others.
And yet, within minutes, neither band seemed to remember that they had
ever been separated.
By the time they had returned, it was apparent that Louie was succeeding
where Jed had failed in finding the colonists. In the few hours that
had elapsed, the nucleus had tripled in size. Louie's wandering through
the brush, calling, pleading with them to follow him, promising there
was no danger if they would allow him to watch over them, intercede for
them with Those who had caused all this, had indeed coaxed them from
their hiding places, calmed their fears.
And still through the day he toiled, finding them, bringing them back
into the fold, one and two and three at a time, until, at last, by Jed's
count, all were there, no more missing.
And yet, in spite of his success, there was a kind of hurt and
disappointment in Louie's eyes. For once back, they not only forgot
their fears, they seemed also to forget him. They coalesced into a
placid herd, without memory of their panic. Without memory of the
shepherd who had found the lost sheep and returned them to the fold.
They wandered among the trees and bushes, picking fruit and nuts, eating
leaves and stems and flowers of plants. They wandered down to the river
to lie prone on the sand, dip their faces into the clear cold water to
drink. During the heat of the day they bathed in the river, and as they
lay on white sand or grassy slopes to dry, they slept contentedly.
The phenomenon was not as startling to Cal as it might have seemed to
others.
On Earth, gradually learned through trial and error, experimental
colonists were not picked for their jobs because of flexible, incisive,
or brilliant minds. Quite the contrary. The basic test of a successful
colonist was endurance--the endurance of hardship, privation, the stoic
indifference to conditions of discomfort, monotony, pain, uncleanliness,
immodesty--conditions which would send a more imaginative or sensitive
temperament into a downward-spiraling syndrome of failure. They were the
kind of men and women who, on Earth in an earlier time, had been able to
endure the harshness of the sea, of arctic cold, jungle disease, desert
heat; to make those first steps in taming a hostile environment, so that
men with less endurance, but with more delicately poised and sensitive
minds, following them might then endure.
It was characteristic of such men and women, even under Earth
conditions, that they seldom questioned their reasons for these things.
They simply went, and endured, and tamed. Even on Earth, when the taming
had been done, they moved on. This was the stuff of the experimental
colonist.
Now, here, that temperament still persisted. They had fled in panic, but
now they had returned to their original purpose--to endure. It was
enough.
Louie was to learn, in disappointment, that failure to be curious about
scientific reasoning was usually accompanied by an equal failure to be
curious about philosophical implications. They listened idly to his
exhortations, but their eyes did not light with fire nor cloud with
doubt. They simply wandered away after a time and ate or slept.
In the evening of that second day, Cal sat with Tom and Jed down by the
bank of the river where the sky was clear and the stars beginning to
shine. They were talking quietly of home, of Eden, of the colonists who,
more and more, seemed to take on the character of a contented herd of
animals. So far there had been no attempt of the old males to drive the
young ones out of the herd, destroy them, but that might come in time;
as surely as the old males on Earth by tacit agreement on both sides,
were always able to work up a war for the purpose of weeding out and
destroying lusty young male competition.
They were talking of the curious fact that all three of them seemed able
to continue thinking in a straight line, hold their minds to a subject,
while all the rest grew more vague, less retentive, more content to live
from moment to moment, without concern for past or future.
Except Louie. He too seemed able to hold his thinking in a straight
line, one tangential to theirs. He seemed, in these hours, to have
turned wholly mystical, to a stronger belief that they were being
watched and cared for by some higher power, and that this was for a
purpose. Yet not so tangential, for Cal had come to the same conclusion,
although his interpretation differed.
"I can't doubt that there is an intelligent direction of this peculiar
co-ordinate system," he said to Tom and Jed. "But I must doubt it is
supernatural in the way Louie interprets. Anything appears to be magic
when we don't understand how it happens, and becomes science when we
do."
He paused, and looked at his companions' faces in the starshine. They
were quiet, reposed, listening.
"Ever since man got up off the bottom of his ocean of air," he said,
"and out into space, we've been prepared to run into some form of
intelligence which doesn't behave the way we do. Not prepared to do
anything about it, you understand," he said with a shrug. "Just
theoretically prepared that it might happen. It was a possibility. Now
it does seem to have happened. E McGinnis asked me, before I left Earth,
if I thought Eden was an alluring trap, especially baited to catch some
human beings. It begins to appear that it is."
"I've caught many a wild animal in my day," Jed said slowly,
thoughtfully. "I've pinned 'em up in cages, watched how they behaved. I
guess scientists do that all the time. Don't want to hurt 'em, fact make
'em as comfortable as they can--just want to know about 'em. Sometimes,
after I watched them awhile I'd turn 'em aloose and watch 'em scoot back
to their natural world. That could happen to us. Sometimes they'd die,
and I wouldn't know why. That could happen. Some animals won't bear
young in captivity. We can't because of an operation. Maybe whatever's
holdin' us don't know that, and might turn us aloose when, after a time,
we don't bear any young."
He paused and looked even more thoughtful.
"Sometimes," he added slowly, "after I studied 'em, found out how they
would behave no matter what, I had to kill 'em, because they was too
dangerous to let run around among humans. That could happen."
"I haven't done much trapping," Tom said. "But in zoos I've watched
animals in cages. The thought always came to me that if they could think
the way we do, they could just open their cages and walk away."
"Now you take turkeys," Jed answered. "Pin 'em up with a high fence,
they'll back up, take off and fly over it. But pin 'em with a low fence,
and they won't. Seems like they know they have to fly over a high
obstruction, but don't figger on it for a low one. Sometimes they
flutter up against it, or try to push it over, but most of the time they
just walk around and around in the yard lookin' for an opening."
"Natural survival pattern," Cal commented. "In the woods, in their
natural state, when they came up against a fallen log, it took more
effort to lift their heavy bodies in flight over it than it took to walk
around the log. It became a fixed pattern of behavior to walk around
it."
"That's what they do with a low fence then," Jed said. "They just keep
tryin' to walk around the obstruction. Not enough sense to treat it like
a high fence, because it ain't high, see? No use tryin' to tell 'em it's
high, because they know it ain't. So they can't solve it. Seems awful
stupid, somehow, a little low fence, all that blue sky above 'em, and
they can't figger it out."
"I suspect that's what's happening to us," Cal said. "We've always
argued that wherever there is matter and energy in the universe, certain
natural laws will prevail. We've learned ways to take advantage of those
natural laws, to do certain things that will make them work for us
instead of against us.
"We've always argued that for any kind of intelligence to arise in the
universe it, too, would have to become aware of these natural laws; that
it, too, would have to do these same certain things to take advantage of
those laws; that because the laws and what to do about them would always
be similar man would have a lot in common with that other intelligence,
and a means of communicating because of that similarity.
"We'd argue that whatever its evolutionary physical shape, this wasn't
so important as its mental evolution--because that mental evolution
would follow the same course as ours. They wouldn't be truly alien,
because science would be a common denominator.
"Now it appears we could be wrong. Maybe our concept of science is too
narrow. Maybe we're like the turkey. We've become so fixed in our
pattern of solving a problem we can't change, can't back off and take
another look, see the problem not as it appears but as it really is."
"But isn't that the science of E?" Tom asked curiously. "To be able to
extrapolate any co-ordinate system? I'm not criticizing," he added
hastily. "Just asking."
"I suspect even our means of extrapolation are too limited, too based on
the relationship of things and forces to each other, too set in the
notion that only physical tools can affect physical things. We may be
looking at a low fence, calling it a log, and therefore not able to
understand why we can't walk around the obstruction in the usual
manner." He stopped, and added with a shrug. "Stupid, maybe. Or like the
turkey, the yard is so big that he never gets a picture of it as a whole
enclosure. By the time he's wandered down this side of the fence he's
forgot what he found on the other side. Never can put the whole thing
together in his mind. That's my trouble, anyhow. So far, I'm not able to
put the whole thing together, see it all as one piece.
"When I do, if I do, then maybe like a caged animal I'll see how to
unlock an opening, or maybe realize the only way out is to fly."
There beside the softly flowing river, where water was obeying natural
law without any trouble, the three men broke off their discussion when
they saw a bright flash high in the sky above them. All three knew what
it meant.
Another E ship had arrived.
No doubt the ship would expect light signals from the colonists in
acknowledgment of their space flare.
If the ship had come while this portion of the planet was still in
daylight, they would have seen there was no village, no ship, no
equipment for direct communication. They may even have reasoned there
was no means of signaling with artificial light.
But there was nothing to tell them that those on Eden could not build a
fire.
As if they were present on the ship themselves, the three men could
anticipate what must be happening there. Right now they would be
anxiously waiting for signal flares to light up, to spring up like
signal fires on a lonely island where a marooned man has, at last,
sighted a ship on the horizon.
The colonists were no longer hiding, but were freely wandering in open
spaces. If the ship had arrived before dusk they would have seen the men
and women in the viewscopes. If after dusk, they still might have
spotted them in the infrared viewers which picked up the heat
differentials and gave a fair approximation of shapes.
The men on the ship would be waiting and looking at their watches. How
long, they would be asking, does it take those colonists, that E down
there, to get a signal fire going?
About five minutes passed, and another flare lighted the heavens.
"Get off the dime down there!" it seemed to say. "Acknowledge us!"
Cal took the chance that they might have an infrared viewscope directly
on him, and he waved his arms above his head. But apparently they had
not spotted him, for there was no answering flare.
At intervals of five minutes at first, then later cut to fifteen
minutes, throughout the long night the flares continued to light the
sky.
"Talk to us," the flares begged. "Surely you were expecting us. Surely
you would not all be sleeping so soundly that our light could not rouse
you."
Several times the three men stood up and waved their arms, but it
brought no answer from the ship. In the darkness perhaps the equipment
wasn't good enough. Perhaps in the night breeze bushes and trees also
swayed with movement.
Once there was a rustle in the brush, and in the starlight they
recognized the figure of Louie approaching them.
"This has got to stop," he said worriedly as he came up to them. "That
light is an unnatural thing. It will anger Them. It is not meant for the
peace of Eden to be disturbed by any artificial thing. And if They
should turn Their wrath upon us--woe, woe!"
His face was stricken in the light of a new flare, and as suddenly as he
had come to object, he left, plunged back under the trees to seek his
people, be beside them, comforting them when disaster struck down.
After a time the three men gave up trying to wave their acknowledgment
of the flares in darkness. They watched for an hour or so, and then
tried to sleep. The periodic flares continued to come throughout the
long night, as if now no longer pleading for acknowledgment, but rather
reassuring men in such deep distress that they could not answer.
Reassuring them that help was at hand and morning would come.
They tried to sleep, and although fitfully disturbed by the continuing
flares, they did sleep. But at the first hint of dawn, Cal awoke and
aroused his two companions, and by the time there was enough light for
the ship to see clear detail upon the ground, the three men were ready
for a better attempt at answering the ship's signal.
They went up to the village site, where the colonists were sleeping in
the way a herd is bedded down together. They awoke Frank and Martha,
Ahmed and Dirk, and told them of their plan. Louie, too, awoke, heard
the plan, and tried to warn them against it. Any attempt, he said, to
communicate with those not on Eden would surely increase the wrath of
Those who wanted only the natural state here--a wrath still withheld
because of superhuman mercy, but which must not be tried too far.
In spite of his warnings, Cal, and those co-operating with him, got
together enough colonists to carry out his plan.
Good-naturedly, the colonists did as they were told, but with the
attitude that it was something amusing, that there was nothing they'd
rather be doing at the moment. Any sense of urgency about communicating
with home seemed to have been washed from their minds.
In a clear space, on the soft grass, Cal got the colonists to sit or lie
in certain positions. Checked against Tom's knowledge of ancient signal
patterns, those certain positions took the shape of space-navy patterns.