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.
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.
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 innaturalpillars, domes, arches, spires.
Like spokes of a wheel radiating out from the hub, ridges fellaway 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 schismsnotdeveloped.Thatwould 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 littlegroups, 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 theonly cohesive force man had been able to find to keep the nation from disintegrating.
Another nudge.
Factions took shape on Eden and clashed in town meetings. At last, as 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.
"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, neverto 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 nocompulsion 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'swould 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 wasan 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. "Ordersfrom 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.
Louie was right. After they cleared the solar system there was no trouble gettingtoEden. 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 exampleof 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 wouldshoulder 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 youknowanything 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 lastcolonist 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 ofthe 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.
What he saw, or did not see, seemed to stun him. He squatted, as frozen as a statue for long moments. Then, on hands and knees, they saw him back away from the crest. Now they saw he did not wear even so much as a breechclout. When the height of the ridge concealed him from the other side, he sprang to his feet and began to run, zigzagging in the manner of an obstacle racer to avoid the bushes.
"Looks like they've decided to make a nudist colony of it," Lynwood commented.
"And faked the pictures so nasty-minded old Earth people wouldn't come out to break it up," Louie persisted.
"Then why should he be so scared?" Frank asked.
"Notice that patch of bare dirt he's crossing?" Cal asked. "See the little spurts of dust when he puts his feet down? Now look behind him."
The three crewmen leaned closer to look over his shoulder at the scanning screen. Cal adjusted it minutely, to get a sharp focus on the ground.
"No footprints!" Lynwood exclaimed. "He doesn't leave any footprints!"
The three of them looked at Cal, wide-eyed. Cal didn't like what he saw in Louie's eyes. The habitual irritation and annoyance with life's little petty tricks was gone.
The look had been replaced with fear, and something more.
The naked man, running frantically down the side of the slope, disappeared momentarily under some taller growth, came out the other side of it still running. He leaped over a small ravine, stumbled, recovered himself, and disappeared again beneath a larger growth of trees. Below him, on his side of the ridge, there lay another valley with its own stream.
They caught one more fleeting glimpse, a mere flash of sunlight on tan skin. He was still heading downward in the direction of the stream. It was their last sight of him. They watched for a while longer, but he did not reappear under the green canopy of forest.
"Just a guess," Cal said. He spoke matter-of-factly in the hope the casualness would wash the fear and awe from Louie's eyes. "That's probably one of the dissident men who broke away from the main colony and set up housekeeping in this adjacent valley. Apparently the same things have happened to him as happened to the main colony, whatever it was.
"I'd guess it came as pretty much of a shock and he's just now worked up courage to scout the main valley. From that I'd say whatever happened wasn't very long ago, not more than a week. Just a guess."
None of the crew answered him. It was obviously not the case of a voyeur spying on others—not with the kind of excitement the running man had shown. Running away—that is.
"Let's drop down into the atmosphere," Cal suggested. "I'd assume it is breathable from the fact we've seen earth animals and a human being. Still we'd better make tests."
"Yeah," Louie said unexpectedly. "If the man isn't making any footprints maybe he isn't breathing, either." He tried to make it a joke, to fight his fear with self-derision. He didn't succeed. Nobody laughed. He swallowed hard and studied the charts again for no apparent reason.
Cal glanced quickly from Tom to Frank. A look at Norton's face showed him Frank wasn't very far behind Louie in the progress of shock. Perhaps, as with himself, it was Lynwood's sense of responsibility for his crew that was helping the pilot to maintain a better control. But there was a white line around Lynwood's mouth, running up the line of his jaw. Caused by clenching his teeth too tightly? Clenched, to keep them from chattering?
However experienced a man became, however dependable the reactions, one never knew how to predict reaction in the face of the completely unknown. Yet Cal knew that even if he asked any of the men if they feared to take him down it would be an insult never forgotten. It was their job to take an E where he wanted to go. It wouldn't be the first time they had gambled their lives on the judgment of an E.
"Oh-oh," Tom exclaimed. "We have company." He pointed to an indicator on the panel.
They swept the space around them with the scanner, and hovering off to one side they picked up another ship. They watched it for a while, as it hovered there. It made no move to come closer, no move to communicate with them.
"From its markings," Tom said at last, "I think that's a special investigation ship from the attorney general's office. Wonder what they're doing here?"
"To make first-hand observation of my failure," Cal said shortly. "Let's get on with our work."
Perhaps it helped the crew to realize they were not alone, thatwhatever might happen to them would not only be heard on the E.H.Q. channel back to Earth, but would also be seen by these special observers. Perhaps it bucked them up a little to know that they were being watched, that faltering uncertainty would be noted and scorned. Perhaps it was the mechanical routine of air sampling and testing as they lowered the ship by degrees.
Norton grew more relaxed, more sure of himself. Lynwood handled the ship on manual control with ease, almost with flourish. But Louie's hands, gripping the edges of the chart table, still showed bloodless white at the knuckles. Perhaps because there was nothing for him to do at the moment, he alone wasn't snapping out of it.
The tests showed normal atmosphere. It checked exactly with the readings for this altitude established by the surveying scientists. To complete the record, Cal repeated them aloud each time so the open communicator would carry the information back to Earth where, by now, not only McGinnis and Hayes would be listening, but probably a group of scientists as well. Perhaps their hands, too, gripped the edges of tables, showed bloodless at the knuckles?
To wait, helplessly, eleven light-years away might create more tenseness than being right on the scene. Yet no voice came through the ship's speaker, either from Earth or from the observer's ship.
Perhaps McGinnis, forgetting his eighty years, wished now he were at Eden instead of Cal. Perhaps, mindful of his years, he didn't. He made no comment.
Tom dropped the ship lower and lower, each time pausing for an air sample. Each time they scanned the valley where the village of Appletree should be. There was no change. Now the unlikely idea of a superimposed mirage was dispelled. The disappearance of the colony was no trick of vision. The ship hovered, at the last, not more than fifty feet from the ground.
"Let's set her down, Tom," Cal said quietly.
Tom shrugged, as if that were the only thing left to do.
"You're the E," he said. His glance at Louie showed he was placing the responsibility not so much to avoid consequences forhimself, nor so much to assure they were willing to follow an E's orders without question, as to remind Louie that there was, after all, an E with them. And if he were willing to face this unknown, they could hardly do less themselves.
But Louie's eyes were fixed in unblinking stare upon the ground below them. He was frozen and unheeding.
The actual landing was so flawless that Cal, involuntarily, glanced out of the port to confirm that they were no longer hovering.
"Might as well open up," he said. "Nothing has happened to us, so far."
Norton pushed a button. The exit hatch slipped open and the ramp unfolded and slid down to touch ground. Cal, flanked by Tom and Frank, looked through the opening into the woods beyond.
And while they looked, a man came from behind the screening protection of some shrubbery. He was followed by two other men. All of them were completely naked.
"You three stay inside the ship until I signal you to come out," Cal instructed. "If anything unusual happens to me, stand off from the planet until help can come from Earth. Don't be foolish and try to help me."
"You're the E," Tom repeated. When a man is outside his own knowledge, heroics might do more harm than good.
Cal stepped through the exit and walked slowly down the ramp.
The three colonists seemed in no panic. They walked toward him, also slowly, obviously in attempt at dignified control. Yet their faces were breaking into broad grins of relief and welcome.
Cal stepped off the ramp, took a step toward them, then it happened.
He heard breathless grunts of surprise and pain behind him. He whirled around. The three crewmen were lying awkwardly on the ground. There was no ship. The three crewmen were completely naked.
Cal felt the stirring of a breeze, and looked down quickly at his own body. He also was nude.
He turned back to face the colonists. They had stopped in front of him. Their joyous grins had been replaced by grimaces of despair.
Behind him the crewmen were in the act of getting to their feet. A quick glance showed Cal none was hurt. Louie looked around, dazed and uncomprehending. There was not so much as a bent blade of grass to show where the ship's weight had pressed. Louie sank down suddenly on the ground and buried his face in his hands.
Tom and Frank stood over him, in the way a man would try to shield some wounded portion of his own body, instinctively.
A fact obvious to all of them was that their own communication with Earth had been shut off. In this daylight they could not see the observer ship hovering out in space, but its occupants had no doubt seen them, seen what had happened. It, no doubt, was telling Earth what it had seen—the attorney general's office, at any rate. Doubtful that it was including E.H.Q. in its report. Problematical that the attorney general would tell E.H.Q. what had happened.
Cal hoped the observers would have enough sense not to try to land.
A second shock, powerfully magnified, hit him then. Because he was personally involved?
For what seemed an interminable time, Cal's mind ceased to function rationally, and like an animal suddenly faced with the unknown he froze, shrank within himself, stood motionless. Yet far down within his mind, there was still detached observation, as if a part of him were removed from all this, still in the role of disinterested observer.
The crew behind him was likewise frozen in tableau. And the colonists in front of him. A balance in number, with himself in between, a still picture from a modernist ballet.
Or a charade. Guess what this is!
He felt laughter bubbling to his lips, recognized it for the beginning of hysteria, and the impulse was washed away.
With that portion of detached curiosity he watched his mind functioning, darting frantically here and there for rational explanation, and momentarily taking refuge in irrationality. It was all being done with trick photography! Such a sudden transition could take place in a motion picture, a transition from reality into a dream sequence lying discarded on the cutting-room floor.
Reversion to the primitive, accounting for the phenomena by devising a mind more powerful than his own. The childhood viewof the omnipotent parent, reality's disillusionment, the parent substitute, the creation of a god in his parent's image without the weakness of his parent, so that he might go on in perpetual irresponsibility since he could now place responsibility outside himself.
Or this was a fairy story in which he lived. This was the spell of enchantment. This was magic. And at the first concept of magic, the first lesson of E sharpened into focus once more.
"Anything is magic if you don't understand how it happens, and science if you do."
In that odd, detached portion of his mind he deliberately used the statement as a foundation. Upon it he reconstructed the science of E. The universe and all in it is logical, logical at least to man because he is part of that universe, of its essence. There can be nothing in the universe that is wrong, or out of place, except and only as the limited interpretation of man who sees a force in terms of a threat to the ascendancy of himself-and-his at the center of things. This is the sole basis of morality, and prevents man's appreciation of total reality.
He had been trapped in the first concept, and was accepting these phenomena as a statement of Eminent Authority. But what if this were not the whole of reality, what then?
Once begun, his mind progressed rapidly through the seven stages of E science, and in the seventh he found rationality. If there is only one natural law, and we see it only in seemingly unrelated facets because of our ignorance, because we cannot apperceive the whole, then this, too, is no more than another facet.
Perhaps it was this which broke the spell. Perhaps it was the movement of the colonists. They were moving, withdrawing, walking backward step by step. Their faces were masks of despair, and in them Cal read the knowledge that what had just happened to him, his men, his ship, had previously happened to them.
Slowly they backed away, backed out of the open space, soughtthe shelter of a great and spreading tree at the edge of the clearing. There they paused.
It was a return to ballet, a gravely executed change in the proportions of the tableau. They stood, a drooped and huddled group, cowering beneath the tree, in nude dejection, in the suggestion of a wary crouch, uncertain whether to flee precipitously, or freeze to make themselves as small and inconspicuous as possible.
In the same grave choreography he turned to look at his crew. And at the turning, as if on signal, on musical cue, Tom and Frank began the pantomime of urging Louie to his feet. Louie looked at the two standing men alternately. With bloodless lips he tried to grin wryly, apologetically, for what his nervous system was doing to his body against his will.
The old flash of an expression which seemed to say, "This is just the kind of dirty trick life always plays on me," came back into his eyes for an instant, and he tried to grin. But the attempt was a grimace of terror. He cowered back down at their feet, his courage swamped in funk.
"Let's get him under the tree," Cal said, and wondered why he had spoken in such a low voice, almost a whisper. That, too, was a part of the classical pattern of fear, to make no noise. As was getting him under the tree, an animal's instinct to hide from the eyes of the unknown.
As the four of them approached the tree, with Tom and Frank half-carrying, half-dragging Louie—and he still trying to make his legs behave, support him—the colonists made a fluttering movement of uncertainty, as if to bolt, to run in panic, farther and farther back into sheltering protection of the deep forest.
But they stood their ground, in acceptance. The seven men came together under the protecting branches of the tree. Protection? From what?
Louie sank down gratefully, and clutched the trunk of the tree, as if, on a high place, he feared falling.
"Sorry," he muttered through clenched teeth. "Just can't help it."
One of the colonists answered first, the tall, leather-faced, spare-framed one. Stamped on his face was his origin, the imperishable impression of the West Texan, grown up in a harsh land that can be made responsive to man's needs only through strength, his will to survive against all odds.
"It figgers," the man said in his quiet drawl. "We've all been like that for days, maybe a week or more. Lost count. You're doin' all right. Better than some."
Cal drew a deep breath, consciously squared his shoulders, fought off the urge to like dejection.
"Then everybody's still alive?" he asked.
"Oh yeah, sure. Nobody's kill't. Just hidin' out in the woods, and mostly from each other. It's a turrible thing." He looked down at himself with a wry grimace. "Not outta shame," he added. "We've seen naked bodies before. Just plumb scared, I guess."
To talk, to hear himself talking, and that to strangers, to tell somebody about it, seemed to restore some confidence in himself. Something of quiet dignity came back over him, a knowledge of responsibility for leadership. He straightened, as if silently reminding himself that he was a man.
"I'm Jed Dawkins," he said. "Sort of the kingpin of the colony, I reckon you might say. Mayor of Appletree, or what was Appletree. I don't rightly know if I'm mayor of anything now. This here is Ahmed Hussein, and this miserable hunk o' man is Dirk Van Tassel. Manner of speakin'," he amended. "He ain't no more miserable than the rest of us."
"I'm Calvin Gray," Cal answered. He indicated his crew. "This is Tom Lynwood, Frank Norton, Louie LeBeau. They're all good men. Just under the weather right now."
"You should'a seen us when it first happened," Jed said with feeling. "I reckon you're the E? Come to find out why we didn't communicate?" He spread his open hands and waved them to indicate the area around him. "Now you see why we didn't.Hollerin' loud as we could wouldn't do the job, and that's all we got left."
Somehow the introductions relaxed them all a little, as if the familiar formality provided some kind of normalcy in an incredible situation.
"Don't seem right hospitable, just standin' here," Jed added with a shrug. "But there ain't no house, nor camp, nor fire to share with you."
"We're not suffering at the moment, except mentally," Cal reassured him. Involuntarily he glanced up at the spreading branches of the tree, as if to reassure himself also; then grinned in self-consciousness at the pantomime of fear. "First thing is to find out what happened."
"Might as well hunker down right here on the ground," Jed said. "One place is good as another right now."
The men all crouched or sat on the dead leaves which carpeted the ground. Cal suddenly realized he was glad to take the strain from his legs, as if he had been maintaining stance through sheer will.
"It is a poor greeting to visitors from home," Ahmed spoke up, then cleared his voice in surprise to hear himself speaking. "We cannot even provide a cup of coffee."
"Cain't have no fire," Dawkins explained. "See?"
He picked up two dead twigs laying on the ground near him. He began rubbing them together, in the ancient way of creating fire. The two sticks flew apart and out of his hands.
"Try it," he invited Cal.
Curious, even unbelieving, Cal picked up two broken branches. He started to rub them together. He felt them twisted, wrenched, and pulled out of his hands. He saw them flying through the air with a force he had not provided. He got up, picked them up again, sat back down, and held the sticks very tightly in his hands. He tried to bring them together. Suddenly, he simply lost interest.
"Oh to hell with it," he said unexpectedly, and dropped the sticks. His astonishment at himself was a shock.
There was a kind of chuckle from Van Tassel, one without mirth. "Kind of gets you, doesn't it?" he said.
Cal looked at his hands, and at the sticks laying beside him.
"Now why would I do that?" he asked. "All at once it seemed unimportant to start a fire, or even try. What's happened here? What's been going on?"
"Cain't explain it," Dawkins said. "Sort of hoped you bein' an E, and all ..."
"Maybe if you told me just what happened, started at the beginning when everything was normal...."
"Something else you should tell him, Jed," Ahmed spoke up. He looked at Cal, and explained himself. "We don't think easily," he added. "Can't keep our minds on anything for more than a minute or so. In fact, I'm a little surprised that we've been able to carry on the conversation this long. From the way we've been behaving, I would have expected more that we'd have wandered away back into the woods before now—simply left you to your own devices without interest in you. Strange."
"Yeah," Jed confirmed, "I was thinkin' that, too. Funny thing. Right now I feel like I could tell the whole yarn. I feel like ... Well, while I'm in the mood I'd better git it said. Don't know how long I can keep interested.
"Well, there we were, one day, seems like it ought to be about a week ago, give or take a couple of days. Anyway, I remember it was around noon...."