Eden (23 page)

"It doesn't matter," said the Engineer, leaning against Defender's cold hull. "We took two hundred frames a second, and we'll see everything when the film is developed."

"An idyllic excursion," said the Doctor.

The Engineer switched the rear telescreen and put Defender into reverse. They went uphill for a while, but when they came to a wider place, they turned and headed due north.

"We're not taking the same route back," said the Engineer. "That would add something like sixty miles. I'll follow the clearing as long as I can. We should be there within two hours."

The road was winding, the thicket walls pressed in on Defender, stalks struck the windshield, and now and then a pod-leaf would drop in the Chemist's or the Doctor's lap. The Doctor raised one to his nose and sniffed.

"A nice smell," he said, surprised.

They were in a wonderful mood. In the crystal-clear sky the serpentine Milky Way sparkled like a mass of diamonds. A gentle breeze combed the thicket with a sigh. Defender, rolling along, hummed softly.

"Curious that there are no tentacles on Eden," the Doctor said. "In all the science fiction I ever read, other planets are full of tentacles out to strangle you."

"And their inhabitants have six fingers," added the Chemist. "Almost always six."

"Six is a mystical number," said the Doctor. "Half of six is three, and success only comes on the third try."

"Stop that jabbering, or I'll lose the way," said the Engineer, who was sitting higher up. He still hadn't turned on the headlights, although now one could not see much without them—but the night was unusually fine, and he would ruin it if he switched them on. And traveling by radar meant closing the turret. Inside, all he could see were his own hands at the controls, and the dials glowing pale green and rose on the panel in front of him, and the atomic indicator arrows twinkling like orange stars.

"Can you call the ship?" asked the Doctor.

"No," said the Engineer. "There's no ionosphere here. There is one, actually, but it's riddled with holes. And for shortwave we haven't had the time to adjust the transmitter. You know that."

The tracks started rattling; the machine began to sway. The Engineer switched on the lights and saw that they were traveling over round white rocks, while high overhead limestone crags assumed fantastic shapes. They were in a canyon.

This bothered him, because he had no idea where, other than the general direction, the road was taking them, and not even Defender could negotiate such walls. They rode on. There were more and more rocks, and the thicket was replaced by separate clumps that shone black in the headlights. The road twisted, went uphill, went level. The cliffs became lower on one side, then disappeared altogether, and the men found themselves in a meadow rimmed by limestone ridges from which ran small scree-filled gullies. At ground level, green-gray stalks stood among rocks.

They had been going in too northeasterly a direction for about a quarter of an hour now, and it was time to get on course again, but the limestone wall to their right would not permit this.

"Still, we were lucky," the Chemist said unexpectedly. "We could have gone off that cliff…"

The way was blocked by something like netting with long hairy fringes. Defender approached the barrier slowly, and the netting adhered to it. The Engineer accelerated a little, and the bizarre netting tore and disappeared, some of it mashed into the ground under the tracks. The lights picked tall black shapes out of the darkness, a forest of shapes, like a petrified army. The men nearly crashed into the base of a column. The large middle spotlight came on and traveled up the tapering black object.

It was a statue, a gigantic statue, which at last they recognized as a doubler—that is, its smaller torso only, enlarged a hundredfold. Its arms were crossed, upraised, and it had a flat, almost concave face, with four symmetrical eye sockets, a face therefore different from the ones they had seen, and the doubler was leaning to the side, as though watching them.

For a long time nobody spoke. Then the spotlight left the statue, probed the darkness, hit other bases, other columns, other torsos, which were dark, spotted, though sometimes there would be a white one, as if carved from bone. Every face had four eyes, but some were deformed, swollen, with an enormous ridge across the forehead. Farther off, at a distance of perhaps six hundred feet: a wall of giant hands reaching upward, or pointing to different constellations in the sky.

"It's like a cemetery," said the Chemist in a lowered voice.

The Doctor had already climbed out onto the rear section of the vehicle, and the Chemist followed. The Engineer turned the spotlight to the limestone wall. In its place he saw a frieze filled with worn, nearly obliterated carvings, an intricate tangle of forms and figures that his eyes couldn't follow. Sometimes he thought he saw something familiar, but the sense of it escaped him.

The Chemist and the Doctor walked among the statues while the Engineer lit their way from the turret. Then the distant, indistinct murmur that he had not paid attention to before, too absorbed by the unusual scene, became a virulent hissing close at hand. Gray clouds drifted out from the rows of statues, and a pack of doublers rushed through them, leaping, whining, coughing, wailing. They fled blindly, colliding into one another.

The Engineer jumped into his seat and grabbed the lever. His first thought was to ride over to his men. A hundred feet away, at the end of an overgrown lane, he could see the pale, astonished faces of the Doctor and the Chemist. But he couldn't move, because the fleeing creatures, totally disregarding the machine, ran right in front of it. Several of the enormous bodies had fallen. The hissing was all about him now; it seemed to come from the ground itself. And, indeed, a flexible tube had emerged, close to the ground, from the nearest base lit by Defender's headlights, and foam was pouring from it. When the foam hit the soil, it began to smoke violently, spreading a gray mist.

As the first wave of mist swept over the turret, the Engineer felt that there were hundreds of needles in his lungs. Blinded, tears pouring down his cheeks, he made a strangled cry and pressed the accelerator. Defender lurched, knocked over a statue, climbed onto it, rolled along it, screeching. The Engineer couldn't breathe, the pain was atrocious, but the turret couldn't be closed; first he had to pick up the others, so he rode on, barely able to see the statues that Defender was knocking down. The air became clearer, and the Chemist and the Doctor—he could hear them—leaped out of the thicket and climbed on. He wanted to shout to them, "Get in!" but no sound emerged from his burned throat. The other two jumped inside, coughing and choking. The Engineer groped for the lever, and the dome closed over them, but the throat-searing mist was still inside. Groaning, with the last of his strength, he grappled with a valve on a pipe, and oxygen burst out in a jet; he could feel it strike his face. The gas, at high pressure, hit him like a fist between the eyes, but he did not mind, thankful for the life-giving flow. The other two bent over his shoulders and inhaled greedily.

The filters were working, and the oxygen replaced the toxic mist. The men could see again. Panting, they felt an intense pain in their chests—each breath seemed to be made through a raw wound—but this sensation passed. The Engineer, having recovered his sight completely, switched on the screen.

A few bodies still quivered among the columns in a side lane where he had not gone; the majority were not moving at all. A jumble of small hands, torsos, and heads disappeared and reappeared through the gray mist. The Engineer turned on the sound monitor and heard feeble coughing, whimpering; something pattered in the rear, and a chorus of broken, rasping voices was raised again in the direction of the frieze. But there was nothing to be seen there, except for the flowing mist. The Engineer made certain that the turret was hermetically sealed and, clenching his teeth, began to turn Defender around. The tracks clattered over the stone fragments; the three headlight beams tried to penetrate the haze. He moved past the fallen statues, looking for the hissing tube—and guessed that it was in the foam gushing about thirty feet ahead, where a cloud was covering the upraised arms of the statue.

"No!" cried the Doctor. "Don't shoot! Some of them may be alive!"

It was too late. The screen went dark for a split second; Defender recoiled, was thrown back with a terrible grinding; and the antiproton beam, emerging from the tip of the generator concealed in its nose, crossed the distance of forty feet to the source of the foam and there annihilated an equivalent amount of matter.

When the screen cleared, there was a fiery crater surrounded by scattered, broken statues.

The Engineer strained his eyes, trying to find the source of the tube. He turned Defender ninety degrees and proceeded slowly along the row of fallen statues. The mist was thinner here. They passed three or four rag-covered bodies. The Engineer braked and steered to avoid running over the nearest ones. A large shape loomed in the thicket ahead. A long clearing opened up, and at the other end of it silvery shapes fled, taking cover. Instead of small torsos in their chests, they had narrow helmets flattened at the sides, with beaks on top.

Something thudded into Defender's front; the screen darkened, then brightened again. The left light had gone out.

The Engineer ran the middle light along the edge of the copse, picking out numerous glints of silver among the branches. Behind the silver, something began to gyrate. It went faster and faster, branches and whole bushes flew, and the huge whirling mass, churning the air in the gleam of the headlights, moved sideways. The Engineer aimed the nose at the point of the greatest activity and depressed the pedal. A muffled roar shook the turret.

It looked as if the sun had risen. They were in the middle of the clearing now, and where the copse had stood, a fifth of the horizon was a white sea of fire. Against this wall of flame and smoke, a glittering sphere rolled toward them.

The Engineer could hear nothing but the roar of the fire. Defender was a bug on the ground compared with this colossus, which spun faster, becoming a whirlwind high as a mountain and divided in the middle by a black zigzag. He had it in his cross hairs, then saw, several hundred feet away, pale silhouettes fleeing.

"Brace yourselves!" he yelled, feeling that there were nails in his throat.

A hellish scraping, a jolt, a deafening crash, and for a moment it seemed that the turret was falling toward him. Defender groaned, its dampers overloaded; the hull rang like a bell; when Defender fired, the screen darkened and brightened, and a hundred hammers began pounding on them. The din abated; the blows became slower, fewer; a long arm continued to flail; then a clatter across the armor, and several arms, spider arms, opened and closed convulsively in front of the screen. One of them tapped rhythmically on the hull, as though stroking it, and finally stopped. The Engineer tried moving, but the tracks wouldn't turn—they were jammed—so he switched into reverse, and slowly, through twisted pieces of metal, Defender crawled crabwise. The obstructions gave way with a clang, and the vehicle, released, shot backward.

Against the flaming copse, the wreck looked like a crushed ninety-foot spider. One severed arm still thrashed, digging into the ground. Among the limbs was a horned globe; it was open now, and silvery figures were leaping from it.

Without thinking, he pressed the pedal.

There was thunder, and a new sun tore through the clearing. Fragments of the wreck flew in all directions, whistling, as a column of seething clay, sand, and soot rose in the center. The Engineer felt suddenly weak, he felt that he was going to vomit. Cold sweat trickled down his back and poured from his face. He was putting his hand to a lever when he heard the Doctor shout, "No, turn back! Do you hear? Turn back!"

Reddish smoke gushed from the crater, as though it were a volcano, and slag flowed down the slope, kindling what remained of the crushed vegetation.

"But I am," said the Engineer. "I am turning back…"

But he didn't move. Sweat continued to trickle down his face.

"Are you all right?" The Doctor's voice seemed to come from far off.

The Engineer saw the Doctor's face over him; he shook his head and blinked. "I'm fine," he mumbled. The Doctor returned to his seat.

Defender shuddered and swung around, but they could hear nothing over the sound of the fire, whose roar was like the ocean. They retreated by the same route they had come.

Their single headlight—they had lost the middle one in the collision—again swept over toppled statues and dead bodies, both covered now with a metallic gray deposit. The men rode between the fragments of two white statues and headed north. Like a ship cutting through waves, Defender plowed through brushwood. Several pale forms darted panic-stricken from the light.

The men picked up speed, and the ride grew bumpy. The Engineer took deep breaths, fighting his weakness. He could still see the swirling ashes, all that remained of the leaping silvery forms. Defender pushed uphill, springy branches smacking its hull, and the tracks grated against something that the men could not see. Now they moved faster, uphill, downhill, across small gullies, through winding ravines, knocking down tangled, woody scrub. The machine went like a battering ram through a copse of spider trees, and their prickly abdomens hit the hull with soft, forceless blows as mashed stalks cracked and hissed. The glow of the fire was still visible in the rear screens. Slowly it faded; then darkness covered everything.

An hour later they were on the plain. The night was full of stars. The bushes were few and far between, then disappeared altogether, and there was nothing but dunes, which undulated in the single headlight. Defender took them quickly, as though impatient. The seats rocked, the tracks whistled. The lights on the control panel shone pink, orange, green. The Engineer had his face to the screen, looking for the ship.

What before had been accepted matter-of-factly—that they had gone off without radio contact—now seemed madness to him. As though the extra hour or two it would have taken to modify the transmitter was too much. When he was almost certain that he had passed the ship in the dark and was now to the north of it, he sighted it—not the ship, that is, but a strangely luminous bubble. Defender slowed down. The slanting walls gleamed like silver and fire in its headlight. When the blinker inside went on, the effect was extraordinary: a high dome, open at the top, erupted in tangled rainbows.