Eight Keys to Eden by Mark Clifton (book club reads TXT) 📖

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As one awakened from a deep sleep, a hypnotic trance, Cal opened his eyes.

Man's ancient thought filled his being, the subject of man's dreams, of yearnings, of philosophies. In ancient eidetic memory, the unbroken thread persisted: If I could only grasp this elusive thing, always just barely beyond my reach, I would not need the ox, the wagon, the train, the plane, the spaceship to transport me from here to there.

And now, at last, the thought was in Cal's grasp. Express the things and forces balanced in equation to describe them as they are; or, equally, to alter the things and forces instead to fit the equation balance one had in mind; purely a matter of choice. Each was the use of natural law. No chaos here, no magic, one as much true science as the other.

How long had he slept, and dreamed? A few minutes? An hour? Or by chance was he another Rip Van Winkle, doomed to find the colonists aged or dead?

But why wonder?

A short distance first, just outside the amphitheater, just a small test. He first rearranged the relative position of himself to the amphitheater, to be outside instead of in it. He diagrammed the forces in his mind that would alter the relationship, connected them.[172]

He was standing outside the entrance arch.

With a hoarse cry, Louie, who had been watching all the while through the open arch, shrank back away from Cal, wavered in uncertainty, then fell to his knees, then groveled in the dust.

"Forgive me!" he cried. "In my blind, senseless vanity, I did not know you were a Holy One. I was going to kill you, I confess. Woe! Woe! I saw you lying there in Their temple, defaming it in blasphemy by your sleep. But when I tried to enter, I could not. Their will prevented me. Some shielding force protected you. And then I knew you were a Holy One. Forgive me. Let me live to expiate my sin."

"Louie, Louie," Cal said sadly.

As if in tangled ball, the thought stream of Louie, twisted and warped by the false reasonings and interpretations fed to him in childhood, seemed clearly revealed to Cal. Again a change in concept of relationship to reality, the schematic of forces visualized, the untangling, straightening of thought.

Louie scrambled to his feet, a rueful grin on his face.

"Sorry, Cal," he said. "I must have gone nuts there for a while, shock and all. I'm all right now. Don't worry anymore about me. I'll get on back to the rest."

"Sure, Louie. See you there," Cal agreed.

A rearrangement of relationships, and Cal walked out from behind a bush to approach Jed and Tom.

"You must not have gone all the way to the top," Jed said when he looked up and caught sight of Cal. "It's just barely past noon, I reckon. Didn't expect to see you back until nightfall."

"I took a short cut," Cal said with a grin. "Little past noon," he continued, as if musing with a thought. "About the same time of day that everything happened a couple of weeks ago."

"Yeah, about the same time of day," Jed said, and looked at him curiously.

Tom had arisen to his feet and was staring at Cal curiously, sensing a difference in the E. Now Jed felt it too, and looked at Cal with puzzlement on his face.[173]

"There's something important about it being around this time of day, Cal?" he asked.

"Not really," Cal said, "but I thought it might be helpful. I could restore the village, the fields, the escape ship, everything just as it was; make it feel like a continuation of the same day to the people. It being the same time of day would help the illusion that no time had passed, nothing had happened."

Tom's eyes narrowed in speculation.

"You can do that, Cal?" he asked. "You've solved the problem?"

"Yes," Cal said simply. "I'll tell you about it sometime. There's quite a few loose ends to catch up right now." He turned to Jed. "How about it, Jed?" he asked. "Think it'll be too much of a shock to put things back as they were?"

In spite of himself, Jed was trembling. He drew a deep breath, firmed his jaw. Seemed to set himself as one does in the dentist's chair at the approach of the drill.

It was a bigger equation, a more complex one, but not different in kind.

The village of Appletree sprang suddenly into being, the hangar with the metallic gleam of the ship inside, the fields, the pasture fences with the calves separated from the cows. A few people, clothed, were walking on the dirt street between the houses. They looked at one another. They looked up at the sky, at the fields around them, the forests beyond. They looked back at one another. They shook their heads, and blinked their eyes, as if suddenly wakened from a sleep, a dream, the craziest dream.

Later they would compare the dream, and with Jed's help piece together, and feel the shock, and wonder.

Upon the hill, away from the village, where Jed lay, clothed, in the hammock swung between two trees, Martha came out of the house, clothed.

"I must have sat down in a chair for a minute and fallen asleep or something, Jed," she said as she came to stand beside him. "And I had the funniest dream. You can't imagine. You know how[174] sometimes we'll dream about being out in front of folks, all naked ..."

"That wasn't any dream, Martha," he answered with a grin. "All the people in the village are going to start realizing it pretty soon. They'll need some help. We'd better walk down there. Them people across the ridge, too. Bet they'll be hightailing it back over here first thing you know. And something else, there's an E ship here, come to find out why we didn't communicate."

"Well whatever on Earth are you talkin' about, Jed?" she asked curiously. "It won't be time to communicate for a couple of days yet. You ought to know that. Have you been dreaming, too? Or you and the boys fermenting something? Here, let me smell your breath!"

"Aw, now Martha," he said with a huge grin. He clambered out of the hammock and stood up, took her in his arms, hugged her tightly.

"Jed!" she scolded. "Right out here in the front yard in front of everybody." But she didn't struggle away from him.

"Won't matter a bit," he said. "Not after what's been goin' on in front of everybody right along."

"Whatever has been goin' on can't be half as bad as what I've been dreamin'," she said.

"Better start gettin' used to the idea that it wasn't a dream, Martha," he cautioned.

"Jed!" she scolded again, her face aflame with embarrassment.

[175]

27

The communications operator looked up as the supervisor came down the aisle toward him.

"Communication from the E.H.Q. ship at Eden coming in just fine," he said enthusiastically. He'd thought it over and decided he'd better repair some fences. Good job here, no use letting his irritation with the supervisor's old-maid fussiness make him cut off his nose to spite his face.

"See that it does," the supervisor answered sharply. He recognized the overture for what it was, felt relieved that he wouldn't have any more insubordination, was willing to let bygones be bygones—after a suitable period of punishment. "What's been happening?" he asked with a curiosity that got the better of his desire to discipline.

"E Gray has come back out of that quartz outcropping where we lost him. He's standing there talking to the astronavigator who followed him up the mountain."

"More of the same, I guess," the supervisor said. "Nothing's happened for ten days. Nothing likely to happen," he said. He turned and started back down the aisle toward his own office.

"Wait a minute," the operator called. "Here's something."

Other operator heads raised up all down the aisle.

"Now, now; now, now!" the supervisor quarreled at them. "Get[176] on with your work, nothing to concern you here, none of your business."

But of course it was everybody's business. Anything different was everybody's business. All over the world everybody was wondering about the enigma of Eden, everybody speculating, everybody with a different answer. Some were gleeful that science had finally got its comeuppance, and felt no more than a pleasure that the bigdomes had proved they weren't any smarter than anybody else. Others took an equal pleasure in crying woe, woe, at this proof there were mysteries beyond man's knowing, woe, woe, now that man would be punished for trying to know what he was not meant to know.

The operator took time out, in spite of the supervisor's admonishments, to listen frankly.

"They've lost sight of the E," the operator exclaimed. "No, wait a minute. There he is, down in the valley, coming out from behind a bush to talk to the pilot and the head man of the colony."

"Can't have happened like that," the supervisor grumbled. "Ten or twelve miles from that mountain top to the valley. The ship has garbled their reporting. Probably got behind in reporting and then just decided to skip the journey back, and pick up to make it current. There's going to be complaints about this."

"Well, you were right here," the operator said. "You were listening. I didn't skip anything. It wasn't my fault."

"All right, all right."

"Wait a minute," the operator said. "Here, listen in."

The supervisor's eyes grew round.

"Can't be," he exclaimed.

"All the buildings, everything's just like it was before," the operator said loudly to the room at large. "All of a sudden, the way they report it."

"They're faking the reports," the supervisor grumbled irritably. "Have to be."

"Now, no matter how much they fake, you can't rebuild all those buildings in a couple hours," the operator argued.[177]

"None of our business," the supervisor cautioned. "We just take the reports. Can't criticize us for whatever the E.H.Q. ship out there's doing."

"And everybody's got their clothes back on," the operator said loudly.

There was a sigh of regret up and down the aisle.

"Now the E's disappeared again," the operator said, "They're scanning all over, trying to find him."

The supervisor put down his headset with resolution.

"I'm going to my office to make a report on the sloppy way this reporting has been done. There's going to be fur flying over these skips and jumps, and I don't want it to be our fur. Best thing is to make the complaint first," he said to the room at large. "Now you call me if there's any more of this bollix," he said to the operator as he left.

An hour passed while the supervisor sat in his office. He wrote furiously, scratched out, wrote some more, tore up papers and threw them in the vague direction of the wastebasket, started afresh to write some more. How to report without stepping on anybody's toes?

His buzzer sounded softly to give him respite, and he looked up from a virtually blank piece of paper to the board. The Eden operator again.

"Oh, no," he groaned. But he left his desk at once and half trotted up the aisle.

"Now the captain of the ship says he wants Sector Chief Hayes at once," the operator called out. "Something very important."

"Very well," the supervisor said. "Ring him."

But Hayes didn't wait for the ring. He had been listening, red-eyed, tired, gaunt for lack of sleep.

"Give me connection," he said to the operator as soon as the line opened.

"Bill Hayes here, Captain," he said, as soon as he received the signal. "What now?"[178]

"Mrs. Gray, the Junior E's wife, has disappeared from aboard ship," the Captain said without any preliminaries.

"What do you mean 'disappeared'?" Hayes asked. "How could she disappear in deep space? Have you looked everywhere? Checked the lifeboats? Maybe she took one and tried to get down to her husband by herself."

"We've looked everywhere. No lifeboats missing. No port has opened. You ought to know we wouldn't bother you until we'd checked everything out first."

"She can't have disappeared into thin air, thin space," Hayes quarreled back. "She must be on your ship somewhere. When was she last seen?"

"That's—ah—that's mainly why I'm calling you, Bill," the captain said. "A wild tale, obviously a mistake. One of the crewmen passed her stateroom about an hour ago. Door was open and he looked in, the way anybody does. Says he saw her standing inside her cabin embracing a man. Says he didn't stop to look close, but he was pretty sure it was E Gray. Says he knows because he's had access to the viewscope and has watched E Gray on the surface of Eden."

"There's been no report of any ship leaving Eden, joining you, Captain," Hayes said accusingly.

"Because there hasn't been any," the captain snapped back. "So it can't have been E Gray she was embracing. That's why I called you. Looks like we're going to have some petty scandal mixed up with