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

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."[64]

"There's a whole raft of pictures to show they were there," Frank reminded him.

"Pictures!" Louie answered scornfully. "You think they couldn't fake pictures?" He thought for a moment. "And where's their ship, their escape ship?" he asked as a clincher. "They didn't like it here and have gone off somewhere else, and then covered up by sending reports and pictures on how things would have developed if they'd stayed."

There was a sense of unreality in the whole conversation. Cal let the talk flow on, knowing it was a reaction to shock. What if a modern ocean liner pulled into the harbor of New York—to find an untouched Manhattan Island in its virgin state?

It couldn't happen, therefore it wasn't to be treated seriously.

"Better set up communication with Earth," Cal said quietly.

In E science the unpredictable, the incredible, the illogical could happen at any time. With a mind more open to acceptance of this, he had felt the run of shock sooner. For them, the shock impact was delayed since their minds rejected the illogical as unreal. For him the human shock came at once, and then, as E thinking took over, passed off.

"Sure, Cal," Lynwood agreed. It was a measure of their acceptance that they had quite normally fallen into using his first name.

On the emergency signal it took less than three minutes to clear through eleven light-years to E.H.Q.—and then sixteen minutes for the operator at base to find Bill Hayes.

"Sector Chief Hayes here," the voice said at last through the speaker.

"Gray here, on the Eden matter," Cal answered. "Any other E's available?"

"Hm-m," Hayes answered. "Wong has picked up on a problem in the Pleiades sector, and left this morning. Malinkoff has given out word not to disturb him if the whole universe falls apart. That leaves McGinnis, who, I believe, is spending his time working on the defense against the injunction by Gunderson. An example[65] of the way petty restrictions can bring a fine mind down to trivial problems. But he said call him if you need him."

"Please," Cal said. "And you might stay on while I talk to him, if you're not busy."

"Sure, E Gray, sure," Hayes answered. "I'm flashing the operator to locate McGinnis. Seen anything of the police ship, yet? I understand one is following to observe what you do."

"I'm sure it will be a big help," Cal said drily. "Not that it matters, so long as it doesn't get in the way."

McGinnis came on at that point.

"I'm not yelling for help, yet," Cal told him. "But here's what it is like at this end." He sketched in the details, and heard a sharp gasp at the other end from Hayes.

"Now I'd like to stay on this problem," he concluded his brief summary. "But somewhere there's fifty colonists in trouble because this whole thing is out of focus. I'm not a full E, and maybe their lives are more important than my ambition to do a solo job. Certainly more important. Then, trivial as it is, we'd be playing right into Gunderson's hands if we've sent out a boy to do a man's job."

"Dismiss the Gunderson side of it," McGinnis said drily. "It's inconsequential to the main issue. As for that, I don't know any more than you do. There's never been anything like this. Colonists have been wiped out on other planets, sure; but what happened left traces. This one is an oddball, and I'd say you're as well equipped to handle it as anybody else."

"I don't—I don't understand this at all," Hayes said in a worried voice.

"Who does?" Cal asked. "I'd say set up for continuous communication. I'll leave it wide open here, so that everything we say will come through. Then, if anything should happen to us, you'll have the record up to that point."

"It's the only thing we can do," Hayes agreed.

"If you think I should come out there to stand by, I'll do it," McGinnis said. But the tone of his voice said he hoped Cal would[66] shoulder the full responsibility, not weaken out of a chance at a real solo.

"I'm not crying uncle, yet," Cal said. "But I may have to take you up on the offer. I hope not."

"But do you know anything is wrong?" Hayes asked incredulously. He was having the same trouble facing the reality as the ship's crew.

"If you were flying to Los Angeles and found only desert where the city is supposed to be, you might assume something was wrong," Cal answered drily. "But I don't know what it is. Do you have a recorder set up, so I can begin trying to find out?"

"Yes, yes, E Gray," Hayes said hurriedly. He was suddenly conscious that he had been interrupting an E conversation, not once but several times. "Pardon the intrusions. It was just that ..."

"I understand," Cal reassured him.

When Cal stood up from the communicator, the eyes of the crew were on him. Overhearing his conversation with Earth had sobered them, made reality come closer.

"You think it might be a mirage?" Tom asked. "Some freak air current reflecting from another island and superimposing over this one?" Then he answered himself. "No. I guess it isn't. There aren't enough discrepancies."

"Let's pan down to the ground with the scanner," Cal said. "Take it slow over the area where the village is supposed to be."

Glad to be doing something with his hands, Lynwood twisted the controls to take them instantly, in magnification, to a distance slightly above the tops of the trees. The automatic pilot caused the ship to drift with the rotation of the planet, keeping them in fixed relative position.

They scanned the ground rod by rod. There were expanses of heavy tree and bush growth that they could not penetrate. Some of these trees grew where the pictures showed cleared fields, buildings, truck gardens, cattle pastures.

"Those big trees didn't grow up in a month, since the last[67] colonist report," Louie said positively. He still clung to his belief that it was all a hoax.

Cal made no comment. He was intent on the scanner screen. There were heavy foliage spots, but there were also bare areas covered by a soft, springy turf and patches of wild flowers. But there was no sign of man or his works. There was not so much as a board, the glint of a nail, not a furrow, not even the scar of a campfire. And no indication that there had ever been.

In the sandy patches along the banks of the small meandering river, there was not even a footprint.

They swept the scanner down the valley.

"Wait a minute," Cal said. "There are some cows and horses." He held the scanner fixed while they studied the animals. In two small herds, the animals grazed contentedly near a patch of woods.

"We're in the right time slot, then," Tom said, with an attempt to pick up the spirit of treating it lightly. "They've been here. Else the cows and horses wouldn't be."

"Funny thing about those horses," Frank commented in a puzzled voice. "I grew up on a farm. Those are work horses, but field horses always have harness marks on them where the hair gets rubbed off or the skin gets calloused. If they used these horses for work, there ought to be collar and hames rubs on their necks. There ought to be worn streaks left by the traces on their sides. There isn't. Far as the evidence shows, they might have been wild all their lives."

"Whatever happened didn't seem to hurt them any," Cal agreed.

He swept the scanner on down the valley to the sandy shore of the sea. They were close enough to pick up the brown streaks of beached seaweed. A flock of shore birds were busy running up the sand away from the gentle, beaching waves, then following the water line back down to dig their beaks into the soft, wet sand for food. The birds showed no alarm, no sign of lurking presence near them.

Cal brought the scanner back up the valley and over to one of[68] the ridges bordering it. High on the crest of the ridge, the undergrowth was less luxuriant than down in the valley.

And it was here they caught their first glimpse of a human being.

He was hunkered down behind some rocks at the crest, peering over them at the valley below. From the shape of his shoulders and back, the set of his head, they knew it to be a man. As far as they could tell, he had no clothes on. Apparently they had caught him at the moment of his arrival at the crest.

They watched him turn his head as he looked quickly, then searchingly, up and down the valley. They watched his hand come up to shade his eyes against the light from Ceti as he attempted to see into the dark patches of foliage where the village ought to be.

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!"[69]

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.

[70]

11

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.[71]

"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