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

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, that[72] whatever 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 for[73] himself, 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.[74]

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.

[75]

12

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 view[76] of 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, sought[77] the 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.[78]

"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,