"The individual we killed was covered with a kind of foil, while these others were naked. The corpse in the well had a tube in its umbilicus, and it had an eye, an eye like the one you're looking at now, while the other corpses had no eyes… I'm beginning to think that even this doubler we brought with us won't help us much. We'll try to communicate with it, of course, but I doubt that we'll have much success…"
The Cyberneticist said: "All the information we've collected so far should be written down, classified, or we'll get confused. The Doctor's probably right, but… Those skeletons, were they definitely skeletons? And the crowd of doublers that surrounded you and then fled…"
"I saw the skeletons as clearly as I see you. As for the crowd…" And he spread his arms.
"That was absolute madness," the Chemist put in.
"Maybe you woke up the settlement, and they were surprised. Imagine a hotel on Earth, and one of these gyrating disks suddenly appearing. Of course people will panic!"
The Chemist shook his head, and the Doctor smiled.
"You weren't there, so it's difficult to explain it to you. Panic, you say… And when all the people have hidden themselves or fled, one of them, naked as a jaybird, runs after the disk and asks for a ride."
"But it didn't ask you…"
"He didn't? And what happened when I pushed him away to make him go back?"
"Gentlemen, it's a quarter to four," said the Captain, "and tomorrow—I should say today—they could pay us a new visit, at any time. Nothing would surprise me! What did you do in the ship?" he asked the Engineer.
"Very little, since we were sitting by the thrower for four hours! One microbrain has been checked, and the remote is almost working—the Cyberneticist can give you the details. There's quite a mess, unfortunately."
"I need sixteen niobium-tantalum diodes," said the Cyberneticist. "The cryotrons are intact, but I can't do anything with the brain without the diodes."
"Can't you cannibalize?"
"I did, I took over seven hundred."
"There aren't any more?"
"Maybe in Defender—I couldn't reach it. It's lying at the very bottom."
"Listen, do we have to stand out here all night?"
"You're right, let's go. But wait—what about the doubler?"
"And what about the jeep?"
"You're not going to like this, gentlemen, but from now on we'll have to stand watch around the clock," said the Captain. "It was crazy of us not to have done that before. Who will volunteer for the first two hours, until dawn…?"
"I will," said the Doctor.
"You? Don't be ridiculous. It has to be one of us," said the Engineer. "After all, we were just sitting here."
"And I was sitting in the jeep. I'm no more tired than you are."
"Enough. First the Engineer, then the Doctor," the Captain decided. He stretched, rubbed his numb hands, went over to the jeep, turned off the lights, and wheeled it around slowly, pushing it under the hull of the ship.
"And the doubler?" The Cyberneticist was standing over the recumbent creature.
"He'll stay here. He's sleeping. If he were going to run away, he wouldn't have come here in the first place," observed the Physicist.
"We can't just leave him like this. We have to secure him somehow," said the Chemist.
But the others were entering the tunnel one by one. He looked around, shrugged, and followed them. The Engineer meanwhile put an air cushion beside the thrower and sat down. But, afraid of falling asleep, he got up and began to pace back and forth.
The sand crunched softly under his boots. The first gray light appeared in the east, and the stars gradually went out. The air, cold and fresh, filled his lungs. He tried to pick out the strange odor that he recalled from the first time they had set foot on the planet, but he could no longer detect it. The side of the creature lying nearby rose and fell rhythmically. Long thin tentacles emerged from its chest and grabbed the Engineer by the leg. He struggled, stumbled, almost fell over—and opened his eyes. He had been asleep on his feet. It was brighter now. In the east, cirrus clouds had formed into a long, slanting line, the end of which was beginning to glow as the gray of the sky turned azure. The last star disappeared.
The Engineer faced the horizon. The clouds turned from dark gray to golden bronze; fire blazed at their edges; a streak of rose now lay on the horizon. This could have been Earth.
He was pierced with despair.
"My turn!" a strong voice rang out behind him. The Engineer gave a start. The Doctor was smiling at him. The Engineer suddenly wanted to thank him, to say something, he didn't know what—something very important—but he had no words for it, so he shook his head, answered the smile with a smile, and went into the dark tunnel.
VIII
At noon five half-naked men with tanned faces and necks were lying near the ship. Around them were utensils, pieces of equipment, and a square of canvas covered with suits, boots, and towels. The smell of freshly brewed coffee came from an open thermos. Shadows of clouds moved silently across the plain. Had it not been for the creature sitting motionless several feet farther beneath the hull, the scene might have resembled a picnic on Earth.
"Where's the Engineer?" asked the Physicist. He propped himself up lazily on his elbows.
"Writing his book."
"You mean, on how to repair one's spaceship?"
"Yes, it should make for interesting reading. A thick volume!"
The Physicist looked at the speaker. "You're in a good mood. That's important. And your wound is almost healed. I don't think the cut would have closed so fast on Earth."
The Captain touched the scab on his forehead and raised his brows. "That's possible. The ship was sterile, and the bacteria here are harmless to us. And there don't seem to be any insects. I haven't seen any, have you?"
"The Doctor's white butterflies," the Physicist said quietly, reluctant to talk in the heat.
"Well, that's only a hypothesis."
"And what isn't a hypothesis here?" asked the Doctor.
"Our presence," the Chemist said, turning over on his back. "You know, I wouldn't mind a change of scenery…"
"Nor would I," agreed the Doctor.
"Did you notice how red the doubler's skin became after only a few minutes in the sun?" the Captain said.
The Doctor nodded. "Yes. That means either that he has never been in the sun before, or that normally he wears some sort of clothing. Unless…"
"Unless what?"
"I don't know what…"
"Things aren't too bad," said the Cyberneticist, looking up from a sheet of paper covered with writing. "Henry tells me he can get the diodes from Defender. If everything checks out tomorrow, by evening we'll have the first robot working. I'll put it in charge of the rest, and if it can patch together three units, our troubles are over. We'll get the hoists going, the shovel, and in a week the ship will be up, and…"
"And what?" asked the Chemist. "We climb in and take off?"
The Doctor grinned. "Space travel is the purest expression of man's curiosity," he said. "Did you hear? The Chemist doesn't want to leave now!"
"No, but seriously, Doctor, what about the doubler? You've been with him all day!"
"That's true."
"Well? Don't get mysterious! We've had enough mystery!"
"I wish I had something to be mysterious about! He's behaving … like a child. A retarded child. He recognizes me. When I call him, he comes. When I push him away, he sits."
"You took him to the engine room. How did he react?"
"Like a baby. It didn't interest him at all. When I went behind the generator and he couldn't see me, he began to sweat with fear. If it is sweat, and if the sweat does signify fear…"
"Can he speak? I could hear him gurgling to you."
"He doesn't produce articulate sounds. I made tape recordings and analyzed the frequencies. Yet he can hear speech… He's timid, fearful, as docile as a cow, but the whole community seems to be like that…"
<
br /> "Maybe he's young; maybe their young are large."
"He's not young. You can tell by the skin, its wrinkles and folds. And the soles of his feet are callused, hard, hornlike. In any case, he isn't a child in our sense of the word. On our return that night, he noticed certain things before we did, and reacted strangely, for example, to that mirage in the air, as I told you. He was afraid. Afraid, also, of that settlement. Otherwise why would he have fled it?"
"But they have built factories, the disks—they must be intelligent," said the Physicist.
"This one isn't."
"Wait," said the Chemist, sitting up and brushing the sand off his elbows. "Suppose he's … handicapped, or…"
"You're suggesting that was an insane asylum back there?" asked the Doctor. "Or an isolated place where they keep their sick?"
"And perform experiments on them," suggested the Chemist.
"What you saw you call experiments?" asked the Captain, who had been silent until now.
"I'm not judging it morally. How can I? We understand nothing, really," the Chemist replied. "The Doctor found a tube in one of them, a tube not unlike the one that was in the body we dissected…"
"Aha. In other words, the doubler that got into the ship at night also came from there, escaped from there?"
"Why not? Is it impossible?"
"And the skeletons?" said the Physicist, obviously not convinced by the Chemist's argument.
"Well, I don't know, maybe they're exhibits. Or perhaps they show them as … as a kind of shock treatment."
"Sure, and they have their own Freud, too," said the Doctor. "No, you'd better drop your asylum theory, my friend. And don't tell us that those skeletons are some sort of house of horrors in an amusement park. It's an enormous installation, and a lot of technology was needed to get the skeletons into those glass cells. Could it be a factory? But manufacturing what?"
"The fact that you can't get information out of this doubler doesn't prove anything," the Physicist said. "You might just as well try to learn about Earth's civilization from a janitor at my university."
Everyone laughed. Suddenly the laughter stopped. The doubler was standing over them, waving his little knotted fingers in the air, and his small flat face was dangling, twitching.
"What's he doing?!" exclaimed the Chemist.
"Laughing," said the Captain.
And, indeed, the torso appeared to be hiccuping in mirth, and the big clumsy feet were stamping. But, seeing five pairs of human eyes fixed on him, the creature froze, then drew itself in, retracting the small hands and head, which peered out once more from its slit of muscle. The creature hobbled back to its place and sank to the ground with a soft wheeze.
"If that was laughter," whispered the Physicist.
"Laughter doesn't prove anything, either. Apes laugh."
"Wait," said the Captain. His eyes sparkled in his lean, sunburned face. "Suppose they have a much wider genetic range of ability than we do. That there exist classes—castes—of creative workers and builders, and on the other hand a great number of individuals who are basically fit for no work—for nothing at all. And that these useless ones…"
"Are killed. Or experimented on. Or eaten. Don't be afraid, say whatever comes to mind," the Doctor replied. "No one will laugh at you, because anything is possible. Unfortunately not everything that is possible makes sense to us."
"And what about the skeletons?" the Chemist asked.
"They serve as teaching aids after lunch," the Cyberneticist said with a grimace.
"If I were to tell you all the theories that have occurred to me since yesterday," said the Doctor, "it would make a book five times larger than the one Henry is writing, though certainly not so edifying. As a boy I knew an old astronaut. The man had seen more planets than he had hairs on his head, and he was still far from bald… He wanted to describe to me the landscape of a particular moon—I don't remember which. 'There are these … large … you know,' he said, spreading his arms. 'And they have these… It's sort of like… But the sky is different … although…' Finally he laughed and gave up. You can't tell someone who has never been in space what it's like to hang in the void with the stars at your feet. And we're only talking about differences in physical environments! Here we have a civilization that is at least five thousand years old. At least! And we're trying to understand it after a few days!"
"But try we must, because if we fail, the price we have to pay may be … too high," said the Captain. After a pause, he added, "What, then, do you think we should do?"
"What we've been doing up to now," said the Doctor, "though I think our chances of success are about one in five thousand, or however long Eden's civilization has been around…"
The Engineer emerged from the tunnel and, seeing his comrades lying in the shade as though they were on the beach, got out of his suit and joined them. The Chemist greeted him with a nod.
"How is it going?" asked the Captain.
"Well, I'm three-quarters done… But I haven't been working on it the whole time, because I was thinking about that first factory, the one to the north, which we theorized was abandoned and out of control… What's funny? Why are you laughing?"
"I'll tell you something," said the Doctor, who was the only one to remain serious. "When the ship is ready to take off, there will be a mutiny. No one will want to leave until we find out… Because if, even now, instead of sweating over your nuts and bolts…"
"Ah, you're theorizing, too?" said the Engineer. "And what have you come up with?"
"Nothing. And you?"
"Also nothing, but … I was trying to find common elements, a more general pattern to what we encountered there, and it struck me that at the factory—the automated factory—even though it worked in cycles, seemingly repeating the process, its 'finished products' varied… Remember?"
There was a murmur of assent.
"And yesterday the Doctor noted that the doublers varied—that some had no eyes, some no nose, or the number of fingers was different, or the color of the skin. Everything here differs within certain limits, and the variation seems to be the result of flaws in the process, both the biological and the technological…"
"Now, that's interesting!" said the Physicist, who had been listening with increasing attention.
"Yes, you have something there. Go on," the Doctor said, turning to the Engineer, who was shaking his head doubtfully.
"No, really, it's a silly idea. When a man sits and thinks on his own, all sorts of things…"
"Tell us the idea!" the Chemist shouted, almost indignant.
"Now that you've started," said the Cyberneticist.
"Well, I thought: In the factory we were looking at a circular process of production and destruction, and then yesterday you discovered something that resembled a factory. If it was a factory, it had to produce something."
"But there was nothing there," said the Chemist, "except for the skeletons. Of course we didn't look everywhere…" he added hesitantly.
"And what if that factory produces … doublers?" the Engineer asked softly. In the general silence, he went on: "The system is analogous: mass production, an assembly line, except that the variation is caused not so much by a lack of supervision as by the very nature of the process, because of its complexity. The skeletons did vary."
"And you think … they kill the ones that don't 'pass inspection'?" the Chemist asked in a changed voice.
"Not at all! My thought was that those bodies you found … never lived at all! That the system creates organisms equipped with all the muscles and every internal organ, but whose deviation from the norm is so great that they are unable to function … so they are never animated, they are removed from the production line…"
"And that ditch with the bodies, what was that? More 'defective merchandise'?" asked the Cyberneticist.
"I don't know, but the possibility can't be ruled out…"
"No, it can't," said the Doctor, looking toward the bluish haze on the horizon. "In what yo
u're saying … that broken tube…"
"Maybe they introduced nutrients through it during the synthesis."
"That would also explain why the doubler you brought back appears to be retarded," the Cyberneticist observed. "If he was produced full-grown, he has no experience…"
"No," the Chemist disagreed. "That doubler of ours does know things. He was afraid to return to his stone asylum—for which he might have good reason—and he was afraid, too, of that strip of mirror. And he knew something about the curious border we crossed, with the mirage…"
"I don't know. The picture we get, from Henry's hypothesis, doesn't make sense," said the Captain, contemplating the sand at his feet. "The first factory produces parts that aren't used. And the second factory living beings? Why? And are you suggesting that they, too, are thrown back into the hopper?"
"What an awful thought!" said the Cyberneticist with a shudder.
"But if living beings are put back into the hopper," said the Chemist, "then disposal of individuals too defective for animation would be unnecessary. Besides, we saw no evidence of such recycling…"
In the ensuing silence, the Doctor got up and swept his eyes over the group.
"We've taken the Engineer's idea," he said, "and now we're all trying to fit the facts to it, to his 'biological factory' hypothesis. Which proves only one thing, that we are very noble-minded and very naïve…"
As they looked at him with surprise, he continued: "A moment ago you were attempting to imagine the most horrible possibility—and you came up with a picture a child might have drawn: a factory producing people in order to grind them up again… The reality, my friends, may be much worse."
"Really!" the Cyberneticist sputtered.
"Wait, let him speak," the Engineer said.
"The more I think about what happened in that settlement, the more I am convinced that we were seeing something totally different from what we thought we were seeing."
"What, then, according to you, happened?" asked the Physicist.
"What happened I don't know, but I know what didn't happen."
"Talk clearly! No riddles!"
"After wandering through that stone labyrinth, we were suddenly charged by a crowd that then dispersed and fled. Having seen the lights go out as we approached the settlement, we concluded that the inhabitants were hiding from us, and that we had been trampled by a mob rushing for cover—or something like that. Now, in my mind I've gone over the whole sequence of events as thoroughly as I can, and I'll tell you this: one resists the truth as one fights madness."
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