EIGHT KEYS TO EDEN (1960) [Part 2]

16

“After everything disappeared, the buildings, the escape ship, everything,” Cal reviewed, “and you, with your wife, found yourself crouching under the trees in what had been your front yard, without any clothes on—what then?”

“That was the beginning of it,” Jed Dawkins answered. He looked toward his two companions as if for confirmation. He looked at the three crewmen, at Cal, all sprawled or crouched there beneath the tree at the edge of the clearing. “We thought it was the end of everything,” he said in retrospect, “but we found out quick that things had just begun.”

Cal nodded. Dawkins had told his tale simply, without fictitious emotionalism, without straining to get the horror of it across—and thereby succeeded. He glanced at his three crewmen, to see how they were faring. Louie seemed to have gained some control over his nerves, and yet the way he sat there staring at nothing showed he was enduring some special horror of his own. Frank Norton shifted his position, pulled a dry stick from beneath the leaves, looked at it resentfully, and tossed it aside. He settled back down and indicated by his expression that now he could be more comfortable.

One grateful fact, the day was warm, the breeze under the tree was gentle, the ground on which they sat was not too wet for comfort. Except for custom, for modesty, clothes weren’t really needed; and perhaps the shock of being without them would pass. Nudists, on Earth, claimed that one very quickly lost all self-consciousness if no one were clothed; that such was part of the value; that sex, for instance, became less of an issue instead of more because, without concealment, one could see instead of imagining, and the sight more often discouraged than enticed. Cal wondered what the militant moralists would make of the idea that clothes encouraged immorality.

“It was a hard thing to believe,” Jed was saying. “It wasn’t like a natural thing—like a cyclone, or earthquake, or fire, or flood. Nothin’ like that. Them things a man can understand. Even if he’s dyin’, at least he knows, he understands, what’s killin’ him. I never thought I’d hear myself say it would be a comfort to know what you was dyin’ of, but, believe me…”

He broke off and stared in front of himself. His voice took on a note of perplexity.

“Only nobody died. Nobody even got hurt. We was like little kids screamin’ at the top of their lungs when they ain’t hurt at all—only scared.” He looked abashed. “I got to tell you, real truthful,” he said, “most of the yellin’ came from the men. The women, by and large, was real swell.

“Fact is,” he continued, “come to think of it, I don’t recollect ever seein’ a woman in real hysterics. Plenty of fake, of course. Say she’s tryin’ to hook some man into protectin’ her; or lay public blame on him for not doin’ it. Other times, in real danger, womenfolks, our kind of womenfolks, anyhow, they pitch right in and help. It takes a man to make a jackass outta himself at the wrong time.”

Cal nodded and smiled. There was an attempt at a hollow laugh from Louie, as if the shoe had fit. Jed didn’t seem to realize it, and made no apology about present company being excepted.

“It wasn’t like the aftermath of a storm, either,” Jed said, “where you begin pickin’ up the pieces to start over. We—we couldn’t pick up any pieces.”

They couldn’t pick up any pieces. In a way, that was worse than the disappearance of things. In a catastrophe, after taking care of those that are hurt, first thing a man does is gather the materials and tools to fix things up again. The women, after soothing them that’s hurt, taking care of them as much as possible, first thing they think of is making hot coffee, maybe hot soup.

That was when they began to realize this was more than the desolation following a cyclone or other freak of nature.

Cal wanted to know what happened? Well, there he was, still sort of hiding behind his tree. It was Martha who snapped out of it first, who insisted that clothes or no clothes it was their plain duty to get down to the village where they could help somebody. He’d need other men to help him get things back in shape; she could help the other women take care of the needy.

And still he hung back, ashamed of his nakedness. She scolded him then, pointed out that if everybody was naked, their being naked too wasn’t likely to start up a passel of gossip.

He gave in to her scolding, because she was right, and came out from behind his tree. It seemed more than passing strange to be walking down that slope naked, in plain sight of everybody. Thing that helped was that nobody seemed of a mind to stop and stare at them.

Everybody had his mind on his own problems, and then a funny thing happened. Maybe, Jed reasoned, it was seeing that everybody else was naked too. Anyway, the self-consciousness disappeared all of a sudden, and they didn’t think any more about it—not right then, anyhow.

By the time they’d got to the foot of their hill and into the crowd of people, he forgot all about it. There was plenty of other things to think about. Martha pitched right in, the way he ought to have done. She was the one who thought of giving the men something to do, get them over their hysterics.

“Why don’t some of you men get a fire going!” she called out, as soon as they got to the edge of the crowd. “Something hot to drink is what we need most. Hot water, in case anybody is hurt.”

Of course she wasn’t thinking straight, not entirely. They didn’t have a pot to heat water in. Or maybe she was, because right away he heard her asking other women if any of them knew where there might be some dried gourds. He remembered then an old pioneer trick—cutting open a gourd, scooping out the seed, filling it with water, dropping hot stones into it until it boiled, Indian style.

It might seem funny to city women, always protected against everything, that Martha wasn’t more excited, and helpless. First place, she had her man already, and didn’t need to put on such a show. Second place, she was a colonist woman, an experimental colonist woman, trained all her life to take care of the unexpected; and for the experimentals something unexpected was always happening.

Under her influence, and maybe a little under his, Jed acknowledged, now that he’d been set straight by Martha’s example, everybody began to settle down a little, like they would after the first shock of a fire or flood. It was all over. Now it was time to start picking up the pieces, rebuilding.

Only it wasn’t all over.

That’s when they found out they couldn’t build a fire.

Easiest way, without matches, is to string a bow and twirl a stick in a hole punched into another stick. Next easiest way is to find a piece of flint, strike two pieces together to make sparks and hope one will set a wad of punk on fire. If no other way, rubbing two dry sticks together will do it if you can rub them fast enough, get them hot enough to make the powdered fibers burst into flame. Or if they’d had some of those quartz crystals from the top of the mountain to focus sun rays.…

But they couldn’t make a bow, or strike two stones together, or rub two sticks together. It couldn’t be done. Well, Cal had seen for himself what happened when it was tried. All the men were trying it, and for a little bit everybody thought it was only happening to him, that he must have lost the knack, or something. For a little bit there the men were more worried about how their wife would bring it up for weeks or months, how he had let the rest of the men show him up when it came to building a fire.

One of the men tore it then.

He yelled out that somebody he couldn’t see was watching him over his shoulder, that it wasn’t meant they should have fire.

Cal looked quickly at Louie at that point of the story. Louie was staring, with mouth open, at Jed; and in his eyes was confirmation of that same feeling. But Jed didn’t notice the effect, and went on with the telling.

Everybody stopped and listened to the man, because they were having the same feeling. Jed knew it. Him, too. The crowd might have panicked right there if the man had let it rest, but he started explaining it, the way a man does, and makes himself ridiculous.

He kept on yelling how the men shouldn’t listen to the women. That it was in the first Garden of Eden that man had made the mistake of listening to woman; that it was Eve who had egged Adam into eating that apple because a woman was never satisfied to leave well enough alone. And now, he said, in this new Eden, man was being given another chance. If he was smart, if he’s learned anything at all, this time he wouldn’t listen to no woman.

Somebody bust out laughing when he said that, and it kind of eased the tension a little.

A woman said, real disgusted, that if the men was too helpless to start a little fire, least they could do was scrape up some dry leaves because in a few hours it would get dark. Magic or no magic, watchers or no watchers, night would fall, and she for one liked a soft bed. That caused them to look up at the sky, and sure enough the sun, Ceti, was already half way down the sky from where it had been at noon. At least the world was turning and time was moving. That, at least. About three hours had passed in what seemed like minutes.

Somebody else, one of the men this time, said why didn’t they go a little farther than scraping up some leaves. Why didn’t they get busy and knock together some shelters in case it rained during the night—the way it often did.

Now any one of them, man or woman, ought to have been able to put up a small shelter in less time than it takes to tell about it, even without no tools. Break off a limb, or take a sharp stone, dig holes in the ground with it. Take straight saplings, trim them, stick them upright in the ground, tamp in the dirt good and hard, lash them together with vines, lash other poles together to make the frame of the roof, lift that onto the poles and lash them all together with braces. Thatch it with grass, and there you were.

But there they weren’t. They couldn’t do it.

Things just wouldn’t behave. They dug a hole, and it filled right up again. They couldn’t cut down a sapling, because the sharp stone, the only tool they had, would fly out of their hands. They even tried lashing some saplings together where they grew, and the saplings were like things alive. They wouldn’t be bound. The vines slithered out of their hands and dropped to the ground, and the saplings sprang up again straight.

Not only that. They could scrape together some leaves into a pile, all right, but when anybody tried to lie down in them the leaves would scatter as if blown by a wind. Only there wasn’t any wind.

Some of the women got pretty disgusted with their menfolks. They tried it themselves, and the same things happened. After that, they was a little more forgiving.

A couple more hours had passed while they were trying that. The sun got low. People began to realize they were getting hungry, and they began to realize there wasn’t any way to cook supper.

Now there wasn’t any real hardship, not physical. Nobody’d been hurt. Shook up a little, scared for sure. But not hurt.

The river was still flowing good, clean water. All they had to do was go down to the river bank and cup the water in their hands, lift it to their lips; or even better, lie down on the bank and lower their faces into the water. They could do that. It helped a little to know they could.

The wild bushes and trees all around had plenty of fruit and nuts to eat. One thing you could say for Eden, the fruit didn’t seem to depend on seasons. There was always something ripe, and plenty of it.

The people wandered off from the village site then, to forage their supper, for all the world like animals grazing in a pasture. They sort of hung together, in herds, glad to be together—then.

By dark they all came back and sat around in a circle, the way people in the wilds sit around a campfire. It seemed funny without a campfire. The darker it got, the funnier it felt. The more you thought about it, the stranger it got. The excitement had begun to wear off, and people were starting to think a little. It got stranger and stranger. In the dusk you could see the same thought in all the gleaming eyes.

They couldn’t have fire!

Maybe the strangest thing of all, nobody was trying to explain what had happened. Now you take mankind, he’s always right in there with an explanation for everything. Maybe it’s not the right one, maybe, looking back, it’s a silly one—but at the time he believes it, and that’s a comfort.

But this was like being in a dream, knowing it’s a dream, knowing it can’t happen this way, and so it doesn’t have to be explained. And yet, isn’t that the worst part of a bad dream? No explanation for what’s happening in it? Nothing you can do about it, either?

Somebody said, it being dark and all, they should get some sleep. Somebody mentioned being thankful there weren’t any children. That was one of the hardships of being an experimental colonist, you couldn’t have children. Wouldn’t be right to expose children to hardships they’d have to suffer helpless. Only here, the way kids were, he wouldn’t have been surprised if kids would have taken to it a lot easier than the grown folks.

The people sort of bedded down all together, the way a herd of animals take shelter, each, even in its sleep, taking comfort from the presence and protection of the others. They bedded around on the ground, making themselves comfortable as possible. One thing you could say, experimental colonists might not be long on brains, the way scientists are, but they weren’t picked for that. They were picked for endurance, and the brainy will often crack up under a strain that the enduring kind hardly notices. Far as endurance went, physical, this wasn’t bad.

Up through the leaves, and in between the trees, the stars were as bright as ever—brighter because there wasn’t no fire to dim their glow. They couldn’t see Earth, of course, but everybody knew right where to look for Sol. There it was, a tiny little spot of light in its constellation. It was still there.

Somebody said into the darkness that it was only two more days until the regular monthly communication with Earth was due. That as soon as E.H.Q. didn’t hear from them, there’d be a rescue party out here in nothing flat. So, at worst, it meant living this way only five or six more days.

That made everybody feel better. It was a comforting thing to look up through the leaves, to see Sol in the sky, to know they weren’t forgotten back home; that on Earth people would soon be buzzing around like a disturbed hive of hornets, with stingers cocked and ready as soon as the message didn’t get through.

Yep, somebody said, just like the museum collection of Western movies where the U.S. cavalry always got there in time. At least they weren’t being attacked by no Indians, somebody said.

Or were they? Maybe everybody asked that to themselves, but nobody said it.

Most everybody got some sleep. No one really suffered, any discomfort just showed them how soft they were getting with easy living. Considering everything, they were coming along just fine. And in a few days everything would be all right again. They went to sleep thinking that even if there was some equivalent to the old-time Indians attacking them, rescue would soon be here and they would be safe.

Because man always wins.

Most people were wide awake by dawn. Some had slept in little bits, waking often enough to keep a sense of continuity. Others, those who slept better, awoke with a start; looked around themselves wildly, realized they were lying out in the open plumb naked in front of other people; maybe wondered for an instant what kind of party they’d been to the night before; and nearly bolted in panic before they remembered.

Most everyone felt sort of surprised that things weren’t back to normal, with yesterday being something soonest forgot soonest mended. It takes time for folks to realize—things.

Not having a hot drink for breakfast was another little hardship, a reminder of how soft they’d got. But nobody complained. Seemed like everybody had woke with a determination to make the best of things and help one another do the same. Everybody was pitching in together to make the best of things. Once they bit into the cool fruit on the trees around them, even not having a hot drink to start the day didn’t seem to matter.

Some of the women got together and decided it would help things get back to normal if the people covered their nakedness, or least parts of it. It might be all right just among themselves, they said, because everybody was in the same fix and knew what happened—but how would they feel when the rescue ship landed and they had to walk out in front of strange men with nothing on?

They picked some big green leaves without any trouble. But when they strove to pin them together with thorns, the thorns just slipped out and fell to the ground. Then they tried sewing the leaves together with bindweed. Same thing. The bindweed slithered out and fell to the ground.

One woman figured to stick some leaves together with thick mud from the river and paste them with more mud on her body. It wouldn’t stick, peeled right off like she was oiled. One man said he could do it without leaves, just cover himself with mud. He lay down in a muddy pool and got himself covered with wet clay.

He was a sight. All at once he looked vulgar, obscene. And nobody had, before. That did it. Somebody said they were humans, not pigs, and if the men on the rescue ship had never seen a naked body before it was time they did. What was so wrong about the human body, anyhow?

They made the muddy man go bathe himself in the river, and gave up trying to cover themselves. All at once the desire to cover themselves was a nasty kind of thinking, something to be ashamed of.

Midmorning somebody got to wondering if the ten colonists who’d broken off from the main colony and moved across the ridge were all right.

Soon as he reminded them, everybody began to laugh. What fools they’d all been. Showed you how a bit of trouble could keep a man from thinking straight. Here they’d been eating and sleeping like animals when, all the while, just across the ridge there’d be houses and beds, fires and clothes. Sure, those folks might differ in some opinions, but humans always stood ready to help one another in distress, differences forgotten.

In a body, they started for the ridge. Everybody knew just where the dissidents had built their homes. But when they got to the top of the ridge there weren’t no houses there. Nothing but virgin woods, same as this side. That shook them up. They’d been so sure.

Maybe it was the jolt of that, maybe it was a measure that we still weren’t thinking straight, something—they didn’t go on down and join forces. Nobody thought of it, somehow. They went back down and congregated around where the village had been. Maybe it was the beginning of something that would come later, something Cal would see for himself. That they were already not thinking the way humans do. Thinking and behaving more the way dumb animals do.

Nothing else worth mentioning happened that day, nor the next. In some ways it was still like a dream. The way people were just accepting things, without question, maybe without curiosity. Jed remembered one time an E had said there was a wider gap between the thinking man and the average man than there was between that average man and the ape. He’d resented it at the time, of course, but now he thought of it again and began to realize what the E had meant.

Two or three people commented on how easy it was to go back to nature, wondered why they hadn’t all done it before. How stupid it was for man to knock himself out chasing all over the universe, undergoing such hardships, when all a man could ever want was right here.

Jed tried to put down this kind of talk when it came up. He reminded them it was Lotus Land thinking, and would be the ruination of a prime bunch of colonists. He reminded them they’d been through hardships worse than this, and had ought to keep their wits about them.

Funny thing, though. He couldn’t get very excited about it. Just did it because it was his duty. Maybe not even that strong, maybe because once upon a time, long ago, hardly remembered, it had been his duty.

It was the next day that things got real rough.

Somebody, in a clearer-thinking moment, said they couldn’t be sure when the rescue ship would get here; that when the rescuers came and didn’t see any village they wouldn’t know what to think—maybe they’d just go away. Shows we weren’t thinking so straight after all, to believe that you’d go away just because you didn’t find our village.

Anyhow, hadn’t we ought to work out some kind of a message? Maybe scrape some kind of a message on the ground? They decided the smooth sand above the tide line down on the sea shore was the best place for it.

Nobody had anything else to do, so the whole colony, all forty of them, walked the couple of miles down to the seashore. They picked out a nice stretch of white sand, and with a broken piece of driftwood they started to scratch a message, just a big SOS. The driftwood wriggled out of their hands like a snake. Nobody could hold it. Several men tried together, made no difference.

Somebody started scooping out a furrow with his hands. The furrow closed up and smoothed out right behind him. Somebody tried piling up sand, first in letters, then in code signals. Made no difference. Sand smoothed right out again.

Then somebody got a bright idea. All right, he said. Didn’t need to use a stick, or scoop out a furrow, or pile up the sand. They had their bare feet, didn’t they? They could tromp out the letters that way. Footprints, close together, would be as good as a furrow.

That’s when it happened.

Jed tried it himself. And his footprints disappeared. They just weren’t there. Everybody looked behind himself, where he’d been walking. Nobody was leaving any footprints.

That’s when they bolted in panic.

17

Jed looked quickly at Cal when he told him how the colonists had spooked, bolted in panic. As if he expected disbelief.

“Maybe that seems funny to you,” he commented. “After taking so much we’d spook like crazy animals and hightail for the woods over not making footprints.”

“Pretty fundamental thing,” Cal said with a shrug. “Animals are aware of spoor long before they are aware of tools. It hit deep down into fundamental being, a thing like that.”

Jed looked relieved. Hussein and Van Tassel exchanged glances, as if confirming their belief that an E would understand their problems. Cal appreciated the confidence expressed in that glance, but did not feel it was justified. It was now pretty obvious that this was some alien co-ordinate system, never before encountered by man. But how to get hold of it? How to reconcile with it? Coexist with it?

Never before encountered by man? What if the myths of early man be true? And too authentic the legends of his being a pawn to the will of the gods? Could there have been some factual basis for the gods? And not, as was supposed, rationalizations dreamed up by man to account for the control of phenomena at a level beyond his own power to control?

“It’s been bad since then,” Jed continued. “Seems like once they got the wind up, the whole thing hit them all over again. Like cattle in a stampede, they didn’t have a lick of sense. They didn’t even stay together. They scattered in all directions, hid out in the bushes from each other.

“You could hunt for ’em, call for ’em, yell your lungs out. You could pass within ten feet of one of ’em, callin’, pleadin’, and they wouldn’t say a word. Just stand there and watch you like a hunted animal, not even breathin’ lest you discover them.

“After a couple of days, some of us kind of pulled ourselves together—me and Martha, Ahmed and Dirk here. Maybe a dozen of us now have got together again. Funny thing though, even so, all we want is to hide. Can’t get over hidin’, somehow. That’s why you didn’t see us from the air. We was hidin’ from you.

“Martha, couple other womenfolks, they practically had to push us out of the woods to come greet you, lead you to us. They wouldn’t come themselves, being naked and all. They told us, first thing was to get some clothes for them from the ship.

“We was countin’ on the arrival of your ship to bring the rest of the colonists back to their senses. Some ain’t been found yet, not since the footprint thing. If they were watchin’ you from hidin’ places, if they also saw your ship disappear—well now, I just don’t know.”

“There’ll be another ship from Earth,” Cal said. “In a matter of fifteen or twenty hours at most. We were communicating at the time. They’ll know we didn’t cut out through choice.”

“Yes,” Tom Lynwood confirmed. “As I remember, I got cut off in the middle of a sentence. They’ll know something was wrong.”

“There’s another ship out there right now,” Cal added. “Not an E.H.Q. ship, but one that would have seen what happened. We’ll not count on anything from them, but an E.H.Q. ship will be here soon, probably with an E on board—McGinnis.”

“Don’t know what good it would do,” Jed said despondently. “That ship might disappear, too, soon as it landed. And the next, and the next.”

“I don’t plan to let it land,” Cal told them. “You’ll notice nothing happened to us until we touched ground. I’ll find a way to talk to the ship, keep it from landing until we’ve got a line on whatever this is.”

“You figger to solve this one?” Jed asked curiously, unbelieving.

“I’m going to try,” Cal said with more confidence than he felt. “It’s what I’m here for. Maybe I can’t solve it, but I can try.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to start,” Dirk spoke up. “We’re just like animals here. We can’t use tools.”

“But animals do use tools,” Cal answered after a moment. “Materials, anyway. Birds build nests using sticks, grass, clay. Monkeys and apes throw sticks and stones. Even insects use materials. Basic difference between man and the rest is that man gives special shapes to tools, where mainly the rest use whatever falls to hand. But all higher, organized protoplasmic life uses tools in one form or another.”

“We ain’t allowed to,” Jed said emphatically. “Not even what’s at hand. Somebody, or somethin’, is bound and determined we ain’t goin’ to.”

At that moment Cal felt close to a solution, or at least an understanding of the nature of the problem, which is the first step toward solution. But like the specter seen in twilight from the corner of the eye, as soon as he tried to focus on the problem, the concept disappeared. Something about protoplasmic life using materials. Non-protoplasmic life? Could there be, and still meet the definitions of what constitute life? As compared with our evolution, from its earliest beginning finding some other approach to the manipulation of the physical universe? A totally alien kind of science? Come to think of it, the use of material to affect other material was a cumbersome, indirect, awkward way of going about it, as compared with…

Compared with what?

The concept would not yet allow him full focus upon it. He filed it away for future contemplation.

He saw Dawkins and the other colonists looking at him defiantly, as if interpreting his silence to be doubt of their veracity about the taboo on tools. Their eyes challenged him to disbelieve them, to find out for himself.

“Other than the feeling of being watched,” he said carefully, “have you had any sign, any other evidence or indication of somebody, or something? I know about the feeling, because I feel it too. And very strongly, right now. But any specific evidence?”

Jed Dawkins looked relieved at the confession.

“Everything’s the evidence. Everything that’s happened. What more evidence would you want?” he said.

“One of the strongest arguments in favor of something, or some kind of intelligence,” Cal said slowly, “is that nobody’s been hurt. All natural law hasn’t been canceled. We still have light radiation, heat radiation, gravity, water still flows, the planet still turns. Trees still grow and fruit still ripens. We can talk and be understood, using our tongues and minds as tools. We can still eat and drink. We can still know.

“This is no chaotic co-ordinate system that defies all natural law. This is a deliberate manipulation of some natural laws to get a result. Man manipulates natural laws by the use of tools and materials, but he doesn’t suspend them. Here, apparently without tools, at least tools we can perceive, natural law is manipulated, but not suspended.

“When the village disappeared, no one was hurt. A lot of people were caught in awkward positions and fell, some of them several feet. There should have been at least a few broken bones, pulled ligaments. There weren’t. Our ship landed safely. We were a long time in the atmosphere of Eden, and for a few minutes there on the ground we were still using tools of a high order. It was only when danger of real harm to us was past that the ship disappeared.”

“I reckon it’s comfortin’ to know we ain’t meant to be hurt,” Jed said, and looked at his two companions. “I guess it is,” he repeated doubtfully. “Maybe it ain’t something as nice and familiar as a cyclone, or a den of rattlesnakes, something you could understand, but you got to admit we ain’t been hurt yet.” It was as if he were arguing the point with his companions.

“Something I’ve been noting, Jed,” Ahmed spoke up. “A discrepancy of a sort that has me puzzled. Sun reckoning, we’ve been able to keep our minds on this subject for over two hours now. As if, whatever this is manipulating natural laws can also manipulate the way our minds work.”

“Yeah,” Jed admitted slowly, his face thoughtful. He turned to Cal. “Like I said at the start. Our minds have sort of wandered of late. Start to do something, and first thing y’know, we’re doin’ something else. Can’t keep our minds on one thing very long—like animals.”

“That might be no more than the aftermath of deep shock,” Cal said.

“It’s for a purpose!”

Startled at the outburst, they all turned and looked at Louie.

“It’s for a purpose,” Louie repeated in a kind of rapture. “They want us to understand we are being watched over, cared for. That colonist you all laughed at was right. This is the first Garden of Eden, where man lived in complete innocence. Now man has been returned to it, to live again in complete innocence. You do not think straight because there is no reason. You will be cared for. Woe unto him who seeks to despoil it again by seeking vain knowledge!”

His eyes were wild, his face contorted with a mixture of exaltation and condemnation.

“Shut up, Louie,” Tom said in a low, firm voice.

“We understand,” Jed said tolerantly. “Some of the colonists are talkin’ the same way. He’s got plenty of company.”

18

All the rest of that day, and throughout the following, Cal and Tom worked with Jed in trying to round up the colonists, get them living together again.

By agreement, Ahmed and Dirk stayed with the small band of colonists that had overcome their fears enough to mingle together again. Louie frankly deserted his shipmates, and spent all his time with the colonists. Frank, as if reverting to his childhood farming days, occupied himself with trying to round up the stock. He tried to keep the cows separated from their calves so the colonists would have milk to drink, but without ropes or corrals it was hopeless. He finally gave up his attempt to husband the stock, and he too seemed content then to mingle with the colonists.

The marked change in Louie could not be ignored, for he was not idling away his time in lazy feeding and sleeping. He had dropped his lifelong pose of superficial complaint that the fates always gave him the dirty end of the stick, and now he spent his time preaching to the little band of colonists. Or wandering through the forests and undergrowth calling, praying, comforting.

Cal felt no condemnation for him. He was not the first man, seemingly dedicated to science, who, confronted with mysteries beyond his power to comprehend, reverted to childlike superstitious awe for an explanation. In the face of mystery or catastrophe, it takes a faith beyond the capacity of most to continue believing that the universe has a rational order to its laws that can be comprehended if man persists. It is temptingly easy for man to revert back to the irresponsibility of childhood, assuming that the control of phenomena is in the hands of those stronger, wiser than he. It takes a strength, in the face of this temptation, to go on believing that man can know, that it is not morally wrong for him to know.

No blame then for Louie.

Tom was torn in his loyalties. He frequently remembered that away from E.H.Q. the crew become the E’s attendants, and that their first duty is always to the E. But separation from the other two men of his crew was like the loss of a part of himself. To these also he had a duty. He tried to solve his problem by alternating his time, spending part of it with Cal, the remainder with his crew.

Cal and Jed made a trip the following morning across the ridge, and found the dissident group huddled together in abject terror. They had seen the ship coming down through the atmosphere and, all together, they had climbed the ridge, where one of their scouts had recently gone, to watch the ship’s landing—and its disappearance.

Once they were found, it took little persuasion to convince them they should return to the other colonists, that differences of opinion meant nothing now as against the need of human beings to cling together in the face of catastrophe.

But they too were having trouble thinking in a straight line, and even though they first appeared eager to join the other colonists, it took some doing to keep them all together and moving forward to cross the ridge, to come down the other side, to assemble again at the site of the village with the others.

And yet, within minutes, neither band seemed to remember that they had ever been separated.

By the time they had returned, it was apparent that Louie was succeeding where Jed had failed in finding the colonists. In the few hours that had elapsed, the nucleus had tripled in size. Louie’s wandering through the brush, calling, pleading with them to follow him, promising there was no danger if they would allow him to watch over them, intercede for them with Those who had caused all this, had indeed coaxed them from their hiding places, calmed their fears.

And still through the day he toiled, finding them, bringing them back into the fold, one and two and three at a time, until, at last, by Jed’s count, all were there, no more missing.

And yet, in spite of his success, there was a kind of hurt and disappointment in Louie’s eyes. For once back, they not only forgot their fears, they seemed also to forget him. They coalesced into a placid herd, without memory of their panic. Without memory of the shepherd who had found the lost sheep and returned them to the fold.

They wandered among the trees and bushes, picking fruit and nuts, eating leaves and stems and flowers of plants. They wandered down to the river to lie prone on the sand, dip their faces into the clear cold water to drink. During the heat of the day they bathed in the river, and as they lay on white sand or grassy slopes to dry, they slept contentedly.

The phenomenon was not as startling to Cal as it might have seemed to others.

On Earth, gradually learned through trial and error, experimental colonists were not picked for their jobs because of flexible, incisive, or brilliant minds. Quite the contrary. The basic test of a successful colonist was endurance—the endurance of hardship, privation, the stoic indifference to conditions of discomfort, monotony, pain, uncleanliness, immodesty—conditions which would send a more imaginative or sensitive temperament into a downward-spiraling syndrome of failure. They were the kind of men and women who, on Earth in an earlier time, had been able to endure the harshness of the sea, of arctic cold, jungle disease, desert heat; to make those first steps in taming a hostile environment, so that men with less endurance, but with more delicately poised and sensitive minds, following them might then endure.

It was characteristic of such men and women, even under Earth conditions, that they seldom questioned their reasons for these things. They simply went, and endured, and tamed. Even on Earth, when the taming had been done, they moved on. This was the stuff of the experimental colonist.

Now, here, that temperament still persisted. They had fled in panic, but now they had returned to their original purpose—to endure. It was enough.

Louie was to learn, in disappointment, that failure to be curious about scientific reasoning was usually accompanied by an equal failure to be curious about philosophical implications. They listened idly to his exhortations, but their eyes did not light with fire nor cloud with doubt. They simply wandered away after a time and ate or slept.

In the evening of that second day, Cal sat with Tom and Jed down by the bank of the river where the sky was clear and the stars beginning to shine. They were talking quietly of home, of Eden, of the colonists who, more and more, seemed to take on the character of a contented herd of animals. So far there had been no attempt of the old males to drive the young ones out of the herd, destroy them, but that might come in time; as surely as the old males on Earth by tacit agreement on both sides, were always able to work up a war for the purpose of weeding out and destroying lusty young male competition.

They were talking of the curious fact that all three of them seemed able to continue thinking in a straight line, hold their minds to a subject, while all the rest grew more vague, less retentive, more content to live from moment to moment, without concern for past or future.

Except Louie. He too seemed able to hold his thinking in a straight line, one tangential to theirs. He seemed, in these hours, to have turned wholly mystical, to a stronger belief that they were being watched and cared for by some higher power, and that this was for a purpose. Yet not so tangential, for Cal had come to the same conclusion, although his interpretation differed.

“I can’t doubt that there is an intelligent direction of this peculiar co-ordinate system,” he said to Tom and Jed. “But I must doubt it is supernatural in the way Louie interprets. Anything appears to be magic when we don’t understand how it happens, and becomes science when we do.”

He paused, and looked at his companions’ faces in the starshine. They were quiet, reposed, listening.

“Ever since man got up off the bottom of his ocean of air,” he said, “and out into space, we’ve been prepared to run into some form of intelligence which doesn’t behave the way we do. Not prepared to do anything about it, you understand,” he said with a shrug. “Just theoretically prepared that it might happen. It was a possibility. Now it does seem to have happened. E McGinnis asked me, before I left Earth, if I thought Eden was an alluring trap, especially baited to catch some human beings. It begins to appear that it is.”

“I’ve caught many a wild animal in my day,” Jed said slowly, thoughtfully. “I’ve pinned ’em up in cages, watched how they behaved. I guess scientists do that all the time. Don’t want to hurt ’em, fact make ’em as comfortable as they can—just want to know about ’em. Sometimes, after I watched them awhile I’d turn ’em aloose and watch ’em scoot back to their natural world. That could happen to us. Sometimes they’d die, and I wouldn’t know why. That could happen. Some animals won’t bear young in captivity. We can’t because of an operation. Maybe whatever’s holdin’ us don’t know that, and might turn us aloose when, after a time, we don’t bear any young.”

He paused and looked even more thoughtful.

“Sometimes,” he added slowly, “after I studied ’em, found out how they would behave no matter what, I had to kill ’em, because they was too dangerous to let run around among humans. That could happen.”

“I haven’t done much trapping,” Tom said. “But in zoos I’ve watched animals in cages. The thought always came to me that if they could think the way we do, they could just open their cages and walk away.”

“Now you take turkeys,” Jed answered. “Pin ’em up with a high fence, they’ll back up, take off and fly over it. But pin ’em with a low fence, and they won’t. Seems like they know they have to fly over a high obstruction, but don’t figger on it for a low one. Sometimes they flutter up against it, or try to push it over, but most of the time they just walk around and around in the yard lookin’ for an opening.”

“Natural survival pattern,” Cal commented. “In the woods, in their natural state, when they came up against a fallen log, it took more effort to lift their heavy bodies in flight over it than it took to walk around the log. It became a fixed pattern of behavior to walk around it.”

“That’s what they do with a low fence then,” Jed said. “They just keep tryin’ to walk around the obstruction. Not enough sense to treat it like a high fence, because it ain’t high, see? No use tryin’ to tell ’em it’s high, because they know it ain’t. So they can’t solve it. Seems awful stupid, somehow, a little low fence, all that blue sky above ’em, and they can’t figger it out.”

“I suspect that’s what’s happening to us,” Cal said. “We’ve always argued that wherever there is matter and energy in the universe, certain natural laws will prevail. We’ve learned ways to take advantage of those natural laws, to do certain things that will make them work for us instead of against us.

“We’ve always argued that for any kind of intelligence to arise in the universe it, too, would have to become aware of these natural laws; that it, too, would have to do these same certain things to take advantage of those laws; that because the laws and what to do about them would always be similar man would have a lot in common with that other intelligence, and a means of communicating because of that similarity.

“We’d argue that whatever its evolutionary physical shape, this wasn’t so important as its mental evolution—because that mental evolution would follow the same course as ours. They wouldn’t be truly alien, because science would be a common denominator.

“Now it appears we could be wrong. Maybe our concept of science is too narrow. Maybe we’re like the turkey. We’ve become so fixed in our pattern of solving a problem we can’t change, can’t back off and take another look, see the problem not as it appears but as it really is.”

“But isn’t that the science of E?” Tom asked curiously. “To be able to extrapolate any co-ordinate system? I’m not criticizing,” he added hastily. “Just asking.”

“I suspect even our means of extrapolation are too limited, too based on the relationship of things and forces to each other, too set in the notion that only physical tools can affect physical things. We may be looking at a low fence, calling it a log, and therefore not able to understand why we can’t walk around the obstruction in the usual manner.” He stopped, and added with a shrug. “Stupid, maybe. Or like the turkey, the yard is so big that he never gets a picture of it as a whole enclosure. By the time he’s wandered down this side of the fence he’s forgot what he found on the other side. Never can put the whole thing together in his mind. That’s my trouble, anyhow. So far, I’m not able to put the whole thing together, see it all as one piece.

“When I do, if I do, then maybe like a caged animal I’ll see how to unlock an opening, or maybe realize the only way out is to fly.”

There beside the softly flowing river, where water was obeying natural law without any trouble, the three men broke off their discussion when they saw a bright flash high in the sky above them. All three knew what it meant.

Another E ship had arrived.

No doubt the ship would expect light signals from the colonists in acknowledgment of their space flare.

If the ship had come while this portion of the planet was still in daylight, they would have seen there was no village, no ship, no equipment for direct communication. They may even have reasoned there was no means of signaling with artificial light.

But there was nothing to tell them that those on Eden could not build a fire.

As if they were present on the ship themselves, the three men could anticipate what must be happening there. Right now they would be anxiously waiting for signal flares to light up, to spring up like signal fires on a lonely island where a marooned man has, at last, sighted a ship on the horizon.

The colonists were no longer hiding, but were freely wandering in open spaces. If the ship had arrived before dusk they would have seen the men and women in the viewscopes. If after dusk, they still might have spotted them in the infrared viewers which picked up the heat differentials and gave a fair approximation of shapes.

The men on the ship would be waiting and looking at their watches. How long, they would be asking, does it take those colonists, that E down there, to get a signal fire going?

About five minutes passed, and another flare lighted the heavens.

“Get off the dime down there!” it seemed to say. “Acknowledge us!”

Cal took the chance that they might have an infrared viewscope directly on him, and he waved his arms above his head. But apparently they had not spotted him, for there was no answering flare.

At intervals of five minutes at first, then later cut to fifteen minutes, throughout the long night the flares continued to light the sky.

“Talk to us,” the flares begged. “Surely you were expecting us. Surely you would not all be sleeping so soundly that our light could not rouse you.”

Several times the three men stood up and waved their arms, but it brought no answer from the ship. In the darkness perhaps the equipment wasn’t good enough. Perhaps in the night breeze bushes and trees also swayed with movement.

Once there was a rustle in the brush, and in the starlight they recognized the figure of Louie approaching them.

“This has got to stop,” he said worriedly as he came up to them. “That light is an unnatural thing. It will anger Them. It is not meant for the peace of Eden to be disturbed by any artificial thing. And if They should turn Their wrath upon us—woe, woe!”

His face was stricken in the light of a new flare, and as suddenly as he had come to object, he left, plunged back under the trees to seek his people, be beside them, comforting them when disaster struck down.

After a time the three men gave up trying to wave their acknowledgment of the flares in darkness. They watched for an hour or so, and then tried to sleep. The periodic flares continued to come throughout the long night, as if now no longer pleading for acknowledgment, but rather reassuring men in such deep distress that they could not answer. Reassuring them that help was at hand and morning would come.

They tried to sleep, and although fitfully disturbed by the continuing flares, they did sleep. But at the first hint of dawn, Cal awoke and aroused his two companions, and by the time there was enough light for the ship to see clear detail upon the ground, the three men were ready for a better attempt at answering the ship’s signal.

They went up to the village site, where the colonists were sleeping in the way a herd is bedded down together. They awoke Frank and Martha, Ahmed and Dirk, and told them of their plan. Louie, too, awoke, heard the plan, and tried to warn them against it. Any attempt, he said, to communicate with those not on Eden would surely increase the wrath of Those who wanted only the natural state here—a wrath still withheld because of superhuman mercy, but which must not be tried too far.

In spite of his warnings, Cal, and those co-operating with him, got together enough colonists to carry out his plan.

Good-naturedly, the colonists did as they were told, but with the attitude that it was something amusing, that there was nothing they’d rather be doing at the moment. Any sense of urgency about communicating with home seemed to have been washed from their minds.

In a clear space, on the soft grass, Cal got the colonists to sit or lie in certain positions. Checked against Tom’s knowledge of ancient signal patterns, those certain positions took the shape of space-navy patterns.

Three men lay in a triangle. Next to that, six men sat in a circle, and last three more men lay in another triangle. Cal hoped someone on the ship would be able to read the ancient message.

“Keep clear of me. I am maneuvering with difficulty.”

The signal had no more than formed when there was a flash from the ship so bright that it could be seen in the morning sky. They had read his signal, and now they began a series of flashes, of questions. “What’s going on down there?” was the essence of their questioning.

It was well the ship had caught the first signal, for the colonists lost all interest in the game which had no point. They simply stood up and wandered away in search of their breakfasts from the trees and bushes.

Louie, who had stood to one side glowering, now took charge of them again and shepherded them to a grove of trees where the fruit seemed especially large and succulent.

But now that the ship had spotted him, Cal could signal alone. He lay down on the ground, himself, to move his arms in semaphore positions. But even as he lay back, he became conscious that he, too, could hardly care less. With a detached interest that amounted to amusement at such childish, primitive things, he watched his arms spell out one more message.

“Keep off! No mechanical science allowed in this co-ordinate system.”

He stood up then, and made a farewell gesture toward the ship.

At that instant he felt strangely that he had passed into another stage of growth, completed a task, cut himself off from an environment that had held him back. What the ship did, in response to his warnings, no longer mattered. If it landed, its personnel too would join the colonists. If it obeyed the request of an E, it might circle there indefinitely.

Indefinitely watching the turkeys circle inside their low fence, unable to aid them, release them.

He did not particularly care what they did.

They could go on, spluttering out their signals, trying to question him. He didn’t even try to read their messages. It didn’t matter. Their science had nothing to do with him, nothing to offer him. Through it he could not reach a solution.

Somehow he knew that already.

19

“This time,” the communications supervisor said with all the firmness he could muster, “this time there must not be any interference with communication. There just absolutely must not be!”

“Well, it wasn’t my fault,” the operator retorted with an exasperation that blanketed prudent restraint. “You heard what E McGinnis said—that they could identify E Gray, and the ship’s crew, and many of the colonists, but that there was no sign of the ship that took them there. If there wasn’t any ship there couldn’t be any communication. It’s not my fault. I can’t receive something that wasn’t sent.”

“I know, I know,” the supervisor said, and then, worried that he may be giving the appearance of backing down, commanded savagely, “just watch it, that’s all!” He chewed violently at his knuckle and glared at the operator.

“Just watch it,” the operator mumbled bitterly. “Just watch it, the man says. And what will I watch if the message stops coming?”

“Now, now, now, now,” the supervisor nagged, “we’ll have no insubordination, if you please.”

And upstairs this time more than Bill Hayes, sector chief, were monitoring the message. The top administrative brass of E.H.Q. were assembled in their big plush conference room used for arriving at major policy decisions that sometimes affected the whole course of man’s progress and direction in occupying the universe.

They sat in worried silence as E McGinnis reported the two messages he had received from Junior E Gray.

First: Keep clear of me. I am maneuvering with difficulty.

Then: Keep off. No mechanical science allowed in this co-ordinate system.

They looked at one another under beetled brows. They wondered, at first privately and then openly if that Junior E had blown his stack. They had looked at many a problem finally solved by the E’s, but never before had such a ridiculous situation come up.

And right at the time, too, when the civil government had decided to place a curb on E.H.Q.’s freedom of movement, its control over the experimental phases of planet development. The injunction to halt a Junior E from taking over the Eden problem fooled none of them. They knew that Gunderson wasn’t concerned for those colonists out there, that he was merely using the public furor to advance his own personal power. They knew that the police worked unremittingly, unceasingly, always and ever to bring every phase of human activity under their control. They knew it was a centuries-old tactic to wait for the right situation to arise, so that the lawmakers could be stampeded into passing some law which seemed only to apply to this given condition but in actuality broadened police powers over a wide area of man’s actions.

Yes, there was far more at stake here than the fate of fifty colonists. In a sense E.H.Q. itself was the stake. The whole science of E was at stake.

And E McGinnis had played right into Gunderson’s hands. It was he who had been the E influence in deciding to allow a Junior to handle the problem in the first place. It was he who was standing off from the planet, not landing and taking over things as he should.

There was obviously no danger. By his own report, the people on Eden were in good health, and from their apparent actions, not even distressed.

This message about no mechanical science being allowed, for example. Did the Junior mean the colonists wouldn’t allow it? Must mean that. What else could prevent it? But when an E, a real E, took charge in an experimental colony, the colonists had nothing further to say about the matter. True, when the five-year experimental period was over and the three-generation colonists took over a planet, then it came more under civil control, and E.H.Q. largely withdrew with the provision that it could step back in at any time the problem seemed not to have been solved after all.

But while under the five-year test… The E was the final word, or should be. The colonists knew it. The E knew it, or should know it. Obviously then it was weakness on the part of the Junior if he allowed the colonists to dictate that there could be no mechanical science. Proof of his inability to handle the job.

A perfect setup for Gunderson!

They decided they were forced to take a strong hand with McGinnis. Ordinarily the E was the final word, not only with the colonists, but with the administration at E.H.Q. But maybe there were times when he shouldn’t be. Yes, definitely they should take a hand. After all, Gray was still a Junior, hardly more than a boy. Was it right that a mere boy could stop investigation by anyone except himself? Tell Earth with all its power and might what to do?

Definitely there was a time when an exception to general E policy should be made. Definitely this was that time. If nothing else, they must take a strong hand to prevent Gunderson from moving in with his police powers. Protect the E science from Gunderson, or at least salvage what they might.

Their conference over, they asked for a connection with McGinnis.

“We assume you will land and take charge, E McGinnis?” the board chairman asked.

“Certainly not,” McGinnis snapped back. “An E has forbidden it.”

“Well now,” the chairman argued, and sweat began to come out on his forehead. “He’s only a Junior. We have decided his judgment isn’t mature enough for this problem.”

“I have every confidence in Junior E Gray,” McGinnis said acidly. “And every E in the system will back me. It makes no difference what you have decided. Either the science of E means something, or it doesn’t. Either we have complete freedom to handle a problem, or we don’t. Let me remind you, gentlemen, this isn’t the first time that laymen have decided the E is a fool and tried to take matters into their own hands. Do you want to repeat past disasters?”

“If we don’t land a ship, E McGinnis”—the chairman was all but pleading now—”Gunderson’s police will. We feel we must land a ship to take a firmer control over the situation. Public sentiment demands it. Policy demands it. Perhaps the whole future of E demands it.”

A new voice cut into the communications hookup, a feminine voice.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “this is Linda Gray. I requested that I be cut in on any communication concerning my husband, and E McGinnis made it an order before he left. If another ship does land, I must be on it. I want to be with my husband.”

“I will not be landing on Eden, Linda,” E McGinnis said firmly. “An E has forbidden it. That is enough for any other E in the universe. No other E will land. Your husband is all right. He is in good health, and apparently mentally sound. At least sound enough to warn us against landing. He must have a reason. We don’t know, yet, what it is.

“Now he has stopped communicating, we don’t know why. He must have a reason for that, too. It is probably a sound reason. E science has been drilled into him until it is a part of his every mind cell, perhaps even every body cell.

“I assume he is not communicating because we can’t help him, because communicating with us distracts him from solving the problem. If E.H.Q. decides to send out a ship on its own, and risk landing in an unknown co-ordinate system, against the orders of two E’s, which will become the combined orders of all E’s in the universe, that is their decision. If you wish to be on it, that is your decision.

“I am cutting off now. It will be no accident that E.H.Q. cannot connect with me. I’m cutting out because I don’t want to be distracted any further. I’m trying to think.”

The acid rebuff of the old E left the administrative board hanging in a vacuum of indecision, frustration. Angry determination to do something, anything.

They were caught between the intransigence of the E fraternity it was their duty to serve and from whom they should be able to expect help, and the obvious determination of Gunderson to use this incident as his means of regaining control over the E’s and E.H.Q. for civil authority. Didn’t the stupid E see the danger? Wasn’t it the same danger that men of science had always faced, the same mistake they had always made—leaving out the human element in a problem?

The eternal blind spot in men of science! The average man doesn’t give a tinker’s damn for progress or knowledge, not really. He wants only that he and his shall be ascendant at the center of things, the inevitable, the only possible goal of the non-science mind. Surely the history of science versus non-science should have made this evident long ago! Surely there had been enough incidents in history.…

Very well, it was up to them to help the E in spite of himself. If he refused the see the clear danger to his whole structure—and their own ascendant position at the center of it—it was their clear duty to protect him nonetheless.

They would send out another ship, a large one, a floating laboratory, a miniature E.H.Q., at least to be there on the scene; to help in any way they could, perhaps to counter the moves Gunderson’s police might make, at least to stand by.

At least, in the face of all this public clamor about Eden, to show their concern. The chairman of the board rationalized it masterfully, without once mentioning that their real concern was to remain ascendant at the center of things at all costs, and thereby maintained the tradition of all non-science endeavors.

“Gentlemen,” he said in summary, “we have a grave responsibility not only to the E structure, but to all mankind as well. In every system, in every rule, there must be provision for the exception. Gray is only a Junior E. Herein lies the weakness of our position. Herein lies Gunderson’s strength, his weapon for swaying the sentiment of the people. A Junior E is not mature enough to make the decisions affecting the life or death of fifty people. More than that, perhaps the future progress of mankind.

“May I point out, gentlemen, that in a showdown, if it should become necessary for us to land a ship to rescue those colonists, in spite of the Junior’s demand that we stay clear of the planet, we will not be overriding the decision of an E, but of a boy who has not yet proved his capacity to merit an E.

“We have to draw the line somewhere. I am forced to agree with Gunderson on that. If we must honor the command of the Junior E, then why not the Associate E? Why not the student E? Why not the apprentice student E? Why not any kid in the universe who thinks he is extra smart?

“The line of demarcation, the point at which civil control over the individual gives way to immunity from civil control has never been clearly drawn. We may regret that the issue has arisen at all, but it has arisen. Gunderson’s purpose is clear. He intends to bring the E structure back under civil control. We must salvage what we can. Perhaps if we concede his control over the Juniors on down, we can maintain the immunity of the Senior E. We must work to save at least that much.”

The floating laboratory, which might have to become a rescue ship, left six hours later.

Linda was on it.

20

There was no frustration, no uncertainty in Gunderson’s mind.

His course was now clear. His observer ship had also read the messages spelled out by the placement of naked bodies on the grass, and in the semaphore wavings of the Junior E’s arms. The photographs taken were all the evidence he needed to prove the morals charges he intended to bring.

It might not be wise to allow the total photographs to show in the newspapers, on television, for there were ex-navy men here and there who might interpret the code. But enlarged pictures of the individuals, separated from the total, disporting themselves in lewd, naked positions would do the job.

Clearly the police must put a stop to this. He would have every organization in the universe dedicated to dictating the morals of others on his side. No politician would have the guts to stand up in opposition.

There remained only one thing to do. Go out and get that Junior E, place him under arrest, bring him back for trial. Perhaps it might be wise to let the colonists off easy—he could easily show that it was the influence of the Junior which had made a disgusting orgy develop there on Eden. Never mind that they were naked before the Junior arrived. The public could always be razzle-dazzled about the nature of the evidence, its order and meaning. It was an old police, prosecution, and political trick to separate a few items from the total context, but still a good one; for the public never bothered to know the whole context of anything. An old trick to fasten on phrases and slogans to fix an attitude in the public mind, for a phrase or slogan was about all the public was able to master. Anyone who had ever served on a jury, observed its deliberations, knew that out of all the welter of evidence, only certain isolated statements or facts, often minor and insignificant, penetrated the juror’s mind, and around these bits he formed his conclusions. Any smart lawyer knew that, and tried to set up his case accordingly.

His own course was clear.

His orders to the selected captain of his police ship were equally clear:

1. Proceed at once to Eden, the scene of the crime.

2. Ignore any protests from the E ship already out there, or any other ship E.H.Q. might have sent.

3. Ignore any signals from the Junior E on the planet.

4. Land on the planet at the site of Appletree, the main site of the lewd and obscene crime.

5. Place Junior E Calvin Gray under arrest.

6. Place the crew of the Junior E’s ship, Thomas Lynwood, Franklin Norton, Louis LeBeau, under arrest.

7. Place any colonist who opposed the police under arrest.

8. Place the remainder of the colonists in detention under protective custody.

9. Place E McGinnis under arrest if he interfered in any way with the police in carrying out the foregoing orders.

The police captain raised his eyebrows when he read the final order.

Place a Senior E under arrest?

Certainly, a Senior E. It was one thing to allow these birds to wander around, free as air to do as they please. It was one thing to let them get away with making such statements as “The police attitude toward the people is the major cause of crime.” It was something else, and time the E’s found it out, for them to make any overt move to interfere with the police in their performance of duty.

Personally, he hoped the old E would be fool enough to resist. It would strengthen his case.

The police captain obeyed the first of the orders without a hitch. He proceeded to the scene of the crime.

He obeyed the second order. He ignored the command of E McGinnis, received over the ship’s communicator when they arrived at the scene of the crime, to stand clear of the planet. What policeman moving in to make an arrest for an illegal act—and certainly running around stark naked, posing in lewd and indecent postures in full view of the public, was an illegal act—would pay any attention to the request of an onlooker which amounted to “Aw, let ’em alone, copper”?

There was no communication at all from the Junior E on the planet’s surface, so the third order did not apply.

It was in trying to execute the fourth order that he ran into trouble.

He passed inside the orbits of the three other ships now circling the planet, the police observer ship, the E McGinnis ship, the E.H.Q. floating laboratory. He gave orders to lower his ship into Eden’s atmosphere.

The proper buttons were pushed, the proper levers pulled.

And nothing happened.

It was as if some invisible shield held him back. He could not lower the ship into the atmosphere gently, taking the normal precautions against crashing. Very well then, not so gently. Full power. And nothing happened. They lowered not another inch.

A thrust. A thrust at tangent to the surface. Once past whatever this barrier was, they could skim the surface and come back to land on the proper site. They backed the ship farther out into space. They made their thrust with full speed and momentum.

There was no sensation when they hit the barrier, but they did not penetrate it. It was as if a flat stone had been skipped across slick ice, and they shot back out into space again. The tangent penetration would not do.

Very well, then. A direct thrust, full power, straight down. Be prepared to put braking forces into immediate power, lest they crash the ship at full power against the surface.

And again, no sensation. Against all natural laws of inertia, they came to a full stop at the given level outside the atmosphere without any feeling of jar or opposing pressure at all.

What now, Mr. Gunderson, sir?

Reluctantly, Gunderson ordered the police captain to contact E McGinnis. E science apparently had some kind of shield which they’d kept secret from the people—and wouldn’t there be a stink over that one, once he released that information! Contact E McGinnis and find out!

“Why sure,” E McGinnis cackled with derisive laughter, “sure there’s a shield. I didn’t make it. I wouldn’t know how. No, I don’t know what’s causing it. But I’ll tell you what I think. I think They’ve caught the specimen They want. There’s an E down there.

“So, naturally, the trap door is closed.”

21

Cal didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that his efforts to signal McGinnis not to land were unnecessary. Didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that he himself was the specimen They had hoped to catch. That having caught what They wanted They would naturally close the door to the trap to prevent any possibility of escape, as yet, or any interference with their experiment.

From the moment he walked away from the grassy slope where he had signaled the outer ship, he moved and thought as someone detached from ordinary existence. As he walked away from the slope, ignoring the frantic signals from the ship out in space, he felt he was also walking out of a shell of superficial cerebration and into a deeper sense of reality. It was as if, in spite of E training, for the first time in his life, he could commit himself wholly, in all areas of his being, to the consideration of a problem.

His conviction was complete that the ship could give him nothing he needed, that all Earth’s mechanical science could give him nothing he needed. That it could not provide the key to unlock the door which led into this new area of reality. He must find, must define, some new concept of man’s relation to the universe. He must again travel that road, that million-year-long road man had traveled in trying to determine his position in reality.

He wandered down to the river, climbed to the top of a great boulder that overhung a pool, and sat down with his feet hanging over the edge. He watched some young colonists wade through the pool to drive fish into the shallows where they could pin them, with their legs, catch them with their hands. In their need for protein, the colonists were finding, as many Earth peoples had found, raw fish were excellent in flavor and texture as food.

At the beginning of the road man had traveled first there was awareness, awareness of self as something separate from environment. There was awareness of self-strength, ability to do certain things to and with that environment. There was awareness of self always at the center of things, and therefore awareness of his importance in the scheme of things. But there was awareness of more.

There was awareness of things happening to his environment which he, in all his strength and importance, could not do. Awareness gives rise to reason, reason gives rise to rationalization. If things happened in his environment which he himself could not do, then there must be something stronger and more important than he.

To be ascendant at the center of things, to remain ascendant, meant that all things of lesser importance, outside the center, must be made subservient to him, else that ascendancy was lost. And if they would not assume positions of subservience, they must be destroyed.

If there were unseen beings, stronger and more important than he, who could do unexplained things to his environment; then it was plain that he must assume positions of subservience to those beings, lest he himself be destroyed.

So man created his gods in his own image, with his own attributes magnified.

Was this a wrong turning of the road? No-o.… Awareness carries with it its commands and penalties. A problem must have an answer. Conscious and willful beings beyond his own strength and importance became the only answer open to him at that stage of his mental evolution. And served the important need of bringing order to chaos. Let all things he could not do, and therefore could not understand, be attributed to those higher beings. Without such an answer, awareness without resolution would have driven him into madness. Without such an answer, man could not have survived to remain aware.

But answers also carry in themselves their commands and their penalties. The penalty being that when one thinks he has the answer he stops looking for it. The command being that he must conduct himself in accord with the answer.

The long, long road that led him nowhere. That today still leads untold millions nowhere. For the penalty of a wrong answer is failure to solve the problem. That non-science had failed to provide any answer beyond the primitive one was self-evident.

To some, then, it became evident that the question must be reopened. Through the long written history of man, here and there, by accident often, sometimes by cerebration, the use of the brain with which he was endowed, man found on occasion he could do things to his environment that heretofore had been the province of the gods—and in the doing had not become a god! To the courageous, the brave, the daring, the foolhardy questions then that demanded new answers.

Perhaps the most daring and courageous question of all time was asked by Copernicus: What if man is not at the center of the universe, the reason for its creation?

He personally escaped the penalties for asking it. The question was too new, too revolutionary for the men of his day to grasp, for the non-science leaders, secure in their ascendancy at the center of things, to see in it the threat to their ascendancy. It was on his followers, those who saw sense in the question, that the wrath of non-science descended. Non-science used the only method it had ever devised to achieve the only result it had ever been able to countenance—torture and force to make dissidents kneel in subservience.

But the question had been asked! And once asked, it could not be erased!

Still, it was almost an accidental question. For the method of science, as something understood and communicable, as a calculated point of view, had not yet been discovered. The key that would unlock its door had not yet been found.

Cal lay back on the rock to bathe in the warm rays of Ceti, almost to doze, yet with thought running clear and unimpeded. The splashing and the laughter of the colonists below the rock were no more than accompanying music.

The key which opened the door to physical science was not discovered until 1646 by a bunch of loafers, ne’er-do-wells, beatniks, who hung around the coffee shops of London. Later, because non-science always persecutes those who dare ask questions and thereby demonstrate some subversion to subservience, many had to flee to Oxford which, at that time, was sanctuary for those who differed from popular thought.

As he lay there drinking in the sun, the peacefulness, he sent his vision back through the card index of his mind to find the reference, the key that opened the door to physical science, the pregnant point of view that would give birth to a whole new concept of man’s relationship to the universe. He found the passages in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London (1667).

“…to make faithful records of all the works of nature, or art which can come within their reach… They have stud’d to make it, not only an enterprise of one season, or of some lucky opportunity; but a business of time; a steddy, a lasting, a popular, an uninterrupted work.”

He stirred restlessly and changed his position to lay his head on one arm. Not quite, not yet the key. Ah, here it was, perhaps the most significant sentence ever written by man.

“They have attempted to free it from the artifice, and humors, and passions of sects; to render it an instrument whereby mankind may obtain a dominion over Things, and not only over one another’s judgements.”

That was it. That was the essence of its difference from non-science, for the only method ever discovered until then was the non-science method of making its judgments prevail over all others.

Once this answer was discovered, it too could not be erased in spite of all the efforts of non-science. With that answer, man had come this far.

And now?

Could it be that science, as with non-science, was only a partial answer? Only another stage? Only a section of the road man must travel? Something as limited in its way as non-science was limited? Something too narrow to contain the whole of reality? Something also to be left behind? A milestone passed, instead of the goal?

What comes after science? What new door must be opened into a still newer point of view? What pregnant new concept of his relationship to reality must man now discover before he could continue his journey down the long road toward total comprehension?

He could ask the question, but it was not the right question; for it contained no hint of an answer. He felt an irritation in himself, almost as if some teacher in the past had shaken his head in disapproval.

For a moment he welcomed the distracting shout from one of the colonists, and sat up. In the shallows of the river one of the men had caught a foot long fish and was holding it up in his hands. Delightedly, the others acknowledged his victory, and renewed their efforts. He lay back down again, and stretched his cramped muscles.

Too fast! He had come down the long, long road too fast. He had missed something, something early. Something man had known in pre-science, and had forgotten in science.

These colonists. Would they grow in awareness? Now they seemed only to be a part of their environment, without curiosity, their fears of even the day before forgotten. Wiped away, as though it had never been, was their memory of a previous existence to this. They were wholly at one with their environment—unaware.

Were they to begin the long road? To telescope its distance? Would they be able to continue living without peopling the trees, the streams, the clouds, the winds, with spirits benign and vengeful—created in their own image? Could they continue to live alone in the universe?

Yes, that was the thing he had missed. Loneliness.

In separating himself from the animals, man had cut off his kinship with them. And so he found companionship with the gods. And cutting himself off from the gods…

Loneliness.

Was man the only thing aware throughout the universe? What purpose then his exploration of it? What might he find that he had not already found?

Already, like a minor thread almost unheard in the symphony of exploding exploration, the questions of the artists were already finding themselves woven into music, painting, literature.

“Are we alone? In all this glittering, sterile universe, are there none other than we who are aware?”

The theme would expand as the purposelessness of colonizing still more and more worlds became wider known. The minor would become major, the recessive dominant. The endless aim of non-science to make all others subservient had lost its purpose for those who could still think. The dominion over things instead of people, the goal of science—was that also to lose its purpose for those who could still think? Until man, defeated by purposelessness, sank back in apathy, lost the very willingness to live—and so died?

What if some other awareness did inhabit the universe, sentient—and lonely? What if, farther along in its explorations, it was feeling that apathy? Facing that dissolution?

When one is lonely, the sensible thing is to seek companionship! To discover in companionship purpose not apparent to the alone—or at least hope to discover it.

For companionship there must be communication. And yet the exasperation, the futility of trying to communicate with a friend who always interpreted everything one said and did as meaning something entirely different from the intent.

Some other friend was the normal answer. But what if there were no other? Wouldn’t one extra effort, a final attempt to break through that closed mind be made?

All right.

Communication, then. That was wanted. He would try. But if Their frameworks were so different from his that They misinterpreted all his efforts?

He was interrupted by the soft pad of footsteps, bare feet on grass that sprang up to leave no sign it had been trod upon. A young colonist and his wife, hand in hand, laughing gaily, were coming toward him. The man was carrying a fresh-caught fish. They came to a stop at the base of his rock and looked up at him, the Ceti light glinting on their smiling faces.

“We gave Louie a fish because he said it was our duty,” the young man said. “I don’t remember why it is our duty. Perhaps it is our duty to give you one too.”

At least they were being impartial.

22

When he had pulled the scaled skin of the fish away from the flesh, the flesh away from the bones, and eaten his fill, Cal lay back on the rock again, to doze, to continue his search for a means of communicating.

He was now sharply aware of Their presence, of Their urgency, of Their long patience. Awareness! Once man had got over his greedy delight in occupying more and more of the universe simply because he could, to protect himself against the cosmic loneliness that must follow, he too would be searching for awareness.

But he would define it in his own terms, and pass it by if it did not meet those terms.

That there was some other intelligence which had found man instead, Cal did not doubt. The experiment of Eden, the manipulation of natural laws, the denial of physical tools—for what purpose? To clear away the debris which prevented communication of awareness as They defined it?

There was a trace, a minor trace of awareness in man not dependent upon the tools and artifacts of physical science—extra-sensory perception, psi. Underdeveloped, because with physical tools its development had been made unnecessary? Because having found the answers with physical tools, man stopped looking for answers other than these?

Was there, then, a science of controlling things, forces, without the use of physical tools? Was there a road of transition from the crude manipulation of things and forces through tools to a manipulation without them? There was precedent in man’s science. The elaborate wirings of the first bulky and crude electronic sets, that gave way to a printed diagram of such wirings on a card to obtain the same result?

A step farther? The visual picture, the mental image of the diagram to obtain the same result? But how?

To one whose total orientation is through the use of physical tools (for the material printed on the card diagram was the physical carrier of the current) how to cause the current to follow the mental image of that diagram? With voice and music bathing one’s senses simply because one thought of the diagram of a receiver? How?

He felt like the turkey come up against the obstruction of a fence too low to justify the effort of flying over it. Instead of flying, he was walking around and around, looking for an opening, walking in an endless circle.

Circle?

Excitedly, he climbed down from the rock and headed for a patch of bare sand at the river’s edge.

In every framework of thought which man had ever devised, the circle was prominent, vital. It played its part in every creed of every race, of every time. It was as essential to the ancient arts of magic as to the current methods of science. It played its part in the movement of planets, the shape of stars, perhaps the essence of the total universe.

Man might be too didactic in requiring that awareness develop a physical science comparable to his own, but surely awareness, whatever form it took, would know the circle.

He sank down on his haunches beside the smooth sand, and with the tip of his finger he quickly drew a circle.

The furrow, scratched in the sand, did not close or smooth out!

He sat back and waited. Nothing happened. It was almost as if the invisible intelligence were saying, “All right. You are aware of a circle. That was obvious to us from your artifacts. What else do you know?”

He leaned forward, and as nearly as he could estimate, he dotted the center of the circle with a finger, then scratched a radius to the perimeter. It stayed. To one side he drew another line, approximating the radius and in parenthesis he drew a small 2. Beside this he wrote R². He drew an equals sign. He scratched the pi sign.

Then he drew another circle and with the palm of his hand he smoothed all its interior. That should be plain enough. The symbols stayed. They understood his mathematics, then. The equation seemed undisturbed, yet there was something wrong with it. He had to look closely at the sand before he saw what it was.

The = had changed to : !

Why had they changed the meaning by substituting “proportionate to” for “equals”? He felt a flash of exasperation. Well sure, without tools he could not draw a perfect circle, nor two of them entirely equal. It was pedantic of them to split hairs over that? He must practice, without tools, to draw a perfect circle?

Or was that running around inside his low fence?

He looked down at the sand, and saw the entire scratching was now smoothed out. Apparently he was on the wrong track. Hadn’t got what they meant.

He wrote again in the sand: “pi = 3.14159265.…”

Again = changed to : .

Again he felt his flash of exasperation. It must be obvious by his string of dots that he knew pi had never been exactly resolved. They were being too pedantic. He must exactly resolve it? Yet the numbers could be continued to infinity and never exactly resolved. He looked down again, and the equation was gone.

Wrong track again.

He sat forward, hugged his knees, and stared into the water.

The equation had never been exactly resolved, yet man used it as a constant, an absolute. An obvious fallacy. Was the difference between physical science and psi science based in this insignificant difference in exactness? Try something else. See what happens. There was an equation which had proved its effectiveness, upon which the whole science of atomics was based.

“E = MC²,” he wrote.

Again = changed to : .

What were they saying? That the fallacy lay in using the equals sign? That the science of psi was one of proportion. But equals was one of the possible proportions. Had we become walled in our low fence because we were too dependent upon the exact balance? Been satisfied to find that answer, and therefore stopped looking for the possibilities inherent in unbalanced equations?

He looked down at the symbols again half expecting to see them erased. But they were still there. So he was starting on the right track. But wait.

Before his eyes he saw the C² smooth out, disappear. Only “E : M” remained. Were they saying that dependence upon constants was the low fence? That man must learn to do without his firm absolutes? That was the ultimate in relativity: Energy is proportionate to matter. But so all-inclusive as to be too vague for use.

For more than three centuries now, controversy had raged over Einstein’s use of C² in his expression. Some held that it was a product of his time, that he was able to make only one step beyond classical physics where all things must be related to a fixed value. Others held that its inclusion was a deliberate fallacy; that Einstein, by his other work, had shown he knew it was a fallacy; that, tongue in cheek, he inserted it into his equation in full knowledge that his fellow scientists of his day could not even bear to think of the awesome concept of things without orientation to an absolute; that he knew they would reject him entirely, refuse even to consider his thought unless he catered that much to their superstitions.

The need of the absolute was not mathematical or scientific, but emotional. Man was still tortured by his determination to be the center of things, himself the fixed absolute! The need of a familiar, fixed cave where he might run and hide, close himself in securely when the chaos of storm outside became too frightening to bear. The need of a fixed absolute, whether in philosophy or science, a fixed spot that would not shift.

The science of psi, then, was based in a willingness to shift?

He looked down at the equation, to see if he were still on the track.

It had changed again. Now it read “EδM”: The form of the function of energy to matter is variable.

Quickly, another change. “Df(em)”: The form of the function and the independent variable of the function vary together.

Still another: “E = f(M)”: There is a general relationship of energy to matter.

And then: “F(e,m) = 0”: There is a general unspecified relationship between energy and matter.

He slapped his hand down on the sand in frustration.

“All right,” he said. “You’ve made your point. And it means about as much as if I said to the turkey, ‘All you have to do is fly’.”

There was a stir behind him. He turned his head and saw Louie. A deep sigh, almost a sob came from Louie as he stared down at the symbols in the sand.

“They talked to you,” Louie said brokenly. “I wanted only to serve Them, but it was to you They talked.”

And all the tragedy of his life was contained therein.

Cal sprang to his feet, and put his arms around the other man’s shoulders. The two of them, the bitter and the sympathetic, looked down at the sand. The symbols were still changing, and now read “There is an infinity of relationships between matter and energy, an infinity of forms to be taken by matter as you control the energy.”

The signs were wiped out, and the sense of Their presence was gone. Cal felt the withdrawal, the sense of a lesson being over. He did not regret it, he had enough to think about. But first, there was Louie, racked with broken sobbing.

Here was a man whose life had been a search for certainties, absolutes that would not shift under the weight of his questioning. No doubt in his youth he had turned to the religions of the day—and found them a tissue of rationalizations without contact in reality. Then to science—and found it, too, constantly shifting in its interpretations, making new evaluations as evidence discounted the old. The shock of landing on Eden to drive him back into childhood interpretations again—at last, the clear evidence that had been denied his belief in youth.

Wholehearted in his belief of Them, yet it was not to him They had talked.

“Louie,” Cal said slowly. “If you were lonely, very lonely, if you had searched through the years for companionship, and thought you might have found it, would it please you to have that companion drop to his knees, grovel before you? Would this be your idea of companionship?

“What manner of monstrous egotism would require that? What but the incredible vanity of primitive man, to whom life meant nothing more than conquering or being conquered, could imagine such conduct would be pleasing to another intelligence?

“We are men, Louie. If, in our loneliness, we found another intelligence, wouldn’t we want an equal exchange instead of abasement? The use of that intelligence to know, to understand, instead of a denial of it?”

Louie twisted out of Cal’s embracing arm, and ran stumbling toward the depths of the forest.

23

For another week, perhaps ten days or more, since time measurement had lost its meaning, Cal lived among the colonists, watched their complete retrogression into a state of unawareness. Even the speech which they had retained seemed now to thin and falter as the simplifying of their idea-content no longer required its use.

Only Tom and Jed seemed to retain their orientation to the past, the clarity of awareness. These two spent much time together, seemed always available when Cal needed them, yet did not intrude upon his thought. Frank now seemed one with the colonists. Louie lived on the outskirts of the herd, near the colonists but not of them. He had ceased to exhort, warn, command, argue. His face was closed, told nothing of what he was thinking.

And he had ceased to demand his tithe as intercessor. He was gathering his own food, catching his own fish.

And he seldom let Cal out of his sight.

Tom and Jed helped as best they could by maintaining contact with the old reality. They spent much of the daytime with the colonists. At night they turned their faces to the dark sky to watch the ships, now grown to four, bathed in the light of Ceti like a constellation of bright stars above them. They read the intermittent flashes of light from McGinnis, and from the E.H.Q. laboratory. McGinnis told of the police ship’s attempts to break through the barrier surrounding Eden, and its failure. The laboratory told of Linda’s presence on board, and now and then flashed out a message to Cal from Linda of her love, her nearness, her faith in him, her desire to be with him, her patience in waiting.

McGinnis told of the arrival of a fifth ship, carrying Gunderson in person. He had been unable to believe his police captain. Unable to believe that the ship could not land at will. He had come in person to take charge, and apparently fumed his frustration in idleness, unable to do anything with the situation, unwilling to go back to Earth and leave it alone.

Tom and Jed told Cal the content of these messages, but to Cal the reports of the police activity seemed noises heard from far away and unrelated to himself. The messages from Linda seemed the haunting strains of a song remembered from long ago.

For his mind was wholly enrapt with the problem. He had been given the key—reality is a matter of proportion, change the concept of proportion and you change the material form—but he had not found the lock and the door it would open. He knew it, but he couldn’t do it.

Perhaps Tom might help? Tom was well-grounded in math, had to be for his job as pilot.

“Look, Tom,” Cal said one morning after they had given him the night’s messages from the ships. He squatted on the ground and brushed away some leaves from an area of dirt. “Watch the equals sign.” He scratched a formula in the dirt:

“2 + 2 = 4”

The = changed to : . Then to δ. Then through the series of variable relationships.

Tom leaped to his feet from the log where he had been sitting.

“That’s crazy,” he exclaimed. “It isn’t just proportionate, it isn’t variable. It equals.”

Jed was looking from one to the other, obviously at a loss.

“Well,” Cal said drily, “I’m much more interested in what They have to say than in trying to convince Them that They’re wrong.”

“But if everything were only proportionate and variable,” Tom argued, “then you’d have nothing fixed, constant. Why the proportionate relationship might be dependent solely upon choice. Nothing would be solid, dependable.”

“Not even the footprints under your feet,” Cal answered softly. “Not a house, nor a field of grain, nor a spaceship. Simply alter the choice of proportion—and they aren’t there anymore.”

24

Throw a key at the feet of a turkey and it is useless to him. Show him the lock it fits, and it is still useless without the knowledge of how to insert the key and turn it. Unlock it for him, and still it is useless without the knowledge of how to push or pull the door.

This was the essence of why so few mastered the simple steps of physical science, the essence of why so few were able to get beyond step two of E science. Anyone could disagree with a statement, but in answer to “What if it not be true, how then to account for the phenomena?” most bogged down at that point, unable to demonstrate with evidence the validity of some other answer.

Everyone knew the equation E = MC², but few could implement it to build an atomic power plant.

Perhaps the reactions of Tom, that taking away the concept of a balanced equation destroyed all certainty, and therefore was not to be countenanced, was a reflection of his own reaction, willing though he might be to consider something else.

In his wanderings about the island, picking fruits and nuts, stems and leaves, catching fish when he hungered, drinking the clear water of the stream when he thirsted, yet so enrapt that he was unaware he was taking care of his body’s needs, Cal built up whole structures of alien philosophies on the nature of the universe, and saw them topple of their own weight.

Until, at last, he realized the basic flaw in all his reasoning. He was too well-grounded in the essence of physical science, and all physical science was built on the balanced equation. Even in trying to consider the unbalanced equation, he had been attempting to determine the exact nature of the unbalance, and to supply it as an X factor on the other side of the equation to restore balance.

To restore balance was to maintain the status quo of physical reality. To turn the key in the lock, to open the door, he must change the physical reality to balance the equation, rather than supply the X factor to keep reality unchanged.

But how to do it still eluded him.

At times, as if seeing partial diagrams, he seemed very close to a solution. At times it seemed the printed card of an electronic wiring was necessary only because the human mind could not visualize the whole without that aid, that music did not come through because in incomplete visualization some little part was left dangling, unconnected. And the long history of non-science belief in the magic properties of cabalistic signs and designs rose up to taunt him, to goad him with the possibility that perhaps man had once come close to the answer of how to control physical properties without the use of tools; that the development of a physical science had taken man down a sidetrack instead of farther along the direct route toward his goal.

Or that man had once been shown, and never understood, or forgot. Yet kept alive the memory that physical shifts could be changed if he could only draw the right design.

Through his wanderings, one fact gradually intruded upon his mind. It seemed the farther inland he roamed, the closer he came to grasping the problem; the nearer the seashore, the more it eluded him.

One morning he looked up at the glittering heights of Crystal Palace Mountain, and suddenly he resolved to climb it. Perhaps the winds of the mountain being stronger, the fuzziness of his thought would be blown away? Perhaps the arrangement of the crystalline structures, the arches and spires, might catch his brain waves, modulate them, transform them, strengthen them, feed them back, himself a part of the design instead of outside it?

In the framework of physical science a nonsense notion. But what harm to try?

He sought out Tom and Jed, the two who would miss him, the two who would care.

“There ain’t no water up there, far as I know,” Jed said. “And you can’t carry none, now. Me and a party scouted the mountain once. It’s mighty purty, but useless. The quartz ain’t valuable enough to cover its shipping costs back to Earth. The ground is too rocky to farm. Not much in the way of food growing there. So we never went back.”

“The scientists surveyed it when the planet was first discovered,” Cal said. “One of the first places they went because it was so outstanding. But they found nothing interesting and useful either. Still, I think I’ll go.”

“Well,” Jed said with a shrug. “You can’t get lost. If you should lose your bearings, just walk downhill and you’ll come to food and water. Follow the shore line until you get back, either direction. And, I reckon, the way things go now, you ain’t goin’ to hurt yourself. We won’t worry about you none. We’re all gettin’ along all right, so you needn’t worry about us either.”

“You want me to come with you, Cal?” Tom asked.

“No,” Cal answered, “I think better if I’m alone.”

He left them then, went past some colonists who were picking berries and eating them, and on up the valley that ran between two ridges.

It was only a few miles to the foothills, a gradual rise of the valley floor, a gradual shallowing and narrowing of the stream, a gradual drawing in of the spokelike ridges until the valley at last became a ravine. The morning air was clear and still, the scent of flowers and ripening fruit was sweet.

Before he left the ravine to begin his climb he ate some of the fruit, and washed the lingering sweet taste from his mouth with a long, cool drink of water from one of the many springs that fed the stream.

He looked up at the mountain above him, and his eye picked out the most likely approach to its summit. It was not a high mountain, not in terms of those tremendous, tortured skin folds of other planets. Hardly more than a high hill in terms of those. Nor, as far as he could see, would the climb be difficult or hazardous.

The fanciful thought of Mount Olympus on Earth came into his mind, although this one was not so inaccessible, so parched and barren. The gods of Greece would have found this a pleasanter place, although they might not have lived so long in the minds of man, since the mountain was more easily climbed, and therefore man would have been the more easily convinced after repeated explorations that no gods lived there after all.

Would the Greeks, as with the later religions, have placed the site of heaven farther and farther away, retreating reluctantly, as man explored the earlier site and found no heaven there? Retreat after retreat until at last the whole idea was patently ridiculous?

Dead are the gods, forever dead, and yet—to what may man now turn in rapture? In ecstasy? In communion? What, in all physical science, filled the deep human need of these expressions?

The climb of the first slope, up to the crest of the ridge he intended to follow, was quickly done. He turned there and looked behind him, at the valley of the colonists below, and far down where the valley merged into the sea, and far on out at the hazy purple line of another island. As he started to turn back again, to resume his climb, his eye caught a flash of something moving in the ravine below him, sunlight on brown, bare skin.

He waited until he caught another glimpse through the trees. As he had suspected it was Louie, still trying to keep him always in sight.

His first impulse was to call out, to wait for Louie, ask him to join in the climb. He discarded the impulse. His need was to get away from all others. And sympathetic and compassionate though he might be, the confusion in Louie’s mind seemed to intrude upon his own. Nor had his earlier attempts to comfort Louie met success.

Let Louie follow if he willed. Perhaps the clean air would clear his mind as well. He feared no physical harm, even if Louie’s tortured mind intended it. There were no tools to strike at him from a distance. Even a boulder pushed from a height above him would not strike, for that would be the physical use of a tool to gain an end. He feared no bodily attack from ambush, for his own strength and knowledge were dependable.

He began his climb again, followed the crest of the ridge where it swept upward to buttress the side of the mountain. The going was not difficult. The trees and shrubs grew thinner here, and provided clear spaces for him to wind among them. The stones, at first a problem to his bare feet, bothered him less and less until he forgot them. He felt no physical discomfort, neither from tiredness nor thirst, nor from the branches scraping his bare skin, nor anything to drag his mind into trivialities.

Nor tortured theories such as had plagued him in trying to reason out the new concepts of a proportionate, variable reality.

Instead, there was a sense of well being, anticipated completeness, a merging of the often quite separated areas of thought, intuition, and appreciation.

Although at no great height, now the trees no longer grew so tall that they obscured his vision of the heights above. As he climbed they were replaced by shrubs shoulder high, then waist high, then merely low, creeping growths which his feet avoided without mental direction.

A curve of the ridge brought him to the first outcroppings of crystallized quartz. On them he saw no signs of scar left by the geologist’s hammer, no imperfections where nodes may have been broken away. They were complete, singularly unweathered.

There was no path, nor hint of one, nor sign that either scientist or colonist had ever passed this way.

The ridge swung back into line, and still he climbed, effortlessly and without consciousness of passing time. Time and space and matter seemed to have receded far into the background of consciousness. Man’s star-strewn civilization was no more than a dream. It was as if he, alone and complete, occupied the whole of the universe, encompassed it as he was encompassed by it.

Yet not alone! Their presence, which seemed so evanescent on the valley floor, was closer now, more clearly sensed. Almost as if, at any instant, the veil of blindness would disperse and They would stand revealed.

Now up the final slope of the mountain he threaded his way through higher outcroppings of a more perfectly formed quartz, with deeper amethystine hue scintillating in the Ceti sun’s light, diffracted not only in the purples but into greens and reds and blues.

As he came around the base of one of these, there towering above he caught his first full view of the greater spires, pinnacles, buttresses, and arches of the mountain’s crest.

It was the crystal palace.

The climb had been steep, steeper than it had appeared from below, yet his breathing was not labored, his mouth was not dry from thirst, nor were his muscles protesting the effort. He did not need to stop and rest, to gather his energy for the last steep assault upon the peak.

Far below him he saw Louie toiling up a slope, then dropping with every appearance of exhaustion when he came to each level place. Still he would rest no more than a minute, and always his head was turned to keep sight of Cal above him. He would push himself to his knees, then to his feet; and slowly, step by step, begin his climb again.

As if from far away, Cal felt a pity at the uselessness of the self-torture, the senseless need of man to punish himself for the guilt of imagined wrongs; and felt a wonder if the strangely developed moral sense of man had not, after all, done more harm than good. For in the ordered universe, where everything fitted into the whole, what could be either good or bad, right or wrong, except as a reflection of man’s inadequacies in his imaginings? Rightness and good, wrongness and evil, these could not possibly be other than assessments of furtherance or threat to the ascendancy of me-and-mine at the center of things, and had no meaning beyond that context.

He turned from watching Louie, pitying him, and made the last sharp climb with no more effort than the whole had been. Now he drew near to the towering structures of the crest, now he was beside them. Now he walked beneath and through an arch which seemed almost a gothic entrance.

And stood transfixed in ecstasy.

Magnificent the dreams of man that took form in steel and stone and glass, yet none matched the lightness, the grace, the intricacy, the sublime simplicity of these interwoven crystalline structures where light from the noonday sun separated prismatically until it filled the air with myriads of living, darting, colored sparks of fire above him. Where the breeze that blew through the vibrating spires made blended sounds the ear could barely endure in rapture.

As once, in childhood, he had stood in a grove of giant trees that laced their limbs in gothic splendor above him, now again he stood, lost in time and space and being, lost in vision and in music which neither had nor needed form nor beginning nor end.

And knew it was a simple tool; Their concession to the mind of man, to bridge the gap between Their minds and his.

Without wondering more, he sank down upon the mossy turf of the floor and lay supine to gaze upward, to follow line to blended line until they seemed mirrored into infinity.

The darting lights above him whirled, spiraled up, then down, clockwise, then counterclockwise, reminding him…reminding him…

…the internal structure of crystals.…

25

Across the universe, two billion years ago, there too a planet coalesced from the mutually attracted vortices of twisted space; gases compelled by gravitational forces solidifying to hardened matter, forming a crust over a molten core. In the soupy atmosphere of metallic salts and gases, tortured and rent by electrical storms of incalculable fury, among the vibrating crystals one formed that was aware.

Not in the sharp awareness of later times, but at the first only ill-defined, perhaps no more than the awareness of acid chains of molecules that formed into non-crystalline viscid protoplasm on another planet across the universe. No distinct line of cleavage where affinity to other chemicals left off and sentient selectivity began marked the distinction here as in that protoplasm.

As with its cousin across the universe, the one-celled amoeba, these crystals too were sensitive to light, to heat, to cold—to food. Ill-defined, but distinct already from the non-sentient crystals about them, these life forms grew through absorbing from the rich and soupy atmosphere those elements necessary to growth, to branching, to cleavage into new individuals.

What is awareness? At what point even in protoplasmic life does it appear? The amoeba avoids pain, seeks food, reproduces itself, and blunders blindly through its environment in search for condition more favorable to its continuance.

In the monotony of a purposeless existence, most humans do no more than that.

Must awareness, too, be defined in terms of the consciousness of me-and-mine? Defined only by what me-and-mine can feel, know? A protoplasmic growth feeling awareness, excluding all possibility of awareness in other kinds of growth because they are not a part of me-and-mine, therefore too inferior to know awareness?

Each crystal structure has its own vibration characteristic, and on that planet, in time, one special vibratory rate knew awareness of self. Mutation here too gave added complexity to the structure, and self-awareness took on that added growth of awareness of surroundings.

Through eons of time, and the mutations brought by time, awareness of self and surroundings grew into awareness of wider peripheries, to sensing their world, its structure, its nature.

Another mutant leap and there was comprehension of other worlds, of other stars. Theirs was a vibratory awareness, directly akin to the vibrating fields of force which compose the material universe, and the vibrations of fields of force can be altered. To change their surroundings to a more suitable environment through vibration rates of things led surely to negation of distance. To change from crystal form to fields of energy and back again combined with negation of distance—they too spread out and out among the stars.

At first it was enough. But awareness is never still. Questions form.

In all the universe were they the only sentient thing? Did any cry but theirs rise to the stars, seeking to know? Because of the nature of their being their search was unconcerned with the outer shape of things which could be changed by them at will, but rather with the inner vibratory rate which would signal sentience, awareness.

They found no more than unconscious interaction of forces. Water runs down hill without knowing that it does, without the internal structure to provide the vibratory rate which would permit knowing.

For long eras they too were imprisoned within the confines of a me-and-mine envisioning, and it took a major leap for them to conceive that other structures than the crystalline might have a form of awareness. Alien to their kind, perhaps, yet a kind which must be acknowledged.

For they found something, at last, in a viscid non-crystalline substance, protoplasm.

On one distant planet this substance was already differentiated and specialized to a high degree. From the simplest to the most complex of its organization there were degrees of awareness, and in the most complex of these there was undeniable evidence of sentience outside of self.

Joy! Unparalleled ecstasy!

Recognition is not wisdom. With the unwisdom of inexperience in communicating with an unlike thing, not realizing that the values of their kind of awareness might not be the values of this differing kind, they rushed in with all their powers and forces, a joyful rapturous pyrotechnical display of material manipulation to show this new life form that they too were aware—to communicate that the loneliness of one might now be softened by the presence of the other.

And man fell down to the ground and groveled his face in the dust.

His awareness was of the outer shapes of things, his security lay in adapting himself to those shapes, his certainties lay in the dependability of those shapes. A rock was a rock.

But no! The crystals were delighted that they had brought something which they could share with this new life form. The rock could be a tree! See!

And lo, the rock was a tree.

And the people were sore afraid.

For that which had been certain and sure was no longer so. This mountain wall which had formed an impassable barrier to migration into a new and richer valley was rent asunder, so! And beyond, the new valley beckoned. But the people huddled in their caves and dared not venture forth.

The vibrating entities, no longer dependent upon their crystalline forms, withdrew to confer among themselves. To one life form, awareness composed of the outer shape of things, the relationship of those shapes, security in the unchanging shape. To the other life form, awareness composed of the inner vibration, the relationships of those vibrations, with outer shapes changed at will, and therefore meaningless.

Yet even this protoplasmic life must see the changing shapes of things. The clouds that formed and disappeared; the seed that became root and stem and leaf and flower; the infant that became man, and man that decomposed as corpse. Surely this life form must see an inner cause! Surely they must see that even the permanent rock changed slowly into dust, that the eternal sea was restless, never still; that stars moved in the vault of heavens, warmth changed to cold and night to day. How did they account for changes in these outer forms if not by inner cause?

They changed the shapes of things themselves, these men; the seed ground into meal, the moving animal shot down with stick or stone and stilled and changed to food, the moving of the smaller rocks, erection of a dwelling made of poles and thatch to change environment for the man inside. Change, then, man knew; why fear the greater change, the easier one? Why tug and lift and strain to move the boulder from the path, when all was needed was to shift proportion in one tiny way, rebalance the equation of relationship with one slight thought, and lo, the stone no longer barred the way?

Too long ago, lost in the distant past, the crystals had forgot their own once-orientation of all other things to me-and-mine, forgot to credit it to man. To lift the boulder with one’s strength to serve a purpose was within the ken of man, a thing that he could do. To see it lifted, moved, without his strength, bespoke a greater strength than his, and purpose that he could not understand. And man fell to his knees in fear and awe.

For man knew only one relation to all things—to conquer if he could, and force acknowledgment of superior strength and purpose. To kill if that acknowledgment was not given. To survive by giving that acknowledgment to a stronger one than he.

Man groveled in the dust, the only pattern of survival that he knew when strength beyond his own was shown. But even while he knelt, to scheme a way that he-and-his might find ascendancy in future days. The one invariable pattern persisting from the cave man dressed in furs to diplomat in striped pants, the only pattern possible while me-and-mine ascendant is the aim and goal.

To show another pattern then, the crystals aim. Ascendancy of me-and-mine was meaningless, belonged to orders of awareness lower than intelligence that they could meet in partnership. Instruct them, then. No joy or purpose in conquering them. No companionship in these disgusting grovelings. Show them the inner forces that controlled the outer shapes of things.

Once crystals, now divorced from hardened form, the outer shape of things was no longer a consideration in their life; but for this form of life, still dependent for that life upon the maintenance of material form, no doubt the shapes and forms of things were paramount to them. Well then, show them the true relationship, sketch out upon the sands the diagram of how the forces that control the shapes of things are interwoven, interact.

Before the kneeling men, the cabalistic diagrams took shape, and lo, a spring of water flowed from dry and barren stone.

But man saw only shape of diagram, its cabalistic lines and form. A sacred thing, a magic thing, a sign that he might draw with finger in the air or in the sand, protection from the evil forces that surrounded him.

The sentient fields of force withdrew. Too soon, too soon. Man was not ready for communication. Too soon, too soon.

But man did not forget, the memory lived on. And fathers spoke to sons, and made the outer forms of gestures, drew the cabalistic signs, and told of magic things and powers that these signs could do. To some, one diagram was shown, a way to build a house of stone that better weathered the storms of Earth. The house of stone became a holy place, a thing existing in its own right, and not, as was intended, an example of one use to which this arrangement of forces might be put.

And to some other man another diagram was shown, this time to slay an animal for food. And men fought wars over these differing symbols, each side determined to make its symbol ascendant over the other.

Deep within the Asian land where contact had been made, the memories lived on, and some of the meaning of the diagrams beyond their outer shape had gained sway. The racial memory persisted, and in the latter Pleistocene epoch the knowledge of altering shapes through force of mind became a racial memory, coalesced into cults of belief, degenerated into forms and phrases; but from generation to generation the memory was kept alive that once, when the world was new, the form of things was indeed changed by thought. This holy man, far away and long ago, had pointed his finger at a tree, and lo! a beautiful nymph had stepped forth clad in jewels and coins to make him rich. This hero climbed a mountain and a voice spoke unto him, and proof of this were letters cut in stone. Well-witnessed, this divine one changed some water into wine, and fed a multitude from five small loaves and fishes.

A kind of radiation of its own, always the cults who sought the inner meanings formed within that Asian land and spread outward through the world.

But out on the periphery, and not exposed to thought of inner meanings, another cult took shape. Here concern was solely with the outer shape and size and weight and measurement of things, and how the size and shape and weight of one interacted with another. The Dravidian culture, which grasped only the idea but not the method of how the inner vibration could change the outer shape receded and became submerged in the Western cult that found a method in the measurement of shape and weight of things to make them change.

It was Rabindranath, centuries later, who described the essential difference between the Indian and the Grecian civilization as that between a forest culture which had known no walls, and a city culture where everything has limit and every inch must be mapped.

But perhaps, also, the Greeks had never seen this tree changed into bird, this cloud changed into flower. Not trapped by memories grown into tradition that must not die, they hit upon an approach that man could master. For it was the Greek beginnings which led to the Oxford definition of how to make scientific inquiry into the properties of things.

Inquiry into the properties, at first the outer shapes and weights, led inevitably straight back to vibrations. All matter is merely a specific vibration of energy, a range of vibrations feeling solid to the senses, as a range of light vibrations translate into color through the eyes.

E = MC²!

It took man far. He too began an exploration of the stars!

Failure in their first attempt had brought a wisdom to the sentient fields of force. This time they did not rush in with pyrotechnic displays to show the wondrous power they knew. Observing patiently through the centuries, by now they knew man well. They knew his weakness, yet by making thing react with thing, he’d proved his strength. For here he was among the stars.

Perhaps by now he might communicate? Perhaps, by now, he would not prostrate himself and grovel in the dust, if someone said, “Hello!”

But careful, perhaps he would.

There had been a man by name of Galileo, with the first crude telescope he’d made, who first saw the rings of Saturn. But not as rings, but rather in the planet’s tilting, he had seen a spot of light on either side. And sometime later, when he looked again, the tilting of the planet back had made the rings edge on, and so they disappeared. He never looked again, nor told of what he’d seen; for legend had it that the god Saturn periodically devoured his own children, and this phenomenon he’d seen, if it became widely known, would be interpreted as the proof the legend was correct—and do incalculable damage to scientific inquiry. He’d known the temper of his fellow man well enough to take no chances of this kind, to note the experience in his works, perhaps discuss it with a cautious friend or two, but to add no further fuel to the raging fires of superstition that consumed men’s minds and seared out possibility of rational thought.

So walk with care. For superstition still is paramount, despite the fact that some men know how to reach the stars.

To communicate this time, the fields of force took a sere planet, of barren, blistered rock, and with a concept made it into the garden of man’s dreams. On one island, they set up a crystalline structure, a thing, this much concession to the mind of man; a tool, to amplify and clarify their thought to reach the still rudimentary but nevertheless present centers of man’s mind—some certain man who might be ready to receive that thought.

Placed in man’s exploratory path, the waiting was not long until man found it. They had not led him to it through any intuitive change of course that he might find suspect. The explorers landed, claimed it for Earth, and went away. None among them felt any pull from the crystal tool upon the mountaintop.

The scientists came to make their measurements. Their busy minds were full of weight and size and the relationship of thing to thing. Perhaps by now they too were so committed to the use of a thing to act upon another thing that they could not countenance the thought that thought could act upon a thing direct. They measured the crystal tool, and recorded all their measurements, but found no meaning in its arches and its spires. If any felt the impact of the thinking of the fields of force, he made no sign nor gave response. Indeed, to preserve his status and reputation with his fellow scientists he’d not have dared admit a meaning that could not be measured with his instruments. Forevermore he’d be outcast, if he but hinted that he thought their science was insufficient to capture everything of meaning there. And to scientist most of all, his status with his fellow man means more than truth. At least to most. But are there some to whom the truth is paramount?

Yes, for had not scientist after scientist through the years risked and lost his status through his questioning? And then perhaps today there are such men.

So walk with care, and wait.

The colonists came, and as the scientists’ minds had been filled with measurements and weights and analyses; the colonists’ minds were filled with cabins, fields, food.

Surely, among men somewhere, there must be those not wholly captured on the one hand by formless superstition; and on the other hand not bound within the tightly narrowed circle of weight and measurement! Surely man must know by now he could not capture the inner meaning of a thing through a description of its outer surface.

But as long as man got by, and did great things by using physical things to act upon other physical things, even in considering the universal energy as a thing, he would look no farther.

All right then, a little nudge in another direction. Change the concept of the planet slightly, so that one thing cannot act upon another, no tool be used except this crystal set to act as intermediary. Let that happen, and out from Earth a man would come, perhaps a dozen men, perhaps a hundred ships, a thousand men, and all to find their ships, their tools, were gone. But someday there would come a man with mind trained in the ability to conceive that there might be a road to truth outside the useless superstitions that sent man to groveling in the dust at each small breath that blew, and also one who would not quit because he had no weather vane to test the direction of that breath.

And they would know when that mind came.

The first man came. Take away his tools and wait. He did not fall to earth in awe nor freeze in fear. His mind searched curiously. Enough. The man was here. Shield off the planet from the rest that he be undisturbed in his thought.

Could he go farther? Conceive the purpose of this lack of tools, that it was by design? And still not grovel in the dust? They’d made their move. Could he respond?

He drew a circle in the sand!

Joy! Ecstasy!

This time there might be surcease to the loneliness, and two intelligences so unlike commune. The very unlikeness of each bringing to the other thought not yet considered, and together going on to find…to find…

Now let him see the fallacy of such strict measurement. Now let him think, to realize that measuring the balance of the status quo of things in only one relationship of an infinity of possibilities, to realize that he can change his measurements to balance an equation designed to express the status quo, or with equal truth, at his desire, he can change the status quo, the shape of things, to fit the equation he desires.

Let him wander, puzzled, worrying on this. Let him work it out himself, for experience from long ago had taught them that if man was not ready to accept an alien thought he could not, would not, accept but in his own interpreting.

Now, at last, at his readiness to make things fit the equation he conceives, instead of making the equation fit the things as they are, bring him closer in the range of the amplifier, the crystal tool, that communication might be direct.

He holds the key.

He knows the lock.

He finds the door.

Show him the one small step remaining—the diagram, the design, the movement of the forces of his mind.

To turn the key.

Unlock the lock.

Throw wide the door.

26

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.

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.

“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 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.

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 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.

“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?”

“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 everything else.”

“Looks like it, then,” Hayes said with a vast weariness. “Some member of your crew, or one of the scientists,” he said. “Keep looking. Somebody’s hiding her, probably to keep the scandal from breaking. But it seems odd to me that she was so anxious to get out there near her husband and then in ten days she’d…”

“Maybe her real anxiety was to be near somebody already assigned to the ship,” the captain said. “I mean, we’ve got to consider all the possibilities. Somebody she knew there at E.H.Q.”

“Keep checking, Captain. I’ll see if the Board wants to contact E McGinnis. Maybe he knows what’s been going on around here that could lead us to the guy who’s hiding her.”

“I’ll keep checking, but she’s not on board my ship,” the captain said. He sighed. Bill Hayes sighed. They broke connection.

Hayes made contact with the Board chairman. It took only a few minutes to spin the latest tale of woe. Another minute for the Board to decide direct intervention.

“Now they want me to make contact with the other ship,” the operator said to the supervisor. “The Wheel himself wants to know if E McGinnis will talk to him.”

“Well, contact it, contact it,” the supervisor commanded urgently.

“I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” the operator quarreled back.

The both of them listened in on the conversation, on the grounds that testing the quality of reception was a necessity. E McGinnis’s pilot was quite explicit.

“E McGinnis left orders that under no circumstances was he to be disturbed,” the pilot said. “He, E Gray and Mrs. Gray are in his cabin, in conference.”

“E Gray! Mrs. Gray!” the chairman exploded. “Impossible. How the devil did they get into your ship?”

“Don’t ask me,” the pilot said in a tired voice. “I just work here. I’m sitting here minding my own business. I see E McGinnis’s door open. He leans out the door and gives me my orders. I look past him and I see E Gray and Mrs. Gray sitting in the room. Don’t ask me how they got in there. I don’t know. But I do know this, I’m going to get myself a nice quiet milk run to Saturn or someplace, soon as I get back to E.H.Q. If I ever do get back.”

“Now, now,” the Board chairman soothed. “I’m sure there’s a simple explanation.” Crewmen willing to pilot an E around the universe were hard to find.

“Yeah? After what I’ve seen out here, I don’t think I’d even want to hear it,” the pilot said, and without apology cut off the communication.

28

Had the pilot been able, a moment later, to look into the E’s stateroom he would have seen still another visitor, another who had not entered his ship by any normal means.

Attorney General Gunderson sat in a chair facing the two E’s and Linda. He seemed stunned, frozen into immobility. Only his eyes were alive, darting here and there, unbelieving. There is limit to the number of shocks the mind can withstand, and the series had come too fast for him to adjust to them.

He too had picked up Junior E Gray as soon as he came through the arch of the quartz outcropping on top of the mountain, the structure that somehow interfered with their visoscope’s ability to penetrate and see what went on inside. He had been watching when Gray suddenly disappeared from where he had been talking with the astronavigator. That had been a shock, immediately followed by a greater one, when the ship’s operator had scanned the valley and found Gray talking with the E’s pilot and the chief of the colonists. There was no way in which the journey could have been made that rapidly.

He was still watching when the village, the fields, the escape ship, the E ship all had suddenly materialized before his eyes. And the people were all clothed. It couldn’t be done, but he had seen it. But he kept his head. E science must be farther along than he’d realized, to produce a miracle such as this—but it was science. He must hold to that, otherwise…

He saw his case begin to melt out from under him, and he made one more effort to regain some measure of control. He gave his own pilot orders to land on the surface of Eden. He transmitted orders to the other two police ships to follow in close formation; the three of them to land and take custody.

But the barrier still remained, and the ships could not penetrate it.

He told himself that all wasn’t lost. Maybe the E was back in control of Eden, but he, Gunderson, still had a morals case. All those photographs! Some of the press and commentators might desert him, now that the Junior had proved adequate to the job. Unless he chose carefully, some stupid judge might decide the means were justified by the end result. But there were those photographs, and the world was full of Mrs. Grundy. He might have to back up a little bit on the incompetence of the Junior E, but Mrs. Grundy would be behind him a hundred per cent on the morals issue—when he released some of the photographs, and titillated her nasty imagination by reference to others too indecent to release.

It was then that the observer ship got a call through to him, and told him that the photographs, every one of them, had disappeared from the ship’s vault where they had been locked, and the only thing remaining in the vault was one little slip of paper which read, “Shame on you for taking feelthy pictures. Naughty, naughty! Calvin Gray.”

The case was crumbling, but all was not lost. He still had witnesses. He thought for a minute and began to wonder about those witnesses. Any judge, anybody around the courts, anybody connected with the press, and maybe even some of the public knew that any police officer will swear to any lie to back up another police officer because he might need the favor returned tomorrow.

Without concrete evidence…

He suddenly found himself standing in the cabin of the E ship, confronted by E McGinnis, Junior E Gray, and Mrs. Gray. He sank down in a chair and sat frozen, immobile. Only his eyes were alive, darting frantically here and there as if expecting some hole to open up and swallow him—perhaps wishing one would.

“I don’t know just what to do with you,” Cal said a little sadly, ruefully. “Far as the E’s are concerned, you’ve only been a minor nuisance, hardly worth noticing, but your intentions were dangerous. As far back as man’s history goes the growth of police powers immediately preceded and caused the fall and destruction of each culture.

“It is a law of the nature of man that he will resist the ascendancy of any special me-and-mine group over him; that this resistance will grow until man will even destroy himself in the attempt to destroy that ascendancy. In more recent history it was the growth, extension, and severity of the police in controlling every activity of man that destroyed both the United States and Russia.

“Now you are attempting to rebuild that same police control in world government. The result will be the same. Man will destroy himself in trying to destroy you.

“We in E don’t want that to happen. We see no need of it. We have already warned that the attitude of the police toward the public is the major cause of crime, that crime will increase with each increase of police power and severity until the whole structure rots and crumbles.

“Yet man has not yet progressed far enough to know how to maintain an organized society without some special body to enforce that organization. It’s a problem which the E’s haven’t solved, probably because we know too little about the natural laws affecting the behavior of man. Perhaps it is still a field belonging to non-science, because science doesn’t know enough yet to take hold of it.

“I would suggest, Gunderson, that you turn your talents and your organization to solving this problem of how to build an organized society instead of destroying it.”

The chair where Gunderson had sat was empty.

E McGinnis looked at Cal; he too was sitting silent and immobile. But E science had inured him to shock. He waited because it was E Gray’s show, and he was letting Cal handle it.

“Where is he now?” McGinnis asked when he saw the empty chair.

“Sitting at his desk in his office back on Earth,” Cal said with a grin. “Our boy has a few things to think about.”

“You’ve explained the theory back of all this”—McGinnis changed the subject—”but I still find it incredible. It’s still just theory.”

“Well,” Cal said, “theory comes first. Even to add two and two, you first have to get the idea that it can be done, a theory of how it is done, but that still won’t get you four. You’ve got to learn how to apply the theory.

“When I first found I knew how, I was pretty concerned. The whole basis of science is that anybody can do it, anybody who follows the step-by-step method. It doesn’t take any special gifts that can’t be trained. I had visions of a world, a universe of people, in possession of this theory and method before they were wise enough to use it, and chaos.

“But when I thought it over, I stopped worrying. The methods of science are also open to all. But few bother to learn them. Most prefer their frustrations and their miseries to making the effort which will solve them. For centuries the libraries containing all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of mankind have been free and open to anybody who wants to read, but few have bothered to absorb that knowledge and that wisdom.

“This new key we have that unlocks the door to another vista of knowledge, another point of view whereby we can change material things to suit our desire, is merely another advance of science. For science, after all, is no more than organized knowledge of reality. You can’t multiply six times six until you’ve learned how to add two and two. Most people won’t bother.

“It will be a long, long time before any significant number will graduate through all the normal seven steps of E science to become ready for the eighth. Some of the E’s will master it, but you know how few E’s there are. And the E’s have enough restraint, wisdom, and selflessness to use this new knowledge for the benefit of man instead of his detriment.

“I suspect that one has to be graduated beyond the desire to make me-and-mine ascendant over others before he can absorb this knowledge.”

“Maybe that’s my trouble,” McGinnis said slowly. “I’ve been thinking, all along, of how much power this gives the E’s. Wondering if even the E’s should have that much power over others.”

Linda spoke up.

“E McGinnis,” she said, “Cal has solved the problem of what happened to the colonists, why they didn’t communicate. Do you think this will qualify him for his big E?”

Both men burst into laughter.

“No question of it, Linda,” E McGinnis said with a chuckle. “But I doubt it really matters to E Gray, now. He can do things none of the rest of us can do, and the real question now is whether we have the right to call ourselves Seniors until we can match his ability.”

“I think,” Cal said slowly, “we’d better recommend to E.H.Q. that the colonists be withdrawn from Eden, assigned somewhere else. I’ve left the shield around the planet so none can enter or leave without the eighth key. I can unlock the door and close it again. Perhaps Eden should become the next step for the E, the next hurdle he must cross.

“When I’ve sent my ship and crew back to Earth, and we’ve removed all the colonists, it might be a good idea to restore Eden to what it was when I arrived—a place where no tools will work, no physical tools. To qualify for E, a man will be put on the island, where he can live as we lived, to work out the step-by-step method. When he’s ready, he can go into the thought-amplifier on top of the mountain, and if his mind is open enough to the potentials he’ll receive the final step of instruction—as I did.

“One by one, as the E’s shake free of their present projects, they can take this next step.”

“I’m not working on any project right now,” E McGinnis said hopefully.

“I’ll be right back,” Cal said with a grin, “and we’ll get started on it.”

The chair where he had been sitting was empty.

29

Cal stood within the crystal amphitheater atop the mountain and watched the interplay of lights until he felt communion come.

Rapture! Joy!

Question?

“Be patient,” he said. “There will be more, and more, and more.

“You had an advantage,” he reminded Them. “You started with a crystalline vibration nearer to the force field than that possible in protoplasm. We’ve had to come up the hard way.

“But we have come up.

“You had no competition. We’ve had to fight for our very lives every inch of the way, endure the setbacks lasting for centuries, millennia. It is no wonder that the me-and-mine-ascendant concept has dominated all our thought, and does still. Without it, we’d not have survived at all.

“It takes time to outgrow it, to learn we can survive without it. Five hundred years after Copernicus, a survey of the high school students in the United States revealed that a third of them still rejected his knowledge, still believed the Earth to be at the center of the universe and man was the reason why the universe had been created at all. But two thirds had adjusted.

“More important, there was a Copernicus.

“Don’t sell man short because he’s slow to learn, and you are impatient for fuller, deeper exploration of the truths in reality. He has much to offer you, as you to him. Competition for survival has given him ingenuity.

“Once all learned men believed the Earth to be the center of the universe, but there was a Copernicus who asked the question, ‘What if it isn’t so?’

“Millions of men watched apples fall to the ground, but one did ask if this might not be the key to the structure of the universe, the balance of the stars.

“Billions watched the stars, but finally one did ask, ‘What if the light be curved instead of straight?’

“There is capacity in man, this protoplasmic life, that had to learn an ingenuity which might surpass even yours.

“This is not the final door in the corridor of thought. Still other doors, on down the corridor, are yet to be explored. And you may need these special gifts of man to open them, as he has needed this new room of thought.

“Be patient. A million or a billion may come here to seek the method that can change things to fit the equation of desire, before one comes who asks a question even you have not conceived.

“But someday he will come—and ask.”

The lights danced faster now in patterns of delight.