Eight Keys to Eden Part 19

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 p.r.o.ne 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 gra.s.sy 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 hards.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+ne. 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 l.u.s.ty young male compet.i.tion.

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 stars.h.i.+ne. They were quiet, reposed, listening.

"Ever since man got up off the bottom of his ocean of air," he said, "and out into s.p.a.ce, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p had arrived.

No doubt the s.h.i.+p would expect light signals from the colonists in acknowledgment of their s.p.a.ce flare.

If the s.h.i.+p had come while this portion of the planet was still in daylight, they would have seen there was no village, no s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+p themselves, the three men could antic.i.p.ate 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 s.h.i.+p on the horizon.

The colonists were no longer hiding, but were freely wandering in open s.p.a.ces. If the s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed, 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 rea.s.suring men in such deep distress that they could not answer.

Rea.s.suring 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 s.h.i.+p to see clear detail upon the ground, the three men were ready for a better attempt at answering the s.h.i.+p's signal.