10
Louie was right. After they cleared the solar system there was notrouble getting _to_ Eden. And there was no trouble circumnavigating theglobe while still in space.
Closer, but still outside the atmosphere in their surveying spiral, theyhad no trouble in locating the island with Crystal Palace Mountain atits center. There was only one such spot on Eden, and in their telescopeviewer its crystalline spires and minarets sparkled back at them like adiamond set in jade.
The trouble began when they hovered over the location, when theyamplified their magnification to get a close look at the Appletreevillage before dropping down to land.
Louie found the right valley. He said it was the right valley, and hestuck to his claim stubbornly.
But there was no settlement there. No sign there had ever been.
Louie could see that for himself, they told him. There was nothing butvirgin land. The trees were undisturbed, and old. There were splashes ofrolling meadows spotted here and there by other trees, untilled meadowssloping downward from the ridges to the river. And not a blemish norscar to show that man had ever landed there.
"Fine thing," Norton chaffed him. "Fine navigation, Louie. Get us clearacross the universe in great shape, and then you can't even find thelanding field."
But Louie was in no mood for banter. He wished Tom would go back andhold the manual controls of the ship instead of letting it hover onautomatic. He wished Cal would go back to his stateroom and think. Hewished Frank Norton would shut up. He wished they wouldn't all standover him, reading his charts over his shoulder.
In irritated silence he reduced the viewscope dimensions to scale, andsnapped a picture of the whole island. He took the fresh picture, stillmoist from its self-developing camera, and laid it beside the chart.Wordlessly, for the benefit of them all, he traced his pencil over theoutlines of the chart and their duplicates in the picture. As incomparing fingerprints, he flicked his pencil at the points of identity.There were far too many to ignore. He poked the point of his pencil atAppletree where it was located on the chart. Then he picked out the samelocation in the picture.
It was not the science of navigation that was wrong.
"It's just one of those dirty tricks life plays on a fellow," Tom saidover Cal's shoulder. "You got us in the right place, Louie, but probablyin the wrong time slot. You've warped us right out of our own time, andEden hasn't been discovered yet. Maybe won't be for another millionyears. Maybe, back on Earth, man is just discovering fire."
"Yeah," Norton agreed. "Or maybe in the wrong dimension. You and yourfancy navigation. Now you take a midgit-idgit navigating machine. Itwouldn't know how to pull such fancy short cuts. Take a little longer,maybe, but when we got there we'd be there."
They were both talking nonsense and knew it. Time and dimensional travelwere still purely theoretical. Louie ignored the ribbing with elaboratepatience.
"You know what I think," he asked seriously. "I think the whole thing'sa hoax. I'll betcha there never was any settlement there. I'll betchathe colonists have pulled a whingding all the way through."
"There's a whole raft of pictures to show they were there," Frankreminded him.
"Pictures!" Louie answered scornfully. "You think they couldn't fakepictures?" He thought for a moment. "And where's their ship, theirescape ship?" he asked as a clincher. "They didn't like it here and havegone off somewhere else, and then covered up by sending reports andpictures on how things would have developed if they'd stayed."
There was a sense of unreality in the whole conversation. Cal let thetalk flow on, knowing it was a reaction to shock. What if a modern oceanliner pulled into the harbor of New York--to find an untouched ManhattanIsland in its virgin state?
It couldn't happen, therefore it wasn't to be treated seriously.
"Better set up communication with Earth," Cal said quietly.
In E science the unpredictable, the incredible, the illogical couldhappen at any time. With a mind more open to acceptance of this, he hadfelt the run of shock sooner. For them, the shock impact was delayedsince their minds rejected the illogical as unreal. For him the humanshock came at once, and then, as E thinking took over, passed off.
"Sure, Cal," Lynwood agreed. It was a measure of their acceptance thatthey had quite normally fallen into using his first name.
On the emergency signal it took less than three minutes to clear througheleven light-years to E.H.Q.--and then sixteen minutes for the operatorat base to find Bill Hayes.
"Sector Chief Hayes here," the voice said at last through the speaker.
"Gray here, on the Eden matter," Cal answered. "Any other E'savailable?"
"Hm-m," Hayes answered. "Wong has picked up on a problem in the Pleiadessector, and left this morning. Malinkoff has given out word not todisturb him if the whole universe falls apart. That leaves McGinnis,who, I believe, is spending his time working on the defense against theinjunction by Gunderson. An example of the way petty restrictions canbring a fine mind down to trivial problems. But he said call him if youneed him."
"Please," Cal said. "And you might stay on while I talk to him, ifyou're not busy."
"Sure, E Gray, sure," Hayes answered. "I'm flashing the operator tolocate McGinnis. Seen anything of the police ship, yet? I understand oneis following to observe what you do."
"I'm sure it will be a big help," Cal said drily. "Not that it matters,so long as it doesn't get in the way."
McGinnis came on at that point.
"I'm not yelling for help, yet," Cal told him. "But here's what it islike at this end." He sketched in the details, and heard a sharp gasp atthe other end from Hayes.
"Now I'd like to stay on this problem," he concluded his brief summary."But somewhere there's fifty colonists in trouble because this wholething is out of focus. I'm not a full E, and maybe their lives are moreimportant than my ambition to do a solo job. Certainly more important.Then, trivial as it is, we'd be playing right into Gunderson's hands ifwe've sent out a boy to do a man's job."
"Dismiss the Gunderson side of it," McGinnis said drily. "It'sinconsequential to the main issue. As for that, I don't know any morethan you do. There's never been anything like this. Colonists have beenwiped out on other planets, sure; but what happened left traces. Thisone is an oddball, and I'd say you're as well equipped to handle it asanybody else."
"I don't--I don't understand this at all," Hayes said in a worriedvoice.
"Who does?" Cal asked. "I'd say set up for continuous communication.I'll leave it wide open here, so that everything we say will comethrough. Then, if anything should happen to us, you'll have the recordup to that point."
"It's the only thing we can do," Hayes agreed.
"If you think I should come out there to stand by, I'll do it," McGinnissaid. But the tone of his voice said he hoped Cal would shoulder thefull responsibility, not weaken out of a chance at a real solo.
"I'm not crying uncle, yet," Cal said. "But I may have to take you up onthe offer. I hope not."
"But do you _know_ anything is wrong?" Hayes asked incredulously. He washaving the same trouble facing the reality as the ship's crew.
"If you were flying to Los Angeles and found only desert where the cityis supposed to be, you might assume something was wrong," Cal answereddrily. "But I don't know what it is. Do you have a recorder set up, so Ican begin trying to find out?"
"Yes, yes, E Gray," Hayes said hurriedly. He was suddenly conscious thathe had been interrupting an E conversation, not once but several times."Pardon the intrusions. It was just that ..."
"I understand," Cal reassured him.
When Cal stood up from the communicator, the eyes of the crew were onhim. Overhearing his conversation with Earth had sobered them, madereality come closer.
"You think it might be a mirage?" Tom asked. "Some freak air currentreflecting from another island and superimposing over this one?" Then heanswered himself. "No. I guess it isn't. There aren't enoughdiscrepancies."
"Let's pan down to the groun
d with the scanner," Cal said. "Take it slowover the area where the village is supposed to be."
Glad to be doing something with his hands, Lynwood twisted the controlsto take them instantly, in magnification, to a distance slightly abovethe tops of the trees. The automatic pilot caused the ship to drift withthe rotation of the planet, keeping them in fixed relative position.
They scanned the ground rod by rod. There were expanses of heavy treeand bush growth that they could not penetrate. Some of these trees grewwhere the pictures showed cleared fields, buildings, truck gardens,cattle pastures.
"Those big trees didn't grow up in a month, since the last colonistreport," Louie said positively. He still clung to his belief that it wasall a hoax.
Cal made no comment. He was intent on the scanner screen. There wereheavy foliage spots, but there were also bare areas covered by a soft,springy turf and patches of wild flowers. But there was no sign of manor his works. There was not so much as a board, the glint of a nail, nota furrow, not even the scar of a campfire. And no indication that therehad ever been.
In the sandy patches along the banks of the small meandering river,there was not even a footprint.
They swept the scanner down the valley.
"Wait a minute," Cal said. "There are some cows and horses." He held thescanner fixed while they studied the animals. In two small herds, theanimals grazed contentedly near a patch of woods.
"We're in the right time slot, then," Tom said, with an attempt to pickup the spirit of treating it lightly. "They've been here. Else the cowsand horses wouldn't be."
"Funny thing about those horses," Frank commented in a puzzled voice. "Igrew up on a farm. Those are work horses, but field horses always haveharness marks on them where the hair gets rubbed off or the skin getscalloused. If they used these horses for work, there ought to be collarand hames rubs on their necks. There ought to be worn streaks left bythe traces on their sides. There isn't. Far as the evidence shows, theymight have been wild all their lives."
"Whatever happened didn't seem to hurt them any," Cal agreed.
He swept the scanner on down the valley to the sandy shore of the sea.They were close enough to pick up the brown streaks of beached seaweed.A flock of shore birds were busy running up the sand away from thegentle, beaching waves, then following the water line back down to digtheir beaks into the soft, wet sand for food. The birds showed no alarm,no sign of lurking presence near them.
Cal brought the scanner back up the valley and over to one of theridges bordering it. High on the crest of the ridge, the undergrowth wasless luxuriant than down in the valley.
And it was here they caught their first glimpse of a human being.
He was hunkered down behind some rocks at the crest, peering over themat the valley below. From the shape of his shoulders and back, the setof his head, they knew it to be a man. As far as they could tell, he hadno clothes on. Apparently they had caught him at the moment of hisarrival at the crest.
They watched him turn his head as he looked quickly, then searchingly,up and down the valley. They watched his hand come up to shade his eyesagainst the light from Ceti as he attempted to see into the dark patchesof foliage where the village ought to be.
What he saw, or did not see, seemed to stun him. He squatted, as frozenas a statue for long moments. Then, on hands and knees, they saw himback away from the crest. Now they saw he did not wear even so much as abreechclout. When the height of the ridge concealed him from the otherside, he sprang to his feet and began to run, zigzagging in the mannerof an obstacle racer to avoid the bushes.
"Looks like they've decided to make a nudist colony of it," Lynwoodcommented.
"And faked the pictures so nasty-minded old Earth people wouldn't comeout to break it up," Louie persisted.
"Then why should he be so scared?" Frank asked.
"Notice that patch of bare dirt he's crossing?" Cal asked. "See thelittle spurts of dust when he puts his feet down? Now look behind him."
The three crewmen leaned closer to look over his shoulder at thescanning screen. Cal adjusted it minutely, to get a sharp focus on theground.
"No footprints!" Lynwood exclaimed. "He doesn't leave any footprints!"
The three of them looked at Cal, wide-eyed. Cal didn't like what he sawin Louie's eyes. The habitual irritation and annoyance with life'slittle petty tricks was gone.
The look had been replaced with fear, and something more.