13
It was one day around noon.
Jed Dawkins had come in early from his experimental field to get hisdinner, well, city folks would call it lunch, and so he'd be readyafterwards for a talk with the colony committee. He'd eaten his lunch,all right, a good one. There was never any scarcity of food on Eden.Always plenty, and wide variety. If anything, a man ate too much anddidn't have to work hard enough to get it. That was the main thing thathad been wrong with Eden, right from the start. Man was ordained to earnhis bread by the sweat of his brow, and there's no reason to sweat forit on Eden.
He was lying on the hammock that was stretched between two big trees inthe front yard of his house. The house was set a little way off from therest of the village, oh maybe five hundred yards more or less, not sofar he couldn't be handy when he was needed by the colony, but still farenough to give a man some space.
The domestic sound of rattled pots and pans came from the kitchen windowwhere his wife Martha was washing up after dinner. It was a drowsy,peaceful time. Honeybees they'd brought from Earth were buzzing theflowers Martha had planted all around. A bird was singing up in thetrees above him. A man ought to be pretty contented with a life likethat, he remembered telling himself. Ought to be.
He felt like taking a nap, but made himself keep awake because thecommittee was coming right over, and he didn't want to wake up allgroggy, the way a man does when he sleeps in the daytime. Couldn'tafford to be groggy because the committee was all set up to scrap outsomething that was splitting the colony right down the middle.
He remembered looking out at the fields where the grains and vegetableswere growing, thinking how easy it was to farm here--plenty of rain,plenty of sun, no storms to flatten and ruin the crops, not even enoughinsect pests to worry a man. He looked out at the fenced pastures wherethe colony's community stock grazed.
The horses had eaten their fill and were ambling up from the drinkingpond, getting ready to take a siesta of their own in the shade of sometrees at the corner of their pasture. The cows were already lying downin a grove of trees and were sleepily chewing their cuds. The greengrass around them was so tall he could barely see their heads and backs.
His house was on top of a little hill, knoll you might call it. Martha,like himself, had been raised in West Texas where all you could see, asthe city feller said, was miles and miles of miles and miles. She nevercould stand not being able to see a long ways off, and she'd picked outthis spot herself. They could see all the valley and the sea, and somedim shapes of islands in the distance. Right nice.
Yes, it was all very peaceful--and tame.
That was the main trouble in the colony. Too tame. Some of them gotrestless. They argued the five-year test was all right for most planets.You needed every bit of it to prove that man could make it there, orcouldn't, or how much help he would need from Earth, maybe for a while,maybe always.
On Eden you didn't have to prove anything. There wasn't anything to makea man feel like a man, proud to be one. Maybe that would be all rightfor ordinary folks, but for experimental colonists it was a slowdeath--almost as bad as living on Earth.
Sure, they'd made their complaints to Earth. Half a dozen times or maybemore. They'd asked for an inspector to come out and see for himself, andsee what it was doing to the colonists. Jed put it right up to E.H.Q.that they were plumb ruining a prime batch of colonists with this easyliving.
A man had to stretch himself once in a while if he expected to growtall.
Some of the colonists were getting so lazy they'd stopped bitching andwere even talking about maybe just staying on here after theexperimental was over--maybe getting a doctor to reverse the operationso they could have kids--which, of course, you couldn't have in anexperimental colony.
And that was bad. What with easy living and wanting kids as was normalto most, experimental colonists weren't so plentiful that Earth couldafford to lose any.
Some of the colonists wanted to leave this--well, they called it a LotusLand, whatever that was--right away, before everybody went under, gotplumb ruined. They were all for taking the escape ship and hightailingit back to Earth. Sure, they knew there'd be a stink, and they'd get alittle black mark in somebody's book for not obeying orders to stick itout. But that was better than losing their trade, their desire to followit. Maybe there'd be a penalty and they'd be marooned to stay on Earthfor a while. But they'd bet there was a hundred planets laying idleright now because there weren't enough experimentals to go around.
They'd get a black mark, but after a while they'd get another job too.Anyway, living on Earth couldn't be any worse for them than living here.
Half of them wanted to stay here permanently. The other half wanted toleave right now. That was what the committee was going to decide today.He'd done some checking around, and it looked like they were going tovote to go. He'd also checked with them who wanted to stay permanently,and it looked like, in a showdown, they'd come along. They were proud tobe men, too, men and women. Everybody would join. He'd been pretty sureof it.
Even the dissenters who'd moved away across the ridge. That was thetrouble with them. There hadn't been enough hardship to bind thecommunity together. People forgot how to be kind to one another and getalong when there wasn't any hardship to share among themselves.
It would mean deserting the planet entirely. Even though his sympathieswere with the ones who wanted to go, Jed felt there was something wrong,real bad, about deserting the planet. Still and all, if they voted to gohe couldn't stop them.
Maybe Earth would let the three-generation colonists come on out withoutthe total test period. But maybe not. Maybe E.H.Q. would decide thatEden was too hard to colonize because it was too easy. Maybe they'dabandon the planet entirely. There'd be no more humans here, and no morecoming.
That was when he hit the ground with a solid thump!
He first thought the hammock had somehow twisted out from under him, andhe looked up at it resentfully, the way a man blames something else forhis own fault. There wasn't any hammock.
At the same time, he heard Martha cry out. He craned his neck quickly inthe direction of the house. There wasn't any house. Martha was standingthere on bare ground, and there wasn't a dad-blamed thing else, not astove, nor a chair, a dish, nothing.
And Martha didn't have a stitch of clothes on her!
His first thought was that she ought to have more sense than to standright out in the yard plumb naked. What was the matter with her anyhow?He peered quickly down toward the village to see if anybody was lookingup in this direction.
The whole thing hit him like a blow on top the head. There wasn't anyhammock. There wasn't any house.
There wasn't any village.
He saw a whole passel of people squirming around down there where thevillage ought to be. They were standing, or crouched, or lying around asif they'd fallen down.
And every one of the crazy galoots was plumb naked.
And so was he! He'd just realized it.
It had all happened so quietly that that fool bird up in the tree wasstill singing. Hadn't missed a note. Funny how a thing like that stoodout above all the rest. Still singing.
Jed got up on his knees, scrambled to his feet, and dodged behind atree. Fine lot of authority he'd have as village mayor if anybody sawhim standing out in his front yard naked as a jay bird.
The reminder of his responsibility caused him to sweep his eyes beyondthe sight of the village to where their spaceship should be in itshangar, always ready for instant escape if anything should go wrong,real wrong, that is. This ship wasn't there. The hangar wasn't there.Nothing.
For a little bit he thought he must be looking in the wrong direction.He'd got turned around or something in the confusion, because there wasa grove of trees where the hangar ought to be. And it was the same grovethey'd cleared away over two years ago. He recognized one of the treesbecause it had a peculiar shape.
And he remembered feeding the trunk of that very tree into the power sawfor lumber. It wa
s twisted and gnarled, and Martha had asked him to savethe wood for furniture because it was real pretty. That was the tree,there on the edge of the grove.
He felt drunk, in a daze. He turned the other direction and looked outwhere the experimental fields ought to be. They'd cleared that wholearea of timber and brush because it was a good, flat land. Only theyhadn't, because that was virgin forest, too.
Maybe he'd gone insane? He felt a flood of relief. Sure, that was it.He'd just gone insane, that was all. Everything else was all right.
"The calves have got loose to the cows and they're going to take all themilk, Jed."
He turned around and looked at Martha. If he was crazy, so was she. Hereyes showed it. Her words showed it, at a time like this to be worryingabout them fool calves getting out. It took all the comfort away fromhim. Her face was white, her eyes were dazed.
"You got some dirt on your cheek, Martha," he heard himself saying. "Andfor Pete's sake, woman, put on some clothes. The committee's comingover, and you running around like that!"
He thought he had the solution then. He'd fallen asleep in the hammockafter all, while he was waiting for the committee, and he was dreaming.Of course, he ought to have known all along. This was just the waythings happened in a dream--even him and Martha running around naked. Heeven chuckled to himself. He must be a pretty moral kind of fellow afterall, because even in a dream it was his own wife that was next to himthere, naked--not some other man's.
The fool things a man can dream! Might as well make the most of it. Hetook her into his arms, and she clung to him.
Must have got the sheet tangled around his throat to choke him, and hewas dreaming it was her arms. But there hadn't been any sheet in thehammock when he went to sleep.
And he wasn't dreaming.
"What's happened, Jed?" she whispered. Even her whisper was shaking withfear, and her arms were wound around his neck so tight now he couldhardly breathe.
"Now, now, Martha," he cautioned. "Don't you go getting hysterical."
"What has happened?" she asked again.
"I don't know," he said. They were both talking in low tones.
"It's some kind of a miracle," she whispered.
"Now there's a woman's thinking for you," he chided her fondly, joshingher a little. "Nothing of the sort. It's just plain ... Well anyscientist would tell you that ..." And then he stopped. He was prettysure the frameworks of science, as he knew them, wouldn't be able totell you.
He guessed that while they stood there clinging to one another, theyboth went a little nuts. It was sort of like drowning, he guessed. You'dhave the feeling of sinking down and down, and there'd be nothing butblinding, swirling chaos all around you. Then you'd kind of come to fora minute, and there'd be the trees, the sky, the farm animals, the seain the distance.
You'd look down toward the village, and make a mental note, almostabsently, that people were getting to their feet now, some of themclinging together the way you and Martha were--and then back down intomental chaos you'd go again.
That went on several times, he remembered, before he'd begun to snap outof it a little.
"But the funniest thing of all," Jed said, and looked at Cal quickly,penetratingly. "I had the feeling all the time that we were beingwatched!"
Cal said nothing.
"You know," Jed explained. "Like catching an animal in a trap? Thenwatching it, to see what it will do?"
Cal nodded, without speaking.
"It was just another crazy thought, I guess," Jed said deprecatingly."Plumb crazy."
But, clearly, he didn't believe it was.