18
All the rest of that day, and throughout the following, Cal and Tomworked with Jed in trying to round up the colonists, get them livingtogether again.
By agreement, Ahmed and Dirk stayed with the small band of coloniststhat had overcome their fears enough to mingle together again. Louiefrankly deserted his shipmates, and spent all his time with thecolonists. Frank, as if reverting to his childhood farming days,occupied himself with trying to round up the stock. He tried to keep thecows separated from their calves so the colonists would have milk todrink, but without ropes or corrals it was hopeless. He finally gave uphis attempt to husband the stock, and he too seemed content then tomingle with the colonists.
The marked change in Louie could not be ignored, for he was not idlingaway his time in lazy feeding and sleeping. He had dropped his lifelongpose of superficial complaint that the fates always gave him the dirtyend of the stick, and now he spent his time preaching to the little bandof colonists. Or wandering through the forests and undergrowth calling,praying, comforting.
Cal felt no condemnation for him. He was not the first man, seeminglydedicated to science, who, confronted with mysteries beyond his power tocomprehend, reverted to childlike superstitious awe for an explanation.In the face of mystery or catastrophe, it takes a faith beyond thecapacity of most to continue believing that the universe has a rationalorder to its laws that can be comprehended if man persists. It istemptingly easy for man to revert back to the irresponsibility ofchildhood, assuming that the control of phenomena is in the hands ofthose stronger, wiser than he. It takes a strength, in the face of thistemptation, to go on believing that man _can_ know, that it is notmorally wrong for him to know.
No blame then for Louie.
Tom was torn in his loyalties. He frequently remembered that away fromE.H.Q. the crew become the E's attendants, and that their first duty isalways to the E. But separation from the other two men of his crew waslike the loss of a part of himself. To these also he had a duty. Hetried to solve his problem by alternating his time, spending part of itwith Cal, the remainder with his crew.
Cal and Jed made a trip the following morning across the ridge, andfound the dissident group huddled together in abject terror. They hadseen the ship coming down through the atmosphere and, all together, theyhad climbed the ridge, where one of their scouts had recently gone, towatch the ship's landing--and its disappearance.
Once they were found, it took little persuasion to convince them theyshould return to the other colonists, that differences of opinion meantnothing now as against the need of human beings to cling together in theface of catastrophe.
But they too were having trouble thinking in a straight line, and eventhough they first appeared eager to join the other colonists, it tooksome doing to keep them all together and moving forward to cross theridge, to come down the other side, to assemble again at the site of thevillage with the others.
And yet, within minutes, neither band seemed to remember that they hadever been separated.
By the time they had returned, it was apparent that Louie was succeedingwhere Jed had failed in finding the colonists. In the few hours thathad elapsed, the nucleus had tripled in size. Louie's wandering throughthe brush, calling, pleading with them to follow him, promising therewas no danger if they would allow him to watch over them, intercede forthem with Those who had caused all this, had indeed coaxed them fromtheir hiding places, calmed their fears.
And still through the day he toiled, finding them, bringing them backinto the fold, one and two and three at a time, until, at last, by Jed'scount, all were there, no more missing.
And yet, in spite of his success, there was a kind of hurt anddisappointment in Louie's eyes. For once back, they not only forgottheir fears, they seemed also to forget him. They coalesced into aplacid herd, without memory of their panic. Without memory of theshepherd who had found the lost sheep and returned them to the fold.
They wandered among the trees and bushes, picking fruit and nuts, eatingleaves and stems and flowers of plants. They wandered down to the riverto lie prone on the sand, dip their faces into the clear cold water todrink. During the heat of the day they bathed in the river, and as theylay on white sand or grassy slopes to dry, they slept contentedly.
The phenomenon was not as startling to Cal as it might have seemed toothers.
On Earth, gradually learned through trial and error, experimentalcolonists were not picked for their jobs because of flexible, incisive,or brilliant minds. Quite the contrary. The basic test of a successfulcolonist was endurance--the endurance of hardship, privation, the stoicindifference to conditions of discomfort, monotony, pain, uncleanliness,immodesty--conditions which would send a more imaginative or sensitivetemperament into a downward-spiraling syndrome of failure. They were thekind of men and women who, on Earth in an earlier time, had been able toendure the harshness of the sea, of arctic cold, jungle disease, desertheat; to make those first steps in taming a hostile environment, so thatmen with less endurance, but with more delicately poised and sensitiveminds, following them might then endure.
It was characteristic of such men and women, even under Earthconditions, that they seldom questioned their reasons for these things.They simply went, and endured, and tamed. Even on Earth, when the taminghad been done, they moved on. This was the stuff of the experimentalcolonist.
Now, here, that temperament still persisted. They had fled in panic, butnow they had returned to their original purpose--to endure. It wasenough.
Louie was to learn, in disappointment, that failure to be curious aboutscientific reasoning was usually accompanied by an equal failure to becurious about philosophical implications. They listened idly to hisexhortations, but their eyes did not light with fire nor cloud withdoubt. 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 thebank of the river where the sky was clear and the stars beginning toshine. 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 ofanimals. So far there had been no attempt of the old males to drive theyoung 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 anddestroying lusty young male competition.
They were talking of the curious fact that all three of them seemed ableto continue thinking in a straight line, hold their minds to a subject,while all the rest grew more vague, less retentive, more content to livefrom moment to moment, without concern for past or future.
Except Louie. He too seemed able to hold his thinking in a straightline, one tangential to theirs. He seemed, in these hours, to haveturned wholly mystical, to a stronger belief that they were beingwatched and cared for by some higher power, and that this was for apurpose. 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 peculiarco-ordinate system," he said to Tom and Jed. "But I must doubt it issupernatural in the way Louie interprets. Anything appears to be magicwhen we don't understand how it happens, and becomes science when wedo."
He paused, and looked at his companions' faces in the starshine. Theywere 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 ofintelligence which doesn't behave the way we do. Not prepared to doanything about it, you understand," he said with a shrug. "Justtheoretically prepared that it might happen. It was a possibility. Nowit 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 somehuman 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. Iguess scientists do that all the time. D
on'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 backto 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 bearyoung in captivity. We can't because of an operation. Maybe whatever'sholdin' 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 theywould behave no matter what, I had to kill 'em, because they was toodangerous to let run around among humans. That could happen."
"I haven't done much trapping," Tom said. "But in zoos I've watchedanimals in cages. The thought always came to me that if they could thinkthe 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 highobstruction, but don't figger on it for a low one. Sometimes theyflutter up against it, or try to push it over, but most of the time theyjust walk around and around in the yard lookin' for an opening."
"Natural survival pattern," Cal commented. "In the woods, in theirnatural state, when they came up against a fallen log, it took moreeffort to lift their heavy bodies in flight over it than it took to walkaround the log. It became a fixed pattern of behavior to walk aroundit."
"That's what they do with a low fence then," Jed said. "They just keeptryin' to walk around the obstruction. Not enough sense to treat it likea high fence, because it ain't high, see? No use tryin' to tell 'em it'shigh, because they know it ain't. So they can't solve it. Seems awfulstupid, somehow, a little low fence, all that blue sky above 'em, andthey can't figger it out."
"I suspect that's what's happening to us," Cal said. "We've alwaysargued that wherever there is matter and energy in the universe, certainnatural laws will prevail. We've learned ways to take advantage of thosenatural laws, to do certain things that will make them work for usinstead of against us.
"We've always argued that for any kind of intelligence to arise in theuniverse it, too, would have to become aware of these natural laws; thatit, too, would have to do these same certain things to take advantage ofthose laws; that because the laws and what to do about them would alwaysbe 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'tso important as its mental evolution--because that mental evolutionwould 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 toonarrow. Maybe we're like the turkey. We've become so fixed in ourpattern of solving a problem we can't change, can't back off and takeanother 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 toextrapolate any co-ordinate system? I'm not criticizing," he addedhastily. "Just asking."
"I suspect even our means of extrapolation are too limited, too based onthe relationship of things and forces to each other, too set in thenotion that only physical tools can affect physical things. We may belooking at a low fence, calling it a log, and therefore not able tounderstand why we can't walk around the obstruction in the usualmanner." He stopped, and added with a shrug. "Stupid, maybe. Or like theturkey, the yard is so big that he never gets a picture of it as a wholeenclosure. By the time he's wandered down this side of the fence he'sforgot what he found on the other side. Never can put the whole thingtogether in his mind. That's my trouble, anyhow. So far, I'm not able toput 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 tounlock an opening, or maybe realize the only way out is to fly."
There beside the softly flowing river, where water was obeying naturallaw without any trouble, the three men broke off their discussion whenthey saw a bright flash high in the sky above them. All three knew whatit meant.
Another E ship had arrived.
No doubt the ship would expect light signals from the colonists inacknowledgment of their space flare.
If the ship had come while this portion of the planet was still indaylight, they would have seen there was no village, no ship, noequipment for direct communication. They may even have reasoned therewas no means of signaling with artificial light.
But there was nothing to tell them that those on Eden could not build afire.
As if they were present on the ship themselves, the three men couldanticipate what must be happening there. Right now they would beanxiously waiting for signal flares to light up, to spring up likesignal 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 openspaces. If the ship had arrived before dusk they would have seen the menand women in the viewscopes. If after dusk, they still might havespotted them in the infrared viewers which picked up the heatdifferentials and gave a fair approximation of shapes.
The men on the ship would be waiting and looking at their watches. Howlong, they would be asking, does it take those colonists, that E downthere, 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 directlyon him, and he waved his arms above his head. But apparently they hadnot spotted him, for there was no answering flare.
At intervals of five minutes at first, then later cut to fifteenminutes, throughout the long night the flares continued to light thesky.
"Talk to us," the flares begged. "Surely you were expecting us. Surelyyou would not all be sleeping so soundly that our light could not rouseyou."
Several times the three men stood up and waved their arms, but itbrought no answer from the ship. In the darkness perhaps the equipmentwasn't good enough. Perhaps in the night breeze bushes and trees alsoswayed with movement.
Once there was a rustle in the brush, and in the starlight theyrecognized the figure of Louie approaching them.
"This has got to stop," he said worriedly as he came up to them. "Thatlight is an unnatural thing. It will anger Them. It is not meant for thepeace of Eden to be disturbed by any artificial thing. And if Theyshould turn Their wrath upon us--woe, woe!"
His face was stricken in the light of a new flare, and as suddenly as hehad come to object, he left, plunged back under the trees to seek hispeople, be beside them, comforting them when disaster struck down.
After a time the three men gave up trying to wave their acknowledgmentof the flares in darkness. They watched for an hour or so, and thentried to sleep. The periodic flares continued to come throughout thelong night, as if now no longer pleading for acknowledgment, but ratherreassuring 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 continuingflares, they did sleep. But at the first hint of dawn, Cal awoke andaroused his two companions, and by the time there was enough light forthe ship to see clear detail upon the ground, the three men were readyfor a better attempt at answering the ship's signal.
They went up to the village site, where the colonists were sleeping inthe way a herd is bedded down together. They awoke Frank and Martha,Ahmed and Dirk, and told them of their plan. Louie, too, awoke, heardthe plan, and tried to warn them against it. Any attempt, he said, tocommunicate with those not on Eden would surely increase the wrath ofThose who wanted only the natural state here--a wrath still withheldbecause of superhuman mercy, but which must not be tried too far.
In spite of his warnings, Cal, and those co-operating with him, gottogether enough colonists to carry out his plan.
Good-naturedly, the colonists did as they were told, but with theattitude that it was something amusing, that there was nothing they'drather be doing at the moment. Any sense of urgency about communicatingwith home seemed to have been washed from their minds.
In a clear space, on the soft grass, Cal got the colonists to sit or liein certain positions. Checked against Tom's knowledge of ancient signalpatterns, 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, andlast three more men lay in another triangle. Cal hoped someone on theship 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 shipso bright that it could be seen in the morning sky. They had read hissignal, and now they began a series of flashes, of questions. "What'sgoing on down there?" was the essence of their questioning.
It was well the ship had caught the first signal, for the colonists lostall interest in the game which had no point. They simply stood up andwandered away in search of their breakfasts from the trees and bushes.
Louie, who had stood to one side glowering, now took charge of themagain and shepherded them to a grove of trees where the fruit seemedespecially large and succulent.
But now that the ship had spotted him, Cal could signal alone. He laydown on the ground, himself, to move his arms in semaphore positions.But even as he lay back, he became conscious that he, too, could hardlycare less. With a detached interest that amounted to amusement at suchchildish, primitive things, he watched his arms spell out one moremessage.
"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 stageof growth, completed a task, cut himself off from an environment thathad held him back. What the ship did, in response to his warnings, nolonger mattered. If it landed, its personnel too would join thecolonists. If it obeyed the request of an E, it might circle thereindefinitely.
Indefinitely watching the turkeys circle inside their low fence, unableto 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. Theirscience had nothing to do with him, nothing to offer him. Through it hecould not reach a solution.
Somehow he knew that already.