Eight Keys to Eden Part 12

Better than some."

Cal drew a deep breath, consciously squared his shoulders, fought off the urge to like dejection.

"Then everybody's still alive?" he asked.

"Oh yeah, sure. n.o.body's kill't. Just hidin' out in the woods, and mostly from each other. It's a turrible thing." He looked down at himself with a wry grimace. "Not outta shame," he added. "We've seen naked bodies before. Just plumb scared, I guess."

To talk, to hear himself talking, and that to strangers, to tell somebody about it, seemed to restore some confidence in himself.

Something of quiet dignity came back over him, a knowledge of responsibility for leaders.h.i.+p. He straightened, as if silently reminding himself that he was a man.

"I'm Jed Dawkins," he said. "Sort of the kingpin of the colony, I reckon you might say. Mayor of Appletree, or what was Appletree. I don't rightly know if I'm mayor of anything now. This here is Ahmed Hussein, and this miserable hunk o' man is Dirk Van Ta.s.sel. Manner of speakin',"

he amended. "He ain't no more miserable than the rest of us."

"I'm Calvin Gray," Cal answered. He indicated his crew. "This is Tom Lynwood, Frank Norton, Louie LeBeau. They're all good men. Just under the weather right now."

"You should'a seen us when it first happened," Jed said with feeling. "I reckon you're the E? Come to find out why we didn't communicate?" He spread his open hands and waved them to indicate the area around him.

"Now you see why we didn't. Hollerin' loud as we could wouldn't do the job, and that's all we got left."

Somehow the introductions relaxed them all a little, as if the familiar formality provided some kind of normalcy in an incredible situation.

"Don't seem right hospitable, just standin' here," Jed added with a shrug. "But there ain't no house, nor camp, nor fire to share with you."

"We're not suffering at the moment, except mentally," Cal rea.s.sured him.

Involuntarily he glanced up at the spreading branches of the tree, as if to rea.s.sure himself also; then grinned in self-consciousness at the pantomime of fear. "First thing is to find out what happened."

"Might as well hunker down right here on the ground," Jed said. "One place is good as another right now."

The men all crouched or sat on the dead leaves which carpeted the ground. Cal suddenly realized he was glad to take the strain from his legs, as if he had been maintaining stance through sheer will.

"It is a poor greeting to visitors from home," Ahmed spoke up, then cleared his voice in surprise to hear himself speaking. "We cannot even provide a cup of coffee."

"Cain't have no fire," Dawkins explained. "See?"

He picked up two dead twigs laying on the ground near him. He began rubbing them together, in the ancient way of creating fire. The two sticks flew apart and out of his hands.

"Try it," he invited Cal.

Curious, even unbelieving, Cal picked up two broken branches. He started to rub them together. He felt them twisted, wrenched, and pulled out of his hands. He saw them flying through the air with a force he had not provided. He got up, picked them up again, sat back down, and held the sticks very tightly in his hands. He tried to bring them together.

Suddenly, he simply lost interest.

"Oh to h.e.l.l with it," he said unexpectedly, and dropped the sticks. His astonishment at himself was a shock.

There was a kind of chuckle from Van Ta.s.sel, one without mirth. "Kind of gets you, doesn't it?" he said.

Cal looked at his hands, and at the sticks laying beside him.

"Now why would I do that?" he asked. "All at once it seemed unimportant to start a fire, or even try. What's happened here? What's been going on?"

"Cain't explain it," Dawkins said. "Sort of hoped you bein' an E, and all ..."

"Maybe if you told me just what happened, started at the beginning when everything was normal...."

"Something else you should tell him, Jed," Ahmed spoke up. He looked at Cal, and explained himself. "We don't think easily," he added. "Can't keep our minds on anything for more than a minute or so. In fact, I'm a little surprised that we've been able to carry on the conversation this long. From the way we've been behaving, I would have expected more that we'd have wandered away back into the woods before now--simply left you to your own devices without interest in you. Strange."

"Yeah," Jed confirmed, "I was thinkin' that, too. Funny thing. Right now I feel like I could tell the whole yarn. I feel like ... Well, while I'm in the mood I'd better git it said. Don't know how long I can keep interested.

"Well, there we were, one day, seems like it ought to be about a week ago, give or take a couple of days. Anyway, I remember it was around noon...."

13

It was one day around noon.

Jed Dawkins had come in early from his experimental field to get his dinner, well, city folks would call it lunch, and so he'd be ready afterwards 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 and didn't have to work hard enough to get it. That was the main thing that had been wrong with Eden, right from the start. Man was ordained to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, and there's no reason to sweat for it on Eden.

He was lying on the hammock that was stretched between two big trees in the front yard of his house. The house was set a little way off from the rest of the village, oh maybe five hundred yards more or less, not so far he couldn't be handy when he was needed by the colony, but still far enough to give a man some s.p.a.ce.

The domestic sound of rattled pots and pans came from the kitchen window where his wife Martha was was.h.i.+ng up after dinner. It was a drowsy, peaceful time. Honeybees they'd brought from Earth were buzzing the flowers Martha had planted all around. A bird was singing up in the trees above him. A man ought to be pretty contented with a life like that, he remembered telling himself. Ought to be.

He felt like taking a nap, but made himself keep awake because the committee was coming right over, and he didn't want to wake up all groggy, the way a man does when he sleeps in the daytime. Couldn't afford to be groggy because the committee was all set up to sc.r.a.p out something that was splitting the colony right down the middle.

He remembered looking out at the fields where the grains and vegetables were 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 enough insect pests to worry a man. He looked out at the fenced pastures where the colony's community stock grazed.

The horses had eaten their fill and were ambling up from the drinking pond, getting ready to take a siesta of their own in the shade of some trees at the corner of their pasture. The cows were already lying down in a grove of trees and were sleepily chewing their cuds. The green gra.s.s 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, as the city feller said, was miles and miles of miles and miles. She never could stand not being able to see a long ways off, and she'd picked out this spot herself. They could see all the valley and the sea, and some dim 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 got restless. 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, or couldn'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 make a man feel like a man, proud to be one. Maybe that would be all right for ordinary folks, but for experimental colonists it was a slow death--almost as bad as living on Earth.

Sure, they'd made their complaints to Earth. Half a dozen times or maybe more. They'd asked for an inspector to come out and see for himself, and see 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 easy living.

A man had to stretch himself once in a while if he expected to grow tall.

Some of the colonists were getting so lazy they'd stopped b.i.t.c.hing and were even talking about maybe just staying on here after the experimental was over--maybe getting a doctor to reverse the operation so they could have kids--which, of course, you couldn't have in an experimental colony.

And that was bad. What with easy living and wanting kids as was normal to most, experimental colonists weren't so plentiful that Earth could afford to lose any.

Some of the colonists wanted to leave this--well, they called it a Lotus Land, whatever that was--right away, before everybody went under, got plumb ruined. They were all for taking the escape s.h.i.+p and hightailing it back to Earth. Sure, they knew there'd be a stink, and they'd get a little black mark in somebody's book for not obeying orders to stick it out. But that was better than losing their trade, their desire to follow it. Maybe there'd be a penalty and they'd be marooned to stay on Earth for a while. But they'd bet there was a hundred planets laying idle right now because there weren't enough experimentals to go around.