Part 9 (1/2)

Cal wondered whether the orders to disintegrate had been a bluff. Would the attorney general have dared disintegrate a s.h.i.+p with even a Junior E on board? Maybe it had been just a threat of the local police, one they didn't expect to have called.

Or maybe he had played directly into the attorney general's hands by defying him, and getting that defiance on record was what the man had wanted.

Whatever it was, the Eden matter had become bigger than merely finding out what had happened to some colonists. Whatever it was, he'd better find a successful solution, because the attorney general was counting on him to fail. And if he did fail, certainly the position of the Junior E would be altered, and possibly a deep thrust into the very heart of the Senior E position, as well.

10

Louie was right. After they cleared the solar system there was no trouble getting _to_ Eden. And there was no trouble circ.u.mnavigating the globe while still in s.p.a.ce.

Closer, but still outside the atmosphere in their surveying spiral, they had no trouble in locating the island with Crystal Palace Mountain at its center. There was only one such spot on Eden, and in their telescope viewer its crystalline spires and minarets sparkled back at them like a diamond set in jade.

The trouble began when they hovered over the location, when they amplified their magnification to get a close look at the Appletree village before dropping down to land.

Louie found the right valley. He said it was the right valley, and he stuck 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 but virgin land. The trees were undisturbed, and old. There were splashes of rolling meadows spotted here and there by other trees, untilled meadows sloping downward from the ridges to the river. And not a blemish nor scar to show that man had ever landed there.

”Fine thing,” Norton chaffed him. ”Fine navigation, Louie. Get us clear across the universe in great shape, and then you can't even find the landing field.”

But Louie was in no mood for banter. He wished Tom would go back and hold the manual controls of the s.h.i.+p instead of letting it hover on automatic. He wished Cal would go back to his stateroom and think. He wished Frank Norton would shut up. He wished they wouldn't all stand over him, reading his charts over his shoulder.

In irritated silence he reduced the viewscope dimensions to scale, and snapped a picture of the whole island. He took the fresh picture, still moist from its self-developing camera, and laid it beside the chart.

Wordlessly, for the benefit of them all, he traced his pencil over the outlines of the chart and their duplicates in the picture. As in comparing fingerprints, he flicked his pencil at the points of ident.i.ty.

There were far too many to ignore. He poked the point of his pencil at Appletree where it was located on the chart. Then he picked out the same location 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 said over Cal's shoulder. ”You got us in the right place, Louie, but probably in the wrong time slot. You've warped us right out of our own time, and Eden hasn't been discovered yet. Maybe won't be for another million years. Maybe, back on Earth, man is just discovering fire.”

”Yeah,” Norton agreed. ”Or maybe in the wrong dimension. You and your fancy navigation. Now you take a midgit-idgit navigating machine. It wouldn'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 travel were still purely theoretical. Louie ignored the ribbing with elaborate patience.

”You know what I think,” he asked seriously. ”I think the whole thing's a hoax. I'll betcha there never was any settlement there. I'll betcha the colonists have pulled a whingding all the way through.”

”There's a whole raft of pictures to show they were there,” Frank reminded him.

”Pictures!” Louie answered scornfully. ”You think they couldn't fake pictures?” He thought for a moment. ”And where's their s.h.i.+p, their escape s.h.i.+p?” he asked as a clincher. ”They didn't like it here and have gone off somewhere else, and then covered up by sending reports and pictures on how things would have developed if they'd stayed.”

There was a sense of unreality in the whole conversation. Cal let the talk flow on, knowing it was a reaction to shock. What if a modern ocean liner pulled into the harbor of New York--to find an untouched Manhattan Island 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 could happen at any time. With a mind more open to acceptance of this, he had felt the run of shock sooner. For them, the shock impact was delayed since their minds rejected the illogical as unreal. For him the human shock came at once, and then, as E thinking took over, pa.s.sed off.