Eight Keys to Eden Read online

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  EIGHT KEYS TO EDEN

  BY MARK CLIFTON

  NOVELS Eight Keys To Eden They'd Rather Be Right* The Forever Machine*

  NON-FICTION BOOK Opportunity Unlimited

  NOVELETTES Remembrance and Reflection How Allied What Thin Partitions** Sense From Thought Divide Star, Bright Hide! Hide! Witch! A Woman's Place Clerical Error What Now, Little Man? Do Unto Others

  SHORT STORIES What Have I Done? The Conqueror Kenzie Report Bow Down To Them Reward For Valour Progress Report** Crazy Joey** We're Civilized** Solution Delayed**

  ARTICLES It Can't Be Done The Dread Tomato Affliction

  * _In collaboration with Frank Riley_ ** _In collaboration with Alex Apostolides_

  EIGHT KEYS TO EDEN

  by Mark Clifton

  Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York 1960

  _All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental._

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-9470 Copyright (C) 1960 by Mark Clifton All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition

  Transcriber's Note:

  Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. Variant and dialect spellings remain as printed. Superscript text is preceded by the ^ symbol, bold text is shown as =bold=, and {d} represents the Greek letter _delta_.

  To

  Charles Steinberg

  who made writing possible for me

  EIGHT KEYS TO EDEN

  SEVEN DOORS TO SEVEN ROOMS OF THOUGHT

  =1= Accept the statement of Eminent Authority without basis, without question.

  =2= Disagree with the statement without basis, out of general contrariness.

  =3= Perhaps the statement is true, but what if it isn't? How then to account for the phenomenon?

  =4= How much of the statement rationalizes to suit man's purpose that he and his shall be ascendant at the center of things?

  =5= What if the minor should become major, the recessive dominant, the obscure prevalent?

  =6= What if the statement were reversible, that which is considered effect is really cause?

  =7= What if the natural law perceived in one field also operates unperceived in all other phases of science? What if there be only one natural law manifesting itself, as yet, to us in many facets because we cannot apperceive the whole, of which we have gained only the most elementary glimpses, with which we can cope only at the crudest level?

  =And are those still other doors, yet undefined, on down the corridor?=

  1

  One minute after the regular report call from the planet Eden wasoverdue, the communications operator summoned his supervisor. His fingerhesitated over the key reluctantly, then he gritted his teeth andpressed it down. The supervisor came boiling out of his cubicle,half-running down the long aisle between the forty operators hunchedover their panels.

  "What is it? What is it?" he quarreled, even before he came to a stop.

  "Eden's due. Overdue." The operator tried to make it laconic, but itcame out sullen.

  The supervisor rubbed his forehead with his knuckles and punchedirritably at some buttons on an astrocalculator. An up-to-the-secondstar map lit up the big screen at the end of the room. He didn't expectthere to be any occlusions to interfere with the communications channel.The astrophysicists didn't set up reporting schedules to include suchblunders. But he had to check.

  There weren't.

  He heaved a sigh of exasperation. Trouble always had to come on hisshift, never anybody else's.

  "Lazy colonists probably neglecting to check in on time," herationalized cynically to the operator. He rubbed his long nose andhoped the operator would agree that's all it was.

  The operator looked skeptical instead.

  Eden was still under the first five-year test. Five-year experimentalcolonists were arrogant, they were zany, they were a lot of things, someunprintable, which qualified them for being test colonizers and nothingelse apparently. They were almost as much of a problem as theExtrapolators.

  But they weren't lazy. They didn't forget.

  "Some fool ship captain has probably messed up communications byinserting a jump band of his own." The supervisor hopefully tried outanother idea. Even to him it sounded weak. A jump band didn't last morethan an instant, and no ship captain would risk his license by using theE frequency, anyway.

  He looked hopefully down the long room at the bent heads of the otheroperators at their panels. None was signaling an emergency to draw himaway from this; give him an excuse to leave in the hope the problemwould have solved itself by the time he could get back to it. He chewedon a knuckle and stared angrily at the operator who was sitting back,relaxed, looking at him, waiting.

  "You sure you're tuned to the right frequency for Eden?" the supervisorasked irritably. "You sure your equipment is working?"

  The operator pulled a wry mouth, shrugged, and didn't bother to answerwith more than a nod. He allowed a slight expression of contempt forsupervisors who asked silly questions to show. He caught thesurreptitious wink of the operator at the next panel, behind thesupervisor's back. The disturbance was beginning to attract attention.In response to the wink he pulled the dogged expression of the unjustlynagged employee over his features.

  "Well, why don't you give Eden an alert, then!" the supervisor mutteredsavagely. "Blast them out of their seats. Make 'em get off their--theirpants out there!"

  The operator showed an expression which plainly said it was about time,and reached over to press down the emergency key. He held it down.Eleven light-years away, if one had to depend upon impossibly slowthree-dimensional space time, a siren which could be heard for tenmiles in Eden's atmosphere should be blaring.

  The supervisor stood and watched while he transferred the gnawing at hisknuckles to his fingernails.

  He waited, with apprehensive satisfaction, for some angry colonist tocome through and scream at them to turn off that unprintable-phrasessiren. He braced himself and worked up some choice phrases of his own toscream back at the colonist for neglecting his duty--gettingExtrapolation Headquarters here on Earth all worked up over nothing. Hewondered if he dared threaten to send an Extrapolator out there to checkthem over.

  He decided the threat would have no punch. An E would pay no attentionto his recommendation. He knew it, and the colonist would know it too.

  He began to wonder what excuse the colonist would have.

  "Just wanted to see if you home-office boys were on your toes," theinsolent colonist would drawl. Probably something like that.

  He hoped the right words wouldn't fail him.

  But there was no response to the siren.

  "Lock the key down," he told the operator. "Keep it blasting until theywake up."

  He looked down the room and saw that a couple of the near operators werenow frankly listening.

  "Get on with your work," he said loudly. "Pay attention to what you'rerecording."

  It was enough to cause several more heads to raise.

  "Now, now, now!" he chattered to the room at large. "This is nothing toconcern the rest of you. Just a delayed report, that's all. Haven't youever heard of a delayed report before?"

  He shouldn't have asked that, because of course they had. It was likeasking a mountain climber if he had ever felt a taut rope over the razoredge of a precipice suddenly go slack.

  "But there's nothing any of you can do," he said. He tried to cover theplaintive note by adding, "And if you louse up your own messages ..."But he had threatened them so often that there was no longer any menace.

  He spent the next ten minutes hauling out the logs of Eden to see ifthey'd ever been tardy before. The logs covered two and a fractionyears, two years and four months. The midgit-idgit scanner didn't pickup a single symbol to show that Eden had been even two seconds offschedule. The first year daily, the second year weekly, and now monthly.There wasn't a single hiccough from the machine to kick out anExtrapolator's signal to watch for anything unusual.

  Eden heretofore had presented about as much of an _outre_ problem as anIowa cornfield.

  "You're really sure your equipment is working?" he asked again as hecame back to stand behind the operator's chair. "They haven't answeredyet."

  The operator shrugged again. It was pretty obvious the colonists hadn'tanswered. And what should he do about it? Go out there personally andshake his finger at them--naughty, naughty?

  "Well why don't you bounce a beam on the planet's surface, to see?" thesupervisor grumbled. "I want to see an echo. I want to see for myselfthat you haven't let your equipment go sour. Or maybe there's a spacehurricane between here and there. Or maybe a booster has blown. Or maybesome star has exploded and warped things. Maybe ... Well, bounce it,man. Bounce it! What are you waiting for?"

  "Okay, okay!" the operator grumbled back. "I was waiting for you to givethe order." He grimaced at the operator behind the supervisor. "I can'tjust go bouncing beams on planets if I happen to be in the mood."
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  "Now, now. Now, now. No insubordination, if you please," the supervisorcautioned.

  Together they waited, in growing dread, for the automatic relays strungout through space to take hold, automatically calculating the route, setup the required space-jump bands. It was called instantaneouscommunication, but that was only relative. It took time.

  The supervisor was frowning deeply now. He hated to report to the sectorchief that an emergency had come up which he couldn't handle. He hatedthe thought of Extrapolators poking around in his department, upsettingthe routines, asking questions he'd already asked. He hated theforethought of the admiration he'd see in the eyes of his operators whenan E walked into the room, the eagerness with which they'd respond toquestions, the thrill of merely being in the same room.

  He hated the operators, in advance, for giving freely of admiration toan E that they withheld from him. He allowed himself the momentarysecret luxury of hating all Extrapolators. Once upon a time, when he wasa kid, he had dreamed of becoming an E. What kid hadn't? He'd gonefarther than the wish. He'd tried. And had been rebuffed.

  "Clinging to established scientific beliefs," the tester had told himwith the inherent, inescapable superiority of a man trying to be kind toa lesser intelligence, "is like being afraid to jump off a precipice infull confidence that you'll think of something to save yourself beforeyou hit bottom."

  It might or might not have been figurative, but he had allowed himselfthe pleasure of wishing the tester would try it.

  "To accept what Eminent Authority says as true," the tester hadcontinued kindly, "wouldn't even qualify you for being a scientist.Although," he added hopefully, "this would not bar you from an excellentcareer in engineering."

  It was a bitter memory of failure. For if you disbelieved what sciencesaid was true, where were you? And if it might not be true, why was itsaid? Even now he shuddered at the chaos he would have to face, livewith. No certainties on which to stand.

  He washed the memory out of his thought, and concentrated on theflashing pips that chased themselves over the operator's screen. Therewas nothing wrong with the equipment. Nothing wrong with thecommunication channels between Eden and Earth.

  "Blasted colonists," the supervisor muttered. "Instead of a beam ontheir planet, I'd like to bounce a rock on their heads. I'll bet they'velet all the sets at their end get out of order."

  He knew it was a foolish statement, even if the operator's face hadn'ttold him so. Any emergency colonist, man or woman--and there were fiftyof them on Eden--could build a communicator. That was regulation.

  "You sure there haven't been any emergency calls from them?" he askedthe operator with sudden suspicion. "You're not covering up some neglectin not notifying me? If you're covering up, you'd better tell me now.I'll find out. It'll all come out in the investigation, and ..."

  The operator turned around and looked at him levelly. He looked himover, with open contempt, from bald head to splayed feet. Then he coollyturned his back. There was a limit to just how much a man could stand,even to hold a job at E Headquarters.

  It was about time the supervisor got somebody with brains onto the job.The sector chief should be called immediately. Supervisors were supposedto have enough brains to think of something so obvious as that. Thatmuch brains at least.