Eight Keys to Eden Part 13

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 to leave 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 to vote 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 to be men, too, men and women. Everybody would join. He'd been pretty sure of it.

Even the dissenters who'd moved away across the ridge. That was the trouble with them. There hadn't been enough hardship to bind the community together. People forgot how to be kind to one another and get along when there wasn't any hardship to share among themselves.

It would mean deserting the planet entirely. Even though his sympathies were 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 go he couldn't stop them.

Maybe Earth would let the three-generation colonists come on out without the total test period. But maybe not. Maybe E.H.Q. would decide that Eden was too hard to colonize because it was too easy. Maybe they'd abandon the planet entirely. There'd be no more humans here, and no more coming.

That was when he hit the ground with a solid thump!

He first thought the hammock had somehow twisted out from under him, and he looked up at it resentfully, the way a man blames something else for his own fault. There wasn't any hammock.

At the same time, he heard Martha cry out. He craned his neck quickly in the direction of the house. There wasn't any house. Martha was standing there on bare ground, and there wasn't a dad-blamed thing else, not a stove, nor a chair, a dish, nothing.

And Martha didn't have a st.i.tch of clothes on her!

His first thought was that she ought to have more sense than to stand right 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 looking up in this direction.

The whole thing hit him like a blow on top the head. There wasn't any hammock. There wasn't any house.

There wasn't any village.

He saw a whole pa.s.sel of people squirming around down there where the village ought to be. They were standing, or crouched, or lying around as if 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 was still singing. Hadn't missed a note. Funny how a thing like that stood out above all the rest. Still singing.

Jed got up on his knees, scrambled to his feet, and dodged behind a tree. Fine lot of authority he'd have as village mayor if anybody saw him standing out in his front yard naked as a jay bird.

The reminder of his responsibility caused him to sweep his eyes beyond the sight of the village to where their s.p.a.ceship should be in its hangar, 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 was a grove of trees where the hangar ought to be. And it was the same grove they'd cleared away over two years ago. He recognized one of the trees because it had a peculiar shape.

And he remembered feeding the trunk of that very tree into the power saw for lumber. It was twisted and gnarled, and Martha had asked him to save the 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 out where the experimental fields ought to be. They'd cleared that whole area of timber and brush because it was a good, flat land. Only they hadn'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 the milk, Jed."

He turned around and looked at Martha. If he was crazy, so was she. Her eyes showed it. Her words showed it, at a time like this to be worrying about them fool calves getting out. It took all the comfort away from him. Her face was white, her eyes were dazed.

"You got some dirt on your cheek, Martha," he heard himself saying. "And for Pete's sake, woman, put on some clothes. The committee's coming over, and you running around like that!"

He thought he had the solution then. He'd fallen asleep in the hammock after 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 way things happened in a dream--even him and Martha running around naked. He even chuckled to himself. He must be a pretty moral kind of fellow after all, because even in a dream it was his own wife that was next to him there, naked--not some other man's.

The fool things a man can dream! Might as well make the most of it. He took her into his arms, and she clung to him.

Must have got the sheet tangled around his throat to choke him, and he was dreaming it was her arms. But there hadn't been any sheet in the hammock when he went to sleep.

And he wasn't dreaming.

"What's happened, Jed?" she whispered. Even her whisper was shaking with fear, and her arms were wound around his neck so tight now he could hardly 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, joshing her a little. "Nothing of the sort. It's just plain ... Well any scientist would tell you that ..." And then he stopped. He was pretty sure the frameworks of science, as he knew them, wouldn't be able to tell you.

He guessed that while they stood there clinging to one another, they both went a little nuts. It was sort of like drowning, he guessed. You'd have the feeling of sinking down and down, and there'd be nothing but blinding, swirling chaos all around you. Then you'd kind of come to for a minute, and there'd be the trees, the sky, the farm animals, the sea in the distance.

You'd look down toward the village, and make a mental note, almost absently, that people were getting to their feet now, some of them clinging together the way you and Martha were--and then back down into mental chaos you'd go again.

That went on several times, he remembered, before he'd begun to snap out of 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 being watched!"

Cal said nothing.

"You know," Jed explained. "Like catching an animal in a trap? Then watching 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.

14