Free Eden by Stanislaw Lem Page B

Doctor's pale face and dark beard appeared below them. "Really?" he asked, then broke into a noiseless laugh. As the men stared at the dials, he clambered up from the gallery and sat down next to the Physicist. Like the others, he watched the pointers all in working position. "Do you know what?" he said finally, in a youthful voice. Everybody looked at him, as if waking up. "I've never been so happy," he whispered and turned away.

IV
    Just before nightfall the Captain went out on top with the Engineer to get a breath of fresh air. They sat down on a bank of upturned earth and fixed their eyes on the last visible sliver of the ruby-red solar disk.
    "I wouldn't have believed it," murmured the Engineer.
    "Nor I."
    "That pile—they built it well."
    "Solid Earth workmanship."
    They said nothing for a while.
    "It's a good start," said the Captain.
    "Yes, but we've only done about a hundredth of what has to be done in order for the…"
    "I know," the Captain replied calmly.
    "And we still don't know if…"
    "Yes, the steering nozzles, the whole lower deck."
    "But we'll do it."
    "Yes."
    The Engineer's eyes stopped on a long mound at the top of the knoll: the place where they had buried the creature. "I completely forgot…" he said in amazement. "It's as if it happened a year ago."
    "I haven't. I've been thinking about it—about the creature—the whole time. Because of what the Doctor found in its lungs."
    "What did he find?"
    "A needle."
    "A needle?!"
    "Or not a needle—you can see for yourself. It's in a jar in the library. A piece of thin tubing, broken, with a sharp end, almost like something used to give injections."
    The Engineer stood up. "It's curious, but somehow I don't find that interesting. I feel now like someone at a foreign airport, at a stopover of a few minutes, who mixes with the local crowd and sees strange, incomprehensible things but knows that he doesn't belong to the place and that soon he will be flying away. So to him it's all distant, indifferent."
    "It won't be that soon…"
    "I know, but that's how I feel."
    "Let's go back. We have to replace the stopgaps before we turn in. And install proper fuses. Then the pile can be put on idle."
    "All right, let's go."
    They spent the night in the ship, leaving the small lights on. Every so often one of the men would wake up, check with sleepy eyes to see if the bulbs were glowing, and fall asleep again, reassured.
    In the morning, the first piece of equipment to be mobilized was the cleaning robot. Every quarter of an hour or so, it became helplessly stuck in the wreckage that obstructed everything. The Cyberneticist, armed with tools, would run after it, extricate it from the rubbish, removing pieces that had proved too large for the neck of the grasper, then start the thing up again. The robot shuffled forward, took on the next heap of wreckage, and soon got stuck again. After breakfast the Doctor tried out his shaver. The result was a man in a bronze mask: the forehead and skin around the eyes were tanned, but the lower part of the face was white. Everyone followed his example.
    "We should feed ourselves better," concluded the Chemist, surprised by his gaunt reflection in the mirror.
    "What do you say to fresh game?" proposed the Cyberneticist.
    The Chemist shuddered.
    "No, thank you. Don't even mention it. I had nightmares about that … that…"
    "That animal?"
    "Animal or…"
    "What else could it have been?"
    "Can an animal start a generator?"
    Everyone was listening to the conversation.
    "All things at a higher level of development wear clothing of one form or another," said the Engineer, "and that doubler was naked."
    "Interesting. You said 'naked,'" observed the Doctor.
    "So?"
    "You wouldn't say that a cow or an ape was naked, would you?"
    "That's because they have hair."
    "A hippopotamus or a crocodile has no hair, yet you don't call them naked."
    "So? It just seemed the right thing to say."
    "Precisely."
    They fell silent for a while.
    "It's almost