Free The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel by Brian Stableford Page A

some other way. On Earth, the amphibians had been “superseded”; on Naxos they had held their own—maybe by doing things that the amphibians of Earth never had a chance to do.
    I nursed these ideas while I looked most carefully at the woefully inadequate information the Ariadne ’s eager resources had managed to harvest. I didn’t voice them too loudly to my companions, though; there were reasons for being discreet. (Reasons, I hasten to add, which had nothing to do with Jason Harmall’s passion for secrecy, but with more mundane concerns like the inability to defend my prejudices against skeptical criticism, and the fact that any scientist always wants to have a little theory up his sleeve, in case it helps him to be first to the answer to a puzzle. Intraspecific competition isn’t just a feature of gene pools.)
    After a couple of hours of studying the photographs and related data I began to feel that the law of diminishing returns was definitely taking its toll, and that there wasn’t much more to be learned without actually going into the field. Caution, though, demanded that I soldier on, in case vital clues to the puzzle concerning the deaths of Ariadne ’s advance guard might somehow turn up. Zeno and Angelina Hesse likewise accepted their burden with good grace. Not so Vesenkov, however, who—as a pathologist—had little or no interest in ecological analysis.
    “Time wastes,” he pronounced, in his inimitable style. “Plain bloody stupid. Answer in corpses. Rotting away.”
    He repeated this opinion to Captain d’Orsay, who promised that we would all be under way just as soon as the equipment transferred from the Earth Spirit was properly stowed in the capsules we’d be riding down to the surface.
    “It’s not an easy job,” she pointed out. “Falling through atmosphere isn’t nearly as smooth as gliding through hyperspace. Even with the best parachutes there’s quite a bump when you hit the ground.”
    “Should use shuttle,” growled the Russian.
    “Wasteful,” she said. “One shuttle would carry ten times as much weight as the four capsules you’ll be riding down in. We want the shuttle to drop a whole crew, if there is no danger...if you can give us a way to stop what happened once happening again.”
    “You’d have to use the shuttle anyway, to lift us off,” I pointed out.
    “If you have proved that there is no danger,” replied the captain, “the shuttle which takes down our second crew can bring you back. If you prove that the danger is too great—perhaps there will be no need to bring you back at all.”
    I could see the economics of the argument, but I didn’t have to like it. The simple fact was that using a shuttle which could set us down and then take off again was very much more energy-expensive than dropping us in heat-shielded capsules, but I would have thought that the special circumstances would have permitted a little less parsimony. In the least likely eventuality, we might prove the world uninhabitable and still need lifting off...and there was also a chance that our survival might depend on the ability to make a quick getaway.
    “I heard that Juhasz wanted to send a whole crew down with us,” I observed.
    “Even had we done so,” she replied evenly, “they would have gone down the same way that the first crew went down. We would not have used the shuttle.”
    To make allowances for her, I guess that spending ten generations and more cooped up in a big tin can with a closed ecology would make one rather oversensitive to questions of energy economics.
    “Are you sure that you can put the capsules down on the right spot?” I asked.
    She dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “The computers will calculate the trajectories, and will operate the controls by radio. There will be no problems.”
    I went back to looking at pictures. Later, we all progressed to endless tables which had been collated out of the biochemical data transmitted back by the