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

research team prior to their demise. Again, there wasn’t nearly enough of it to tell us what we needed to know. There may have been clues there, but the possibility of picking them up was minimal. Knowing the composition of alien biomolecules isn’t much good unless you also know about their activity and functions.
    “Well,” I said to Zeno, at the end of it all, “any ideas?”
    “Something’s missing,” he said. “The dry-land ecosystem doesn’t make sense. The ground vegetation is waist-high—a tremendous biomass. Nothing eats it except insects. If there are enough insects to crowd out herbivores, what eats the insects? In the marshes, anything might be lurking under the water—but on the land, where do they hide?”
    “Perhaps they’re just discreet,” I said.
    He shook his horny head. “There must be more to it than that.”
    I wasn’t so sure. Herbivores don’t have to be the size of cows. They might still be under the surface—if one reckoned the level to which the grasses grew as the “surface”. They might be any size from field mice to pigs. I pointed this out.
    “Something,” he insisted, “is missing. Not from the world, but from this picture of it. There is something the men and the robots alike have failed to see.”
    “Maybe they’re too well camouflaged,” I suggested.
    “Maybe,” he said. I could tell that he wasn’t convinced.
    We could have continued the discussion for a long time, no doubt, without getting anywhere, but as it happened, we didn’t get the chance. We were invited—perhaps summoned would be a better word—to have dinner with Captain Juhasz himself, and we dispersed in order to make ready for the occasion. I took a shower and changed my skinsuit; no doubt if there’d been any way to dress formally for dinner I’d have found it, but shipboard life isn’t geared to such intricacies of habit.
    He received us in what I supposed to be his cabin.
    The bunk was partitioned off, though, and the space we occupied was mostly occupied by a conference table whose screens had been covered with plastic sheets in order to make it resemble a dining table. The chairs had harnesses by which we could secure ourselves but the food was in the same old tubes.
    I was faintly surprised to find that neither Harmall nor Alanberg was included in the invitation. Apparently, Juhasz had already spoken to them at great enough length. There were only six at table—the five of us who were scheduled to make the drop and the great man himself.
    All through the meal, I was uncomfortable. Juhasz didn’t say much while we were actually eating, but he kept looking at us, one by one, and I got the impression that he wasn’t much liking what he saw. Indeed, it seemed almost as if he would rather that we didn’t exist. I couldn’t quite figure that, until he finally opened up and started talking. Then I realized that it hadn’t quite been the way Harmall implied, when he had first briefed us on Sule. Juhasz hadn’t decided to wait for help from Earth at all.
    “You may find this difficult to believe,” he said, “but we did not expect the Earth Spirit to come to us in response to our lighting of the Hyper-Spatial Beacon. We looked upon the lighting of the beacon more as a ritual—hoisting the flag to signal our success. We expected messages of congratulation, perhaps, or silence. It may seem foolish, but we did not expect that we would have made a unique discovery. Indeed, we had anticipated our small and long-delayed triumph as a rather ordinary event. The actual situation regarding the exploration of the galaxy comes as a surprise. Of course, when Captain Alanberg learned of our problem, he was quick to claim that it could be solved more easily with Earth’s resources than our own. There seemed to be no way that we could decline his offer of help...but you may understand why I was—and am—a little reluctant to accept it.”
    He paused, but no one wanted to comment.
    “I had not