Eden Read Online Free PDF

caravan. First came the Doctor, now carrying his knapsack under his arm; behind him was the Captain; the Chemist brought up the rear. They had all opened their suits, rolled up their sleeves. Bathed in sweat, their mouths parched, they slowly dragged themselves across the plain. A long horizontal strip loomed on the horizon. The Doctor halted and waited for the Captain.
    "How far do you think we've gone?"
    The Captain looked back into the sun, in the direction of the ship. It was no longer visible.
    "The planet has a smaller radius than Earth's," he said, wiping his face with a handkerchief. "I'd say about five miles."
    The Doctor squinted, his eyelids swollen. His black hair was covered with a cloth cap. Every now and then he dampened the cap with water from his canteen.
    "This is madness, you know," he said, as they both looked at the spot on the horizon where, not long before, the ship had stood, a faint oblique line. All they could see there now were the slender silhouettes of the calyxes, pale gray in the distance. The calyxes had re-emerged behind them. The other men came up, and the Chemist threw his tent roll on the ground and sat on it.
    "Strange, that there are no signs of civilization," said the Cyberneticist, rummaging in his pockets. He found some vitamin pills in a crumpled packet and offered them around.
    "You wouldn't find such desolation on Earth," the Engineer agreed. "No roads, no aircraft of any kind."
    "What, you expect to find a replica of Earth's civilization?" the Physicist snorted.
    "This system is stable," the Doctor began, "so a civilization on Eden could be older than on Earth, and therefore…"
    "Assuming it's a civilization of anthropoids," the Cyberneticist said.
    "Let's get moving," said the Captain. "In half an hour we ought to reach that." And he pointed at a thin purple strip on the horizon.
    "What is it?"
    "I don't know. Water, maybe."
    "Shade would be enough for me right now," the Engineer croaked. He rinsed his mouth and throat with a gulp of water.
    There was a squeaking of straps as they hoisted their packs onto their shoulders, and the group spread out once more and resumed its trek across the sand. They passed a dozen more calyxes and several larger growths that appeared to be supported by lianas or creepers, but none of these was closer than six hundred feet, and they had no wish to deviate from their line of march.
    The sun was at its zenith when the landscape changed. There was less sand. Red, sun-scorched earth began to show in long, low ridges overgrown here and there with clumps of gray moss. When the men nudged the moss with their boots, it crumbled like burned paper. The purple strip, they saw, was made of separate groups of squat shapes, and its color was now clearer—more a green sprinkled with faded blue. A northerly breeze brought a delicate fragrance, which the men drew into their nostrils with cautious curiosity. As they neared a bent wall of tangled shapes, the men in front slowed so that the others could catch up, and the whole group finally came to a halt before a motionless façade of bizarre forms.
    From a hundred feet, the forms still looked like scrub, like a bluish thicket full of birds' nests—not so much because of any true resemblance as because of the eye's endeavor to find the familiar in the alien.
    "Are they spiders?" the Physicist asked hesitantly, and everyone saw spiders with small spindle-shaped bodies covered with thick bristles, standing motionless on extraordinarily long legs tucked under them.
    "They're plants!" exclaimed the Doctor, drawing nearer to one of the tall gray-green creatures. In fact, its "legs" turned out to be stalks, whose thickened, hair-covered nodes could easily be taken for the joints of an arthropod. These stalks, emerging from the mossy ground in groups of six, seven, or eight, converged, archlike, to form a "body" that, surrounded by thin gossamer threads glittering in the sun, resembled a flattened arachnid abdomen. The