The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

awakened periodically to carry out systems checks and to evaluate incoming information.
    “Once into the cluster, she hit an apparent jackpot. The evidence suggests that at least ten of the G-types have planetary systems, and the odds seem good that at least half of those have life-supporting planets. Ariadne headed straight for the likeliest prospect, and found this.”
    Schumann dimmed the lights, and Harmall dabbed at a button on the screen with one of his long fingers. It was a still picture, not a video-tape, but it looked as sharp now as when it was taken.
    Earth, from space, looks blue with lots of white streaks. The continents never really show up very well, and they always look rather undistinguished—mottled and muddy—by comparison with the smooth, bright ocean. This world, by contrast, was mostly green-and-white. The clouds might have been Earthly clouds, white and voluminous. The other “Earthlike” worlds don’t have clouds like that. They either have a greenhouse atmosphere that is mottled in shades of grey without a break, or they have hardly anything at all. The surface below the clouds, if it really was land, appeared to be highly verdant. If there was water there, it must have been a virtual soup of photosynthetic algae.
    Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Angelina Hesse. She was watching me. Clearly, she’d already seen the peep-show.
    “It’s a very similar kind of world to our own,” said Harmall. “Apparently, though, it’s more stable. Less axial tilt, a trifle smaller, with a shorter day. A single moon, but much smaller than our own—less influential in terms of tides. Little evidence of tectonic activity and no noticeable vulcanism. Not much in the way of mountains; the seas are shallow and there are vast shallow swamps covering fully half the planetary surface. What you or I would call solid ground accounts for only a seventh of the surface, not counting islands in the swamplands, which are legion. No deserts, but there are polar ice-fields which—of course—are hidden here by cloud cover. The name given to it by the duty-crew is Naxos.”
    “Why?” I inquired.
    “Naxos,” explained Harmall, “was the island where Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus, and from which she was subsequently rescued by Dionysus, who gave her a place among the stars.”
    I wasn’t altogether convinced of the propriety of that, but it was hardly for me to question it.
    “One full crew was revived,” the blond man went on. “Captain d’Orsay, following the procedure laid down, floated a technical crew down to the surface. There they established a bubble-dome, following the rules with regard to sterile environments. The dome was completely sealed, with a space between the two membranes of the shell that could be evacuated, with a double airlock and the usual facilities for showering down. No one went outside, of course, without a sterile suit. This ground-crew consisted of twenty people. A reserve of thirty waited aboard ship. Six of the twenty were ecosystemic analysts, but as you can imagine, they’d had no opportunity to develop the experience that is routinely available nowadays. Similarly, their equipment was crude compared to what we can put into the field.
    “All the early results implied that the planet was both habitable and safe. The one obvious danger was oxygen intoxication: the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere at ground level is a little higher on Naxos than on Earth. They found no obvious evidence of biological threat. They found that the basis of the life-system was a nucleic acid similar to DNA, and that the supplementary cell biochemistry was a reasonable analogue of our own. They worked, of course, mostly with plant specimens, and they carried out their work with all due precautions—at least, we suppose that they did. In view of what happened, there must be some doubt. Perhaps they got careless when nothing showed up to worry them.”
    He paused, and began