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

to prod the button under the screen again. The green world disappeared, to be replaced by a series of shots taken on the planet’s surface. All stills. Long-shots and close-ups, mixed in together. Stands of trees, individual flowering plants, flat expanses of tall grass. Ponds and streams decked out with rafts of vegetation or trailing pennants of weed. Insects ranging from small, rounded bugs to big dragonflies, with chimerical water-beasties thrown in for good measure. A few creatures that wore their skeletons inside instead of out, but none bigger than my hand, mostly soft and moist of skin—nothing that could properly be insulted if you decided to call it a frog.
    There were half a dozen points in the sequence where I wanted to call “stop,” but I let the chances go. There’d be other times. FTL journeys are notoriously boring—what’s there to do in zero- g but study hard?
    Then the pictures changed to interior shots. The dome and its staff. People at work and people at rest. The lab, where everyone wore plastic bags and polythene festoons made the whole working area into a parody of a membrane-filled cell. Chromatograms by the dozen, plotting out in pastel-colored clouds the chemical make-up of the not-so-very-alien life-system. White mice, unprotected by plastic bags, running free and waiting (though they surely didn’t know it!) to give warning of any pathogens by falling ill and maybe dying. Canaries, too, testing the local seeds for digestibility. The mice and the canaries looked suspiciously healthy, bearing in mind the baleful comments Harmall had appended to his last instalment of the Naxos saga.
    The show finished without offering the least pictorial evidence of anything going wrong. The lights came on again.
    “Well?” I said to the man from the Space Agency.
    “They blew it,” he said. “They all died. Every last one, within the space of a single night. They never got a chance to find out what it was that hit them. They couldn’t provide the shipboard personnel with a single clue. They started dying, and they had no way to fight.”
    “Cross-systemic infection,” I said. “Instant epidemic. That’s what you think?”
    “I don’t know what to think,” replied Harmall. “That’s up to you, if you want the job.”
    “Nobody else went down from the ship?”
    Harmall shook his head. “By this time, the crew had the HSB in orbit and ready to burn. Captain d’Orsay considered that a state of emergency had arisen. The captains of the other crews were revived, and d’Orsay handed over command to Captain Juhasz. Rather than send a second technical crew to follow the first, he decided to wait for a time for a response to the beacon. He considered—correctly—that three hundred and fifty years of technical progress and expanding knowledge might allow him to call upon greater resources than he already had on the Ariadne . All further investigation of the surface was carried out by robot probes—which were not, of course, permitted to return.”
    “We three, then, are being invited to play detective?” This time the question came from Zeno.
    “That’s right,” said Harmall. “As I’ve said, there are manifest dangers. On the other hand, you start with one advantage: the bodies are there for examination. An autopsy might reveal the cause of death. Forewarned is forearmed.”
    “How long will they have been dead by the time we get there?” I wanted to know.
    “Nearly two months,” he told me.
    Obviously, it wasn’t going to be a nice job. On the other hand, I was only a humble geneticist. Angelina Hesse was a physiologist. In my book, that made her number-one scalpel-wielder. Zeno and I were the hit men—we had to sort out the cure once the disease was identified.
    “Why no pathologist?” I inquired.
    “There is one,” said Harmall. “He’s coming in from a station in the belt.”
    “A Soviet?”
    “That’s right. Vesenkov—know him?”
    I shook my head. Theoretically, the