The west wall of the E club room began to glow, lose its appearance of solidity. Cal signaled his orderly to lift away his table. Now, where the west wall had been, another room seemed to join this one, an office. A large man in a brown suit made an entrance through the door of the office and sat down back of the desk. His face was drawn with weariness.
"I am Bill Hayes," he said. "Sector administration chief of the Eden area. I am acting moderator of this review. We follow the usual rules of procedure. I just want to say, as an aside, that the scientists involved in this problem have been up all night reviewing every known fact about Eden. We ask the indulgence of the E's not only for the kind of knowledge that may prove too little, but for any strain caused by trying to assemble such massive data into order in so short a time.
"For the press, let me say we are aware of some questions of why we didn't immediately send out a fleet of ships as soon as the call failed to come through. A military man does not rush troops into battle until he has some idea of what he must oppose; even a plumber needs to get some idea of the problem before he knows what tools to take with him. It would serve no constructive purpose to rush an unprepared fleet out to rescue, and might prove the highest folly."
All over E.H.Q., in the various buildings where anybody was directly concerned, the same effect would be taking place as appeared here in the club room. The tri-di screen wall would seem to join the room of the person speaking. A pressed button signaled the desire to speak, and like the chairman of a meeting, Bill Hayes decided whom to recognize. It was a way to conduct a meeting of two or three thousand people as intimately as a small conference.
"The E's have signaled they are ready for the Eden briefing," Hayes continued formally. He faded out his own office, and was immediately replaced by an astrophysics laboratory. The review of Eden was under way.
With sky charts, pointers, math formulae and many references to documentation, the astrophysicist established the celestial position of Ceti relative to Earth, and its second planet Ceti II--popularly called, he had heard, Eden. For his part, bitterly, he preferred a little less popularizing of scientific data, a little more exactitude. He would, therefore, continue to call it Ceti II.
He reminded Cal of certain teachers in schools he had been asked to leave back in his ugly duckling days. How didactically, positively, they clung to their exactitudes--like frightened little children in a chaotic world too big for them to face, hanging on to mother's skirts, something safe, sure, dependable.
The astrophysicist continued, at considerable length, to establish the position of Ceti II to his own complete satisfaction.
In his own mind Cal willingly conceded that, at least in terms of third-dimensional space-time continuum, Eden could be found where the man said it was. Then he reminded himself, sternly, that the essence might be that Eden was there no longer; that he'd better pay closest attention to everything said, however positive and didactic, lest he find his own mind closed to a solution. He reminded himself that, after all, these people had worked all night for his benefit, while he lay peacefully in Linda's arms.
He reminded himself that one little bit of datum, one little phrase, carelessly heard now, might mean his success or failure. Didactic pedantry has its place in science, and these were scientists, not vaudeville performers. Silently, he apologized to the lot of them.
A geophysicist took over the review. He quickly got down out of space to the surface of Eden. Personally he didn't mind calling it Eden, just so all the purists knew he was referring to Ceti II. This was supposed to be humorous, and he waited until all the viewers had had a chance to chuckle with him.
If the astrophysicist signaled his demand for a retraction and apology for this public ridicule, Bill Hayes apparently didn't feel it worth breaking up the review to oblige him.
After he had enjoyed his own humor, the geophysicist did present his capsule of knowledge with excellent brevity.
There were no large continents. Instead, there were thousands of islands, so many that the land mass roughly equaled the sea surface. The islands had not been counted, he admitted, and then needlessly explained that Eden had been discovered only ten years ago. Since universe exploration was expanding much faster than properly qualified scientists could follow to catalogue conditions, details such as this had been left for future colonists to complete.
He took time out to complain that the younger generation was too dazzled by glamor and wanted to become entertainment stars, sports stars, jet jockeys exploring space, and there weren't enough going into the solid sciences to keep up with the work to be done.
A biophysicist interposed here and stated that his research with the injection of uric acid into rats caused a marked rise in intelligence, and if the Administration would just pay attention and let him have the grant he was asking, he felt confident that research in how to change the human kidney structure would take us a long mutant leap ahead toward humans with super-intelligence.
Bill Hayes cut him off as tactfully as possible and suggested that the Eden problem was here and now, and perhaps we should get that one out of the way first. Both scientists, by their expressions, indicated that they did not appreciate being frustrated, hampered, driven--but they did comply.
Back to Eden they went.
The climate was something like that of the Hawaiian area. Partly this was due to the variable plane rotation that heated all parts evenly, partly due to favorable flow of ocean currents. It had been noted that there was such an interweaving of cool and warm currents all over the globe that a relatively even temperature was maintained throughout. Some differential in spots, of course, enough to cause rainfall, but no real violence of storms, not as we classified hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes here on Earth.
"Probably no sudden storm to wipe out the colony before they could send news, then," Wong suggested in an aside to Cal.
"Or a freak one did occur and they weren't prepared because it wasn't supposed to happen," Cal said.
Wong and McGinnis exchanged a quick glance, and Cal knew Wong had laid a little trap to see how easily he might be lulled into a premature conclusion.
The gravity was slightly less, the geophysicist was saying, but only to the extent that man, newly arrived from Earth, walked with a springier step, didn't tire as quickly. Not enough to cause nausea, even to the inexperienced. The oxygen content of the air, in fact the whole make-up of the air, was so close to Earth quality there were no breathing adaptations necessary.
So much for generalities. He went on to document them with exactitudes. He teamed up with a meteorologist to explain the distribution of rainfall in spite of lack of frigid and torrid air masses. Cal's doubt was not appeased. Weather prediction was about on a par with race-horse handicapping, and easy to explain after it happened.
Eventually the geophysicist and the meteorologist completed their duet to the accompaniment of oceanographers and geologists.
A chorus of botanists replaced them on the tri-di screen, the major theme of their epic being that an astonishing proportion of the plant forms bore edible fruit, nuts, seeds, leaves, stems, roots, flowers. A choir of zoologists joined their voices here to point out the large number of small meat animals, fish, and crustaceans--with the whole thing sounding like a pean of thanksgiving.
After two hours, the condensed information added up to a most interesting fact. In essence, due to quite natural conditions--odd how much the scientists seemed to need stressing the word "natural"--Eden was more favorable to easy human life than Earth!
Cal leaned forward. Here was the spot where some student or apprentice might distinguish himself by asking an embarrassing question or so. Say the range of easily possible conditions on any given planet was a scale ten miles in length. Then that area on the scale where man could exist without artificial aids would still be less than a hair's breadth. And now to find a planet more nearly perfect for man than the one on which he evolved....
Or were the students considering this too obvious to mention? He decided to nudge them a little. Sometimes a discussion of the too obvious brought out things not obvious at all.
"How frequently," he asked, when Hayes had cut him in, "do we find a mass revolving in such a manner that its poles revolve at right angles to its forward revolution, so there is no real pole?"
"It requires near-perfect roundness, and an even distribution of land and water masses, such as we have on Ceti II," the first astrophysicist answered.
"How frequently do we find that?" Cal repeated.
"I know of no other," the astrophysicist replied shortly.
"Any evidence of tampering with those ocean currents to get them flowing so beneficially?" Cal asked.
"None yet discovered," an oceanographer cut in.
Well, at least he hadn't stated with positiveness that there hadn't been and couldn't be. But an anthropaleontologist inserted himself and spoiled the effect of open-mindedness.
"There is definitely no life form on Eden with sufficient intelligence for that," the man said, "nor has there ever been. Such a feat would require enormous engineering works. Such works under the ocean would be matched by comparable works on land, and would therefore show up in our aerial surveys, however ancient and overgrown."
Cal sighed softly to himself. The human kind of civilization, yes, that would have left traces. But what of some other kind? Perhaps a deep-sea kind that had never come out upon the land? Never mind the arguments that such a civilization could not have developed--that was looking at it from the human point of view again. Had man grown so accustomed to not finding comparable intelligence anywhere in the universe he had begun to discount, or forget, there could be?
The review went on and on. The zoologist sketched in the prevalent animals and fish forms, showed there was nothing in land animals higher than a large rodent, no sea mammals at all, no fish larger than the tarpon. Nothing at all to hint at a line of primates.
A bacteriologist exclaimed at length over the similarity of minute life forms to those on Earth, and used the occasion to again expound the old theory of space-floating life spores to seed all favorable matter, and thus develop similar forms through evolution, wherever found. Quickly and tactfully Bill Hayes nudged him back on the track before the expected storm of controversy could break out.
Then there was a short lunch time, but not a leisurely one. Quite aside from the emergency of what might be happening to the colonists, there was growing clamor from the people and pressure from various governmental bodies to get off the dime and get going--rescue those people, or, cynically, at least make a show of action to quell the flood of telegrams. E.H.Q. resisted the pressures in favor of doing a workmanlike job in preparation for a genuine rescue instead of a haphazard show, but was mindful of them nevertheless.
