Eden by Stanislaw Lem Page A

march and made for the highest point on the rise.
    Before them now lay a rolling landscape with copses of breathing trees here and there, olive and russet. There were hillocks with clay slopes the color of honey and patches of moss that were silver in the sun and gray-green in the shade. The whole expanse was crisscrossed by thin, narrow lines that went in different directions. They ran through the valleys but avoided the hills. Some were reddish, some white, as though strewn with sand, and some were black as coal.
    "Roads!" exclaimed the Engineer, but corrected himself immediately. "No, they're too narrow for roads… What could they be?"
    "We found something similar beyond the spider grove," said the Chemist, raising binoculars to his eyes.
    "No, that was different," the Cyberneticist began.
    "Look! Look!" The Doctor's shouts made them all jump.
    Something transparent was gliding along a yellow line that passed, descending, between two hillocks half a mile away. The thing shone pale in the sunlight; it was like a semitransparent wheel with spokes, rotating. When it appeared against the sky, it became almost invisible, but farther down, at the foot of a clay escarpment, it gleamed more clearly, a spinning cloud, and shot off in a straight line past a clump of breathing trees—and vanished into the mouth of a distant canyon.
    The Doctor turned to his colleagues, his eyes bright, his teeth bared, as if smiling, but there was no gaiety in his face. "Interesting, no?"
    "Damn, I forgot my binoculars. Give me yours," said the Engineer, turning to the Cyberneticist. "Never mind," he added, because it was too late.
    The Cyberneticist hefted his jector. "We're not well armed," he mumbled.
    "Why, do you think we're going to be attacked?" asked the Chemist, glaring at him.
    They said nothing for a while, staring at the scene around them.
    "Well, let's move on," the Cyberneticist suggested.
    "Yes," said the Captain. "Wait! There's another!"
    A second cloud, moving much faster than the first, snaked in and out of the hills. It kept low to the ground. When it came straight in their direction, they lost sight of it altogether; it was only when it turned that the blurred, revolving disk again became visible.
    "Some kind of vehicle…" muttered the Physicist, putting his hand on the Engineer's shoulder but not taking his eyes off the gleaming cloud, which grew smaller and smaller as it retreated among the copses.
    "I have a Ph.D.," said the Engineer, as if to himself, "but this… Anyway, there is something inside there, convex, like the hub of a propeller."
    "Yes, and it's brighter than the rest," said the Captain. "How big do you think the craft is?"
    "If the trees down there are the same height as the ones above the canyon, then I would say at least thirty feet in diameter."
    The Doctor pointed to a line of hills. "Both of them disappeared there. So we should head in that direction, agreed?" And he began to descend the slope. The others hurried after him.
    "We'd better prepare ourselves for contact," said the Cyberneticist, nervously licking his lips.
    "We have no idea what form it will take. The best thing is to remain calm, to exercise self-control," said the Captain. "But we should change formation. One man in front, one in the rear, and let's spread out a bit more."
    "Do we have to stay in the open?" asked the Physicist. "It might be better if we were less visible."
    "We don't want to conceal ourselves too much. That will look suspicious. But, true, the more we observe without being observed, the better…"
    After descending a few hundred feet, they came to the first of the lines.
    It resembled a furrow made by an old-fashioned plow; the soil, crumbly, had been thrown up on both sides of a groove no more than two hands wide. The sunken, moss-covered strips that they had encountered on their first expedition had been of similar dimensions, but here there was no moss, only bare, broken ground that ran through a uniform cover of whitish