Eden by Stanislaw Lem Page B

overgrowth.
    "Strange," grumbled the Engineer, rising from his haunches. He wiped his hands on his suit.
    "The grooves to the north, I think, are older," said the Doctor, "and haven't been used for a long time. While these…"
    "That's possible," agreed the Physicist. "But what made this? Not a wheel—the track of a wheel would be totally different."
    "Some sort of agricultural machine?" the Cyberneticist suggested.
    "Why would they plow to a depth of four inches?"
    They stepped across the line and walked on. As they passed a wooded copse, whose noise made it difficult even to carry on a conversation, they heard a piercing whistle from behind and instinctively dived behind some trees. From their concealment they saw, high above the meadow, a luminous perpendicular vortex traveling at the velocity of an express train. Its rim was darker, and the bright center shone violet, orange, violet, orange. The diameter of the center was from six to eight feet.
    The craft rushed past and was gone. They continued in the same direction. When the copse came to an end, they were obliged to cross open country, which made them uncomfortable. They kept looking over their shoulders. The chain of hills was already quite close when they heard another piercing whistle. There being no cover whatsoever, they dropped to the ground. A gyrating disk hurtled by, its center a deep blue.
    "That one must have been more than fifty feet high!" the Engineer hissed excitedly. They got up and dusted themselves off. Between them and the hills lay a hollow that was exactly bisected by a strangely colored ribbon: a brook with a bright, sandy bottom visible through the water. The flowing water was bordered on both sides by a strip of iridescent blue vegetation, followed by another strip of pale rose and, after that, thin silver plants that were interspersed with fluffy spheres as big as a man's head; above each sphere rose the three-lobed chalice of an enormous flower white as snow.
    The men approached this unusual collection of colors. When they reached the fluffy spheres, the nearest flowers suddenly started quivering and slowly lifted into the air. They floated overhead for a while in a flock, emitting a soft hum, then soared upward, whirling and gleaming in the sun, and alighted in a thicket of spheres on the other side of the brook. Where the brook intersected the furrow, its banks were lined by an arch of a glassy substance perforated at regular intervals by circular openings. The Engineer tested the strength of this bridge with his foot and gingerly crossed to the other side. As soon as he got there, a host of white flowers flew up from under his feet and circled above him anxiously like startled pigeons.
    At the brook the men stopped to fill their canteens with water. Not for drinking, obviously, but to run tests on it later. The Doctor plucked one of the small plants that formed the rose strip and put it in his buttonhole, like a flower. Its stem was covered with tiny translucent flesh-colored nodes whose fragrance was exquisite. No one said so, but they were sorry to leave such a beautiful spot.
    The hillside they ascended was overgrown with mosses that rustled underfoot.
    "There's something at the top!" the Captain said. Against the sky, a vague shape moved. There were blinding flashes of light. Several hundred feet from the summit, they saw the object, a low revolving dome. On its surface were mirrors that reflected now the sun, now fragments of the landscape.
    Running their eyes along the ridge, they noticed another, similar dome—or, rather, guessed its presence by its regular flashing. And there were more and more such points, sparkling along the ridge as far as the horizon.
    From the top of the hill, they were finally able to gaze into the interior of a region hitherto unseen. The gentle slopes became fields crisscrossed by rows of pointed masts. The farthest masts blurred at the foot of a blue edifice made indistinct by the intervening atmosphere.