Read Eden for Free Online

unum," the Doctor replied. "Or, rather, e uno plures, if my Latin's right. This must be the sort of multiple monster that divides in an emergency…"
    "It stinks to high heaven," said the Physicist. "Let's get out of here."
    "Let's," agreed the Doctor. But when they had gone about fifty feet, he said, "I wonder what would have happened if I had touched that hair."
    "To find out might have cost you a lot," the Chemist suggested.
    "Or possibly nothing. Evolution often gives fearsome forms to completely harmless species."
    "Look, it's getting brighter over there, to the side," cried the Cyberneticist. "Let's get out of this damned spider forest!"
    The sound of a brook reached their ears, and they stopped. They continued, and the sound grew louder, then fainter, then disappeared altogether. They could not find its source. The forest thinned, and the ground grew softer, almost boggy. It was unpleasant walking. Sometimes something creaked underfoot, like soaked grass, but no water was visible anywhere.
    They found themselves on the rim of a circular depression a few hundred feet in diameter. A number of eight-legged plants stood inside it, not that close to one another. They seemed very old, their stalks splayed, as though supporting with difficulty the central swellings. They resembled spiders—huge emaciated spiders—to a greater degree than anything the men had encountered so far. At the bottom of the depression, here and there, were rust-colored, pitted hunks of metal half-buried in the ground and partly wrapped by plant tendrils. The Engineer immediately slid down the steep though short slope. Curiously, once he was inside it, what had looked like a depression to the men now looked like a crater—a bomb crater.
    "A war?" said the Physicist. He stood at the top of the ridge, watching the Engineer approach a large fragment at the base of the biggest "spider" and attempt to move it.
    "Iron?!" the Captain called out.
    "No!" the Engineer shouted back. He disappeared behind an object that resembled a shattered cone, then emerged from a clump of stalks, which snapped as he pushed through them. He returned frowning. Several hands reached out to help him as he clambered up. Seeing the expectant faces of the others, he shrugged. "I don't know what it is. Ruins of some kind. Erosion is far advanced. They're a hundred, maybe three hundred years old…"
    The men filed past the crater in silence and headed for where the vegetation was lowest. Then it ceased—or, rather, it parted to form a narrow trench, a kind of corridor, perfectly straight. The stalks here seemed to have been cut and trampled, the large abdomens pushed aside onto other plants. These other plants were flat, dry, with husks that cracked underfoot like sloughed-off tree bark. The men decided to take the path. Though they had to wade through the dead stalks, they made better progress than before. The path arced northward. They left the dead vegetation and found themselves on a plain on the other side of the copse.
    An indistinct line met the path at the point where it emerged from the forest, a continuation of the path, though not paved. In the barren soil there was a rut or groove about six inches deep and six inches wide, covered with a green-gray growth silky to the touch. This curious "moss," as the Doctor called it, went straight as an arrow, terminating at a bright strip that went like a wall from one end of the horizon to the other.
    Above this wall—it was a wall—glimmered peaks resembling Gothic spires covered with silvery metal. As the men walked quickly, more and more detail emerged. Above the wall was a surface that stretched for miles in both directions; it rose in regular arches, like the roofs of giant hangars. Between the arches were downward bulges, from which something grayish fell in a fine dust or mist. Drawing closer, the men smelled a strange, bitter, but pleasant odor, as of unfamiliar flowers. The arched roofs loomed higher as the men