Eight Keys to Eden

Produced by Greg Weeks, Geoffrey Kidd, Stephen Blundell
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net









EIGHT KEYS TO EDEN




BY MARK CLIFTON


 NOVELS
       Eight Keys To Eden
       They'd Rather Be Right*
       The Forever Machine*

 NON-FICTION BOOK
       Opportunity Unlimited

 NOVELETTES
       Remembrance and Reflection
       How Allied
       What Thin Partitions**
       Sense From Thought Divide
       Star, Bright
       Hide! Hide! Witch!
       A Woman's Place
       Clerical Error
       What Now, Little Man?
       Do Unto Others

 SHORT STORIES
       What Have I Done?
       The Conqueror
       Kenzie Report
       Bow Down To Them
       Reward For Valour
       Progress Report**
       Crazy Joey**
       We're Civilized**
       Solution Delayed**

 ARTICLES
       It Can't Be Done
       The Dread Tomato Affliction

 * _In collaboration with Frank Riley_
 ** _In collaboration with Alex Apostolides_




        EIGHT KEYS
          TO EDEN

            by
       Mark Clifton


 Doubleday & Company, Inc.
   Garden City, New York
           1960




 _All of the characters in this book
 are fictitious, and any resemblance
 to actual persons, living or dead,
 is purely coincidental._


 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-9470
 Copyright © 1960 by Mark Clifton
 All Rights Reserved
 Printed in the United States of America
 First Edition


Transcriber's Note:

    Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
    copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
    typographical errors have been corrected without note. Variant and
    dialect spellings remain as printed. Bold text is shown as =bold=.




                To

        Charles Steinberg

 who made writing possible for me




EIGHT KEYS TO EDEN




SEVEN DOORS TO SEVEN ROOMS OF THOUGHT


 =1= Accept the statement of Eminent Authority without basis, without
       question.

 =2= Disagree with the statement without basis, out of general
       contrariness.

 =3= Perhaps the statement is true, but what if it isn't? How then to
       account for the phenomenon?

 =4= How much of the statement rationalizes to suit man's purpose that
       he and his shall be ascendant at the center of things?

 =5= What if the minor should become major, the recessive dominant, the
       obscure prevalent?

 =6= What if the statement were reversible, that which is considered
       effect is really cause?

 =7= What if the natural law perceived in one field also operates
       unperceived in all other phases of science? What if there be only
       one natural law manifesting itself, as yet, to us in many facets
       because we cannot apperceive the whole, of which we have gained
       only the most elementary glimpses, with which we can cope only at
       the crudest level?

 =And are those still other doors, yet undefined, on down the corridor?=




1


One minute after the regular report call from the planet Eden was
overdue, the communications operator summoned his supervisor. His finger
hesitated over the key reluctantly, then he gritted his teeth and
pressed it down. The supervisor came boiling out of his cubicle,
half-running down the long aisle between the forty operators hunched
over their panels.

"What is it? What is it?" he quarreled, even before he came to a stop.

"Eden's due. Overdue." The operator tried to make it laconic, but it
came out sullen.

The supervisor rubbed his forehead with his knuckles and punched
irritably at some buttons on an astrocalculator. An up-to-the-second
star map lit up the big screen at the end of the room. He didn't expect
there to be any occlusions to interfere with the communications channel.
The astrophysicists didn't set up reporting schedules to include such
blunders. But he had to check.

There weren't.

He heaved a sigh of exasperation. Trouble always had to come on his
shift, never anybody else's.

"Lazy colonists probably neglecting to check in on time," he
rationalized cynically to the operator. He rubbed his long nose and
hoped the operator would agree that's all it was.

The operator looked skeptical instead.

Eden was still under the first five-year test. Five-year experimental
colonists were arrogant, they were zany, they were a lot of things, some
unprintable, which qualified them for being test colonizers and nothing
else apparently. They were almost as much of a problem as the
Extrapolators.

But they weren't lazy. They didn't forget.

"Some fool ship captain has probably messed up communications by
inserting a jump band of his own." The supervisor hopefully tried out
another idea. Even to him it sounded weak. A jump band didn't last more
than an instant, and no ship captain would risk his license by using the
E frequency, anyway.

He looked hopefully down the long room at the bent heads of the other
operators at their panels.