Eden by Stanislaw Lem Read Free Book Online

see red arms in the air.
    "We must find where the finished product is stored," the Engineer concluded.
    The Captain tapped him on the shoulder. "What kind of energy do you think this is?"
    The Engineer shrugged. "I have no idea."
    "It would take you a year to locate the finished product—this room is miles long," the Physicist said.
    It was curious, but the deeper they went into the hall, the easier it was for them to breathe—as if the bitter smell came only from the wall.
    "Are we lost?" the Cyberneticist asked anxiously.
    The Captain checked his compass.
    "No. The reading is good… There's probably no iron here, and no electromagnetism."
    For more than an hour they wandered through the pulsing forest of this unusual factory, until the area around them became more open. They felt a cool, almost refrigerated gust of air. The network of tubes parted, and they found themselves near the mouth of an enormous helical funnel. Boughs from above descended to it, flapping like whips, each ending in a nodule, and from the nodules came a sudden hail of somersaulting objects, black and shiny, that dropped into the funnel in a place the men could not see, since it was twenty feet above their heads.
    The dark-gray wall of the funnel now began to expand: something was pushing it from within. They stepped back instinctively, so ominous was the appearance of the swelling bubble. Then, without a sound, it burst, and a stream of black things poured from the opening at the top. At the same moment, lower down, a trough with outward-turned edges emerged from a wide well, and the objects dropped into it with a drumming sound. The trough shook in such a way that in a few seconds the black objects were resting in a neat quadrangle on its shallow bottom.
    "The finished product!" cried the Engineer. He rushed to the edge and without a moment's hesitation bent over and grabbed the nearest black object. The Captain caught him by the belt of his suit at the last moment, and this was all that kept the Engineer from falling headfirst into the trough, because he refused to let go of the heavy object but was unable to lift it himself. The Physicist and the Doctor had to give him a hand, and together they hauled the thing out.
    It was as large as a man's torso and had semitransparent segments, inside which were rows of small crystals, metallic, sparkling, and there were apertures surrounded by earlike swellings, and, at the top, an uneven mosaic of projections made of an exceptionally hard substance that did not reflect the light. In a word, the object was extremely complex. The Engineer knelt in front of it, fingered and tapped it, examined the apertures from various angles in an attempt to discover any moving parts.
    Meanwhile the Doctor was observing the trough. After forming a geometric quadrangle of the black objects, it rose a little, pivoted, and suddenly softened, but only on one side. Changing shape, it turned into an enormous spoon. Then a large snout protruded and opened, giving off a hot, bitter stench; the opening sucked in all the objects with a loud smack and closed again, whereupon the snout began to glow in the middle. The Doctor could see the objects melting inside, fusing to form a fiery orange slurry. Then the glow dimmed; the snout went dark.
    Forgetting his colleagues, the Doctor walked around two great soaring columns, inside which lumps of the molten material now flowed, as through a monstrous esophagus. Craning his neck and wiping his teary eyes from time to time, he attempted to trace the path of the incandescent slurry through the labyrinth of tubes. At times it disappeared from view, but he would come upon its trail again as it glowed in the depths of the tortuous black conduits. Finally he stopped at a spot that seemed familiar, and saw red-hot objects, already partly formed, flying into a pit, while nearby others shot out of one of the open wells—only to be swallowed up by a row of thick tubes dangling overhead like elephant