Eden by Stanislaw Lem

Cyberneticist complained. "I stink. There must be water here somewhere!"
    "Where there's water, there must be a barber," the Doctor added, peering into a small mirror and grimacing. "Only I'm afraid that on this planet a barber, after shaving you, would put all the hairs back."
    "You'll joke on your deathbed," the Engineer said.
    "Well," replied the Doctor, "that's not a bad way to go."
    They gathered their things, deflated and packed the tent, and set off along the undulating screen, until they were almost a mile from their campsite.
    "Maybe I'm mistaken, but the wall seems a bit higher here," said the Physicist, squinting at the ripples going in both directions. Higher up, they shimmered, like silver.
    The men put their packs down in one pile and entered the factory without incident, as on the previous day. The Physicist and the Cyberneticist were the last to enter.
    "How does that disappearing work?" asked the Cyberneticist. "So much happened yesterday, I forgot all about it."
    "Something to do with refraction," the Physicist replied, without conviction.
    "And what supports the roof? It can't be that." He pointed to the rippling curtain before them.
    "I don't know. Maybe the supports are inside somewhere, or on the other side."
    "Alice in Wonderland," the Doctor's voice greeted them. "Shall we begin? I seem to be sneezing less today. Perhaps we're adapting. Which way do we go first?"
    The place was similar to what they had seen the day before. They walked through it now with greater confidence and speed. At first it seemed that everything was the same: the columns, the wells, the forest of pulsing tubes, the incandescence, the whole flickering confusion of processes taking place at different tempos. But the "finished products," whose troughlike receptacle it took them a while to discover, were not the same; they were larger and shaped differently from those of yesterday. And that was not all.
    These "products," which were also being reclaimed and recycled, were not identical. They all resembled half of an egg, each notched at the top and with various details that indicated it was to be joined to other things. The half-egg also had protruding pipes, in the mouths of which were lens-shaped pieces that moved like valves. But some of the objects had two pipes, and others three or four. The additional pipes were smaller and often seemed unfinished, as though work on them had been interrupted. Sometimes a lens filled the entire bore of a pipe, sometimes only part of it, and sometimes there was no lens, or only the "bud" of one, a particle hardly bigger than a pea. The surface of the half-egg was smooth, polished.
    And the pipes varied in other ways: in one half-egg the men found two pipes fused together and communicating through a small opening, their lenses forming something in the nature of a figure eight. The Doctor called this "Siamese Twins." And the mouths of some small pipes were closed.
    "What do you say to this?" asked the Captain, kneeling as the Engineer worked his way through an entire collection fished out of the trough.
    "For the time being, nothing. Let's move on," said the Engineer, getting up. But it was obvious that his spirits were improved.
    They now saw that the hall was divided into sections, according to the process being performed in the cycle. The production mechanisms themselves—such as the forest of esophaguslike tubes—were everywhere the same. Half a mile farther on, the men came to a section that, while going through the same motions as the one before, carried nothing in its tubes, deposited nothing into its wells, and absorbed, treated, and melted nothing. Thinking at first that the product was so transparent as to be invisible, the Engineer leaned over to a chute and put out his hand to catch what should have been dropping out, but there was indeed nothing.
    "This is crazy," said the Chemist.
    But somehow the Engineer was not that surprised. "Interesting," he said, and they walked on.
    They