CHAPTER SIX

THE LEGEND OF THE BLUE SUNS

 

Dr. Louma Lasvy and Eon Thai, the biologist, dragged their heavy weight slowly towards him from the ship’s sick bay. Erg Noor went to meet them.

“Nisa?” “Alive, but….”

“Dying?”

“Not yet. She is totally paralysed. Her respiration is extraordinarily low. Her heart is functioning — one beat in a hundred seconds. It is not death but it is absolute collapse which may last a long, an indefinitely long time.”

“Is there any possibility that she may regain consciousness and suffer?” “None whatever.”

“Are you sure?” The look in the commander’s eyes was sharp and insistent, but the doctor was not at all put out. “Absolutely sure!”

Erg Noor looked inquiringly at the biologist. He nodded his affirmation.

“What do you intend to do?”

“Keep her in an even temperature, absolute repose and weak light. If the collapse does not progress… what does it matter… let her sleep till we reach Earth. Then she can go to the Institute of Nerve Currents. The injury is due to some form of current, her spacesuit was holed in three places. It is a good thing that she was scarcely breathing!”

“I noticed the holes and sealed them with my plaster,” said the biologist.

In silent gratitude Erg Noor squeezed his arm above the elbow.

“Only…” began Louma, “we’d better get her away from high gravitation as quickly as we can… and… at the same time there’s danger, not so much in the acceleration of the take-off as in the return to normal gravitation.”

“I see, you’re afraid the pulse will get even slower. But the heart is not a pendulum that accelerates its oscillations in a field of high gravitation, is it?”

“The rhythm of impulses in the organism, in general, follows the same laws. If the heartbeats slow down to, say, one in two hundred seconds, then the brain will not get a sufficient supply of blood, and….”

Erg Noor fell into such deep thought that he forgot that he was not alone: he suddenly came to himself and sighed deeply.

His companions waited patiently.

“Would it not be a way out if the organism were to be submitted to higher pressures in an atmosphere enriched with oxygen?” asked the commander cautiously, and by the satisfied smile of the faces of Louma Lasvy and Eon Thai he knew that the idea was the right one.

“Saturate the blood with the gas under increased pressure, good…. Of course, we must take precautions against thrombosis and — let her heart beat once in two hundred seconds, it will come right later.”

Eon’s smile showed his white teeth under a black moustache and gave his stern face a look of youthfulness and reckless merriment.

“The organism will remain paralysed but will live,” said Louma with relief. “Let’s go and get the chamber ready. I want to use the big silicolloid hood that we took for Zirda. We can get a floating armchair inside it to make a bed for her during the take-off. After acceleration ceases we can make her a proper bed.”

“As soon as you’re ready report to the control tower. We’re not staying here a minute longer than necessary… we’ve had enough of the darkness and weight of the black world!”

The crew hurried to their various sections of the ship, each of them struggling against excess weight as best he could.

The signals for the take-off resounded like a song of victory.

With feelings of such absolute relief as they had never before experienced the people of the expedition entrusted themselves to the soft embraces of the landing chairs. A take-off from a heavy planet is a difficult and dangerous undertaking. The acceleration necessary to escape its gravity would strain the very limit of human endurance and the slightest mistake on the part of the pilot might lead to the death of them all.

There was a deafening roar of the planet motors as Erg Noor directed the spaceship at a tangent to the horizon. The levers of the hydraulic chairs were pressed lower and lower under the influence of growing weight. In a moment the levers would reach the limit and then, under the pressure of acceleration the frail human bones might be broken as they would be on an anvil. The commander’s hands, lying on the buttons that controlled the ship’s machinery, were unbearably heavy. But his strong fingers were at work and Tantra, describing a huge, flattened arc, rose higher and higher out of thick darkness into the transparent blackness of infinity. Erg Noor kept his eyes fixed on the red line of the horizontal leveller — it wavered in its unstable equilibrium, indicating that the ship showed a tendency to stop its climb and travel on the downward arc. The heavy planet had still not given up its prisoner. Erg Noor decided to switch on the anameson motors whose power was sufficient to lift the spaceship from any planet. Their ringing vibration made the whole ship shudder. The red line rose about half an inch above the zero line. A little more….

Through the upper inspection periscope the commander saw that Tantra was covered with a fine layer of blue flame that flowed slowly towards the stern of the vessel. The atmosphere had been passed! In empty space vestigial electric currents, following the law of superconductivity, flowed along the vessel’s hull.

The stars had again become needles of light and Tantra, escaping, flew farther and farther from the dread planet. The burden of gravity decreased with every minute. The body became lighter and lighter, the artificial gravitation machine began to hum and after so many days under the pressure of the black planet terrestrial gravity seemed indescribably small. The people jumped up from their chairs. Ingrid, Louma and Eon performed intricate passages from a fantastic dance. The inevitable reaction, however, soon set in and the greater part of the crew fell into a brief sleep that gave temporary repose. Only Erg Noor, Pel Lynn, Pour Hyss and Louma Lasvy remained awake. The spaceship’s temporary course had to be worked out to avoid the belt of ice and meteoroids by describing an arc perpendicular to the plane of rotation of star T’s system. After this the ship could be brought up to its normal subphotonic speed and work could be begun on the computation of the real course.

The doctor kept watch over Nisa’s condition after the take-off and the return to normal terrestrial gravity. She was soon able to reassure all those who were awake by her report that the pulse had reached a constant of one beat in a hundred and ten seconds. This was not mortal as long as there was an excess supply of oxygen. Louma Lasvy proposed using a tiratron,21 an electronic cardiac exciter, and neurosecretory stimulators[19].

The walls of the ship whined for fifty-five hours from the vibration of anameson motors until, at last, the speedometer showed that they had attained a speed of nine hundred and seventy million kilometres an hour, very close to the safety limit. In the course of a terrestrial 24-hour day their distance from the iron star increased by more than 20,000 million kilometres. It is difficult to describe the relief felt by all thirteen members of the expedition after their severe trials — the murdered planet, the loss of Algrab and the awful black sun. The joy of liberation was not complete, one member of the expedition, young Nisa Creet, lay motionless in a special partition of the sick bay in a cataleptic half sleep and half death.

The five women on the ship, Ingrid, Louma, the second electronic engineer, the geologist, and lone Marr, the teacher of rhythmic gymnastics (who was also keeper of the food stores, radio operator and collector of scientific material), gathered as though for an ancient funeral rite. Nisa’s body, divested of all clothing and washed with the special solutions TM and AS, had been laid out on a thick hand-stitched carpet of the softest Mediterranean sponges. This carpet was placed on a pneumatic mattress under a dome of transparent, rosy-hued silicolloid. An accurate air-condition controller would keep the necessary temperature, pressure and composition of the air inside the hood constant for many years. Soft rubber blocks kept Nisa fixed in one position which Louma intended to change once a month. She was more afraid of bed-sores than of anything else — they could come from absolute motionlessness. Louma, therefore, decided that a watch had to be kept over Nisa’s body and herself refused to take her periods of long sleep during the first year or two of the journey. Nisa’s cataleptic state continued. The only improvement Louma could effect was an increase in pulse-beats to one a minute. Little as this was, it was sufficient to enable them to stop the oxygen saturation which was harmful to the lungs….

Four months passed. The spaceship was following its real, computed course home, avoiding the belt of free meteoroids. The crew, worn out with their adventures and hard toil, were sunk in a seven-months’ sleep. This time there were four instead of the three people awake on board: Erg Noor and Pour Hyss, whose tour of duty it was, were joined by Louma Lasvy and Eon Thai.

The commander, after having got out of a graver situation than any spaceship commander had ever been in before, felt very lonely. The four years’ journey back to Earth seemed endless to him. He did not deceive himself — they were endless because he could hope to save his fearless auburn-haired astronavigator, whom he had come to love, only on Earth.

For a long time he put off doing what he would otherwise have done on the day after the take-off — running through the electronic stereofilms from Parus — he had wanted to see them together with Nisa and with her hear the first news from those wonderful worlds, the planets of the blue star of the terrestrial night sky. He had wanted Nisa to share with him the pleasure of seeing the boldest romantic dreams of the past and present coming true — the discovery of new stellar worlds, the future distant islands of human civilization. But at last they were brought out….

The films had been taken at a distance of eight parsecs from the Sun eighty years before and, although they had been lying in the open ship on the black planet of star T they were in excellent condition. The hemispherical stereo-screen took the four members of Tantra’s crew back to where blue Vega shone high above them.

There were many sudden changes of subject — the screen was filled by the dazzlingly blue star which was followed by casual, minute-long pictures of life on board the ship. The 28-year-old commander of the expedition, unbelievably young for his post, worked at the computers while still younger astronomers made observations. The films showed obligatory daily sport and dances that the young people had brought to acrobatic perfection. A mocking voice announced that the biologist had maintained the championship all the way to Vega. That girl with short, flaxen hair, was demonstrating the most difficult exercises twisting her magnificently developed body into all sorts of improbable poses.

As they looked at the perfectly natural images with all the normal colour tones on the hemispherical screen, they forgot that these happy, vigorous young astronauts had long before been devoured by the foul monsters of the black planet.

The terse chronicle of expedition life soon passed. The light amplifiers in the projector began to hum; so brightly did the blue star glow that even this pale reproduction forced people to put on protective glasses. The star was almost three times our Sun in diameter and mass — colossal, greatly flattened and madly rotating with an equatorial speed of three hundred kilometres a second, a ball of indescribably luminous gas with a surface temperature of 11,000 °C. and a corona of rosy-pearl flame spreading millions of kilometres around it. It seemed as though Vega’s rays would crush everything they met in their path as they thrust out their mighty million-kilometre long spears into space. The planet nearest to the blue star was hidden in their glow, but no ship from Earth or from any of her neighbours on the Great Circle could plunge into that ocean of fire. The visual image was followed by a vocal report on observations that had been made and the almost phantom lines of stereometric drawings showed the positions of Vega’s first and second planets. Parus could not approach even the second planet whose orbit was a hundred million kilometres from the star.

Monstrous protuberances flew out of the depths of an ocean of transparent violet flame, the stellar atmosphere, and stretched like all-consuming arms into space. So great was Vega’s energy that the star emitted light of the strongest quanta, the violet and invisible parts of the spectrum. Even when human eyes were protected by a triple filter it aroused the horrible effect of an invisible but mortally dangerous phantom. They could see photon storms flashing past, those that had managed to overcome the star’s gravitation. Their distant reverberations shook and tossed Parus dangerously. The cosmic ray meters and instruments measuring other non-elastic radiations refused to function. Dangerous ionization began to grow, even inside the well-protected ship. They could only guess at the extent of the furious radial energy that poured out into the emptiness of space in a monstrous stream.

The commander of Parus navigated his ship cautiously towards the third planet — a big planet with but a thin layer of transparent atmosphere. It looked as though the fiery breath of the blue star had driven away the cover of light gases for they trailed in a weakly glowing tail behind the planet on her dark side. They recorded the destructive evaporation of fluorine, poisonous carbon monoxide, and the dead density of the inert gases — nothing terrestrial could have lived for a second in that atmosphere.

The great heat of the blue sun made inert mineral substances active. Sharp spears, ribs, vertical battlemented walls of stone, red like fresh wounds or black like empty pits, rose out of the bowels of the planet. On the plateaux of lava, swept by violent gales, there were fissures and abysses belching forth molten magma like streaks of blood-red fire.

Dense clouds of ash whirled high into the air, blindingly blue on the illuminated side and impenetrably black on the dark side. Streaks of lightning thousands of miles long struck in all directions, evidence of the electric saturation of the dead atmosphere.

The awful violet phantom of the huge sun, the black sky, half covered by the pearly corona, and below, on the planet, the crimson contrasting shadows on a wild chaos of rock, the fiery crevices, cracks and circles, the constant flashes of green lightning — all this had been picked up by the stereotelescopes and the electron films had recorded it with unimpassioned, inhuman precision.

Behind the machines, however, were the emotions of the travellers, the protest of reason against the senseless power of destruction and the piling up of dead matter, the consciousness of the hostility of this world of furious cosmic fire. The four viewers, hypnotized by the sight, exchanged glances of approval when a voice announced that Parus would move on to the fourth planet.

The human selection of events reduced the time factor and in a few seconds the outer planet of Vega appeared under the spaceship’s keel telescopes; in size it was comparable with Earth. Parus descended sharply, the crew had evidently decided to explore the last planet in the hope that they would find a world, if not beautiful, then at least fit to bear life.

Erg Noor caught himself mentally repeating those words — ”at least.” Most likely those who navigated Parus had similar ideas as they studied the planet’s surface through their telescopes.

“At least” — with those two syllables they bade farewell to the dream of the beautiful worlds of Vega, of the discovery of pearls of planets on the far side of outer space for the sake of which people of Earth had voluntarily agreed to forty-five years of imprisonment in a spaceship.

Carried away by the pictures passing before his eyes, Erg Noor did not think of that immediately. In the depths pf the hemispherical screen he raced over the surface of he fantastically distant planet. To the great grief of the travellers, of those who were dead and those still living, The planet turned out to be like our nearest neighbour in he solar system, the planet Mars, which they had known since childhood. The same thin envelope of transparent as with a blackish-green, permanently cloudless sky, the same level surface of desert continents with chains of eroded mountains. The difference was that on Mars there “was a searing cold night and very sharp changes in the daytime temperature. There were shallow swamps on Mars, like huge puddles, that had evaporated until they were almost dry, there were rare and scanty rains and hoarfrosts, faint life in the form of gangrenous plants and peculiar apathetic burrowing animals.

Here, however, the raging flames of the blue sun kept the temperature of the planet so high that it breathed heat like Earth’s hottest deserts. What little vapour there was rose to the upper layer of the atmosphere and the huge plains were overshadowed by vortices of hot currents in the constantly disturbed atmosphere. The planet rotated at high speed, like the others. The cold of night had broken the rocks up into a sea of sand; orange, violet, green, bluish or dazzlingly white patches of sand drowned parts of the planet that from a distance had the appearance of seas of imaginary vegetation. The chains of eroded mountains, higher than those on Mars but just as lifeless, were covered with a shining black or brown crust. The blue sun, with its powerful ultra-violet radiation, had destroyed the minerals and evaporated the lighter elements.

It seemed that the light, sandy plains were radiating flames. Erg Noor recalled that at the time when only a small part and not the majority of Earth’s population had been scientists, many artists and writers had dreamed of people on other planets who had adapted themselves to life at high temperatures. It was a poetic and beautiful notion, it increased faith in the power of the human race — people on the fire-breathing planets of the blue sun meeting their terrestrial brethren! Erg Noor, like many others, had been impressed by a picture he had seen in the museum of the eastern sector of the southern inhabited zone: a hazy horizon on a plain of crimson sand, a grey, burning-hot sky and under it faceless human figures in temperature suits throwing blue-black shadows of improbably clear definition. They stood at the corner of some metal structure that was at white heat in dynamic poses that showed their amazement. Beside the structure stood an undraped female figure with her red hair hanging loose. Her light-coloured skin gleamed more brightly than the sand in the glaring light, blue and vermilion shadows stressed every line of her tall and graceful figure, the symbol of the victory of beautiful life over the forces of the Cosmos. Beautiful, that was the most important thing of all. For even the adaptation of animal life that reduced it to a formless devourer with but a faint spark of life in it, might be termed a victory.

It was a bold and quite unreal dream that contradicted the laws of biological development, laws that were far better known in the Great Circle Era than they had been when the picture was painted.

Erg Noor gave a shudder as the surface of the planet rushed towards him. The unknown pilot of Parus was bringing his ship down. Sand cones, black cliffs, deposits of some shining green crystals flashed past. The spaceship was flying in a regular spiral round the planet from pole to pole. There was not a sign of water or at least of the most primitive vegetable life. Again that “at least” how accommodating the human mind could be! Then came the nostalgia of loneliness, the feeling that the ship was lost in the dead distance, was in the power of the flaming blue star. Erg Noor could feel the hopes of those who took the film, who were watching the planet, could feel them as though they were his own. If there had only been at least the remains of some past life! How well known is this thought to all those who have flown to dead ^planets without water or atmosphere, who have searched in vain for ruins, for the remains of towns and buildings in the accidental shapes of the crevices, in the details of the lifeless rocks and in the precipices of mountains that had never known life.

The earth of that distant world, scorched, churned up by violent storms, without any trace of a shadow, flashed swiftly across the screen. Erg Noor, recognizing the collapse of an ancient dream, strove to imagine how such an incorrect conception of the planets of the blue sun could have arisen.

“Our terrestrial brothers will be disappointed when they know this,” said the biologist, softly, moving closer to the commander. ‘‘For many thousands of years millions of people on Earth have gazed at Vega. On summer evenings in the north all young people, all those who loved and dreamed, turned their eyes to the sky. In the summer Vega, bright and blue, stands almost in the zenith, how could one not admire it? Many centuries ago people knew quite a lot about the stars. But by some strange freak of thought they did not suspect that almost every slowly rotating star with a strong magnetic field had its planets in the same way as almost all planets have their satellites. They did not know of this law but when they were overtaken by bitter loneliness they dreamed of fellow-beings in other worlds, and, more than elsewhere, on Vega, the blue sun. I remember translations from some of the ancient languages of beautiful poems about semi-divine people from the blue star….”

“I dreamed about Vega after the Parus communication,” confessed Erg Noor, turning to Eon Thai, “and in my hope that my dream would come true I read my own meaning into that communication. Today it is obvious that thousands of years of longing for distant, beautiful worlds have impaired my vision and that of many clever and serious people.”

“How do you understand the Parus communication now?”

“Quite simply. ‘Vega’s four planets quite lifeless. Nothing more beautiful than our Earth, what happiness to return.’ “

“You’re right,” exclaimed the biologist, “why didn’t we think of it before?”

“Perhaps somebody did, but not we astronauts and not the Council. That is to our honour — bold dreams and not sceptical disappointment bring victory in life.”

The flight round the planet, as shown on the screen, was over. It was followed by the records made by the robot station that had been put out to study surface conditions on the planet. Next came a loud explosion as the geological bomb[20] was dropped. The huge cloud of mineral dust thrown up by the bomb explosion reached the keel of the spaceship where powerful suction pumps drew samples into the filtering side-channels of the vessel. Several samples of mineral dust from the sands and mountains of the scorched planet were put into silicolloid test-tubes and samples of the upper layers of the atmosphere were put into quartz containers. Parus set off on its long journey back home, a journey it was not fated to finish. Now the terrestrial sister ship of Parus was carrying back to the people of Earth everything that the lost travellers had won at the cost of such patient endeavour.

The remaining records — six reels of observations — were to be specially studied by Earth’s astronomers and the moat important details broadcast round the Great Circle.

Nobody wanted to see films about the later history of Parus, the hard struggle to repair the damaged ship and the battle with star T; nobody wanted to hear the last sound spool as their own experiences were still too fresh. They decided to leave the examination of the remainder until the time came for the whole crew to be awakened. Leaving the commander alone in the control tower the others went away for a brief rest.

Erg Noor’s dreams had collapsed and he no longer thought of them. He tried to estimate the value of those few pitiful crumbs of knowledge the two expeditions, his and Parus’, would bring back to mankind at such terrific cost. Or did they seem pitiful only on account of his disappointment?

For the first time Erg Noor began to think of beautiful Earth as an inexhaustible treasure-house of refined, cultured human beings who had an insatiable thirst for knowledge now that they had been relieved of the terrible worries and dangers that nature and primitive society had inflicted them with. The sufferings of the past, the searchings and failures, the mistakes and disappointments still remained in the Great Circle Era but they had been carried to a loftier plane of creative activity in science, art and building. Knowledge and creative labour had freed Earth from hunger, over-population, infectious diseases and harmful animals. The world no longer had to fear the exhaustion of fuel and useful chemical elements, premature death and debility had been eliminated. Those crumbs of knowledge that Tantra would bring home would also be a contribution to the mighty stream of knowledge that made for constant progress in the organization of society and the study of nature.

Erg Noor opened the safe that housed Tantra’s records and took out the box containing the piece of metal from the spiral spaceship on the black planet. The heavy piece of sky-blue metal lay flat on his palm. Although he had put off the analysis of this precious sample for the huge laboratories on Earth, he knew that neither on Earth not-on any of the planets of the solar system or neighbouring stars was any such metal to be found. The Universe was made up of similar simple elements that had long before been systematized in the Mendeleyev Table. Consequently no new element — no metal — could be discovered; but in the processes of the creation of elements, natural or artificial, countless isotope variations, possessing vastly different physical properties, could emerge. Then again, directed recrystallization changed the properties of elements to a great extent. Erg Noor was convinced that this piece of the hull of a spaceship from worlds inconceivably far away was a terrestrial metal whose atoms had been completely rearranged. This would be something, perhaps the most important thing after news of Zirda’s ruin, that he would take bade to Earth and the Great Circle.

The iron star was very close to Earth and a visit to its planet by a specially prepared expedition would not now, after the experience of Purus and Tantra, be particularly dangerous, no matter what multitude of black crosses and medusae there might be in that eternal darkness. They had been unfortunate in their opening of the spiral spaceship. If they had had time to ponder over the tiling they would have realized then that the gigantic spiral tube was part of the spaceship’s propulsion system.

In his mind the commander went over the events of hat fateful last day. He remembered Nisa spread over him like. a shield after he had fallen unconscious near the roonster. Youthful emotions that combined the heroic loyalty of the ancient women of Earth and the frank and wise courage of the modern world had not had time to develop in her to the full….

Four Hyss appeared silently from behind him to relieve she commander at his post. Erg Noor went through the library-laboratory but did not go on to the central dormitory cabin; instead he opened the heavy side-bay door; The diffused light of an earthly day was reflected from the silicolloid cupboards containing drugs and instruments, from the X-ray, artificial respiration and blood-circulation apparatus. He drew back a heavy curtain that reached up to the ceiling and entered the semi-darkness of the sick-room. The faint illumination, like moonlight, acquired warmth in the rosy crystal of the silicolloid. Two tiratron stimulators were kept permanently switched on in case of sudden collapse; they clicked away almost soundlessly, keeping the paralyzed patient’s heart beating. In the rosy-silver light inside the hood Nisa was stretched out motionless and seemed as though she were sunk in calm, sweet slumber. A hundred generations of the healthy, clean and full life of her ancestors had produced the strong and supple lines of the female body that approached the acme of artistic perfection — the most beautiful creation of Earth’s powerful life.

Everything moves and develops in a spiral and Erg Noor could see in his imagination that magnificent spiral of the common ascent as applied to life and to human society. Only now did he realize with surprising clarity that the more difficult the conditions for the life and work of organisms as biological machines, the harder the path of social development, the tighter the spiral is twisted and the closer to each other are its turns, the slower the process and more standardized and similar are the forms that emerge. By the laws of dialectics, however, the more imperceptible the ascent, the more stable is that which has been achieved.

He had been wrong in his pursuit of the wonderful planets of the blue sun and he had been teaching Nisa wrongly! They should not fly to new worlds in search of some uninhabited planet that chance made suitable for life, but man should advance deliberately, step by step, through his own arm of the Galaxy in a triumphal march of knowledge and the beauty of life. Such as Nisa….

In a sudden burst of deep sorrow Erg Noor dropped to his knees in front of the astronavigator’s silicolloid sarcophagus. The girl’s breathing was not perceptible, her eyelashes cast blue shadows on her cheeks and her white teeth were just visible through her slightly parted lips. On her left shoulder, at the base of her neck and near the elbow there were pale, bluish marks — the places where the injurious currents had struck her.

“Can you see me, do you remember anything in your sleep?” asked Erg Noor in agony, in an outburst of grief; he felt his own will-power becoming softer than wax, it was difficult for him to breathe and there was a catch in his throat. The commander strained his interlocked fingers until they turned blue in his effort to transmit his thoughts to Nisa, to make her hear his impassioned call to life and Happiness. But the girl with the auburn curls lay as immobile as a statue of pink marble carved to perfection from a living model.

Dr. Louma Lasvy entered the sick bay softly and sensed the presence of somebody else in the silent room. Cautiously withdrawing the curtain she saw the kneeling figure of the commander as motionless as a memorial to the millions of men who have mourned their loved ones. This was not the first time she had found Erg Noor there and her heart was moved with pity for him. He rose gloomily to his feet. Louma went over to him and whispered in anxious tones:

“I want to speak to you.”

Erg Noor nodded and went out, blinking as he entered the lighted part of the sick bay. He did not sit down on the chair Louma offered him but remained leaning against the upright of a mushroom-shaped irradiation apparatus. Louma Lasvy stood up in front of him to her full, lint not very great, height, trying to make herself look taller and more important for the impending talk. The commander’s looks gave her no time for preparations.

“You know,” she began uncertainly, “that present-day neurology has discovered the process by which emotions emerge in the conscious and subconscious divisions of the psyche. The subconscious yields to the influence of inhibiting drugs administered through the ancient spheres of the brain that control the chemical regulation of the organism, including the nervous system and, to some extent, higher nervous activity….”

Erg Noor raised his brows. Louma Lasvy felt that she was speaking in too great detail and too long.

“I want to say that medicine is able to affect those brain centres that control the strong emotions. I could….” Understanding flashed up in Erg Noor’s eyes and developed into a slight smile.

‘‘You propose affecting my love for Nisa and relieving me of suffering?” he asked brusquely.

The doctor nodded in affirmation, afraid to spoil the tenderness of her sympathy with words that would inevitably be schematic.

Erg Noor stretched out his hand gratefully but shook his head in refusal.

“I would not give up the wealth of my emotions, no matter how much suffering they cause me. Suffering, so long as it is not beyond one’s strength, leads to understanding, understanding leads to love and the circle is complete. You’re very kind, Louma, but it isn’t necessary!”

And the commander disappeared through the door with his usual swift gait.

Hurrying, as they would have done in an emergency, the electronic and mechanical engineers erected the televisophone screen for the reception of terrestrial transmissions. After thirteen years the screen was being erected in the library of the central control tower as the ship was now in a zone where radio waves, dispersed by Earth’s atmosphere could be received.

The voices, sounds, forms and colours of their native Earth cheered the travellers up and also served to increase their impatience — the great length of the Cosmic journey was becoming intolerable.

The spaceship sent out a call to Artificial Earth Satellite No. 57 on the usual wavelength used for long-distance Cosmic journeys and impatiently awaited an answer from this powerful station that served as a link between Earth and the Cosmos.

At last the call signals from the spaceship reached Earth.

The whole crew of the ship were awake and did not leave the receivers. They were returning to life after thirteen terrestrial and nine dependent years in which there had been no contact with their native planet! They listened eagerly to reports from Earth, and they took part in the discussion of important questions raised on the world radio network by anybody who wished to do so.

Quite by chance they picked up a proposal from the soil scientist Heb Uhr that gave them material for a six-weeks’ discussion and very intricate calculations.

“Discuss Heb Uhr’s proposal!” thundered the voice of Earth. “Let everybody who is working in that field; who has any similar ideas or objections, say his word!”

This, the usual formula, had a pleasant sound for the travellers. Heb Uhr had proposed to the Astronautical Council a plan for the systematic exploration of the reachable planets of the blue and green stars. He believed these to be special worlds with extraordinarily strong power emanations that might chemically stimulate mineral compounds that are inert under terrestrial conditions to struggle against entropy, that is, give them life. Special forms of life from minerals that are heavier than gas would be active in high temperatures and in the intense radiation of stars in the higher spectral classes. Heb Uhr was of the opinion that the failure of the Sirius expedition, the failure to find life there, was to be expected since that rapidly rotating star was a binary that did not possess a powerful magnetic field. Nobody disputed with Heb Uhr the fact that binary stars could not be regarded as the originators of planetary systems in the Cosmos, but the essence of the proposal called forth very lively opposition from Tantra’s crew.

The astronomers, headed by Erg Noor, compiled a report which was transmitted as being the opinion of the first people who had seen Vega in the film taken by Parus.

People on Earth listened with delight and admiration to the voice from the approaching spaceship.

Tantra opposed the dispatch of the expeditions suggested by Heb Uhr. The blue stars really did emanate tremendous energy per unit of their planets’ surfaces, sufficient to ensure the life of heavy compounds. Any living organism, however, was at once both an energy filter and a dam which, in its struggle against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, functioned only by means of the creation of a complex, by means of the great complication of simple mineral and gas molecules. Such complications could only occur in a process of tremendously active development, which, in turn, entailed the lengthy stability of physical Conditions. Stable conditions did not exist on the planets of high-temperature stars which rapidly destroyed complicated compounds in bursts and vortices of powerful radiation. Nothing there could exist for long despite the fact that minerals acquired the most stable crystal structure with a cubic atomic pattern.

Tantra was of the opinion that Heb Uhr was merely repeating the one-sided assertions of the ancient astronomers who had not understood the dynamics of planet development. Every planet lost the lighter substances that were carried away into space and dispersed. The loss of light elements was especially great in cases where there was great heat and great light pressure from the blue suns.

Tantra gave a long string of examples and concluded that the process of “increasing weight” on the planets of the blue stars did not permit the emergence of living forms.

Satellite 57 transmitted Tantra’s objections direct to the Council observatory.

At last the moment came that Ingrid Dietra and Kay Bear, like all other members of the expedition, had been awaiting so impatiently. Tnntra began to reduce her speed from her subphotonic velocity, had passed the ice belt of the solar system and was approaching the spaceship station on Triton. High velocity was no longer necessary: travelling at a speed of 900 million kilometres an hour, they would have reached Earth from Neptune’s satellite. Triton, in less than five hours. The acceleration of the spaceship, however, took so long that she would have overshot the Sun and travelled far away from it into space if she had set out from Triton.

In order to economize the precious anameson and save the ship from carrying unwieldy equipment, communications inside the solar system were effected by ion planet-ships. Their speed did not exceed 800,000 kilometres an hour for the inner planets and 2,500,000 kilometres an hour for the most distant outer planets. The usual trip from Neptune to Earth took two and a half to three months.

Triton was a very big satellite, only a little smaller than the huge third and fourth satellites of Jupiter, Ganymede and Callisto, or the planet Mercury. It therefore possessed a thin atmosphere consisting mainly of nitrogen and carbon monoxide.

Erg Noor lauded the spaceship at the appointed place at the satellite’s pole, far from the broad domes of the station buildings. On a ledge of the plateau, near a cliff that was honeycombed with underground premises, stood the gleaming glass building of the quarantine sanatorium.

Here the travellers were subjected to a five-week quarantine in complete isolation from all other people. In the course of this time skilled doctors would study their bodies to make sure that no new infection had taken root. The danger was too great to be ignored: every person who had landed on another planet, even on an uninhabited one, had to submit to this inspection no matter how long he had afterwards been confined to the spaceship. The interior of the ship itself was also inspected by the sanatorium’s scientists before the station gave permission for the journey to Earth. Those planets that had been studied long before and had been colonized by man, such as Venus and Mars, as well as some of the asteroids, had their own quarantine stations where travellers were examined before the ships left.

Confinement in the sanatorium was easier than in the spaceship. There were laboratories in which to work, concert halls, combined baths using electric currents, music, water and wave oscillations, daily walks in light protective suits in the hills near the sanatorium, and, lastly, there was contact with Earth, not always regular, but, still, Earth was only five hours away!

Nisa’s silicolloid sarcophagus was carried into the sanatorium with every possible precaution. Erg Noor and the biologist Eon Thai were the last to leave Tantra. They moved easily even though wearing weights to prevent their making sudden leaps in the low gravitation on the satellite.

The floodlights around the landing fieldwere extinguished. Triton was moving across Neptune’s daylight side. Dull as the greyish light reflected by Neptune was, the giant mirror of the planet, only 35,000 kilometres away from Triton, dispelled the gloom and gave the satellite a bright twilight like that of a spring evening in the northern latitudes of Earth. Triton revolved about Neptune in the opposite direction to the planet’s revolution, that is, from east to west, once in about six terrestrial days so that the “daytime” twilight lasted about seventy hours. In that time Neptune revolved about its Own axis four times and at the moment of their arrival the shadow of the satellite was noticeable as it crossed the nebulous disc.

Almost simultaneously the commander and the biologist noticed a small ship standing near the edge of the plateau. This was not a spaceship with its stern half broader than the bows and with high stabilizer ribs. Judging by the sharp bows and slim hull it must have been a planetship hut its contours differed in the thick ring at the stern and the long, distaff-shaped structure on top.

“There’s another ship here in quarantine?” half asked, half asserted Eon. “Can the Council have changed its rules?”

“Not to send out stellar expeditions before a previous one has returned?” asked Erg Noor in his turn. “We have kept to our schedule but the report we should have sent to Earth from Zirda was two years late.”

“Perhaps it is an expedition to Neptune,” suggested the biologist. They soon covered the two kilometres to the sanatorium and climbed up to a wide terrace faced with red basalt. The tiny disc of the Sun, easily visible from the pole of the non-rotating satellite, shone brighter than any other star in the black sky. The bitter frost, — 170 °C., felt like the ordinary cold of a northern winter on Earth through their heated protective suits. Huge flakes of snow, frozen ammonia or carbon monoxide, fell slowly through the still atmosphere, giving their surroundings the serene appearance of Earth during a snow-fall.

Erg Noor and Eon Thai stared hypnotized at the falling snow-flakes as did their distant ancestors in the northern lands for whom the first snow-fall meant the end of the farm year. And this unusual snow also meant the end of their journey and their labours.

The biologist, in response to a subconscious impulse, held out his hand to the commander.

“Our adventures are over and we are still alive and well — thanks to you!”

Erg Noor made an abrupt gesture repelling his hand. “Are we all well? And thanks to whom am I alive?” Eon Thai was not put out.

“I’m sure Nisa will be saved! The doctors here want to begin treatment immediately. Instructions have been received from Grimm Schar himself, you know, the head of the General Paralysis Laboratory.”

“Do they know what it is?”

“Not yet. But Nisa has obviously been struck by some sort of current that condenses in the nerve nodes of the autonomous systems. When we find out how to put a stop to its extraordinarily long action the girl will be cured. We have discovered the functioning of persistent psychic paralysis that was considered incurable for centuries, haven’t we? This is something similar caused by an outside exciter. We’ll carry out some experiments on my prisoners, whether they are dead or alive, then… my arm will also begin to function again!”

The commander felt ashamed and frowned; in his great sorrow he had forgotten how much the biologist had done for him. Not at all decent in a grown man! He took the biologist’s hand and they expressed their warm friendship in man’s age-old handshake.

“Do you think the lethal organs of the black jelly-fish and that — that cross-shaped abomination are of the same order?” asked Erg Noor.

“I don’t doubt it, my arm tells me that. Adaptation to life in these black creatures, inhabitants of a planet rich in electricity, has taken the form of the accumulation and transformation of electric energy. They are obviously beasts of prey but we still don’t know whom they prey on.”

“But do you remember what happened to us all when Nisa….”

“That’s another thing. I have thought a lot about that. When that awful cross appeared it radiated infrasonic waves of tremendous strength that broke down our willpower. Sounds in that black world are also black and we cannot hear them. This monster dulls the consciousness with infrasonic effects, and then uses a sort of hypnosis much stronger than that once used by the now extinct big terrestrial snakes, like the anaconda, for example. That was what nearly finished us — if it had not been for Nisa….”

Erg Noor looked at the distant Sun that was at that moment also shining on Earth. The Sun is man’s eternal hope, has been since the prehistoric days when man dragged out a pitiful existence in the teeth of ruthless nature. The Sun is the incarnation of the bright forces of the intellect driving away the darkness and the monsters of the night. And a joyful spark of hope went with him for the rest of his journey.

The Director of the Triton Station came to see Erg Noor at the sanatorium to tell him that Earth wanted to speak to him. The Director’s appearance in a building that was in strict quarantine meant that their isolation was over and that Tantra would be able to complete her thirteen-year journey. Erg Noor came back looking more business-like than ever.

“We are leaving today. I have been asked to take six people from the planetship Amat with us; the ship is remaining here to organize the mining of new mineral deposits on Pluto. We are taking back the expedition and the material they collected on Pluto.

“These six people re-equipped an ordinary planetship for the performance of a deed of great valour. They dived into the depths of hell, down through Pluto’s thick atmosphere of neon and methane, they flew through blizzards of ammonia snow, every second bringing fresh risks of collision with gigantic needles of frozen water as hard as steel. They managed to find a region where there are mountains.

“The mystery of Pluto has been solved at last — it is a planet that does not belong to our solar system but one that was captured by the Sun during its passage through the Galaxy. This accounts for Pluto’s density being much greater than that of any other planet. The explorers discovered strange minerals on this alien world but more important still, on one ridge they found an almost completely ruined structure that told of an inconceivably ancient civilization. The research data must, of course, be checked. The intelligent working of building materials has still to be proved. But still, an amazingly valorous deed has been done. I am proud that our spaceship will carry the heroes back to Earth and I am all impatience to hear their stories. Their quarantine was over three days ago.”

Erg Noor stopped, exhausted by such a lengthy speech.

“But there is a serious contradiction in this!” shouted Pour Hyss.

“Contradiction is the mother of truth!” Erg Noor answered calmly, making use of an old proverb. “It’s time to get Tantra ready.”

The tried and tested spaceship got away from Triton very easily and described a huge arc perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. It was impossible to get directly to Earth — any ship would have been destroyed in the wide asteroid and meteoroid belt, a zone filled with the fragments of the burst planet Phaeton that once existed between Mars and Jupiter and was exploded by the gravitation of the giant of the solar system.

Erg Noor increased acceleration. He did not intend to take his expedition back to Earth by the normal seventy-two day route but to use the colossal power of the spaceship to make the journey in fifty hours with a minimum expenditure of anameson.

Transmission from Earth raced through space to Tantra and the planet greeted the victory over the gloom of the iron star and over the gloom of icy Pluto. Specially written songs and symphonies in honour of Tantra and Amat were performed.

The Cosmos resounded with triumphant melodies. Stations on Mars, Venus and the asteroids called the ship, their chords merging with the general chorus of homage to the heroes.

‘“Tantra… Tantra…” came, at last, the voice from the Council’s control post. “You may land on El Homra!”

The Central Cosmic Port was situated where there had formerly been a desert in North Africa and the spaceship made its way there through the sun-drenched atmosphere of Earth.