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[ABRIDGED CHAPTERS ONE & TWO]
CHAPTER ONE:
THE IRON STAR
In the faint light emitted by the helical tube on the ceiling the rows of dials on the instrument panels had the appearance of a portrait gallery—the round dials had jovial faces, the recumbent oval physiognomies were impudently self-satisfied and the square mugs were immobile in their stupid complacency. The light—and the dark-blue, orange and green lights flickering inside the instruments—served to intensify the impression.
A big dial, glowing dull red, gazed out from the middle of the convex control desk. The girl in front of it had forgotten her chair and stood with her head bowed, her brow almost touching the glass, in the attitude of one in prayer. The red glow made her youthful face older and sterner, cast clear-cut shadows round her full lips and even made her slightly snub nose look pointed. Her thick eyebrows, knitted in a frown, looked jet black in that light and gave her eyes the despairing expression seen in the eyes of the doomed.
The faint hum of the dials was interrupted by a soft metallic click. The girl started and raised her head, straightening her tired back.
The door opened behind her, a large shadow appeared and turned into a man with abrupt and precise movements. A flood of golden light sprang up, making the girl’s thick, dark-auburn hair sparkle like gold. She turned to the newcomer with a look that told both of her love for him and of her anxiety.
“Why aren’t you sleeping? A hundred sleepless hours!”
“A bad example, eh?” There was a note of gaiety in his voice but he didn’t smile; it was a voice marked by high metallic notes that seemed to rivet his words together.
“The others are all asleep,” the girl began timidly, “and … don’t know anything …” she added whispering instinctively.
“Don’t be afraid to speak. Everybody else is asleep, we’re the only two awake in the Cosmos and it’s fifty billion kilometers to Earth—a mere parsec and a half!”
“And we’ve got fuel for just one acceleration!” There was fascinated horror in the girl’s exclamation.
Erg Noor, Commander of the Cosmic Expedition # 37, reached the glowing dial in two rapid strides.
“The fifth circle!”
“Yes, we’ve entered the fifth … and … still nothing.” The girl cast an eloquent glance at the loudspeaker of the automatic receiver.
“So obviously I have no right to sleep with so many variants and possibilities to study. A solution must be found by the end of the fifth circle.”
“But that’s another hundred and ten hours.”
“All right, I’ll go to sleep in the armchair here as soon as the effect of the sporamin wears off. I took it twenty-four hours ago.”
The girl stood deep in thought for a time but at last, decided to speak.
“Perhaps we should decrease the radius of the circle? Suppose something’s gone wrong with their transmitter?”
“Certainly not! If you reduce the radius without reducing speed you’ll break up the ship. If you reduce speed you’ll be left without anameson … with a parsec and a half to go at the speed of the old lunar shuttles! At that rate we’d get somewhere near our solar system in about a hundred thousand years.”
“I know that. But couldn’t they …”
“No, they couldn’t. Eons ago people could be careless or could deceive each other and themselves. But not today!”
“That’s not what I wanted to say.” The sharpness of her retort showed that the girl was offended. “I was going to say that Algrab may have deviated from its course looking for us.”
“It couldn’t have deviated so much. It must have left at the time computed and agreed on. If the improbable had happened and both transmitters had been put out of action it would have had to cross the circle diametrically and we should have heard it on the planetary receiver. There’s no possibility of a mistake—there it is, the rendezvous planet.”
Erg Noor pointed to the mirror screens in deep niches on all four sides of the control tower. Countless stars burned in the profound blackness. A tiny gray disc, barely illuminated by a sun very far away from them, from the outer edge of the system B-7336-S + 87-A, was crossing the forward port screen.
“Our beacons are functioning well although we put them up four independent years ago.” Erg Noor pointed to a clear-cut line of light running across a glass panel that stretched the whole length of the left-hand wall. “Algrab should have been here three months ago. That means,” Erg Noor hesitated as though he did not wish to finish the sentence, “Algrab is lost!”
“But suppose it isn’t, suppose it’s only been damaged by a meteoroid and can’t regain its speed?” objected the auburn-haired girl.
“Can’t regain its speed!” repeated Erg Noor. “Isn’t that the same thing? If there’s a journey thousands of years long between the ship and its goal, so much the worse—instead of instantaneous death there’ll be years of hopelessness for the doomed. Maybe they’ll signal. If they do, we’ll know … on Earth … in about six years.”
With one of his impetuous movements Erg Noor pulled a folding armchair from under the table supporting the computer, a small MNU-11; the ITU electronic brain capable of any computation was not fitted in spaceships to pilot them unaided because of its great weight, size and fragility. A navigator had always to be on duty in the control tower, especially as it was impossible to plot an exact course over such terrific distances.
The commander’s hands danced over the levers and buttons with the rapidity of a pianist’s. The clear-cut features of his pale face were as immobile a statue’s and his lofty brow, inclined stubbornly over the control desk, seemed to be challenging the elemental forces menacing that tiny world of living beings who had dared penetrate into the forbidden depths of space.
Nisa Creet, a young astronavigator on her first space flight, held her breath and kept silent as she watched Erg Noor, and the commander himself seemed oblivious of everything but his work. How cool and collected, how resourceful and full of energy was the man she loved. And she had loved him for a long time, for all of the past five years. There was no sense concealing it from him, he knew it already, Nisa could feel that. Now that this great misfortune had happened she had the tremendous joy of serving a watch with him, three months alone with him while the other members of the crew lay in deep hypnotic sleep. Another thirteen days and they, too, would be able to sleep for six months while the other two watches—the navigators, astronomers and mechanics—served their turns. The other members of the expedition, the biologists and geologists who would only have work to do when they arrived at their destination, could sleep longer, but the astronomers—theirs was the greatest strain of all!
Erg Noor rose and Nisa’s train of thought was broken. “I’m going to the chartroom. You’ll be able to sleep in”—he glanced at the clock showing dependent, or ship’s, time—“nine hours. I’ll have time for some sleep before I relieve you.”
“I’m not tired, I can stay here as long as necessary—you must get some rest!”
Erg Noor frowned and was about to object but was captivated by the tenderness of her words and by the golden hazel eyes that appealed to him so trustingly; he smiled and went out without another word.
Nisa sat down in the chair, cast an accustomed glance over the instruments and was soon lost in deep meditation.
The reflector screens, through which those on the bridge could see what was happening in the surrounding expanses of space, gleamed black overhead. The lights of many-hued stars pierced the eyes like needles of fire. The spaceship was overtaking a planet whose gravity made the ship vacillate in a field of changing intensity. Magnificent but malignant stars also made wild leaps in the reflector screens. The outlines of the constellations changed with a rapidity that memory could not record.
Planet K2-2N-88, cold, lifeless, far from its sun, was known as a convenient rendezvous for spaceships … for the meeting that had not taken place. The fifth circle—Nisa could visualize her ship traveling with reduced speed around a monster circle with a radius of a billion kilometers, steadily gaining on a planet that crawled along at a snail’s pace. In a hundred and ten hours the ship would complete the fifth circle—and what then? Erg Noor’s tremendous brain was now strained to the utmost to find the best solution. As commander both of the expedition and the ship he could not afford mistakes. If he made a mistake, the First Class Spaceship Tantra with its crew of the world’s most eminent scientists would never return from outer space! But Erg Noor would make no mistake.
Nisa Creet was suddenly overcome by a feeling of nausea which meant that the spaceship had deviated from its course by a tiny fraction of a degree, something possible only at the reduced speed at which they were traveling: at full speed not one of the ship’s fragile human cargo would have survived. The gray mist before the girl’s eyes had not yet dispersed when the nausea swept over her again, as the ship returned to its course. Delicately sensors had located a meteoroid, the greatest enemy of spaceships, in the black emptiness ahead of them and had automatically made the deviation. The ship’s navigational controls (only they could carry out all adjustments with the necessary speed, since human nerves are unsuited to cosmic velocities) had taken her off her course in a millionth of a second and, the danger past, had returned her with equal speed. < … >
Cosmic Expedition No. 37 had been sent to the planetary system of the nearest star in The Serpent Holder (the constellation Ophiuchus) whose only inhabited planet, Zirda, had long been in communication with Earth and other worlds throughout the Great Circle. The planet had suddenly gone silent, and for over seventy years nothing more had been heard. It was Earth’s duty, as the Circle planet nearest to Zirda, to find out what had happened. With this aim in view the expedition’s ship had taken on board a large number of instruments and several prominent scientists, those whose nerves, after lengthy testing, had proved capable of withstanding confinement in a spaceship for several years. The ship was fueled with anameson; only the bare minimum had been taken, not because of its weight but because of the tremendous size of the containers in which it was stored. It was expected that supplies could be renewed on Zirda. In case something serious had happened on Zirda, Second Class Spaceship Algrab was to have met Tantra with fuel supplies, in orbit around planet K2-2N-88. < … >
Nisa’s most vivid memory was that of a blood-red sun that had been steadily growing in their field of vision during the last months of their fourth space year. The fourth year for the inhabitants of the spaceship as it traveled at 83% of the speed of light, but on Earth seven independent years had already passed. The filters on the screens were kind to human eyes; they reduced the composition of the rays of any celestial body to what could have been seen through the dense atmosphere of Earth, with its protective screens of ozone and water vapors. The indescribable ghostly violet light of high temperature bodies was toned down to blue or white and gloomy greet-pink stars took on cheerful golden-yellow hues, like our Sun. A celestial body that burned triumphantly with bright crimson fire took on a deep, blood-red color, the hue that a terrestrial observer sees in Class M stars. The planet was much nearer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, and as the ship drew nearer to Zirda the star grew into a tremendous crimson disc that radiated massive heat energy. For two months before approaching Zirda Tantra had initiated attempts to contact the planet’s outer space station. There was only one such station—on a small natural satellite with no atmosphere that was much nearer to Zirda than the Moon is to Earth. The spaceship continued calling when the planet was no more than thirty million kilometers away and the terrific speed of Tantra had been reduced to three thousand km/sec. It was Nisa’s watch but all the crew were awake, sitting in anticipation in front of the bridge screens. Nisa kept hailing, increasing the power of the transmissions and sending rays out fanwise ahead of the ship. At last they saw the tiny shining dot of the satellite. The spaceship came into orbit around the planet, approaching it in a spiral and gradually adjusting its speed to that of the satellite. Soon Tantra’s speed was the same as that of the fast-moving little satellite and it seemed as though an invisible hawser held them fast. The ship’s stereo telescope scanned the surface of the satellite until the crew of Tantra were suddenly confronted with an unforgettable sight.
A huge, flat-topped glass building seemed to be on fire in the rays of the blood-red sun. Directly under the roof was something in the nature of an assembly hall. There a number of beings—unlike terrestrial humans but unmistakably people—were frozen into immobility. Excitedly, Pour Hyss, the astronomer of the expedition, continued to adjust the focus. The vague rows of people visible under the glass roof were absolutely motionless. Pour Hyss increased the instrument’s magnification. Out of the vagueness a dais surrounded by instrument panels appeared, and on it a long table on which a man sat cross-legged facing the audience, his insane, terrifying eyes staring into the distance.
“They’re dead, frozen,” exclaimed Erg Noor. The spaceship continued to hover over Zirda’s satellite and fourteen pairs of eyes remained fixed on that glass tomb, for such, indeed, it was. How long had the dead been sitting there in their hall of glass? The planet had broken off communication seventy years before; add the six years required for the transmission to reach Earth and three quarters of a century must have passed.
All eyes were turned on the commander. Erg Noor, his face pale, was staring into the smoky yellow atmosphere of the planet through which the lines of the mountain ranges and the glint of the sea were faintly discernible. But nothing gave the answer they had come for. “The station perished seventy-five years ago and has not been re-established! That can only mean a catastrophe on the planet. We have to enter the atmosphere, maybe even land. Everyone’s here now, so I’ll ask your opinion.”
The only objection was raised by Pour Hyss, a man on his first space trip flight; he had replaced an experienced worker who had fallen ill just before launch. Nisa looked with indignation at his big, hawk-like nose and the ugly ears set low on his head.
“If there’s been a catastrophe on the planet there’s no possibility of our getting anameson there. If we circle the planet at low altitude we’ll drain our supply of planetary fuel, and if we land we’ll drain it even more. Apart from that, we don’t know what happened, there could be high-level radiation that would kill us.”
The other members of the expedition supported their commander. “There’s no planetary radiation that can cause any problems to our shields. Weren’t we sent here to find out what happened? What are we going to tell the Great Circle? It’s not enough to establish the fact, we have to account for it—sorry if this sounds like a high-school lecture!” said Erg Noor and the usual metallic tones in his voice now held a note of ridicule in them. “I don’t think we can get out of doing what’s obviously our duty.”
The upper layers of the atmosphere have a normal temperature!” exclaimed Nisa, happily, completing rapid measurements. Erg Noor smiled and began to put the ship down in a spiral, each turn slower than the last as they neared the planet surface. Zirda was somewhat smaller than Earth and no great speed was needed for a low-altitude orbit. The astronomers and the geologist checked the maps of the planet against the observations of Tantra’s instruments. There had been no noticeable change in the outlines of continents and the seas gleamed calmly in the red sun. Nor had the mountain ranges altered from the configurations known from former photographs—but the planet was silent. < … > The spaceship was crossing Zirda’s night disc at a speed no greater than that of a terrestrial helicopter. Below them there should have been cities, factories and ports, but not a single light showed in the pitch blackness, no matter how thoroughly the powerful stereotelescopes scanned the surface. The thunder of the spaceship cutting through the atmosphere must have been audible for dozens of miles. Another hour passed and still no light was seen. The anxious wait was becoming unbearable. Noor switched on the warning sirens hoping that their awe-inspiring howl, added to the roar of the spaceship, would be heard by the mysteriously silent inhabitants of Zirda.
A fiery light wave swept away the ominous darkness as Tantra reached the daylight side of the planet. Below them everything was still black. Rapidly developed and enlarged photographs showed that the surface was covered with a solid carpet of flowers something like the velvety-black poppies that grow on Earth. The masses of black poppies stretched for thousands of miles to the exclusion of all other vegetation—trees and bushes, reeds and grass. The city streets looked like the ribs of giant skeletons lying on a black carpet; metal structures formed gaping rusty wounds. Not a living being, not a tree anywhere, nothing but the black poppies!
Tantra dropped an observation beacon and again plunged into the night. Six hours later the robot reported the content of the atmosphere, the temperature, pressure and other conditions on the surface. Everything was normal for Zirda with the exception of increased radioactivity.
“What an awful tragedy!” Eon Thal, the expedition’s biologist, muttered in a dull voice as he recorded the data. “They’ve destroyed themselves and everything on their planet!”
“How could they?” asked Nisa, hiding tears that were very near the surface. “Is it as bad as that? The ionization really isn’t very high.”
“It’s been a long time,” answered the biologist glumly. His virile Circassian face with its aquiline nose assumed a stern expression, despite his youth. “Radioactive disintegration is dangerous just because it accumulates unnoticed. For hundreds of years the total radiation could increase corus by corus; then suddenly there’s a qualitative change, the genome implodes, species reproduction ceases, and on top of that you get epidemics of radiation sickness. It’s happened before, more than once. The Circle knows about other disasters like this.”
“Like the so-called ‘Planet of the Lilac Sun’,” came Erg Noor’s voice from behind them.
“Whose Spectral-class A° sun, equal to 78 of our suns, provided its inhabitants with very high energy,” added the morose Pour Hyss.
“Where is that planet?,” asked Eon Thal. “Isn’t it the one the Council intends to colonize?” “That’s the one, Algrab was named after its star.”
“The star Algrab, that’s Delta Corvi,” exclaimed the biologist. “But it’s such a long way off!”
“Forty-six parsecs. But we’re constantly increasing the power of our spaceships …”
The biologist nodded but muttered that it was hardly right to name a spaceship after a dead star.
“The star didn’t die and the planet is still safe and sound. Before another century’s out we’ll plant vegetation there and settle the planet,” said Erg Noor with confidence.
He had decided to perform a difficult maneuver—to change the ship’s orbit from latitudinal to meridianal, sending the ship along a north-south line parallel to the planet’s axis of rotation. How could they leave the planet until they were certain there were no survivors? It might be that survivors were unable to communicate with the spaceship because power installations had been wrecked and instruments damaged.
This was not the first time Nisa had seen her commander at the control panel in a moment of great responsibility. With his impenetrably expressionless face, his abrupt but always precise movements, he seemed to the astronavigator like the hero of a legend.
Again Tantra made her futile journey round Zirda, this time from pole to pole. In some places, especially in the temperate latitudes, there were wide belts of bare ground, a yellow haze hung over them and through it, from time to time, appeared rows of gigantic red dunes from which the wind sent up clouds of sand.
Then again came the funeral pall of black velvet poppies, the only plant that had withstood the radioactivity or had produced a mutation of its species viable under radiation.
The whole picture was clear. It was not only useless, it was even dangerous to search for the supplies of anameson that had, on the recommendation of the Great Circle, been laid in for visitors from other worlds. Tantra began slowly unwinding the spiral away from the planet. She gained a velocity of 17 km/sec using her ion engines that provided her with the speed necessary for pulling away from the dead planet. Tantra turned her nose towards an uninhabited system known only by its code name where projectile beacons had been thrown out and where Algrab should have awaited. The anameson engines were now switched on and in fifty-two hours they accelerated the spaceship to her normal speed of 900,000,000 km/hour. Fifteen months’ journey would take them to the meeting place—eleven months of the ship-time—and the crew, with the exception of those on watch, could sleep. < … >
Tantra had been circling the gray planet for many days, and with each passing hour the possibility of encountering Algrab grew less and less likely. Something terrible loomed ahead. Erg Noor stood in the doorway with his eyes on Nisa as she sat there in meditation—her inclined head with its cap of thick hair like a luxuriant golden flower, the mischievous, boyish profile, the slightly slanting eyes that were often crinkled with repressed laughter but which were now wide open, apprehensively but courageously probing the unknown …
Nisa did not realize what a tremendous moral support her selfless love had become for him. Despite the long years of trial that had steeled his will-power and his senses, he tired of command, of the need to be ready at any moment to shoulder entire responsibility for the crew, the ship, and the success of the expedition. Back there on Earth such single-handed responsibility had long since been abandoned—decisions there were taken collectively by the group who had to carry them out. If anything unusual occurred on Earth you could always get advice, and consultations on the most intricate problems could be arranged. Here there was no one to consult, and spaceship commanders were granted special rights. It would have been easier if this responsibility had been for two or three years rather than the ten to fifteen that were normal for space expeditions! Erg Noor entered the bridge.
Nisa jumped up to meet him.
“I’ve got all the necessary data and charts,” he said, “let’s fire it up!”
The commander stretched himself out in his armchair and slowly turned over the thin metal sheets he had brought, calling out the coordinates, the strength of magnetic, electric and gravitational fields, the power of space-dust streams and the velocity and density of meteoroid showers. Nisa, every muscle tense with excitement, pressed the buttons and turned the knobs of the computer. Erg Noor noted a series of responses, frowned and lapsed into deep thought.
“There’s a strong gravitational field in our way, the area in Scorpion with an accumulation of dark matter, near 6555CB + 11PKU,” began Noor. “We can save fuel by changing course that way, towards the Serpent. In the old days they flew without engines, using the gravitational fields as accelerators.”
“Can we do the same?” asked Nisa.
“No, our ships are too fast. At 5/6ths light speed, or 250,000 kilometers/second, our weight would be 12,000 times greater within a gravitation field, and that would reduce the whole expedition to dust. We can only fly like this in space, far from large accumulations of matter. If the ship enters a strong gravitational field we have to reduce speed, the stronger the field the greater the reduction.”
“So there’s a contradiction here,” said Nisa, resting her head on her hand in a childish manner, “the stronger the gravitational field the slower we have to fly!”
“That’s only true with velocities close to light speed, when the ship is like a ray of light and can only move in a straight line or along the so-called curve of equal tension.”
“If I understand you, we’ve got to aim our Tantra-ray straight at the solar system.”
“That’s where the great difficulty of space travel comes in. It’s practically impossible to aim directly at any star, even when we make all the corrective calculations we can think of. Throughout the entire flight we have to compute the accumulating error and constantly change the course of the ship, so an automatic pilot is impossible. Right now we’re in a dangerous situation. There’s nothing left to start another acceleration going, so any halt or even a significant deceleration means certain death. Look, the danger’s here—in area 344 + 2U, which has never been explored. No stars, no inhabited planets, nothing known but the gravitational field—there’s the perimeter. We’ll wait for the astronomers before we make the final decision—after the fifth rotation we’ll wake everybody, but in the meantime …” The commander massaged his temples and yawned.
“The sporamin is wearing off,” exclaimed Nisa, “you can get some sleep!” “Good. I’ll be fine right here, in this chair. What if there’s a miracle … just one beep from them would suffice!” There was something in Erg Noor’s voice that made Nisa’s heart race. She wanted to take that stubborn head of his, press it to her breast and stroke his dark hair with its strands of premature gray. < … >
The powerful anameson engines were silent. The peace of a long night hung over the sleepy ship as though no serious danger threatened her and her inhabitants. At any moment the long-awaited call signal would be heard over the loudspeaker and the two ships would check their unbelievably rapid flight, draw closer on parallel courses and finally equalize their speeds that they would essentially be berthed side by side. A wide, tubular gallery would connect the two ships and Tantra would regain her tremendous strength.
Deep in her heart Nisa was calm, she had faith in her commander. Their five years of travel had not seemed either long or tiring. Especially when Nisa realized that she fell in love…. But even before that the absorbingly interesting observations, the electronic recordings of books, music and films gave her every opportunity to increase her knowledge, and not feel the loss of beautiful Earth, that tiny speck of dust lost in the depths of infinite darkness. Her fellow travelers were people of true erudition. And when her nerves were exhausted by a surfeit of impressions or lengthy, strenuous work, there was prolonged sleep. The sleep state was maintained by attuning the patient to hypnotic oscillations and, after certain preliminary medical treatments, long stretches of time were lost in forgetfulness, passed without leaving a trace. Nisa was now especially happy because she was near the man she loved. The only thing that troubled her was the thought that others were having a harder time, especially Erg Noor. If only she could … no, what could a young and still very green astronavigator do, compared with such a man! Perhaps her tenderness, her constant fund of good will, her ardent desire to give up everything in order to make his tremendous task easier—would help.
The commander woke and raised his sleep-heavy head. The instruments were humming evenly as before, there were still the occasional thuds from the planetary engines. Nisa Creet was at the instruments, bending slightly over them, the shadows of fatigue on her young face. Erg Noor cast a glance at the ship-time clock, and leapt from his deep chair in a single athletic bound.
“Fourteen hours! And you didn’t wake me, Nisa! That’s….” Meeting her radiant glance he stopped short. “Off to bed at once!”
“May I sleep here, like you did?” asked Nisa. She had a quick meal, and dropped into the deep armchair. Her flashing hazel eyes, circled by dark rings, stealthily followed Erg Noor as he took his place at the instruments. He checked the indicators on the communications panel and then began to pace back and forth with rapid strides.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” he asked the navigator. She shook the red curls that were by then in need of clipping—women on extraterrestrial expeditions did not wear long hair. “I was thinking …” she began hesitantly, “just now, when we’re in this great danger, I bow my head before the might and majesty of humanity, who has penetrated to the stars, far, far into the depths of space! Most of this is ordinary for you, but I’m in space for the first time. Just think of it, I’m taking part in a magnificent journey through the stars to new worlds!”
Erg Noor smiled and rubbed his forehead. “I’ll have to disappoint you, or rather, show you the real measure of our so-called might. Look….” He paused beside a projector and on the back wall of the bridge appeared the glittering spiral of the Galaxy. Erg Noor pointed to a ragged outer branch of the spiral comprised of sparse stars, looking like dull dust and scarcely perceptible in the surrounding darkness.
“This is a desert area in the galaxy, an outer fringe poor in light and life, and our solar system is here, and right now so are we. That branch of the galaxy stretches, as you can see, from Cygnus to Carina and, in addition to being far removed from the central zone, it contains a dark cloud, here … Just traveling to that branch of the Galaxy would take our Tantra 40,000 independent years. To cross the empty space that separates our branch from our neighbors would take 4,000 years. So you see that our flights into the depths of space are still nothing more than just marking time on our own ground, a ground with a diameter of no more than fifty light-years! We’d know very little about the Universe if it weren’t for the Great Circle. Reports, images and ideas transmitted through space’s unconquerable in man’s brief life span reach us sooner or later, and we get to know about still more distant worlds. Knowledge is constantly piling up and the work goes on all the time!”
Nisa listened in silence.
“The first interstellar flights …” continued Erg Noor, still lost in thought. “Small ships with low speed and no effective shields … and people in those days lived only half as long as we do—that was the period of man’s real greatness!”
Nisa tossed her head as she usually did when she disagreed. “And when new ways of overcoming space have been discovered and people don’t just force their way through it like we do, they’ll say the same about you—those were the heroes who conquered space with their primitive methods!”
The commander smiled happily and held out his hand to the girl. “They’ll say it about you, too, Nisa!”
“I’m proud to be here with you!” she answered, blushing. “And I’m prepared to give up everything if I can only travel into space again and again!”
“I know that,” said Erg Noor, thoughtfully, “but that’s not the way everybody thinks!” Intuition gave her an insight into the thoughts of her commander. In his cabin there were two stereo portraits, splendidly done in violet-gold tones. Both were of Veda Kong, a woman of great beauty, a specialist in ancient history; eyes of the same transparent blue as the skies above Earth looked out from under long eyebrows. Tanned by the sun, smiling radiantly, she raised her hands to her ash-blonde hair. In the second picture she was seated, laughing heartily, on the bronze gun of a ship, a relic of ancient days …
Erg Noor lost some of his impetuosity—he sat down slowly in front of the astronavigator.
“If you only knew, Nisa, how brutally fate dealt with my dreams, there on Zirda!” he said suddenly, in a dull voice, placing his fingers cautiously on the lever controlling the anameson engines as though intending to accelerate the spaceship to the limit. “If Zirda hadn’t been destroyed, if we had gotten our fuel,” he continued, in response to her unspoken question, “I’d have led the expedition farther. That’s what I arranged with the Council. Zirda would have made the necessary report to Earth and Tantra would have continued its journey with those who wanted to go. The others would have waited for Algrab, it could have gone on to Zirda after its tour of duty here.”
“Who’d want to stay on Zirda?” exclaimed the girl, indignantly. “Unless Pour Hyss would. He’s a great scientist though, wouldn’t he be interested in gaining further knowledge?”
“And you, Nisa?”
“I’d go, of course.”
“Where?” asked Erg Noor suddenly, fixing his eyes on the girl.
“Anywhere you wanted, even …” and she pointed to a patch of abysmal blackness between two arms of the Galaxy’s starry spiral; she returned Noor’s fixed stare with one equally determined, her lips slightly parted.
“Oh, not that far! You know, Nisa, my dear navigator, about eighty-five years ago, Cosmic Expedition No. 84, the ‘Three-Stage Expedition’ left Earth. It consisted of three spaceships carrying fuel for each other, and it took off for Lyra. The two ships that weren’t carrying scientists passed their anameson on to the third and then came back to Earth. That’s the way mountain-climbers used to reach the highest summits. Then the third ship, Parus. …”
“That’s the ship that never returned!” whispered Nisa excitedly.
“That’s right, Parus didn’t return. It reached its objective but was lost on the return journey after transmitting a message. The goal was the large planetary system of Vega, or Alpha Lyrae, a bright blue star that countless generations of human eyes have admired in the northern sky. The distance to Vega is eight parsecs and human beings had never been that far from our Sun. Anyway, Parus got there. We don’t know why it was lost, a meteoroid or an irreparable malfunction. It’s even possible that the ship is still traveling through space and the heroes we think are dead are still alive.”
“That would be terrible!”
“It’s the fate of any spaceship that can’t maintain a speed approaching light speed. It’s instantly separated from the home planet by thousands of years.”
“What message did Parus send?” asked the girl.
“There wasn’t much to it. It was interrupted several times and then broke off altogether. I remember every word: ‘This is Parus. This is Parus, traveling twenty-six years from Vega … enough … will wai … Vega’s four planets … nothing more beautiful … happiness….’”
“But they were calling for help, they wanted to wait somewhere.”
“Of course they were calling for help, otherwise they wouldn’t have used up the tremendous energy needed for transmission. But nothing could be done, there wasn’t another word was from Parus.”
“They’d been on their way back for twenty-six independent years, from Vega to the Sun is thirty-one years. They must have been somewhere near us, or even nearer Earth.”
“Hardly, unless, of course, they exceeded the normal speed and got close to the quantum limit. Which would have been very dangerous!”
Briefly Erg Noor explained the mathematical basis for the destructive change that takes place in matter when it approaches light speed, but he noticed that Nisa was not really listening.
“I understand all that!” she exclaimed. “I’d have realized it before if your story about the lost ship hadn’t taken my mind off it. Things like that are always terrible, and you just can’t accept them!”
“You recognize the main point of the transmission,” said Erg Noor gloomily. “They discovered some particularly beautiful worlds. For a long time I’ve been dreaming of following Parus’ course; with modern improvements we could do it with one ship. I’ve been living with a dream of Vega, the blue sun with the beautiful planets, since I was very young.”
“To see worlds like that …” breathed Nisa, a break in her voice, “But to see them and return would take sixty terrestrial years—forty dependent … and that’s … half a lifetime.”
“Great achievements demand great sacrifices. For me, though, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice. I’ve lived on Earth for a few short intervals between space flights. I was born on a spaceship, you know!”
“How could that have happened?” asked the girl in amazement.
“Expedition No. 35 consisted of four ships. My mother was astronomer on one of them. I was born half-way to the binary star MN19026 + 7AL and managed to break the conventions twice—firstly by being born on a spaceship, and secondly because I was raised and educated by my parents, not in a school. What else could they have done? When the expedition returned to Earth, I was eighteen years old. I’d learned to pilot a spaceship and had acted as astronavigator in place of one got sick. I could also do mechanical repairs on the planetary or the anameson engines, and all this was accepted as the Labors of Hercules I had to perform to grow up.”
“I still don’t understand …” began Nisa.
“About my mother? You’ll understand when you’re a little older! Although the doctors didn’t know it then, the Anti-T serum didn’t keep…. Well, never mind how—I was brought onto a bridge like this one to look at the screens with my brand-new eyes, and to watch the stars dancing up and down on them. We were on course for Lupus, where there was a binary star close to the Sun. The two dwarfs, one blue and the other orange, were hidden by a dark cloud. The first thing that registered on my consciousness was the sky over a lifeless planet, which I observed from the glass dome of a temporary space station. The planets of double stars are usually lifeless because of the irregularity of their orbits. The expedition touched down and for seven months engaged in mineral prospecting. As far as I remember there were enormous quantities of platinum, osmium and iridium. My first toys were unbelievably heavy building blocks made of iridium. And that sky, my first sky, was black and dotted with the pure lights of stars that didn’t twinkle, and there were two suns of indescribable beauty, one a deep blue and the other a bright orange. I remember how their rays sometimes crossed and at those times our planet was inundated with so much wonderful green light that I shouted and sang for joy!” Erg Noor stopped. “That’s enough, I’ve been carried away by my memories and you have to sleep.”
“Go on, please do, I’ve never heard anything so interesting,” Nisa begged him, but the commander was implacable. He brought a pulsating hypnotizer and, either because of his impelling eyes or the sleep-inducing apparatus, Nisa was soon fast asleep, and she awoke only the day before they were to enter the sixth circle. By the cold look on the commander’s face Nisa Greet realized that Algrab had not shown up.
“You’re awake just in time!” “Switch on the re-animation music and lights. For everybody!”
Nisa swiftly pressed a row of buttons, sending intermittent bursts of light and music consisting of certain of low, vibrant chords, gradually increasing in intensity, to all the cabins where members of the expedition were asleep. This initiated a gradual awakening of their inhibited nervous systems, returning them to a normal active state. Five hours later everyone gathered in the bridge; by then they had fully recovered from their sleep, eaten, and taken nerve stimulants.
They received the news of the loss of the auxiliary spaceship in various ways. As Erg Noor expected, the expedition was equal to the occasion. Not a word of despair, not a glance of fear. Pour Hyss, who had not shown himself particularly brave on Zirda, heard the news without a tremor. Louma Lasvy, the expedition’s young physician, went slightly pale and furtively licked her parched lips.
“To the memory of our lost comrades!” said the commander as he switched on the screen of a projector showing Algrab, a photograph taken before Tantra’s launch. All rose to their feet. On the screen, one after another, came the photographs of the seven members of Algrab’s crew, some serious, some smiling. Erg Noor named each of them in turn and the travelers gave the farewell salute. This was the astronauts’ custom. < … >
There was a conviction among astronauts that there existed in space certain neutral fields, or zero areas, in which all radiation and all communications sank like stones into water. Astrophysicists, however, regarded the zero areas as nothing more than the idle invention of space travelers who were, in general, inclined to monstrous fantasies.
After the sad ceremony and a very short conference, Erg Noor changed Tantra’s course in the direction of Earth and switched on the anameson drive. Forty-eight hours later they were switched off again and the ship began to approach its home planet at the rate of 21,000 million kilometers per day. The journey back to the Sun would take about six terrestrial years. Everybody was busy on the bridge and in the ship’s combined library and laboratory, where a new course was being computed and plotted on the charts.
The task was to fly the whole six years using anameson only for course corrections. In other words the spaceship had to be flown with as little deceleration as possible. Everyone was worried about the unexplored area 344 + 2U that lay between the Sun and Tantra. There was no way of avoiding this: on both sides of it, as far as the Sun, lay belts of free meteoroids and apart from that they would lose velocity if they redirected the ship. Two months later the flight-course computation was complete. Tantra began to describe a long, flat curve.
The superb ship was in excellent condition and her speed was kept within the computed limits. Now nothing but time, about four dependent years, separated the ship from its home.
Erg Noor and Nisa Greet finished their watch and, dead tired, started their period of extended sleep. Together with the two astronomers, the geologist, biologist, physician and four engineers departed into temporary forgetfulness. The watch was taken over by Pel Lynn, an experienced astronavigator on his second expedition, assisted by astronomer Ingrid Dietra and electronic engineer Kay Bear, who had volunteered to join them. Ingrid, with Pel Lynn’s consent, often left for the library adjoining the bridge. She and her old friend, Kay Bear, were writing a monumental symphony, Death of a Planet, inspired by the tragedy of Zirda. Pel Lynn, whenever he tired of the hum of the instruments and his contemplation of the black cosmic void, left Ingrid at the control desk and plunged into the thrilling task of deciphering puzzling inscriptions from a planet in the system of the nearest stars of Centaur, whose inhabitants had mysteriously abandoned it. He believed in the success of his impossible undertaking….
Twice watches were changed, the ship had drawn ten billion kilometers nearer Earth and the anameson engines had only been activated for a few hours.
One of Pel Lynn’s watches, the fourth since Tantra had left the place where she was to have met Algrab, was coming to an end. Ingrid Dietrahad finished a calculation and turned to Pel Lynn who was watching, with melancholy mien, the constant flickering of the red arrows on the graded blue scales of the gravitation dials. The usual sluggishness of psychic reaction that not even the strongest people could avoid made itself felt during the second half of the watch. For months and years the ship had been automatically piloted along a given course. If anything untoward had happened, something that the controls were incapable of dealing with, it would have meant the loss of the ship. Human intervention could not have saved it, since the human brain, no matter bow well-trained, cannot react with the necessary alacrity.
“In my opinion we are already deep in the unknown area 344 + 2U. The commander wanted to take over the watch himself when we got there,” said Ingrid. Pel Lynn glanced up at the counter that marked off the days. “Another two days and we change watches. So far there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about. Shall we see the watch through?”
Ingrid nodded assent. Kay Bear came into the control tower from the stern of the ship and took his usual seat beside the equilibrium mechanism. Pel Lynn yawned and stood up. “I’ll get some sleep for a couple of hours,” he said to Ingrid. She got up obediently and went forward to the control desk.
Tantra was travelling smoothly in an absolute vacuum. Not a single meteoroid, not even at a great distance, had been registered by the supersensitive Voll Hoad detectors. The ship’s course now lay somewhat to one side of’ the Sun, about one and a half light-years. The screens of the forward scanners registered an astounding blackness. It seemed as though the spaceship was diving into the very heart of universal darkness. The side telescopes still showed needles of light from countless stars.
Ingrid’s nerves tingled with a strange sensation of alarm. She returned to her computers and telescopes, again and again checked their readings as she mapped the unknown area. Everything was quiet but still Ingrid could not take her eyes from the malignant blackness ahead of the ship. Kay Bear noticed her anxiety and for a long time studied and listened to the instruments. “I don’t see anything,” he said at last, “aren’t you imagining things?” “I don’t know why, but that unusual blackness ahead of us bothers me. I think our ship is diving straight into a dark nebula.” < … >
The long shrill of a bell made them all start. Ingrid grabbed Kay Bear.
Tantra was in danger! The gravitation was double the computed figure!
The astronavigator turned pale. The unexpected had happened and an immediate decision was essential. The fate of the spaceship was in his hands. The steadily increasing gravitational pull made a reduction in speed necessary, both because of increasing weight in the ship and an apparent accumulation of solid matter in the ship’s path. But after reducing speed what would they use for further acceleration? Pel Lynn clenched his teeth and turned the lever that started the ion trigger motors used for braking. Gong-like sounds disturbed the melody of the measuring dials and drowned the alarming ring of those recording the ratio of gravitational pull to velocity. The ringing ceased and the indicators showed that speed had been reduced to a safe level and was normal for the growing gravitation. But no sooner had Pel Lynn switched off the brake engines than the bells began ringing again. Obviously the spaceship was flying directly into a powerful gravitation pool which was slowing it down.
The astronavigator did not dare change the course that had been plotted with such difficulty and precision. He used the planetary engines to brake the ship again although it was already clear that there had been an error in plotting the course and that it lay through an unknown mass of matter.
“The gravitational field is truly great,” said Ingrid softly, “perhaps …”
“We must slow down still more so as to be able to turn,” exclaimed the navigator, “but what can we accelerate with after that? …”
There was a note of fatal hesitancy in his words. “We have already passed the zone of outer vortices,” Ingrid told him, “gravitation is increasing rapidly all the time.” The frequent clatter of the planet engines resounded through the ship; the electronic ship’s pilot switched them on automatically as it felt a huge accumulation of solid matter in front of them. Tantra began to pitch and toss. No matter how much the ship’s speed was reduced the people in the control tower began to lose consciousness. Ingrid fell to her knees. Pel Lynn, sitting in his chair, tried to raise a head as heavy as lead. Kay Bear experienced a mixture of unreasoning brute fear and puerile hopelessness.
The thuds of the motors increased in frequency until they merged into a continual roar—the electronic brain had taken up the struggle in place of its semi-conscious masters: it was a powerful brain but it had its limits, it could not foretell all possible complications and find a way out of unusual situations.
The tossing abated. The indicators showed that the supply of ion charges for the motors was dropping with catastrophic rapidity. As Pel Lynn came to consciousness, he realized that the strange increase of gravity was taking place so fast that urgent measures had to be taken to stop the ship and then make a complete change of course away from the black void. He turned the handle switching on the anameson engines. Four tall cylinders of boron nitride that could be seen through a slit in the control desk were lit up from inside. A bright green flame beat inside them with lightning speed, it flowed and whirled in four tight spirals. Up forward, in the nose of the spaceship, a strong magnetic field enveloped the engine jets, saving them from instantaneous destruction.
The astronavigator moved the handle farther—through the whirling green wall of light a directing ray appeared, a grayish stream of K-particles. Another movement and the gray stream was cut by a blinding flash of violet lightning, a signal that the anameson had begun its tempestuous emission. The huge bulk of the spaceship responded with an almost inaudible, unbearable, high-frequency vibration….
Erg Noor had eaten the necessary amount of food and was lying half asleep enjoying the indescribably pleasurable sensation of an electric nerve massage. The veil of forgetfulness that still covered mind and body left him very slowly. The music of animation changed to a major key and to a rhythm that increased in rapidity …
Suddenly something evil coming from without interrupted the joy of awakening from a ninety-day sleep. Erg Noor realized that he was commander of the expedition and struggled desperately to get back to normal consciousness. At last he recognized the fact that the spaceship was being braked and that the anameson engines were switched on, all of which meant that something serious had occurred. He tried to get up. His body still would not obey his will, his legs doubled under him and he collapsed like a sack on the floor of his cabin. After some time he managed to crawl to the door and open it. Consciousness was breaking through the mist of sleep—in the corridor he rose on all fours and made his way into the control tower.
The people staring at the screens and instrument dials looked round in alarm and then ran to their commander. He was not yet able to stand but he muttered: “The screens … the forward screen … switch over to infrared … shut the engines!”
The borason cylinders were extinguished at the same time as the vibration of the ship’s hull ceased. A gigantic star, burning with a dull reddish-brown light, appeared on the forward star-board screen. For a moment they were all flabbergasted and could not take their eyes off the enormous disc that emerged from the darkness directly ahead of the spaceship.
“Oh, what a fool!” exclaimed Pel Lynn bitterly, “I was sure we were in a dark nebula! And that’s …”
“An iron star!” exclaimed Ingrid Dietra in horror.
Erg Noor, holding on to the back of a chair, stood up. His usually pale face had a bluish tinge to it but his eyes gleamed brightly with their usual fire.
“Yes, that’s an iron star,” he said slowly and the eyes of all those in the room turned to him in fear and hope, “the terror of astronauts! Nobody suspected that there would be one in this area.”
“I only thought about a nebula,” Pel Lynn said softly and guiltily.
“A dark nebula with such a gravitational field would contain comparatively large solid particles and Tantra would have been destroyed already. It would be impossible to avoid a collision in such a swarm,” said the commander in a calm, firm voice.
“But these sharp gravitational changes and vortices—aren’t they a direct indication of a cloud?”
“Or that the star has a planet, perhaps more than one….” The astronavigator bit his lip so badly that it began to bleed. The commander nodded his head encouragingly and himself pressed the buttons to awaken the others.
“A report of observations as quickly as possible! We’ll work out the gravitation contours.”
The spaceship began to rock again. Something flashed across the screen with colossal speed, something of terrific size that passed behind them and disappeared.
“There’s the answer, we’ve overtaken a planet. Hurry up, hurry up, get the work done!” The commander’s glance fell on the fuel supply indicator. His hands gripped the back of the chair more tightly, he was going to say something but refrained.
CHAPTER TWO:
EPSILON TUCANAE
The faint tinkle of glass that came from the table was accompanied by orange and blue lights. Varicolored lights sparkled up and down the transparent partition. Darr Veter, Director of the Outer Stations of the Great Circle, was observing the lights on the Spiral Way. Its immense curved into the heights and scored a dull yellow line along the sea-coast. Keeping his eyes on the Way, Darr Veter stretched out his hand and turned a lever to point M, ensuring himself solitude for meditation. A great change had on that day come into his life. His successor Mven Mass, chosen by the Astronautical Council, had arrived that morning from the southern residential belt.
They would carry out his last transmission to the Circle together and then … it was precisely this “then” that had not yet been settled. For six years Veter had been doing a job demanding superhuman effort. This was work for which the Council selected extraordinary people, those who were distinguished by superb memories and encyclopedic knowledge. When he began to experience attacks of complete indifference to work and to life with ominous frequency—and this is one of the most serious ailments of man—Veter had been examined by Evda Nahl, a noted psychiatrist. A proven remedy—melancholy strains of minor music in a room of blue dreams saturated with pacifying waves—hadn’t helped. The only thing left was to change his work and take a course of physical labor, anything that demanded daily, hourly muscular effort. His best friend, the historian Veda Kong, had offered him an opportunity to do archaeological work with her. Machines couldn’t do all the excavation work, the final stage required human hands. Veda had promised him a long trip to a region of the ancient steppes where he would be close to nature.
If only Veda Kong … but of course, he knew the whole story. Veda was in love with Erg Noor, Member of the Astronautical Council and Commander of Cosmic Expedition No. 37. There should have been a message from Erg Noor—he should have reported from Zirda and said whether he was going farther. But since no message had come—and all space fights were computed with the greatest precision—then … but no, he must not think of winning Veda’s love! The Vector of Friendship, that was all, that was the greatest tie that there could be between them.
Nevertheless he would go and work for her. Darr Veter moved a lever, pressed a button and the room was flooded with light. A crystal window formed one of the walls of this room situated high above land and sea, giving a view over a great distance. With a turn of another lever Darr Veter caused the window to open inwards, leaving the room open to the starry sky; the window frame blocked the lights of the Spiral Way and the buildings and lighthouses on the sea-coast.
Veter’s eyes were fixed on the hands of the galactic clock with its with three concentric, subdivided rings. Information transmission in the Great Circle followed galactic time, every one hundred-thousandth of a galactic second, or once in eight days, forty-five times a year according to terrestrial time. One revolution of the Galaxy around its axis equaled one day of galactic time.
The next and, for Veter, the final transmission would be at 9 a.m. Tibetan Mean Time or at 2 a.m. at the Mediterranean Council Observatory. A little more than two hours still remained.
The instrument on the table tinkled and flashed again. A man in silky light-colored clothing appeared from behind the partition.
“We’re ready to transmit and receive,” he said briefly. He showed no outward signs of deference, but in his eyes one could read admiration for his Director. Darr Veter did not say a word, nor did his assistant who stood by, confident and relaxed.
“In the Cubic Hall?” asked Veter at last, and, receiving an answer in the affirmative, asked where Mven Mass was.
“He’s in the Morning Freshness Room, getting tuned up after his journey and, apart from that, I think he’s a little excited.”
“In his place I’d be excited myself” said Darr Veter, thoughtfully. “That’s how I felt six years ago.
“The assistant flushed with the effort necessary to preserve his outward calm. With all the fire of youth he was sorry for his chief, perhaps realizing that some day he too would experience the joys and sorrows of work and great responsibility. The Station Director didn’t show his feelings in any way, at his age it wasn’t considered decent. “When Mven Mass appears, bring him straight to me.” The assistant left the room.< … >
Darr Veter closed the shutters and turned to meet his successor. Mven Mass entered the room with long strides. The cast of his features and his smooth, dark-brown skin revealed his African ancestry. A white mantle fell from his powerful shoulders in heavy folds. Mven Mass took both Darr Veter’s hands in his strong, slender ones. The two Directors of the Outer Space Stations, the new and the old, were both very tall. Veter, whose genealogy led back to the Russian people, seemed broader and more massive than the graceful African.
“It seems to me that something important is happening today,” began Mven Mass, with the trusting sincerity typical of humans in the Era of the Great Circle. Darr Veter shrugged his shoulders. “Important things are happening for three people. I’m handing over my work, you’re taking over for me and Veda Kong will speak to the Universe for the first time.”
“She is beautiful’” responded Mven Mass, half questioning, half affirming.
“You’ll see her. By the way, there’s nothing special about today’s transmission. Veda will give a lecture on our history for planet KRZ 664456 + BS 3252.”
Mven Mass made an astonishingly rapid mental calculation. “Constellation of the Unicorn, star Ross 614, its planetary system has been known from time immemorial but has never in any way distinguished itself. I love the old names and old words,” he added with a scarcely detectable note of apology.
“The Council knows how to select people,” Darr Veter thought to himself. Aloud he said:
“Then you’ll get on well with Junius Antus, the Director of the Memory Banks. He calls himself the Director of the Memory Lamps. He’s not thinking of the lamps they used for light in ancient days but of those first electronic devices in clumsy glass envelopes with the air pumped out of them.”
Mven Mass laughed so heartily and frankly that Darr Veter could feel his liking for the man growing rapidly.
“Memory lamps! Our memory network consists of kilometers of corridors lined with billions of cells.” He suddenly checked himself. “I’m letting my emotion run away with me and haven’t found out about essentials. When did Ross first speak?”
“Fifty-two years ago. Since then they ‘ve mastered the language of the Great Circle. Only four parsecs away from us. They’ll receive Veda’s lecture in thirteen years.”
“And then?”
“After the lecture we’ll go over to reception. We’ll get some news from the Great Circle through our old friends.”
“Through 61 Cygni?”
“Of course. Sometimes we get contact through 107 Ophiuchi, to use the old terminology.”
A man in the same silvery Astronautical Council uniform worn by Veter’s assistant entered the room. He was of medium height, sprightly, with an aquiline nose. People liked him for the keenly attentive glance of his jet-black eyes. The newcomer rubbed his hairless head.
“I’m Junius Antus,” he said to Mven Mass. The African greeted him respectfully. The Directors of the Memory Banks exceeded everyone else in erudition. They decided what must be preserved by the data machines, and what would be sent out as general information or used by the Palaces of Creative Endeavor.
“Another brevus,” muttered Junius Antus, shaking hands with his new acquaintance.
“What’s that?” inquired Mven Mass.
“A Latin appellation I thought up. I give that name to all those who don’t live long—vita breva, you know—workers on the Outer Stations, pilots of the Interstellar Space Fleet, technicians at spaceship engine plants … And … er … you and me. We also live no more than half the allotted span. What can you do, it’s more interesting. Where’s Veda?”
“She intended to get here earlier,” began Darr Veter. < … >
Suddenly Mven Mass’ glance became fixed and his face began to glow with admiration. Darr Veter looked around. Unobserved by them Veda Kong had arrived and was standing beside a luminescent column. For her lecture she had donned the costume that most complements the beauty of women, a costume invented thousands of years ago, during the Great Civilization era. The heavy knot of ash-blonde hair piled high on the back of her head did not detract from her strong and graceful neck. Her smooth shoulders were bare and her neckline was cut very low to reveal a high bosom supported by a bodice of cloth of gold. A wide, short silver skirt embroidered with blue flowers, exposed bare, suntanned legs in slippers of cherry-colored silk. Large cherry-colored stones from Venus, set with careful crudeness in gold links, lay like roundels of flame on her soft skin, echoing the excited glow of her cheeks and delicate ear-lobes.
Mven Mass was meeting the learned historian for the first time, and he gazed at her in frank admiration.
Veda lifted her troubled eyes to Darr Veter.
“Very nice,” he said in answer to his friend’s unspoken question.
“I’ve spoken to many audiences, but not like this,” she said.
“The Council is observing the custom. Communications to other planets are always read by beautiful women. This gives them an impression of the sense of the beautiful as perceived by the inhabitants of our world, and in general it tells them a lot,” continued Darr Veter.
“The Council is not mistaken in its choice!” exclaimed Mven Mass.
Veda gave the African a penetrating look. “Are you a bachelor?” she asked softly and, acknowledging Mven Mass’s nod of affirmation, smiled. < … >
“It’s time. In half an hour the Great Circle will be activated!” Darr Veter took Veda Kong carefully by the arm. Accompanied by the others they went down an escalator to a deep underground chamber, the Cubic Hall, carved out of living rock.
There was little in the hall but instruments. The dull black walls looked like velvet panels divided by clean lines of crystal. Gold, green, blue and orange lights lit up the dials, signs and figures. The emerald-green points of needles trembled on black semi-circles, giving the broad walls an appearance of strained, quivering expectation. < … >
Darr Veter beckoned to Mven Mass and pointed to high black armchairs for the others. The African approached, walking on the balls of his feet, just as his ancestors had once walked the sun-baked savannas on the trail of huge, savage animals. Mven Mass held his breath. Out of this deeply-hidden stone vault a window would soon be opened into the endless spaces of the Cosmos and humans would unite their thoughts and their knowledge with that of their brothers in other worlds. This small group of five individuals represented terrestrial mankind to the entire Universe. And from the next day on, he, Mven Mass, would be in charge of these communications. He was to be entrusted with the control of that tremendous power. A slight shiver ran down his back. Perhaps only at that moment did he realize what a burden of responsibility he had undertaken when he accepted the Council’s proposal. As he watched Darr Veter manipulating the control switches something of the admiration that burned in the eyes of Darr Veter’s young assistant could be seen in his own gaze.
A deep, ominous rumble sounded, as though a huge gong had been struck. Darr Veter turned around swiftly and threw over a long lever. The gong ceased and Veda Kong saw that a narrow panel on the right-hand wall had lit up from floor to ceiling. The wall itself seemed to have disappeared into the unfathomable distance. Phantom-like outlines of a pyramidal mountain surmounted by a gigantic stone ring appeared. Below its cap of molten stone, lay patches of pure white mountain snow.
Mven Mass recognized the second highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kenya.
Again the strokes of the gong resounded through the underground chamber, putting all those present on the alert and compelling them to concentrate their thoughts.
Darr Veter indicated a handle in which a ruby eye glowed. Mven obediently turned the handle as far as it would go. All the power produced by Earth’s 1,760 gigantic power stations was concentrated on the equator, on a mountain 5,000 meters high. A multi-colored luminescence appeared over the peak, formed a sphere and then surged upwards in a spear-shaped column that pierced the very depths of the sky. Like the narrow column of a whirl-wind it remained poised over the glassy sphere, and over its surface, climbing upwards, ran a spiral of dazzlingly brilliant blue smoke.
The directed rays cut a regular channel through Earth’s atmosphere that acted as a line of communication between Earth and the Outer Stations. At a height of 36,000 kilometers above Earth hung the diurnal satellite, a giant station that revolved around Earth’s axis once in twenty-four hours and kept in the plane of the equator so that to all intents and purposes it stood motionless over Mount Kenya in East Africa, the point that had been selected for permanent communications with the Outer Stations. < … >
The narrow panel on the right went dark, a signal that the transmission channel had connected with the receiving station of the satellite. Then the gold-framed, opalescent screen lit up. In its center appeared a monstrously enlarged figure that grew clearer and then smiled broadly. This was Goor Hahn, one of the observers on the diurnal satellite, whose picture on the screen grew rapidly to fantastic proportions. He nodded and stretched out a ten-foot arm to switch on all the Outer Stations around our planet. They were linked up in one circuit by the power transmitted from Earth. The sensitive eyes of receivers scanned every quarter of the Universe. The planet of a dull red star in Monoceros had established a better contact with Satellite 57, and Goor Hahn switched over to it. This invisible contact between Earth and the planet of another star would last for three-quarters of an hour and not a moment of that valuable time could be lost.
At a sign from Darr Veter, Veda Kong stepped to a spot on a gleaming round metal dais facing the screen. Invisible rays poured down from above and noticeably deepened the her sun-bronzed skin. Computers blinked soundlessly as they translated her words into the language of the Great Circle. In thirteen years’ time the receivers on the planet of the dull-red star would write down the incoming oscillations in universal symbols and, if they had them, computers would translate the symbols into the living speech of the planet’s inhabitants.
“All the same it’s too bad those distant beings will not be hearing the soft, melodious voice of a woman of Earth, and will not understand its expressiveness,” thought Darr Veter. “Who knows how their ears are constructed, they may possess an entirely different type of hearing. But vision, which uses the range of the electromagnetic oscillations capable of penetrating the atmosphere, is almost the same throughout the Universe, and they will see the charming Veda in her flush of excitement …
“Darr Veter did not move his gaze from Veda’s delicate ear, partly covered by a lock of hair, while he listened to her lecture.
Briefly but clearly Veda Kong spoke of the chief stages in the history of mankind. She spoke of the early epochs of man’s existence, when there were numerous large and small nations that in constant conflict, owing to the economic and ideological hostility dividing their them. She spoke very briefly and called the period The Era of Disunity. People living in the era of the Great Circle were not interested in lists of the destructive wars and the horrible sufferings, nor in the so-called great rulers who filled ancient history books. More important to them were the development of productive forces and the formation of ideas, the history of art and knowledge and the struggle to create the authentic human, the ways in which the creative urge had been developed and humanity had evolved new conceptions of the world, of social relations and of the duties, rights and happiness of Mankind. These concepts had nurtured the mighty tree of communist society now flourishing over the entire planet.
During the last century of the Era of Disunity, known as The Fission Age, humanity had at last begun to understand that their misfortunes were attributable to a social structure with its origins in ancient savagery: they realized that all their strength, all the future of Mankind, lay in labor, in the correlated efforts of millions of free people, in science and a scientific way of life, something that came to be of greater importance as the population of the planet increased.
In the Fission Age the struggle between the old and new ideas became more acute and led to the division of the world into two camps. The first types of atomic energy had been discovered, but the stubbornness of those championing the old order had almost led mankind into a colossal catastrophe.
The new social system was bound to triumph, but victory was delayed by the difficulty of training people in the new spirit. Rebuilding the world along communist lines entailed a radical economic change accompanied by the disappearance of poverty, hunger and heavy, exhausting toil. < … >
Communist society had not been established in all countries and among all nations simultaneously. A tremendous effort had need required to eliminate the hostility and, in particular, the lies remaining from the propaganda prevalent during the Fission Age’s ideological struggles. Many mistakes were made in this period as new human relations were developing. Here and there insurrections had been raised by backward people who worshipped the past and who, in their ignorance, saw a solution to humanity’s difficulties in a return to that past.
“With inexorable persistence the new way of life spread over the entire earth, and the many races and nations had been united into a single friendly and wise family.
Thus began the next era, the Era of World unity, consisting of four ages—The Age of Alliance, the Age of Linguistic Disunity, the Age of Power Development and the Age of the Common Tongue.
As Man’s power over nature progressed with giant steps society developed more rapidly and each new age passed more quickly than the one before.
In the ancient Utopian dreams of a happy future, great importance had been attached on Man’s gradual liberation from the necessity of work. The Utopians promised Man an abundance of all he needed in exchange for a brief working day of two or three hours, with the rest of his time free to devote to doing nothing, to the dolce far niente. This fantasy had arisen naturally, out of Man’s abhorrence of the arduous, exhausting toil of ancient days.
Humanity soon realized that happiness could only derive from labor, from a never-ceasing struggle against nature, from overcoming difficulties and the solution of ever-new problems arising as science and the economy evolve. Man needed to work to the full measure of his strength, but his labor had to be creative and in accordance with his natural talents and inclinations. And it had to be varied and changed from time to time. < … > Progressively expanding science embraced all aspects of life and a growing number of people came to know the joy of the creator, of the discoverer of new secrets of nature. Art played a greater part in social education and in the formation of a new way of life. Then came the most magnificent era in Man’s history, the Era of Common Labor—consisting of The Age of Simplification, The Age of Realignment, The Age of the First Abundance, and The Cosmic Age. < … >
The frail and risky old spaceships, poor as they were, enabled us to reach the other planets of our system. Earth was encircled by a belt of artificial satellites from which scientists were able to make a close study of the Cosmos. And then, eight hundred and eight years ago, there occurred an event of such great importance that it marked a new era in the history of mankind—the Era of the Great Circle.
For a long time the human intellect had labored over the transmission of images, sounds and energy over great distances. Hundreds of thousands of the most talented scientists worked in a special organization that still bears the name of the Academy of Direct Radiation; they developed methods for the directed transmission of energy over great distances without any conductor. This became possible when ways were found to concentrate energy in non-divergent rays. The clusters of parallel rays—laser beams—then provided constant communication with the artificial satellites, and, therefore with the Cosmos. Long, long before, towards the end of the Era of Disunity, our scientists had established the fact that powerful radiation streams were inundating Earth from the Cosmos. Signals from the Cosmos transmissions from the Great Circle of the Universe were reaching us, together with radiation from other constellations and galaxies. At that time we did not understand them, although we had learned to receive the mysterious signals which we, at that time, thought to be natural radiation.
Kam Amat, an Indian scientist, got the idea of conducting experiments from the satellites with television receivers, and with infinite patience tried all possible wavelength combinations over a period of dozens of years. He caught a transmission from the planetary system of the binary star that had long been known as 61 Cygni. A man appeared on his screen—not like us but undoubtedly a man—and he pointed to an inscription made in the symbols of the Great Circle. Another ninety years passed before the inscription was deciphered and today it is inscribed in our language, the language of Earth, on a monument to Kam Amat: ‘Greetings to you, our brothers, who are joining our family. Separated by space and time we are united by intellect in the Circle of Great Power.’
The language of symbols, drawings and maps used by the Great Circle proved easy to assimilate at the level of development then reached by man. In two hundred years we were able to use translation computers to converse with the planetary systems of the nearest stars and to receive and transmit whole pictures of the varied life of different worlds. We recently received an answer from the fourteen planets of Deneb, a first magnitude star and tremendous center of life in the Cygnus; it is 122 parsecs distant from us and radiates as much light as 4,800 of our suns. Intellectual development there has proceeded on different lines but has reached a very high level.
Strange pictures and symbols come from immeasurable distances, from the ancient worlds, from the globular clusters of our Galaxy and from the huge inhabited area around the Galactic Center, but we do not understand, and have not yet deciphered them. They have been recorded by our computers and passed on to the Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge, an institution that works on problems our science can as yet only hint at. We are trying to understand ideas that are millions of years ahead of us—ideas that greatly differ from ours due to life there having followed different paths of development.
Veda Kong turned away from the screen into which she had been staring as though hypnotized and cast an inquiring glance at Darr Veter. He smiled and nodded his head in approval. Veda proudly raised her head, stretched out her arms to those invisible and unknown beings who would receive her words and her image in thirteen years.
“Such is our history, such is the difficult, devious and lengthy ascent we have made to the heights of knowledge. We appeal to you—join us in the Great Circle, aid us in carrying to the ends of the tremendous Universe the gigantic power of the intellect!”
Veda’s voice had a triumphant sound to it, as though it were filled with the strength of all the generations of the people of Earth who had reached such heights that they now aspired to send their thoughts beyond the bounds of their own Galaxy to other stellar islands in the Universe …
The bronze gong sounded as Darr Veter turned over the lever that switched off the stream of transmitted energy. The screen went dark.
The luminescent column of the conductor channel remained on the transparent panel on the right. Veda, tired and subdued, curled up in the depths of her armchair. Darr Veter turned the control desk over to Mven Mass and leaned over his shoulder to watch him at work. The absolute silence was broken only by the faint clicks of switches opening and closing.
Suddenly the screen in the gold frame disappeared and its place was taken by unbelievable depths of space. It was the first time that Veda Kong had seen this marvel and she gasped audibly. Even those well acquainted with the method of complex light-wave interference by means of which this exceptional expanse and depth of vision was achieved found the spectacle amazing. < … >
The unchanging voice of the electron translator continued: “We have received a transmission from star …” again a long string of figures and staccato sounds, “by chance and not during the Great Circle transmission times. They have not deciphered the language of the Circle and are wasting energy transmitting during the hours of silence. We answered them during their transmission period and the result will be known in three-tenths of a second …” The voice broke off. The signal lamps continued to burn with the exception of the green electric eye that had gone out.
“We get these unexplained interruptions in transmission, perhaps due to the passage of the astronauts’ legendary neutral fields between us,” Junius Antus explained to Veda.
“Three-tenths of a galactic second—that means waiting six hundred years,” muttered Darr Veter, morosely. “A lot of good that will do us!”
“As far as I can understand they are in communication with Epsilon Tucanae in the southern sky. That’s ninety parsecs away from us and close to the limit of our regular communications. So far we haven’t established contact with anything farther away than Deneb,” Mven Mass remarked.
“But we receive the Galactic Center and the globular clusters, don’t we?” asked Veda Kong.
“Irregularly, quite by chance, or through the memory machines of other members of the Great Circle that form a circuit stretching through the Galaxy,” answered Mven Mass.
“Communications sent out thousands and even tens of thousands of years ago are not lost in space, but eventually reach us,” said Junius Antus.
“So that means we get a picture of the life and knowledge of the peoples of other, distant worlds with great delay. For the Central Zone of the Galaxy, for example, a delay of about twenty thousand years.’”
“Yes, it doesn’t matter whether they are computer records of other, nearer worlds, or whether they are received by our stations, we see the distant worlds as they were a very long time ago. We see people that have long been dead and forgotten in their own worlds.” < … >
“The Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge is engaged in projects to overcome space, time and gravity,” Darr Veter put in. “They’re working on the fundamentals of the Cosmos, but they haven’t even gotten as far as the experimental stage yet, and can’t …” The green eye suddenly flashed on again and Veda once more felt giddy as the screen opened out into endless space.
The sharply outlined edges of the image showed that it was the computer record and not a direct transmission.
At first the onlookers saw the surface of a planet, obviously as seen from an outer station, a satellite. The huge pale violet sun, spectral in the terrific heat it generated, deluged the cloud envelope of the planet’s atmosphere with its penetrating rays.
“Yes, that’s it, the luminary of the planet is Epsilon Tucanae, a high temperature star, class B, 78 times as bright as our Sun,” whispered Mven Mass.
Darr Veter and Junius Antus nodded in agreement. The spectacle changed, the scene grew narrower and seemed to be descending to the very soil of the unknown world. The rounded domes of hills that looked as though they had been cast in bronze rose high above the surrounding country. An unknown stone or metal glowed like fire in the amazingly white light of the blue sun. Even in the imperfect apparatus used for transmission the unknown world gleamed triumphantly, with a sort of victorious magnificence.
The reflected rays produced a silver pink corona around the contours of the copper-colored hills and lay in a wide path on the slowly moving waves of a violet sea. The water, of a deep amethyst color, seemed heavy and glowed from within with red lights that looked like an accumulation of living eyes. The waves washed the massive pedestal of a gigantic statue that stood in splendid isolation far from the coast. It was a female figure carved from dark-red stone, the head thrown back and the arms extended in ecstasy towards the flaming depths of the sky. She could easily have been a daughter of Earth, the resemblance she bore to our people was no less astounding than the amazing beauty of the carving. Her body was the fulfillment of an earthly sculptor’s dream; it combined great strength with inspiration in every line. The polished red stone of the statue emitted the Games of an unknown and, consequently, mysterious and attractive life.
The five people of Earth gazed in silence at that astounding new world. The only sound was a prolonged sigh that escaped the lips of Mven Mass whose every nerve had been strained in joyful anticipation from his first glance at the statue.
On the sea-coast opposite the statue, carved silver towers marked the beginning of a wide, white staircase that swept boldly over a thicket of stately trees with turquoise leaves. “They ought to ring like bells!” Darr Veter whispered in Veda’s ear, pointing to the towers, and she nodded her head in agreement.
The camera of the new planet continued its steady and soundless journey into the country. For a second the five saw white walls with wide cornices through which led a portal of blue stone; the screen carried them into a high room filled with strong light. The dull, pearl-colored, grooved walls lent unusual clarity to everything in the hall. The attention of the Earth-dwellers was attracted to a group of people standing before a polished emerald panel.
The flame-red color of their skin was similar to that of the statue in the sea. It was not an unusual color for Earth—photographs preserved from ancient days recorded tribes of Central American Indians whose skin had been almost the same color, perhaps just a little lighter. There were two men and two women in the hall. They stood in pairs, differently clothed. The pair closest to the emerald panel wore short golden garments, something like elegant overalls fastened with a number of clips. The other pair wore cloaks that covered them from head to foot and were the same pearly hue as the walls. < … >
At this moment the pair in golden clothing moved away to the right and their place was taken by the second pair. With a movement so rapid that the eye could not follow it the cloaks were thrown aside, and two dark-red bodies gleamed like living fire against the pearl of the walls. The man held out his hands to the woman and she answered him with such a proud and dazzling smile of joy that the Earth-dwellers responded with their own involuntary smiles. And there, in the pearl hall of that immeasurably distant world, the two began a slow dance. It was probably not danced for the sake of dancing, but was something more in the nature of eurythmics, in which the dancers strive to show their perfection, the beauty of their lines and the flexibility of their bodies. A majestic and at the same time sorrowful music could be sensed in the rhythmic alternation of movement, as though the dancers were recalling the great ladder—countless unnamed victims sacrificed to the development of life that had produced Man, that beautiful and intelligent being. < … >
The dance was over. The young red-skinned woman came into the center of the hall and the camera focused on her alone. The red-skinned girl from the distant world turned to face her audience, her arms spread wide as though to embrace some invisible person standing before her. She threw back her head and shoulders as a woman of Earth might do in a moment of passion. Her mouth was open slightly, and her lips moved as she repeated inaudible words. So she stood, immobile, appealing, sending forth into the cold darkness of interstellar space fiery human words, an entreaty for friendship with people of other worlds. < … >
Mven Mass had worked on the construction of the water-supply system of a mine in Western Tibet, on the restoration of the Araucaria pine forests on the Nahebt Plateau in South America and had taken part in the annihilation of the sharks that had again appeared off the coasts of Australia. His training, his heredity and his outstanding abilities enabled him to undertake many years of persistent study to prepare himself for difficult and responsible activities. On that day, during the first hour of his new work, there had been a meeting with a world that was related to our Earth and that had brought something new to his heart. With alarm Mven Mass felt that some great depths had opened up within him, something whose existence he had never even suspected. How he craved another encounter with the planet of star Epsilon in the Tucana Constellation! … That was a world that seemed to have come into being by power of the best legends known to Earth-dwellers. He would never forget the red-skinned girl, her outstretched alluring arms, her tender, half-open lips! The fact that the two hundred and ninety light years dividing him from that marvelous world was a distance that could not be covered by any means known to the technicians of Earth served to strengthen rather than weaken his dream. Something new had grown up in Mven’s heart, something that lived its own life and did not submit to the control of the will and cold intellect. The African had never been in love, he had been absorbed in his work almost as a hermit would be and had never experienced anything like the alarm and incomparable joy that had entered his heart during that meeting across the tremendous barrier of space and time.
(1956-7) Translated by A. L. and M. K.