What should he, the captain of the Tellur, tell his young colleagues? “We ol the Tellur have lost all those whom we hold near and dear on Earth. But the people awaiting us in the future are no less near and dear to us — their minds will be keener and their feelings richer than those of the contemporaries we have left behind…” Yes, that is what he must tell them.
In the meanwhile Tey Eron was at work in the control room. As usual, he had turned off all the unnecessary lights and in the half-gloom the large round chamber looked cosier. Humming a simple tune, he was checking the calculations over and over again. The ship was near-ing the farthest point on its journey, and today the course would have to be altered in the direction of Serpentarius in order to skirt the carbon star they were investigating. But it was still dangerous to approach it. The increasing pressure of its radiation was apt to wreck the ship moving at a speed close to that of light.
Sensing someone behind him, Tey Eron turned to face his commander.
Moot Ang leaned over his assistant’s shoulder to scan the summarized indicator readings flashed on in a row of little square windows along the lower edge of the control panel. Tey Eron looked up at him questioningly. The captain nodded. In response to a barely perceptible movement of Tey Eron’s fingers the intercommunication system sprang into action. There was a pealing of bells through the ship accompanied by the metallic words: “Attention all!”
Moot Ang pulled the microphone toward himself, knowing that all members of the crew were tensely waiting for the next words to come from the loudspeakers concealed in the walls.
“Attention all!” Moot Ang repeated. “Deceleration in fifteen minutes. All except those on duty should lie down in their cabins. The first phase of deceleration will end at 18:00 hours, the second phase at 6g will continue for 144 hours. Change in course after Collision Danger signal. That’s all!”
At 18:00 hours the captain rose from his seat, conscious of the usual deceleration pains in his back and the back of his head, and announced that he would retire to his cabin for the remaining six days of braking action ahead. The rest of the crew sat glued to their instruments for this was their last opportunity to observe the carbon star.
Tey Eron frowned as he watched the captain leave the control room. He would have felt better with the captain there beside him during the difficult manoeuvre. For although there was little comparison between a powerful cosmic ship like the Tellur and those flimsy shells called ships that plied the Earth’s seas, it too was nothing more than an egg-shell in the infinity of space.
* * *
Kari Ram started at the sound of Moot Ang’s merry laugh. A few days ago the crew had been greatly alarmed to learn that the captain had been suddenly taken ill. Only the doctor had been allowed to enter his cabin, and everyone had spoken in whispers when passing the tightly-closed door. With the captain laid up the task of bringing the ship around and accelerating again to get it away from the radiation zone of the carbon star and send it back toward the Sun and home had been left to Tey Eron.
Now Tey Eron was walking beside the captain with a faint smile on his lips. He had just learned that the latter had conspired with the doctor to leave the ship in Tey’s hands and force him to rely on himself alone. He would not confess to the agonized doubts that had assailed him just before he swung the ship around, but he reproached the captain for having unnecessarily alarmed the crew.
Moot Ang laughed it all off and assured Tey that the ship was perfectly safe in the great open spaces of the Cosmos. The instruments could not err, and the system of fourfold check-up of every computation excluded the possibility of mistakes. Nor could there be any belt of asteroids and meteorites in the vicinity of the carbon star: the pressure of radiation was too heavy.
“You really think there will be no more surprises?” Kari Ram put in cautiously.
“Unforeseen accidents, of course, are always possible. But that great law of the Cosmos we call the law of averages works in our favour. You can be certain that in this deserted corner of the Universe we cannot expect to run into anything new. We shall go back some distance and warp back along our old path to the Sun, past the Heart of the Serpent. For some days now we’ve been heading for Serpentarius. We’ll be there soon enough.”
“Strange, but I feel no joy, no satisfaction at a job well done, nothing that might justify leaving Earth-life for seven hundred years,” Kari went on thoughtfully. “Oh, yes, I know all about the tens of thousands of observations and millions of computations, photographs and notes — all that will help to delve deeper into the secrets of matter back on Earth… But how inconsequential it all seems! A mere spore of the future — nothing more.”
“Have you ever stopped to think of the effort humanity has spent and the lives it has sacrificed for the sake of what you call spores of the future — not to speak of the countless generations of unthinking animals that preceded it on the ladder of historical progress?” Tey Eron said heatedly.
“You’re right enough, so far as reason goes. But emotionally the only thing that matters for me is Man, the only rational force in the Universe, capable of mastering and making use of the elemental development of matter. Yet how infinite is Man’s solitude! We know beyond doubt that there are many inhabited worlds, but Earthmen have not yet met another thinking being in all the vastness of space. Do you realize how long men have dreamed — in vain — of such encounters, how many books have been written, how many songs composed and pictures painted in anticipation of the great event? And yet this dream cherished ever since religious blindness first began to be dispelled has not yet come true.”
“You speak of blindness,” Moot Ang put in. “Do you know how our distant forebears back at the time of the Initial Emergence in Space visualized encounters with the inhabitants of other worlds? War, destruction of each other’s ships, mutual killing at the very first encounter.”
“Incredible!” Kari Ram and Tey Eron cried in one voice.
“Our modern writers seem to have preferred not to write about the period of the decline of capitalism,” Moot Ang went on. “But you know from your school history books about that critical period in human development.”
“Of course,” Kari said. “Though man had begun to master matter and space, social relations retained their old forms and the development of social thought lagged behind the achievements of science.”
“You have a good memory, Kari. But we could put it this way too: man’s conquest of space, his knowledge of the Universe, clashed with the primitive thinking of the individualistic property-owner. The future and the very life of humanity hung in the balance for years before progress triumphed and mankind joined into one family in a classless society. Before that happened people in the capitalist half of the world refused for a long time to see any new paths into the future and regarded their mode of life as eternal and unchanging, with war and self-destruction as man’s inevitable lot.”
“Most likely, every civilization has its critical periods in whatever planet and solar system it may exist,” Tey Eron said, running a quick eye over the instrument panel. “So far we’ve found two planets where there is water and an atmosphere with traces of oxygen, but no sign of life. We’ve photographed lifeless wind-swept sands and dead seas and…”
“I just can’t believe it,” Kari Ram interrupted him, “I can’t believe that people who had already savoured the infinity of space and the power that science gave them could…”
“…reason like beasts who have just acquired the faculty of logical thinking?” Moot Ang completed his thought. “Don’t forget the old society came into being as a result of an elemental play of forces, without the planning and foresight which distinguish the higher social forms created by man. Man’s thinking, the very nature of firs reasoning, was still at the primitive stage of simple, mathematical logic, which reflected the logic of the laws governing the development of matter and nature as perceived through direct observation. But as soon as mankind accumulated enough historical experience
and came to perceive the whole historical process of the development of the world around it, dialectical logic appeared as the highest stage of thought. Man came to understand the duality of the phenomena of nature and his own existence. He realized that while as an individual he was as minute and transitory as a drop of water in the ocean or a spark struck in a high wind, he was at the same time as great as the Universe which his reason and emotions embraced in the infinity of time and space.”
The captain rose and paced back and forth in silence while the others watched in deep concentration. Then he continued:
“I happen to have in my film library a book that gives an excellent picture of that time. It was translated into Modern not by machine, but by Sania Chen, the last-century historian. I think we ought to read it.”
The young people were eager to start at once. Pleased at their reaction, Moot Ang left the control room to fetch the book.
“I know I’ll never make a real captain,” Tey Eron sighed. “I’ll never know as much as Ang.”
“I heard him say once that his biggest shortcoming is the wide range of his interests,” Kari put in as he settled down in the navigator’s seat.
Tey Eron looked at Kari in wonder. Neither spoke and the room was soundless except for the even hum of the navigation instruments. The ship was running at full speed away from the carbon star toward a quarter of the Universe where four island universes quivered in the blackness of space as pinpricks of light too tiny to be detected by the naked eye.
Suddenly a glowing spot burst out and trembled on the main locator screen and the pealing of the caution signal cut through the control room. For a moment the men in the room froze into breathless immobility.
Then Tey Eron gave the alarm signal that sent every member of the crew to his post.
Moot Ang rushed into the control room and in one bound was at the control panel. The black screen of the locator was no longer dead; on it, as in a bottomless lake, swam a tiny glowing globe with sharply defined outline, swaying up and down but slowly bearing to starboard. The robots on guard against collision with meteorites did not react, however. Did this mean that the spot of light on the screen was a reflection not of their own beam, but of someone else’s?
The ship was still following the same course and the spot of light was now quivering in the bottom starboard square of the screen. Realization of what this meant made the three men quiver with excitement. Kari Ram gripped the edge of the control panel until his hands hurt. Something stupendous and unimaginable was coming toward them preceded by a powerful locator ray of the kind the Tellur cast ahead.
So great was the captain’s hope that his surmise should prove correct, and so great his fear that this upsurge of hope might again end in the bitter disappointment Earth astronauts had experienced hundreds of times before, that for a moment he could not speak.
The spot of light on the screen went out, came on again, then flashed on and off at regular intervals — four quick flashes, a pause, then two in succession. Such a pattern of regularity could be attributed only to human agency — the sole rational force in the Universe.
There could be no doubt now — another space ship was heading toward them. And in these parts of the Universe where ships from the Earth had never been before it could only be a ship from another world, from some planet of another, distant sun.
The locator of the Tellur too was now sending out intermittent signals; the thought that they were probably being received on board the unknown ship seemed utterly fantastic.
Moot Ang’s voice coming over the intercommunication system betrayed his agitation:
“Attention all! An unknown ship is approaching. We shall veer off course and begin emergency deceleration. All hands to landing stations!”
There wasn’t a second to lose. If the oncoming ship was running at roughly the same speed as the Tellur, the two were approaching each other almost at the speed of light, or some 294,000 kilometres per second. According to the locator the gap would close in no more than one hundred seconds. While Moot Ang was at the microphone, Tey Eron whispered something to Kari, whose hand flew to the locator panel.
“Excellent!” cried the captain as he watched the light ray playing on the control screen describe a curve to port and then go into a spiral.
In some ten seconds a glowing arrow-like shape appeared on the screen, curved over the right side of the black circle and also went into a spiral. A sigh of relief that was more like a groan broke from the three men in the control room. The strangers coming towards them from the unfathomed depths of the Cosmos had understood them. Just in time!
The caution signal went on again. This time it was not a locator ray but the solid hull of a space ship that was reflected on the main screen. In an instant Tey Eron had switched off the robot and turned the ship a fraction to port. The pealing stopped and the main screen was black again. The starboard scanner showed a mere streak of light moving aft. The two ships had passed each other at a staggering speed and were now hurtling farther and farther apart.
Several days would pass before they could meet again, but meet they would, for like the Tellur the strange ship would brake and swing around and return to the point of their meeting as determined by the precision instruments on board.
“Attention all! Emergency deceleration/ All stations signal readiness!” Moot Ang spoke into the microphone.
In response the row of lights above the now dead engine counter indicators turned green one after the other. The engines had stopped, and a tense air of expectation settled over the ship. The captain glanced quickly at the control panel and nodded toward the seats as he switched on the deceleration robot. His aides saw him bend grim-faced over the programme scale and turn the main switch to the figure “8.”
To swallow a pill to reduce heart action, drop into the seat and press the robot button was a matter of seconds.
The ship seemed to brace itself against the emptiness of space, throwing its crew into the depths of hydraulic seats and momentary unconsciousness, just as the racehorses of old would throw their riders as they dug their hooves into the ground to come to a sudden stop.
* * *
The crew of the Tellur had gathered in the library. Everybody was there except the man on duty at the electronic devices control post designed to signalize if anything went wrong with any of the circuits. The ship had cut its speed enough to put about, but not before it had travelled more than ten thousand million kilometres beyond the point where it had passed the space ship from another world. It was now moving at only one-twentieth absolute speed, held to the exact return course by the computing devices. At least eight terrestrial days would pass before the two ships could be expected to meet — provided the Tellur kept within the margin of error allowed for and the unknown space travellers also possessed equally precise navigation instruments and an equally reliable ship. If everything went well the two ships, two tiny specks in the infinity of the Cosmos, might be expected to come within locator range of each other.
When that happened, man, for the first time in his history, would meet his counterparts from another part of the Universe, thinking beings with comparable powers and aspirations whose existence had been foretold and established beyond all doubt by human reason. If hitherto the vast gulfs of time and space that separated different inhabited worlds had been insurmountable, now Earthmen would clasp the hands of other thinking beings and establish through them a link with still others as a token of the final triumph of thought and conscious labour over the elemental forces of Nature.
For billions of years minute droplets of living protoplasm had inhabited the dark warm waters of ocean gulfs, and hundreds of millions of years more passed before they developed into more complex organisms that finally emerged from the water to dry land. Then more millions of centuries passed in an elemental struggle for survival, in complete dependence on the forces of Nature, before the brain developed into a powerful instrument to guide the living creatures’ search for food and the bat
tle they waged for survival.
The rate of development speeded up, the battle to exist grew more bitter and natural selection proceeded at an ever more rapid pace. And all along that long path there were countless victims — herbivorous animals devoured by carnivorous, carnivorous animals that perished from hunger, the weak and sick and old that succumbed, the males that were killed in battle over females, those that perished defending their young or in natural disasters…
This went on through the long course of blind, elemental evolution until some distant relative of the ape in the rigorous conditions of the great ice age replaced instinct with conscious labour in his search for sustenance. It was then that he became man after he first realized the mighty power of joint labour and rational experience.
But even after this thousands of years were still to pass in wars and suffering, hunger and oppression and ignorance; but always too there dwelt hope and faith in a better future.
That hope and faith were not betrayed. The radiant future men had looked forward to had come, and humanity, united in a classless society and free of fear and oppression, &ad reached heights of scientific and artistic achievement without equal in all previous history. What had seemed the most difficult of all — the conquest of space — was accomplished. And finally, as the culmination of this long and laborious ascent up the ladder of progress, the latest fruit of man’s accumulated knowledge and labour — the invention of the Tellur, this long-range space ship now exploring remote areas of the Universe. Now this supiems product of the development of matter on Earth and in the Solar System was about to contact what represented the crowning accomplishment of another, and probably no less tortuous and difficult, path of development that started thousands of millions of years ago in another corner of the Universe.
These were the thoughts that in one form or another occupied the minds of all the members of the Tellur crew. Even young Taina was awed by the tremendous significance of the moment. Would they, a handful of people representing all the thousands of millions inhabiting the Earth, prove worthy of their exploits in labour, their physical perfection, their intelligence and steadfastness? How was one to prepare oneself for the meeting? There was no better way than to review the great yet bitter battle humanity had waged for freedom of body and spirit.
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