At the moment, however, most exciting was the thought of the coming meeting with living creatures from another world. What would they be like? Monsters, or models of perfection, judged by Earth standards?
Afra Devi, the biologist, was the first to speak.
Flushed with excitement, she looked even more beautiful than usual. As she spoke her glance rested from time to time on the painting over the door — a coloured panorama in three-dimensional paint of a mountain scene in Equatorial Africa. The startling contrast between the sombre, forest-clad slopes and the shining splendour of the peak seemed to illustrate her thoughts.
Afra recalled the time long ago when it was still widely believed that thinking beings could exist in practically any form, that the structure of their organisms could vary greatly. That was when the survivals of religious prejudices induced even serious scientists to assume that a brain could develop in any body — just as men once believed gods could assume any physical form. Actually, however, the anatomy and physiology of man, the only creature with a brain capable of rational thinking on Earth, were not the result of some accidental caprice of Nature. On the contrary, they represented a maximum degree of adaptation to environment and corresponded to man’s highly developed reasoning powers and nervous activity.
Our concepts of beauty in human beings and beauty in general evolved in the course of thousands of years as a result of unconscious acceptance of structural expediency and forms best adapted for one action or another. That is why we see beauty in powerful machines, in ocean waves, in trees and in horses, although none of these have anything in common with beauty as we see it in human beings. Even at the animal stage, man, thanks to the development of his brain, ceased to be compelled to adapt himself to only one mode of life as is the case with most animals.
Human legs are not adapted for constant running even on firm ground, yet they enable man to travel far and fast and to climb trees and rocks. As for the human hand, it is the most universal organ, capable of doing millions of things; indeed it was the hand that transformed the primitive beast into a human being…
In other words, man beginning with the earliest stages of his development evolved as a universal organism adapted to a great variety of conditions. With subsequent socialization of his existence, man’s organism became increasingly adapted to his multiform activities. As distinct from all other animals, the beauty of human beings consists, besides physical perfection, in their universality enhanced by the activity of the mind and nobility of spirit.
“Any thinking being from some other world that has been able to reach the Cosmos must be just as perfect and universal as the humans of our Earth, and hence just as beautiful,” Afra went on. “There can be no thinking monsters, no mushroom-men, no octopus-men! I cannot say what we shall meet in reality — some similarity of form or other aspect of beauty, but that it will be beauty, I have no doubt.”
“I like your theory,” Tey Eron said. “But…”
“I know what you mean,” Afra cut in. “Even slight departures from the norm can produce monstrosities, and here departures are highly probable. A human face without a nose, eyelids or lips is repulsive because the disfigurement is a departure from the normal. The face of a horse or dog also differs greatly from the human face, but we do not consider it ugly. On the contrary, it can be beautiful. The reason for this is that its beauty springs from natural expediency, whereas in the disfigured human face natural harmony has been upset.”
“You suggest that even if they may look quite different from us, we may not think them ugly?” Tey persisted. “But supposing they resemble us but have horns and elephant-like trunks?”
“A thinking being does not need horns and hence will not have them. The nose may be somewhat elongated to form a trunk, although a trunk too is unnecessary for a being with hands, and a human being must have hands. If there is a trunk, it will be a mere exception to the rule. But everything that comes into being as a result of historical development, of natural selection becomes the rule, however numerous the exceptions. Therein lies the beauty of expediency. No, I do not expect to find monsters with horns and tails in the space ship we shall meet. Only the lower forms of life differ greatly from one another; the higher the form the closer it is bound to be to us Earth-dwellers.”
“You win,” Tey Eron said, looking around at the others with obvious pride in Afra’s logic.
Kari Ram held another view, however, and he propounded it in his somewhat diffident manner. He believed that the strange beings, even if they were quite human in appearance and beautiful besides, might prove to be utterly remote from us as regards intelligence and outlook on life. In which case they might turn out to be cruel and terrible enemies.
Moot Ang came to the defence of the biologist.
“I happened to think of this quite recently,” he said. “And I realized that at the highest stage of development all thinking beings must reach a state of perfect mutual understanding. The mind of the intelligent being reflects the laws governing the development of the entire Universe. In this sense man is a microcosm. Thinking follows the laws of the Universe which are the same everywhere. Thought, no matter where it is found, will inevitably be based on mathematical and dialectical logic. There cannot be any other entirely different thought process, just as man cannot exist outside of society and Nature…”
A murmur of approval rose from his listeners.
“How wonderful it is when the ideas of many people coincide!” said Afra Devi. “That is proof of their correctness and evidence of a sense of comradeship …especially if each approaches a problem from the standpoint of his own particular branch of learning.”
“You mean biology and the social sciences?” asked Yas Tin who had taken no part in the conversation so far.
“Yes. The brightest page in the entire history of man on Earth was the steady growth of mutual understanding that accompanied the development of culture and knowledge. The higher the level of culture, the easier it was for the different peoples and races in the classless society to understand one another, and the clearer became the common goals of human existence, the need to unite first countries and then the whole planet. At the present level of development attained by humanity on Earth and no doubt by those we are about to meet…” Afra broke off.
“Yes, indeed,” agreed Moot Ang. “Two different planets meeting in outer space will be able to understand each other better than two savage nations on a single planet!”
“But what about the theory that war is inevitable even in the Cosmos?” asked Kari Ram. “Our ancestors who already were at a rather high level of culture were convinced of it.”
“Where is that book you promised to show us?” Tey Eron remembered. “The one about the two space ships which tried to destroy each other at their first meeting?”
The commander went to his room. This time nothing interfered and he returned shortly carrying the small eight-rayed star of a microfilm roll which he placed in the reading machine. The astronauts gathered around to hear the tale of fantasy told by an ancient American author.
* * *
“The First Contact,” as it was called, was a dramatic story of the meeting between a space ship from Earth and one from another world in the nebula of Cancer at a distance of more than a thousand parsecs from the Sun.
The commander of the Earth ship ordered the crew to prepare all the astronomical charts, records of observations and calculations of the course for immediate destruction and to train all their anti-meteorite guns at the approaching ship. The Earthlings then proceeded to wrestle with the momentous problem: should they attempt to enter into negotiations with the other ship or were they in duty bound to attack and destroy it without warning? They feared that the men from another world might be able to trace back the course of their ship and use their knowledge to try to conquer the Earth.
These ridiculous apprehensions aroused no opposition on the part of the entire crew. It was taken for granted that the meeting of two civilizatio
ns that had sprung up in different parts of the Universe was bound to lead to the subordination of one by the other, to the victory of the one possessing the strongest weapons. A meeting in space could only mean one of the two things — trade or war. They could not conceive of anything else. It soon turned out that the men from the other world closely resembled the Earthlings except that they could see only in infra-red light and communicated with one another by radio waves. Yet the Earthlings at once deciphered the strangers’ language and intercepted their thoughts. It turned out that the commander of the space ship from the other world entertained just as primitive views on social development and relations as the Earthmen and was primarily concerned with how to get out of the situation in which he found himself without jeopardizing his own life or destroying the Earth ship.
In other words, the long-awaited encounter of representatives of two human races threatened to turn into a fearful tragedy. The two ships hung in space some seven hundred miles apart while negotiations went on for more than two weeks through a robot. Both captains gave each other assurances of their peaceable intentions and at the same time declared their distrust of the other. The situation might indeed have been hopeless had it not been for the ingenuity of the hero of the story — a young astrophysicist. Concealing bombs of terrific destructive power in their clothing, he and his commander boarded the strange ship ostensibly to continue the negotiations. Once there, however, they presented an ultimatum to the strangers: to exchange ships, with part of the strange ship’s crew going over to the Earth ship, and part of the Earth-men boarding the unknown craft, first putting all meteorite guns out of commission; the boarding parties were then to learn to run the ships and all the supplies were to be transferred from each of the ships to the other. In the meantime the two heroes with the bombs would remain on board the strangers’ ship, ready to blow it up at the first sign of treachery. The captain from the other world accepted the ultimatum, and the exchange of ships proceeded smoothly. Finally the black space ship with the Earthlings on board and the Earth ship now manned by the strangers hastily drew apart, vanishing into the feeble luminosity of the nebula.
As soon as the story came to the end the library filled with the hum of voices. During the reading some of the astronauts had shown signs of impatience and disagreement. So eager were they to have their say that they barely refrained from committing the worst breach of good manners — interrupting someone. All turned to the captain as if he were personally responsible for the ancient story he had brought to their attention from the limbo of the past.
Most of the astronauts pointed to the contradiction between the time of the action and the psychology of the characters. If the space ship had managed to travel four thousand light years away from the Earth in three months, the time of the story was obviously later than the present, for nobody had yet reached out so far into the Universe. Yet the mode of thinking and the actions of the Earthmen described in no way differed from those that prevailed under capitalism so many centuries ago.
There were technical inaccuracies too. For instance, space ships could not be stopped as quickly as the writer assumed. Nor was it feasible for two thinking beings to communicate with each other directly by radio waves. If the unknown planet had an atmosphere of practically the same density as Earth — and that was how it was described in the story — its inhabitants would inevitably have developed the sense of hearing as we have on Earth. For this requires far less expenditure of energy than communication by radio waves or biocurrents. It would also have been impossible in such a short time to decipher the strangers’ language with the accuracy required for coding it in a translating machine.
Tey Eron pointed out that the meagre knowledge of the Universe displayed in the story was all the more surprising since several decades before the story was written the great ancient scientist Tsiolkovsky had warned that the Universe was far more complex than was believed at the time. But in spite of the work done by dialectical thinkers, there still were scientists who thought they had practically reached the outermost bounds of human powers of cognition.
As centuries passed countless discoveries revealed the infinite complexity of the interdependence of phenomena and on the face of it seemed to slow down the growth of man’s knowledge of the Cosmos. Yet science found solutions to an enormous number of the most complicated technical and other problems. A good example was the creation of the warp ship, which seemed to defy the conventional laws of motion. Indeed, it was in this kind of solution of problems seemingly insoluble from the viewpoint of mathematical logic that the irresistible power of progress was manifested most spectacularly. But the author of “The First Contact” did not even have an inkling of the boundlessness of knowledge implicit in the simple formulas of the great dialecticians of his time.
“There’s another thing nobody here has pointed out,” the usually reserved Yas Tin spoke up. “The author gave his characters English names, although the action was laid so far in the future. I think this too is indicative. You see, linguistics happens to be my hobby and I made a study of the formation of the first world language. English, of course, used to be one of the most widespread languages, but in assuming that it would always remain so, the author was reflecting his absurd belief that the social set-up of his time was also eternal. The exceedingly slow development of the ancient slave society or of feudalism was erroneously taken as proof of the stability of all forms of social relations, including language and religion and of the stability of the last of the anarchic societies, capitalism. The dangerous social lack of equilibrium of the last period of capitalism was considered everlasting. As for the English language of the time, it was even then archaic, consisting as it did of actually two languages — the written and the spoken, both completely unsuitable for translation machines.
“The faster relations among men and their outlook on the world change, the greater and more rapid are the changes in language too.
“As it was, the half-forgotten ancient Sanskrit was found to be the most logical in structure, and because of this it came to be used as the basis for the intermediary language needed for translation machines. Sometime later this developed into the first world language, which has changed a great deal since then. The old Western languages proved rather short-lived. Still less enduring were people’s names derived through religious legends from long-dead languages.”
“Yas Tin has noted what I think is most important,” Moot Ang joined in the conversation. “Ignorance or mistaken methodology in science are bad enough, but still worse is conservatism, persistence in defence of social forms which have failed even in the eyes of their contemporaries. At the root of this conservatism, apart from the rarer cases of simple ignorance, lay a selfish desire to prolong the existence of a social system whose benefits were enjoyed by a small minority. Hence the disregard for the interests of mankind as a whole displayed by these proponents of social stagnation, their disregard for the future of our planet, waste of its power resources and complete unconcern for the health of its inhabitants.
“Wanton waste of mineral fuels and forests, exhaustion of rivers and the soil, dangerous experiments to create murderous atomic weapons — these were the actions of those who sought at the cost of untold misery and suffering for the majority to prolong the existence of social relationships that had outlived their time. It is against this background that the poisonous concept of the privileged elite sprang up and developed, a concept that proclaimed the superiority of a group or class or race over others and justified violence and war — everything that came to be known as fascism.
“Any privileged group will inevitably seek to put a brake on progress in order to retain its privileges, while the oppressed section of society is bound to fight all such attempts in order to stand up for its own rights. The greater the pressure exerted by the privileged few, the greater grew the resistance to it, the more bitter the struggle, the more cruelty there was in the world and the greater moral degradation among men. Now remember that besi
des the struggle between classes there was a struggle between the privileged and oppressed countries. Remember too that there was a struggle between the new, socialist world and the old, capitalist, and you will understand why there sprang up a war ideology, why it was believed that there would always be wars and that they would eventually be fought on a cosmic scale. I see in this the very quintessence of evil, a serpent that is bound to strike however it may be hidden because it cannot but strike. Remember the sinister reddish-yellow glow of the star we passed on our way…”
“The Heart of the Serpent!” cried Taina.
“Right. And in the writings of those who sought to defend the old society, proclaiming the inevitability of war and the eternal existence of capitalism, I also see the heart of a poisonous snake.”
“In other words, our fears too are atavistic survivals of an ancient time when that snake poisoned the lives of men, isn’t that so?” Kari said sadly. “And I am probably the most serpentine of all of us, since I have fears — doubts, if you wish.”
“Kari!” Taina cried.
“Our commander has told us about the deadly crises that engulfed civilizations,” Kari went on. “And we all know about lifeless planets which are dead today because their inhabitants were overtaken by atomic war before they had time to create a new society in conformity with the laws of science, to put an end to the lust for destruction — in a word, tear out the heart of the serpent! We also know that our own planet barely escaped a similar fate. Had not the first socialist state appeared in Russia and started a chain of epoch-making changes in the world, fascism would have taken the upper hand and plunged the world into nuclear wars. But supposing the people out there,” the young astronavigator pointed in the direction from which the strange ship was expected to appear, “supposing they have not yet passed that dangerous Rubicon in their history?”
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