“That is out of the question,” replied Moot Ang. “There may be a certain analogy between the development of the highest forms of life and the highest forms of society. Man could develop only in a comparatively stable and favourable environment. This does not, of course, mean that there were no changes. On the contrary, there were some rather radical ones — but only in relation to Man himself, not Nature as a whole. Global cataclysms would have made it impossible for the reasoning being to develop. The same applies to the highest form of society capable of conquering space, building space ships and penetrating deep into the Universe — all this can be achieved only after global stabilization of conditions of life for the whole of humanity, and, of course, when the disastrous wars accompanying capitalism have been done away with for good. That is why I am certain that the men of another world whom we are about to meet have passed the danger point. They too must have built a truly rational society.”
“It is my opinion that you will find what might be called a universal, elemental wisdom running through the histories of the civilizations found on the various planets,” Tey Eron said, his eyes alight with excitement. “Human beings cannot vanquish space before they have achieved a higher mode of life when there are no more wars and when each individual has a high sense of responsibility to all his fellow-men!”
“In other words — humanity has been able to harness the forces of Nature on a cosmic scale only after reaching the highest stage of the communist society — there could be no other way,” added Kari. “And the same applies to any other human race, if we mean by this the higher forms of organized, thinking life.”
“We and our ships are the hands mankind on Earth reaches out to the stars,” Moot Ang said, “and these hands are clean. But that cannot be true only of us! Soon we shall clasp other hands just as clean and strong as ours!”
The younger members of the crew cheered their commander in an outburst of feeling. But neither were the older members who had learned to control their emotions able to conceal their agitation as they gathered round Moot Ang.
* * *
Somewhere millions of kilometres away the ship from a planet of some distant star was headed toward the Earth ship whose crew was to be the first in the Earth-dwellers’ long history to contact another race of men from a different world. No wonder the astronauts were unable to suppress their feverish excitement. Any thought of rest was out of the question. But Moot Ang insisted, and having once again gone over his calculations as to when the two ships would meet, he told Svet Sim to issue tranquillizers to everyone.
“We must be in perfect form mentally and physically when we meet our cosmic brothers,” he said, brushing aside all protests. “We have an enormous job ahead of us: we must find a way of communicating with them so as to take over the knowledge they possess and give them ours.” Moot Ang’s face darkened. “Never before have I been so afraid of proving unequal to a task.” Anxiety lined the captain’s usually calm features and the knuckles of his clenched fists grew white.
Now, perhaps for the first time, the rest of the crew realized how great a responsibility the coming meeting imposed on each one of them. They took the pills Svet Sim gave them without a murmur, and withdrew to their cabins.
At first Moot Ang intended to remain on duty with Kari alone, but then he changed his mind and signed to Tey Eron to accompany them to the control room.
Moot Ang settled down in his seat. Only now did he realize how tired he was. He stretched out his legs and rested his head against the palms of his hands. Tey and Kari said nothing. They did not want to disturb the captain’s thoughts.
The ship was now travelling very slowly as far as cosmic speeds go — at what was called tangential velocity. This was the speed, 200,000 kilometres per hour, at which space ships usually entered the Roche’s limit of any heavenly body. The autopilots kept the ship strictly to the calculated course. It was time for the locator to pick up the other ship’s signals, but so far there was no sign of its approach. Tey Eron grew more and more nervous every moment.
Suddenly Moot Ang sat up and his lips parted in that whimsical smile of his which every member of the crew knew so well. “Come, distant friend, enter the cherished gate. .”he sang in a low voice. Tey frowned as he peered into the blackness of the forward screen. He felt the captain’s levity to be out of place under the circumstances.
But Kari joined in the chorus of the merry song with a sly glance at the sour face of the second-in-command.
“Try sweeping ahead with the locator ray, Kari — two points port and starboard and as much up and down,” Moot Ang broke off in the middle of the song.
Tey flushed slightly. He should have thought of that himself. Song or no song, the captain had his wits about him!
Two hours passed. Kari pictured the locator ray sweeping the vastness of space ahead in strokes hundreds of thousands of kilometres long. This was “flagging” on a scale undreamt of even in the most fantastic legends ever invented on Earth.
Tey Eron sat lost in thought — slow, lumbering thought completely drained of emotion. Ever since they had left Earth he had been unable to shake off a strange feeling of detachment. Primitive man must have had the same feeling, a sense of being bound down to nothing, free of all obligations, all concern for the future. Men caught in the midst of natural disasters, wars and social upheavals must have felt the same. For Tey too the past, everything he had left behind on Earth, was gone never to return; from the future he was separated by a gulf of hundreds of years beyond which everything was new and unknown. Hence the absence of personal plans, feelings and desires. All he had wanted was to carry back to Earth the new knowledge the expedition was to wrest from the Cosmos. This had been the meaning and purpose of his life. And now here was something beside which everything else dwindled into insignificance.
In the meantime Moot Ang’s thoughts were occupied with the ship they expected to meet. He tried to picture the ship and its crew as being very much like his own. But he found it easier to endow the unknown space travellers with the most fantastic characteristics than to restrict his imagination to the rigid laws Afra Devi had spoken of with such conviction.
Moot Ang was not looking at the screen when it happened, but the sudden tension of his comrades told him at once that their vigil had not been in vain. The point of light flashed across the screen, and the sound signal was over almost as soon as it had begun. The astronauts sprang up and leaned forward over the control panel in an instinctive effort to obtain a better view of the locator screen. But as brief as the fleck had been, it had told its story. The other ship had turned back to meet them. This meant it was manned by creatures no less versed in the art of space navigation than themselves; they had worked out the bearings of the two ships with sufficient accuracy and now were searching for the Tellur with their locator. The imagination reeled at the thought of the two minute particles lost in the vastness of space searching for each other — two grains of dust that at the same time were two enormous worlds full of energy and knowledge probing for each other with directed beams of light waves. Kari moved the main beam control from 1488 to 375, then further down the scale. The point of light returned, vanished, reappeared, accompanied by a sound signal that died in a fraction of a second.
Moot Ang gripped the locator verniers and described a spiral from the periphery to the centre of a gigantic circle in the quarter where the signals originated.
The oncoming ship evidently did the same, for after a great deal of groping the spot of light settled firmly within the limits of the third circle of the black screen, vacillating only as much as might be due to the vibration of the two ships. The sound signal was constant now, and it had to be cut off. There was no doubt that the signals of the Tellur had been received by the strangers. The two ships were now approaching each other at a rate of no less than 400,000 kilometres per hour.
Tey Eron read the computer calculations. The ships were now about three million kilometres apart. At the present speed they wou
ld meet in seven hours. Integral braking action could be started in an hour; this would delay the meeting a few more hours, provided the oncoming ship did the same and decelerated at a like rate. It might be able to stop sooner than the Tellur, but on the other hand they might pass each other again and this would cause a further delay; the astronauts hoped this would not happen, for to wait any longer seemed unbearable.
The oncoming ship did not hold things up. It cut speed faster than the Tellur and then, having established the lat-ter’s rate of deceleration, settled down to an equal pace. The ships were now closing in. The crew of the Tellur again gathered in the central control room and all eyes were glued to the pin-point of light on the locator screen spread out into a luminous blotch. This was the beam of the Tellur reflected back from the other ship. Gradually the blotch took the shape of a tiny cylinder girdled with a thicker ring in the middle. The other ship bore no resemblance whatever to the Tellur. At closer range cupola-shaped bulges could be discerned at both ends of the cylinder.
The glowing contours of the ship spread out until they filled the entire diameter of the screen.
“Attention all! All hands to their stations! Final deceleration at 8 g!”
Blood rushed to the eyes and sticky sweat rose on faces as bodies developed a leaden weight pressing down on the hydraulic shock-absorbers of the crew’s soft padded seats. At last the Tellur hung motionless in the icy darkness of space where there is no above or below, right or left, one hundred and two parsecs from its home star, the yellow Sun.
As soon as they had recovered from the deceleration the astronauts switched on the direct-view scanners and the ship’s powerful illuminator. But they saw only a bright fog forward and to port. The illuminator went out, and at once a strong blue light completely blinded the men peering at the scanners.
“Polarizer at thirty-five degrees. Light filter!” ordered Moot Ang.
“At a wave-length of 620?” asked Tey Eron.
“Right.”
The blue glow was gone. Instead, a powerful orange flood of light cut into the blackness, swung over, caught a corner of something solid and finally spread over the whole of the strange ship.
It was now only a few kilometres away. This did credit to the skill of the pilots of both ships. But the distance was still too great to determine the exact size of the stranger. Suddenly a thick orange ray shot upward from the ship; its wave-length was the same as that of the light of the Tellur. Then the finger of light disappeared only to shoot up again and remain vertical.
Moot Ang passed his hand over his forehead as he always did in moments of intense concentration.
“That must mean something,” Tey Eron said cautiously.
“I’m sure it does. I believe they are signalling us to stand still while they come up alongside. Let’s try answering.”
The Tellur switched off its projector, then on again with a wave-length of 430. The blue beam swept aft. The orange light on the other ship died at once.
The astronauts waited, breathless with tension. The ship lying abeam was now clearly visible. Roughly its shape was that of a cylinder with a cone, base outward, at each end. The base of one of the cones, evidently the forward one, was covered with a dome-shaped nosepiece, while aft there was a wide funnel-like opening. Amidships was a thick band of uncertain outline which emanated a faint glow. Through it the contours of the cylindrical part of the hull could be seen. Suddenly the band grew dense and opaque and began spinning around like the wheel of a turbine. The ship grew bigger and in three or four seconds filled the entire range of vision of the scanners. It clearly was bigger than the Tellur.
“Afra, Yas and Kari, I want you on the observation platform with me,” Moot Ang said. “Tey, you will remain at the controls. Switch on the planetary illuminator and the port landing lights.”
In the airlock the four quickly got into space suits which were used for exploring planets and for emerging from the ship in outer space wherever there was no danger from stellar radiation.
Moot Ang inspected the gear of his three companions, quickly checked up on his own, and threw in the air-pump switch. In a moment the airlock was a vacuum. When the pressure-gauge indicator reached green he flipped over three levers one after the other. In response, several layers of sliding panels slid aside noiselessly, a round hatch opened overhead, and a hydraulic lift went into action. Slowly the floor of the airlock rose until the four astronauts were standing four metres above the nose of the Tellur on the round upper observation platform.
* * *
In the belt of blue lights the strange space ship was pure white. It gleamed with the dazzling brilliance of mountain snow, unlike the Tellur whose outer armour of metal polished to a mirror-like sheen was designed to reflect all types of cosmic radiation. Only the central ring-like structure of the mystery ship continued to glow faintly.
Its huge bulk had drawn noticeably closer to the Tellur. Far from other gravitational fields, the two ships attracted each other, which was proof that the ship from the unknown world was not made of anti-matter. The Tellur extended its port landing struts. These were a structure of telescoping tubes tipped with cushions of a resilient plastic covered with a protective layer designed to safeguard the ship against possible contact with anti-matter. In the meantime a black gash that looked like a sneering mouth appeared on the nose of the other ship and a retractable balcony with a barrier of thin uprights all around emerged from it. Something white moved in the dark opening, then five figures stepped out on the platform. Afra caught her breath sharply. The figures were all white and of extraordinary proportions, roughly of the same height as people on Earth, but far greater in girth, and with a ridge of humps down their backs. Instead of spherical transparent space helmets they wore something like large sea-shells with a fan-shaped fringe of spines in front under which there was the dull gleam of black glass.
The first of the strangers made a sharp movement which revealed that they had two arms and two legs. The white ship swung around and when its nose was pointed directly at the Tellur it projected a red metal framework to a distance of more than twenty metres.
There was a gentle bump and the two ships were in contact. But there was no blinding flash of atomic disintegration: the two ships that had met consisted of identical matter.
Afra, Yas and Kari heard a low chuckle in their helmet telephones. It was the captain. They exchanged question ing glances.
“I can assure you all, and especially Afra,” Moot Ang said. “Just imagine what we must look like to them. Bulbous dummies with articulated limbs and huge round heads that are three-quarters empty!”
Afra laughed.
“Everything depends on what’s inside the space suits. The outside doesn’t matter.”
“At least they’ve got the same number of legs and arms as we have,” observed Kari.
An accordion-pleated white covering appeared around the metal framework the white ship had projected. Its end reached out toward the Tellur.
The first of the figures on the platform — Moot Ang was certain it was the commander — made inviting gestures that left no doubt as to their meaning, and in response the closed gallery which the crew of the Tellur used to communicate with other ships lying alongside in outer space was ejected from its nest in the lower part of the hull. But the gallery of the Tellur was round, whereas the strangers’ was elliptical in shape. To make it possible to connect the two, the Earth ship’s technicians quickly made a new frame of soft wood, which became stronger than steel as soon as it was exposed to the intense cold of outer space, for the low temperature changed its molecular structure. In the meantime a cube-shaped red-metal box with a black screen in front appeared on the platform of the white ship. Two of the crew members bent over it, then straightened up and backed away. A figure resembling the human body in outline appeared on the screen. Its upper part expanded and contracted while tiny white arrows either flowed into it or were expelled in rhythm with the expansion and contraction.
; “Ingenious!” cried Afra. “That’s breathing! Now they’re bound to tell us the composition of their atmosphere. But how?”
As if in answer to her question, the figure on the screen was replaced by a black spot in a greyish annular cloud — evidently the nucleus of an atom surrounded by electrons in orbit. Moot Ang’s throat contracted. He wanted to cry out in amazement, but he couldn’t utter a sound. For now there were four figures on the screen — two, one above the other — in the centre with a thick white connecting line in between, and one on each side with black arrows pointing to them.
With fast-beating hearts, Moot Ang and his companions counted the electrons. The bottom figure probably represented the principal element in the unknown world’s oceans; it showed one electron spinning around the nucleus — hydrogen. The uppermost was by the same token the principal element of their atmosphere — nine electrons in orbit around the nucleus meant fluorine!
“Fluorine!” Afra cried out in despair.
“Keep on counting!” snapped Moot Ang. “Top left — six electrons, that means carbon. Right — seven, meaning nitrogen. Couldn’t be clearer. Pass on the word to draw up a similar table of our atmosphere and metabolism. It’ll be the same as theirs except for the top centre figure, which will be oxygen with its eight electrons instead of fluorine. What a pity!”
When the table was displayed, the astronauts on the observation platform of the Tellur saw the foremost of the white figures on the other space ship start and raise his hand to his helmet in a gesture that made it clear he was no less, if not more, disappointed than the Earthmen.
Bending over the railing of the platform, the captain of the ship from the unknown planet made a sharp movement with his arm as if severing some invisible bond. The spines on his helmet seemed to bristle menacingly at the Tellur, which was then several metres below the level of his ship. Then he raised his arms and brought them down as if trying to indicate two parallel planes.
The Heart of the Serpent вк-2 Page 5