“I was thinking…” she began hesitantly, “and now, when we are faced with great danger I bow my head before the might and majesty of man who has penetrated to the stars, far, far into the depths of space! Much of this is customary for you, but I’m in the Cosmos 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 wanly and rubbed his forehead. “I shall have to disappoint you, or rather, I must show you the real measure of our might. Look…” he stopped beside a projector and on the back wall of the control tower the glittering spiral of the Galaxy appeared. Erg Noor pointed to a ragged outer branch of the spiral composed 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 it is there that our solar system is situated and where we are at present. 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 to travel along that one branch of the Galaxy would take our Tantra 40,000 independent years. To cross the empty space that separates our branch from our neighbours 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! How little we should know of the Universe if it were not for the might of the Great Circle. Reports, images and ideas transmitted through space that is unconquerable in man’s brief span of life reach us sooner or later, and we get to know 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. “Little ships of low speed with no powerful protective installations… and people in those days lived only half as long as we do — that was the period of man’s real greatness!”
Nisa jerked up 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 the Cosmos again and again!”
“I know that,” said Erg Noor, thoughtfully, “but that’s not the way everybody thinks!”
Feminine intuition gave her an insight into the thoughts of her commander. In his cabin there were two stereoportraits, splendidly done in violet-gold tones. Both were of her, Veda Kong, a woman of great beauty, a specialist in ancient history; eyes of that same transparent blue as the skies above Earth looked out from under long eyebrows. Tanned by the sun, smiling radiantly, she had raised her hands to her ash-blonde hair. In the other picture she was seated, laughing heartily, on a ship’s bronze gun, 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 motors as though he intended accelerating the spaceship to the limit.
“If Zirda had not perished and we had got our supplies of fuel,” he continued, in reply to her mute question, “I would have led the expedition farther. That is what I had 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 would have wanted 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 to?” asked Erg Noor suddenly, fixing his eyes on the girl.
“Anywhere you like, even…” and she pointed to a patch of abysmal blackness between two arms of the starry spiral of the Galaxy; she returned Noor’s fixed stare with one equally determined, her lips slightly parted.
“Oh, no, not as far as that! You know, Nisa, my dear little astronavigator, about eighty-five years ago. Cosmic Expedition No. 34, the so-called ‘Three-Stage Expedition’ left Earth. It consisted of three spaceships carrying fuel for each other and left Earth for the Lyra Constellation. The two ships that were not carrying scientists passed their anameson on to the third and then came back to Earth. That is the way mountain-climbers reached the tops of the highest peaks. 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 and was lost on the return journey after sending a message. The goal was the big 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 people had never been so far away from our Sun. Anyway, Parus got there. We do not know the cause of its loss, whether it was a meteoroid or an irreparable break-down. It is even possible that the ship is still moving through space and the heroes whom we regard as dead are still alive.”
“That would be terrible!”
“Such is the fate of any spaceship that cannot maintain a speed close to that of light. It is immediately separated from the home planet by thousands of years.” “What message did Parus send?” asked the girl. “There wasn’t much of it. It was interrupted several times and then broke off altogether. I remember every word of it: ‘I am Parus. I am Parus, travelling twenty-six years from Vega… enough… shall wait… Vega’s four planets… nothing more beautiful… what happiness….”
“But they were calling for help, they wanted to wait somewhere!”
“Of course they were calling for help, otherwise the spaceship wouldn’t have used up the tremendous energy needed for the transmission. But nothing could be done, not another word was received from Parus.”
“‘They were twenty-six independent years on their way back and the journey from Vega to the Sun is thirty-one years. They must have been somewhere near us, or even nearer to Earth.”
“Hardly, unless, of course, they exceeded the normal speed and got close to the quantum limit[8]. That would have been very dangerous!”
Briefly Erg Noor explained the mathematical basis for the destructive change that takes place in matter when it approaches the speed of light, but he noticed that the girl was not paying any great attention to him.
“I understand all that!” she exclaimed the moment the commander had finished his explanation. “I would have realized it at once if your story of the loss of the spaceship hadn’t taken my mind off it. Such losses are always terrible and one cannot become reconciled to them!”
“Now you realize the chief thing in the communication,” said Erg Noor gloomily. “They discovered some particularly beautiful worlds. I have long been dreaming of following the route taken by Parus; with modern improvements we can do it with one ship now: I’ve been living with a dream of Vega, the blue sun with the beautiful planets, ever since early youth.”
“To see such worlds…” breathed Nisa with a breaking voice, “but to see them and return would take sixty terrestrial or forty dependent years… and that’s… half a lifetime.”
“Great achievements demand great sacrifices. For me, though, it would not be a sacrifice. My life on Earth has only been a few short intervals between journeys through space. I was born on a spaceship, you know!”
“How could that have
happened?” asked the girl in amazement.
“Cosmic Expedition No. 35 consisted of four ships. My mother was astronomer on one of them. I was born halfway to the binary star MN19026 +, 7AL and managed to Contravene the law twice over. Twice — firstly by being born on a spaceship and secondly because I grew up and was educated by my parents and not in a children’s school. What else could they have done? When the expedition returned to Earth I was eighteen years old. I had learnt the art of piloting a spaceship and had acted as astronavigator in place of one who was taken ill. I could also work as a mechanic at the planetary or the anameson motors and all this was accepted as the Labours of Hercules I had to perform on reaching maturity.” “Still I don’t understand…” began Nisa. ‘‘About my mother? You’ll understand when you get a bit older! Although the doctors didn’t know it then, the Anti-T serum wouldn’t keep…. Well, never mind what the reason was I was brought to a control tower like this one to look at the screens with my uncomprehending baby eyes and watch the stars dancing up and down on them. We were flying towards the Lupus Constellation 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 tiling that impinged on my infant consciousness was the sky over a lifeless planet that I observed from under the glass dome of a temporary station. The planets of double stars are usually lifeless on account of the irregularity of their orbits. The expedition made a landing and for seven months engaged in mineral prospecting. As far as I remember there were enormous quantities of platinum; osmium and iridium there. 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 unwinking stars, 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 jolly green light that I shouted and sang for joy!” Erg Noor stopped. “That’s enough, I got carried away by my reminiscences 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-producing apparatus, the girl was soon fast asleep and did not wake up until 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 woke up just at the right time!” he said as soon as Nisa had taken her electric and wave baths and returned ready for work. “Switch on the animation music and light.
For everybody!”
Swiftly Nisa pressed a row of buttons sending intermittent bursts of light accompanied by a specific music of low, vibrant chords that gradually increased in intensity, to all the cabins where members of the Cosmic expedition were sleeping. This initiated the gradual awakening of the inhibited nervous system to bring it back to its normal active state. Five hours later all the members of the expedition gathered in the control tower; they had by then fully recovered from their sleep and had taken food and nerve stimulants.
News of the loss of the auxiliary spaceship was received in different ways by different people. 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 secretly licked her dry lips.
“To the memory of our lost comrades!” said the commander as he switched on the screen of a projector showing Algrab, a photograph that had been taken before Tantra took off. 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 travellers gave him the farewell salute. Such was the custom of the astronauts. Spaceships that set off together always carried photographs of all the people of the expedition. When a ship disappeared it might keep travelling in Cosmic space for a long time with its crew still alive. But this made no difference, the ship would never return. There was no real possibility of searching for the ship and rendering it aid. Minor faults never, or seldom, occurred and were easily repaired, but a serious break-down in the machinery had never been successfully repaired in the Cosmos. Sometimes ships, like Parus, managed to send a last message, but in the majority of cases such messages did not reach their destination on account of the great difficulty of directing them. The Great Circle had, for thousands of years, been investigating exact routes for its transmissions and could vary them by directing them from planet to planet. The spaceships were usually in unexplored areas where the direction for a message could only be guessed.
There was a conviction amongst astronauts that there existed in the Cosmos certain neutral fields or zero areas in which all radiation and all communications sank like stones in water. Astrophysicists, however, regarded the zero areas to be nothing more than the idle invention of Cosmic travellers who were, in general, inclined to monstrous fantasies.
After that sad ceremony and a very short conference, Erg Noor turned Tantra in the direction of Earth and switched on the anameson motors. Forty-eight hours later they were switched off again and the spaceship began to approach its own planet at the rate of 21,000 million kilometres in every twenty-four hours. The journey back to the Sun would take about six terrestrial, or independent, years. Everybody was busy in the control tower 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 and use anameson only for purposes of correcting the ship’s course. In other words the spaceship had to be flown with as little loss of acceleration as possible. Everybody was worried about the unexplored area 344 +2U that lay between the Sun and Tantra. There was no way of avoiding it: on both sides of it, as far as the Sun, lay belts of free meteoroids and, apart from that, they would lose velocity in turning the ship.
Two months later the computation of the line of flight had been completed. Tantra began to describe a long, flat curve.
The wonderful 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 Creet finished their watch and, dead tired, started their period of long sleep. Together with them two astronomers, the geologist, biologist, physician and four engineers departed into temporary forgetful-ness.
The watch was taken over by an experienced astronavigator, Pel Lynn, who was 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 went away to the library adjoining the control tower. 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 grew tired of the hum of the instruments and his contemplation of the black void of the Cosmos, left Ingrid at the control desk and plunged into the thrilling task of deciphering puzzling inscriptions brought from a planet in the system of the nearest stars of the Centaur whose inhabitants had mysteriously quit it. He believed in the success of his impossible undertaking….
Twice again watches were changed, the spaceship had drawn ten billion kilometres nearer Earth and still the anameson motors had only been run 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 Dietra, the astronomer, had 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 meters. 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 spaceship had been automatically piloted along a given
course. If anything untoward had happened, something that the electronic machines were incapable of dealing with, it would have meant the loss of the ship, for human intervention could not have saved it since the human brain, no matter how well trained it may be, 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 reached it,” said Ingrid to the astronavigator. 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 super-sensitive Voll Hoad detectors. The spaceship’s course now lay somewhat to one side of the Sun, about one and a half flying years. The screens of the forward observation instruments were of 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 machines 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 off 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?”
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