Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale) вк-1

by Ivan Yefremov

“Why without leaving the ship? You know that’s impossible and that we have to go out and work outside. We’ve been warned and we’ll take the necessary steps.”

  “I suppose you mean a barrage around the place where we’re going to work,” said biologist Eon Thal.

  “Not only that, a barrage along the whole way between the two ships,” added Pour Hyss.

  “Naturally! We don’t know what to expect so we’ll make the barrage a double one, a radiation and an electric wall. We’ll put out cables and have a path of light all the way. There’s an unused rocket standing behind Parus that contains sufficient energy for all the time we’ll have to work.”

  Beena Ledd’s head dropped on to the table with a thud. The doctor and the second astronomer moved their heavy bodies with difficulty towards her.

  “It’s nothing,” explained Louma Lasvy, “concussion and overstrain. Help me get Beena to bed.”

  Even that simple task would not have been performed very quickly if mechanic Taron had not thought of adapting an automatic robot car. With the help of the car all the eight explorers were taken to their beds — if they did not rest in time, organisms that had not yet adapted themselves to new conditions would break down. At this difficult moment every member of the expedition was essential and irreplaceable.

  Soon two universal automatic cars for transport purposes and road building were linked together and used to level the road between the two spaceships. Heavy cables were hung on both sides. Watch towers with a protective hood of thick silicoborum[15] were erected at each of the spaceships. In each tower an observer from time to time would send a fan-shaped bunch of death-dealing rays along the road from an impulse chamber. During the hours of work the powerful searchlights were kept going all the time. The main hatch in Parus’ keel was opened, some of the bulkheads were removed and four containers of anameson and thirty cylinders with ion charges were made ready to load on to the cars. It would be more difficult to load them on to Tantra. They could not open the spaceship the way Parus was opened and so allow whatever was engendered by the alien life of the planet, and which was probably lethal, to enter the ship. For this reason they only made the necessary preparations inside the ship but did not open the hatch; interior bulkheads were removed and containers of compressed air were brought from Parus. The plan was to blow a strong blast of air under high pressure down the shaft from the time the manhole was opened until the containers were loaded into Tantra. At the same time the hull of the vessel would be screened by a radiation cascade.

  The expedition gradually grew accustomed to working in their “steel skeletons” and began to bear the triple weight somewhat more easily. The unbearable pain in all their bones that had begun as soon as they landed was also beginning to ease up.

  Several terrestrial days passed and the mysterious “nothing” did not appear. The temperature of the surrounding atmosphere began to fall rapidly. A hurricane arose that increased in fury hour by hour. This was the setting of the black sun — the planet rotated and the continent on which the spaceship stood plunged into night. The convection currents, the heat given off by the ocean and the thick atmosphere prevented a sudden drop in temperature but towards the middle of the planetary “night” a sharp frost set in. The work continued with the heating systems in the spacesuits switched on. They had managed to get the first container out of Parus and transport it to Tantra when at “sunrise” there came a hurricane much fiercer than had been the one at “sunset.” The temperature rose rapidly above freezing point, a current of dense air brought with it excessive humidity and the sky was rent by endless lightnings. The hurricane became so fierce that the spaceship began to tremble under pressure of the terrific wind. The crew concentrated all their efforts on safely anchoring the container under Tantra’s keel. The fearful roar of the wind increased and there were dangerous whirling vortices on the plateau that closely resembled a terrestrial tornado. In the searchlight beam there appeared a huge whirlwind, a rotating column of water, snow and dust whose funnel rested on the low dark sky. The whirlwind broke the high-voltage cables and there were blue flashes caused by short circuits as the ends coiled up. The yellow light of Parus’ searchlight disappeared as though the wind had blown it out.

  Erg Noor gave the order to stop work and take cover in the ship.

  “But there is an observer there!” exclaimed geologist Beena Ledd, pointing to the faintly visible light of the silicoborum turret.

  “I know, Nisa’s there and I’m going over there myself,” answered the commander.

  “The current is cut off and ‘nothing’ has come into his own,” said Beena in serious tones.

  “If the hurricane affects us it will no doubt also affect ‘nothing.’ I’m sure there’s no danger until the storm dies down. I’m so heavy in this world that I won’t be blown away if I crawl along the ground. I’ve been wanting to watch that ‘nothing’ from an observation turret for a long time.”

  “May I come with you?” asked the biologist, jumping towards the commander.

  “Come along, only remember, I won’t take anybody else! You need that….”

  The two men crawled for a long time, hanging on to irregularities and cracks in the stones and keeping as far as possible out of the way of the whirlwinds. The hurricane did its best to tear them from the ground, turn them over and roll them along. Once it succeeded but Erg Noor managed to catch hold of Eon Thal as he rolled past, dropped flat on his stomach and caught hold of a big boulder with his hooked gloves.

  Nisa opened the hatch of her turret and the two men crawled into the narrow space. It was quiet and warm inside, the turret stood firm, securely anchored against the storms their wisdom had foreseen. The auburn-headed astronavigator frowned but was glad to have companions. She frankly admitted that she was not looking forward to spending twenty-four hours alone in a storm on a strange planet.

  Erg Noor informed Tantra of their safe arrival and the searchlight was turned off. The tiny lamp in the turret was now the only light in that kingdom of darkness. The ground trembled under the gusts of wind, the lightning and the passing whirlwinds. Nisa sat in a revolving chair with her back against the rheostat. The commander and the biologist sat at her feet on the round ledge formed by the base of the turret. In their spacesuits they occupied almost all the space inside the turret.

  “I suggest we sleep,” came Erg Noor’s soft voice in the telephones. “It’s a good twelve hours to the black sunrise when the storm will die down and it will be warmer.”

  His companions readily agreed. And so the three of them slept, held down by triple weight, enclosed in their spacesuits, hampered by the stiff “skeleton” in the narrow confines of a turret that was shaken by the storm. Great is the adaptability of the human organism and great its powers of resistance!

  From time to time Nisa woke up, transmitted a reassuring message to the watcher on Tantra and dozed off again. The hurricane was blowing itself out and the earth tremors had ceased. The “nothing,” or, more correctly, the “something” might appear now. The observers on the turrets took VP, vigilance pills, to liven up a tired nervous system.

  “That other spaceship bothers me,” confessed Nisa, “I should so much like to know who they are, where they came from and how they got here.”

  “So would I,” answered Erg Noor, “only it’s obvious how they got here. Stories of the iron stars and their planet traps have long been circulating round the Great Circle. In the more densely inhabited parts of the Galaxy, where ships have been making frequent trips for a long time already, there are planet graveyards of lost spaceships. Many ships, especially the earlier types, got stuck to those planets and many hair-raising stories are told about them, stories that are almost legend today, the legends of the arduous conquest of the Cosmos. Perhaps there are older spaceships on this planet that belong to more ancient days, although the meeting of three ships in our sparsely populated part of the Galaxy is an extraordinary event. So far not a single iron star was known to exist in the vicinity
of the Sun, we have discovered the first.”

  “Do you intend to investigate the disc ship?” asked the biologist.

  “Most certainly! Could a scientist ever forgive himself if he let such an opportunity go? We don’t know of any disc spaceships in regions neighbouring on our solar system. This must be a ship from a great distance that has, perhaps, been wandering about the Galaxy for several thousand years after the death of the crew or after some irreparable damage. Many transmissions round the Great Circle may become comprehensible to us when we get whatever material there is in the disc ship. It has a very queer form, it’s a disc-shaped spiral, the ribs on its exterior are very convex. As soon as we have transferred the cargo from Parus we’ll start on that ship but at present we cannot take a single person away from work.”

  “It took us only a few hours to investigate Parus.” “I have examined the disc ship through a stereotelescope. It is sealed tight, not a single opening is to be seen anywhere. It is very difficult to penetrate into any Cosmic ship that is reliably protected against forces that are many times stronger than our terrestrial elements. Just try and get into Tantra, through her armour of metal with a reorganized internal crystal structure, through the borason plating — it would be a task equal to the siege of a fortress. It’s still more difficult to deal with an alien ship, the principles of whose structure are unknown to us. But we’ll make an attempt to find out what it is!”

  “When are we going to examine what we’ve found in Parus?” asked Nisa. “There should be some staggeringly interesting observations made in those marvellous worlds mentioned in the message.”

  The telephone transmitted the commander’s good-natured laugh.

  “I’ve been dreaming of Vega since childhood and am more impatient than any of you. But we’ll have plenty of time for that on the way home. The first thing we have to do is get out of this darkness, out of this inferno, as they used to say in the old days. The Parus explorers did not make any landings otherwise we should have found the things they brought from those worlds in the collection rooms of the ship. You remember that despite the thorough search we made we found only films, measurements, lists of surveys, air tests and containers of explosive dust.”

  Erg Noor stopped talking and listened. Even the sensitive microphones did not register the slightest breath of wind — the storm was over. A scraping, rustling sound came through the ground from outside and was echoed by the walls of the turret.

  The commander raised his hand and Nisa, who understood him without words, extinguished the light. The darkness seemed as dense inside the turret, warmed up with infrared rays, as if it were standing in black liquid on the bed of an ocean. Flashes of brown light showed through the transparent hood of silicoborum. The watchers clearly saw the lights burn up and for a second form tiny stars with dark-red or dark-green rays; they would go out and then appear again. These little stars stretched out in lines that wavered and bent into circles and figures of eight, and slid soundlessly over the smooth diamond-hard surface of the hood. The people in the turret felt a strange, acute pain in their eyes and a sharp pain along the bigger nerves of the body as though the short rays of the brown stars were stabbing the nerve stems like needles.

  “Nisa,” whispered Erg Noor, “turn the regulator on to ‘full’ and switch on the light suddenly.”

  The turret was lit up with a bright, bluish terrestrial light. The people were blinded by it and could see nothing, or practically nothing. Eon and Nisa managed to see — or did they imagine it? — that the darkness on the right-hand side of the turret did not disappear immediately but remained for a moment as a flattened condensation of gloom with tentacles attached. The “something” instantaneously withdrew its tentacles and sprang back into the wall of darkness that the light had pushed farther from the turret.

  “Perhaps those are phantoms?” suggested Nisa, “phantom condensations of darkness around a charge of some sort of energy, like our fire balls, and not a form of life at all. If everything here is black why shouldn’t the lightning be black, too?”

  “That’s all very poetical, Nisa,” objected Erg Noor, “but hardly likely. In the first place the ‘something’ was obviously attacking, was after our living flesh. It or its brethren annihilated the people from Parus. If it’s organized and stable, if it can move in the desired direction, if it can accumulate and discharge some form of energy, then, of course, there can be no question of an atmospheric phantom. It’s something created from living matter and it’s trying to devour us!”

  The biologist supported the commander’s conclusion.

  “It seems to me that here, on this planet of darkness, it’s dark for us alone because our eyes are not sensitive to the infrared rays of the heat end of the spectrum; but the other end of the spectrum, the yellow and blue rays, should affect these creatures very strongly. Its reaction is so swift that the crew of Parus could not see anything when they illuminated the site of the attack and if they did see anything it was already too late and they were unable to tell anybody.”

  “Let’s repeat the experiment, even if the approach of that thing is unpleasant.”

  Nisa switched off the light and again the three observers sat in profound darkness awaiting the approach of the denizens of the world of darkness.

  “What is it armed with? Why is its approach felt through the hood and the spacesuit?” asked the biologist aloud. “Is it some new form of energy?”

  “There are few forms of energy and this is most likely electromagnetic. There is no doubt that countless modifications of this form of energy exist. This being has a weapon that affects our nervous system. You can imagine what it would be like if those feelers were to touch the unprotected body!”

  Erg Noor flinched and Nisa Creet shuddered inwardly as they noticed the line of brown lights rapidly approaching from three sides.

  “There isn’t just one being!” exclaimed Eon, softly. “Perhaps we ought not let them touch the hood.”

  “You’re right. Let each of us turn his back on the light and look in one direction only. Nisa, switch on!”

  On this occasion each of the observers noted some details that could be combined to give a general impression of creatures like huge flat jelly-fish, floating low over the ground with a dense fringe waving in the air below them. Some of the feelers were short when compared with the dimensions of the creature and could not have been more than a yard long. The acute-angled corners of the rhomboid body each had two feelers of much greater length. At the base of the feelers the biologist noticed huge bladders that glowed inside and seemed to be transmitting the star-like flashes along them.

  “Hullo, observers, why are you switching the light on and off?” came Ingrid’s clear voice in the helmet telephones. “Are you in need of help? The storm’s over and we’re going to begin work. We’re coming to you now.”

  “Stay where you are,” ordered the commander. “There is great danger abroad. Call everybody!”

  Erg Noor told them about the terrible jelly-fish. After a consultation the explorers decided to move part of a planetary motor forward on an automatic car. An exhaust flame three hundred metres long swept across the stony plane removing everything visible and invisible from its path. Before half an hour had passed the crew had repaired the broken cable and protection was restored. They realized that the anameson fuel must be loaded before the planet’s night came again; at the cost of superhuman effort it was done and the exhausted travellers retired behind the armour of their tightly sealed spaceship and listened calmly as it trembled in the storm. Microphones brought the roar and rumble of the hurricane to them but it only served to make more cosy the little world of light impregnable to the powers of darkness.

  Ingrid and Louma opened the stereoscreen. The film had been well chosen. The blue waters of the Indian Ocean splashed at the feet of those sitting in the ship’s library. The film showed the Neptune Games, the world-wide competition in all types of aquatic sports. In the Great Circle Era the entire world’s
population had grown accustomed to water in a way that had only been possible for the maritime peoples in earlier days. Swimming; diving and plunging, surf-board riding and the sailing of rafts had become universal sports. Thousands of beautiful young bodies, tanned by the sun, ringing songs, laughter, the festive music of the finals….

  Nisa leaned towards the biologist, who sat beside her deep in thought, carried away in his mind to the far distant planet that was his, to that dear planet where nature had been harnessed by man.

  “Did you ever take part in these competitions. Eon?” The biologist looked at her somewhat puzzled. “What? Oh, these? No, never. I was thinking and didn’t understand you at first.”

  “Weren’t you thinking about that?” asked the girl, pointing to the screen. “Don’t you find your appreciation of the beauty of our world comes so much fresher to you after all this darkness, after the storms and the jellyfish?”

  “Of course I do, but that only makes me all the more anxious to get hold of one of those jelly-fish. I was racking my brains over that, trying to think of a way to capture one.”

  Nisa Greet turned away from the smiling biologist and met Erg Noor’s smile.

  “Have you, too, been thinking about how to catch that black horror?” she asked, mockingly.

  “No, but I was thinking of how to explore the disc-shaped spaceship,” he said and the sly glint in the commander’s eyes almost annoyed Nisa.

  “Now I understand why it is that men engaged in wars in the old days! I used to think it was only the boastfulness of your sex, the so-called strong sex of that unorganized society.”

  “You’re not quite right although you are pretty near to understanding our old-time psychology. My ideas are simple — the more beautiful I find my planet, the more I get to love it, the more I want to serve it, to plant gardens, extract metals, produce power and food, create music, so that when I have passed on my way I shall leave behind me a little piece of something real made by my hands and my head. The only thing I know is the Cosmos, astronautics, and that is the only way I can serve mankind. The goal is not the flight itself but the acquisition of fresh knowledge, the discovery of new worlds which we shall, in time, turn into planets as beautiful as our Earth. And what aim have you in view, Nisa? Why are you so interested in the disc spaceship? Is it mere curiosity?”