Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale) вк-1

by Ivan Yefremov

  The four friends walked down to the water. A cold breeze came towards them from the ocean and the heavy swell of the stormy Antarctic seas came in mighty surfless rollers that raced up the beach. Veda Kong looked at the steel-grey water with interest, it grew rapidly darker in the depths and in the rays of the low sun took on the violet hue of the ice.

  Nisa Greet was standing beside her in a blue fur coat and round cap from which her dark auburn curls escaped in profusion. The girl held her head up in her usual pose. Darr Veter could not help but admire her but frowned as he did so.

  “Veter, don’t you like Nisa?” exclaimed Veda with exaggerated indignation.

  “You know I’m very fond of her,” answered Darr Veter moodily, “but at the moment she seems to me so small and fragile in comparison with….”

  “With what awaits me?” asked Nisa with a note of challenge in her voice. “Are you transferring the attack from Erg to me now?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of anything of the sort,” answered Darr Veter, seriously and sadly, “but my grief is natural. A beautiful creature of my wonderful Earth must disappear into Cosmic void, into the darkness and frightful cold. It’s not pity that I feel, Nisa, but grief over a loss!”

  “You feel the same about it as I do,” agreed Veda. “Nisa, a bright spark of life… and dead, icy space.”

  “You think I’m a delicate flower?” asked Nisa and there was a strange intonation to the question that made Veda hesitate to agree that that was what she did think.

  “Who, more than I, enjoys the struggle against the cold?” and the girl took off her cap and her fur coat and shook out her auburn curls.

  “What are you doing?” asked Veda, the first to guess her intention. She ran to get hold of the girl.

  But Nisa ran to the edge of the cliff, threw her fur coat to Veda and stood poised over the water.

  The cold waves closed over Nisa and Veda shivered as she tried to imagine the sensation of such a bath. Nisa calmly swam out to sea, cutting through the waves with strong strokes. As she rose on a crest she waved to those on shore, inviting them to join her in the water.

  Veda Kong watched with growing admiration.

  “Veter, Nisa would be a better mate for a polar bear than for Erg. How can you, a man of the north, admit yourself beaten?”

  “I am a northerner by ancestry but still I prefer the warm southern seas,” admitted Darr Veter plaintively as he walked unwillingly towards the edge of the sea. He took off his clothes and touched the water with his toe and then, ouch! he plunged into an approaching steel-grey wave. With three powerful strokes he reached the crest of a wave and dived into the trough of another. Darr Veter’s reputation was saved by his many years of training and his habit of bathing all the year round. His breath was checked and there were red rings before his eyes. A few brisk dives and leaps in the water returned to him the ability to breathe freely. He returned shivering and blue with the cold and ran up the hill together with Nisa. A few minutes later they were enjoying the warmth of their fur clothes. It seemed that even the icy wind brought with it a breath of the coral seas.

  “The more I get to know you, the more I’m convinced that Erg hasn’t made any mistake in his choice,” whispered Veda. “You, better than anybody else, will be able to encourage him in a moment of difficulty, to bring him joy and take care of him.”

  Nisa’s cheeks, devoid of any sunburn, were flushed a rosy red.

  At breakfast on a high crystal terrace that vibrated in the wind, Veda met the girl’s gentle, pensive glance several times. All four ate in silence, unwilling to talk as people usually are on the eve of parting for a long time.

  “It’s hard to have to part from such people when you have only just got to know them,” Darr Veter suddenly exclaimed.

  “Perhaps you…” began Erg Noor.

  “My free time is over. It’s time for me to get up into the sky. Grom Orme’s waiting for me!”

  “And it’s time for me to get down to work, too,” added Veda. “I’m going down into the depths, into a recently discovered cave, a treasure repository of the Era of Disunity.”

  “Lebed will be ready to take off in the middle of next year and we’re going to start preparations in six weeks from now,” said Erg Noor, softly. “Who’s directing the Outer Stations at the moment?”

  “So far Junius Antus has been, but he doesn’t want to give up his job with the memory machines and the Council has not yet confirmed the candidacy of Embe Ong, an engineer and physicist from the Labrador F station.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Few people do, he’s working for the Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge on questions of megawave mechanics.”

  “What may that be?”

  “The powerful rhythms of the Cosmos, huge waves that spread slowly through space. The contradiction between colliding light velocities producing negative values greater than the absolute unit, for example, finds expression in the megawave. The problem has not yet been developed.”

  “And what is Mven Mass doing?”

  “He’s writing a book on emotions. He, too, has very little time left to himself, the Academy of Stochastics and Prognostication has appointed him to a consultative job in connection with the flight of your Lebed. As soon as they have enough material for him he’ll have to give up his book.”

  “That’s a pity, it’s an important subject. It’s time we had a proper understanding of the reality and strength of the world of emotions,” said Erg Noor.

  “I’m afraid Mven Mass is incapable of a cold analysis,” said Veda.

  “That’s as it should be, if he were he wouldn’t write anything outstanding,” objected Darr Veter, as he rose to his feet to say good-bye.

  “Till our next meeting!” Erg and Nisa held out their hands to him. “Hurry up and finish that job of yours or we shan’t meet again.”

  “Yes, we shall,” promised Darr Veter confidently. “Even if it’s only in the El Homra Desert before the take-off.”

  “Before the take-off,” repeated the astronauts.

  “Come on, my angel of heaven,” said Veda Kong as she took Darr Veter by the arm, pretending not to notice his knitted brows. “You’re probably fed up with Earth?”

  Darr Veter stood with his feet wide apart on the still shaky structure that formed the skeleton of the hull and looked down into the fearful abyss between the clouds. Our planet was there and its tremendous size could still be felt at a distance of five times its own diameter: he could see the grey outlines of the continents and the violet of the seas.

  Darr Veter recognized outlines that had been familiar to him from childhood through pictures taken from satellites. There was the concave line with dark strips of mountains stretching across it. To the right the sea sparkled and directly under his feet was a narrow mountain valley. He was in luck that day — the clouds had parted directly over that part of the planet where Veda was living and working. At the foot of the vertical terraces of iron-coloured mountains there was an ancient cave that went deep into the earth in a number of extensive storeys. It was there that Veda was selecting from amongst the dumb and dusty fragments of past life those grains of historical truth without which the present could not be properly understood nor the future foreseen.

  Darr Veter, leaning over the rail of a platform of corrugated zirconium bronze sent a mental greeting to the spot, roughly conjectured, that was fast disappearing under the wing of the cirrus clouds of intolerable brightness coming up from the west. The darkness of night stood like a wall sprinkled with shining stars. Layers of clouds floated by like gigantic rafts hanging one over the other. Below them the Earth’s surface was rolling into the darkening abyss as though it were disappearing for ever into the absolute. A delicate zodiacal light clothed the dark side of the planet shedding its glow into Cosmic space.

  There was a layer of light-blue clouds over the daylight side of Earth that reflected the powerful light of the blue-grey Sun. Anybody who looked at the clouds except through
dark filters would be blinded as would anybody unprotected by the 800 kilometres of Earth’s atmosphere who turned his face to the Sun. The harsh short-wave rays — ultra-violet and X-rays were irradiated in a powerful stream that was lethal to all living things. A constant downpour of cosmic particles was added to the stream. Newly-awakened stars or those that had collided at unimaginably great distances in the Galaxy sent deadly radiation out into space. Only the reliable protection of their spacesuits saved the workers from speedy death.

  Darr Veter threw the safety line over to the other side and moved towards the radiant dipper of Ursa Major. A giant pipe had been fixed in position throughout the entire length of the future satellite. At either end acute-angled triangles rose up from it to support the discs radiating the magnetic field. When the batteries transforming the Sun’s blue radiations into electricity were installed it would be possible to do away with lifelines and walk along the lines of force in the magnetic field with directional plates on the chest and back.

  “We want to work at night.” The voice of a young engineer, Cadd Lite, suddenly sounded in his space helmet. “Altai has promised to provide the light.”

  Darr Veter looked to the left and below where a bunch of cargo rockets, tied together, lay like sleeping fish. Above them, under a flat roof to protect it from meteorites and the Sun, floated the temporary platform built from the inner plating of the satellite where all the components brought by the rockets were stored and assembled. Workers crawling there like black bees suddenly turned to glow-worms when the reflecting surfaces of their space-suits moved beyond the shadow of the roof. A cobweb of ropes stretched from the gaping hatches in the sides of the rockets out of which big components were being unloaded. Higher still, directly over the hull of the satellite, a group of people in strange, often ridiculous, poses were busy round a huge machine. One ring of beryllium bronze with borason plating would have weighed at least a hundred tons on Earth. Here the huge mass was dangling beside the metal skeleton of the satellite on a thin wire rope whose only purpose was to keep all these components rotating round Earth at the same velocity.

  The workers became confident and agile once they had become accustomed to the absence of weight or rather, to the negligible weights. These skilled workers, however, would soon have to be replaced by others. Lengthy periods of physical labour without gravitation lead to disturbances in blood circulation which might become chronic and make the sufferer a permanent invalid on his return to Earth. For this reason the shift on the satellite was one of fifty working hours after which the worker returned to Earth, going through reacclimatization at the Intermediate Station revolving round the Earth at a height of 900 kilometres.

  Darr Veter directed the assembly of the satellite and tried to avoid physical exertion although, at times, he badly wanted to help hasten the completion of some job or another. He would have to hold out at a height of 57,000 kilometres for several months.

  If he agreed to night work he would have to send his young workers back to the planet and call others before time. Barion, the construction job’s second planetship was on the Arizona Plain where Grom Orme sat at the TVP screens and registration machine controls.

  A decision to work through the entire icy Cosmic night would have reduced the time required for assembling the satellite by one half and Darr Veter could not let such an opportunity pass. As soon as they had obtained h’s consent the workers came down from the platform, running about in all directions, making a still more complicated network of ropes. The planetship Altai that served as living quarters for the satellite builders and hung motionless, moored to one end of the satellite’s main beam, suddenly cast off the hawsers that linked her main hatch with the satellite. A long stream of blinding flame shot out of her exhausts. The huge ship swung round swiftly and silently, not the slightest noise carrying through the emptiness of interplanetary space. The skilled commander of Altai needed no more than a few strokes of his engines to send the ship forty metres above the structure and turn with his landing lights directed at the assembly platform. Hawsers were again dropped between the ship and the satellite and the whole mass of objects suspended in space became motionless relative to each other as they continued their revolutions round the Earth at a speed of about ten thousand kilometres an hour.

  The distribution of the cloud masses told Darr Veter that the construction job was passing over the Antarctic region of the planet and would, therefore, soon enter Earth’s shadow. The improved heating system of the spacesuit could not fully guarantee its wearer against the bitter cold of Cosmic space and woe betide the careless traveller who exhausted his batteries. An architect-erector had been killed that way a month before when he hid from a meteorite shower in the cold shell of an open rocket. He did not live to reach the sunny side of the planet. Another engineer was killed by a meteorite — such occurrences could not be foreseen or prevented with any degree of certainty. The building of a satellite always claimed its victims and nobody knew who would be the next. The laws of stochastics, although only partly applicable to such tiny particles as individual people, said that he, Darr Veter, would most probably be the next because he would be there, at that height and open to all the vagaries of the Cosmos, longer than anybody else. There was an impudent little inner voice, however, that told Darr Veter that nothing could possibly happen to his magnificent person. No matter how ridiculous such confidence may have been for a mathematically minded man it never abandoned Darr Veter and helped him calmly balance himself on narrow girders and grilles on the open, unprotected hull of the satellite in the abyss of the black sky.

  Structures on Earth were erected by special machines called embryotecti because they worked on the principle of the cybernetic development of the living organism. It goes without saying that the molecular structure of the living organism, effected by the hereditary cybernetic mechanism, was immeasurably more complicated.

  Living organisms, however, could only grow in the conditions provided by warm solutions of ionized molecules while the embryotecti usually worked in polarized streams of electricity or light or in a magnetic field. The markings and keys on all the component parts painted in radioactive thallium gave the correct orientation to the machines assembling them precisely and at high speed. At the great height of the satellite there were not and could not be any such machines. The assembly of the satellite was an old-fashioned building job employing human hands. Despite the dangers involved the work seemed so interesting that it attracted thousands of volunteers. The psycho-physiological stations were scarcely able to examine the flood of volunteers desirous of informing the Council of their readiness to venture into interplanetary space.

  Darr Veter reached the foundations of the solar machines that were arranged fanwise round a huge hub containing the artificial gravity apparatus and joined the battery he was carrying on his back to the terminals of the test circuit. A simple melody could be heard in the phones of his space helmet. Then he connected in parallel a glass plate with the thin gold lines of a drawing on it. It produced the same melody. Darr Veter turned a couple of vernier scales until points of time coincided and listened to make sure there was no difference in the melody or even in the tone of the tuning. An important part of the future satellite had been assembled faultlessly. They could now begin the erection of the radiation electric motors. Darr Veter straightened shoulders that were bent wearily under the weight of a spacesuit worn over a long period and turned his head to the right and to the left. The movement caused a creaking of the upper vertebrae that immobility in the space helmet had made stiff. It was a good thing that, so far, Darr Veter had proved impervious to the psychoses that affect those who work outside the terrestrial atmosphere — these included ultra-violet sleeping sickness and infrared madness — otherwise he would not have been able to bring his worthy mission to a successful conclusion.

  Soon the outer walls of the hull would protect the workers from the effects of a feeling of loneliness in the Cosmos, alone over an abyss that had ne
ither sky nor ground!

  Altai sent out a small rescue rocket that shot past the construction job like an arrow. This was a tug going to fetch the automatic rockets carrying only cargo and halting at a given altitude. Just in time! The bundle of rockets, people, machines and building materials, floating in space, was passing over to the night side of the planet. The tug rocket returned pulling behind it three long, gleaming, blue fish-like rockets that weighed a hundred and fifty tons on Earth (without fuel).

  The rockets joined their fellows around the assembly platform. In one leap Darr Veter reached the other side of the hull and was soon amongst the technicians supervising the unloading who were gathered in a circle. They were discussing the plan for the night work. Darr Veter consented but insisted that all personal batteries be changed for freshly charged ones with sufficient energy to keep the spacesuits warm for thirty hours and at the same time supply the electric lamps, air filters and radiotelephones.

  The whole construction job was plunged in darkness as though it were at the bottom of the sea but the soft zodiacal light from the Sun’s rays dispersed by the gases of the atmospheric zones still lit up the skeleton of the future satellite that was gripped in a frost of 180 degrees C. The superconductivity of the metal now hindered them even more than it did by day. The slightest amount of wear in the insulation of the instruments, batteries or accumulators surrounded the nearby objects with a blue glow from current flowing along their surfaces and which could not be canalised in any given direction.

  The profound darkness of outer space came together with increasing cold. The stars burned fiercely like dazzlingly bright blue needles in the sky. The invisible and inaudible flight of the meteoroids was even more awe-inspiring at night. In the currents of the atmosphere over the dark globe down below there were variously coloured clouds of electric glow, spark discharges of tremendous length and sheets of dispersed light thousands of kilometres long. Down below, in the upper layers of the atmosphere there were gales of greater fury than anything known on Earth. Vigorous movements of energy continued in an atmosphere saturated by the radiations of the Sun and the Cosmos and made communication with the planet extremely difficult.