Nisa jumped up to meet him.
“I’ve got all the necessary data and charts,” he said, “let’s fire it up!”
The commander stretched himself out in his armchair and slowly turned over the thin metal sheets he had brought, calling out the coordinates, the strength of magnetic, electric and gravitational fields, the power of space-dust streams and the velocity and density of meteoroid showers. Nisa, every muscle tense with excitement, pressed the buttons and turned the knobs of the computer. Erg Noor noted a series of responses, frowned and lapsed into deep thought.
“There’s a strong gravitational field in our way, the area in Scorpion with an accumulation of dark matter, near 6555CB + 11PKU,” began Noor. “We can save fuel by changing course that way, towards the Serpent. In the old days they flew without engines, using the gravitational fields as accelerators.”
“Can we do the same?” asked Nisa.
“No, our ships are too fast. At 5/6ths light speed, or 250,000 kilometers/second, our weight would be 12,000 times greater within a gravitation field, and that would reduce the whole expedition to dust. We can only fly like this in space, far from large accumulations of matter. If the ship enters a strong gravitational field we have to reduce speed, the stronger the field the greater the reduction.”
“So there’s a contradiction here,” said Nisa, resting her head on her hand in a childish manner, “the stronger the gravitational field the slower we have to fly!”
“That’s only true with velocities close to light speed, when the ship is like a ray of light and can only move in a straight line or along the so-called curve of equal tension.”
“If I understand you, we’ve got to aim our Tantra-ray straight at the solar system.”
“That’s where the great difficulty of space travel comes in. It’s practically impossible to aim directly at any star, even when we make all the corrective calculations we can think of. Throughout the entire flight we have to compute the accumulating error and constantly change the course of the ship, so an automatic pilot is impossible. Right now we’re in a dangerous situation. There’s nothing left to start another acceleration going, so any halt or even a significant deceleration means certain death. Look, the danger’s here—in area 344 + 2U, which has never been explored. No stars, no inhabited planets, nothing known but the gravitational field—there’s the perimeter. We’ll wait for the astronomers before we make the final decision—after the fifth rotation we’ll wake everybody, but in the meantime …” The commander massaged his temples and yawned.
“The sporamin is wearing off,” exclaimed Nisa, “you can get some sleep!” “Good. I’ll be fine right here, in this chair. What if there’s a miracle … just one beep from them would suffice!” There was something in Erg Noor’s voice that made Nisa’s heart race. She wanted to take that stubborn head of his, press it to her breast and stroke his dark hair with its strands of premature gray. < … >
The powerful anameson engines were silent. The peace of a long night hung over the sleepy ship as though no serious danger threatened her and her inhabitants. At any moment the long-awaited call signal would be heard over the loudspeaker and the two ships would check their unbelievably rapid flight, draw closer on parallel courses and finally equalize their speeds that they would essentially be berthed side by side. A wide, tubular gallery would connect the two ships and Tantra would regain her tremendous strength.
Deep in her heart Nisa was calm, she had faith in her commander. Their five years of travel had not seemed either long or tiring. Especially when Nisa realized that she fell in love…. But even before that the absorbingly interesting observations, the electronic recordings of books, music and films gave her every opportunity to increase her knowledge, and not feel the loss of beautiful Earth, that tiny speck of dust lost in the depths of infinite darkness. Her fellow travelers were people of true erudition. And when her nerves were exhausted by a surfeit of impressions or lengthy, strenuous work, there was prolonged sleep. The sleep state was maintained by attuning the patient to hypnotic oscillations and, after certain preliminary medical treatments, long stretches of time were lost in forgetfulness, passed without leaving a trace. Nisa was now especially happy because she was near the man she loved. The only thing that troubled her was the thought that others were having a harder time, especially Erg Noor. If only she could … no, what could a young and still very green astronavigator do, compared with such a man! Perhaps her tenderness, her constant fund of good will, her ardent desire to give up everything in order to make his tremendous task easier—would help.
The commander woke and raised his sleep-heavy head. The instruments were humming evenly as before, there were still the occasional thuds from the planetary engines. Nisa Creet was at the instruments, bending slightly over them, the shadows of fatigue on her young face. Erg Noor cast a glance at the ship-time clock, and leapt from his deep chair in a single athletic bound.
“Fourteen hours! And you didn’t wake me, Nisa! That’s….” Meeting her radiant glance he stopped short. “Off to bed at once!”
“May I sleep here, like you did?” asked Nisa. She had a quick meal, and dropped into the deep armchair. Her flashing hazel eyes, circled by dark rings, stealthily followed Erg Noor as he took his place at the instruments. He checked the indicators on the communications panel and then began to pace back and forth with rapid strides.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” he asked the navigator. She shook the red curls that were by then in need of clipping—women on extraterrestrial expeditions did not wear long hair. “I was thinking …” she began hesitantly, “just now, when we’re in this great danger, I bow my head before the might and majesty of humanity, who has penetrated to the stars, far, far into the depths of space! Most of this is ordinary for you, but I’m in space 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 and rubbed his forehead. “I’ll have to disappoint you, or rather, show you the real measure of our so-called might. Look….” He paused beside a projector and on the back wall of the bridge appeared the glittering spiral of the Galaxy. Erg Noor pointed to a ragged outer branch of the spiral comprised 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 our solar system is here, and right now so are we. 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 traveling to that branch of the Galaxy would take our Tantra 40,000 independent years. To cross the empty space that separates our branch from our neighbors 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! We’d know very little about the Universe if it weren’t for the Great Circle. Reports, images and ideas transmitted through space’s unconquerable in man’s brief life span reach us sooner or later, and we get to know about 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. “Small ships with low speed and no effective shields … and people in those days lived only half as long as we do—that was the period of man’s real greatness!”
Nisa tossed 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 tra
vel into space again and again!”
“I know that,” said Erg Noor, thoughtfully, “but that’s not the way everybody thinks!” Intuition gave her an insight into the thoughts of her commander. In his cabin there were two stereo portraits, splendidly done in violet-gold tones. Both were of Veda Kong, a woman of great beauty, a specialist in ancient history; eyes of the same transparent blue as the skies above Earth looked out from under long eyebrows. Tanned by the sun, smiling radiantly, she raised her hands to her ash-blonde hair. In the second picture she was seated, laughing heartily, on the bronze gun of a ship, 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 engines as though intending to accelerate the spaceship to the limit. “If Zirda hadn’t been destroyed, if we had gotten our fuel,” he continued, in response to her unspoken question, “I’d have led the expedition farther. That’s what I 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’d want 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?” asked Erg Noor suddenly, fixing his eyes on the girl.
“Anywhere you wanted, even …” and she pointed to a patch of abysmal blackness between two arms of the Galaxy’s starry spiral; she returned Noor’s fixed stare with one equally determined, her lips slightly parted.
“Oh, not that far! You know, Nisa, my dear navigator, about eighty-five years ago, Cosmic Expedition No. 84, the ‘Three-Stage Expedition’ left Earth. It consisted of three spaceships carrying fuel for each other, and it took off for Lyra. The two ships that weren’t carrying scientists passed their anameson on to the third and then came back to Earth. That’s the way mountain-climbers used to reach the highest summits. 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 but was lost on the return journey after transmitting a message. The goal was the large 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 human beings had never been that far from our Sun. Anyway, Parus got there. We don’t know why it was lost, a meteoroid or an irreparable malfunction. It’s even possible that the ship is still traveling through space and the heroes we think are dead are still alive.”
“That would be terrible!”
“It’s the fate of any spaceship that can’t maintain a speed approaching light speed. It’s instantly separated from the home planet by thousands of years.”
“What message did Parus send?” asked the girl.
“There wasn’t much to it. It was interrupted several times and then broke off altogether. I remember every word: ‘This is Parus. This is Parus, traveling twenty-six years from Vega … enough … will wai … Vega’s four planets … nothing more beautiful … happiness….’”
“But they were calling for help, they wanted to wait somewhere.”
“Of course they were calling for help, otherwise they wouldn’t have used up the tremendous energy needed for transmission. But nothing could be done, there wasn’t another word was from Parus.”
“They’d been on their way back for twenty-six independent years, from Vega to the Sun is thirty-one years. They must have been somewhere near us, or even nearer Earth.”
“Hardly, unless, of course, they exceeded the normal speed and got close to the quantum limit. Which would have been very dangerous!”
Briefly Erg Noor explained the mathematical basis for the destructive change that takes place in matter when it approaches light speed, but he noticed that Nisa was not really listening.
“I understand all that!” she exclaimed. “I’d have realized it before if your story about the lost ship hadn’t taken my mind off it. Things like that are always terrible, and you just can’t accept them!”
“You recognize the main point of the transmission,” said Erg Noor gloomily. “They discovered some particularly beautiful worlds. For a long time I’ve been dreaming of following Parus’ course; with modern improvements we could do it with one ship. I’ve been living with a dream of Vega, the blue sun with the beautiful planets, since I was very young.”
“To see worlds like that …” breathed Nisa, a break in her voice, “But to see them and return would take sixty terrestrial years—forty dependent … and that’s … half a lifetime.”
“Great achievements demand great sacrifices. For me, though, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice. I’ve lived on Earth for a few short intervals between space flights. I was born on a spaceship, you know!”
“How could that have happened?” asked the girl in amazement.
“Expedition No. 35 consisted of four ships. My mother was astronomer on one of them. I was born half-way to the binary star MN19026 + 7AL and managed to break the conventions twice—firstly by being born on a spaceship, and secondly because I was raised and educated by my parents, not in a school. What else could they have done? When the expedition returned to Earth, I was eighteen years old. I’d learned to pilot a spaceship and had acted as astronavigator in place of one got sick. I could also do mechanical repairs on the planetary or the anameson engines, and all this was accepted as the Labors of Hercules I had to perform to grow up.”
“I still don’t understand …” began Nisa.
“About my mother? You’ll understand when you’re a little older! Although the doctors didn’t know it then, the Anti-T serum didn’t keep…. Well, never mind how—I was brought onto a bridge like this one to look at the screens with my brand-new eyes, and to watch the stars dancing up and down on them. We were on course for Lupus, 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 thing that registered on my consciousness was the sky over a lifeless planet, which I observed from the glass dome of a temporary space station. The planets of double stars are usually lifeless because of the irregularity of their orbits. The expedition touched down and for seven months engaged in mineral prospecting. As far as I remember there were enormous quantities of platinum, osmium and iridium. 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 stars that didn’t twinkle, 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 wonderful green light that I shouted and sang for joy!” Erg Noor stopped. “That’s enough, I’ve been carried away by my memories 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-inducing apparatus, Nisa was soon fast asleep, and she awoke only 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’re awake just in time!” “Switch on the re-animation music and lights. For everybody!”
Nisa swiftly pressed a row of buttons, sending intermittent bursts of light and music consisting of certain of low, vibrant chords, gradually increasing in intensity, to all the cabins where members of the expedition were asleep. This initiated a gradual awakening of their inhibited nervous systems, returning t
hem to a normal active state. Five hours later everyone gathered in the bridge; by then they had fully recovered from their sleep, eaten, and taken nerve stimulants.
They received the news of the loss of the auxiliary spaceship in various ways. 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 furtively licked her parched lips.
“To the memory of our lost comrades!” said the commander as he switched on the screen of a projector showing Algrab, a photograph taken before Tantra’s launch. 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 travelers gave the farewell salute. This was the astronauts’ custom. < … >
There was a conviction among astronauts that there existed in space certain neutral fields, or zero areas, in which all radiation and all communications sank like stones into water. Astrophysicists, however, regarded the zero areas as nothing more than the idle invention of space travelers who were, in general, inclined to monstrous fantasies.
Worlds Apart Page 88