Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN ANGELS OF HEAVEN

Erg Noor held his breath as he followed the manipulations of the skilled laboratory workers. The mass of instruments reminded him of a spaceship’s control tower, but the huge area of the room with its big, bluish windows, immediately took his mind off the Cosmic ship.

On a metal table in the middle of the room stood a special chamber made of thick sheets of rutholucite, a material that is transparent to visible and to infrared rays. A network of pipes and wires encircled the brown enamel water-tank from the spaceship in which the two black jelly-fish from the planet of the iron star were still imprisoned.

Eon Thal, erect as though doing gymnastics but with his arm still helplessly hanging in a sling, looked from a distance at the slowly revolving drum of a recording instrument. Above the biologist’s black brows there appeared beads of perspiration.

Erg Noor licked his dry lips.

‘“Nothing there. There can’t be anything left but dust after five years’ journey,” said the astronaut hoarsely.

“If so, that’s bad luck for Nisa and me,” answered the biologist, “we shall probably have to fumble for years to find out the nature of our injuries.”

“Do you still think that the ‘medusae’ and the ‘crosses’ have the same organs for killing victims?”

“I do. Grimm Schar and all the others have come to the same conclusion. Before that I had the most unexpected ideas. I imagined that the black cross had nothing at all to do with the planet….”

“I thought so, too; if you remember, I spoke about it. I got the idea that it was a being from the disc-shaped spaceship and was on guard over it. If you think about it seriously there’s no reason to guard an invincible fortress from the outside, is there? When we tried to open the disc we had proof of the foolishness of such ideas.”

“My idea was that the ‘cross’ wasn’t alive but was just a robot placed there to guard the spaceship.”

“That’s what I thought. But now, of course, I’ve given up all such ideas. The black cross is a living being engendered by the world of darkness. The beasts probably live down below, on the plain. This one came from the direction of the gap in the cliffs. The medusae are lighter and more mobile, they live on the platean where we landed. The connection between the black cross and the spiral disc is a pure coincidence due to the fact that our protective arrangements did not reach the far corner of the plain and it was all the time in the shadow behind the disc.”

“And do you think the lethal organs of the ‘cross’ and the ‘medusa’ are identical?”

“Yes. Animals living in similar conditions should evolve similar organs. The iron star is a sun that radiates heat and electricity. The whole atmosphere of the planet is strongly saturated with electricity. Grimm Schar believes that the animals gathered energy from the atmosphere and created condensations like our fire-balls. Do you remember how the brown lights moved along the tentacles of the medusae?”

“The cross had tentacles, too, but there was no….” “Simply because nobody had time to take note of them. The nature of the injury to the nerve column accompanied by paralysis of the higher centre concerned — we all agree on this — is the same in my case and Nisa. That is the chief proof and the main hope!” “Hope?” Erg Noor showed signs of agitation. “Of course. Look at this,” said the biologist showing him the regular line of the recording instrument. “The sensitive electrodes placed in the trap with the jelly-fish do not show anything. The monsters had a full charge of energy when they went in there and it could not have escaped from the tank after it was sealed. I do not think that the insulation of the cosmic food containers could be broken down, it’s much stronger than our light biological spacesuits. If you remember, the ‘cross’ that injured Nisa did not do you any harm. Its supersonic waves penetrated into the super-protective spacesuit you wore and broke down your will-power but the paralyzing charges were powerless to inflict harm. They penetrated Nisa’s light spacesuit in the same way as the jelly-fish’s penetrated mine.”

“You mean that the charges of globular lightning or whatever it is that went into the tank should still be there, is that it? But the instruments don’t record anything.”

“That’s why I say there is hope: it means that the jelly-fish have not been reduced to dust. They….”

“Now I understand. They have sealed themselves up in something like a cocoon!”

“That’s it. Such forms of adaption are widespread among living organisms that have to go through long periods of unfavourable climatic conditions — like the long, icy nights of the black planet and the hurricanes at ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset.’ As these conditions on the planet alternate very quickliy I imagine the jelly-fish can come out of their state of lethargy as quickly as they go into it. If our assumptions are correct it will be fairly easy to restore the lethal propensities of the black medusae.”

“By providing the temperature, atmospheric, lighting and other conditions of the black planet, I suppose?”

“Yes, we’ve made all the calculations and preparations. Soon Grimm Schar will be here and we’ll start filling the tank with a mixture of neon, oxygen and nitrogen until the pressure reaches three atmospheres. But first let’s make sure of our ground.”

Eon Thal conferred with his two assistants. Some sort of a machine began crawling slowly towards the brown tank. The sheet of rutholucite that formed the front of the protective housing moved to one side opening up a passage for the machine.

The electrodes inside the tank were changed for micro-mirrors with cylindrical lamps to provide light for them. One of the assistants stood at the remote control panel: a concave surface appeared on the screen; it was covered with a sort of granular coating that reflected light very dully — this was the interior wall of the tank.

“X-rays won’t be of much use,” said Eon Thal, “the insulation is too thick. We’ll have to use a more complicated method.”

The revolutions of the mirror revealed, on the bottom of the tank, two white masses of irregular spherical shape and with a spongy, fibrous surface. The balls bore some resemblance to the fruit of the bread-tree that had shortly before been developed and were about 70 centimetres in diameter.

“Switch the televisophone on to Grimm Schar’s vector,” said the biologist to an assistant. The scientist, as soon as he was sure of the correctness of the general assumptions, hurried to the laboratory. He screwed up his eyes near-sightedly, but merely from habit and not from weak sight, and looked over the apparatus. Grimm Schar did not have the impressive appearance and imperative character one would expect in a prominent scientist. Erg Noor remembered Renn Bose, whose bashful, boyish appearance was also deceptive and belied the greatness of his mind.

“Open the welded seam,” ordered Grimm Schar. A mechanical hand cut through the hard enamel mass without moving the heavy lid. Hoses with the gaseous mixture were attached to the stop-cocks. A strong infrared ray projector took the place of the iron star.

“Temperature… pressure… electrical charge…” called out an assistant reading off the dials of the instruments.

Half an hour later Grimm Schar turned to the astronauts.

“Let’s go to the rest-room, there’s no way of guessing how long those capsuled beasts will take to revive. If

Eon’s right it won’t be long. The assistant will call __, “

The Institute of Nerve Currents was situated far from the inhabited zone, on the fringe of the steppe reservation. At the end of summer the earth was dry and the wind had a peculiar rustle to it that came through the open windows together with a faint odour of sun-dried grasses.

The three scientists, seated in comfortable armchairs, kept silent as they stared out of the windows over the tops of wide-spreading trees towards the haze of the distant horizon. From time to time one or the other of them would close his tired eyes but the waiting was too tense for anybody to doze. This time, however, the patience of the scientists was not too severely tried. Before three hours had passed the screen giving direct communication with the laboratory lit up and an assistant appeared, scarcely able to contain himself.

“The lid’s moving!”

In an instant all three of them were in the laboratory.

“Shut the rutholucite chamber tight, check up on its hermetic sealing!” ordered Grimm Schar. “Arrange planet conditions in the chamber.”

The powerful pumps hissed faintly, the pressure regulators whistled and in a moment the transparent cage was filled with the atmosphere of the world of darkness.

“Increase gravitation, humidity and atmospheric electricity,” continued Grimm Schar. The laboratory was filled with the acrid odour of ozone.

Nothing happened. The scientist knitted his brows as he studied the instruments and tried to imagine what had been omitted.

“They need darkness!” came Erg Noor’s measured tones.

Eon Thal even jumped in the air.

“How could I have forgotten? Grimm Schar, you haven’t been on the blade planet, but I have!”

“The polarizing shutters!” ordered the scientist instead of answering him.

The light went out. The laboratory was illuminated only by the lights in the instruments. The assistants pulled blinds over the control desk and complete darkness ensued. Here and there faint stars twinkled — the-luminous dials of some indicators.

The breath of the black planet wafted in the faces of the astronauts bringing with it memories of the awful but thrilling days of hard struggle.

There was silence for some minutes that was broken only by the cautious movements of Eon Thal who was tuning in the demonstration screen for infrared reception and arranging the polarizing shield so that light from the screen would not be reflected.

First came a faint sound and then a heavy thud as the lid from the tank fell down inside the chamber. It was followed by the familiar flickering of brown lights as the tentacles of the black monster appeared over the edge of the tank. With a sudden jump it leaped upwards spreading darkness over the whole area of the rutholucite chamber and banged against the transparent ceiling. Thousands of brown stars spread over the body of the jellyfish, its black cloak bulged and formed a dome as if the wind were blowing from below and then rested on the floor of the chamber with all its tentacles gathered in a bunch. The second monster rose out of the tank like another black phantom, its swift and silent movement inspiring fear in the onlookers. Here, however, within the walls of the experimental chamber and surrounded by remote-controlled instruments, the spawn of the planet of darkness was powerless.

Instruments measured, photographed, drew intricate curves, determined the nature of the animals and broke down their structure into various physical, chemical and biological indicants. The human intellect gathered these qualitatively different data together again and mastered the structure of the awe-inspiring monsters in order to subordinate them to himself.

As hour after hour passed almost unnoticed Erg Noor became sure of victory.

Eon Thal was becoming more and more radiant, Grimm Schar grew as vivacious as his youthful assistants.

At last the scientist approached Erg Noor.

“You may go now with an easy heart. We shall stay here until the investigation is finished. I’m afraid to switch on visible light as these black medusae can’t hide from it here as they would on their own planet. They must first be made to tell us all we want to know.”

“And how long will it take to find out?”

“In three or four days our investigation will have become exhaustive for the level of knowledge we possess. We can already imagine how their paralysing organs function.”

“And will you be able to cure… Nisa… Eon?”

“Yes!”

Only then did Erg Noor realize what a heavy burden he had been bearing since that black day. Day or night… what did it matter! Wild joy filled the whole of that man of great restraint. He had difficulty in overcoming a mad desire to throw Grimm Schar up into the air, to shake the little scientist and embrace him. Erg Noor was astounded at himself, began to calm down and a minute later had returned to his normal state of concentration.

“Your studies will be a tremendous help to the future expedition that will have to fight against the black jellyfish and crosses!”

“Of course! We shall know the enemy now. But is there going to be another expedition to that world of heavy weight and darkness?”

“I don’t doubt it.”

The warm morning of a northern autumn was just beginning.

Erg Noor, without his usual hustle, was walking barefoot on the soft grass. In front of him, at the forest fringe, the green wall of the cedars was interspersed with already leafless maples that looked like columns of thin smoke. On the reservation man did not interfere with nature — there was beauty in the disorderly growths of tall grasses, in their mixed, contradictory, pleasant and pungent odours.

A cold stream barred his way and Erg Noor turned on to a foot-path. The ripples caused by the wind on the sunlit surface of the transparent water gave it the appearance of an undulating network of wavy golden lines thrown on the pebbles of the river-bed. Unnoticeable strands of moss and water-weeds floated on the water casting shadows that ran like blue patches along the bottom. On the far bank big pale-blue harebells swayed in the wind. The aroma of damp meadows and red autumn leaves promised the joy of labour to man, for tucked away in a far corner of his heart everyone had hidden something of the experience of the first ploughman.

A bright yellow oriole alighted on a branch and emitted its mocking self-confident whistle.

The clear sky over the cedar forest was turned to silver by the far-spreading wing of a cirrus cloud. Erg Noor dived into the gloom of the forest with its odours of cedar needles and resin, came out on the other side, climbed a hill and wiped his bare head that the dew had wetted. The forest reservation that surrounded the Nerve Clinic was not a big one and Erg Noor soon came to a road. The stream had been diverted into a series of basins of milk-coloured glass, keeping them filled with water. Several men and women in bathing costumes ran round a bend in the road and raced on between rows of brightly coloured flowers. The autumn water could hardly have been warm but the runners, encouraging one another with laughter and jokes, sprang into the basins and in a jolly crowd swam down the cascade from basin to basin. Erg Noor smiled in spite of himself. It was rest time at some local factory or farm.

Never before had our planet seemed so beautiful to him who had spent the greater part of his life in the close quarters of a spaceship. He was filled with profound gratitude to all people, to Earth’s nature, to everything that had helped to save Nisa, his astronavigator with the auburn curls. Today she had come to meet him in the clinic gardens. After a consultation with the doctors they had arranged to go away together to a polar sanatorium for nervous disorders. As soon as the scientists had managed to break the chain of paralysis and put an end to the persistent inhibition of the cerebral cortex caused by the discharge of the “cross” beast’s charge through its tentacles, Nisa had become quite healthy. She had only to regain her former energy after such a long cataleptic sleep. Nisa was alive and well! It seemed to Erg Noor that he would never be able to think of that without an impulse of joy somewhere inside him.

He saw the solitary figure of a woman coming rapidly towards him from a side path. He would have recognized her among thousands — Veda Kong, the Veda who had been so much in his thoughts before it had become clear that their paths in life were different. Erg Noor was accustomed to the diagrams of the computing machines and his thinking followed the same lines — he saw a steep arc sweeping upwards into the heavens — his own urge — while Veda’s path of life and work left her hovering over the planet to delve into the depths of centuries passed and gone. The lines diverged until they were far apart.

Erg Noor knew every tiny detail of Veda’s face but he was suddenly surprised to notice the resemblance she bore to Nisa Greet. The same narrow face with eyes placed wide apart, the same high forehead with the long upward sweep of the eyebrows, the same expression of gentle irony in her big mouth. Even their noses were both slightly snub, softly rounded and a bit long, just as though they were sisters. The only difference was that Veda always had a direct and pensive look while Nisa Greet would throw her head back in youthful exuberance or would lower her forehead and knitted brows to meet an obstacle.

"Are you examining me?” asked Veda, surprised.

She held out both hands to Erg Noor who took them and pressed them to his cheeks. Veda shivered and pulled herself away. The astronaut gave a weak smile.

“I wanted to thank those hands for having nursed Nisa. She… I know about everything! Somebody had to be in constant attendance and you gave up an interesting expedition. Two months….”

“I didn’t give it up, I was late for it, waiting for Tantra. The expedition had left by then, and well… she’s charming, your Nisa! We look alike but she’s the real companion for the conqueror of the Cosmos and the iron stars, with her urge to get back into space and her loyalty.”

“Veda!”

“I’m not joking, Erg, I mean it. Don’t you feel that this is no time for jokes? We must make everything clear!”

“I find everything clear enough as it is! And I’m thanking you for Nisa, not for myself.”

“Don’t thank me. It would have been difficult for me if you’d lost Nisa, that’s why….”

“I understand but still I don’t believe you because I know that Veda Kong could never be so calculating. And so my gratitude remains.”

Erg Noor patted the young woman’s shoulder and placed his fingers in the crook of her arm. They walked side by side along the deserted road in silence until Erg Noor spoke again.

“Who is he, the real one?”

“Darr Veter.”

“The former Director of the Outer Stations? So that’s it!”

“Erg, you are saying words that mean nothing. I don’t recognize you.”

“I suppose I must have changed. I can’t imagine Darr Veter apart from his work and I thought that he was a Cosmic dreamer.”

“He is. He dreams of the world of stars but he has proved able to combine the stars with an ancient farmer’s love of Earth. He is a man of knowledge with the big hands of the simple mechanic.”

Erg Noor involuntarily looked at his narrow hand with the long fingers of a mathematician and musician.

‘“If you only knew, Veda, how much I love our Earth at this moment!”

“After the world of darkness and a long journey with paralysed Nisa? Of course, you do!”

“You don’t believe that love for Earth can provide the basis of my life?”

“I don’t. You’re a real hero and will always be thirsting for deeds. You will carry that love like a full bowl from which you are afraid to spill a drop, carry it on Earth in order to give it to the Cosmos for the sake of that same Earth!”

“Veda, you’d have been burnt at the stake in the Dark Ages!”

“I’ve been told that before. Here’s the fork…. Where are your shoes, Erg?”

“I left them in the garden when I came to meet you. I’ll have to go back.”

“Well, good-bye, Erg. My job here’s finished and yours is just about to begin. Where shall we meet again? Perhaps it will be only before you leave on the new ship?”

“Oh, no, Veda. Nisa and I are going to a polar sanatorium for three months. Come and see us and bring Darr Veter with you.”

“Which sanatorium? The ‘Stone Heart’ on the north coast of Siberia or ‘Autumn Leaves’ in Iceland?”

“It’s too late for the northern polar regions. We’re being sent to the southern hemisphere where the summer will soon begin. The ‘White Dawn’ in Grahamland.”

“All right. Erg, we’ll come if Darr Veter does not start out immediately to rebuild Satellite 57. There’ll probably be a long time spent on getting materials together.”

“That’s a fine terrestrial man for you — almost a year in the sky!”

“Don’t try to be smart. That’s quite near compared with your tremendous spaces, the spaces that divided us.”

“Do you regret it, Veda?”

“Why do you ask, Erg? There are two halves in each of us, one half is anxious to get at the new, the other half cherishes the old and would be glad to return to it. You know that and you also know that return never achieves its aim.”

“But regret remains like a wreath on a beloved grave. Give me a kiss, Veda, my dear!”

The young woman obediently complied with the request, pushed the astronaut lightly aside and strode swiftly away to the main road where there was an electrobus service. Erg Noor watched her until the robot driver of the first bus to arrive stopped the vehicle and her red dress disappeared inside.

Veda also looked through the glass at Erg Noor as he stood there immobile. Her head was filled with the refrain of a song dating back to the Era of Disunity that had recently been reset to music by Arck Geer. Darr Veter had once repeated it to her in response to a gentle reproach from her.

This was the challenge of a man of ancient days to the menacing forces of nature that had taken his beloved from him… the challenge of a man who was not reconciled to his loss and did not want to make any concessions to fate!

The electrobus drew near the branch of the Spiral Way but Veda Kong was still standing by the window holding on to the polished hand-rails and humming the beautiful romance filled with such sweet sorrow.

“Angels — that’s what religious Europeans in the old days called the imaginary spirits of heaven, the heralds who made known the will of the gods. Angelas meant ‘herald’ or ‘messenger’ in the ancient Greek language. It’s a word that has been forgotten for centuries….” Veda shook off these thoughts while she was at the station but they returned to her in the coach of the Spiral Way train.

“The Heralds of Heaven, of the Cosmos — why, that’s what we might call Erg Noor and Mven Mass and Darr Veter. Especially Darr Veter when he will be in the nearby, terrestrial heaven, building a satellite….” Veda smiled mischievously. “Then the demons down under the sea that’s us, the historians,” she said aloud, listening to the sound of her own voice, and laughed merrily. “Yes, that’s right, the angels of heaven and the spirits of the under world! Only Darr Veter may not like it.”

Low cedars with black needles, a variety impervious to frosts that had been developed for the subantarctic regions, sang solemnly and monotonously in the never-slackening wind. The cold, dense air flowed like a swift river, carrying that extraordinary purity and freshness with it that one associates with the open ocean and high mountain ranges. When the wind comes in contact with the eternal snows of the mountains, however, it is dry, it tends to burn, like sparkling wine. Here the breath of the ocean made its heavy touch felt as the wind wrapped the body in a humid mantle.

The building of the “White Dawn” Sanatorium stretched down to the sea in terraces, the rounded form of its glass walls resembling the huge ocean liners of ancient days. The pale vermilion tones of the walls, staircases and vertical columns were in sharp contrast to the domed masses of the chocolate and violet andesite cliffs, cut by blue and grey porcelain-like paths of cast syenite. The polar night in late spring, however, made all colours alike in its specially white light that seemed to come from the depths of the sky and the sea. The sun had hidden for an hour behind the plateau to the south. A majestic arc of light covered the southern half of the sky, reflected from the giant ice-cap of the southern continent that still remained on the high plateau of the eastern part to where it had been moved back by the will of man who had reduced it to one-quarter of its former mass. The icy white dawn, whose name the sanatorium bore, turned the whole countryside into a phantom world of light without shadows or reflections.

Four people were coming down the silvery porcelain path to the ocean. The faces of the two men who walked behind seemed carved out of grey granite and the big eyes of the two women were bottomless and mysterious.

Nisa Greet, pressing her face against the fur collar of Veda Kong’s jacket, was arguing with the historian. Veda, making no effort to conceal her faint amazement was looking into that gentle face that outwardly resembled hers.

“I believe that the best gift a woman can make to the man she loves is to re-create him and in this way prolong the existence of her hero. Then another loving woman will create a new copy — why, it’s almost like immortality!”

“Men feel differently about us,” answered Veda. “Darr Veter once told me that he would not like to have a daughter that was too much like the woman he loved because it would be hard to go out of the world and leave her behind without him, without the cloak of his love and tenderness, leave her to a fate of which he would know nothing. That’s just a relic of the jealousy and protection of the old days.”

“I cannot bear the thought of parting with a tiny being that is mine to his last drop of blood,” continued Nisa, full of her own thoughts, “of giving him up to the school as soon as I have finished nursing him.”

“I can understand you although I do not agree,” said Veda, frowning, as though the girl had touched a painful string in her heart. “One of mankind’s greatest victories is the conquest of the blind instinct of maternity, the realization that only the collective upbringing of children by people trained and selected for the job can produce a man of our society. That insane maternal love of the past has almost died out. Every mother knows that the whole world is kind to her child and that he runs none of the dangers he formerly did. And so the instinctive love of the she-wolf that arose out of fear for her progeny has disappeared.”

“I understand all that but only with my mind,” said Nisa.

“I not only know it but feel it, I know that the greatest happiness is to bring joy to another and that is now possible for anybody, irrespective of age. That which was possible in former ages for parents and grandparents, and most of all for mothers…. Why must one always be together with the little one? That’s also a relic of ancient days, when the woman was compelled to live a narrow life and could not always be together with the man she loved. You’ll always be together, as long as you love each other….”

“I don’t know, but sometimes I feel an overpowering desire to have beside me a little one that is like him, it is so strong that I clench my hands in despair… no, I don’t know anything.”

“There’s Java, the Mothers’ Island. Those who want to bring up their own children live there, those who’ve lost their dear ones, for example….”

“Oh no! And I couldn’t be a teacher, either, like those who have some special love for children. I feel that I have great strength and I’ve been into the Cosmos once already.”

“You’re the personification of youth, Nisa, and not only physically. Like all people who are very young you don’t realize when you come up against contradictions that they are what go to make up life. You don’t realize that the joy of love will most certainly bring anxiety, cares and sorrows that will be the greater, the stronger the love. And you think that you’ll lose everything at the first blow struck by life.”

As she uttered those last words Veda herself became aware that Nisa’s restiveness and anxiety were not to be explained by youthfulness alone.

Veda had made a mistake common to many people, that of believing that spiritual traumas heal together with physical wounds. That, however, is not the case, for wounds to the psyche remain for a long, long time, hidden deep down in a physically healthy body, and they may open up at any moment from the most insignificant of causes. Such was Nisa’s case — she had been paralysed for five years and it had left its impress in every cell of her body; even if the memory was subconscious it still remained — the horror of her meeting with the terrible cross that almost been the death of Erg Noor!

Nisa guessed what Veda was thinking about and answered her in a dull voice.

“Ever since the iron star there is a strange feeling that has never left me. Somewhere there is an empty place in my heart. It continues to exist together with confident joy and strength and does not exclude them and at the same time does not disappear. I can struggle against it only by means of something that will employ me entirely and will not leave me alone with… Oh, now I know what the Cosmos is for a lonely man and have even greater respect for the first space travellers!”

“I think I can understand,” said Veda. “I was once on the tiny Polynesian islands that are lost in the ocean. There, standing by the sea in a moment of loneliness, you are overcome by a profound sorrow that is like a nostalgic song merging with the deadly monotony of great distances. Perhaps that is a memory of the distant past, n memory of the primordial isolation of his consciousness telling man how weak and helpless he formerly was, shut up in his own little cage of a soul. The only cure was common work and common thoughts — a boat came, smaller, even, than the island, but it was enough to change the ocean. A handful of companions and a ship is a world of its own striving towards distant objectives that they can reach and subordinate to their will. The same is true of the Cosmic vessel, the spaceship. In that ship you are together with strong and brave companions! But alone in the Cosmos,” Veda shuddered, “I don’t suppose a man could stand it!”

Nisa clung still more closely to Veda.

“How well you said that, Veda! That’s why I want everything at once….”

“Nisa, I’m getting very fond of you. Now I can sense the meaning of your decision but at first I thought it was sheer madness. For a ship to be able to return from such a long flight your children will have to take your places on the return journey — two Ergs, or maybe, more.”

Nisa squeezed Veda’s hand and pressed her nose against her cheek, cold from the wind.

“Do you think you can stand it, Nisa? It’s impossibly difficult!”

“What difficulties are you talking about, Veda?” asked Erg Noor, turning round on hearing her last exclamation. “Have you come to an agreement with Darr Veter? For the last half-hour he’s been trying to persuade me to give the youth the benefit of my experience as an astronaut and not to set out on a flight from which I shall never return.”

“Has he persuaded you?”

"No. My experience as an astronaut is still more necessary to pilot Lebed to her destination, up there,” said Erg pointing to the bright starless sky, to the place where Achernar should be seen, lower than the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and just below Tucana and the Hydra, “to pilot her where no ship from Earth had ever been before!”

As Erg Noor spoke those last words the edge of the rising sun came in a burst of fire over the horizon, its rays driving away all the mystery of the white dawn.

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 neither 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.

Suddenly something changed in that tiny world lost in the darkness and fearful cold. Darr Veter did not immediately realize that the planetship had switched on its searchlights. The darkness had become even blacker, the burning stars grew dull, leaving the platform and the hull in a sea of bright white light that divided them off from the gloom. A few minutes later Altai reduced the voltage and the light turned yellow and was less intense.

The planetship was economizing current from its accumulators. The squares and ellipses that went to make up the walls of the hull, the latticed trusses that reinforced the structure, the cylinders and pipes of the reservoirs again moved about, finding their places in the skeleton of the satellite as though in daylight.

Darr Veter felt for a cross beam, took hold of the handles of a roller car running on a ropeway, and with one hard push of his feet sailed up to Altai. Right in front of the planetship’s hatch he pressed the brake lever in his hand and halted just in time to prevent his crashing into a closed door.

The air-lock was not kept at normal terrestrial pressure in order not to lose too much air with the coming and going of such a large number of workers. Darr Veter kept on his spacesuit until he was in a second, auxiliary air-lock, where he unscrewed his space helmet and battery.

Flexing a body that was weary of the spacesuit, Darr Veter walked firmly along the deck of the ship, enjoying a return to almost normal gravity. The artificial gravitation of the planetship worked constantly. It was inexpressibly pleasant to feel yourself standing firmly on the ground as a man should stand and not be like a flea floundering in an unsteady, treacherous gulf! Soft light and warm air and a comfortable chair tempted him to stretch out in it and relax without having to think. Darr Veter was experiencing the pleasures of his distant ancestors that had once astonished him in old novels. It was in this way that people entered a warm house, a mud hut or a felt tent after long journeys through cold deserts, wet forests or icy mountains. And now as then a thin wall separated him from a huge, dangerous world, hostile to man, a wall that retained the warmth and light, gave him a chance to rest, gather fresh strength and think over what he was to do next.

Darr Veter did not yield to the temptation of armchair and book. He had to contact Earth — the light burning all night at that height might cause alarm amongst those who were keeping the satellite under observation. It was also necessary to warn Earth that reinforcements would be needed ahead of time.

There was good communication that day and Darr Veter talked with Grom Orme on the TVP and not in coded signals; the TVP was an extremely powerful one, such as was fitted to every spaceship. The old chairman was pleased with the progress made and said he would immediately see about new workers and extra materials.

Darr Veter left the Altai’s control tower and passed through the library that had been re-equipped as a dormitory with two tiers of bunks. Cabins, dining-rooms, the cook’s galley, the side corridors and the forward engine room had all been fitted out with extra bunks. The planet-ship had been converted into a stationary base and was overcrowded. Scarcely able to drag his feet Darr Veter walked down the corridor panelled with plastics warm to the touch, and lazily opened and closed hermetically sealed doors.

He was thinking of astronauts who spent dozens of years inside such a ship without any hope of leaving it before the appointed time, a cruelly long one. He had been living there six months and every day had left the narrow confines to work in the oppressive spaces of interplanetary vacuum. He was already longing for his beautiful Earth with its steppes and seas and the teeming life of the big centres in the inhabited zones. But Erg Noor, Nisa Greet and twenty other people would have to spend ninety-two dependent years or a hundred and forty terrestrial years in a spaceship before it brought them back to their own planet. Not one of them could possibly live so long! Their bodies would be cremated and buried away on the distant planets of the green zirconium star!

Or they would die en route and their bodies enclosed in a funeral rocket would be sent out into the Cosmos just,as the funeral boats of their ancestors swept out to sea carrying dead warriors away with them. But such heroes as those who undertook life-long imprisonment in a spaceship without the hope that they, personally, would return, were unknown in the history of mankind. No, he was wrong, Veda would have rebuked him! How could he have forgotten the nameless fighters for the dignity and freedom of man in distant epochs who undertook even greater risks — horrible tortures and life-long imprisonment in damp dungeons. Yes, these heroes had been stronger and more worthy even than his contemporaries preparing to make their magnificent flight into the Cosmos to explore distant worlds!

And he, Darr Veter, who had never been away from his native planet for any length of time, was a pygmy compared with them and by no means an angel of heaven, as his infinitely dear Veda Kong had called him!