hardly take the place of hydrogen in very many cases. Such an atmosphere would obviously be a rarer phenomenon than a fluorine atmosphere.”
“And possible only on very hot planets,” Tey Eron said, turning over the pages of the manual. “A sulphur ocean would be liquid only at a temperature of one hundred to four hundred degrees.”
“I think Afra is right,” Moot Ang said. “All these atmospheres we have been talking about are far less likely than our standard type of atmosphere consisting of the most common elements in the Universe. That it is made up of these elements is no chance phenomenon.”
“I agree with you there,” put in Yas Tin. “But the element of chance occurs often enough in the infinity of the Universe. Take our ‘standardized’ Earth, for instance. Both it and its neighbours the Moon, Mars and Venus have a great deal of aluminium which is rare enough elsewhere in the Universe.”
“And yet it can take tens if not hundreds of thousands of years to run across repetitions of these chance phenomena,” Moot Ang said gloomily. “Even with warp ships. If the people of the other ship have been looking for another planet like theirs for a long time, I can understand what they felt like on meeting us.”
“It’s a good thing our atmosphere consists of the most common elements in the Universe,” Afra said. “At least we can look forward to finding a great many planets like ours.”
“And yet our first encounter was with one of a different order,” Tey remarked.
Afra had a retort ready but the ship’s chemist came in just then to report that the transparent screen was finished.
“But we can enter their ship in space suits, can’t we?” Yas Tin asked.
“Of course we can. And so can they visit ours. We’ll probably have many such exchanges of visits, but it’s better to get acquainted from a distance,” replied the captain.
The Earthmen mounted the transparent sheet of plastic at the outer end of the gallery, and the others did the same in theirs. Then the members of both crews met in space where they worked together to connect the two galleries. Pats on the sleeve or shoulder were exchanged as a token of friendship equally understandable to both sides.
Thrusting the horn-like protuberances of their helmets forward, the strangers tried to peer through the Earthmen’s space helmets, which afforded a much better view of the faces inside than the strangers’ helmets whose slightly convex fronts revealed nothing of their owners’ features. Yet the Earthmen instinctively felt that the curious eyes examining them were friendly.
When invited to board the Tellur the figures in white gestured their refusal. One of them touched his helmet and then flung his arms outward as if scattering something. Tey understood this to mean that the stranger was afraicf for his helmet in an oxygen atmosphere.
“They obviously have the same idea as we have and want to meet us in the gallery first,” Moot Ang said.
The two space ships now hung motionless in the infinity of space, joined together by the communication gallery. The Tellur turned on its powerful heating units, which made it possible for the crew to enter the gallery in the close-fitting blue artificial wool overalls they always wore at work on shipboard.
A pale blue light like the crystalline radiance on mountain tops on Earth appeared on the other side of the partition. The difference in the lighting on either side of the transparent wall tinted it aquamarine as if it were made of petrified pure sea-water.
A silence set in broken only by the Earthlings’ quickened breathing. Tey Eron’s elbow touched Afra. He felt the young woman trembling with excitement. He drew her close and she flashed him a quick look of gratitude.
A group of eight from the other ship appeared in the far end of the gallery. A gasp of astonishment escaped the Earthmen. They could hardly believe their eyes. In his heart of hearts each had expected something extraordinary, something supernatural. Because of this, the close resemblance of the strangers to themselves struck them as a miracle. But that was only at first glance, for the closer they examined them the more points of difference they noticed in all that was not concealed by the short loose jackets and long wide trousers the strangers wore, which, incidentally, were very much like the clothes worn on Earth in ancient times.
Suddenly the blue light went out and terrestrial lighting was switched on. The transparent wall in the gallery lost its greenish tint and became colourless. Looking at the people standing behind the almost invisible screen at the far end of the corridor, it was hard to believe that they breathed a gas that was lethal on Earth and that they bathed in hydrofluoric acid! Their physical proportions were normal according to Earth standards, and their height was the same as the average Earthling’s. The strangest thing about them was the colour of their skin — iron grey with a silvery sheen and an inner blood-red glow like that of polished hematite.
The strangers had round heads and pitch-black hair, but their most remarkable feature was their almond- shaped eyes. These were incredibly large, so large that they seemed to take up the whole width of the face, and heavily slanted, with the outer corners rising up to the temples, higher than the eyes of Earth-dwellers. The whites, of a deep turquoise, seemed abnormally long in comparison with the black irises and pupils.
Over the eyes were straight, fine, black eyebrows that ran into the hair high over the temples and almost joined over the narrow bridge of the nose. The hairline on the forehead was sharply defined and in perfect symmetry with the line of the eyebrows, giving the forehead the shape of a horizontally extended diamond. The nose was short and flat, with two nostrils opening downward as in men from Earth. The strangers’ mouths were small, and their parted lilac-coloured lips revealed even rows of teeth of the same pure turquoise as the white of the eyes. Just below the eyes the faces narrowed sharply to a chin with angular lines, which made the top part of the face seem inordinately wide. The structure of their ears remained a mystery, for the headbands of gold braid they wore came down over their temples.
Some of them were evidently women, judging by their long, shapely necks, softer facial lines and fluffy, short-cropped hair. The men were taller and more muscular, and their chins were wider. The differences between them were comparable to the differences between the sexes on Earth.
It seemed to Afra that they had only four fingers in each hand. Besides, the fingers looked as if they had no joints at all, for they bent without forming angles.
What their feet were like was impossible to tell, for they sank deep into the soft carpet on the floor. Their clothing seemed to be dark-red in colour.
The longer the astronauts from Earth gazed at their counterparts from the fluorine planet the less odd their appearance seemed. More than that, they realized they were looking at beings that were endowed with a beauty of their own. The secret of the strangers’ charm lay mainly in their huge eyes which regarded the Earthmen with a warm glow of intelligence and goodwill.
“Look at those eyes!” Afra exclaimed. “It is easier to become human with eyes like those than with ours, though ours are wonderful too.”
“Why do you think so?” Tey asked in a whisper.
“The bigger the eye the more of the world it can take in.”
Tey nodded in agreement.
One of the strangers stepped forward and gestured with his hand. The light to which the Earthmen were accustomed went out on the other side of the partition.
“I should have thought of the lights!” Moot Ang groaned.
“I did,” Kari said, switching off the normal lighting and turning on two powerful lamps fitted with “430” filters.
“But it’ll make us look like corpses,” said Taina. “Humanity doesn’t look its best in this light.”
“You have no cause for worry,” Moot Ang said. “Their range of perfect vision extends far into the violet region, and perhaps even into the ultraviolet. That suggests that they are sensitive to a great many more shades and obtain a softer visual picture than we.”
“We probably look yellower to them than we really are,” Tey said after a moment’s thought.
“That’s better than the bluish colour of a corpse,” Taina said. “Just look around!”
The Earthmen took several photographs and then passed an osmin-crystal overtone speaker through a small airlock in the screen. The strangers took it and put it on a tripod. Kari directed a narrow beam of radio waves at the disc antenna and the speech and music of Earth could be heard in the fluorine planet’s space ship. A device for analysing the air and measuring the temperature and atmospheric pressure was passed through in the same way.
