“Yes, Kari, go on.”
“My imagination doesn’t go any further,” said the engineer.
But Taina had got into the spirit of the thing and she
pulled Kari after her into a dimly-lit side passage. The vibration indicators blinked wearily on the walls as if the ship itself was fighting an overpowering drowsiness. Taina tiptoed down the corridor a little way and then stopped. A shadow of boredom flitted over her face but was gone before Kari could be certain that he had really seen it. An unfamiliar emotion seized him and he took the girl’s hand again.
“Let’s go to the library,” he said. “I’ve still got two hours before my watch.”
She followed him obediently.
The library was a large common room with indirect lighting that created the illusion of a luminous mist floating under the ceiling. It was located immediately aft of the central control room, as was customary in all space ships. Kari and Taina opened the pressurized door of the third transverse passage and came to the double-doored elliptical hatchway of the central gallery. No sooner had Kari stepped on the bronze plate in front of it and caused the heavy leaves to slide open than the air grew vibrant with sound. Taina brightened.
“It’s Moot Ang,” she said, pressing Kari’s fingers.
They slipped into the library. There were three men in the room. The ship’s doctor, Svet Sim, and the stocky warp engineer Yas Tin, were ensconced in soft armchairs between the upright columns of the film cabinets, and to the left, the commander of the Tellur himself was bent over the keys of the EMV.
The EMV, or electromagnetic viono, had long replaced the harsh-toned piano of old, retaining the tonal wealth of the piano but imparting to it the melodious richness of the violin. Amplifiers could give the sounds it produced an amazing power.
Moot Ang was unaware of the newcomers. He sat, leaning forward slightly, his face lifted to the rhombic panels of the ceiling, his fingers running lightly over the keyboard. As in the old-time piano, every nuance of sound depended on the musician’s touch, although the sound itself was produced not by hammers striking strings but by delicate electronic impulses that might almost be compared to the nerve impulses of the human brain.
The music flowed in interweaving harmonies that spoke of the fusion of Earth and Cosmos. Presently the pattern broke, notes of wistful melancholy mingled with the rumble of a distant storm in a gradual crescendo of sound through which rang notes like cries of despair. The tension rose higher and higher until it reached the final cataclysmic burst that resolved itself in an avalanche of dissonances sliding down and down into a dark abyss of inconsolable grief for that which was gone for ever.
But suddenly pure clear notes of limpid joy rang out under Moot Ang’s fingers and merged with the gentle sadness of the accompaniment.
Just then the door opened and Afra Devi, who had changed into a white smock, slipped into the room and went over to Svet Sim. The doctor listened to her, then signed to the captain. The captain’s hands left the keyboard and silence broke the spell of the music as swiftly as the tropical night banishes day.
The captain left the room with the doctor followed by the worried glances of the others. Something most unusual had occurred — the second navigator had had an attack of acute appendicitis. He had evidently neglected to carry-out the full programme of medical preparation for the voyage. Now Dr. Sim had to ask the captain’s permission to operate without delay.
Moot Ang hesitated. Modern medicine, with its methods of regulating nervous activity in much the same way as the impulses were regulated in electronic devices, was able to cure a great many ailments. But the doctor insisted. He argued that although the condition could be cured at the moment, the enormous strain imposed on the organism by cosmic flight might cause a relapse.
The patient was placed on a wide operating table and enmeshed in a maze of wires leading to the thirty-six electronic devices that gave a complete picture of his condition. The hypnotic sleep-inducer blinked and hummed rhythmically in the darkened room. Dr. Sim read the instruments once more and nodded to Afra Devi. It was her job to assist the doctor. Each member of the crew, besides being an expert in some branch of science, was trained for some particular shipboard duty — servicing the ship’s mechanisms, taking care of the feeding arrangements, and so on.
Afra brought out a transparent vessel filled with a bluish liquid. In it lay a segmented metal device resembling a good-sized centipede. Afra took out the device and from another vessel she extracted a conical-shaped instrument attached to some long fine tubes. A light click and the metallic centipede came to life with a barely audible whirr.
Svet Sim nodded and the apparatus was inserted in the patient’s mouth. Moot Ang moved closer to the semi-transparent screen which had been placed at an angle over the sick man’s abdomen. In the greenish glow of the screen the grey contours of the internal organs and the segmented metal device making its way down the alimentary canal were clearly visible. In a little while its blunt end was pressed against the base of the appendix.
With the apparatus pressing in the area of inflammation the pain increased and sedatives had to be administered to counteract the convulsions that appeared in the intestines. In a few minutes the data processor had completed the diagnosis and recommended the antibiotics and disinfectants needed. The metallic centipede inserted its long flexible feelers deep into the appendix and sucked out the pus and the alien bodies that had caused the inflammatory process. This was followed by a vigorous irrigation with biological solutions which quickly restored the mucous membranes of the appendix and the adjoining intestine to normal.
The patient slept peacefully while the ingenious automatic device did its work. Now the operation was over and it only remained for the doctor to remove the instrument.
The captain heaved a sigh of relief. Despite the force of medicine, unforeseen peculiarities of individual organisms often resulted in unexpected complications, for it was obviously impossible to establish in advance every deviation from the normal among all the thousands of millions of inhabitants of the Earth. And if these possible complications were nothing to worry about on Earth with its great medical institutions, they could very well be dangerous enough on expeditions like the present.
But everything had gone off well. With an easy mind Moot Ang returned to the now deserted library and sat down at the viono. But he did not play, though his hands rested on the keys. Instead his thoughts returned, as they had so many times before, to human happiness and the future.
This was his fourth voyage into the Cosmos. But never before had he embarked on a flight covering so much space and time. With man forging ahead at great speed from one accomplishment and discovery to another, with the sum total of knowledge mankind had accumulated, seven hundred years now could hardly be compared with an equal span of Earth-time in the days of the ancient civilizations. Then society’s progress was limited to opening up formerly uninhabited expanses of our planet to human habitation. In those distant days, time crawled and human progress was as slow as the movement of the Arctic and Antarctic glaciers. Time seemed to have stood still for centuries. What indeed did the human life-span amount to then, or a century, or ten centuries, for that matter?
What would the people of the ancient world have felt, Moot Ang thought with a shudder, had they known in advance how slow social development would be, had they foreseen that oppression, injustice and chaos were to remain man’s lot for so many years to come? You could sleep for seven hundred years in ancient Egypt and wake up to find the same slave system in existence, except for perhaps even more brutal exploitation. In ancient China seven-hundred-year spans began and ended with the same wars, the same dynasties, and Europe passed in like time only from the beginning of the Dark Ages to the height of the Inquisition.
But now the mere thought of the grand vistas that would be opened up by the next seven centuries — centuries packed with changes, improvements in life, ever new knowledge — staggered the imagination.
And if true happiness consists in movement, change, rapid progress, Moot Ang mused, who could be happier than he and his comrades? Yet things are not as simple as they might seem. Man’s nature is as complex as his environment. While reaching ever forward, we are always saddened by the passage of time, or rather by the loss of the fine things of the past — things that are hallowed by memory and that once gave rise to legends about golden ages vanished in the labyrinths of time.
Men could not help looking to whatever had been good in the past, and yearning for its return, for only the most clear-minded were able to foresee the inevitable coming of something better in the future. And ever since then there has persisted in the minds of men a deep regret for that which is gone, a nostalgic longing for what has ceased to be, a sadness one most poignantly feels when viewing ancient ruins and monuments to mankind’s past
