history. One felt all this more and more keenly as one grew older.
Moot Ang rose from his seat and squared his powerful shoulders.
Yes, all that had been vividly described in historical novels. But what was there to frighten the young men and women on board a space ship bound for the future? Loneliness? The loss of one’s relatives? The loneliness of a man projected into the future had often been described in old novels. It had meant being torn away from one’s kin. Yet these kinsfolk had been a handful of individuals linked only by the formal bond of blood. Were not all men brothers now, had not the old conventions and barriers between men everywhere on Earth been banished for ever?
What should he, the captain of the Tellur, tell his young colleagues? “We ol the Tellur have lost all those whom we hold near and dear on Earth. But the people awaiting us in the future are no less near and dear to us — their minds will be keener and their feelings richer than those of the contemporaries we have left behind…” Yes, that is what he must tell them.
In the meanwhile Tey Eron was at work in the control room. As usual, he had turned off all the unnecessary lights and in the half-gloom the large round chamber looked cosier. Humming a simple tune, he was checking the calculations over and over again. The ship was near-ing the farthest point on its journey, and today the course would have to be altered in the direction of Serpentarius in order to skirt the carbon star they were investigating. But it was still dangerous to approach it. The increasing pressure of its radiation was apt to wreck the ship moving at a speed close to that of light.
Sensing someone behind him, Tey Eron turned to face his commander.
Moot Ang leaned over his assistant’s shoulder to scan the summarized indicator readings flashed on in a row of little square windows along the lower edge of the control panel. Tey Eron looked up at him questioningly. The captain nodded. In response to a barely perceptible movement of Tey Eron’s fingers the intercommunication system sprang into action. There was a pealing of bells through the ship accompanied by the metallic words: “Attention all!”
Moot Ang pulled the microphone toward himself, knowing that all members of the crew were tensely waiting for the next words to come from the loudspeakers concealed in the walls.
“Attention all!” Moot Ang repeated. “Deceleration in fifteen minutes. All except those on duty should lie down in their cabins. The first phase of deceleration will end at 18:00 hours, the second phase at 6g will continue for 144 hours. Change in course after Collision Danger signal. That’s all!”
At 18:00 hours the captain rose from his seat, conscious of the usual deceleration pains in his back and the back of his head, and announced that he would retire to his cabin for the remaining six days of braking action ahead. The rest of the crew sat glued to their instruments for this was their last opportunity to observe the carbon star.
Tey Eron frowned as he watched the captain leave the control room. He would have felt better with the captain there beside him during the difficult manoeuvre. For although there was little comparison between a powerful cosmic ship like the Tellur and those flimsy shells called ships that plied the Earth’s seas, it too was nothing more than an egg-shell in the infinity of space.
Kari Ram started at the sound of Moot Ang’s merry laugh. A few days ago the crew had been greatly alarmed to learn that the captain had been suddenly taken ill. Only the doctor had been allowed to enter his cabin, and everyone had spoken in whispers when passing the tightly-closed door. With the captain laid up the task of bringing the ship around and accelerating again to get it away from the radiation zone of the carbon star and send it back toward the Sun and home had been left to Tey Eron.
Now Tey Eron was walking beside the captain with a faint smile on his lips. He had just learned that the latter had conspired with the doctor to leave the ship in Tey’s hands and force him to rely on himself alone. He would not confess to the agonized doubts that had assailed him just before he swung the ship around, but he reproached the captain for having unnecessarily alarmed the crew.
Moot Ang laughed it all off and assured Tey that the ship was perfectly safe in the great open spaces of the Cosmos. The instruments could not err, and the system of fourfold check-up of every computation excluded the possibility of mistakes. Nor could there be any belt of asteroids and meteorites in the vicinity of the carbon star: the pressure of radiation was too heavy.
“You really think there will be no more surprises?” Kari Ram put in cautiously.
“Unforeseen accidents, of course, are always possible. But that great law of the Cosmos we call the law of averages works in our favour. You can be certain that in this deserted corner of the Universe we cannot expect to run into anything new. We shall go back some distance and warp back along our old path to the Sun, past the Heart of the Serpent. For some days now we’ve been heading for Serpentarius. We’ll be there soon enough.”
“Strange, but I feel no joy, no satisfaction at a job well done, nothing that might justify leaving Earth-life for seven hundred years,” Kari went on thoughtfully. “Oh, yes, I know all about the tens of thousands of observations and millions of computations, photographs and notes — all that will help to delve deeper into the secrets of matter back on Earth… But how inconsequential it all seems! A mere spore of the future — nothing more.”
“Have you ever stopped to think of the effort humanity has spent and the lives it has sacrificed for the sake of what you call spores of the future — not to speak of the countless generations of unthinking animals that preceded it on the ladder of historical progress?” Tey Eron said heatedly.
“You’re right enough, so far as reason goes. But emotionally the only thing that matters for me is Man, the only rational force in the Universe, capable of mastering and making use of the elemental development of matter. Yet how infinite is Man’s solitude! We know beyond doubt that there are many inhabited worlds, but Earthmen have not yet met another thinking being in all the vastness of space. Do you realize how long men have dreamed — in vain — of such encounters, how many books have been written, how many songs composed and pictures painted in anticipation of the great event? And yet this dream cherished ever since religious blindness first began to be dispelled has not yet come true.”
“You speak of blindness,” Moot Ang put in. “Do you know how our distant forebears back at the time of the Initial Emergence in Space visualized encounters with the inhabitants of other worlds? War, destruction of each other’s ships, mutual killing at the very first encounter.”
“Incredible!” Kari Ram and Tey Eron cried in one voice.
“Our modern writers seem to have preferred not to write about the period of the decline of capitalism,” Moot Ang went on. “But you know from your school history books about that critical period in human development.”
“Of course,” Kari said. “Though man had begun to master matter and space, social relations retained their old forms and the development of social thought lagged behind the achievements of science.”
“You have a good memory, Kari. But we could put it this way too: man’s conquest of space, his knowledge of the Universe, clashed with the primitive thinking of the individualistic property-owner. The future and the very life of humanity hung in the balance for years before progress triumphed and mankind joined into one family in a classless society. Before that happened people in the capitalist half of the world refused for a long time to see any new paths into the future and regarded their mode of life as eternal and unchanging, with war and self-destruction as man’s inevitable lot.”
“Most likely, every civilization has its critical periods in whatever planet and solar system it may exist,” Tey Eron said, running a quick eye over the instrument panel. “So far we’ve found two planets where there is water and an atmosphere with traces of oxygen, but no sign of life. We’ve photographed lifeless wind-swept sands and dead seas and…”
“I just can’t believe it,” Kari Ram interrupted him, “I can’t believe that people who had already savoured the infinity of space and the power that science gave them could…”
“…reason like beasts who have just acquired the faculty of logical thinking?” Moot Ang completed his thought. “Don’t forget the old society came into being as a result of an elemental play of forces, without the planning and foresight which distinguish the higher social forms created by man. Man’s thinking, the very nature of firs reasoning, was still at the primitive stage of simple, mathematical logic, which reflected the logic of the laws governing the development of matter and nature as perceived through direct observation. But as soon as mankind accumulated enough historical experience and came to perceive the whole historical process of the development of the world around it, dialectical logic appeared as the highest stage of thought. Man came to understand the duality of the phenomena of nature and his own existence. He realized that while as an individual he was as minute and transitory as a drop of water in the ocean or a spark struck in a high wind, he was at the same time as great as the
