Universe which his reason and emotions embraced in the infinity of time and space.”
The captain rose and paced back and forth in silence while the others watched in deep concentration. Then he continued:
“I happen to have in my film library a book that gives an excellent picture of that time. It was translated into Modern not by machine, but by Sania Chen, the last-century historian. I think we ought to read it.”
The young people were eager to start at once. Pleased at their reaction, Moot Ang left the control room to fetch the book.
“I know I’ll never make a real captain,” Tey Eron sighed. “I’ll never know as much as Ang.”
“I heard him say once that his biggest shortcoming is the wide range of his interests,” Kari put in as he settled down in the navigator’s seat.
Tey Eron looked at Kari in wonder. Neither spoke and the room was soundless except for the even hum of the navigation instruments. The ship was running at full speed away from the carbon star toward a quarter of the Universe where four island universes quivered in the blackness of space as pinpricks of light too tiny to be detected by the naked eye.
Suddenly a glowing spot burst out and trembled on the main locator screen and the pealing of the caution signal cut through the control room. For a moment the men in the room froze into breathless immobility.
Then Tey Eron gave the alarm signal that sent every member of the crew to his post.
Moot Ang rushed into the control room and in one bound was at the control panel. The black screen of the locator was no longer dead; on it, as in a bottomless lake, swam a tiny glowing globe with sharply defined outline, swaying up and down but slowly bearing to starboard. The robots on guard against collision with meteorites did not react, however. Did this mean that the spot of light on the screen was a reflection not of their own beam, but of someone else’s?
The ship was still following the same course and the spot of light was now quivering in the bottom starboard square of the screen. Realization of what this meant made the three men quiver with excitement. Kari Ram gripped the edge of the control panel until his hands hurt. Something stupendous and unimaginable was coming toward them preceded by a powerful locator ray of the kind the Tellur cast ahead.
So great was the captain’s hope that his surmise should prove correct, and so great his fear that this upsurge of hope might again end in the bitter disappointment Earth astronauts had experienced hundreds of times before, that for a moment he could not speak.
The spot of light on the screen went out, came on again, then flashed on and off at regular intervals — four quick flashes, a pause, then two in succession. Such a pattern of regularity could be attributed only to human agency — the sole rational force in the Universe.
There could be no doubt now — another space ship was heading toward them. And in these parts of the Universe where ships from the Earth had never been before it could only be a ship from another world, from some planet of another, distant sun.
The locator of the Tellur too was now sending out intermittent signals; the thought that they were probably being received on board the unknown ship seemed utterly fantastic.
Moot Ang’s voice coming over the intercommunication system betrayed his agitation:
“Attention all! An unknown ship is approaching. We shall veer off course and begin emergency deceleration. All hands to landing stations!”
There wasn’t a second to lose. If the oncoming ship was running at roughly the same speed as the Tellur, the two were approaching each other almost at the speed of light, or some 294,000 kilometres per second. According to the locator the gap would close in no more than one hundred seconds. While Moot Ang was at the microphone, Tey Eron whispered something to Kari, whose hand flew to the locator panel.
“Excellent!” cried the captain as he watched the light ray playing on the control screen describe a curve to port and then go into a spiral.
In some ten seconds a glowing arrow-like shape appeared on the screen, curved over the right side of the black circle and also went into a spiral. A sigh of relief that was more like a groan broke from the three men in the control room. The strangers coming towards them from the unfathomed depths of the Cosmos had understood them. Just in time!
The caution signal went on again. This time it was not a locator ray but the solid hull of a space ship that was reflected on the main screen. In an instant Tey Eron had switched off the robot and turned the ship a fraction to port. The pealing stopped and the main screen was black again. The starboard scanner showed a mere streak of light moving aft. The two ships had passed each other at a staggering speed and were now hurtling farther and farther apart.
Several days would pass before they could meet again, but meet they would, for like the Tellur the strange ship would brake and swing around and return to the point of their meeting as determined by the precision instruments on board.
“Attention all! Emergency deceleration/ All stations signal readiness!” Moot Ang spoke into the microphone.
In response the row of lights above the now dead engine counter indicators turned green one after the other. The engines had stopped, and a tense air of expectation settled over the ship. The captain glanced quickly at the control panel and nodded toward the seats as he switched on the deceleration robot. His aides saw him bend grim- faced over the programme scale and turn the main switch to the figure “8.”
To swallow a pill to reduce heart action, drop into the seat and press the robot button was a matter of seconds.
The ship seemed to brace itself against the emptiness of space, throwing its crew into the depths of hydraulic seats and momentary unconsciousness, just as the racehorses of old would throw their riders as they dug their hooves into the ground to come to a sudden stop.
The crew of the Tellur had gathered in the library. Everybody was there except the man on duty at the electronic devices control post designed to signalize if anything went wrong with any of the circuits. The ship had cut its speed enough to put about, but not before it had travelled more than ten thousand million kilometres beyond the point where it had passed the space ship from another world. It was now moving at only one-twentieth absolute speed, held to the exact return course by the computing devices. At least eight terrestrial days would pass before the two ships could be expected to meet — provided the Tellur kept within the margin of error allowed for and the unknown space travellers also possessed equally precise navigation instruments and an equally reliable ship. If everything went well the two ships, two tiny specks in the infinity of the Cosmos, might be expected to come within locator range of each other.
When that happened, man, for the first time in his history, would meet his counterparts from another part of the Universe, thinking beings with comparable powers and aspirations whose existence had been foretold and established beyond all doubt by human reason. If hitherto the vast gulfs of time and space that separated different inhabited worlds had been insurmountable, now Earthmen would clasp the hands of other thinking beings and establish through them a link with still others as a token of the final triumph of thought and conscious labour over the elemental forces of Nature.
For billions of years minute droplets of living protoplasm had inhabited the dark warm waters of ocean gulfs, and hundreds of millions of years more passed before they developed into more complex organisms that finally emerged from the water to dry land. Then more millions of centuries passed in an elemental struggle for survival, in complete dependence on the forces of Nature, before the brain developed into a powerful instrument to guide the living creatures’ search for food and the battle they waged for survival.
The rate of development speeded up, the battle to exist grew more bitter and natural selection proceeded at an ever more rapid pace. And all along that long path there were countless victims — herbivorous animals devoured by carnivorous, carnivorous animals that perished from hunger, the weak and sick and old that succumbed, the males that were killed in battle over females, those that perished defending their young or in natural disasters…
This went on through the long course of blind, elemental evolution until some distant relative of the ape in the rigorous conditions of the great ice age replaced instinct with conscious labour in his search for sustenance. It
