and one from another world in the nebula of Cancer at a distance of more than a thousand parsecs from the Sun.
The commander of the Earth ship ordered the crew to prepare all the astronomical charts, records of observations and calculations of the course for immediate destruction and to train all their anti-meteorite guns at the approaching ship. The Earthlings then proceeded to wrestle with the momentous problem: should they attempt to enter into negotiations with the other ship or were they in duty bound to attack and destroy it without warning? They feared that the men from another world might be able to trace back the course of their ship and use their knowledge to try to conquer the Earth.
These ridiculous apprehensions aroused no opposition on the part of the entire crew. It was taken for granted that the meeting of two civilizations that had sprung up in different parts of the Universe was bound to lead to the subordination of one by the other, to the victory of the one possessing the strongest weapons. A meeting in space could only mean one of the two things — trade or war. They could not conceive of anything else. It soon turned out that the men from the other world closely resembled the Earthlings except that they could see only in infra-red light and communicated with one another by radio waves. Yet the Earthlings at once deciphered the strangers’ language and intercepted their thoughts. It turned out that the commander of the space ship from the other world entertained just as primitive views on social development and relations as the Earthmen and was primarily concerned with how to get out of the situation in which he found himself without jeopardizing his own life or destroying the Earth ship.
In other words, the long-awaited encounter of representatives of two human races threatened to turn into a fearful tragedy. The two ships hung in space some seven hundred miles apart while negotiations went on for more than two weeks through a robot. Both captains gave each other assurances of their peaceable intentions and at the same time declared their distrust of the other. The situation might indeed have been hopeless had it not been for the ingenuity of the hero of the story — a young astrophysicist. Concealing bombs of terrific destructive power in their clothing, he and his commander boarded the strange ship ostensibly to continue the negotiations. Once there, however, they presented an ultimatum to the strangers: to exchange ships, with part of the strange ship’s crew going over to the Earth ship, and part of the Earth-men boarding the unknown craft, first putting all meteorite guns out of commission; the boarding parties were then to learn to run the ships and all the supplies were to be transferred from each of the ships to the other. In the meantime the two heroes with the bombs would remain on board the strangers’ ship, ready to blow it up at the first sign of treachery. The captain from the other world accepted the ultimatum, and the exchange of ships proceeded smoothly. Finally the black space ship with the Earthlings on board and the Earth ship now manned by the strangers hastily drew apart, vanishing into the feeble luminosity of the nebula.
As soon as the story came to the end the library filled with the hum of voices. During the reading some of the astronauts had shown signs of impatience and disagreement. So eager were they to have their say that they barely refrained from committing the worst breach of good manners — interrupting someone. All turned to the captain as if he were personally responsible for the ancient story he had brought to their attention from the limbo of the past.
Most of the astronauts pointed to the contradiction between the time of the action and the psychology of the characters. If the space ship had managed to travel four thousand light years away from the Earth in three months, the time of the story was obviously later than the present, for nobody had yet reached out so far into the Universe. Yet the mode of thinking and the actions of the Earthmen described in no way differed from those that prevailed under capitalism so many centuries ago.
There were technical inaccuracies too. For instance, space ships could not be stopped as quickly as the writer assumed. Nor was it feasible for two thinking beings to communicate with each other directly by radio waves. If the unknown planet had an atmosphere of practically the same density as Earth — and that was how it was described in the story — its inhabitants would inevitably have developed the sense of hearing as we have on Earth. For this requires far less expenditure of energy than communication by radio waves or biocurrents. It would also have been impossible in such a short time to decipher the strangers’ language with the accuracy required for coding it in a translating machine.
Tey Eron pointed out that the meagre knowledge of the Universe displayed in the story was all the more surprising since several decades before the story was written the great ancient scientist Tsiolkovsky had warned that the Universe was far more complex than was believed at the time. But in spite of the work done by dialectical thinkers, there still were scientists who thought they had practically reached the outermost bounds of human powers of cognition.
As centuries passed countless discoveries revealed the infinite complexity of the interdependence of phenomena and on the face of it seemed to slow down the growth of man’s knowledge of the Cosmos. Yet science found solutions to an enormous number of the most complicated technical and other problems. A good example was the creation of the warp ship, which seemed to defy the conventional laws of motion. Indeed, it was in this kind of solution of problems seemingly insoluble from the viewpoint of mathematical logic that the irresistible power of progress was manifested most spectacularly. But the author of “The First Contact” did not even have an inkling of the boundlessness of knowledge implicit in the simple formulas of the great dialecticians of his time.
“There’s another thing nobody here has pointed out,” the usually reserved Yas Tin spoke up. “The author gave his characters English names, although the action was laid so far in the future. I think this too is indicative. You see, linguistics happens to be my hobby and I made a study of the formation of the first world language. English, of course, used to be one of the most widespread languages, but in assuming that it would always remain so, the author was reflecting his absurd belief that the social set-up of his time was also eternal. The exceedingly slow development of the ancient slave society or of feudalism was erroneously taken as proof of the stability of all forms of social relations, including language and religion and of the stability of the last of the anarchic societies, capitalism. The dangerous social lack of equilibrium of the last period of capitalism was considered everlasting. As for the English language of the time, it was even then archaic, consisting as it did of actually two languages — the written and the spoken, both completely unsuitable for translation machines.
“The faster relations among men and their outlook on the world change, the greater and more rapid are the changes in language too.
“As it was, the half-forgotten ancient Sanskrit was found to be the most logical in structure, and because of this it came to be used as the basis for the intermediary language needed for translation machines. Sometime later this developed into the first world language, which has changed a great deal since then. The old Western languages proved rather short-lived. Still less enduring were people’s names derived through religious legends from long-dead languages.”
“Yas Tin has noted what I think is most important,” Moot Ang joined in the conversation. “Ignorance or mistaken methodology in science are bad enough, but still worse is conservatism, persistence in defence of social forms which have failed even in the eyes of their contemporaries. At the root of this conservatism, apart from the rarer cases of simple ignorance, lay a selfish desire to prolong the existence of a social system whose benefits were enjoyed by a small minority. Hence the disregard for the interests of mankind as a whole displayed by these proponents of social stagnation, their disregard for the future of our planet, waste of its power resources and complete unconcern for the health of its inhabitants.
“Wanton waste of mineral fuels and forests, exhaustion of rivers and the soil, dangerous experiments to create murderous atomic weapons — these were the actions of those who sought at the cost of untold misery and suffering for the majority to prolong the existence of social relationships that had outlived their time. It is against this background that the poisonous concept of the privileged elite sprang up and developed, a concept that proclaimed the superiority of a group or class or race over others and justified violence and war — everything that came to be known as fascism.
“Any privileged group will inevitably seek to put a brake on progress in order to retain its privileges, while the oppressed section of society is bound to fight all such attempts in order to stand up for its own rights. The greater the pressure exerted by the privileged few, the greater grew the resistance to it, the more bitter the struggle, the more cruelty there was in the world and the greater moral degradation among men. Now remember that besides the struggle between classes there was a struggle between the privileged and oppressed countries. Remember too that there was a struggle between the new, socialist world and the old, capitalist, and you will understand why there sprang up a war ideology, why it was believed that there would always be wars and that they would eventually be fought on a cosmic scale. I see in this the very quintessence of evil, a serpent that is bound to strike
