Erg Noor lost some of his impetuosity — he sat down slowly in front of the astronavigator.
“If you only knew, Nisa, how brutally fate dealt with my dreams, there on Zirda!” he said suddenly, in a dull voice, placing his fingers cautiously on the lever controlling the anameson motors as though he intended accelerating the spaceship to the limit.
“If Zirda had not perished and we had got our supplies of fuel,” he continued, in reply to her mute question, “I would have led the expedition farther. That is what I had arranged with the Council. Zirda would have made the necessary report to Earth and Tantra would have continued its journey with those who wanted to go. The others would have waited for Algrab, it could have gone on to Zirda after its tour of duty here.”
“Who would have wanted to stay on Zirda?” exclaimed the girl, indignantly. “Unless Pour Hyss would. He’s a great scientist though, wouldn’t he be interested in gaining further knowledge?”
“And you, Nisa?”
“I’d go, of course.”
“Where to?” asked Erg Noor suddenly, fixing his eyes on the girl.
“Anywhere you like, even…” and she pointed to a patch of abysmal blackness between two arms of the starry spiral of the Galaxy; she returned Noor’s fixed stare with one equally determined, her lips slightly parted.
“Oh, no, not as far as that! You know, Nisa, my dear little astronavigator, about eighty-five years ago. Cosmic Expedition No. 34, the so-called ‘Three-Stage Expedition’ left Earth. It consisted of three spaceships carrying fuel for each other and left Earth for the Lyra Constellation. The two ships that were not carrying scientists passed their anameson on to the third and then came back to Earth. That is the way mountain-climbers reached the tops of the highest peaks. Then the third ship, Parus….”
“That’s the ship that never returned!” whispered Nisa excitedly.
“That’s right, Parus didn’t return. It reached its objective and was lost on the return journey after sending a message. The goal was the big planetary system of Vega, or Alpha Lyrae, a bright blue star that countless generations of human eyes have admired in the northern sky. The distance to Vega is eight parsecs and people had never been so far away from our Sun. Anyway, Parus got there. We do not know the cause of its loss, whether it was a meteoroid or an irreparable break-down. It is even possible that the ship is still moving through space and the heroes whom we regard as dead are still alive.”
“That would be terrible!”
“Such is the fate of any spaceship that cannot maintain a speed close to that of light. It is immediately separated from the home planet by thousands of years.” “What message did Parus send?” asked the girl. “There wasn’t much of it. It was interrupted several times and then broke off altogether. I remember every word of it: ‘I am Parus. I am Parus, travelling twenty-six years from Vega… enough… shall wait… Vega’s four planets… nothing more beautiful… what happiness….”
“But they were calling for help, they wanted to wait somewhere!”
“Of course they were calling for help, otherwise the spaceship wouldn’t have used up the tremendous energy needed for the transmission. But nothing could be done, not another word was received from Parus.”
“‘They were twenty-six independent years on their way back and the journey from Vega to the Sun is thirty-one years. They must have been somewhere near us, or even nearer to Earth.”
“Hardly, unless, of course, they exceeded the normal speed and got close to the quantum limit[8]. That would have been very dangerous!”
Briefly Erg Noor explained the mathematical basis for the destructive change that takes place in matter when it approaches the speed of light, but he noticed that the girl was not paying any great attention to him.
“I understand all that!” she exclaimed the moment the commander had finished his explanation. “I would have realized it at once if your story of the loss of the spaceship hadn’t taken my mind off it. Such losses are always terrible and one cannot become reconciled to them!”
“Now you realize the chief thing in the communication,” said Erg Noor gloomily. “They discovered some particularly beautiful worlds. I have long been dreaming of following the route taken by Parus; with modern improvements we can do it with one ship now: I’ve been living with a dream of Vega, the blue sun with the beautiful planets, ever since early youth.”
“To see such worlds…” breathed Nisa with a breaking voice, “but to see them and return would take sixty terrestrial or forty dependent years… and that’s… half a lifetime.”
“Great achievements demand great sacrifices. For me, though, it would not be a sacrifice. My life on Earth has only been a few short intervals between journeys through space. I was born on a spaceship, you know!”
“How could that have happened?” asked the girl in amazement.
“Cosmic Expedition No. 35 consisted of four ships. My mother was astronomer on one of them. I was born halfway to the binary star MN19026 +, 7AL and managed to Contravene the law twice over. Twice — firstly by being born on a spaceship and secondly because I grew up and was educated by my parents and not in a children’s school. What else could they have done? When the expedition returned to Earth I was eighteen years old. I had learnt the art of piloting a spaceship and had acted as astronavigator in place of one who was taken ill. I could also work as a mechanic at the planetary or the anameson motors and all this was accepted as the Labours of Hercules I had to perform on reaching maturity.” “Still I don’t understand…” began Nisa. ‘‘About my mother? You’ll understand when you get a bit older! Although the doctors didn’t know it then, the Anti-T serum wouldn’t keep…. Well, never mind what the reason was I was brought to a control tower like this one to look at the screens with my uncomprehending baby eyes and watch the stars dancing up and down on them. We were flying towards the Lupus Constellation where there was a binary star close to the Sun. The two dwarfs, one blue and the other orange, were hidden by a dark cloud. The first tiling that impinged on my infant consciousness was the sky over a lifeless planet that I observed from under the glass dome of a temporary station. The planets of double stars are usually lifeless on account of the irregularity of their orbits. The expedition made a landing and for seven months engaged in mineral prospecting. As far as I remember there were enormous quantities of platinum; osmium and iridium there. My first toys were unbelievably heavy building blocks made of iridium. And that sky, my first sky, was black and dotted with the pure lights of unwinking stars, and there were two suns of indescribable beauty, one a deep blue and the other a bright orange. I remember how their rays sometimes crossed and at those times our planet was inundated with so much jolly green light that I shouted and sang for joy!” Erg Noor stopped. “That’s enough, I got carried away by my reminiscences and you have to sleep.”
“Go on, please do, I’ve never heard anything so interesting,” Nisa begged him, but the commander was implacable. He brought a pulsating hypnotizer and, either because of his impelling eyes or the sleep-producing apparatus, the girl was soon fast asleep and did not wake up until the day before they were to enter the sixth circle. By the cold look on the commander’s face Nisa Greet realized that Algrab had not shown up.
“You woke up just at the right time!” he said as soon as Nisa had taken her electric and wave baths and returned ready for work. “Switch on the animation music and light.
8
Quantum Limit — velocity close to that of light (subphotonic velocity) at which a solid body cannot exist: the point at which the mass is equal to infinity and time is equal to zero.