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 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.