Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale)

CHAPTER EIGHT RED WAVES

The wide verandah of the observatory was open to the winds that brought the perfume of flowering plants from the hot African cost across the sea, a perfume that aroused an urgent yearning in a man’s soul. Mven Mass could not compose himself into the state of clarity and firmness, when no doubts remained, that was essential on the eve of a decisive experiment. Renn Bose had reported from Tibet that the Corr Yule installation had been reconstructed and was ready. The four observers on Satellite 57 had willingly agreed to risk their lives if that would help in carrying out an experiment such as Earth had never before known.

The experiment, however, was being mounted without the permission of the Council and without an extensive preliminary discussion of all possibilities. This made it seem like the secret manufacture of weapons in the darkest eras of man’s history and gave it a flavour of cowardly secrecy not common to people of today.

It is true that the great objective they hoped to reach seemed to justify the means, but… they had to remain pure in spirit! The old human conflict between the end and the means of its attainment had arisen: and the experience of thousands of generations teaches mankind that there is a certain boundary limiting the means to an end that must not be overstepped.

The case of Beth Lohn gave the African no rest. Thirty-two years before, one of Earth’s leading mathematicians, Beth Lohn, had discovered that certain signs of displacement in the interaction of strong power fields could be explained by the existence of parallel dimensions. He carried out a series of interesting experiments involving the disappearance of objects. The Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge found an error in his computations and produced an explanation of the observed phenomena that differed from his in principle. Beth Lohn, with his powerful mind hypertrophied at the expense of an underdeveloped sense of moral values and uninhibited desires, was a man of great strength and equally great egoism who decided to continue his experiments in his own way. To get convincing proofs he drew into the work courageous young volunteers who were willing to sacrifice themselves in the service of science. The people in Beth Lohn’s experiments disappeared as completely as the things had done and, contrary to the hopes of the ruthless mathematician, not one of them made his presence known from “the other side” of the other dimension. When Beth Lohn had sent a group of twelve people into “non-existence,” in other words had destroyed them, he was arraigned before the court. He succeeded in proving that he really believed his victims to be alive and somewhere in another dimension and that he had only acted with their consent; he was condemned to exile, spent ten years on Mercury and then, on returning to Earth, went to the Island of Oblivion, out of resentment for our world. Mven Mass felt that Beth Lohn’s story was very much like his own; there, too, a secret experiment undertaken for objectives rejected by science had been forbidden and this was an analogy that Mven Mass did not like.

In two days’ time there would be a transmission round the Great Circle and after that he would be free for eight days for the experiment!

Mven Mass threw back his head to look at the sky. The stars seemed brighter and nearer than usual. Many of them he knew by their ancient names, knew them as old friends — and were they not, indeed, the age-old friends of man that had shown him his ways, given him lofty ideas and encouraged him to dream?

A not very bright star inclining to the northern horizon was the Pole Star or Gamma Cephei. In the Era of Disunity the Pole Star had been in Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, but the revolution of the fringe of the Galaxy, and of the solar system with it, was in the direction of Cepheus. Cygnus, the Swan, one of the most interesting constellations in the northern sky, stretching through the Milky Way, had its long neck turned to the south. In this constellation there was a most beautiful binary star that the ancient Arabs had named Albireo. It was afterwards discovered that there were really three stars, the binary Albireo I and Albireo II, a huge blue star with an extensive planetary system. They were almost as far from us as Deneb, the huge star in the Swan’s tail with a luminosity equal to 4,800 of our suns. Only eight years before this a direct answer had been received from the inhabited worlds of the Deneb system to a message transmitted in the second year of the Great Circle Era. During the last transmission our trusty friend 61 Cygni had received a message of warning from Albireo II some 400 years after it had been sent but which was nevertheless of great interest. A famous Cosmic explorer from Albireo II whose name was transmitted in terrestrial sounds as Vlihh oz Ddiz, had been lost in the vicinity of the Lyra Constellation where he met one of the greatest dangers of the Cosmos, an Ookr star. Terrestrial scientists have placed these stars in class E so called in honour of Einstein, the greatest physicist of ancient days, who predicted their existence although it was long disputed; the limit for the mass of a star was even determined and given the name of the Chandrasekhar Limit. But that ancient astronomer based his calculations exclusively on the mechanics of gravitation and thermodynamics and did not take into consideration the intricate electromagnetic structure of the giant stars. It was precisely these forces that conditioned the existence of E stars that in size rival the huge red M class giants like Antares or Betelgeuse but their density is greater, something like that of our Sun. The terrific gravitation of such bodies prevented radiation so that light could not leave the star and travel through space.

These inconceivably gigantic and mysterious masses had existed in space for an infinitely long time, secretly drawing into their inert ocean everything that came within reach of the inescapable tentacles of their gravity.

There were periods of the lengthy accumulation of matter that later ended with the heating of the surface of the star until it reached class O”, that is, reached a temperature of 100,000 °C.; at last there came the final explosion that hurled into space new stars with new planets, in the way the Crab Nebula once exploded and spread until it had a diameter of fifty billion kilometres.

There was a similar idea in ancient Indian religious mythology; the periods of the deity’s inert repose were called the Nights of Brahma which alternated with his Days, the periods of creative activity.

The explosion was equal in force to the explosion of a quadrillion of the murderous hydrogen bombs made in the Era of Disunity.

The presence in space of absolutely dark stars of the E class could only be guessed by their gravitation and a spaceship whose course lay in the vicinity of the monster was doomed. The invisible infrared stars of the T class also constituted a danger to spaceships; the same applied to dark clouds of big particles or absolutely cold bodies of the TT class.

Mven Mass stood thinking that the establishment of the Great Circle that linked up all the worlds inhabited by reasoning beings had been the greatest of all revolutions for Earth and, consequently, for all inhabited planets. Firstly, this had been a victory over time, over the shortness of the span of human life, that had prevented us and our thinking brothers in other worlds from penetrating into the farther depths of space. The transmission of information around the Great Circle was the transmission into an indefinite future since human thought, transmitted in this form, would continue its journey through space until it reached the farthest regions. The study of the most distant stars had become possible because the receipt of information from any place where there were planets that understood the Circle was only a matter of time. Only recently Earth received a message from the huge but very distant star known as Gamma Cygni; the star is 2,800 parsecs from us and a message takes over 9,000 years to reach Earth but that which had been received was understandable and could be deciphered by those members of the Great Circle whose thought processes are similar. It is another matter if a message should come from globular stellar systems or clusters that are older than our flat systems.

The same is true of the centre of the Galaxy — in its axial star-cloud there is a colossal zone of life on millions of planet systems that do not know the darkness of night for they are illuminated by the radiation of the centre of the Galaxy! Incomprehensible communications have been received from there, pictures of intricate structure that cannot be expressed by any of our concepts. The Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge has been trying, unsuccessfully, to decipher them for eight hundred years. And yet, perhaps…. The African’s heart missed a beat at the suddenness of the idea — reports from the nearer planet systems, members of the Great Circle, dealt with the internal life of each of the inhabited planets, its science, technology, its works of art while the distant, ancient worlds of the Galaxy showed the external. Cosmic movement of their science and life. How they rearranged the planetary systems to suit themselves…. How they sweep space clear of meteoroids that interfere with spaceships and dump them, together with cold planets unsuited to life, into their central sun in order to lengthen the duration of its radiation or with the intention of increasing its heating effect. If that is not enough, perhaps they rearrange neighbouring planetary systems where the best conditions of life for gigantic civilizations are created….

Half ironically, half seriously, Mven Mass got in touch with the Repository of Great Circle Records and selected the catalogue number of a distant message. The screen of his viewer was filled with strange pictures that had reached Earth from the globular cluster Omega Centauri. This cluster is the second nearest to the solar system and is only 6,800 parsecs removed. Light from its bright stars travelled through outer space for 22,000 years before reaching the eye of earthbound man.

A dense blue haze spread in even layers that were pierced by vertical black cylinders rotating fairly rapidly. The contours of the cylinders were scarcely perceptible — from time to time they contracted until they were like squat cones with their bases joined. Then the blue haze would break up into fiery crescents that revolved madly about the axes of the cones. Blackness retreated into the heights, liuge, dazzlingly white columns grew up and from behind them faceted points, green in colour, formed diagonal curtains….

Mven Mass rubbed his forehead in an effort to grasp anything that made sense.

On the screen the pointed green blades wound in spirals around the white columns and suddenly showered down in a stream of gleaming metal globes that lay in the form of a broad, circular belt. The belt began to grow in width and in height. Mven Mass smiled and switched off the record, returning to his former contemplation….

Owing to the absence of populated worlds, or rather, to the absence of contact with them in the higher latitudes of the Galaxy, the people of Earth were still unable to get out of the equatorial belt of the Galaxy where space is darkened by fragments of matter and dust. We could not rise above the gloom in which our star and its neighbours are plunged. It was, therefore, difficult for us to learn about the Universe, even with the aid of the Great Circle.

Mven Mass turned his eyes to the horizon, to the Coma Berenices Constellation lying below Ursa Major and under the Canes Venatici. This was the North Pole of the Galaxy — in this direction lay the whole expanse of extragalactic space in the same way as at the opposite point of the sky, in the Piscis Anstrinus Constellation, near the well-known star Fomalhaut, lay the South Pole of the galactic system. In the outer region of the Galaxy, where our Sun is situated, the width of the branch of the spiral galactic disc is no more than 600 parsecs. Perpendicular to the plane of the galactic equator it was enough to cover a distance of 300–400 parsecs to rise above the level of the Galaxy’s gigantic stellar wheel. This route could not be covered by a spaceship but it was well within reach of Circle transmissions… but… so far not a single planet of any of the stars in those areas had joined the Circle.

These eternal riddles and unanswered questions would have been turned into nothing if another revolution, the greatest in science, could be achieved — if time could be conquered, if we could learn to overcome any distance in any span of time and enter the endless expanses of the Cosmos as its master. Then our Galaxy and other stellar islands would be no farther away from us than the tiny islands of the Mediterranean, against which the sea was splashing down below in the darkness of night. This was justification for the desperate experiment planned by Renn Bose and being put into effect by him, by Mven Mass, Director of the Outer Stations. If only they could have a better scientific basis to their experiment and obtain the sanction of the Council….

The lights of the Spiral Way changed colour from orange to white — 2 a.m. the traffic peak. Mven Mass remembered that next day there would be the Fete of the Flaming Bowls to which Chara Nandi had invited him. The Director of the Outer Stations could not forget the reddish-bronze girl with her precisely supple movements that he had met on the beach. She was like a flower of sincerity and strong passions, rare enough in an epoch when feelings had been disciplined.

Mven Mass went back to his study, called the Institute of Metagalactics, that worked at night, and asked them to send him stereotelefilms of a few galaxies next evening. Having obtained their consent he went up to the roof of the inner building where he kept his long-range leaping apparatus. Mven Mass was very fond of this unpopular sport and had achieved a fair degree of skill. He strapped the helium container to his body, leaped agilely into the air and for a second switched on a tractor propeller that was driven by a light accumulator. He described an arc about 600 metres long and, landing on a ledge of the Catering House, repeated the jump. In five such leaps he reached a small garden under a limestone cliff where he landed on an aluminium tower, removed the apparatus and slid down a pole to the ground and so to his hard bed standing under a huge plane-tree.

The African fell asleep to the rustling of the leaves of the giant tree.

The Fete of the Flaming Bowls got its name from the well-known poem by the poet-historian Zann Senn in which he describes the ancient Indian custom of selecting the most beautiful women to carry swords and bowls containing flaming aromatic incense to heroes about to set out for the performance of great deeds. Swords and bowls were no longer in use but remained as the symbol of heroism. Heroic deeds had grown to countless numbers amongst the bold and energetic population of the planet. A tremendous capacity for work, possessed in the past by only those few people who were known as geniuses, depended entirely on the physical strength of the body and an abundance of hormone stimnlators. Correct physical training for thousands of years had made the average person on the planet the equal of the heroes of antiquity, insatiable in his desire for heroic deeds, love and knowledge.

The Fete of the Flaming Bowls was the women’s spring festival. Every year in the fourth month after the winter solstice or, according to the old calendar, in April, the most beautiful women on Earth took part in dances, singing and gymnastics. The finest shades of beauty of the various races that showed in the mixed population of the planet were to be seen here in inexhaustible variety like the facets of a precious stone; they gave endless pleasure to their audiences which included everybody from scientists and engineers, tired out with their meticulous labours, to inspired artists and the still youthful pupils of the Third Cycle schools.

No less beautiful was the Festival of Hercules, the men’s autumn festival celebrated in the ninth month. At this festival young men coming of age reported on the Herculean labours they had performed. Later it became the custom on these occasions to review all the noteworthy deeds and achievements of the past year. And so the festival had become a general one, celebrated by both men and women, and lasting three days — the Day of Useful Excellence, the Day of Higher Art, and the Day of Scientific Audacity and Fantasy. One year Mven Mass had been elected hero of the first and third days.

Veda Kong sang a number of songs. Mven Mass appeared the gigantic Solar Hall of the Tyrrhenian Stadium during her performance. He found the ninth sector of the fourth radius where Evda Nahl and Chara Nandi were sitting and stood there in the shadow of an arcade listening to Veda’s low deep voice. She was dressed in white. Her blonde head thrown back and her face turned to the upper galleries of the hall, she was singing a song of joy and to the African she seemed the very incarnation of spring. Every member of the audience pressed one of the four buttons in front of him. The golden, blue, emerald or red lights flickering on the ceiling showed the artist to what extent the performance had been appreciated and took the place of the noisy applause of former days.

Veda finished singing and was awarded by a bright cluster of gold and blue lights amongst which the very few green ones were completely lost. Her face flushed with excitement as usual, she ran to her friends. At that moment they were joined by Mven Mass whom they heartily welcomed.

The African looked round the stadium in search of his teacher and predecessor but Darr Veter was nowhere to be seen.

“Where have you hidden Darr Veter?” he asked jokingly, turning to the three women.

“And where have you hidden Renn Bose?” Evda Nahl replied, and the African hastily avoided her penetrating glance.

“Veter is digging holes in South America,” said the more kind-hearted Veda and a shadow passed over her face. With a protective gesture Chara Nandi pulled Veda towards her, pressing her cheek against Veda’s. The faces of the two women were vastly different but possessed a gentle tenderness which lent them similarity.

Chara’s eyebrows; straight and low under a high forehead, resembled the outline of a soaring bird and were in perfect harmony with her long narrow eyes. Veda’s eyebrows slanted upwards.

“A bird flapping its wings,” thought the African. Chara’s thick, shining; black hair lay on her neck and shoulders contrasting sharply with Veda’s fair hair, piled high on her head.

Chara glanced at the clock in the domed roof and got up. Her dress astounded the African. On the girl’s smooth shoulders lay a platinum chain leaving her high neck open. The chain was fastened below her throat by a gleaming red tourmaline.

Her firm breasts, like wide upturned bowls carved with a very delicate chisel, were almost completely exposed. Between them, stretching from the tourmaline clasp to her belt ran a narrow strip of dark purple velvet. Similar strips, running across the middle of each breast, were held taut by the chain and joined on her bare back. The girl’s very narrow waist was encircled by a white belt besprinkled with black stars and fastened by a platinum buckle in the form of a crescent, from which a strip of dark purple velvet hung down to her knees. Attached to her belt behind was what seemed like half a long skirt of heavy white silk, also decorated with black stars. The dancer wore no jewels with the exception of glittering buckles on her tiny black slippers.

“It will soon be my turn!” said Chara calmly making her way towards the arcade exit; she glanced at Mven lass and disappeared, accompanied by whispered questions and thousands of curious glances.

The stage was occupied by a gymnast, a beautifully proportioned girl no more than eighteen years old. In the golden floodlights, to the recitative of the music, she went through an amazingly rapid succession of leaps, springs and turns, balancing with unbelievable equilibrium to slow, lyrical passages of music. The audience awarded her performance with a multitude of golden lights and Mven Mass thought that it would not be easy for Chara Nandi to dance after such a successful number. He looked anxiously at the faceless multitude of people opposite and suddenly noticed the artist Cart Sann sitting in the third sector. The latter greeted him with a gaiety that the African felt out of place — who, if not the artist who had painted Chara’s picture as the Daughter of the Mediterranean, should have been perturbed at the outcome of her performance.

The African was just thinking that after his experiment he would go to see the Daughter of the Mediterranean when the lights overhead were extinguished. The transparent floor of organic glass gleamed with the cherry-red light of hot iron. Streams of red light poured out from under low footlights around the stage. The lights moved back and forth keeping time with the marked rhythm of the melody and merging with the resonant song of the violins and the low hum of bronze strings. Mven Mass was somewhat staggered by the power and tempestuousness of the music and did not immediately notice Chara as she appeared in the centre of that flaming floor and began her dance at a Speed that took the onlookers’ breath away.

Mven Mass was afraid of what might happen if the music demanded still greater acceleration of the dance. She danced not only with her legs and arms — the girl’s entire body responded to the blazing fire of the music with equally searing flames of life. The African thought that if the women of ancient India had been like Chara, then the poet had been right in likening them to flaming bowls and in giving that name to the women’s fete.

Chara’s reddish sunburn turned to a bright copper in the glow of the stage and the floor. Mven Mass’s heart beat wildly. The woman he had seen on the fabulous planet of Epsilon Toucanis had skin of just that colour. At that time, also, he had learned there existed such a thing as the inspiration of a body capable of employing its movements, its delicate changes of beautiful forms, to express the most profound shades of feeling, fantasy and passion, to express a prayer for happiness.

Up to that moment he had known nothing but the urge to overcome the unattainable distance of ninety parsecs but now Mven Mass realized that flowers just as beautiful as the carefully nurtured picture of the distant planet were to be found in the inexhaustible treasure-house of terrestrial beauty. But his long-cherished urge to achieve an unattainable dream did not pass so quickly. Chara’s likeness to the red-skinned daughter in the world of Epsilon Toucanis only served to strengthen the determination of the Director of the Outer Stations. If so much joy was to be felt from one Chara Nandi what would the world be like where the majority of the women were like her?!

Evda Nahl and Veda Kong, excellent dancers themselves, were staggered at this, the first of Chara’s dances that they had seen. Veda, anthropologist and specialist in the history of the ancient races, had come to the decision that in the past the women of Gondwana, the southern countries, had exceeded the men in number because men were often killed hunting dangerous wild beasts. Later when the despotic states of the Ancient East were established in the densely populated countries of the south, the men continued to be killed in wars, by religious excesses and by the whims of the despots. The daughters of the south went through a period of the strictest selection that developed the finer points of adaptation. In the north, where the population was scantier and nature less bounteous, there had not been such despotism in the Dark Ages. More men survived, women were more valued and lived a more dignified life.

Veda followed Chara’s every gesture and conceived the idea that in all her movements there was an amazing duality — they were at once gentle and predatory. The gentleness came from the graceful movements and unbelievable suppleness of the body and the predatory impression was created by the abrupt changes, turns and poses that followed each other with the elusive rapidity that is natural in the wild beast. This feline litheness had been achieved by the dark-skinned daughters of Gondwana in the thousands of years of the struggle for existence through which the debased and enslaved women of the southern continents had lived… but in Chara it was harmonically combined with the small firm features of a Creto-Hellenic face.

The dissonant sounds of some percussion instruments merged in a short, slower adagio. The urgent, ever swifter rhythm of the rise and fall of human emotions was expressed in the dance by the alternation of movements full of meaning and their almost complete cessation when the dancer turned into a motionless statue. Slumbering emotions were aroused, flared up stormily, wilted in their exhaustion, died and were born again, stormy and untasted — life, fettered and struggling against the inevitable march of time, against the clear-cut, merciless definiteness of duty and fate. Evda Nahl felt that the psychological basis of the dance was something so near to her that her cheeks became flushed and her breathing quickened.

Mven Mass did not know that the composer had written the ballet suite specially for Chara Nandi, but he was no longer afraid of the wild tempo when he saw how well the girl was coping with it. Scarlet waves of light embraced her copper body, gave off crimson splashes from her strong legs, were drowned in the dark whirls of velvet and turned the white silk to the pink of dawn. Her arms, raised and thrown back, slowly ceased their motion over her head. Suddenly, without any finale, the music broke off in a stormy clangour of high notes and the red lights came to a standstill and were extinguished. The high dome of the building was flooded with its usual light. The tired girl bowed her head and her thick hair covered her face. The thousands of golden lights were followed by a dull noise. The audience were doing Chara the greatest of all honours — they were thanking her by standing up and stretching their clasped hands towards her. Chara, who, before the performance, had not known a tremor, lost her self-possession, threw back the hair from her face and ran away, after a glance towards the upper galleries. Mven Mass knew then why the artist had been so calm — he knew his model.

The Master of Ceremonies announced an entr’acte. Mven Mass hurried to look for Chara while Veda Kong and Evda Nahl went out on to the gigantic opaque glass staircase, a thousand metres wide, that led from the stadium straight down to the sea. The evening twilight, lucid and warm, tempted the two women to bathe, following the example of thousands of other spectators from the fete.

“No wonder I was attracted to Chara Nandi the moment I saw her,” said Evda Nahl. “She’s a remarkable artist. Today we have seen the Dance of the Power of Life, in which is incorporated the best of everything that constitutes the foundation of the human soul and is frequently its ruler. That must contain something of the erotic dances of the ancients!”

“Now I understand Cart Sann, for beauty really is more important than we think. Beauty is the happiness and the meaning of life — how well he said that! And your definition is a true one!” agreed Veda, kicking off a shoe and putting her foot into the warm water that splashed against the steps.

“It is a true one if the psychic forces are born of a healthy body full of energy,” Evda Nahl corrected her as she removed her clothes and jumped into the transparent water. Veda swam after her and they went together to a huge rubber island that shone silver about a mile away from the stadium. The flat surface of the island, level with the water, was surrounded by rows of shelters in the shape of shells of mother-of-pearl plastic, big enough to screen three or four people from the sun and wind and to isolate them from their neighbours.

The two women lay down on the soft, swaying floor of a “shell,” breathing deeply of the eternally fresh smell of the sea.

“You’ve got beautifully tanned since I met you on the beach!” said Veda looking at her companion. “Have you been at the seaside or does it come from sunburn pills?”

“SB pills,” admitted Evda, “I’ve been in the sun for only two days, yesterday and today. I haven’t got such wonderful skin as Chara Nandi.”

“Don’t you really know where Renn Bose is?” continued Veda.

“I know approximately and that is sufficient to worry me!” answered Evda Nahl, softly.

“Do you really want…” began Veda and then stopped but Evda lifted her lazily closed eyelids and looked her straight in the eyes.

“It seems to me that Renn Bose is somehow… helpless, like an undeveloped boy,” Veda objected, hesitantly, “and you’re so strong, you have an intellect that is the equal of any man’s. One always feels that inside you there is a steel rod, your will-power….”

“Renn Bose told me the same. But you’re wrong in your estimation of him, you’re as one-sided as Renn Bose himself. He is a man with a bold and powerful intellect and a terrific capacity for work. Even today there are few to equal him on our planet. It is the comparison of his other qualities with his great talents that makes them seem undeveloped because they are just about the average or even puerile, perhaps. You were right in calling Renn a boy, he is, but at the same time he’s a hero in the true sense of the word. Take Darr Veter — there’s something boylike in him, too, but with him it’s just a superabundance of physical strength and not the lack of it, like it is with Renn.”

“What do you think of Mven?” Veda inquired, “now that you know him better.”

“Mven Mass is a splendid combination of the cold intellect and the archaic fury of desires. He is a man of great ability and is highly educated but at the same time he is the high priest of nature’s elemental forces!”

Veda Kong burst out laughing. “How can I learn to give such precise character studies?!”

"Psychology is my line,” said Evda, shrugging her shoulders. “But let me ask you a question. Do you know that Darr Veter is a man that I like very much?”

“You’re afraid of half-formed decisions?” Veda blushed. “No, this time there will be no fatal half-way decisions and insincerity. Everything is as clear as crystal….’’ Under the penetrating glance of the psychiatrist, Veda continued:

“Erg Noor… our ways parted long ago. I could not give way to a new feeling as long as he was in the Cosmos. I could not draw myself away and so weaken the strength of my hopes, my faith in his return. Now it is only a case of precise calculation and confidence. Erg Noor knows everything but is going his own way.”

Evda Nahl placed her slender arm round Veda’s shoulder.

“So it’s Darr Veter?”

“Yes,” answered Veda, firmly.

“Does he know?”

“No. Later, when Tantra arrives…. Isn’t it time for us to go back?”

“I have to leave the fete,” said Evda Nahl, “my holiday is finished. I have a big job to do in the Academy of Sorrow and Joy, and I must see my daughter before I go there.”

“Is she a big girl?”

“Seventeen. My son is older. I have done the duty of every woman who is normally developed and has normal heredity — two children, no less! Now I want a third one — but I want him grown up!” Evda Nahl smiled and her serious face was lit up with the tenderness of love, her bow-shaped upper lip lifted slightly.

“I imagine a fine, big-eyed boy with such a loving and ever-astonished mouth… with freckles and a snub nose,” said Veda, slyly, looking straight in front of her. Her companion, after a short pause, asked her;

“Have you got any new job yet?”

“No, I’m waiting for Tuntra, then there will be a big expedition.”

"Then come with me to visit my daughter,” suggested Evda, and Veda gladly consented.

The whole of one wall of the observatory was taken up with a seven-metre hemispherical screen for the demonstration of films and photos taken by powerful telescopes. Mven Mass switched on a general view of a section of the sky near the North Pole of the Galaxy, the meridional strip of constellations from Ursa Major to Corvus and Centaurus. In this part, in Canes Venatici, Coma Berenices and Virgo there were many galaxies, islands of stars in the form of flat wheels or discs. An especially large number of them had been discovered in Coma Berenices — separate galaxies, of regular and irregular form, showing different degrees of revolution and projection, some of them inconceivably far away, at a distance of thousands of millions of parsecs, often forming whole “clouds” of tens of thousands of galaxies. The biggest of the galaxies are anything from 20,000 to 50,000 parsecs in diameter, like the stellar island or Galaxy NN 89105 + SB 23, in the old days known as M 31, or the Andromeda Nebula. This little, faintly gleaming, nebulous cloud could be seen from Earth with the naked eye. Long before this people had discovered the secret of this cloud. The nebula proved to be a gigantic, wheel-shaped stellar system one and a half times the size of our huge Galaxy. The study of the Andromeda Nebula, despite the fact that it was 450,000 parsecs distant from terrestrial observers, did much to help gain knowledge of our own Galaxy.

Mven Mass remembered from childhood the magnificent photographs of the various galaxies that had been obtained by means of electron inverted pictures or by radio telescopes such as the gigantic Pamir and Patagonia installations, each of them almost 400 kilometres in diameter, that penetrated even deeper into the Cosmos. The galaxies, monster clusters of billions of celestial bodies separated by distances of millions of parsecs, had always aroused in him an irrepressible desire to know the laws of their constitution, the story of their origin and their further evolution. The main thing that intrigued every inhabitant of Earth was the possibility of there being life on the countless planetary systems in these islands of the Universe, the question of the fires of thought and knowledge that burned there, of human civilizations in those infinitely distant spaces of the Cosmos.

Three stars appeared on the screen that the ancients had named Alpheratz, Mirach and Almak, (α, β, γ Andromedae), arranged in an ascending straight line. On either side of this line were the two galaxies close to each other, the Andromeda Nebula or M 31, and the beautiful spiral of M 33 in the Triangnlum Constellation. Mven Mass changed the metal film.

He was now looking at the galaxy known in ancient days as M 51, in the Canes Venatici, 800,000 parsecs away. This was one of the few galaxies that we see “flat,” our line of sight being perpendicular to the plane of the “wheel.” It has a very bright, dense core made up of countless millions of stars from which two spiral arms stretch out, each of them with similarly dense star clusters at the beginning. Their long ends seem to get fainter and more nebulous until they disappear into the darkness of space, stretching for tens of thousands of parsecs from each other in opposite directions. Between the arms, or main branches, there are short streams of stellar condensations and clouds of luminous gas alternating with black “voids,” accumulations of dark matter; the bright arms are all curved like the blades of a turbine.

The huge galaxy NGK 4565 in the Coma Berenices Constellation was a very beautiful one. At a distance of a million parsecs it was seen edgeways. Leaning over to one side, like a soaring bird, the galaxy spread its thin disc, apparently consisting of spiral branches, over a huge area; the central core was a greatly oblate spheroid that burned brightly and had the appearance of a solid gleaming mass. It could be clearly seen that the islands of stars were so flat that the galaxy could be compared to a thin wheel belonging to some clockwork mechanism. The edges of the wheel were indistinct, they seemed to merge into the bottomless void. Our Sun is located on just such an edge of a galaxy together with a tiny speck of dust called Earth that, linked by the power of knowledge with many inhabited worlds, is spreading the wings of human thought over the infinity of the Cosmos!

Mven Mass then switched the projector over to the galaxy NGK 4594 in the Virgo Constellation; this galaxy, also visible in its equatorial plane, had always interested him. It stood at a distance of ten million parsecs from Earth and resembled a thick lentil of burning stellar material wrapped in a layer of luminescent gas. A thick black line, a condensation of dark material, cut the lentil along its equator. The galaxy looked like a mysterious lantern shining out of an enormous abyss.

What worlds were hidden there, in a galaxy whose total radiation was brighter than that of other galaxies and averaged that of an F class star? Were there any mighty inhabited planets there? Was thought there also grappling with the mysteries of nature?

The fact that the huge clusters of stars did not answer made Mven Mass clench his fists. He realized the terrific distances involved — light from the galaxy he was looking at travelled thirty-two million years to reach Earth. Sixty-four million years would be required to exchange information!

Mven Mass selected another reel and on the screen there appeared a big, bright, round patch of light amongst dispersed, faint stars. An irregular black strip cut the patch in two, making the brightly gleaming fiery masses on either side of it still brighter by contrast and thickening towards its ends and overshadowing an extensive field of the burning gas that formed a ring round the bright patch. This was a picture of colliding galaxies in the Cygnus Constellation that had been obtained by the most remarkably ingenious technical set-ups. This collision of giant galaxies, each equal in size to our Galaxy or to the Andromeda Nebula, had long been known as a source of radio emanation, probably the most powerful in the part of the Universe that we could probe. Rapidly moving gas streams of colossal size set up electromagnetic fields of such inconceivable power that they sent out news of the titanic catastrophe to all ends of the Universe. Matter itself sent out this alarm signal from a radio station with a power of a quintillion megawatts. So great was the distance to the galaxies, however, that the picture on the screen showed its state millions of years before. The present state of these two galaxies, passing one through the other, will be known on Earth such a long time after that we cannot say whether terrestrial man will continue to exist so unimaginably long.

Mven Mass jumped up and leaned on the table with both hands so hard that the joints cracked.

Transmission periods of millions of years, covering tens of thousands of human generations and which actually amount to that “never” that is killing to scientific thought, could disappear at the wave of a magic wand — Renn Bose’s discovery and their joint experiment!

Inconceivably distant points of the Universe would be within reach!

Astronomers in ancient days believed the galaxies to be moving apart. The light that reached terrestrial telescopes from distant stellar islands had been changed, light oscillations had lengthened, turning to red waves. This reddening of the light was taken as evidence that the galaxies were receding from the observer. People in the past were accustomed to a direct, one-sided conception of phenomena and they created the theory of a Universe that was moving apart or exploding, not realizing that they saw only one side of the magnificent process of destruction and creation. It was this one aspect — dispersion and destruction, that is, the transition of energy to a lower level in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics — that was conceivable to us and was recorded by instruments constructed to sharpen our senses. The other aspect — accumulation, concentration and creation — was outside man’s concepts because life acquired its strength from energy diffused by the stars, the suns, and our conception of the surrounding Universe took shape on the basis of this. Man’s mighty brain, however, penetrated even into the hidden processes of the creation of worlds and of our Universe. But in those distant times it still seemed that the greater the distance to a galaxy the greater the speed of its motion away from the terrestrial observer. As man penetrated farther into outer space he found galaxies with velocities close to that of light. The end of the visible Universe was the point where galaxies seemed to have reached that velocity although actually no light from them could have reached us and we should not have seen them….

We now know why the light from these galaxies is red. As is usually the case in science there proved to be more than one cause — it is not only due to their recession from us. The only light that reaches us from distant stellar islands is that radiated by their brightest centres. These huge masses of matter are encircled by annular electromagnetic fields that strongly affect light rays, not only by their intensity but also on account of the area they cover; they gradually slow down the light waves until they become longer red waves. In very ancient times astronomers knew that light from very dense stars turns red, the spectral lines shifting towards the red end, so that the star seems to be receding like, for example, the second component of Sirius, the white dwarf Sirius B. The farther away the galaxy, the more centralized is the radiation that reaches us and the stronger the concentration at the red end of the spectrum.

During a very long journey through space light waves, on the other hand, are “shaken up” and the light quanta lose part of their energy. This phenomenon has now been studied — the red waves may also be fatigued “old” waves of ordinary light. Even light waves that penetrate everywhere “grow old” from their journey over tremendous distances. What hope had man of overcoming such distances unless he attack gravitation itself by means of its opposite, following Renn Bose’s calculations?

His anxiety was fading away! He was doing the right thing by carrying out the unprecedented experiment!

Mven Mass, as usual, went out on the observatory veran-dah and began walking swiftly up and down. The distant galaxies still shone in his tired eyes, galaxies that sent waves of red light to Earth like signals calling for help, like appeals to the all-conquering thought of man. Mven Mass laughed softly and confidently. These red rays would become as familiar to man as those at the Fete of the Flaming Bowls that had wrapped Chara Nandi’s body in the red light of life — Chara, who had appeared to him unexpectedly as the copper daughter of Epsilon Tucanae, the girl of his impossible dreams.

And he would direct Renn Bose’s vector precisely at Epsilon Tucanae, not merely in the hope of seeing that wonderful world, but also in honour of her, of its terrestrial representative!