The Destruction of Faena

Chapter One THE LITTLE WORLD

There was uproar on Space Station Deimo.

Station engineer Tycho Veg, handsome, prematurely grey-haired, slow and pensive, was looking in disapproval at the bustle that had just begun. But it was not in conformity with his mild nature to interfere in anything: he gave way in all things to his wife, Ala Veg, and she was the one who had thought of holding a banquet in honour of the arriving spaceship Quest.

The still unfaded beauty Ala Veg had become bored at home on Faena with teaching astronomy to blockheaded Superiors. She insisted on leaving with her husband for the space station, which only took married couples with the required special qualifications. They would be able to return to their three children left on Faena after earning enough to last them for the rest of their lives, and Tycho Veg would finally become a workshop proprietor.

Ala Veg, with the pedigree face of a Superior, a fine, straight nose, a short upper lip and a sensual mouth, went about with a permanently haughty frown; she considered herself and her husband the two most important Faetians on the base.

However, the wife of the station chief, Nega Luton, who had illegally taken over the post of Sister of Health without being a qualified doctor, was of a different opinion. Encouraged by her husband, Mrak Luton, a corpulent donkey, she passed herself off as the first lady of space and never missed an opportunity to sting Ala Veg with a reference to the children she had abandoned. Ala would parry these blows, sparing neither Nega’s barrenness nor her unattractive appearance.

Lada, the young but well-upholstered cook and gardener, a good-natured woman with an affectionate smile on her broad, snub-nosed face, did everything quickly and efficiently, trying to please everybody. She adored her husband, proud that he, Brat Lua, was the only one of the roundheads, thanks to his mother’s position in the Dictator’s family, who had been able to obtain an education on Danjab, the continent of the Culturals. He was sent to Deimo both as jack-of-all-trades and as a representative of the roundheads who were to move to the uncomfortable planet of Mar. Lada Lua willingly followed him to serve all the inhabitants of Deimo.

A signal from her communications bracelet found Lada Lua in the greenhouse, a transparent cylindrical corridor thousands of paces long. Apart from Lada, no one used that corridor because it was on the axis of the space station and there was no artificial gravity created by centrifugal force as in the other quarters on the station. The nurserywoman did not feel her weight as she floated in and out among the air-roots of the plants. The function of soil was performed by a nutritive mist of the saps that the roots needed. The harvest in space was much bigger than on Faena.

The signal found Lada Lua collecting sweet fruits for the forthcoming banquet.

Holding on to the air-roots, Lada Lua hurried to answer Ala Veg’s call. She had to float quite a distance through the tangled air-roots and then go down the shaft inside a spoke of the giant wheel, in whose rim all the station’s quarters were housed.

The cage in the shaft seemed to fall down into an abyss. The feeling of weight began to appear only at the end of the ride, when the cage slowed down and stopped. The doors opened automatically. Lada Lua, her normal weight restored, walked out into the corridor, which seemed to tilt upwards before and behind her. She did not, however, have to climb any gradients.

Ala Veg was rushing about her cabin, exasperated at the clumsiness of her husband who was on his knees, unsuccessfully trying to pin some kind of frill to her gown.

Lada Lua threw up her hands in delight.

Ala Veg unceremoniously dismissed her husband and he went off to prepare the welcome for the approaching ship, which would have to refuel. He realised that his wife was bored to death with the monotonous days and tedious dinners at the common table, the faces that she was sick of seeing, always the same ones, the same words heard so many times and the mutual friction that grew worse from day to day. Tycho Veg tried to understand his wife, to excuse her failings, to put them down to homesickness and to her pining for her children. He was missing them himself. If only one of them was here, they would be so happy! But the presence of children was not allowed on the space stations. The Superiors, when complementing the staff on Deimo, managed to oppress the roundheads there too. Nega Luton was barren, Ala Veg already had three children and at her age, which she kept secret, she had not decided to have a fourth. As a result, the ban only affected the young Lua couple, who could not have children on the planet, nor on the space station.

After helping Ala Veg to dress, Lada Lua ran to the kitchen with its glittering pans and dials to boil, roast and bake…

But the communications bracelet summoned her again, this time to Nega Luton. That important lady loved comforts and luxury more than anything. Her husband, a Supreme Officer of the Blood Guard, had supplied her with all these in full measure on Faena. Least of all had the Lutons wanted to go into space. However, they had ended up there by order of the Dictator.

Lada Lua switched the automatic kitchen machines to a set program and hurried off to Nega Luton.

When the spaceship Quest went into orbit round Deimo and approached the station for docking, Mada and Ave never left the porthole.

The enormous planet Mar with its convex rim filled over half the window. Sol no longer looked like a brilliant round star, but had become a blinding disc with a magnificent corona. For a short while, the planet blotted out its own star, plunging the ship into a swiftly-passing night.

Hand in hand, Mada and Ave greeted this unusual dawn of their new life, waiting for the brilliant, curly-fringed Sol to begin rising from behind the hump of Mar. The black surface of the deserts turned brown, and gradually, according to height, there followed one after another all the most delicate hues of a gigantic rainbow that did not hang over the rain-washed forests and plains, as on their native Faena, but embraced the desert planet in a crescent that merged with the rim of the gigantic sphere. Mada caught her breath. She could only squeeze Ave’s fingers in silence.

Then the rainbow glittered at one point and the Faetians saw Deimo, their first destination. It was the brightest star in the heavens, rising swiftly over the rim of the rainbow.

As it drew nearer, Deimo became a gigantic, irregularly shaped lump of rock, and soon a small star became visible next to it. This was Space Station Deimo, the Faetians’ destination.

Then they were able to see that this star was a ring inclined at slight angle to the mass of Mar. Comparable to the planet Sat, it was a satellite of Mar’s satellite. Finally, their eyes began to ache with staring at this artificial metal structure, which was reflecting the rays of Sol.

The first pilot of Quest, Smel Ven, the celebrated astronaut of the Superiors, was executing a complicated manoeuvre to approach the axis of the station’s wheel and dock on to the central compartment. The silvery tail of the greenhouse extended from the station, a bright line receding into the darkness.

When Quest moved up to Deimo station, engineer Tycho Veg summoned Brat Lua to the central compartment as the mechanic who did the heavy work. Mrak Luton, the chief of the station, did not consider it necessary to go up to the central compartment in order to “float about on the loose” in null gravity. He preferred to stay in the ring corridor and paced round it, important and pompous, with his hands thrust behind his back.

The name Mrak (Gloom), given to him in his early youth, suited him: a pudgy, rectangular face, sparse grey hair and small, suspicious eyes under the tufted eyebrows.

He did not linger by the lift-cage but continued promenading in the same direction all the time until finally, after he had gone round the whole outer ring, he turned up in the corridor on the other side.

However, all three Faetesses, unable to restrain their curiosity, met at the lift-cage.

The first to come out into the corridor was the exceptionally tall Dm Sat.

The ladies respectfully inclined their heads.

Two Faetians came next.

The giant Gor Terr, up to the eyes in whiskers, was the ship’s flight engineer and one of the men who designed it. He had a pronounced stoop, thanks to which his arms seemed uncommonly long. His friends used to joke that in height, strength and appearance he resembled the ancestors of the Faetians. However, his low, hairy brow hid an exceptional mind.

His new friend, Toni Fae, educated and refined, wrote poetry. He had a round face, a thin nose and wide-open eyes behind big spectacles.

Nega Luton took charge of the gigantic Gor Terr. Ala Veg took the youthful Toni Fae under her wing.

Um Sat went of his own accord to the roundhead Lada Lua.

“Will the gentle Faetess show me to where I can have a rest?”

Lada Lua blushed and, beside herself with happiness, led the great sage to his appointed cabin.

Ala Veg ran down the corridor with a provocative laugh, beckoning Toni Fae to catch up with her. She conducted him into a comfortable cabin and sat down in a light chair.

“And so is it not true, Toni Fae, that we have kindred souls. Is it by chance that we are both astronomers, that we find ourselves amid the stars and are sitting within reach of one another?”

Toni Fae took off his spectacles to see more clearly.

“The stars have made us friends, is it not so?” continued Ala Veg, well aware of the effect she was having on the young visitor.

“For the sake of everything I see here, it was well worth flying to the stars,” he murmured, lowering his eyes.

“I already know that you’re a poet. But you are also an astronomer. I want us to have views in common.”

“I would like that so much!”

They were silent for a moment as they gazed at one another.

“Soon there will be a banquet. We shall sit side by side.”

“Oh, yes!” Toni Fae nodded his head. “But we must also take Gor Terr under our wing. He is as helpless as I am.”

“I love the helpless ones,” laughed Ala Veg, affectionately touching Toni Fae’s hand. “You are a charming boy and I’m so happy that you have arrived. If only you knew how fed up we are with one another here!”

Mrak Luton, who was finishing his stroll along the corridor as if no one had arrived at the station, had in fact been carefully measuring his pace. Of all the new arrivals, he regarded the Dictator’s daughter as most important. For that reason, he went up to the lift-cage at the precise moment when Mada, Ave and Smel Ven, the first pilot, came out of it.

The chief of the station was chewing it over in his mind: after lift-off from Faena, the Dictator’s daughter had married Ave Mar, son of the Ruler of the Culturals. What was this? Politics?

“May they be prolonged, the successful cycles in the life of the Wisest of the Wise who had the good fortune to have such a daughter,” was the flowery welcome with which he greeted Mada, and he announced that she and Ave had been given two magnificent cabins in opposite compartments of the station.

Mada flared up.

“Was not Station Deimo in electromagnetic communication with Quest?” she asked angrily.

Mrak Luton shrugged his shoulders apologetically.

“If the customs of the Superiors are effective on the station,” continued Mada, as if giving an order, “then you must give my husband and myself a double cabin and send the roundheaded Lua couple there at once.”

The station chief bowed respectfully as low as his paunch would allow.

“They exist to serve. May the cycles in the lives of the Dictator and the Ruler be prolonged,” he concluded, glancing at Ave for the first time.

Mrak Luton personally conducted the young couple to the best cabin on the station, and on the way he showed the glowering Smel Ven his quarters. Then he found Brat Lua and Tycho Veg who had just emerged from the central compartment. He ordered Brat Lua to find his wife and report with her to Mada and Ave. Only then did he notice that Smel Ven was still standing outside his cabin door. Mrak Luton went up to him and heard the following words, uttered in a half-whisper:

“The Dictator will hardly approve of such hasty hospitality.” Smel Ven vanished, slamming the door behind him.

Mrak Luton stared dully at the plastic-covered door.

Brat Lua not only brought his wife to Ave and Mada, he also brought drawings. He was a calm Faetian of medium height, with a tight, glossy skin and intent eyes.

Since his mother had become Mada’s nanny he had grown up away from her, but had always felt her influence. She had even managed to bring her son and her charge together and make them friends. However, their meetings had soon become impossible. The Dictator shut himself off from the world behind walls. The boy learned humiliation and injustice. Impressionable and proud, he became more and more withdrawn.

He had a rare determination. Mother Lua taught him that only knowledge would compel even those who were oppressing the roundheads to take him seriously. And so he fought stubbornly for every crumb of knowledge.

The result was that even in early youth, his face acquired an expression of firmness and concentration.

He fell in love with Lada Nep before his departure for Danjab, the continent of the Gutturals, to finish his education there. Finally persuaded by the nanny and Mada herself, Yar Jupi agreed, although he kept his real opinion to himself.

For several cycles, Lada devotedly waited for her betrothed, intending after his return to leave immediately on the Dictator’s orders for Space Station Deimo, created by him to consolidate his authority and ostensibly to fulfil his plan of resettling the roundheads on Mar.

Brat Lua was now hurrying to share with Mada and Ave the fruits of his reflections and of sleepless nights spent at his drawings.

“I’ve been planning how to make life better for the roundheads,” he said hurriedly but firmly. “I’ve planned the construction of deep underground cities with an artificial atmosphere. On the surface of Mar, in the midst of the deserts which you see in the porthole, I have been planning oases of fertility. It will be enough to water them with melted water from the polar ice and deliver it to them along underground rivers. These will have to be excavated.” He looked trustingly at his listeners. “I have been waiting so long for real men of learning!”

Mada went up to Brat Lua.

“We have known one another since childhood, and we both loved Mother Lua.”

“ ‘Loved’ her?” The Faetian went suddenly on his guard, staring hard at Mada.

Inwardly alarmed, Lada Lua went over to her husband.

“I… I must tell you everything…” continued Mada.

“What is it? Is the war beginning?”

“Mother Lua tried to stop it,” said Mada in a flash of intuition. “And she was killed. Brat…”

“Killed?” The Faetian went white in the face.

“She was murdered by that scoundrel Yar Alt But your mother, and mine, has been avenged.”

Brat Lua let his head fall onto the table with the drawings spread on it and began sobbing. Mada held Ave by the hand, herself almost in tears. Lada Lua rushed to the door.

“Mrak Luton is coming to invite us to a banquet,” she whispered.

“He must not know anything,” warned Mada.

The little world of the tiny inhabited islet in the Universe was like the big world of the planet, rent by hostile forces.

Chapter Two THE GOLDEN APPLE

Mada’s strongest sensation was one of light. It was falling in a brilliant mosaic onto the ground through the leaves of the trees, whose trunks resembled compactly grown roots. Above, they spread out like transparent canopies filled with light. Each fruit up there was like a tiny star.

A stream of foam, tumbling down from a stone ledge, was lit up by a quivering rainbow. The smooth lake that fed the current lay tranquilly there, crossed by a sparkling mother-of-pearl footpath.

Round the banks grew fantastic trees bearing golden apples. And the water lured Mada from the depths with the same vivid fruits, very slightly tinged with haze, that you could touch so easily by just reaching out your hand.

She thought how ugly the two unwieldy, clumsy creatures seemed in such a setting. They moved about on their hind legs, holding their bodies erect but rolling from side to side at each step. Their sturdy bodies, with belts high on the hips, were decorated with a spiral ornament Their upper and lower extremities were covered with inflated bubbles and their heads were enclosed in hard spheres with slits for the eyes.

Two enormous birds were swimming across the lake with proudly upcurved necks; they turned their heads with their red beaks and made trustingly for the shore.

Several light quadrupeds came out of the forest. They had the same wondrous trees with root-branches growing on their heads, but without fruits or foliage. The creatures began drinking the water.

A mighty beast with greenish, glittering eyes softly sprang onto the bright patches in the shade of the canopied trees. His hide merged with the bright mosaic. Lithe and powerful, he made his way soundlessly towards the water, paying no attention to the horned denizens of the forest nor to the strange newcomers.

“I’m not even frightened,” said Mada through her helmet intercom.

“A virgin, unfrightened world,” responded Ave.

“And there’s so much light!”

“The experts on Faena thought it could kill.”

“It can kill only darkness, ignorance and hatred. We have found a world where evil and hatred do not and cannot exist.”

Mada went up quite close to the watering place. A young reindeer looked round curiously, leapt out of the water and dug its wet muzzle into Mada’s glove.

“Could you think of such a thing on Faena?” she cried.

“Alas, there’s no room left for them there!”

“These are children of light. Open your visor and look. Don’t be afraid, the eye is a most self-accommodating organ. They won’t believe our stories on Faena.”

“Millions of Faetians are waiting for them.”

“Aren’t we cheating this way? Why this envelope shutting us off from the new world. I’ve opened my visor all the way!”

“Mada, my dear!” warned Ave. “That’s dangerous.”

“We’ve found a world of amazing beauty, but we haven’t proved that we can live on it.”

“We must remember Dm Sat’s warning.”

“What is there to be afraid of? Dangerous invisible beings? But light is the best medicine for them. I myself am a Sister of Health. Our ancestors didn’t take thought, they injected themselves with illness-creating microbes in order to rid all Faetians of deadly diseases. It is the doctor on Terr who should be the first to shed a space-suit! It is a duty! Besides, I want to bathe in the lake. Will my Ave, who tamed the ocean waves on a board, back out now? Take the tablets I gave you. They will protect you from the unknown world of the Planet of Light. And its light will help us. Take off your space-suit! And help me.”

“Why are you tempting me, Mada?”

“So that we can be the first to do what must be done anyway. After all, we can’t go back to Faena without having tried to live here in real freedom. And not in a shell.”

So saying, Mada plucked a golden apple and held it out to Ave.

“Peel it for me, please. It has a skin as bright as Sol and as tough as one of our space-suits.”

When Quest began approaching the orbit of Terr, the members of the expedition found the brilliant light of Sol more and more intolerable. It became particularly searing when the ship went into orbit round the planet.

Mada established that Terr’s atmosphere was strikingly like that of Faena. Except that there was little carbon dioxide and there was no greenhouse effect. The planet freely emitted the excess solar heat into space. The conditions of existence on it were consequently similar to those on Faena, as Ave Mar had once suggested.

Toni Fae, the astronomer, observed the planet with the enthusiasm of a poet. Most of it was under water and seemed to be hatched with the lines of the waves. The land and sea surfaces were strikingly varied in colour. But most of all, there were clouds over Terr. Singly, they cast distinct shadows onto the surface of the planet, and in the misty oceans here and there it was possible to distinguish the spiral whirlwinds of hurricanes raging down below.

But nowhere, neither on land nor on the sea coast, could they see the patches of towns stretching out the tendrils of roads. This was what struck everyone at the first sight of Terr from space.

“Must be a dead planet,” suggested Flight Engineer Gor Terr.

“It’s a live one!” exclaimed Toni Fae. “The green of the continents means vegetation. And the others…”

“That’s the whole point; you won’t guess what they mean.”

“Why not?” said Toni Fae animatedly. “It’s easy!”

“R-really?” said Gor Terr, astonished.

“The priests in ancient times believed that every living being was surrounded by an aura. Its colour was supposed to enable the ‘psychic vision’ to recognise the most secret thoughts and feelings.”

“You mean the pr-riests would have looked on Terr as a living cr-reature?”

“Yes, so as to draw a map of it,” laughed Toni Fae.

“All r-right, let’s get on with it. I can see black gaps in the mountain r-range.”

“That means the Mountains of Bitterness and Hate.”

“Much as on our Faena. There are dirty green valleys r-running into the distance.”

“The Valleys of Jealousy.”

“And the black and gr-reen ones?”

“Base Deceit.”

“Is it worth it, starting with such gr-rim names?”

“Then look at the big land areas.”

“Bright gr-reen.”

“The priests considered that colour to be a sign of worldly wisdom and subtle deceit.”

“Let’s be indulgent to Terr and call the dry land the Continent of Wisdom without any deceit. And here is a narrow sea with r-red lightning flashing over it.”

“The Sea of Wrath.”

“It has a pink bay.”

“The Bay of Love.”

“And the sea coast here is r-russet brown.”

“The Coast of Greed.”

“Not bad for future Terrans. Will it be better with the dark blue ocean, perhaps?”

“The Ocean of Hope.”

“And its light blue bay?”

“The Bay of Justice.”

“That’s better already. And these fire-breathing mountains with the r-red flames and the black smoke?”

“The Volcanoes of Passions.”

As they carried on with their game, the young Faetians gradually drew the first map of Terr with amusing names recalling the members of the expedition.

“As for Mada’s aura,” continued Toni Fae, “that’s a spectrum of dawn in space.”

“And what about Toni Fae himself? Hasn’t he been blazing with a bright r-red aura ever since the visit to Deimo?”

Toni looked embarrassed.

“You see,” continued Gor Terr, “I interpret your aura no worse than one of those ancient pr-riests.” And he laughed knowingly.

“It’s not so difficult,” said Toni Fae in an attempt at self-defence. “You can see into Ave and even into Smel Ven.”

“R-really?… Even into Smel Ven?”

“We’re all blazing red,” sighed Toni Fae, “only the shades are all different.”

“Then shouldn’t we name the seas after lovers?” said Gor Terr, clutching at this playful idea.

“It would be better to call Terr the Planet of Eternal Passions.”

Toni Fae had been right not only about Terr, but about Smel Ven. If he had an aura, then it must inevitably be fiery red. He was burning with love for Mada, and the feelings she inspired would have streaked his own aura with black and dirty-green.

Fate’s darling on Faena, a celebrated astronaut, the favourite of the Faetesses, he had not even dared to make Mada’s acquaintance although he had often admired her on the Great Shore. He had hoped that the prompt departure into space would cure him, but… Mada was close at hand to humiliate and destroy him with her marriage to an insignificant half-breed whose father had gained the Ruler’s chair by nefarious means.

Like many longfaces, Smel Ven never did things by halves. Which is why he had become a celebrated and fearless astronaut and had flown to Terr. He had not been unpleasant or cunning as a young man, but Mada’s contempt had stirred up the hidden sides of his character. Seeing how happy Mada and Ave were together and hating them for that reason, he brooded on plans of revenge as cunning as they were cruel… But he had to remain beyond all suspicion. The planet Terr itself was going to help him!

Quest, its braking engines switched on, was decelerating, without friction in the atmosphere and without any overheating of the cabin’s outer surface. Gor Terr, the ship’s designer, carried out the landing as “lift off in reverse”, in his own words. He did not apply the parachute brakes typical of the early stages in Faetian astronavigation. The spaceship could make landfall as slowly as it had lifted off.

Quest came down on its three landing feet, towering above the tallest trees and listing dangerously. The automatic controls immediately straightened it up.

The astronauts pressed their faces up against the portholes. A dense forest of unrecognisable trees rose on either side of a river.

“This is Terr,” announced Dm Sat, “that is to be the birthplace • of our successors! In the meantime, however, we must refrain from taking off our space-suits. We have yet to explore the unknown world of this planet.”

First, they lowered the instruments through the open hatch, then dropped the ladder, and strange figures wearing stiff space-suits began climbing down to the ground.

The last to emerge were Smel Ven and Mada. Smel Ven helped Mada to put on her helmet.

“Could it be that a Faetess like Mada Jupi…”

“Mada Mar,” she corrected him.

“Could it be that a Faetess like Mada could agree with Dm Sat and disgrace herself with this garb?”

“You are suggesting a brave deed that is worthy of you, Smel Ven.”

“There is nothing in the world that could frighten me. But I am the ship’s pilot, and an element of return is vital to Um Sat.”

Mada frowned at his pompousness.

“You consider yourself the most valuable?” Smel Ven restrained himself; it was not in his interests to annoy Mada.

“You are a Sister of Health yourself and will feel a need to discard that clothing as soon as you go into the new world.” Mada pulled down her visor.

The sunset on Terr was spreading over the river.

In space, the astronauts had become familiar with Sol and his furious, raging brilliance. But here, in the evening of their first day on Terr, it was possible to stare with the naked eye at the reddish, flattened Sol, shorn of his space corona. Elongated clouds were beginning to gather near its oval disc. Two of them, coming from different directions, joined up and divided Sol into two. And then a miracle happened. Instead of one, two heavenly bodies hung over the horizon one after the other, each of them purple in colour.

Mada could not take her eyes off this spectacle as she watched the two bodies change in size: the lower one touched the sea of forest, the upper one became thinner and thinner, dwindling to a mere segment of a disc and finally disappearing altogether. The lower part of Sol also vanished behind a big cloud. Now the whole sky flickered with fire. And, as if in a crimson ocean spreading above the clouds, there hung lilac waves, and very high up, illumined by the sinking Sol, there floated a solitary white island, its red-hot edges blazing.

The sunset glow was gradually dying away, but the little cloud burned on without going out. Then, as if all of a sudden, darkness came down on Terr. Night had fallen, just as on Faena. And even the stars were the same.

Except that Terr did not have at that time a magnificent nocturnal luminary like Faena’s satellite, Lua, which gave such beauty to the Faetian night and which had appeared near Terr a million years later. The planet Ven, however, was particularly brilliant here. Toni Fae pointed out to Mada the evening star that had begun shining on the horizon like a spark in the flames of dawn. It was still the brightest object in the night sky.

The astronauts continued admiring the sky of Terr for quite some time. Strange nocturnal sounds came from the forest.

Urn Sat suggested spending the night in the rocket.

Mada went back inside reluctantly, although she could take off her heavy space-suit in there.

She could not shake off the unpleasant impression made by Smel Ven’s remarks.

Next morning, the Faetians went for a stroll through the forest in pairs. They were to assemble by the rocket at a prearranged time.

Long shadows lay on the ground. According to the instruments, it had turned cooler. They were about to see Sol set on Terr for the second time.

Ave and Mada were late. Urn Sat was alarmed. Toni Fae painstakingly kept calling the missing pair. Mada and Ave did not reply, as if electromagnetic communications had broken down.

Gor Terr sent up two signal rockets in succession. They soared up into the colourful evening sky, leaving curly trains of smoke behind them. The red and yellow curves floated across the heavens for a long time.

“From red to yellow,” quipped Toni Fae. “From love to wisdom. A hopeless call.”

Gor Terr shook the inflated sleeve of his space-suit at him.

Smel Ven kept apart as if nothing had happened. His helmet concealed tightened lips and downcast eyes.

His hopes were finally fulfilled. Mada ran out of the forest in her skin-tight, wet undergarment. She had taken off her space-suit!

Smel Ven trembled and raised his visor.

This was the Mada whom the sculptors had tried to catch sight of on the Great Shore and whom Smel Ven himself had admired. Head flung back on the slender neck, dark blue, ecstatic eyes. She was holding a golden apple in each hand.

“Ave and I are now the first inhabitants of Terr. It’ll go down in the planet’s history!”

Ave followed behind her, also without his space-suit. They had evidently been enjoying a swim. He was also carrying two golden fruits.

“Maybe we are at fault,” he said in response to the reproach in Dm Sat’s eyes, “but it’s now been proved that Faetians can live on Terr. The planet will feed them. The labours of the colonists will be generously rewarded. This means an end to overpopulation on Faena!”

Dm Sat merely gave Ave a look; the other bowed his head in embarrassment.

“We simply carried out an experiment. Someone had to, otherwise there would have been no point in flying here.”

Smel Ven waited for many days, but in vain. Ave and Mada, Terr’s first inhabitants, enjoyed all the benefits of the paradise they had found and did not succumb to any form of illness.

After a sufficient period of time had elapsed. Dm Sat permitted the other Faetians to take off their space-suits.

They took this alien world of nature at once: the air, filled with strange perfumes, the bright light, unknown on Faena, and the unfamiliar sounds coming from the forest. Something would be walking about in there, hiding, leaping from branch to branch, shrieking, bellowing. Then, suddenly, all the noises would die down and from the depths of the forest Silence itself would seem to be watching the uninvited guests.

Chapter Three PARADISE FOUND

Dm Sat was regarding his companions with a kind of strange sadness, trying not to go near them. He made a sign to Smel Ven and climbed up into the rocket. The First Pilot of Quest found the scientist already lying on the couch in the common cabin. His cheeks were hollow and the pouches under his eyes were even more pronounced.

Smel Ven stopped a short distance away. His narrow face with the big bald patches on his head looked even longer because of the straggly little goatee beard.

“I feel a great weakness,” said the Elder. “I have no headache or rash. It might pass off. Let the Sister of Health stay with me; the rest can carry on with their work. However, I still consider it my duty to hand over the leadership of the expedition to you, as the ship’s commander.”

“So be it,” declared Smel Ven solemnly, drawing himself up as if on parade. “I assume all the authority! Henceforth, I shall be in charge of everything. And I order you, my aged friend, to lie down. You know where the provisions are. I forbid all subordinates to come near the rocket.”

“Even the Sister of Health?” asked Um Sat quietly.

“Even her,” snapped Smel Ven. “She will be useful to the others if they fall ill as well.”

Um Sat laughed weakly but said nothing.

“I am leaving now,” Smel Ven hastened to say.

“I am replacing you,” said the old man after him, but the hatch had already slammed shut.

Um Sat wearily closed his eyes. When would he stop making mistakes? Why ever did they think him wise?

Smel Ven assembled all the astronauts.

“Um Sat has ordered me to inform you that the camp is being transferred from the rocket into the forest. As it will be hard for the old man to spend the night there, he has delegated the leadership of the camp to me as his deputy.”

“But the forest’s dangerous at night,” commented Toni Fae.

Smel Ven looked at him contemptuously.

“I don’t know who is more graced with cowardice: the astronomer or the poet.”

Toni Fae flushed. Gor Terr interceded on his behalf.

“Caution is useful, even in a leader.”

“What risk can there be,” said Smel Ven aggressively, “if we’ve come to a world of love and harmony?” And he turned to Mada and Ave.

“Who’s threatening us?” said Mada, backing him up.

Ave nodded silently.

The explorers collected up everything they needed, armed themselves at Gor Terr’s insistence with pistols, though loaded only with stun bullets harmless to animal life, and set off into the forest.

Mada urgently wanted to see Um Sat, but Smel Ven refused to let her; he was anxious to get into the forest before darkness fell.

They pitched camp on the shore of the lake from which the stream fell into the chasm. White birds with curved necks were swimming on rippling water that was tinged with mother-of-pearl.

“Why do they have such long necks?” asked Toni Fae.

“To fetch up underwater weeds,” replied Mada.

“A very peaceful occupation,” commented Gor Terr.

The evening glow was already flickering in the sky when Smel Ven sent Mada and Ave to survey the other shore of the lake. They had to make their way across the stream, jumping from rock to rock.

They walked on, occasionally stooping under low branches, dressed in their clinging black suits and delightedly looking about them. Suddenly, they both stopped in their tracks.

A reindeer, its antlered head flung back, raced past in front of them. A powerful beast with a spotted hide was following it in great soft bounds. It overtook the reindeer and pounced on its neck. The victim, its artery bitten through, made a last desperate bound and collapsed under a tree. There was a bellowing sound. The beast was tearing its prey to pieces.

Ave snatched at his pistol to reload it with poisoned bullets.

“We daren’t take lives here,” intervened Mada. “We mustn’t bring Faena’s morals with us.”

“I’m afraid they already exist here.”

“But why?”

“The laws of life’s development on the planets are exactly the same.”

“But what about the watering place?” protested Mada weakly. “None of them attacked any of the others there.”

“A beast of prey can’t just slaughter animals. It lets them live, drink, propagate and grow. Otherwise it won’t have anything to eat. It’s like a forest animal-breeder: by catching the weakest when out hunting, it improves the selection of the herd.”

Mada made no objection. She walked along at Ave’s side, dejected, conscious of his hand on her shoulder. But suddenly he snatched it away and slapped his forehead. Mada involuntarily did the same. Then she stared in bewilderment at her fingers, which were stained with blood. It had become dark in the forest and there was a buzzing noise everywhere. Tiny flying creatures swooped on the Faetians and began stinging them. Ave and Mada had to pluck branches and beat the flies off.

They found Smel Ven alone in the camp. He was frantically slapping his cheeks and neck.

“Filthy creatures!” he swore. “We’d be better off in our space-suits.”

“I was terribly wrong,” began Mada at once. “Ave and I have just seen murder in the forest. Murder is committed here as on Faena! We must move the camp back to the rocket as soon as possible, to open ground where there aren’t any insects or beasts of prey.”

“We’re not going back to the rocket,” snapped Smel Ven. “There’s a far more terrible death in store for us there—the one that was lying in wait for Dm Sat.”

“What d’you mean?” Mada was outraged. “And you. Dm Saf’s deputy, wouldn’t allow me, as a doctor, to be with him?”

“Such was his will. It’s not just filthy flying creatures or spotted predators, but the hidden microworld that’s bared its teeth at us.”

“I’m going to Um Sat!” declared Mada.

“With me,” added Ave.

“Only cowards who’ve found a pretext escape by running away!” shouted Smel Ven after them, forgetting his own false warning.

Mada ran ahead. Ave could hardly see her outline in the swiftly approaching darkness. Suddenly, his heart contracted with pain. It seemed to him that Mada had been stopped by a gigantic round-shouldered creature with long, dangling arms. He drew his pistol, which he still hadn’t loaded with live ammunition, but noticed that Mada was not in the least afraid. Ave gasped with relief. That showed how badly his nerves had been set on edge by the forest episode! He hadn’t recognised Gor Terr. And now the puny Toni Fae also turned up.

Ave put his pistol away and only then did he see at least five figures like Gor Terr with him. The Faetoids knocked Toni Fae and the frantically resisting Mada off their feet. The whole gang of them charged at Gor Terr.

Ave dashed towards Gor Terr, but couldn’t tell him from among the similar round-shouldered, shaggy beasts. They sorted themselves out and all five of them hurled themselves on Ave.

He hadn’t time to draw his pistol. He merely shook off the assailants clinging to him. They were bigger than Ave, but had no idea how to fight. Using his fists and his feet, Ave scattered the beasts as they fell on him. Two of them writhed under a tree, the others flung themselves at Ave again. Throwing over his shoulder one who stank of sweat and mud, he glimpsed Gor Terr dealing with his opponents. Several shaggy carcasses were squirming at his feet. But still more of the enemy were tumbling down onto his shoulders from the trees. Ave tried to shout that he should run to open ground, but a shaggy paw clamped itself over his face. Ave twisted the paw till the bones cracked.

Mada was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Toni Fae. Only Gor Terr and Ave Mar continued the unequal struggle.

“Hold out, Ave!” shouted Gor Terr. “These are all of one local family!”

Ave flung aside the first assailants, but at least a dozen fresh ones leapt on him. Four taloned paws fastened on to each of his hands and feet.

The young Faetian summoned up all his strength, heaved and crashed to the ground, crushing his enemies underneath him. More shaggy beasts leapt onto the pile of weltering bodies. He felt as if he had been buried in a mine shaft: he could neither move nor breathe.

On seeing Ave’s predicament, Gor Terr rushed to help him. But it would have probably been easier to fell with one shoulder the wide-spreading tree under which the scrum had taken place than to come to Ave’s assistance. Then Gor Terr made a sudden leap and grabbed hold of a low branch. Two or three of the Faetoids, no shorter in stature than he was himself, hung onto his legs. The bough bent, threatening to crack. With an incredible burst of strength, Gor Terr hoisted himself up onto the bough with all the animals clinging to him. They dived head-downwards off it, howling frantically. Two more seemed to be waiting above Gor Terr, but were thrown down.

With an agility denied to his shaggy opponents, Gor Terr literally soared up to the topmost branches of the tree.

Despairing shrieks and roars came from below.

Gor Terr jumped down from the topmost branch and, it seemed, ought to have crashed into the paws of the beasts galloping in a frenzy round it, but by some miracle he seized hold of a branch on a neighbouring tree and ran lightly along it, although it bent under his considerable weight.

A way had been found, the only escape from the bellowing herd below.

Gor Terr couldn’t understand why none of the fanged beasts had bitten him. There was no time to think about it, and he continued running along the upper branches. He might well have been envied by his remote ancestors, who had come down from the trees of Faena once upon a time.

His pursuers, however, were running along below every bit as fast as he was himself.

At this point, Gor Terr saw something like a Faetian liana. It hung down from a distant, very high tree and was caught on one of the branches near him. Gor Terr seized hold of the living cable and flew downwards. He had a glimpse of the infuriated herd. Gathering speed like a swinging pendulum, he sailed over his pursuers’ heads and managed to kick the biggest of them. He was followed by a despairing wail.

Gor Terr caught sight of a waterfall below him. The liana carried him across to the other bank. He clutched at a branch, jumped down to the ground and started running.

The shouts of pursuit died down far behind him. The Faetoids were evidently afraid of water and could not cross to the other side of the river after him.

Gor Terr slowed down and breathed heavily, inflating his chest, and only then did he discover that in his confusion he had forgotten to bring his pistol from the camp, although he had been the one to insist that everybody should be armed.

He was overcome with horror. There was no one left now, except himself. He must hurry back to the rocket, but his news of what had happened to all the Faetians would be the death of Urn Sat.

He had no alternative, however. He decided to wait until dawn, believing that the Faetoids were nocturnal and feared the daylight.

He climbed a tree and settled himself on the topmost branch.

As he pictured his friends torn to pieces, he wept with grief and helplessness. The tears stuck in his beard, which was as matted as the hair of a Faetoid. At times, his reason was clouded with frenzy. Suddenly, in the pale glimmer of dawn, he saw one of the abominable creatures slowly coming along under the tree.

Round-shouldered, almost the same height, it was rolling from side to side at every step. Its back was covered with wool. The beast turned round, and Gor Terr realised that it was a female Faetoid. She was walking erect, and her forepaws dangled down to her knees. From time to time, she stooped to pluck a plant or grub up a root.

Gor Terr shook with fury, making ready to pounce on the beast and deal with her.

At that moment, something flashed past below and the Faetoid fell to the ground. She was being suffocated by the spotted animal that Mada had told him about.

Himself not knowing why, Gor Terr jumped down on the predator. The animal roared, trying to struggle free of the weight that had landed on its back. But Gor Terr jumped off and gripped it by the hind legs. The human giant pulled the beast towards him, raised it into the air on his outstretched hands and dashed its head against a tree-trunk, then flung the inert body to one side.

The Faetoid rose to her feet and stared at Gor Terr with curiosity rather than in fear. He even took offence.

“Am I really so like her fellow-creatures that I didn’t even frighten her?”

She approached him trustingly and said, “Dzin!”

Yes, that was what she said! These animals could pronounce articulate words. If they were not wholly rational, then in a million or more cycles they could become like the rational Faetians.

“Gor,” said the Faetian, pointing at his naked, hairy chest. His shirt had been ripped down to the waist.

“Dzin,” repeated the Faetoid, and she pointed at herself. It would be hard to say what thought process was taking place in the low-browed, sloping skull. However, she too was capable of the gratitude innate in many Faetian animals.

Dzin had obviously been overtaken by some kind of thought. She clutched Gor Terr by the hand and pulled him along, gibbering incoherently.

Was she taking him to her lair, acknowledging him not only as her saviour, but as her master?

Gor Terr frowned. He wanted to shoo her away and even raised his hand. But she waited for the blow so meekly that he thought better of hitting her. It occurred to him that she might lead him to the dwelling of her fellow-creatures. What if his friends were still alive? Could he miss a chance of going to their assistance? He pushed her forward and went after her.

Dzin was overjoyed and ran off, looking round at Gor Terr. Both moved fast and soon crossed the same stream. She knew where a tree lay across it. Dzin was afraid of water.

Then they walked through the Faetian camp on the shore of the lake. Gor Terr could see the traces of a violent struggle. Bags and scientific instruments lay scattered all round, but the victims of the struggle were nowhere to be seen. Smel Ven had evidently not been able to use his weapon and had been seized by the beasts.

Dzin looked at Gor Terr, but he prodded her firmly in the back. That was evidently the kind of treatment she understood best. She looked round, bared her fangs in the semblance of a grin and joyfully ran on ahead.

Soon she stopped and made a warning sign, if the movement of her paw meant anything at all.

Gor Terr looked cautiously out from behind a tree growing on the edge of a gully. On the opposite side he could see caves, and down below swarmed a herd of shaggy beasts. He could hear them growling, bellowing and shrieking.

Gor Terr saw Smel Ven among the Faetoid predators. He was standing proudly in their midst, with many of them clutching him. For some reason, they had not yet killed him.

At this point, Gor Terr realised that these creatures could not tie people up, they could only hold the prisoner with their forepaws while standing on their hind legs. But what if they didn’t slaughter their victim before devouring him? What if they didn’t like dead flesh?

The Faetoids began roaring down below. Smel Ven was hurled to the ground and the shaggy bodies piled on top of him, tearing him to pieces.

It was too much for Gor Terr. He felt sick.

But Smel Ven never uttered a groan or a cry. Gor Terr had never thought it possible to have such superhuman fortitude. He felt ashamed of his own weakness. He was almost about to jump down, but saw Mada, Ave and Toni Fae on the opposite cliff. They had evidently not been slaughtered so that they could be eaten alive. All of them, like Smel Ven, were unbound. But four beasts were holding each by the hands and feet. The Faetians couldn’t move an inch.

Gor Terr turned to Dzin. She sprang back and lay on the ground, pretending to have fallen asleep. Then she jumped up, waved her paw towards the beasts who were devouring their victim and again threw herself down on the ground.

The engineer understood. Dzin was trying to explain that they would go to sleep as soon as they had gorged themselves.

Dzin was right. She knew her fellow-creatures well.

They soon lay down in a heap and began snoring.

Only the sentries stayed in their places, pretending to be awake, but actually nodding their shaggy heads.

Gor Terr was not very hopeful of success. Still, he crawled to one side and silently moved across the gully. When he had crawled up to the cave in which the prisoners were lying, he jumped to his feet at the entrance.

Ave Mar was lying nearest to him with a useless pistol at his side.

Before the flesh-glutted sentries could make a move, Gor Terr proceeded to dispatch them by methods ordered by Yar Jupi in schools for the Superiors. He struck with precision in the morning light. The sensitive spots of the Faetoids were almost the same as those of the Faetians. The shaggy beasts rolled over without a sound. Gor Terr snatched up Ave Mar’s pistol and fired point-blank at the fourth Faetoid who was still gripping Ave by the hand. It was a stun bullet; the creature fell in convulsions and lay still.

The crash of the explosion terrified the other guards. They let Mada and Toni Fae go free. Mada seized her chance and hit one of them so deftly that he rolled down over the rocks.

Toni Fae had barely recovered his breath when Ave and Gor Terr hurled themselves on the dumbfounded guards.

Gor Terr fired a few more shots. Ave was throwing the feebly resisting beasts down to the bottom of the gully. Indescribable panic broke out down there.

The beasts had no idea of how to put up a fight. They had seized their victims with the sole purpose of eating them. After devouring the first, they had slept peacefully without even mounting a guard. And now—deafening claps of thunder, of which they had always gone in terror. Moreover, the corpses of their fellow-creatures were raining down on them as if from the sky.

The herd scattered, shrieking and abandoning the dead and maimed on the bottom of the gully.

Mada threw herself on Ave Mar’s breast and sobbed her heart out.

Toni Fae offered his hand to his friend and saviour.

In the corner of his eye, Ave noticed one more Faetoid at the cave entrance who was evidently intending to attack Gor Terr from behind.

He promptly sprang to the rescue, but Gor Terr’s huge arm held him back.

“This is Dzin, a female. She helped me to r-rescue you.”

Mada stared in amazement at the shaggy creature, who was not hiding her delight at Gor Terr’s strength and fearlessness.

Chapter Four AT THE PEAK OF CIVILISATION

When Quest lifted off for space, the body of Kutsi Merc was lying in an underground corridor. But the pool of blood under him did not dry up, as if the stiletto-pierced heart was still bleeding. Suddenly, Kutsi Merc’s hand twitched, fell on the wound and stanched it. The blood coagulated and stopped flowing.

It was a long time before Kutsi Merc moved again. Not one of many millions of Faetians could have survived his condition; not a single one except Kutsi Merc himself.

Kutsi Merc came from a roundhead family who had fled the continent of the Superiors after the Uprising of Justice was defeated. Yar Jupi was only beginning the Blood Bath there. Kutsi was still a small boy without a name of his own. Kutsi’s father, Khrom Merc, suspected of being sympathetic to the Doctrine of Justice, was earmarked for elimination by the Blood Guard. The Mercs were poor and could not afford to escape by ship. The three of them made an incredible journey on a raft knocked together by Khrom Merc. After harrowing days at sea, enduring storms that swept away their meagre provisions and a lull that brought an intolerable thirst, they avoided pursuit (none of the Blood Guard ever thought of looking for a raft in the ocean!) until finally, emaciated and at the end of their tether, they reached the coast of Danjab. But no one there had prepared a warm welcome for the refugees. They could not even find work in the fields and workshops of the proprietors, who were indifferent to anything that did not promise gain.

Reduced to desperation by poverty, Khrom Merc steeled himself for what he would have formerly rejected with disgust: he decided to make money out of his deformed little son.

Kutsi had two hearts. This “deformity” is exceedingly rare. On the continent of the Superiors, the parents had kept quiet about their son’s abnormality, afraid that he might be pronounced unfit and destroyed.

But here, on the continent of the Culturals, anything that could arouse even morbid curiosity could be a source of profit.

They began exhibiting the little boy at show-booths. Crowds of the curious came rolling in. And each spectator felt himself entitled to feel the naked, terrified “monster”. He was roughly turned round, cold tubes were applied to his chest and back, or ears were pressed to his skin in a repulsive manner. He was made to squat, dance to general guffaws and shouts, then again he was examined and auscultated. The rubbernecks shook their heads in bewilderment, marvelled and went away to tell, exaggerating wildly, about the weird monster they had seen with their own eyes.

The enterprising Khrom Merc managed to earn so much that he became the owner, first of a small workshop, then of big ones in which thousands of Faetians were employed by him.

Kutsi Merc grew up, remembering with shame and revulsion the days when his deformity had been “put on show”. However, not only his father profited by it. Soon, it transpired that the little boy was becoming uncommonly strong and tough. By tacit agreement between the son and his parents, his two hearts now became a family secret so as not to attract a wearisome curiosity about the boy in school. When he was given a new name on his coming-of-age (he was called Khrom-Merc Junior), he was named Kutsi (Shorty) because of his ungainly shape as a result of his having a double heart.

Kutsi soon grasped that he could make a virtue of his deformity. During the humiliating career of the “show-booth freak”, Kutsi Merc developed the traits of character that were to decide his profession.

Unsociable, cunning, venomous, hating the Superiors across the ocean, he possessed rare strength and stamina. He caught the attention of the Special Service. He was found suitable for intelligence work. His irreproachable knowledge of barbarian mores and the barbarian language enabled him to carry out many dangerous transoceanic assignments (but not on a raft any more).

Making his way up the secret ladder, intelligent and self-effacing, rational and decisive, the son of a proprietor and in no way sympathetic to the Doctrine of Justice, he came to enjoy a position of trust among the big proprietors who were selecting convenient rulers for themselves.

Dobr Mar’s predecessor had been so afraid of a disintegration war that he had been ready to give way to Dictator Yar Jupi, and so he had become useless to the proprietors. Kutsi Merc was able at that time to warn “the Ruler’s friend”, Dobr Mar, on what terms he could himself become Ruler, by being the first to start a disintegration war. That was the only way the proprietors, who were members of the Great Circle, thought of dealing with the proprietors of the Blood Council.

On becoming Ruler, Dobr Mar manoeuvred skilfully on the brink of war. When his re-election fell due and he had to take the prescribed step, he sent Kutsi on a diversionary escapade, even risking his own son’s life in his personal interests. Kutsi Merc was such an eminent spy that he could have refused the mission. But ever since childhood he had had his own score to settle with the Superiors. He could forgive them neither the Blood Bath, nor the misfortunes of his own family, nor the oppression of the roundheads. That is why Kutsi Merc became a “hunchback”, carrying on his back a disintegration charge to destroy the Dictator’s Lair together with all the technology delivered by the short-sighted proprietors of Dan jab.

Kutsi Merc had taken a dangerous risk and had lost, struck down by Yar Alt’s stiletto.

But it could never have entered Yar Alt’s mind, when he tugged the stiletto out of Kutsi’s heart, that the hunchback had a second heart.

Kutsi took a long, long time to regain consciousness. The second heart continued beating. Only an organism as unusual as his could win. But he was too weak owing to the enormous loss of blood.

When he came round and realised what had happened, he first of all took off his “hump” and examined it. It had been punctured in several places. The delayed-action fuse had been rendered useless. He threw the “hump” aside.

He was spurred on by a ravenous hunger. He must get out of this place somehow, although it seemed impossible. Kutsi, however, was not one to give up, even when the situation was hopeless.

Overcoming his pain and stomach spasms, he crawled over the stone floor, convinced that the Wall would bar his way. He could not believe the evidence of his own eyes when he saw a gap in it. After the battle of the brain biocurrents, when Yar Alt had mentally been trying to open the door and Lua to close it, no one had ordered the automatic system to close up the Wall. Also still open were the next two barriers through which Yar Alt had hurried and through which the dying Mother Lua had managed to crawl on her hands and knees.

At the familiar turn in the palace gardens, which Kutsi was hoping to reach, his way was barred by a high wall. He crawled off along Lua’s bloody trail. He would crawl a little way, stop out of exhaustion and then carry on further. And still Kutsi Merc was alive!

During the few hours that had elapsed, the spaceship Quest had lifted off from Cape Farewell. Yar Jupi himself had gone down into the deep underground bunker to begin the disintegration war on which he had finally decided.

The palace was empty. After switching off the energy that fed the palace’s automatic systems, the security robots carried a heavy box with slits on it down into the shelter.

And now the Wall in front of Kutsi Merc trembled slightly. He managed to insert his fingers into the gap and, to his great surprise, was able to assure himself that the Wall was yielding to his pressure. Finally, it parted enough for him to crawl through.

Then, without understanding how, he got to his feet and leaned back against the Wall. It trembled again and moved. Kutsi Merc fell down. (The power supply had been switched on again.)

Kutsi lay there gritting his teeth and trying to understand what had happened. He suddenly realised that the disintegration war was beginning and that he had failed to prevent it nevertheless.

He forced himself to rise to his feet. Everything went dark. He screwed up his eyes and stood swaying slightly, then supported himself by holding onto the priceless wood panelling on the walls. It finally led him out into the garden, fragrant with the Dictator’s celebrated flowerbeds. Kutsi felt very much like lying down and dying. He had even stopped thinking about food.

He decided that the disintegration war had evidently not yet broken out. He couldn’t hear any explosions, which meant that he must go on living! He did not allow himself to remain lying on the sand in the avenue, but crawled on until he was able to stand up from the kneeling position. He wanted to get to the Blood Door, hoping that it, too, would be open. He was right, and he crawled into the ruined shrine. He could wait there till dark in the familiar niche and at night he could make his way to the aged Nepts, a couple who were friendly with Kutsi’s parents. They lived in a former miners’ settlement near Pleasure City. Their youngest daughter, Lada, was married to a roundhead who had been educated in Danjab. They had flown to Space Station Deimo together.

Only Kutsi Merc, with his insatiable lust for life, could have made it to the Nepts that night.

When he entered their home, he collapsed on the floor in a dead faint.

The solicitous old couple, both overweight, flabby and white-haired, looking very much like one another as is often the case with a married pair who have lived together for a long time, carried his heavy, bleeding body across the room with difficulty and laid it down on some bedding in the corner.

Kutsi Merc had overlooked the fact that the cover of his “hump” had been riddled with bullet-holes and the subterranean air had been leaking into the charge. Although the detonator had not been activated, it was sure to explode after a time because of contact with the air.

That explosion was being awaited with terror by Ruler Dobr Mar, who was tired of guessing when it might happen. By destroying the anti-torpedo defence, the explosion would be the signal for a strike, with no chance of retaliation, against Powermania by rockets armed with disintegration warheads, as was desired by the proprietors who had put Dobr Mar in power.

Against any possible emergency, Dobr Mar had taken refuge in a deep bunker, still hoping that Kutsi Merc would be killed before he could detonate his “hump” and that the war desired by the Great Circle of proprietors would be postponed for a time. The Ruler of Danjab was preparing for a war, but he was afraid of it.

Above all, he wanted the disintegration weapon to stay where it was and things to settle down somehow … at least, until the next election.

Deep down below, a luxurious government office had been reproduced in every detail, circular in shape with a vaulted ceiling and highly placed oval windows that looked out on nothing. The communications monitors had been mounted underneath them.

Dobr Mar had changed. His face had lost its hardness and his eyes their penetration. He had become garrulous and seemed to be justifying himself to someone all the time. He even said to one of his military leaders with the intention of making it known to everyone:

“History will not forget the Ruler who started the disintegration war. Is that not so?” And he stared past the other man.

Dobr Mar was troubled by Ave Mar’s sudden departure for outer space, not because of his son’s fate, but because of Kutsi Merc. Why had the man allowed that flight? And what had become of him? Had he really perished in the end?

But everything turned out differently from what Dobr Mar had been expecting, and not as his enemy. Dictator Yar Jupi, had planned. Nor as the proprietors of the Great Circle or of the Blood Council had planned.

The moment came when the fuse in Kutsi Merc’s artificial hump functioned of its own accord. A deep underground disintegration explosion took place.

Kutsi Merc, who had been sitting on the Nepts’ bedding, felt himself hurled upwards. The floor of the cabin shook, the crockery rattled on the rickety shelves and the portrait of Dictator Yar Jupi fell down from its place on the wall. The transparent film in the window was torn apart and a violent gust of wind blew into the humble room, overturning the table. The sheets of paper covered with writing over which old Nept had bent his back, having taken it into his head to learn to write in his declining years, began whirling about in mid-air.

Kutsi Merc cringed as he waited for the blast. But the ceiling did not collapse. Kutsi limped over to the window.

Nothing, apparently, had happened. But there was no sign of the black spire over the Temple of Eternity.

One of Kutsi Merc’s eyebrows shot up. The left side of his face smiled, the other remained watchful. Suddenly, his face grew longer, his eyes widened and he turned pale.

Directly in front of the window, an enormous flowerbed rose up in the centre of the square and out from underneath it glided a smooth cylindrical body with a pointed nose. It grew taller before Kutsi Merc’s eyes and became a lofty tower. A moment later, black smoke began billowing from the shaft hidden underneath and the tower began, to rise on a column of fire. Then it detached itself from the square, gained height and set course for the ocean. Soon, the rear end of the rocket turned into a fiery cross which steadily diminished to a tiny glittering star. Only then did it vanish altogether.

Kutsi Merc’s hair stood on end. He already knew that not only here, but at a thousand other points on the continent, from identical subterranean shafts, from under the surface of the seas, perhaps even from buildings, terrible rockets were bursting forth to head in a deadly swarm for Danjab.

Kutsi Merc was right. Activated by the automatic systems, the rockets had indeed burst out of their hiding places and, programmed to hit the vital points of Danjab, were speeding across the ocean. One of those rockets rose from the multistorey block in which Ave and Kutsi had been staying, and another was to soar straight up from the Temple of Eternity, where it had been camouflaged as one of the columns. The temple had collapsed at the subterranean explosion of Kutsi’s “hump”. However, the Central Automatic Defence Console, which was at a great depth, had not been damaged. Its sensitive instruments, only just detecting the radiation caused by the disintegration explosion, immediately sent their signals to thousands of rocket installations.

Dictator Yar Jupi was terrified when the bunker shook. He learned from the instruments about the explosion and the response of the automatic systems and he realised that the disintegration war had begun earlier than he had intended. He rushed up and down the cramped shelter. He craved action. But it had all been done without him.

He was alone. No one could see him except the mindless secretary box which was unable to appreciate the Dictator’s joy and triumph. Forgetful of his personal fears, he giggled and danced about. He was filled with a delicious excitement at the knowledge that in a short time the cities and industrial centres of Dan jab would be destroyed and tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of enemy Faetians would cease to exist. He had never experienced a pleasure like this before. Now that the war had started, let it spread! He had achieved his aim: to command life and death over the whole of the planet Faena! And so, grimacing because of a nervous tic, he pulled back the curtain in front of the live screens.

The questioning and distraught faces of the military leaders were staring at him from them. Yar Jupi directed a mad glare at the servile faces and, foaming at the mouth in a burst of inspiration, he screamed:

“What? You weren’t expecting it? You were marking time? Well, hear this. I’ve done it! I! I’ve blown up the Temple of Eternity and the palace to activate the automatic systems! What? Are you frightened?”

He ran round the bunker, shouting, although the screens were blacking out one after another. The military leaders were obviously not in agreement with their lord and master and preferred to take cover as quickly as possible in their bunkers, which were similar to the Dictator’s own. When the secret screens of the Blood Council’s members were switched on, they revealed the unhooded, frightened faces of the first proprietors of the ancient continent.

The barbarians’ rockets went above the limits of the atmosphere as they flew over the ocean. Their approach was spotted at once by the ever-vigilant automatic observers far from the targets to which the rockets were flying. Without any help from the military or from Ruler Dobr Mar, the rocket defence system went automatically into action. A flock of defence missiles soared up from Danjab and headed for the disintegration armada. They were themselves packed with disintegration warheads intended to explode when close to any missiles that flew towards them.

And the disintegration explosions occurred one after another in the upper layers of the atmosphere, over the ocean. The shock waves threw the rockets off course or simply destroyed them. Mangled fragments and sometimes even whole torpedoes fell into the ocean, to the great horror of seafarers from both continents. It was as if a meteorite shower had plunged into the ocean, raising to the cloudy sky columns of water like the weird trees of a forest that had suddenly sprung up in the sea.

Over eight hundred rockets were destroyed by Danjab’s automatic sentinels. But over two hundred continued on their way.

During those first moments of the disintegration war, not a single Faetian took part except for the wounded Kutsi Merc. Not one Faetian was killed in that appalling battle of the rockets.

But this was only during the first few moments.

Soon, Danjab began to tremble under disintegration explosions in hundreds of different places.

A disintegration explosion!

Is there anything to compare with it? Perhaps only the supernovas or the mysterious processes which astronomers have observed on Sol, when enormous tongues of white-hot matter have been ejected over distances many times greater than the star’s diameter.

Matter itself was disintegrating, part of it was ceasing to be matter, its mass was diminishing. The energy of the internal bonds was being unleashed and, converted into heat energy according to the laws of nature, was raising the heat level at the place of disintegration by a factor of millions. All the surrounding matter that remained as matter was instantly converted into white-hot gas that shot out in all directions, wiping out everything in its path. But even faster was the action of the radiation that accompanies the disintegration of matter. Penetrating living tissue, its impact was fatal. Even long after the explosion, the impact of those rays was to destroy all who had survived the firestorm or the devastating hurricane.

On the site of each disintegration explosion, a fireball rose up first, immeasurably brighter than Sol itself. Light of such brilliance had never been known on the gloomy planet Faena. This brilliant ball became a pillar of fire that rose up like the white trunk of a magic, gigantic tree, growing up and soaring into the sky, where it spread out in a swirling canopy.

Shuddering, Dobr Mar saw on the communications monitors those ominous mushrooms sprouting on the sites of flourishing cities.

He was appalled. As he paced round his study, he felt himself keeling over; his knees buckled and he slumped into an armchair, scarcely able to clutch hold of it.

What had happened? How had the enemy anticipated him? What about Kutsi?

What had become of the Faetians who were to elect him for another term? They were dead, dead! Thousands, maybe millions, maybe hundreds of millions had ceased to exist!

The military leaders rushed into his office and hastened to help the old Faetian with the shaking head… He was groaning; his left leg was twitching, but his right leg, like his arm, had gone numb.

The military leaders bustled about the circular office and sent for the Sister of Health. They tried to pour water and broke the tumblers. No one was yet capable of understanding the full gravity of the position.

The disintegration war, when they mentioned it, sounded like something horrible but impossible, like a children’s fairy tale. Even now, when the ominous mushrooms could be seen on nearly all the monitors in the bunker and many of the screens were black and networking, the scurrying Faetians still didn’t want to believe that it was all over up above. It was somewhere far away, but here, what was close and visible was the Ruler’s weakness, the Sister of Health fussing over him and the unpleasant odour of medicines.

The dejected military leaders made no decisions and issued no orders.

Once again, commands were given by automatic systems.

Dictator Yar Jupi, who had not such secret communications with the enemy continent like those maintained by Kutsi Merc through the roundheads did not suspect that Danjab had no less reliable a “retaliation system” than the Superiors.

Instruments recording the disintegration radioactivity in the air, the seismic effects of the explosions on Danjab territory and the force of the heat blasts, gave firing commands to countless rocket installations, also camouflaged on the seabed, in deep mine shafts and in mountain gorges. An armada of vengeance had already set off to fly across the ocean to Powermania.

Only Kutsi Merc had foreseen this. No sooner had the coloured, swirling cloud risen up before his eyes than he managed to dive into a disused shaft in which Nept had worked all his life and over which, when it was exhausted, he had built his own cabin. Kutsi Merc took cover in a narrow stone well down which he climbed by means of damp metal rungs.

His weakness seemed to have passed off. Nervous tension had given him back his strength.

He couldn’t see anything any more, but could hear and, it seemed, felt with every cell in his body the terrible explosion that rocked the vicinity. Stones rained down on Kutsi; one of them struck him painfully on the shoulder. But Kutsi clung convulsively to the rungs. Even now, he refused to give in.

Chapter Five CRATERS IN THE WILDERNESS

The exultant and triumphant news about the outbreak of a disintegration war was picked up by Ala Veg on Space Station Dei-mo.

Terribly frightened, unable to believe her own eyes, she read the automatically taped report in which there was news of disintegration strike unleashed on Danjab, the continent of the Gutturals, about the extermination of tens of millions of the enemy, if not more.

With the sole feeling that the explosions had fortunately taken place on the other continent and her children were alive, Ala Veg ran out to report about this terrible event to Mrak Luton, the station commander.

He did not admit her. Puffed up and pompous, as if his office had been invaded by dozens of Faetians awaiting an audience, he made Ala Veg stand for a long time outside the door before he let her in.

He glanced over the proffered papers, stood up and shouted hoarsely:

“Joy! This means happiness for us! May they be without end, the cycles in the blissful life of Dictator Yar Jupi! At last it has come to pass! The continent of Danjab is being cleansed of the scum that settled there!”

Nega Luton ran in and, after a glance at the papers, threw her arms round Ala Veg’s neck.

“What happiness, my dear! At last our mission here is being accomplished and the roundheads needn’t move to this accursed Mar, but will be settled on the newly available spaces of Faena. I’ve been so homesick for comforts, services and refined society. Haven’t you too, my dear?”

Ala Veg seemed turned to stone.

“Is the disintegration war over already?” was all she could manage to say.

“Not yet, of course!” announced Mrak Luton portentously, “but this war will be won by whoever delivers the most devastating salvo. And we are going to do the same too.”

“Who are ‘we’?” asked Ala Veg uncomprehendingly.

Mrak Luton sounded the general alarm and left his office for the big cabin next door in which Mada and Ave had stayed only recently.

Soon, the entire crew of the space station was assembled there. The timid Tycho Veg came, as did the flustered, out-of-breath Brat and Lada Lua.

Mrak Luton read out the news concerning the annihilation of Danjab’s main cities.

Nega Luton closely watched the expressions on the faces of those present. She did not miss Brat Lua’s horror. His now pale face was like polished bone. Lada Lua burst into tears.

“I will not tolerate treachery,” Mrak Luton shouted at her, “even if it expresses itself in pity for the enemy. I order an automatic ship to be sent to Phobo immediately.”

“What? To the enemy?” said Nega Luton in astonishment.

“With a disintegration warhead,” explained Mrak Luton.

“That’s another matter.” And Nega Luton sighed with relief.

“The gentle lady should be ashamed to say such things!” Lada Lua could not help saying. “She is a Sister of Health, after all!”

“Silence!” roared Mrak Luton. “Engineer Tycho Veg and assistant servant Brat Lua! In the name of the Dictator, I order you to fit a missile with a disintegration warhead on the station’s ship and program it for automatic flight to Phobo.”

“A disintegration warhead?” asked Tycho Veg. “But there isn’t one on the station.”

Mrak Luton roared with laughter so that his flabby jowls quivered.

“Don’t be so naive. Engineer Tycho Veg! You will find the warhead in space at the end of the greenhouse to which it was delivered as a spare cabin for the ship.”

“I object, profoundly thoughtful Mrak Luton,” exclaimed Brat Lua. “The blessed Dictator of Powermania concluded a treaty with the Ruler of Dan jab. There cannot be any disintegration weapon in space.”

“Treachery!” roared Mrak Luton. “You’re under arrest, you roundhead traitor! Engineer Tycho Veg, tie the mutineer’s hands!”

Tycho Veg glanced in indecision at his wife.

“If the disintegration war has begun, it means… Clearly, all treaties are invalid,” she said timidly.

Tycho Veg reluctantly obeyed the order. He and Mrak Luton pushed Brat Lua into the chief’s office. Mrak Luton locked the door.

“Now proceed to the greenhouse, quickly,” he ordered Tycho Veg. “I took measures for the disintegration warhead to be close at hand!…”

With a glance at his wife, Tycho Veg went despondently to the lift-cage.

“I proclaim the station to be in a state of emergency. Any act of disobedience will be dealt with not by arrest, but with a poisoned bullet!” And Mrak Luton brandished his pistol.

“Gentle sir, please spare my husband. He didn’t know that the treaty wasn’t valid any more,” said Lada Lua, rushing up to the station chief.

“Quick march to your stations, all of you!” roared Mrak Luton. “The astronomer Ala Veg will report all space observations to me and maintain electromagnetic communications. But your place, roundhead woman, is in the kitchen.”

Mrak Luton collapsed into his armchair, exhausted. His rectangular face with the pendulous jowls went purple, his neck swelled. He tugged at his collar, unable to breathe properly for want of air.

On the other Marian orbit, on the station near Phobo, news of the disintegration war had been brought by Engineer Vydum (Inventor) Polar. His intelligent face, always keenly alert, now expressed horror and dismay. He had earned his name for an early inclination to invention. He had once built a walking steamcar, had made magnetic fastenings for clothes and sprung running shoes, and had obtained a fine strip of dried wood which in some other age on some other planet would have been called paper. He was invariably assisted by his friend, the talented, always cheerful, small and mercurial craftsman Al Ur, who regarded Vydum as an unrecognised genius. He was with him this time too, and had hurried after him into the station chief’s office to back his friend’s demands.

There was one more Faetian who had taken note of the unsuccessful inventor. This was Dovol (Content) Sirus, a powerful proprietor. He was not averse to profiting by Vydum Polar’s abilities, and, on his wife’s advice, had married Vydum to Sveta, his daughter by his first marriage, a mild, quiet girl, totally submissive to her powerful stepmother, who ruled the family with a rod of iron in order to further its social influence.

Dovol Sirus, a sleek, almost bald Faetian with heavy features and thin lips, took fright on meeting Vydum Polar.

Usually genial, always ready to agree with the other person, he was the personification of prosperity, sufficiency and equanimity. But his peace of mind had now been shattered. His small eyes darted here and there almost in dismay. When he heard Vydum Polar’s news, he promptly sent out a call for the greenhouse nurserywoman, his wife Vlasta Sirus.

Vydum Polar passionately tried to drive his point home to the station chief.

“I am prepared personally to take a ship to Deimo, and I am prepared to take my wife and Mila Ur. Her husband will stay behind with you to look after the machinery. Space has been declared peaceful. The war of disintegration that has just broken out is our common misfortune: we must share it with the personnel on Deimo.”

Dovol Sirus nodded his agreement, glancing at the door from time to time.

Sveta was his favourite.

On the insistence of his vociferous wife Vlasta, Dovol Sirus had made use on Faena of the pre-war jitters to acquire influence over Dobr Mar in Danjab. He had even obtained the rank of general from him. True, when a disintegration war became imminent, Vlasta Sirus made General Sirus get as far away from Faena as possible and become chief of a space station, taking his stepdaughter with him and her luckless husband.

“You’ll fly from here, but what about us?” asked Dovol Sirus uncertainly.

“We’ll come back as soon as we’ve discussed with our unfortunate brothers from Faena what’s to be done next…”

“What’s the meaning of all this gadding about?” came the fruity voice of Vlasta Sirus as she entered the room. “I shall never let Sveta go. I am as a mother to her.”

“But, my dear-” objected the station chief.

“What if the people on Deimo take our ship for a torpedo? They’ve got defence rockets too, you know.”

“But, my dear…”

“’My dear, my dear’!” mimicked Vlasta. “We have a daughter we love. She must be rescued. By any possible means.”

Vlasta Sirus cast a withering glance at her husband from under knitted brows and compressed her thin lips.

“But my dear… I promise you. Our ship will surely fly to Station Deimo. And you and I, you and I only, will appoint the crew members.”

Vlasta Sirus slapped the table with the flat of her hand.

“Exactly—you and I. And that will be the most reliable crew! We must preserve our lives! Preserve them! In this war, what matters most is to survive!” And she ran a glare of hatred over all three Faetians. “To survive!”

Helplessly wringing his hands. Brat Lua was pacing up and down inside the office that was now his prison.

Tycho Veg was uncomplainingly carrying out his assignment without even giving a thought to the possibility that the disintegration warhead in the spare cabin might be inadequately screened and dangerous to any Faetian who approached it.

To get to the spare cabin, he had to float all the way along the greenhouse through the air-roots that seemed to be trying to hold him back. But he pulled his weightless body forward by clutching at them so as to carry out as quickly as possible the chief’s order, which had been confirmed by a nod from Ala Veg. He tried not to think about his children’s fate, as he tried not to think about anything at all: neither the Faetians on Station Phobo, nor himself. In spite of himself, however, he was thinking that there were only two spaceships at the station. Would six people be able to fly to their native planet in one ship? Of course not! It was only a three-seater. Evidently, they would have to wait for another ship from Faena.

The spare cabin, which resembled a conical cap, was floating not far from the long cigar of the ship, to which it was attached by a cable.

Tycho Veg put on his space-suit and, securing himself with a line, kicked himself off from the greenhouse airlock and floated off into the silvery darkness of space.

He miscalculated and did not reach his goal straightway. He had to wind himself back by pulling in the line hand over hand and then push off again.

This time, he propelled himself with one leg only so as to give his jump better direction.

The spare cabin looked rough to him, like a meteorite. Tycho Veg clung to it and crawled towards the base of the cone, where the cable to the spaceship was secured.

He seized hold of the metal bracket outside the spare cabin and taking up the cable that ran to the ship, began pulling it towards him together with the cabin. After a short time, the cabin came into contact with the ship. Tycho Veg had steeled himself for a tough job. To his great astonishment, however, he noticed that the parts of the ship had been designed for instant replacement. It only needed one contact with the joint for the automatic machinery inside to be activated and for the old cabin to detach itself easily from this ship and sail away towards the stars. The new cabin fitted itself into place with the same ease.

Tycho Veg crawled inside to set the automatic pilot.

Another surprise awaited him inside: there was no need for him to readjust the settings.

The impersonal voice of the automatic machine warned him about this the moment he touched the control panel. All he had to do was to switch on the automatic pilot and go back to the greenhouse.

As soon as he was there, he saw the rocket’s nozzles begin blazing; after making a precisely calculated turn, the ship headed for Phobo on a course that had been unerringly checked by the machines.

Tycho Veg sighed. He had only been doing his duty. He never even gave a thought to whether the warhead had been properly screened.

When he emerged from the lift-cage into the station corridor, he was met by a pale and trembling Ala Veg.

“What’s happened, darling?” asked Tycho.

“Our children… Children…” was all that she could say, and she burst into tears.

She was holding in her hands a tablet inscribed with the latest news by electromagnetic communication. Tycho read it and swayed, resting his hand on the lift-cage door.

The news was that flocks of disintegration torpedoes from Danjab had descended on the continent of the Superiors. There had been devastation and casualties… But Yar Jupi foresaw victory and demanded rejoicing.

Mrak Luton ran into the corridor, waving his arms.

“The Dictator is alive! The Dictator is alive! The Blood Council is continuing the struggle! To your stations! This is a space outpost!”

“Can our observer be in her place?” sneered Nega Luton, who had appeared after him. “She should be worrying about her relatives, not about winning the war.”

Her eyes flashing, Ala Veg went into the observatory.

Tycho Veg was left standing in the corridor. He just couldn’t make sense of what was happening; he just couldn’t believe that his native Pleasure City might be lying in ruins, and his children…

He followed his wife into the observatory.

“I can’t keep watch because of my tears,” said Ala Veg as she turned to him. “Take my place at the instrument. A strange star has appeared in that quarter.”

“Could it be our ship with the warhead?” “No, it’s somewhere else.”

Tycho began helping his wife and they soon established that the unknown star was not obeying the usual laws of celestial mechanics and seemed to be choosing its own flight trajectory.

Summoned by the alarm signal, Mrak Luton rushed into the observatory and peered suspiciously at Tycho and Ala Veg.

“News from Faena? Orders from the Dictator? An instruction from the Blood Council?”

“No,” replied Ala Veg. “Communications have broken down. We have also lost contact with Station Phobo.”

“With Phobo?” bellowed Mrak Luton. “Treachery? Who dared to communicate with Phobo, the enemy fortress in space?” He drew his pistol and brandished it threateningly at them.

“I am simply reporting that communications with them do not exist. The former channel has gone dead, as if something had happened there.”

“It hasn’t happened yet! But it soon will! Are you watching our torpedo’s flight?”

“It’s flying dead on course, but…”

“What else?”

“It’s being intercepted by an unidentified ship. Apparently from Phobo. It seems to be heading for us. Is it possible that the station personnel have packed and are flying to us?”

Mrak Luton roared with laughter.

“So as to surrender? To dump themselves on us? To gobble up our food supplies? To breathe our oxygen? Or do they want to escape the punitive torpedo?”

“But they might not know we sent it.”

“But I know their ship’s coming our way. Engineer Tycho Veg, I order you to fire a defence rocket. The approaching ship must be destroyed.”

“What d’you mean ‘destroyed’?” protested Ala Veg. “Mightn’t there be living Faetians on board?”

“Living Faetians?” jeered Mrak Luton. “As if there were living Faetians flying in our ship with the warhead! I’ve issued my orders. Send out defence rockets, knock it out, destroy it!” Mrak Luton stamped his foot in a frenzy and brandished his pistol.

Tycho Veg left the observatory. He knew where the defence rockets were. They were not covered by the Agreement on Peace in Outer Space. They were short-range missiles and could not reach another station, but they were capable of locating in space and destroying the target approaching Deimo.

To activate these defence weapons, Tycho Veg did not have to descend into the greenhouse. It was enough to go to Station Deimo’s Central Console.

He fired the defence rockets when the ship from Station Phobo was clearly distinguishable as a point glittering in Sol’s rays.

He returned to his wife in the observatory, looking dejected and drained of his strength. He felt he had done something dreadful.

Ala Veg could not hold back her tears.

“There are Faetians on board, there could be living Faetians on board,” she kept repeating. “And no news from Faena.”

“Our children can’t possibly have been killed,” said Tycho Veg, who had no grounds whatever for such a statement.

He squinted through the eyepiece and saw something flare up in space like a nova. One of defence rockets had exploded on encountering the ship from Phobo.

On the big screen displaying the image, the ship-star plunged steeply after the explosion towards the surface of Mar. It had been knocked out of orbit by the force of the blast, but not destroyed.

All the Faetians on the station assembled in the observatory, except for the imprisoned Brat Lua.

Mrak Luton personally came to fetch him.

“Let him watch!” he said, pushing Lua into the observatory and showing him the mass of Mar in the porthole. “Let him watch with his own eyes!”

“Are you so sure that’ll knock some sense into him?” asked Nega Luton quietly.

Her husband grinned complacently.

“I know the inner world of the Faetians too well to be wrong. Otherwise I wouldn’t be Supreme Officer of the Blood Guard.”

The six Faetians on Deimo saw another star flare up in space and go out again.

“They’ve knocked out our torpedo!” And Mrak Luton stamped his foot.

Then, on the surface of Mar, two disintegration explosions occurred in succession. In the russet deserts, the trunks of fabulous trees could be seen from space as they soared up into the sky, billowing out into swirling canopies. The distinct shadows of first one and then a second gigantic mushroom lay across the sandy wilderness.

“What did I tell you!” roared Mrak Luton. “They wanted to be the .first to wipe us out. Their ship with its warhead exploded first. But you were just whining, you were talking about living Faetians.”

“The station chief is right,” sighed Tycho Veg. “He can see into the Faetian soul.”

“Engineer Tycho Veg! Stop drivelling! I know what I’m worth! Go back to the greenhouse at once and fit one more ship with a torpedo.”

“But we won’t have any more ships left,” said Tycho in an attempt at protest.

“Victory! Victory at all costs! A ship will be sent for us as heroes of the disintegration war from the triumphant continent of the Superiors.”

“To hear is to obey,” said Tycho Veg with a covert glance at Ala Veg.

But she sat with bowed head, her hands dangling down in despair.

Tycho Veg left to set up another ship-torpedo.

However, this second missile was also knocked out by defence rockets fired by the Culture Is on Phobo.

A second volley of defence rockets was launched from Deimo to beat off yet another ship that was glittering in the rays of Sol and might also have been primed with a disintegration warhead.

Both ships, the one from Phobo and the one from Deimo, blew up almost side by side in the deserts of Mar. First, monstrous mushrooms on stalks of smoke rose up on the site of the explosions, and then, when the smoke had dispersed, it was possible to see from above craters in the deserts of Mar which had not been there before.

“How amazed the astronomers would be,” said Ala Veg in a sinking voice, “if they found craters like that on Mar.”

Tycho did not react at all to these words. He had barely reached the Central Console from which he had been discharging the defence rockets. He was feeling really ill this time. It seemed to him that there had been children flying to them in the ships and that they had been killed.

Chapter Six JUDGEMENT

Sheltering in the deep abandoned mine-shaft, Kutsi Merc had survived the disintegration blast. The thunder above had long since died away.

It was damp underfoot. The raindrops were falling from above as if counting the moments. It seemed to Kutsi that they were measuring out infinite time. He sat there without strength or thoughts, dozing or in a faint. Only hunger made him rise to his feet. But he was afraid to see what awaited him above; he was afraid even to imagine it.

The raindrops were falling noisily, the only sounds to indicate that the world still existed. The world? What world? Dead puddles and dead raindrops?

His ravenous hunger drove Kutsi up the slippery metal rungs. Some of them wobbled. Kutsi could fall to the bottom of the well. And it would all be over. But the metal rungs held. There was a little blue circle high up above. Strange! The Nepts’ cabin had been built directly over the mine-shaft.

The sky! With stars in it! Was it really night?

Kutsi climbed on upwards. The circle above him was growing bigger and brighter, and the stars were gradually disappearing. But certainly not because day was breaking. It was simply the effect of a darkened chimney, when stars are visible from the bottom in the daytime. The circle overhead was growing bigger while they were disappearing. Kutsi climbed out on to the surface.

Sol was at its zenith. The Nepts’ cabin no longer existed. It had evidently been blown away when the stones were falling on to his shoulders.

The Faetian looked round and was dumbfounded. Not only had the Nepts’ cabin disappeared, not a single roundhead shack was left standing. Everything around had been turned into an enormous refuse tip of garbage, pathetic kitchen utensils, smashed furniture and rubble. A jagged wall rose at an angle in the distance.

Kutsi made his way over to it. And immediately stumbled on the first corpses. The Faetians had been killed by the windstorm that had followed the disintegration explosion. Many were buried under the wreckage of their shacks, many had been carried through the air and dashed against any solid object in their way.

That was what had happened to the old Nept couple. Kutsi recognised their mangled bodies by their clothes.

A chill ran up and down Kutsi’s spine. He had heard plenty about the disintegration weapon, but had never imagined that it would look like this after an explosion.

The wall he had reached proved to be part of some huge workshops in a suburb of Pleasure City. The building had collapsed, burying machines and the Faetians who worked in it. In its place towered an ugly pile of rubble.

Had no one survived at all?

Kutsi Merc’s two hearts were thudding painfully in his breast and his temples throbbed accordingly. Why had the wounded one recovered?

Himself not knowing why, perhaps in the hope of meeting at least one living Faetian, Kutsi began wandering round Pleasure City.

His hunger, dulled by the initial horror, made itself felt again. Kutsi’s mind was in shock, and instinct was forcing him to look for something edible in the mass of rubble.

Two mountainous ramparts rose like grey barkhans on either side of what had been a street. In one place, under the fused stones, he thought he saw food containers. He began digging into the pile and came upon a protruding hand. He could not force himself to dig any further and went on between the dunes of ash-covered rubble.

He had the feeling that he was wandering along an enormous dump of builders’ rubble.

Kutsi had never thought that the devastation could be so complete. It was even impossible to make out the shapes of former buildings. There could be no thought of finding something to eat in this pile of rubble.

Kutsi was suffering the torments of hunger. And this combination of horror with the pangs of hunger was unnatural. He was disgusting even to himself.

However, a more powerful emotion was beginning to get the better of Kutsi.

Who was to blame for what had been done? Who had made a war of disintegration the purpose of his doctrine? Who had turned the continent into such a wilderness strewn with ashes?

Kutsi was overcome by a frenzied hatred of Dictator Yar Jupi; it flooded his whole being, it overshadowed everything that he had known, even the stipulations which the Great Circle of the proprietors had made about unleashing a disintegration war and which he had once reported to Dobr Mar. Kutsi Merc had failed to carry out his mission! The automatic systems console was intact. Yar Jupi had begun the disintegration war first!

When he climbed up the cone of rubble, Kutsi saw the ocean. Its shore was disfigured by a gigantic crater, now flooded with sea water. A torpedo had evidently exploded in the port. The enormous crater was ringed by a rampart that had covered part of the ruins. Clouds of sand and ooze had been thrown up from the seabed into the air during the explosion and had then fallen as dry ash onto the ruins.

Hatred, horror and the hopelessness of his position drove Kutsi further on. The results of a shock wave are freakish. In one place, he stumbled on the cross-section of a rocky hill with window openings and shapeless patches. When he went closer, Kutsi saw a pile of scrap iron driven into a wall.

In front of him he saw the wreckage of a steamcar that had been passing that way at the time of the explosion.

Nearby, on the fused stone, shone patches vaguely suggestive of Faetians.

Kutsi shuddered: “The white shadows of passers-by!” The pedestrians themselves had been vapourised by the incredible heat, but their shadows had been imprinted by the exploding star right there on the wall where the outlines, the mangled images of those who not long ago had been living human beings now showed up as lighter, less fused areas on the wall…

Kutsi could not bear it any longer. He ran back. His foot struck a stone that rolled over the slag of the roadway. A smashed jar of something edible! He picked it up. It proved to be carbon inside. The unprecedented heat had coked the contents, converting it into a black, coagulated mass.

Kutsi wanted to get to the central quarters of the city. But he already knew what he was going to see there: shadows on the walls, if the stones had not been piled into shapeless heaps, and endless ramparts of rubble…

Then Kutsi made a decision. What he had been through had clouded his mind. Not a single Faetian in possession of his faculties would have decided on the crazy plan that hatched out in Kutsi’s inflamed brain.

Kutsi knew that he was doomed: the deadly radiation had long since penetrated his body. It would soon begin to make itself felt. There was very little time left. He had no hope of survival whatever! Nor had he any desire to live among the dead.

However, he considered himself under obligation to do his last duty.

With his characteristic determination, he went back across the heaps of rubble to the Great Shore where, not so long ago, a sea wave had brought Ave and Mada together.

The further away he was from the site of the explosion, the more hope there was of finding something to eat. A house lizard with charred skin was lying under a wall just like the bodies of the Nepts. The affectionate, quick-moving, nimble lizard had, of course, been a general favourite of the dead couple.

Kutsi laughed bitterly. The Supreme Officer of the Blood Guard had met him on the ship and had called him a carrion-eater. Had it occurred to the man that he would prove to be right?

Only at night did Kutsi reach the Temple of Eternity, or rather the mountain of stones lying where it had once stood. If his “hump” had been the cause of the explosion, then it might be possible to find a way into the underground by way of the crater.

Kutsi was certain that the electric power system had been put out of action and that the automatic doors would not be working.

He proved right in one respect and wrong in the other.

Only in the morning did he manage to find the way into the deep corridor where the explosion had occurred. The gallery was less cluttered with stones than everything else around, since the gases had shot out of it as from a gun-barrel.

Kutsi’s frenzied will-power helped him to dig out the entrance into the underground where he had been “killed” by Yar Alt.

His old self again, Kutsi made his way like a spy along the walls, lighting his path with a pocket torch. But suddenly a bright light came on of its own accord. Kutsi Merc was overjoyed at this, but he was also frightened by it. If the supply to the underground rooms was still working, he would not be able to get through the closed walls. Yar Jupi was still alive. He was still sending disintegration torpedoes against Danjab. Kutsi Merc had no right to retreat.

A blank wall rose up in front of him. When Kutsi had crawled outside from there, the walls had been divided, which meant that this must be another route leading to the Dictator’s underground Lair.

Kutsi Merc tried in vain to separate the walls, driving into a chink a piece of metal he had picked out on the surface.

Beads of cold sweat started up on his brow. He could not back out, he simply could not do it! He fixed a glare full of hatred at the spiral ornament on the accursed wall.

The wall divided.

Kutsi was well versed in the technology of automatic machines that could memorise the brain biocurrents. He instantly realised that they had been programmed to a particularly strong character trait of the chosen Faetians. For Yar Jupi himself, whom all automatic machines had, of course, to obey, the predominant characteristic was hatred. It was answered by the “blood doors”, which were also tuned to Mada’s kindly nature and that of her nanny. But Kutsi’s hatred now was evidently not inferior to that of the Dictator himself. And so the automatic machines of the Lair went into action.

Kutsi ran along the illuminated corridor. Each time the wall barred his way, Kutsi’s glare of hatred opened it.

After a steep downward slope, the corridor made a turn, emerging into a spacious apartment reminiscent of a palace hall with a vaulted ceiling. There was no furniture in it except for a huge cupboard with shining vertical slits.

Two enormous robots with cubic heads and articulated tentacles came rushing straight at him.

Kutsi guessed that he must have reached his goal. The Dictator’s bunker!

Hatred made Kutsi Merc invincible. He rushed at the robots, ordering them to follow him. And the robots obeyed, programmed to respond to the Dictator’s principal emotion.

Kutsi Merc stopped before the secretary-box, not admitting to himself that it might refuse to obey him.

“Open the study door!” he commanded, fixing his gaze on the machine’s glowing slits.

The machinery of the Faetians was so sophisticated that it detected their moods. This height of development had its vulnerable side.

The secretary-box, manufactured in Dan-jab, was simply a machine always obedient to the will of its owner, the Dictator of Powermania. It now recognised this will in Kutsi and obeyed it.

The door to Yar Jupi’s study opened.

Yar Jupi jumped up from the table and stared in terror at the burly stranger with a wrestler’s neck and a sneer on his face.

“Who are you?” shouted the Dictator, shaking from head to foot.

“Your judge,” replied Kutsi coldly, advancing on him.

If Yar Jupi had not been in such a panic fear of living Faetians and had not kept them at a distance, Kutsi’s plan would not have worked. But this time Kutsi was face to face with the Dictator in person.

“Robots! Security robots!” yelled Yar Jupi in a voice hoarse with terror.

The robots ran in, ready for action.

“Tie his hands together!”

It was not Yar Jupi, but Kutsi who gave the order in a voice full of hatred.

Yar Jupi raged, screamed and ordered the robots to obey him, but his brain was radiating terror, not the hatred so familiar to the robots.

The robots unthinkingly bound the Dictator’s hands.

“You are the greatest criminal of all time!” announced Kutsi Merc, standing before the helpless Dictator. He considered himself the only one who had survived to act on behalf of all the victims. “I bear within me the hatred of all the victims of your criminal doctrine, whose goal you made destruction and whose meaning was hatred. But there is a hatred greater than yours. I bring that hatred down on you in the name of the history of Reason!”

“I pray you for mercy,” whined the Dictator. “Not many are left alive on Faena. I shall work humbly, like the last roundhead; I shall acknowledge the Doctrine of Justice, I shall grow flowers. Just look at the beauty I have raised. Let us go to the niche, let us savour the fragrance of those blossoms together.”

“Silence. I shall not let you breathe the scent of your own flowers. Prepare yourself for the most shameful execution of all. I am going to switch on all the monitor screens and before the eyes of your fellows / am going to hang you!”

Kutsi Merc tore down the curtains covering the screens. The monitors lit up.

The terrified military leaders and members of the Blood Council watched helplessly from them.

Kutsi deftly pulled a cord out of the curtains, deftly tied a noose, jumped onto the desk and attached the cord to the chandelier hook. The noose dangled directly under the lamps. The table had to be moved aside.

Then Kutsi stood Yar Jupi, who was shaking with terror, on the Dictator’s chair as if he were no more than a will-less puppet.

The robots moved away, watching the proceedings impassively. Kutsi noticed that on several screens the military leaders had covered their eyes with their hands, while on the others, the Faetians, with their cowls thrown back, were watching the progress of the execution with malignant glee.

“In the name of History,” announced Kutsi Merc, and he kicked the chair from under the Dictator’s feet.

Dobr Mar only came round from time to time, half-recumbent in the Ruler’s chair and in a far from comfortable position.

All the screens in the bunker were dead. The lamps of the emergency lighting glowed dully.

The military leaders and the anguished Sister of Health were still fussing over the Ruler. Her name was, Vera Fae. All her family had perished up above: father, mother, husband, three daughters—all except her son, who had flown to Terr with a space expedition. Vera Fae was in despair. She could find strength only in attending to the sick Ruler.

Dobr Mar had lost the power of speech. His tongue, right hand and right leg were paralysed. He could only communicate with his eyes. Vera Fae alone could understand him.

Haggard, her hair turned white in the last few hours, with tear-stained eyes, she had not lost the gentle touch and warm voice of the doctor—all that the Ruler could respond to.

There was no one to take over from him. The “Ruler’s friend”, who was supposed to do so according to the law, had been killed up above, like millions of other Faetians.

The military leaders announced through Vera Fae that the reserve torpedoes had been expended. But barbarians’ torpedoes were still showering down on their own continent, leaving a scene of total devastation.

The Ruler made an attempt to move. The Sister of Health looked into his eyes, trying to read his thoughts.

The chief of the disintegration weapons came up. He had been entrusted with that terrible means of aggression because of his known cowardice and reluctance to make his own decisions. Even this time he, too, wanted at all costs the Ruler’s written consent to the detonation of the last, superpowerful underwater disintegration device which had been delivered under Kutsi Merc’s supervision to the Great Shore, almost to the very place where Ave and Mada had once been surf-riding.

Dobr Mar could not understand the showily overdressed general who, his voice rising to a falsetto, tried to convince the Sister of Health by saying, “The destruction of the Dictator’s underground Lair is our only salvation. Such is the will of the Great Circle.”

Dobr Mar wearily closed his eyes.

“He agrees! He agrees!” said the hunchbacked general delightedly.

But Dobr Mar opened his eyes again and, in an effort to say something, stared at his desk.

Vera Fae took some inscribed tablets off it and held them in front of his eyes.

On seeing one of them, Dobr Mar looked down.

Vera Fae showed the tablet to the general.

“I know that!” he screeched like a cockerel. “When he invented the disintegration weapon, the honoured Elder Dm Sat wanted to restrict its use and frightened the Faetians with the apparent prospect of all the planet’s oceans being blown up.”

Dobr Mar closed his eyes.

“Does Ruler Dobr Mar agree?” persisted the general. “Can the Sister of Health sign on his behalf a document authorising the detonation of the underwater disintegration device?”

“How can I do that if the Ruler himself has reminded us of the great Elder’s warning?”

“A naive fabrication! As if all the waters of the oceans, in the event of a superpowerful explosion, would immediately disintegrate, releasing their energy like a supernova. And as if our whole planet would be turned into a tiny supernova.”

“Don’t you find that terrifying?” asked the Sister of Health.

“What could be more terrifying than what’s already happened? The Dictator of Powermania must be stopped at all costs. An underwater explosion by the Great Shore will start an earthquake; it will destroy his bunker down there. The oceanic tidal wave will rise to the heavens, crash down on the Lair and flood it. If the Sister of Health can convince the Ruler, he will agree. His written order is needed for the explosion. He alone is responsible for everything.”

The Sister of Health looked into the dim eyes of the sick man. He closed them.

“He agrees, at last he agrees!” howled the general, seizing the Ruler’s lifeless hand and applying it to the plate. “Explode it!” shouted the general in a thin voice and, his leg dragging, he ran out of the study, plate in hand.

Dobr Mar watched him go with a frightened look. He wanted to say something, but was unable to.

The Sister of Health came to her senses and tried to stop the general, but the Ruler felt worse and she had to help him, wiping his face that was twisted in a grimace and was covered with beads of sweat.

The general returned. The order had been passed on. The explosion would take place…

“I take no responsibility for anything!” he shouted.

Chapter Seven THE STAR OF HATRED

Every Sister of Health has something of the mother in her.

Her desire to help a sick man, her maternal attitude to a suffering person, now helpless as a child and therefore as dear to her as if he were her own, were struggling in Mada with a keen, unjustified, as she considered, homesickness.

Unable to understand this feeling and rejecting it, she looked devotedly after Um Sat, whose life was now fading…

With his large beard, his piercing, yearning (for Faena, of course!) eyes, he was lying motionless on his couch. His illness was delaying the return of Quest and intensifying the homesickness that Mada and her colleagues felt for Faena.

As a Sister of Health, however, she had to rise above her personal sufferings and she looked after the Elder, trying to cure his mysterious illness, since a speedy return might mean his salvation. But there could be no thought of that with Um Sat so seriously ill. Mada looked after him devotedly; she was not only a Sister of Health to him, but a spiritual confidante. She admitted to him her yearning for Faena and received in return the Elder’s terrible confession that all the oceans on Faena might blow up as a result of a disintegration war. Mada shuddered, frowned and shook her head in protest.

By shouldering part of the Elder’s alarm, she eased his condition, affirming that matters could not go as far as such a catastrophe and they would surely go back to their Faena where they were so eagerly awaited.

On Mada’s instructions, Ave and Gor Terr went hunting in the forest. She would not let them touch the provisions intended for the return journey.

Return journey! It was a goal, a dream, a passionate desire, and it was not felt by Mada alone.

She told Toni Fae to stay by the electromagnetic communications apparatus which, for some strange reason, had gone silent. The thread linking Quest and their native planet had snapped. Mada reassured Toni Fae that the atmosphere of Terr was to blame: it was blanketing off the electromagnetic waves from Faena and Mar.

Toni Fae was desperate to go home. He could not sleep. He would doze off at the apparatus, then wake up in a cold sweat, now hearing his mother, Vera Fae, calling him, now imagining that it was Ala Veg laughing at him. But the apparatus remained silent. There were times when Toni Fae couldn’t bear it any more. Then Jvlada’s gentle hand would rest on his trembling shoulder and her calm, soft voice would assure him that the state of Terr’s atmosphere would change; they need only wait, and he would hear the longed-for signal.

Um Sat, however, was not so easily pacified. Mada knew what he thought about a disintegration war and how it had been tormenting him even before they had left Faena.

Ave was gloomy for the same reason.

He was no longer the sensitive youth who had made such an impression on Mada as he rode the ocean waves. He had changed inwardly and outwardly. After growing a moustache and a beard on Terr, he looked much older, calmer, more self-assured and stronger.

Mada knew that by sending her husband out hunting, she was subjecting him to danger. But as she thought about all the crew, she could not act otherwise, for she had faith in his strength, agility and courage.

Consequently, when, apart from a reindeer rescued from a beast of prey, Ave brought back a spotted hide with its jaws fixed in a snarl, Mada was not surprised, seeing it as only natural.

Ave was morose. He said nothing to Mada, but she knew everything! And she feared not so much the something terrible that could happen out there, perhaps somewhere far away, as for her “children” whom she was looking after here, although these children were Ave, Um Sat, Toni Fae and Gor Terr.

The long-armed and stooping Faetian giant was missing his native planet as badly as everyone else. The primitive mode of life which he and Ave, as the main providers, had to lead here was unpleasant and even offensive to a skilled engineer.

As he wandered through the densely packed tree-trunks on the alien planet, Gor Terr never ceased making grandiose plans for technical improvements that there was no one to implement on Terr: there were neither workshops, nor assistants, and so there could not be any progress or civilisation.

Around them lay the alien, primeval forest. From time to time, they would glimpse antlers or the spotted hide of a predator. Who was going to win?

Gor Terr stubbornly shook his head. No! This life was not for him! He didn’t want to be like his ancestors with their clubs and stone axes, however much he might resemble them physically. He was not going to be like the savages of the Stone Age. Let other Faetians colonise other planets, but he was going to return to workshops, steamcars, rockets and skyscrapers!

One starry night, in despair of ever hearing a signal over the electromagnetic communications, Ton! Fae began searching among the stars for the faintly visible Faena, as if hoping to see a light signal.

And then he saw one!

The young astronomer couldn’t believe his eyes and rushed to the star map. Was he looking at the right place? No, he hadn’t made a mistake. Faena should be passing through that particular constellation between Alt and Veg.

The little star had evidently been swamped by the brilliant flare of a supernova. Somewhere immeasurably far away, beyond the fringe of the Galaxy, the latest cosmic disaster had taken place and the light of a once exploding star had finally reached Sol and its planets. And only by chance had the supernova blotted out Faena. He must now wait until the planet, travelling across the sky on a complex path divergent from that of the stars, emerged from the brilliant light of the supernova and began to shine at a distance with its usual faint, but so very dear and appealing light.

The supernova, however, shining more brightly than all the other stars, except for Sol in the daytime, seemed not to want Faena to get away. It was moving across the sky, not like a star, but like a planet…

Ton! Fae caught his breath. He started rousing Gor Terr, who simply wouldn’t wake up and merely bellowed in his sleep.

Ave Mar woke up and applied his eye to the eyepiece.

Yes, an unusually bright star was blazing in the night sky. It was clearly visible to the naked eye; it was like a lantern in the sky. But there was something in its effulgence that made Ton! Fae’s heart beat faster in alarm.

Ave understood everything at once. He had long been keeping to himself the secret that Dm Sat had entrusted to him about the danger hidden in the oceans. And now out there…

Mada came in from the big cabin in which Um Sat slept. She was as white as a sheet. She had only been suspecting it, but when she looked at her husband, she understood everything.

“My dear Toni Fae,” said Mada. “Prepare yourself for the worst. Tell me, is your new star moving across the sky the way Faena should be moving?”

“It doesn’t make sense, but it’s true.”

“Faena doesn’t exist any more,” said Ave Mar gloomily, and he put his arm round Mada’s shoulders.

“To be more precise, the former inhabited Faena doesn’t exist any more,” corrected Mada. “A star has lit up in its place, but not for long.”

Toni Fae looked at Mada and Ave with frightened eyes. He took off his spectacles and methodically wiped the lenses.

“So Faena doesn’t exist? And what about Mother?” The young astronomer looked with childlike eyes at Mada, as if she ought to dispel a terrible dream. “Why hasn’t it lit up for long? No! Isn’t it just that they’ve found a way of signalling to us?”

“My dear Toni Fae, it really is a signal to us…”

“Just as I said!” exclaimed the young Faetian happily.

Ave stood with bowed head.

“It’s a signal that there is nowhere for us to return to,” he said with an effort.

“What’s going on here?” came Gor Terr’s rolling bass voice.

Ave Mar took a deep breath.

“The disintegration war, which we have all been so afraid of, has evidently taken place on our unhappy Faena. And its civilisation has committed suicide.”

“What utter r-rubbish!” yelled Gor Terr. “Leave our civilisation in peace. It gave us all we have here.”

“That’s not enough for us to carry on living here.”

“That’s the last thing I’m aiming to do!”

Toni Fae rushed to his friend as he had done that time in the cave…

“They’re saying that…” he whimpered like a child, “that life has perished on Faena, that the planet has flared up for a time like a star.”

“That’s impossible,” objected the engineer calmly. “There’s been some kind of observation error here. A disintegration war can wipe out a planet’s inhabitants, I’m not disputing that. But it can’t annihilate a planet as a heavenly body. Mass is mass, it can’t just disappear. And what does ‘has flared up for a time’ mean?”

Mada looked inquiringly at Ave.

“We must go down to Um Sat,” he said. “Back on Faena, he told me about one of the secrets of the disintegration of matter. If a superviolent explosion should take place in the depths of the sea and if the heat level should reach the critical limit, then all the water in the oceans would instantly split into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen would become helium, in this way releasing so much energy that the planet would flare up like a star during the reaction.”

“Damnation!” whispered the engineer.

“Um Sat warned both Dobr Mar and Yar Jupi of this. They wouldn’t listen to him.”

“If all the oceans blow up at the same time, then the planet shouldn’t just flare up,” said the engineer. “Under the impact of shock from all directions, it should be broken up into pieces…”

“To be scattered later,” confirmed Ave Mar. “And countless cycles later, its fragments, colliding and breaking up, would spread out along Faena’s former orbit.”

“How can you say all that?” shouted Toni Fae, clenching his fists. “My mother was there, and my little sisters…”

“My mother was there too,” replied Ave Mar sadly.

Toni Fae began sobbing. Gor Terr drew him towards himself, patting him on the shoulder.

Ave and Mada exchanged glances and said more by doing so than could ever have been conveyed in words. Then they held hands.

“So that’s why there were no electromagnetic communications,” said Toni Fae, still sobbing. “War had started up there.”

“And on the Mar stations?” boomed Gor Terr.

“Perhaps on them too,” confirmed Ave Mar sadly.

“No, no!” protested Toni Fae, looking in terror at Ave with eyes full of tears. “It can’t be possible out there too!”

Ave shrugged his shoulders.

“There are Faetians on them as well.”

“Ala Veg is there!” shouted Toni Fae. “She’s not one of them!”

“Calm yourself, Toni Fae,” said Mada gently. “I think we should still tell Dm Sat about the end of Faena.”

“Wretched carr-rion-eaters! Why couldn’t they value what they had? They’ve destroyed thousands of millions of lives! How much higher and more humane the local Faetoids are!”

As he shouted this, Gor Terr charged round the cabin in a frenzy.

“Calm down, friend Gor Terr,” said Ave. “It’s hard for us to bear the horror that’s come down on all of us when we’ve not only lost our dear ones, but…”

“Towns, fields, r-rivers, forests, seas, oceans!” wailed Gor Terr.

“Yes. And oceans,” confirmed Ave Mar sadly.

Gor Terr glared at him almost with hatred.

Then he sighed and said very quietly this time:

“Yes, it’s easier for you. There are two of you.”

“There are five of us,” said Mada.

“If the Elder survives the shock.”

“He has been readying himself for it too long,” replied Mada. “He saw it all coming.”

“I was the one who didn’t see anything coming. I was dreaming about new spaceships, about wonderful cities on new planets, about incredible machines that I was inventing in my mind.”

“It will all have to be done on Terr,” said Mada softly.

Gor Terr burst into a roar of forced laughter.

“Forget about civilisation once and for all, forget about technology. Make clubs and stone axes. If you have children, you won’t be able to teach them anything that the unhappy Faetians knew. Civilisation means workshops and Faetians toiling in them. Civilisation means writings that preserve the treasures of thought. All that is gone, gone, gone! And it cannot exist here either!”

Gor Terr was shouting in a frenzy. Toni Fae was frightened by this fit of fury, but his attention was distracted by a signal from the electromagnetic apparatus. The indicator lamp was winking on and off. The astronomer rushed to the set.

“At last! Now the nightmare is over! You see, they’re worried about us, they want to tell us that it was a supernova, not Faena at all. How could we have assumed such a thing?”

The Faetians watched Ton! Fae, each trying to retain at least a glimmer of hope.

Finally the chesty voice of a Faetess was heard in the cabin. Toni recognised it as Ala Veg’s.

“Quest! Quest! Quest! Can you hear me? There has been a dreadful catastrophe! We shall never have a homeland again. Faena has blown up for some unaccountable reason, although it was recently intact, in spite of a disintegration war that broke out on it. Quest! Quest! Quest! Hostilities between Deimo and Phobo have ceased. If you too have been fighting amongst yourselves, stop the conflict. There aren’t any more Gutturals and there aren’t any more Superiors. There are only three small groups of unhappy Faetians who have lost their homeland. Are you alive? If only you are still alive! Can we live on Terr?”

Ave Mar put out the light in the observation cabin. The starry sky was now clearer than ever, and so was the new star blazing in it, the malignant Star of Hatred.

Did an exploded planet actually exist in the Solar System?

In 1596, when he was investigating the laws governing the structure of the Solar System, Kepler suspected there might be a planet missing between Mars and Jupiter. At the end of the 18th century, the scientists Titius and Bode gave a series of numbers: 0.4—0.7—1.0—1.6—2.8—5.2… It reflected the distance of the planets from the Sun. The distance of the Earth from the Sun was taken as unit. But there was no fifth planet with an Earth-Sun distance of 2.8. The astronomers searched and began discovering, one after another, the “minor planets” and even smaller bodies, or asteroids, which were moving on a common orbit. They were fragmentary in shape and seemed to have formed during the DISINTEGRATION of a destroyed planet. The German astronomer Hermann Oberth 150 years ago expressed the hypothesis that such a planet had once existed. In our own times, Professor Sergei Orlov, analysing this hypothesis, gave the planet the romantic name of Phaeton. His work was continued by Academicians Alexander Zavaritsky and Leonid Kvasha. Soviet research, notably that of Yekaterina Gusakova, has shown that the residual magnetism of the meteorites could be explained only by their magnetisation as parts of a big mother planet. Felix Zigel (1963) determined its size as approaching that of the Earth. However, neither the advocates nor the opponents of this hypothesis have successfully accounted for the destruction of the planet. If Phaeton blew up like a high-explosive bomb, its fragments would have flown apart in elongated elliptical orbits round the Sun, but they have remained in their old circular orbit… If two cosmic bodies had collided in space, then their fragments would also have flown in elliptical orbits and would not have formed a ring on the former orbit of the planet. It is suggested that meteorite swarms form in at least ten places on the ring of asteroids. It is possible that they are created by the collision and disintegration of the former planet’s fragments. Meteorites are falling on Earth to this day, but they include so-called tektites which, perhaps, fell on Earth only once as a consequence of a colossal nuclear explosion in space. All the more so that the form, composition and dehydration of the tektites are identical with nuclear slag.

Thus, a supposition about the cause of its destruction has been added to the hypothesis of a Phaeton that existed in the past.