e out on the other
side, climbed a hill and wiped his bare head that the dew had wetted. The
forest reservation that surrounded the Nerve Clinic was not a big one and
Erg Noor soon came to a road. The stream had been diverted into a series of
basins of milk-coloured glass, keeping them filled with water. Several men
and women in bathing costumes ran round a bend in the road and raced on
between rows of brightly coloured flowers. The autumn water could hardly
have been warm but the runners, encouraging one another with laughter and
jokes, sprang into the basins and in a jolly crowd swam down the cascade
from basin to basin. Erg Noor smiled in spite of himself. It was rest time
at some local factory or farm.
Never before had our planet seemed so beautiful to him who had spent
the greater part of his life in the close quarters of a spaceship. He was
filled with profound gratitude to all people, to Earth's nature, to
everything that had helped to save Nisa, his astronavigator with the auburn
curls. Today she had come to meet him in the clinic gardens. After a
consultation with the doctors they had arranged to go away together to a
polar sanatorium for nervous disorders. As soon as the scientists had
managed to break the chain of paralysis and put an end to the persistent
inhibition of the cerebral cortex caused by the discharge of the "cross"
beast's charge through its tentacles, Nisa had become quite healthy. She had
only to regain her former energy after such a long cataleptic sleep. Nisa
was alive and well! It seemed to Erg Noor that he would never be able to
think of that without an impulse of joy somewhere inside him.
He saw the solitary figure of a woman coming rapidly towards him from a
side path. He would have recognized her among thousands-Veda Kong, the Veda
who had been so much in his thoughts before it had become clear that their
paths in life were different. Erg Noor was accustomed to the diagrams of the
computing machines and his thinking followed the same lines-he saw a steep
arc sweeping upwards into the heavens-his own urge-while Veda's path of life
and work left her hovering over the planet to delve into the depths of
centuries passed and gone. The lines diverged until they were far apart.
Erg Noor knew every tiny detail of Veda's face but he was suddenly
surprised to notice the resemblance she bore to Nisa Greet. The same narrow
face with eyes placed wide apart, the same high forehead with the long
upward sweep of the eyebrows, the same expression of gentle irony in her big
mouth. Even their noses were both slightly snub, softly rounded and a bit
long, just as though they were sisters. The only difference was that Veda
always had a direct and pensive look while Nisa Greet would throw her head
back in youthful exuberance or would lower her forehead and knitted brows to
meet an obstacle.
''Are you examining me?" asked Veda, surprised.
She held out both hands to Erg Noor who took them and pressed them to
his cheeks. Veda shivered and pulled herself away. The astronaut gave a weak
smile.
"I wanted to thank those hands for having nursed Nisa. She ... I know
about everything! Somebody had to be in constant attendance and you gave up
an interesting expedition. Two months...."
"I didn't give it up, I was late for it, waiting for Tantra. The
expedition had left by then, and well ... she's charming, your Nisa! We look
alike but she's the real companion for the conqueror of the Cosmos and the
iron stars, with her urge to get back into space and her loyalty."
"Veda!"
"I'm not joking, Erg, I mean it. Don't you feel that this is no time
for jokes? We must make everything clear!"
"I find everything clear enough as it is! And I'm thanking you for
Nisa, not for myself."
"Don't thank me. It would have been difficult for me if you'd lost
Nisa, that's why...."
"I understand but still I don't believe you because I know that Veda
Kong could never be so calculating. And so my gratitude remains."
Erg Noor patted the young woman's shoulder and placed his fingers in
the crook of her arm. They walked side by side along the deserted road in
silence until Erg Noor spoke again.
"Who is he, the real one?"
"Darr Veter."
"The former Director of the Outer Stations? So that's it!"
"Erg, you are saying words that mean nothing. I don't recognize you."
"I suppose I must have changed. I can't imagine Darr Veter apart from
his work and I thought that he was a Cosmic dreamer."
"He is. He dreams of the world of stars but he has proved able to
combine the stars with an ancient farmer's love of Earth. He is a man of
knowledge with the big hands of the simple mechanic."
Erg Noor involuntarily looked at his narrow hand with the long fingers
of a mathematician and musician.
'"If you only knew, Veda, how much I love our Earth at this moment!"
"After the world of darkness and a long journey with paralysed Nisa? Of
course, you do!"
"You don't believe that love for Earth can provide the basis of my
life?"
"I don't. You're a real hero and will always be thirsting for deeds.
You will carry that love like a full bowl from which you are afraid to spill
a drop, carry it on Earth in order to give it to the Cosmos for the sake of
that same Earth!"
"Veda, you'd have been burnt at the stake in the Dark Ages!"
"I've been told that before. Here's the fork.... Where are your shoes.
Erg?"
"I left them in the garden when I came to meet you. I'll have to go
back."
"Well, good-bye, Erg. My job here's finished and yours is just about to
begin. Where shall we meet again? Perhaps it will be only before you leave
on the new ship?"
"Oh, no, Veda. Nisa and I are going to a polar sanatorium for three
months. Come and see us and bring Darr Veter with you."
"Which sanatorium? The 'Stone Heart' on the north coast of Siberia or
'Autumn Leaves' in Iceland?"
"It's too late for the northern polar regions. We're being sent to the
southern hemisphere where the summer will soon begin. The 'White Dawn' in
Grahamland."
"All right. Erg, we'll come if Darr Veter does not start out
immediately to rebuild Satellite 57. There'll probably be a long time spent
on getting materials together."
"That's a fine terrestrial man for you-almost a year in the sky!"
"Don't try to be smart. That's quite near compared with your tremendous
spaces, the spaces that divided us."
"Do you regret it, Veda?"
"Why do you ask, Erg? There are two halves in each of us, one half is
anxious to get at the new, the other half cherishes the old and would be
glad to return to it. You know that and you also know that return never
achieves its aim."
"But regret remains like a wreath on a beloved grave. Give me a kiss,
Veda, my dear!"
The young woman obediently complied with the request, pushed the
astronaut lightly aside and strode swiftly away to the main road where there
was an electrobus service. Erg Noor watched her until the robot driver of
the first bus to arrive stopped the vehicle and her red dress disappeared
inside.
Veda also looked through the glass at Erg Noor as he stood there
immobile. Her head was filled with the refrain of a song dating back to the
Era of Disunity that had recently been reset to music by Arck Geer. Darr
Veter had once repeated it to her in response to a gentle reproach from her.
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee!
This was the challenge of a man of ancient days to the menacing forces
of nature that had taken his beloved from him ... the challenge of a man who
was not reconciled to his loss and did not want to make any concessions to
fate!
The electrobus drew near the branch of the Spiral Way but Veda Kong was
still standing by the window holding on to the polished hand-rails and
humming the beautiful romance filled with such sweet sorrow.
"Angels-that's what religious Europeans in the old days called the
imaginary spirits of heaven, the heralds who made known the will of the
gods. Angelas meant 'herald' or 'messenger' in the ancient Greek language.
It's a word that has been forgotten for centuries...." Veda shook off these
thoughts while she was at the station but they returned to her in the coach
of the Spiral Way train.
"The Heralds of Heaven, of the Cosmos-why, that's what we might call
Erg Noor and Mven Mass and Darr Veter. Especially Darr Veter when he will be
in the nearby, terrestrial heaven, building a satellite...." Veda smiled
mischievously. "Then the demons down under the sea that's us, the
historians," she said aloud, listening to the sound of her own voice, and
laughed merrily. "Yes, that's right, the angels of heaven and the spirits of
the under world! Only Darr Veter may not like it."
Low cedars with black needles, a variety impervious to frosts that had
been developed for the subantarctic regions, sang solemnly and monotonously
in the never-slackening wind. The cold, dense air flowed like a swift river,
carrying that extraordinary purity and freshness with it that one associates
with the open ocean and high mountain ranges. When the wind comes in contact
with the eternal snows of the mountains, however, it is dry, it tends to
burn, like sparkling wine. Here the breath of the ocean made its heavy touch
felt as the wind wrapped the body in a humid mantle.
The building of the "White Dawn" Sanatorium stretched down to the sea
in terraces, the rounded form of its glass walls resembling the huge ocean
liners of ancient days. The pale vermilion tones of the walls, staircases
and vertical columns were in sharp contrast to the domed masses of the
chocolate and violet andesite cliffs, cut by blue and grey porcelain-like
paths of cast syenite. The polar night in late spring, however, made all
colours alike in its specially white light that seemed to come from the
depths of the sky and the sea. The sun had hidden for an hour behind the
plateau to the south. A majestic arc of light covered the southern half of
the sky, reflected from the giant ice-cap of the southern continent that
still remained on the high plateau of the eastern part to where it had been
moved back by the will of man who had reduced it to one-quarter of its
former mass. The icy white dawn, whose name the sanatorium bore, turned the
whole countryside into a phantom world of light without shadows or
reflections.
Four people were coming down the silvery porcelain path to the ocean.
The faces of the two men who walked behind seemed carved out of grey granite
and the big eyes of the two women were bottomless and mysterious.
Nisa Greet, pressing her face against the fur collar of Veda Kong's
jacket, was arguing with the historian. Veda, making no effort to conceal
her faint amazement was looking into that gentle face that outwardly
resembled hers.
"I believe that the best gift a woman can make to the man she loves is
to re-create him and in this way prolong the existence of her hero. Then
another loving woman will create a new copy-why, it's almost like
immortality!"
"Men feel differently about us," answered Veda. "Darr Veter once told
me that he would not like to have a daughter that was too much like the
woman he loved because it would be hard to go out of the world and leave her
behind without him, without the cloak of his love and tenderness, leave her
to a fate of which he would know nothing. That's just a relic of the
jealousy and protection of the old days."
"I cannot bear the thought of parting with a tiny being that is mine to
his last drop of blood," continued Nisa, full of her own thoughts, "of
giving him up to the school as soon as I have finished nursing him."
"I can understand you although I do not agree," said Veda, frowning, as
though the girl had touched a painful string in her heart. "One of mankind's
greatest victories is the conquest of the blind instinct of maternity, the
realization that only the collective upbringing of children by people
trained and selected for the job can produce a man of our society. That
insane maternal love of the past has almost died out. Every mother knows
that the whole world is kind to her child and that he runs none of the
dangers he formerly did. And so the instinctive love of the she-wolf that
arose out of fear for her progeny has disappeared."
"I understand all that but only with my mind," said Nisa.
"I not only know it but feel it, I know that the greatest happiness is
to bring joy to another and that is now possible for anybody, irrespective
of age. That which was possible in former ages for parents and grandparents,
and most of all for mothers.... Why must one always be together with the
little one? That's also a relic of ancient days, when the woman was
compelled to live" a narrow life and could not always be together with the
man she loved. You'll always be together, as long as you love each
other...."
"I don't know, but sometimes I feel an overpowering desire to have
beside me a little one that is like him, it is so strong that I clench my
hands in despair ... no, I don't know anything."
"There's Java, the Mothers' Island. Those who want to bring up their
own children live there, those who've lost their dear ones, for example...."
"Oh no! And I couldn't be a teacher, either, like those who have some
special love for children. I feel that I have great strength and I've been
into the Cosmos once already."
"You're the personification of youth, Nisa, and not only physically.
Like all people who are very young you don't realize when you come up
against contradictions that they are what go to make up life. You don't
realize that the joy of love will most certainly bring anxiety, cares and
sorrows that will be the greater, the stronger the love. And you think that
you'll lose everything at the first blow struck by life."
As she uttered those last words Veda herself became aware that Nisa's
restiveness and anxiety were not to be explained by youthfulness alone.
Veda had made a mistake common to many people, that of believing that
spiritual traumas heal together with physical wounds. That, however, is not
the case, for wounds to the psyche remain for a long, long time, hidden deep
down in a physically healthy body, and they may open up at any moment from
the most insignificant of causes. Such was Nisa's case-she had been
paralysed for five years and it had left its impress in every cell of her
body; even if the memory was subconscious it still remained-the horror of
her meeting with the terrible cross that almost been the death of Erg Noor!
Nisa guessed what Veda was thinking about and answered her in a dull
voice.
"Ever since the iron star there is a strange feeling that has never
left me. Somewhere there is an empty place in my heart. It continues to
exist together with confident joy and strength and does not exclude them and
at the same time does not disappear. I can struggle against it only by means
of something that will employ me entirely and will not leave me alone with
... Oh, now I know what the Cosmos is for a lonely man and have even greater
respect for the first space travellers!"
"I think I can understand," said Veda. "I was once on the tiny
Polynesian islands that are lost in the ocean. There, standing by the sea in
a moment of loneliness, you are overcome by a profound sorrow that is like a
nostalgic song merging with the deadly monotony of great distances. Perhaps
that is a memory of the distant past, n memory of the primordial isolation
of his consciousness telling man how weak and helpless he formerly was, shut
up in his own little cage of a soul. The only cure was common work and
common thoughts-a boat came, smaller, even, than the island, but it was
enough to change the ocean. A handful of companions and a ship is a world of
its own striving towards distant objectives that they can reach and
subordinate to their will. The same is true of the Cosmic vessel, the
spaceship. In that ship you are together with strong and brave companions!
But alone in the Cosmos," Veda shuddered, "I don't suppose a man could stand
it!"
Nisa clung still more closely to Veda.
"How well you said that, Veda! That's why I want everything at
once...."
"Nisa, I'm getting very fond of you. Now I can sense the meaning of
your decision but at first I thought it was sheer madness. For a ship to be
able to return from such a long flight your children will have to take your
places on the return journey-two Ergs, or maybe, more."
Nisa squeezed Veda's hand and pressed her nose against her cheek, cold
from the wind.
"Do you think you can stand it, Nisa? It's impossibly difficult!"
"What difficulties are you talking about, Veda?" asked Erg Noor,
turning round on hearing her last exclamation. "Have you come to an
agreement with Darr Veter? For the last half-hour he's been trying to
persuade me to give the youth the benefit of my experience as an astronaut
and not to set out on a flight from which I shall never return."
"Has he persuaded you?"
''No. My experience as an astronaut is still more necessary to pilot
Lebed to her destination, up there," said Erg pointing to the bright
starless sky, to the place where Achernar should be seen, lower than the
Lesser Magellanic Cloud and just below Tucana and the Hydra, "to pilot her
where no ship from Earth hag ever been before!"
As Erg Noor spoke those last words the edge of the rising sun came in a
burst of fire over the horizon, its rays driving away all the mystery of the
white dawn.
The four friends walked down to the water. A cold breeze came towards
them from the ocean and the heavy swell of the stormy Antarctic seas came in
mighty surfless rollers that raced up the beach. Veda Kong looked at the
steel-grey water with interest, it grew rapidly darker in the depths and in
the rays of the low sun took on the violet hue of the ice.
Nisa Greet was standing beside her in a blue fur coat and round cap
from which her dark auburn curls escaped in profusion. The girl held her
head up in her usual pose. Darr Veter could not help but admire her but
frowned as he did so.
"Veter, don't you like Nisa?" exclaimed Veda with exaggerated
indignation.
"You know I'm very fond of her," answered Darr Veter moodily, "but at
the moment she seems to me so small and fragile in comparison with...."
"With what awaits me?" asked Nisa with a note of challenge in her
voice. "Are you transferring the attack from Erg to me now?"
"I wasn't thinking of anything of the sort," answered Darr Veter,
seriously and sadly, "but my grief is natural. A beautiful creature of my
wonderful Earth must disappear into Cosmic void, into the darkness and
frightful cold. It's not pity that I feel, Nisa, but grief over a loss!"
"You feel the same about it as I do," agreed Veda. "Nisa, a bright
spark of life ... and dead, icy space."
"You think I'm a delicate flower?" asked Nisa and there was a strange
intonation to the question that made Veda hesitate to agree that that was
what she did think.
"Who, more than I, enjoys the struggle against the cold?" and the girl
took off her cap and her fur coat and shook out her auburn curls.
"What are you doing?" asked Veda, the first to guess her intention. She
ran to get hold of the girl.
But Nisa ran to the edge of the cliff, threw her fur coat to Veda and
stood poised over the water.
The cold waves closed over Nisa and Veda shivered as she tried to
imagine the sensation of such a bath. Nisa calmly swam out to sea, cutting
through the waves with strong strokes. As she rose on a crest she waved to
those on shore, inviting them to join her in the water.
Veda Kong watched with growing admiration.
"Veter, Nisa would be a better mate for a polar bear than for Erg. How
can you, a man of the north, admit yourself beaten?"
"I am a northerner by ancestry but still I prefer the warm southern
seas," admitted Darr Veter plaintively as he walked unwillingly towards the
edge of the sea. He took off his clothes and touched the water with his toe
and then, ouch! he plunged into an approaching steel-grey wave. With three
powerful strokes he reached the crest of a wave and dived into the trough of
another. Darr Veter's reputation was saved by his many years of training and
his habit of bathing all the year round. His breath was checked and there
were red rings before his eyes. A few brisk dives and leaps in the water
returned to him the ability to breathe freely. He returned shivering and
blue with the cold and ran up the hill together with Nisa. A few minutes
later they were enjoying the warmth of their fur clothes. It seemed that
even the icy wind brought with it a breath of the coral seas.
"The more I get to know you, the more I'm convinced that Erg hasn't
made any mistake in his choice," whispered Veda. "You, better than anybody
else, will be able to encourage him in a moment of difficulty, to bring him
joy and take care of him."
Nisa's cheeks, devoid of any sunburn, were flushed a rosy red.
At breakfast on a high crystal terrace that vibrated in the wind, Veda
met the girl's gentle, pensive glance several times. All four ate in
silence, unwilling to talk as people usually are on the eve of parting for a
long time.
"It's hard to have to part from such people when you have only just got
to know them," Darr Veter suddenly exclaimed.
"Perhaps you ..." began Erg Noor.
"My free time is over. It's time for me to get up into the sky. Grom
Orme's waiting for me!"
"And it's time for me to get down to work, too," added Veda. "I'm going
down into the depths, into a recently discovered cave, a treasure repository
of the Era of Disunity."
"Lebed will be ready to take off in the middle of next year and we're
going to start preparations in six weeks from now," said Erg Noor, softly.
"Who's directing the Outer Stations at the moment?"
"So far Junius Antus has been, but he doesn't want to give up his job
with the memory machines and the Council has not yet confirmed the candidacy
of Embe Ong, an engineer and physicist from the Labrador F station."
"I don't know him."
"Few people do, he's working for the Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge
on questions of megawave mechanics."
"What may that be?"
"The powerful rhythms of the Cosmos, huge waves that spread slowly
through space. The contradiction between colliding light velocities
producing negative values greater than the absolute unit, for example, finds
expression in the megawave. The problem has not yet been developed."
"And what is Mven Mass doing?"
"He's writing a book on emotions. He, too, has very little time left to
himself, the Academy of Stochastics and Prognostication has appointed him to
a consultative job in connection with the flight of your Lebed. As soon as
they have enough material for him he'll have to give up his book."
"That's a pity, it's an important subject. It's time we had a proper
understanding of the reality and strength of the world of emotions," said
Erg Noor.
"I'm afraid Mven Mass is incapable of a cold analysis," said Veda.
"That's as it should be, if he were he wouldn't write anything
outstanding," objected Darr Veter, as he rose to his feet to say good-bye.
"Till our next meeting!" Erg and Nisa held out their hands to him.
"Hurry up and finish that job of yours or we shan't meet again."
"Yes, we shall," promised Darr Veter confidently. "Even if it's only in
the El Homra Desert before the take-off."
"Before the take-off," repeated the astronauts.
"Come on, my angel of heaven," said Veda Kong as she took Darr Veter by
the arm, pretending not to notice his knitted brows. "You're probably fed up
with Earth?"
Darr Veter stood with his feet wide apart on the still shaky structure
that formed the skeleton of the hull and looked down into the fearful abyss
between the clouds. Our planet was there and its tremendous size could still
be felt at a distance of five times its own diameter: he could see the grey
outlines of the continents and the violet of the seas.
Darr Veter recognized outlines that had been familiar to him from
childhood through pictures taken from satellites. There was the concave line
with dark strips of mountains stretching across it. To the right the sea
sparkled and directly under his feet was a narrow mountain valley. He was in
luck that day-the clouds had parted directly over that part of the planet
where Veda was living and working. At the foot of the vertical terraces of
iron-coloured mountains there was an ancient cave that went deep into the
earth in a number of extensive storeys. It was there that Veda was selecting
from amongst the dumb and dusty fragments of past life those grains of
historical truth without which the present could not be properly understood
nor the future foreseen.
Darr Veter, leaning over the rail of a platform of corrugated zirconium
bronze sent a mental greeting to the spot, roughly conjectured, that was
fast disappearing under the wing of the cirrus clouds of intolerable
brightness coming up from the west. The darkness of night stood like a wall
sprinkled with shining stars. Layers of clouds floated by like gigantic
rafts hanging one over the other. Below them the Earth's surface was rolling
into the darkening abyss as though it were disappearing for ever into the
absolute. A delicate zodiacal light clothed the dark side of the planet
shedding its glow into Cosmic space.
There was a layer of light-blue clouds over the daylight side of Earth
that reflected the powerful light of the blue-grey Sun. Anybody who looked
at the clouds except through dark filters would be blinded as would anybody
unprotected by the 800 kilometres of Earth's atmosphere who turned his face
to the Sun. The harsh short-wave rays-ultra-violet and X-rays were
irradiated in a powerful stream that was lethal to all living things. A
constant downpour of cosmic particles was added to the stream.
Newly-awakened stars or those that had collided at unimaginably great
distances in the Galaxy sent deadly radiation out into space. Only the
reliable protection of their spacesuits saved the workers from speedy death.
Darr Veter threw the safety line over to the other side and moved
towards the radiant dipper of Ursa Major. A giant pipe had been fixed in
position throughout the entire length of the future satellite. At either end
acute-angled triangles rose up from it to support the discs radiating the
magnetic field. When the batteries transforming the Sun's blue radiations
into electricity were installed it would be possible to do away with
lifelines and walk along the lines of force in the magnetic field with
directional plates on the chest and back.
"We want to work at night." The voice of a young engineer, Cadd Lite,
suddenly sounded in his space helmet. "Altai has promised to provide the
light."
Darr Veter looked to the left and below where a bunch of cargo rockets,
tied together, lay like sleeping fish. Above them, under a flat roof to
protect it from meteorites and the Sun, floated the temporary platform built
from the inner plating of the satellite where all the components brought by
the rockets were stored and assembled. Workers crawling there like black
bees suddenly turned to glow-worms when the reflecting surfaces of their
space-suits moved beyond the shadow of the roof. A cobweb of ropes stretched
from the gaping hatches in the sides of the rockets out of which big
components were being unloaded. Higher still, directly over the hull of the
satellite, a group of people in strange, often ridiculous, poses were busy
round a huge machine. One ring of beryllium bronze with borason plating
would have weighed at least a hundred tons on Earth. Here the huge mass was
dangling beside the metal skeleton of the satellite on a thin wire rope
whose only purpose was to keep all these components rotating round Earth at
the same velocity.
The workers became confident and agile once they had become accustomed
to the absence of weight or rather, to the negligible weights. These skilled
workers, however, would soon have to be replaced by others. Lengthy periods
of physical labour without gravitation lead to disturbances in blood
circulation which might become chronic and make the sufferer a permanent
invalid on his return to Earth. For this reason the shift on the satellite
was one of fifty working hours after which the worker returned to Earth,
going through reacclimatization at the Intermediate Station revolving round
the Earth at a height of 900 kilometres.
Darr Veter directed the assembly of the satellite and tried to avoid
physical exertion although, at times, he badly wanted to help hasten the
completion of some job or another. He would have to hold out at a height of
57,000 kilometres for several months.
If he agreed to night work he would have to send his young workers back
to the planet and call others before time. Barion, the construction job's
second planetship was on the Arizona Plain where Groin Orme sat at the TVP
screens and registration machine controls.
A decision to work through the entire icy Cosmic night would have
reduced the time required for assembling the satellite by one half and Darr
Veter could not let such an opportunity pass. As soon as they had obtained
h's consent the workers came down from the platform, running about in all
directions, making a still more complicated network of ropes. The planetship
Altai that served as living quarters for the satellite builders and hung
motionless, moored to one end of the satellite's main beam, suddenly cast
off the hawsers that linked her main hatch with the satellite. A long stream
of blinding flame shot out of her exhausts. The huge ship swung round
swiftly and silently, not the slightest noise carrying through the emptiness
of interplanetary space. The skilled commander of Altai needed no more than
a few strokes of his engines to send the ship forty metres above the
structure and turn with his landing lights directed at the assembly
platform. Hawsers were again dropped between the ship and the satellite and
the whole mass of objects suspended in space became motionless relative to
each other as they continued their revolutions round the Earth at a speed of
about ten thousand kilometres an hour.
The distribution of the cloud masses told Darr Veter that the
construction job was passing over the Antarctic region of the planet and
would, therefore, soon enter Earth's shadow. The improved heating system of
the spacesuit could not fully guarantee its wearer against the bitter cold
of Cosmic space and woe betide the careless traveller who exhausted his
batteries. An architect-erector had been killed that way a month before when
he hid from a meteorite shower in the cold shell of an open rocket. He did
not live to reach the sunny side of the planet. Another engineer was killed
by a meteorite- such occurrences could not be foreseen or prevented with any
degree of certainty. The building of a satellite always claimed its victims
and nobody knew who would be the next. The laws of stochastics, although
only partly applicable to such tiny particles as individual people, said
that he, Darr Veter, would most probably be the next because he would be
there, at that height and open to all the vagaries of the Cosmos, longer
than anybody else. There was an impudent little inner voice, however, that
told Darr Veter that nothing could possibly happen to his magnificent
person. No matter how ridiculous such confidence may have been for a
mathematically minded man it never abandoned Darr Veter and helped him
calmly balance himself on narrow girders and grilles on the open,
unprotected hull of the satellite in the abyss of the black sky.
Structures on Earth were erected by special machines called embryotecti
because they worked on the principle of the cybernetic development of the
living organism. It goes without saying that the molecular structure of the
living organism, effected by the hereditary cybernetic mechanism, was
immeasurably more complicated.
Living organisms, however, could only grow in the conditions provided
by warm solutions of ionized molecules while the embryotecti usually worked
in polarized streams of electricity or light or in a magnetic field. The
markings and keys on all the component parts painted in radioactive thallium
gave the correct orientation to the machines assembling them precisely and
at high speed. At the great height of the satellite there were not and could
not be any such machines. The assembly of the satellite was an old-fashioned
building job employing human hands. Despite the dangers involved the work
seemed so interesting that it attracted thousands of volunteers. The
psycho-physiological stations were scarcely able to examine the flood of
volunteers desirous of informing the Council of their readiness to venture
into interplanetary space.
Darr Veter reached the foundations of the solar machines that were
arranged fanwise round a huge hub containing the artificial gravity
apparatus and joined the battery he was carrying on his back to the
terminals of the test circuit. A simple melody could be heard in the phones
of his space helmet. Then he connected in parallel a glass plate with the
thin gold lines of a drawing on it. It produced the same melody. Darr Veter
turned a couple of vernier scales until points of time coincided and
listened to make sure there was no difference in the melody or even in the
tone of the tuning. An important part of the future satellite had been
assembled faultlessly. They could now begin the erection of the radiation
electric motors. Darr Veter straightened shoulders that were bent wearily
under the weight of a spacesuit worn over a long period and turned his head
to the right and to the left. The movement caused a creaking of the upper
vertebrae that immobility in the space helmet had made stiff. It was a good
thing that, so far, Darr Veter had proved impervious to the psychoses that
affect those who work outside the terrestrial atmosphere-these included
ultra-violet sleeping sickness and infrared madness-otherwise he would not
have been able to bring his worthy mission to a successful conclusion.
Soon the outer walls of the hull would protect the workers from the
effects of a feeling of loneliness in the Cosmos, alone over an abyss that
had neither sky nor ground!
Altai sent out a small rescue rocket that shot past the construction
job like an arrow. This was a tug going to fetch the automatic rockets
carrying only cargo and halting at a given altitude. Just in time! The
bundle of rockets, people, machines and building materials, floating in
space, was passing over to the night side of the planet. The tug rocket
returned pulling behind it three long, gleaming, blue fish-like rockets that
weighed a hundred and fifty tons on Earth (without fuel).
The rockets joined their fellows around the assembly platform. In one
leap Darr Veter reached the other side of the hull and was soon amongst the
technicians supervising the unloading who were gathered in a circle. They
were discussing the plan for the night work. Darr Veter consented but
insisted that all personal batteries be changed for freshly charged ones
with sufficient energy to keep the spacesuits warm for thirty hours and at
the same time supply the electric lamps, air filters and radiotelephones.
The whole construction job was plunged in darkness as though it were at
the bottom of the sea but the soft zodiacal light from the Sun's rays
dispersed by the gases of the atmospheric zones still lit up the skeleton of
the future satellite that was gripped in a frost of 180 degrees C. The
superconductivity of the metal now hindered them even more than it did by
day. The slightest amount of wear in the insulation of the instruments,
batteries or accumulators surrounded the nearby objects with a blue glow
from current flowing along their surfaces and which could not be canalised
in any given direction.
The profound darkness of outer space came together with increasing
cold. The stars burned fiercely like dazzlingly bright blue needles in the
sky. The invisible and inaudible flight of the meteoroids was even more
awe-inspiring at night. In the currents of the atmosphere over the dark
globe down below there were variously coloured clouds of electric glow,
spark discharges of tremendous length and sheets of dispersed light
thousands of kilometres long. Down below, in the upper layers of the
atmosphere there were gales of greater fury than anything known on Earth.
Vigorous movements of energy continued in an atmosphere saturated by the
radiations of the Sun and the Cosmos and made communication with the planet
extremely difficult.
Suddenly something changed in that tiny world lost in the darkness and
fearful cold. Darr Veter did not immediately realize that the planetship had
switched on its searchlights. The darkness had become even blacker, the
burning stars grew dull, leaving the platform and the hull in a sea of
bright white light that divided them off from the gloom. A few minutes later
Altai reduced the voltage and the light turned yellow and was less intense.
The planetship was economizing current from its accumulators. The
squares and ellipses that went to make up the walls of the hull, the
latticed trusses that reinforced the structure, the cylinders and pipes of
the reservoirs again moved about, finding their places in the skeleton of
the satellite as though in daylight.
Darr Veter felt for a cross beam, took hold of the handles of a roller
car running on a ropeway, and with one hard push of his feet sailed up to
Altai. Right in front of the planetship's hatch he pressed the brake lever
in his hand and halted just in time to prevent his crashing into a closed
door.
The air-lock was not kept at normal terrestrial pressure in order not
to lose too much air with the coming and going of such a large number of
workers. Darr Veter kept on his spacesuit until he was in a second,
auxiliary air-lock, where he unscrewed his space helmet and battery.
Flexing a body that was weary of the spacesuit, Darr Veter walked
firmly along the deck of the ship, enjoying a return to almost normal
gravity. The artificial gravitation of the planetship worked constantly. It
was inexpressibly pleasant to feel yourself standing firmly on the ground as
a man should stand and not be like a flea floundering in an unsteady,
treacherous gulf! Soft light and warm air and a comfortable chair tempted
him to stretch out in it and relax without having to think. Darr Veter was
experiencing the pleasures of his distant ancestors that had once astonished
him in old novels. It was in this way that people entered a warm house, a
mud hut or a felt tent after long journeys through cold deserts, wet forests
or icy mountains. And now as then a thin wall separated him from a huge,
dangerous world, hostile to man, a wall that retained the warmth and light,
gave him