Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale) вк-1 Read online

  Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale)

  ( Великое Кольцо - 1 )

  Ivan Yefremov

  Ivan Yefremov

  Andromeda

  A Space-Age Tale

  FOREIGN LANGUAGES PUBLISHING HOUSE

  MOSCOW 1959

  Иван Ефремов

  Туманность Андромеды

  (Научно-фантастический роман)

  ИЗДАТЕЛЬСТВО ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ НА ИНОСТРАННЫХ ЯЗЫКАХ

  МОСКВА

  Translated from the Russian by George Hanna

  Designed by N. Grishin

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1. THE IRON STAR

  CHAPTER 2. EPSILON TUCANAE

  CHAPTER 3. CAPTIVES OF THE DARK

  CHAPTER 4. THE RIVER OF TIME

  CHAPTER 5. THE HORSE ON THE SEA BED

  CHAPTER 6. THE LEGEND OF THE BLUE SUNS

  CHAPTER 7. SYMPHONY IN F-MINOR, COLOUR TONE 4.75,u

  CHAPTER 8. RED WAVES

  CHAPTER 9. A THIRD CYCLE SCHOOL

  CHAPTER 10. TIBETAN EXPERIMENT

  CHAPTER 11. THE ISLAND OF OBLIVION

  CHAPTER 12. THE ASTRONAUTICAL COUNCIL

  CHAPTER 13. ANGELS OF HEAVEN

  CHAPTER 14. THE STEEL DOOR

  CHAPTER 15. THE ANDROMEDA NEBULA

  CHARACTERS IN THE STORY

  MEMBERS OF COSMIC EXPEDITION No. 37 IN THE SPACESHIP TANTRA

  Men: Erg Noor, Commander of the Expedition

  Pour Hyss, astronomer

  Eon Thal, biologist

  Pel Lynn, astronavigator

  Taron, mechanical engineer

  Kay Bear, electronic engineer

  Women: Nisa Greet, astronavigator

  Louma Lasvy, ship’s physician

  Ingrid Dietra, astronomer

  Beena Ledd, geologist

  Ione Marr, teacher of gymnastics, storekeeper

  CHARACTERS ON EARTH:

  Men: Grom Orme, President of the Astronautical Council

  Diss Ken, his son

  Thor Ann, son of Zieg Zohr, Ken’s friend

  Mir Ohm, Secretary of the Astronautical Council

  Darr Veter, retiring Director of the Outer Stations

  Mven Mass, successor to Darr Veter

  Junius Antus, Director of the Electronic Memory Machines

  Kam Amat, Indian scientist (In a former age)

  Liao Lang, palaeontologist

  Renn Bose, physicist

  Cart Sann, painter

  Frith Don, Director of the Maritime Archaeological Expedition

  Sherliss, mechanic to the expedition

  Ahf Noot, prominent surgeon

  Grimm Schar, biologist of the Institute of Nerve Currents

  Zann Senn, poet-historian

  Heb Uhr, soil scientist

  Beth Lohn, mathematician, criminal in exile

  Embe Ong, candidate for Director of the Outer Stations

  Cadd Lite, engineer on Satellite 57

  Women: Evda Nahl, psychiatrist Rhea, her daughter Veda Kong, historian

  Miyiko Eigoro, historian, Veda’s assistant

  Chara Nandi, biologist, dancer, artist’s model

  Onar. girl of the Island of Oblivion

  Eva Djann, astronomer

  Liuda Pheer, psychologist (in a former age)

  EXTRATERRESTRIAL CHARACTERS:

  Goor Hahn, observer on the diurnal satellite

  Zaph Phthet, Director of External Relations of the planet of 61 Cygni

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE IRON STAR

  In the faint light emitted by the helical tube on the ceiling the rows of dials on the instrument panels had the appearance of a portrait gallery — the round dials had jovial faces, the recumbent oval physiognomies were impudently self-satisfied and the square mugs were immobile in their stupid complacency. The light- and dark-blue, orange and green lights flickering inside the instruments served to intensify the impression.

  A big dial, glowing dull red, gazed out from the middle of the convex control desk. The girl in front of it had forgotten her chair and stood with her head bowed, her brow almost touching the glass, in the attitude of one in prayer. The red glow made her youthful face older and sterner, cast clear-cut shadows round her full lips and even made her slightly snub nose look pointed. Her thick eyebrows, knitted in a frown, looked jet black in that light and gave her eyes the expression of despair seen in the eyes of the doomed.

  The faint hum of the meters was interrupted by a soft metallic click. The girl started and raised her head, straightening her tired back.

  The door opened behind her, a big shadow appeared and turned into a man with abrupt and precise movements. A flood of golden light sprang up, making the girl’s thick, dark-auburn hair sparkle like gold. She turned to the newcomer with a look that told both of her love for him and of her anxiety.

  “Why aren’t you sleeping? A hundred sleepless hours!”

  “A bad example, eh?” There was a note of gaiety in his voice but he did not smile; it was a voice marked by high metallic notes that seemed to rivet his words together.

  “The others are all asleep,” the girl began timidly. “and… don’t know anything…” she added, whispering instinctively.

  “Don’t be afraid to speak. Everybody else is asleep, we’re the only two awake in the Cosmos and it’s fifty billion[1] kilometres to Earth — a mere parsec[2] and a half!”

  “And we’ve got fuel for just one acceleration!” There was fascinated horror in the girl’s exclamation.

  In two rapid strides Erg Noor, Commander of Cosmic Expedition No. 37, reached the glowing dial.

  “The fifth circle!”

  “Yes, we’ve entered the fifth… and… still nothing.” The girl cast an eloquent glance at the loudspeaker of the automatic receiver.

  “And so I have no right to sleep, as you see. I have to think over all the variants and all the possibilities. We must find a solution by the end of the fifth circle.”

  “But that’s another hundred and ten hours.”

  “All right, I’ll go to sleep in the armchair here as soon as the effect of the sporamin[3] wears off. I took it twenty-four hours ago.”

  The girl stood deep in thought for a time but at last decided to speak.

  “Perhaps we should decrease the radius of the circle? Suppose something’s gone wrong with their transmitter?”

  “Certainly not! If you reduce the radius without reducing speed you’ll break up the ship. If you reduce speed you’ll be left without anameson[4]… with a parsec and a half to go at the speed of the ancient lunar rockets! At that rate we’d get somewhere near our solar system in about a hundred thousand years.”

  “I know that. But couldn’t they…”

  “No, they couldn’t. Aeons ago people could be careless or could deceive each other and themselves. But not today!”

  “That’s not what I wanted to say.” The sharpness of her retort showed that the girl was offended. “I was going to say that Algrab may have deviated from its course looking for us.”

  “It couldn’t have deviated so much. It must have left at the time computed and agreed on. If the improbable had happened and both transmitters had been put out of action it would have had to cross the circle diametrically and we should have heard it on the planetary receiver.

  There’s no possibility of a mistake — there it is, the rendezvous planet.”

  Erg Noor pointed to the mirror screens in deep niches on all four sides of the control tower. Countless stars burned in the profound blackness. A tiny grey disc, barely illuminated by a sun very far away from them, from the outer edge of the system B
-7336-S+87-A, was crossing the forward port screen.

  “Our bomb beacons[5] are working well although we put them up four independent years[6] “ ago.” Erg Noor pointed to a clear-cut line of light running along a glass panel that stretched the whole length of the left-hand wall. “Algrab should have been here three months ago. That means,”

  Erg Noor hesitated as though he did not wish to finish the sentence, “Algrab is lost!”

  “But suppose it isn’t, suppose it has only been damaged by a meteoroid and cannot regain its speed?” objected the auburn-haired girl.

  “Can’t regain its speed!” repeated Erg Noor. “Isn’t that the same thing? If there is a journey thousands of years long between the ship and its goal, so much the worse — instead of instantaneous death there will be years of hopelessness for the doomed. Perhaps they will call. If they do, we’ll know… on Earth… in about six years’ time.”

  With one of his impetuous movements Erg Noor pulled a folding armchair from under the table of the electronic computer, a little MNU-11; on account of its great weight, size and fragility, the ITU electronic brain that could make any computation was not fitted in spaceships to pilot them unaided. A navigator had always to be on duty in the control tower, especially as it was impossible to plot an exact course over such terrific distances.

  The commander’s hands flashed over the levers and knobs with the rapidity of a pianist’s. The sharply defined features of his pale face were as immobile as those of a statue and his lofty brow, inclined stubbornly over the control desk, seemed to be challenging the elemental forces that menaced that tiny world of living beings who bad dared penetrate into the forbidden depths of space.

  Nisa Greet, a young astronavigator on her first Cosmic expedition, held her breath as she watched Erg Noor in silence, and the commander himself seemed oblivious of everything but his work. How cool and collected, how clever and full of energy was the man she loved. And she had loved him for a long time, for the whole of the five years. There was no sense in hiding it from him, he knew it already, Nisa could feel that. Now that this great misfortune had happened she had the tremendous joy of serving a watch with him, three months alone with him while the other members of the crew lay in deep hypnotic sleep. Another thirteen days and they, too, would be able to sleep for six months while the other two watches — the navigators, astronomers and mechanics — served their turns. The other members of the expedition, the biologists and geologists who would only have work to do when they arrived at their destination, could sleep longer, but the astronomers — oh! theirs was the greatest strain of all.

  Erg Noor got up from his seat and Nisa’s train of thought was broken.

  “I’m going to the charthouse. You’ll be able to sleep in — ” he looked at the clock showing dependent or ship’s time, “nine hours. I’ll have time for some sleep before I relieve you.”

  “I’m not tired, I can stay here as long as is necessary — you must get some rest!”

  Erg Noor frowned and wanted to object but was captivated by the tenderness of her words and by the golden hazel eyes that appealed to him so trustingly; he smiled and went out without another word.

  Nisa sat down in the chair, cast an accustomed glance over the instruments and was soon lost in deep meditation.

  The reflector screens through which those in the control tower could see what was happening in the space surrounding the ship gleamed black overhead. The lights of differently coloured stars pierced the eyes like needles of fire.

  The spaceship was overtaking a planet and its pull made the ship vacillate in a gravitation field of changing intensity. The magnificent but malignant stars also made wild leaps in the reflector screens. The outlines of the constellations changed with a rapidity that the memory could not register.

  Planet K2-2N 88, cold, lifeless, far from its sun, was known as a convenient rendezvous for spaceships… for the meeting that had not taken place. The fifth circle — Nisa could picture her ship travelling with reduced speed around a monster circle with a radius of a thousand million kilometres and constantly gaining on a planet that crawled at tortoise speed. In a hundred and ten hours the ship would complete the fifth circle — and what then? Erg Noor’s tremendous brain was now strained to the utmost to find the best solution. As commander both of the expedition and the ship he could not make mistakes for if he did First Class Spaceship Tantra with its crew of the world’s most eminent scientists would never return from outer space! But Erg Noor would make no mistakes.

  Nisa Greet was suddenly overcome by a feeling of nausea which meant that the spaceship had deviated from its course by a tiny fraction of a degree, something possible only at the reduced speed at which they were travelling: at full speed not one of the ship’s fragile human load would have remained alive. The grey mist before the girl’s eyes had not had time to disperse before the nausea swept over her again as the ship returned to its course. Delicately sensitive feelers had located a meteoroid, the greatest enemy of the spaceships, in the black emptiness ahead of them and had automatically made the deviation. The electronic machines guiding the ship (only they could carry out all manipulations with the necessary rapidity, since human nerves arc unsuited to Cosmic speeds) had taken her off her course in a millionth of a second and, the danger past, had returned her with equal speed.

  “What could have prevented machines like these from saving Algrab" wondered Nisa when she had recovered. That ship had most certainly been damaged by a meteoroid. Erg Noor had told her that up to then one spaceship in ten had been wrecked by meteoroids, despite the invention of such delicate locators as Voll Head’s and the power screens that repelled smaller particles. After everything had been so well planned and provided for, the loss of Algrab had placed them in a dangerous position. Mentally Nisa went over everything that had happened since they had taken off.

  Cosmic Expedition No. 37 had been sent to the planetary system of the nearest star in the Ophiuchus Constellation whose only inhabited planet, Zirda, had long been in communication with Earth and other worlds through the great Circle. Suddenly the planet had gone silent, and for over seventy years nothing more had been heard from there. It was the duty of Earth, as the nearest of the Circle planets to Zirda, to find out what had happened. With this aim in view the expedition’s ship had taken on board a large number of instruments and several prominent scientists, those whose nerves, after lengthy testing, had proved capable of standing up to confinement in a spaceship for several years. The ship was fuelled with anameson; only the barely necessary amount had been taken, not because of its weight but because of the tremendous size of the containers in which it was stored. It was expected that supplies could be renewed on Zirda. In case something serious had happened to Zirda, Second Class Spaceship Algrab was to have met Tantra with fuel supplies on the orbit of planet K2-2N 88.

  Nisa’s attuned ear caught the changed tone in the hum of the artificial gravitational field. The discs of three instruments on the right began to wink irregularly as the starboard electron feeler came into action. An angular mass flashed on to the screen, brightening it up. It flew straight at Tantra like a shell which meant that it was a long way away — a huge fragment of material such as is seldom met with in cosmic space, and Nisa hurried to determine its volume, mass, velocity and direction. She did not return to her meditations until the spool of the automatic log gave a click to show that the entries were finished.

  Her most vivid memory was that of a blood-red sun that had been steadily growing in their field of vision during the last months of their fourth space-borne year. It had been the fourth year for the inhabitants of the spaceship as it travelled with a speed of 5/6ths of the absolute unit, the speed of light, but on Earth seven of the years known as independent years had passed.

  The filters on the screens were kind to human eyes; they reduced the composition of the rays of any celestial body to what they would have been had they been seen through the thick terrestrial atmosphere with its protective screens of
ozone and water vapours. The indescribable ghostly violet light of the high temperature bodies was toned down to blue or white and the gloomy greyish-pink stars took on jolly golden-yellow hues, like our Sun. A celestial body that burned triumphantly with bright crimson fire took on a deep, blood-red colour, the tone that a terrestrial observer sees in stars of the spectral class[7] M5.7 The planet was much nearer to its star than Earth is to the Sun and as the ship drew nearer to Zirda the star grew into a tremendous crimson disc that irradiated a mass of heat rays.

  For two months before approaching Zirda Tantra had begun attempts to get in touch with the planet’s outer space station. There was only one such station — on a small natural satellite with no atmosphere that was much nearer to Zirda than the Moon is to Earth.

  The spaceship continued calling when the planet was no more than thirty million kilometres away and the terrific speed of Tantra had been reduced to three thousand kilometres a second. It was Nisa’s watch but all the crew were awake, sitting in anticipation in front of the control-tower screens.

  Nisa kept on calling, increasing the power of the transmissions and sending rays out fanwise ahead of the ship.

  At last they saw the tiny shining dot of the satellite.

  The spaceship came into orbit around the planet, approaching it in a spiral and gradually adjusting its speed to that of the satellite. Soon Tantra’s speed was the same as that of the fast-moving little satellite and it seemed as though an invisible hawser held them fast. The ship’s electronic stereotelescope searched the surface of the satellite until the crew of Tantra were suddenly confronted with an unforgettable sight.

  A huge, flat-topped glass building seemed to be on fire in the rays of the blood-red sun. Directly under the roof was something in the nature of an assembly hall. There a number of beings — unlike terrestrial humans but unmistakably people — were frozen into immobility. Excitedly, Pour Hyss, the astronomer of the expedition, continued to adjust the focus. The vague rows of people visible under the glass roof were absolutely motionless. Pour Hyss increased the instrument’s magnification. Out of the vagueness a dais surrounded by instrument panels appeared, and on it a long table on which a man sat cross-legged facing the audience, his crazy, terrifying eyes staring into the distance.