“Metal!” exclaimed the geologist, “an open deposit.” Erg Noor shook his head.
“Although the flash did not last long I managed to note its regular outline. That was a huge piece of metal, a meteorite or….”
“A ship!” exclaimed Nisa and the biologist together. “Fantasy!” snapped Pour Hyss.
“It may be fact,” objected Erg Noor. “What does it matter, it’s no use arguing,” said Pour Hyss, unwilling to give in. “There’s no way of proving it, we’re not going to laud, are we?”
“We’ll check up on it in three hours’ time when we reach that plain again. Notice that the metal object is on the plain that I, too, would have chosen to land on. We’ll throw out the TV robot at that very spot. Tune the locator ray to a six-second warning!”
The commander’s plan was successful and Tantra made another three-hour flight round the dark planet. The next time the ship approached the continental plain it was met by TV broadcasts from the robot. The people peered into the light screen. With a click the visible ray was switched on and peered like a human eye, noting the outlines of things far down below, in that thousand-kilometre-deep black abyss. Kay Bear could well imagine the head of the robot station sticking out of the armour plate and revolving like a lighthouse. The zone that was swept by the instrument’s eye appeared on the screen and was there and then photographed: the view consisted of low cliffs, hills and the winding black lines of watercourses. Suddenly the vision of a gleaming, fish-shaped object crossed the screen and again melted into the darkness as it was abandoned by the light ray to the darkness and the ledges of the plateau.
“A spaceship!” gasped several voices in unison. Nisa looked at Pour Hyss with undisguised triumph. The screen went dark as Tantra left the area of the TV robot’s activity and Eon Thai immediately set about developing the film of the electronic photographs. With fingers that trembled with impatience he placed the film in the projector of the hemispherical screen that would give them stereoscopic pictures of what had been photographed. The inner walls of the hollow hemisphere gave them an enlarged picture.
The familiar cigar-shaped outlines of the ship’s hows, the bulge of the stern, the high ridge of the equilibrium receiver…. No matter how unbelievable it all was, no matter how utterly impossible they might regard a meeting here, on the dark planet, the robot could not invent anything, a terrestrial spaceship lay there! It lay horizontally, in the normal landing position, supported by its powerful landing struts, undamaged, as though it had only just alighted on to the planet of the iron star.
Tantra, revolving in a shorter orbit closer to the planet, sent out signals that were not answered. A few more hours passed. The fourteen members of the expedition again gathered in the control tower. Erg Noor, who had been sitting in deep contemplation, stood up.
“I propose to land Tantra. Perhaps our brothers are in need of help, perhaps their ship is damaged and cannot return to Earth. If so we can take them, transfer their anameson and save ourselves. There is no sense in sending out a rescue rocket. It cannot do anything to give us fuel and will use up so much energy that there will not be enough left to send a signal to Earth.”
“Suppose the ship is here because of a shortage of anameson?” asked Pel Lynn, cautiously.
“Then it should have ion planetary charges, they could not have used up everything. As you see the spaceship is in its proper position which means they landed with the planetary motors. We’ll transfer the ion fuel, take off again and go into orbit; then we can call Earth for help and in case of success that won’t take more than eight years. And if we can get anameson, then we shall have won out.” “Maybe they have photon and not ion charges for their planetary motors,” said one of the engineers.
“We can make use of them in the big motors if we fit them with auxiliary bowl reflectors.”
“I see you’ve thought of everything.,” said the engineer, giving in.
“There is still the risk of landing on a heavy planet and the risk of living there,” muttered Pour Hyss. “It’s awful just to think of that world of darkness!”
“The risk, of course, remains. But there is risk in our very situation and we shall hardly increase it by landing. The planet on which our spaceship will land is not a bad one as long as we do not damage the ship.”
Erg Noor cast a glance at the dial of the speed regulator and walked swiftly to the control desk. For a whole minute he stood in front of the levers and vernier scales of the controls. The fingers of his big hands moved as though they were selecting chords on some musical instrument, his back was bent and his face turned to stone.
Nisa Greet went up to him, boldly took his right hand and pressed the palm to her smooth cheek, hot from excitement. Erg Noor nodded in gratitude, stroked the girl’s mass of hair and straightened himself up.
“We are entering the lower layers of the atmosphere to land,” he said loudly, switching on the warning siren. The howl carried throughout the ship and the crew hurried to strap themselves into hydraulic floating scats.
Erg Noor dropped into the soft embrace of the landing chair that rose up from the floor before the control desk. Then came the heavy strokes of the planetary engines and the spaceship rushed down, howling, towards the cliffs and oceans of the unknown planet.
The locators and the infrared reflectors felt their way through the primordial darkness below, red lights glowed on the altimeter scales at 15,000 metres. It was not anticipated that there would be mountains much over 10,000 metres high on the planet where water and the heat of the black sun had been working to level out the surface as was the case on Earth.
The first revolution round the planet revealed no mountains, only insignificant heights, little bigger than those of Mars. It looked as though the activity of the internal forces that gave rise to mountains had ceased or had been checked.
Erg Noor placed the altitude governor at 2,000 metres and switched on the powerful searchlights. A huge ocean stretched below the spaceship, an ocean of horror, an unbroken mass of black waves that rose and fell over unfathomable depths.
The biologist wiped away the perspiration caused by his strenuous efforts; he was trying to catch in his instrument the faint variations in reflection from the black water to determine its salt and mineral content.
The gleaming black of the water gave way to the dull black of land. The crossed rays of the searchlights cut a narrow lane between walls of darkness. Unexpectedly there were patches of colour in this lane, yellow sands and the greyish-green surface of a flat rocky ridge.
Tantra swept across the continent, obedient to the skilled hand of the commander.
At last Erg Noor found the plain he was looking for; it proved to be low-lying country that could not possibly be termed a plateau although it was obvious that the tides and storms of the black sea would not reach it, lying, as it did, some hundred metres above the surrounding country.
The locator on the spaceship’s port bow whistled. Tantra’s searchlights followed the locator beam and the clear outlines of a first class spaceship came into view.
The bow armour, made of an isotope of iridium having a reorganized crystalline structure, shone like new in the rays of the searchlight. There were no temporary structures anywhere near the ship, there were no lights on board — it stood dark and lifeless and did not in any way react to the approach of a sister ship. The searchlight rays moved past the ship and were reflected from a huge disc with spiral projections as they would have been from a blue mirror. The disc was standing on edge, leaning slightly to one side and was partly buried in the black soil. For a moment the observers got the impression that there were cliffs behind the disc and that beyond them the darkness was blacker and thicker, probably it was a precipice or a slope leading down to the lowlands….