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, lie 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 Algraby 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.