CHAPTER EIGHT

RED WAVES

The wide verandah of the observatory was open to the winds that brought the perfume of flowering plants from the hot African cost across the sea, a perfume that aroused an urgent yearning in a man’s soul. Mven Mass could not compose himself into the state of clarity and firmness, when no doubts remained, that was essential on the eve of a decisive experiment. Renn Bose had reported from Tibet that the Corr Yule installation had been reconstructed and was ready. The four observers on Satellite 57 had willingly agreed to risk their lives if that would help in carrying out an experiment such as Earth had never before known.

The experiment, however, was being mounted without the permission of the Council and without an extensive preliminary discussion of all possibilities. This made it seem like the secret manufacture of weapons in the darkest eras of man’s history and gave it a flavour of cowardly secrecy not common to people of today.

It is true that the great objective they hoped to reach Seemed to justify the means, but… they had to remain pure in spirit! The old human conflict between the end and the means of its attainment had arisen: and the experience of thousands of generations teaches mankind that there is a certain boundary limiting the means to an end that must not be overstepped.

The case of Beth Lohn gave the African no rest. Thirty-two years before, one of Earth’s leading mathematicians, Beth Lohn, had discovered that certain signs of displacement in the interaction of strong power fields could be explained by the existence of parallel dimensions. He carried out a series of interesting experiments involving the disappearance of objects. The Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge found an error in his computations and produced an explanation of the observed phenomena that differed from his in principle. Beth Lohn, with his powerful mind hypertrophied at the expense of an underdeveloped sense of moral values and uninhibited desires, was a man of great strength and equally great egoism who decided to continue his experiments in his own way. To get convincing proofs he drew into the work courageous young volunteers who were willing to sacrifice themselves in the service of science. The people in Beth Lohn’s experiments disappeared as completely as the things had done and, contrary to the hopes of the ruthless mathematician, not one of them made his presence known from “the other side” of the other dimension. When Beth Lohn had sent a group of twelve people into “non-existence,” in other words had destroyed them, he was arraigned before the court. He succeeded in proving that he really believed his victims to be alive and somewhere in another dimension and that he had only acted with their consent; he was condemned to exile, spent ten years on Mercury and then, on returning to Earth, went to the Island of Oblivion, out of resentment for our world. Mven Mass felt that Beth Lohn’s story was very much like his own; there, too, a secret experiment undertaken for objectives rejected by science had been forbidden and this was an analogy that Mven Mass did not like.

In two days’ time there would be a transmission round the Great Circle and after that he would be free for eight days for the experiment!

Mven Mass threw back his head to look at the sky. The stars seemed brighter and nearer than usual. Many of them he knew by their ancient names, knew them as old friends — and were they not, indeed, the age-old friends of man that had shown him his ways, given him lofty ideas and encouraged him to dream?

A not very bright star inclining to the northern horizon was the Pole Star or Gamma Cephei. In the Era of Disunity the Pole Star had been in Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, but the revolution of the fringe of the Galaxy, and of the solar system with it, was in the direction of Cepheus. Cygnus, the Swan, one of the most interesting constellations in the northern sky, stretching through the Milky Way, had its long neck turned to the south. In this constellation there was a most beautiful binary star that the ancient Arabs had named Albireo. It was afterwards discovered that there were really three stars, the binary Albireo I and Albireo II, a huge blue star with an extensive planetary system. They were almost as far from us as Deneb, the huge star in the Swan’s tail with a luminosity equal to 4,800 of our suns. Only eight years before this a direct answer had been received from the inhabited worlds of the Dencb system to a message transmitted in the second year of the Great Circle Era. During the last transmission our trusty friend 61 Cygni had received a message of warning from Albireo II some 400 years after it had been sent but which was nevertheless of great interest. A famous Cosmic explorer from Albireo II whose name was transmitted in terrestrial sounds as Vlihh oz Ddiz, had been lost in the vicinity of the Lyra Constellation where he met one of the greatest dangers of the Cosmos, an Ookr star. Terrestrial scientists have placed these stars in class E so called in honour of Einstein, the greatest physicist of ancient days, who predicted their existence although it was long disputed; the limit for the mass of a star was even determined and given the name of the Chandrasekhar Limit. But that ancient astronomer based his calculations exclusively on the mechanics of gravitation and thermodynamics and did not take into consideration the intricate electromagnetic structure of the giant stars. It was precisely these forces that conditioned the existence of E stars that in size rival the huge red M class giants like Antares or Betelgeuse but their density is greater, something like that of our Sun. The terrific gravitation of such bodies prevented radiation so that light could not leave the star and travel through space.

These inconceivably gigantic and mysterious masses had existed in space for an infinitely long time, secretly drawing into their inert ocean everything that came within reach of the inescapable tentacles of their gravity.

There were periods of the lengthy accumulation of matter that later ended with the heating of the surface of the star until it reached class O”, that is, reached a temperature of 100,000 °C.; at last there came the final explosion that hurled into space new stars with new planets, in the way the Crab Nebula once exploded and spread until it had a diameter of fifty billion kilometres.

There was a similar idea in ancient Indian religious mythology; the periods of the deity’s inert repose were called the Nights of Brahma which alternated with his Days, the periods of creative activity.

The explosion was equal in force to the explosion of a quadrillion of the murderous hydrogen bombs made in the Era of Disunity.

The presence in space of absolutely dark stars of the E class could only be guessed by their gravitation and a spaceship whose course lay in the vicinity of the monster was doomed. The invisible infrared stars of the T class also constituted a danger to spaceships; the same applied to dark clouds of big particles or absolutely cold bodies of the TT class.

Mven Mass stood thinking that the establishment of the Great Circle that linked up all the worlds inhabited by reasoning beings had been the greatest of all revolutions for Earth and, consequently, for all inhabited planets. Firstly, this had been a victory over time, over the shortness of the span of human life, that had prevented us and our thinking brothers in other worlds from penetrating into the farther depths of space. The transmission of information around the Great Circle was the transmission into an indefinite future since human thought, transmitted in this form, would continue its journey through space until it reached the farthest regions. The study of the most distant stars had become possible because the receipt of information from any place where there were planets that understood the Circle was only a matter of time. Only recently Earth received a message from the huge but very distant star known as Gamma Cygni; the star is 2,800 parsecs from us and a message takes over 9,000 years to reach Earth but that which had been received was understandable and could be deciphered by those members of the Great Circle whose thought processes are similar. It is another matter if a message should come from globular stellar systems or clusters that are older than our flat systems.