“How can you get so deep in thought?” came Chara’s voice from behind. “The artist Cart Sann said that wisdom is the combination of knowledge and feelings,” as she walked along the girl threw off her bathrobe, “and so we’ll be wise!”

Chara ran past the African and dived from the height into the noisy swirl below. Mven Mass saw her Jump forward, turn a somersault, spread her arms and disappear into the waves. The lads from the Destroyer Battalion, bathing down below, were suddenly silent. A cold shiver of admiration verging on fright ran down Mven’s back. The African had never dived from such a crazy height but he now stood without a tremor on the edge of the cliff and took off his clothes. He later remembered that in hazy momentary thoughts Chara seemed like an ancient goddess to him, a goddess that could do anything. If she could, then so could he!

A faint cry of warning from the girl arose out of the waves but Mven Mass did not hear it as he dived down. The flight was blissfully long. Mven Mass, a skilled diver, entered the water perfectly and his dive carried him a long way down. The water was so amazingly transparent that the sea bed seemed dangerously close. He twisted his body upwards and the impact of unspent inertia was so terrific that for a moment everything ceased to exist for him. With the velocity of a rocket Mven Mass flew to the surface, rolled over on to his back and lay rocked by the waves. When he opened his eyes he saw Chara swimming towards him, the paleness of fright dulling the bronze of her sunburn. There was both reproach and admiration in her eyes.

“Why did you do that?” she whispered, hardly breathing.

“Because you did. I’ll follow you anywhere to build my Epsilon Tucanae on our Earth!”

“Will you come back to the Great World with me?”

“Yes!”

Mven Mass turned over to swim farther and gave a shout of amazement. The astounding transparency of the ‘ water that had played such a nasty trick on him seemed even greater out there, farther from the beach. He and Chara seemed to be floating at a dizzy height over the sea bed every detail of which showed as clearly through the pure water as it would through the air. Mven Mass was brimming over with courage and triumph such as people experience when they get outside the bounds of terrestrial gravitation. Journeys across the ocean in a storm, leaps into the black gulf of the Cosmos from artificial satellites aroused similar feelings of boundless daring and success. Mven Mass in a single spurt swam up to Chara, whispered her name and read a fervent response in her clear and courageous eyes. Their hands and lips joined over the crystal gulf.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE ASTRONAUTICAL COUNCIL

The Astronautical Council, like the planet’s central brain, the Economic Council, had for centuries possessed its own building for scientific conferences. It was believed that specially designed and decorated rooms would attune the assembled scientists to the Cosmos and in this way facilitate their rapid mental transition from matters terrestrial to matters astral.

Chara Nandi had never before been inside the main hall of the Council building. She was excited when she and Evda Nahl entered that strange, egg-shaped hall with its curved, parabolic ceiling and its rows of seats arranged in ellipses. The hall was drenched in a bright, transparent light that seemed to have been collected from some other star brighter than the Sun. All the lines of the walls, ceiling and seats converged at the end of the huge hall that seemed to be their natural focal point. At that point there was a dais with a screen, a rostrum and seats for the members of the Council who conducted the meetings.

The dull gold panels of the walls alternated with relief maps of the planets. On the right-hand aide there were maps of the solar system and on the left the planets of neighbouring stars that had been studied by the Council’s expeditions. A second series under the pale-blue dome of the ceiling carried diagrams of other inhabited stellar systems done in radiant colours; these had been received from the Great Circle.

Chara’s attention was drawn to an old, faded picture over the rostrum that had apparently been restored several times. A violet-black sky occupied the entire upper half of the huge canvas. The tiny crescent of an alien moon cast a deathly white light on the uplifted stern of an ancient spaceship harshly silhouetted against the ruddy glow of a setting sun. The rows of ugly blue plants, coarse and dry, seemed to be made of metal. A man in a light spacesuit was dragging his feet through deep sand. He was looking back at the wrecked ship and the dead bodies of his companions. The eyeglasses of his mask reflected only the setting sun but by some trick of infinite skill the artist had managed to put into them an expression of the hopeless despair of loneliness in a strange world. Something living, formless and disgusting, was crawling over a nearby sand hummock. There was a title under the picture in big letters, as brief as it was expressive: Left Alone!

So impressed was she by the picture that the girl did not at first notice a wonderful architectural feature of the hall: the seats spread out fanwise and were arranged in steps so that a separate gangway to each seat was provided from galleries running under the rows of chairs. Each row was cut off completely from its higher and lower neighbours. Only when she sat down with Evda did Chara notice the ancient craftsmanship of the chairs, reading desks and barriers, all of which were made from real pearl-coloured African wood. Nobody today would waste so much time and effort on something that could be cast and polished in a few minutes. Perhaps it was due to the love of old things that lives in all people that Chara found the wood warmer and more full of life than plastic. Gently she stroked the curved arms of her chair, all the time looking round the hall.

As usual many people had gathered in the hall although powerful transmitters would carry telepictures of the proceedings over the whole planet. Mir Ohm, Secretary of the Council, opened the proceedings by the usual reading of brief announcements that had accumulated since the last meeting. Not a single unattentive face. not a single person occupied with his own thoughts, could have been found amongst the hundreds in the hall. A tactful attention to everything was a typical feature of the people of the Great Circle Era. Nevertheless Chara missed the first communication as she continued looking round the hall and reading citations from famous scientists written under the planet maps. She liked most of all an appeal to be receptive to natural phenomena written under the map of Jupiter: “Look how we are surrounded by facts that we do not understand — they thrust themselves upon us but we neither see nor hear the great things hidden in their faint outlines and awaiting discovery.” In another place, farther to the left, an inscription said: “The curtain hiding the unknown cannot be lifted easily — it is only after persistent labour, retreats and deviations that we begin to fathom true meanings and new boundless horizons open up before us. Never try to avoid that which at first seems useless and inexplicable, incomprehensible….”

There came a movement on the rostrum and the lights in the hall went out. The strong, calm voice of the Council Secretary quivered with excitement.

“You will now see that which was but recently considered impossible, a photograph of our Galaxy taken from the side. More than a hundred and fifty thousand years ago — one and a half galactic minutes — the inhabitants of planetary system….” Chara let the, to her, meaningless figures go, “in the Centaurus Constellation sent an appeal to the inhabitants of the Great Magellanic Cloud, the only extra-galactic stellar system near us that we know to contain worlds inhabited by intelligences capable of communicating with our Galaxy through the Circle. We still cannot give the exact coordinates of the Magellanic planetary system but we have received their transmission, a photograph of the Galaxy. Here it is!”