CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE ANDROMEDA NEBULA

The huge plain of El Homra stretches away to the south of the Gulf of Sirt in North Africa. Up to the time the trade winds and doldrums were eliminated it had been known as Hammada, the Red Desert, a waste of sand and stone, especially the triangular red stones that had given it its name. In summer it had been an ocean of scorching sunlight and during the autumn and winter nights it became an ocean of cold winds. Only the wind now remained of the old Hammada and that sent wave after wave across the tall silvery-blue grass that covered the firm soil of the plain; the grass had been transplanted from the South African veldt. The whistling of the wind and the bowed grass awakened in man’s memory an uncertain feeling of sorrow and, at the same time, a feeling that the great grassy plains are somehow close to his heart, something that he had met with before in his life — not just once before, but many times and under different circumstances, in sorrow and in joy, in good times and bad.

Every take-off or landing of a spaceship left behind a circle, about a kilometre in diameter, of scorched and poisoned earth. These circles were surrounded by red metal screens and were out of bounds for a period of ten years, twice as long as the harmful fall-out from the spaceship’s exhaust would be active. After each landing or take-off the cosmoport was transferred to another place which gave its buildings the imprint of temporariness and made its staff kin to the ancient nomads of the Sahara who for thousands of years traversed the desert on a special kind of animal with a humped back, a long curved neck and big corns on its paws, an animal called the camel.

The planetship Barion on its thirteenth journey between the satellite under construction and Earth brought Darr Veter to the Arizona Plain that, on account of the accumulated radioactivity there, still remained a desert even after the climate had changed. At the very dawn of the application of nuclear energy in the Era of Disunity, many experiments and tests of this new technique had been carried out there. The radioactive fall-out has remained to this day — it is now too weak to harm man but is sufficient to check the growth of trees and bushes.

Darr Veter took pleasure not only in the great charm of Earth — its blue sky in a bridal gown of white clouds — but also in the dusty soil, the scanty, tough grass….

How wonderful it was to walk with a firm tread on solid earth, under the golden rays of the Sun and with his face turned to meet the fresh dry breeze. After he had been on the threshold of Cosmic space he could better appreciate the full beauty of our planet that our ancestors had once called “the vale of tears and sorrow.”

Grom Orme did not detain the builder for he himself wanted to be present when Lebed took off. They arrived at El Homra together on the day the expedition was to leave.

While still air-borne Darr Veter noticed huge patches on the dull steel-grey plain — the one on the right was almost circular and the other was more elongated, an oval with the narrow end turned away from the other. These patches had been made by the spaceships of the 38th Cosmic Expedition that had recently left.

The circle came from the spaceship Tintagelle that had gone to the terrible star T and was loaded with all sorts of apparatus for the siege of the disc ship from distant worlds. The oval was made by Aella whose ascent was less steep; this ship was taking a large group of scientists to investigate the changes in matter that took place on the white dwarf of the triple star Omicron 2 Eridani. The ash that remained where the ships’ exhausts had burnt up the stony ground was about five feet thick and was covered with a binding material to prevent its being wind-carried. All that remained was to move the red fences from the old take-off ground, and this would be done as soon as Lebed left.

And there stood Lebed, iron-grey in her heat armour that would burn off during her passage through the atmosphere. After that the ship would continue its flight with gleaming walls capable of reflecting any known radiations. Nobody, however, would see it in this magnificence except the robot astronomers that tracked the flight: these machines would provide the people with nothing more than photographs of a flashing dot in the sky. When a ship came back to Earth it was always covered with dross and scored with furrows and hollows made by the explosions of tiny meteoric bodies. Darr Veter remembered how Tantra had returned — greyish-green and rust-red with parts of her outer walling in a state of collapse. None of the people standing around Lebed would ever see her again since none of them could live the hundred and seventy-two years that must elapse before she returned — a hundred and sixty-eight independent years of travel and four years to explore the planets….

Darr Veter’s work was such that he would probably not live long enough even for the ship to arrive at the planet of the green star. Just as in those days of doubt, Darr Veter once again felt great admiration for the bold ideas of Renn Bose and Mven Mass. What did it matter that their experiment had failed — what did it matter that the problem, one which affected the very foundations of the Cosmos, was still far from solution — what did it matter, if it was all nothing more than a figment of the imagination…. These lunatics were giants of creative thought for even in the refutation of their theories and the failure of their experiments people would make tremendous progress in many fields of knowledge.

Lost in thought, Darr Veter almost stumbled over the signal indicating the safety zone, turned round and saw a well-known figure. Running his fingers through his unruly red hair and screwing up his sharp eyes, Renn Bose came running towards him. A network of thin. scarcely perceptible scars had changed the face of the physicist by wrinkling it into an expression of pained intensity.

“I’m glad to see you well again, Renn!”

“I want you urgently!” said Renn Bose, holding his tiny freckled hands out to Veter.

“What are you doing here, so long before the take-off?”

“I saw Aella off, I’m very interested in the gravitation of such a heavy star. I heard you would come and so I waited for you.”

Darr Veter waited for an explanation.

“I hear you are returning to the observatory of the Outer Stations as Junius Antus has requested.”

Darr Veter nodded.

“Antus has recently recorded several undeciphered messages received from a Great Circle transmission.”

“Every month messages are received outside the usual transmission hours and each month the transmission time is advanced by two terrestrial hours. In the course of a year’s testing this amounts to an earthly day and in eight years it makes a whole hundred-thousandth of a galactic second. That is how the gaps in the reception of the Cosmos are filled in. During the last six months of the eight-year cycle we have been receiving incomprehensible messages that undoubtedly come from a great distance.”

“I’m very interested in them and would like you to take me as your assistant.”

“It would be better for me to help you. We’ll examine the records of the memory machines together.”

“What about Mven Mass?”

“We’ll take him, of course.”

“Veter, that’s just wonderful. I feel very awkward since that ill-fated experiment of mine, I’ve a feeling of guilt as far as the Council is concerned. But I can get along easily with you even if you are a member of the Council and a former Director and the one who advised me against the experiment.”

“Mven Mass is also a member of the Council.”

The physicist thought for a while, smiled at some memory of his own.