where several years had already passed since their departure, an
official communiqueŕeporting the loss of the Nautilus III had been
issued.
‘So now we’re dead and gone.’
‘Am I to inform the crew?’, the adjutant asked in embarrassment.
‘Of course. We need have no secrets from each other here.’
The first reaction of the crew to the news of their own deaths was a
roar of laughter. If you survive your own death, you live long, as the
saying goes. And it was a fact that if they survived their meeting with
the space pirates, they would return to Earth as thousand-year-old
ancients, ancients at the height of their powers. But the topic soon
palled, and the usual effects of space flight appeared. The men began to
be tired and to feel sorry for themselves, to be touchy and depressed.
There was only one way to deal with this state of affairs when humour
failed. The captain always pointed out that if it didn’t matter to anyone that the flight from Prague to Moscow made you age two hours in the
old days, why should you mind ageing a couple of years? The main
thing was not to feel any older. But when his jokes failed, he had to
make the day’s routine tougher. Hunger and fear left no room for
useless brooding. For this reason, the captain had made it a practice to
invent all kinds of problems in the spaceship (which was in perfect
order, of course). One day the deck equipment threatened to break
down, and had to be adjusted while it was running. All the parts were
changed, one by one; general rejoicing followed. The next time he
thought up an imminent collision with a meteorite: all supplies had to
be moved from the threatened side to the other side, and after the
supposed danger had passed, everything had to be put back in its place
again. A third time he invented an infectious disease the men must
have brought on board with them and which required reinoculation
for everyone; or the food would be infested, which meant going on a
diet of bread and water for two days. The captain had to continually
think up minor forms of torment to liven their days and keep the men
occupied so there was no time for brooding.
But there was no one there to think up a way to lift Feather’s days.
He had to bear everything alone: the feeling that their expedition and
his own life were utterly senseless, that he was to remain alone
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153
forever; despair at the hopelessness of the task he had undertaken and
at the hopelessness of the life he had left behind him on Earth. He and
the ship’s doctor had made a pact: whenever the doctor thought the
captain’s depression was reaching alarming proportions, he would
discover an attack of gallstones that called for special radiation
treatment in the sick bay. And then while the captain got very
drunk in the sick bay—he refused all medication but whiskey—his
adjutant took over command of the ship. In two days the captain had
usually got rid of his hangover and came up on deck again to think up
some new danger to throw the men into a sweat, to be overcome and
to provide cause for celebration.
After his most recent hangover, however, Nemo did not have to
bother to think up a new trick. The meeting with the pirate ship
seemed imminent at last. They could see it now—a rocket that looked
more like a blimp, shaped like a cigar and about the size of a small
planetoid: half the size of our moon. It was moving very slowly in the
direction of our solar system. There could be no doubt about it: it was
aiming at the sun.
Nemo gave orders for a message to be sent down to Earth at once by
means of their special equipment. It was an experiment, for the
chance of communication at that distance was extremely dubious.
Then he called all hands on deck. The crew had to take turns at the
machines and sleep in their space suits with weapons ready. He
turned the heaviest long-range catapults on the giant, and slackened
speed.
The Encounter
There were several courses open to them. They were all discussed by
the staff officers, and the computers offered an endless list of possible combinations. They all really boiled down to two: either to attack the
ship outright, or to come to terms.
In view of the damage the pirate ship had already done in space,
most of the officers were in favour of direct attack. The test explosions were still very much alive in their minds, and they could not imagine
anything in the whole of the universe that could stand up to their
nuclear weapons. There was, of course, the question whether the
attacking ship could survive the explosion. Would the Nautilus hold
out? No one could offer an answer, because no one had any idea what
material the pirate ship was made of. It was also quite possible that
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Josef Nesvadba
the crew of the super-rocket would be reasonable, intelligent and
willing to reach an agreement. But suppose the pirates seized and
killed the emissaries? That was the risk involved in the second
alternative. The first, however, involved an even greater risk: they
would all be blown to pieces.
Nemo finally decided to fly to the strange vessel in the company of
a few of his most stalwart men, armed to the teeth and ready to open
negotiations. They set off in an old-fashioned Cosmic Bathtub—the
one in which he had first made his name.
They were all amazed to see that the rocket was very similar to
certain types that were used for transport on Earth, only many times
larger. They flew around it like a satellite and found no sign of life.
Either there had been no lookouts, or the pirates were willing to come
to terms. Or they were all dead, thought Nemo.
‘We’ll land there by the main entrance.’ He pointed to an enormous
gap yawning in the bow. The entrance was unguarded, and the five
men easily found their way inside. Roped together and maintaining
radio contact with the Bathtub, they went down into the bowels of
the rocket one by one. The first to disappear was the adjutant. He
came back in a few minutes. His eyes were staring wildly and he was
spitting blood, as far as they could make out through the thick lenses
of his space suit goggles. They had to send him back to the Bathtub at
once. No one felt like going down after that. They stood there
hesitating, their feet weighted down and little batteries in their
hands to allow them to move about; their automatic-rifles were
slung over their shoulders. No one stirred. Then Nemo himself
stepped forward and slowly sank into the abyss.
He was barely ten feet down when a persistent thought began to
circle in his mind, as though somebody were whispering to him:
‘We are friends . . . we are friends . . . we are friends . . .’, he seemed to hear. But of course he didn’t really hear anything. It was like
having a tune stuck in the mind. The words went on and on in his
head like a broken phonograph record.
He began to feel frightened by the words as they swirled around. At
l
ast he landed on a sort of platform. The moment he felt his feet touch
ground, the opposite wall began to open; it was several yards thick. He
shut his eyes and went quickly through the opening. At first he threw
a thin stream of light ahead with his flashlight, but in about three
minutes he was blinded by light.
He was at the side of an enormous hall—impossible to see how far it
stretched. And up front was a group of monsters.
Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure
155
At least they looked like monsters to him. But he was equally sure
that he looked like a monster to them. What surprised him most,
though, was that the creatures were not all alike. One was almost the
size of a whale and looked something like a swollen ciliaphore;
another was covered with flagella, while another featured eight
feet. They were all transparent, and he could see a strange liquid
pulsating through their bodies. They did not move. If it had not been
for the liquid, he would have thought they were dead.
‘They’re only asleep—frozen. You can wake them up if you warm
them, they’ll wake up right away . . .’ He heard the words in his mind.
He had already realized that they came from micro-transmitters on
the brain surface. He switched his battery off. He did not want to wake
them up; he did not even want to warm the place they were in with
his torchlight. He gave a couple of sharp tugs at the cable he had
fastened to his body. The minute the men pulled him up, he heard the
insulating wall close behind him.
‘They really are monsters’, he said to the others, taking a swig of
whiskey. ‘Enormous protozoa. When I was a boy, someone showed
me a drop of water under the microscope. It’s like a drop of water
seven thousand times enlarged’, he added, and almost believed his
own words. They hurried off to the Bathtub, and returned to the
rocket to call a staff officers’ meeting.
‘My suggestion’, said the adjutant, who had come to himself in the
meantime, ‘is to fix all the explosives we’ve got to the surface of their rocket, fix the time fuses for a week from now, and get back to Earth
as quickly as we can.’
‘But suppose they’re friendly’, Nemo objected. ‘We have no right to
destroy them just like that. Suppose they’re bringing us a message—or
a warning?’ Finally, he decided to fix the explosives to the giant
ciliaphore spaceship, but to attempt to negotiate at the same time.
‘Who wants to come along with me and talk to them?’, he asked at
last. He looked at his hardened band of adventurers, but not one of
them could meet his eye. It was the first time in all those years that
they had felt fear. The adjutant had been in a terrible state when they
got him to sick bay. He had raved about monsters and terrible
creatures, and they could see what horrors he had gone through.
‘I’ll go with you.’ It was the adjutant himself who spoke. They were
all astonished. ‘I’ve got to make good . . .’
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Josef Nesvadba
The Sphinx
The two men stood at the edge of the great hall, near the whale-
ciliaphore and the elephant-flagellula, with the giant podia of the
third creature lying in the background. They didn’t even try to
distinguish the rest of the monsters. Once again they heard the two
messages echo in their minds. Slowly, they began to warm the air.
They had brought an active accumulator with them, and in less than
an hour the liquid in the ciliaphore’s body had begun to course more
rapidly, while the unknown creature’s podia began to tremble and the
flagellula stretched itself with lazy delight.
Up to this point the crew of the Nautilus III had been able to follow
the encounter, because the adjutant had taken a television transmit-
ter with him, but when the flagellula moved a second time the picture
seemed to mist over, as though water were pouring over it, and
communication was interrupted.
The second officer immediately called a meeting. Since the two
emissaries had ceased to respond to signals on the cable, the men on
the Nautilus wondered whether they should attack. Finally they
decided to send another party. The men who went discovered that
the wall was closed. It would not open, and even withstood the
oxyacetyle lamps they had brought along with them from the space-
ship, and which were capable of dissolving any material known to
man. They decided to wait by the entrance to the giant rocket for an
hour longer, and then to attack.
Precisely fifty-nine minutes later the two men inside were heard
again. They came out and boarded the Bathtub. When they reached
the Nautilus, Nemo called the whole crew on deck and gave the order
to return home.
‘What about the explosives?’
‘We can leave them behind. They know all about it, anyway’, and
he shut himself up in his cabin with the doctor and the adjutant. They
spent nearly ten hours in consultation.
Meanwhile, the men observed that the crew of the giant rocket was
not idle. The enormous cigar-shaped vessel seemed to bend suddenly,
straightened itself out, and moved off at top speed in the direction
from which it had come, away from our Sun. The Nautilus had
apparently succeeded in its task. But the mystery of the giant pirate
ship had not yet been solved. They were all impatient to hear what
the captain would have to say, and hurried on deck for evening roll
call.
Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure
157
‘I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed’, Nemo addressed them.
‘We only spoke a few words to the foreign ambassadors. They
answered us by telepathy, and I must say they seem to have made
much greater progress there than we have. We asked them whether
they were flying toward our solar system, and why. They explained
that a long time ago they had been sent into space from their planet to
visit our system, which according to their reports seemed to be the
only one in the universe inhabited by intelligent animals—that is to
say, by living creatures who are aware of themselves, their surround-
ings and their own actions.
‘We asked them what they wanted, and why they had undertaken
such a long journey to see us—whether there was anything we could
do to help them, whether they wanted to move to our planet—and of
course we pointed out immediately that it would never work out. It
seemed to us, you see, that nothing short of mortal danger could have
sent these creatures on so long and difficult a journey.
‘They replied that they wanted to know our answer to the
fundamental question of life.’ The captain blushed as he said that,
like a schoolboy who has suddenly forgotten the answer when the
teacher calls on him. ‘I’m sorry. I know it sounds silly, but that’s really what they said . . .’ He glanced at his adjutant, who nodded and
repeated:
‘They said they wanted to know our answer to the fundamental
question of life.’
‘Naturally we did
n’t know what they meant’, the captain went on.
‘We thought they were asking us about the purpose of life. Everyone
knows that the purpose of life is to transform nature. But that didn’t
seem to be what they wanted. Maybe they wanted to find out how
much we know about life. So we offered them the doctor’s notes: we
have mastered the problem of tissue regeneration; we can prolong
human life and heal even the most seriously damaged animal. But
that wasn’t what they wanted either. The fundamental question of life!
They seemed to be shouting the words at us, like a crowd at a football
game, or a pack of mad dogs. They wanted to know the answer. And
we didn’t even know what they meant.’
‘The fundamental question of life.’ The adjutant interrupted him.
‘Of course it occurred to us that it might all be strategy, a way of
distracting us by philosophical arguments. They couldn’t expect us to
believe they’d been en route from some damn spiral nebula for at
least two hundred thousand years, or that they were tagging the stars
as they went so folks back home would know they were going on
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Josef Nesvadba
with their task; they couldn’t expect us to believe they’d volunteered
to be put into suspended animation just to ask the kind of question
that no one on Earth bothers with except idlers, drunkards and
philosophers. I thought it might be a trick—that they were really
out to take us prisoner and destroy the rocket. I tried to give you
orders—’
‘And that’s just what you shouldn’t have done!’, Nemo shouted at
him angrily. ‘The ciliaphore next to us immediately opened the
insulating door and pushed us out.’ ‘‘Tell them we have detached
their explosives’’, he said. ‘‘It is clear to us that life in your solar
system is not yet completely reasonable . . .’’ ’
‘We would have attacked if they’d kept you one minute longer.’
‘You’re all fools’, answered the captain. ‘Fools and idiots. Nothing
would have happened. Can’t you understand that these creatures are
much more technologically advanced than we are? We were at their
mercy, and they spared us, simply because they gave up killing and
destruction long ago. They’re interested in other things.’ He was silent
for a moment and then apologized quickly to the crew. ‘It was an
View from Another Shore : European Science Fiction Page 26
