The biologist wiped away the perspiration caused by his strenuous efforts; he was trying to catch in his instrument the faint variations in reflection from the black water to determine its salt and mineral content.
The gleaming black of the water gave way to the dull black of land. The crossed rays of the searchlights cut a narrow lane between walls of darkness. Unexpectedly there were patches of colour in this lane, yellow sands and the greyish-green surface of a flat rocky ridge.
Tantra swept across the continent, obedient to the skilled hand of the commander.
At last Erg Noor found the plain he was looking for; it proved to be low-lying country that could not possibly be termed a plateau although it was obvious that the tides and storms of the black sea would not reach it, lying, as it did, some hundred metres above the surrounding country.
The locator on the spaceship’s port bow whistled. Tantra’s searchlights followed the locator beam and the clear outlines of a first class spaceship came into view.
The bow armour, made of an isotope of iridium having a reorganized crystalline structure, shone like new in the rays of the searchlight. There were no temporary structures anywhere near the ship, there were no lights on board — it stood dark and lifeless and did not in any way react to the approach of a sister ship. The searchlight rays moved past the ship and were reflected from a huge disc with spiral projections as they would have been from a blue mirror. The disc was standing on edge, leaning slightly to one side and was partly buried in the black soil. For a moment the observers got the impression that there were cliffs behind the disc and that beyond them the darkness was blacker and thicker, probably it was a precipice or a slope leading down to the lowlands….
The deafening roar of Tantra’s sirens shook the hull of the ship. Erg Noor intended to land close to the newly-discovered ship and was giving warning to any people who might be within the danger zone, that is, within a radius of some thousand metres from the landing place. The terrific roar of the planetary motors could be heard even inside the ship and a cloud of red-hot dust appeared in the screens. The ship’s floor began to rise up and then slip backwards. The hydraulic hinges of the landing seats turned them smoothly and soundlessly, keeping them perpendicular to the now vertical floors.
The huge jointed landing struts slid out of the ship’s hull, straightened out and took the first shock of the landing on an alien world. A shock, a recoil and another shock and Tantra, her bows still swaying, came to a standstill at the same time as the engines cut out. Erg Noor raised his hand to a lever on the control desk that was now directly over his head and released the jointed struts. Slowly, with a number of short jerks, the spaceship’s bows sank towards the ground until the hull had assumed its normal, horizontal position. The landing had been accomplished. As usual, the landing had shaken the human organism bo strongly that the astronauts required some time to recover and remained semi-recumbent in their landing seats.
They were all held down by an awful weight and were scarcely able to rise to their feet, like patients recovering slowly from a serious illness. The irrepressible biologist, however, had managed to take a sample of the, air.
“It’s fit to breathe,” he said. “I’ll take a look at it through the microscope.”
“Don’t bother,” said Erg Noor, unfastening the cushions of his landing chair, “we can’t go out without a spacesuit. There may be very dangerous spores and viruses on this planet.”
In the air-lock at the exit to the ship biologically shielded spacesuits and “jumping skeletons” had been prepared in readiness for an exploring party; the “skeletons” were steel, leather-covered frames that were worn over the spacesuits and were fitted with electric motors, springs and shock absorbers to enable the explorers to move about under conditions of excessive weight.
After six years’ travelling through interstellar space every one of them wanted to feel soil, even alien soil, under his feet. Kay Bear, Pour Hyss, Ingrid, Doctor Louma Lasvy and two engineers had to remain on board the vessel to man the radio, searchlights and various measuring and recording instruments.
Nisa stood aside from the party with her space helmet in her hands.
“Why do you hesitate, Nisa?” the commander called to her as he tested the radio set in the top of his helmet. “Come along to the spaceship!”
“I… I…” the girl stammered, “I believe it’s dead, it’s been standing here a long time…. Another catastrophe, another victim claimed by the merciless Cosmos. I know it’s inevitable but still it’s hard to bear, especially after Zirda and Algrab….”
“Perhaps the death of this spaceship will mean life for us,” said Pour Hyss who was busy training a short-focus telescope on the other ship which still remained unlighted.
Eight members of the expedition climbed into the air-lock and waited.
“Turn on the air!” ordered Erg Noor addressing those who were remaining on the ship and from whom they were now divided by an air-tight wall.
When the pressure in the air-lock had risen to ten atmospheres and was higher than that outside, hydraulic jacks opened the hermetically sealed doors. The air pressure in the lock was so great that it almost hurled the people out of the chamber and at the same time prevented anything harmful in the alien atmosphere from entering the chamber. The door clanged to behind them. The rays of a searchlight lit up a clear road along which the explorers hobbled on their spring legs, scarcely able to drag their own heavy weight along. The gigantic spaceship stood at the other end of the beam of light, about a mile away, a distance that seemed interminable to them in their impatience. They were badly shaken up by their clumsy jumps over uneven ground covered with small boulders and greatly heated by the black sun.
The stars made pale, diffused patches when seen through the dense, highly humid atmosphere. Instead of the brilliant magnificence of the Cosmos the planet’s sky showed only a faint suggestion of the constellations, the pale, reddish lanterns of their stars unable to penetrate the darkness on the planet.
The spaceship stood out in clear relief in the profound darkness of its surroundings. The thick borated zirconium lacquer on the hull plates had been rubbed off in places. The ship must have been wandering about the Cosmos for a long time.
An exclamation, repeated in all the radio telephones, came from Eon Thal. With his hand he pointed to the ship’s smaller lift that had been lowered to the ground and stood with its door wide open. What were undoubtedly plants grew around the lift and under the ship’s hull. Thick stems raised black bowls of parabolic shape nearly three feet above the ground; they had serrated edges something like the teeth of a cog-wheel and it was difficult to say whether they were leaves or flowers. A mass of these motionless cog-wheels growing together had an evil look about them. Still more disturbing was the silent, open door of the lift. Untouched plants and an open door could only mean that nobody had used that way for a long time, that the people were not guarding their tiny terrestrial world from that which was alien to them.
Erg Noor, Eon Thal and Nisa Greet entered the lift and the commander pressed the button. With a slight squeak the machinery was set in motion and the lift carried the explorers to the wide-open air-lock. They were followed by the others. Erg Noor transmitted an order to switch off the searchlight on Tantra. An instant later the tiny group of Earth-dwellers was lost in utter darkness. The world of the iron sun enveloped them as though trying to absorb that feeble spark of terrestrial life pressed down to the soil of the huge black planet.
They switched on the revolving electric lanterns in their helmets. The inner door of the air-lock, leading into the ship, was closed but not locked and opened at a push. The explorers entered the central corridor and easily found their way through the dark alleyways. The spaceship differed but little from Tantra in its design.
“This ship was built less than a hundred years ago,” said Erg Noor, drawing closer to Nisa. The girl looked round. Through the silicolloid[14] “ helmet the commander’s half-lighted face look
ed mysterious.
“An impossible idea,” he continued, “but suppose this is….”
“Parus,” exclaimed Nisa. She had forgotten the microphone and saw everybody turn towards her.
The explorers made their way to the chief room of the spaceship, the combined library and laboratory, and from there continued towards the ship’s control tower in the bows. Staggering along in his “skeleton,” swaying from side to side and banging against the walls as he went, the commander reached the main switchboard. The ship’s lights were switched on but there was no current to keep them going. The phosphorescent signs and indicators still glowed in the darkness. Erg Noor found the emergency switch, pressed it and, to their surprise, the lamps glowed dimly, but to the explorers they seemed blindingly bright. The light in the lift must have gone on, too, for they heard the voice of Pour Hyss in their telephones asking about the results of the examination. Geologist Beena Ledd answered him as the commander had suddenly stopped in the doorway of the control tower. Following his glance Nisa looked up and saw, between the fore screens, a double inscription, in the letters of Earth and the symbols of the Great Circle — Parus. A line drawn under the word separated it from Earth’s galactic call sign and the coordinates of the Solar System.
The spaceship that had disappeared eighty years before had been found in the system of the black sun, a system that had formerly been unknown and had been regarded as a dark cloud.
An examination of the interior of the spaceship did not tell them what had happened to the ship’s crew. The oxygen reservoirs were not empty, there were supplies of food and water sufficient for several years but nowhere was there any trace or any remains of Parus’ crew.
Here and there in the corridors, in the control tower and in the library there were strange dark stains on the walls. On the library floor there was another stain that looked as though something that had been spilled there had dried in a warped film of several layers. Before the open door in the after bulkhead of the stern engine room, wires had been torn apart and were hanging down, the massive uprights of the cooling system, made of phosphor-bronze, had been badly bent. Everything else in the ship was in perfect condition so that this damage, caused by a blow of tremendous force, could not be explained. The explorers were becoming exhausted by their efforts but were unable to find anything that would explain the disappearance and undoubted loss of Parus’ crew.
They did, however, make another discovery, one of the greatest importance — the supplies of anameson fuel and ion charges for the planetary motors were sufficient for the take-off of Tantra and for the journey back to Earth.
This information was immediately transmitted to Tantra and relieved all members of the expedition of that feeling of doom that had possessed them since their spaceship had been captured by the iron star. Nor would they have to carry out the lengthy work necessary to transmit a message to Earth. There would be, however, the tremendous task of transferring the anameson containers to Tantra. This would not have been an easy task anywhere, but there, on a planet where everything weighed three times as much as on Earth, it would require all the skill and ingenuity of the engineers. People of the Great Circle Era, however, were not afraid of difficult mental problems; on the contrary, they enjoyed them.
From the tape recorder in the central control tower the biologist removed the unfinished spool of the ship’s log-book. Erg Noor and the biologist opened the door of the hermetically sealed main safe where the results of the Parus expedition were kept. The members of the expedition were burdened down with a heavy weight of numerous spools of photo-magnetic films, log-books, astronomical observations and computations. They were explorers themselves and could not dream of leaving such a valuable find even for a moment.
Dead tired the explorers were met in Tantra’s library by their excited and impatient comrades. In surroundings to which they were accustomed, seated around a comfortable table under bright lights, the tomb-like gloom of the black world outside and the dead, abandoned spaceship seemed like a gruesome nightmare. Nevertheless the force of gravity of that awful planet continued to crush every one of them and from time to time one or another of the explorers would grimace with pain on making some movement. It had been very difficult, without considerable practice, to coordinate the movements of the body with those of the “steel skeleton” so that an ordinary walk became a series of jerks and severe shakings. The short journey to Parus and back had completely exhausted them. Geologist Beena Ledd was apparently suffering from a slight concussion of the brain, but she refused to go away before she had heard the last spool of the ship’s log-book and remained leaning on the table with her hands pressed to her temples. Nisa expected something extraordinary from the records that had lain for eighty years in a dead ship on that horrid planet. She imagined hoarse appeals for help, howls of a suffering, tragic words of farewell. The girl shuddered when a cold, melodious voice came from the reproducer. Even Erg Noor, a man who possessed great knowledge of everything connected with interstellar flights, knew nothing of the crew of Parus. The crew had been made up exclusively of young people and had set out on their fantastically courageous journey to Vega without giving the Astronautical Council the usual film about the members of the crew.
The unknown voice reported events that occurred seven months after the last message had been sent to Earth. Twenty-five years before that, in crossing a Cosmic ice zone on the fringe of the Vega system, Parus had been damaged. The crew managed to patch the hole in the ship’s stern and continue their journey but it nevertheless upset the delicate regulation of the protective field of the motors. After a struggle that lasted twenty years they had had to stop the engines. Parus continued going five years by inertia until she was pulled aside by a natural inaccuracy in the ship’s course. That was when the first message had been sent. The spaceship was about to send another message when she was caught in the field of the iron star. Then the same thing happened to Parus as had happened to Tantra with the difference that Parus was without motors and had been unable to resist. Nor could Parus become a satellite of the black planet since the planetary motors, housed in the vessel’s stern, had been wrecked at the same time as the anameson motors. Parus landed safely on a low plateau near the sea. The crew set about carrying out three tasks of importance: the repair of the motors, the transmission of a message to Earth and the study of the unknown planet. Before they had time to erect a rocket tower people began to disappear mysteriously.
Those sent out to look for them did not return. The exploration of the planet ceased, the remainder of the crew went out to the rocket tower only in a group and for the long periods between spells of work that the strong force of gravity made extremely exhausting, they remained in the tightly sealed spaceship. In their hurry to send off the rocket they had not even studied the strange spaceship in the vicinity of Parus that had, apparently, been there a long time.
“That disc!” flashed through Nisa’s mind. She met the commander’s glance and he, understanding her thoughts, nodded in affirmation. Six out of the fourteen of Parus’ crew had disappeared but after the necessary measures had been taken the disappearances stopped. There then followed a break of about three days in the log-book and the story was taken up by a young woman’s high-pitched voice.
“Today is the twelfth day of the seventh month, year 723 of the Great Circle, and we who have remained alive have completed the construction of the rocket transmitter. Tomorrow at this time….”
Kay Bear glanced instinctively at the time gradations along the tape — 5 a. m. Parus time, and who could know what time that would be on this planet!
“We are sending a reliably computed…” the voice broke off and then began again, this time weaker and suppressed, as though the speaker had turned away from the microphone, “… I am switching on! More!” The tape-recorder was silent although the tape continued to unwind.
“Something must have happened!” began Ingrid Dietra.
Hurried, choking words came from the tape-
recorder. ‘“… two got away… Laik is gone, she didn’t jump far enough… the lift… they couldn’t shut the outside door, only the inside one! Mechanic Sach Kthon has crawled to the engines… we’ll start the planetary motors going… there is nothing to them but fury and horror, they are nothing! Yes, nothing…” for some time the tape unwound in silence, then the same voice began again.
“I don’t think Kthon managed it. I’m alone, but I’ve thought of what to do. Before I begin,” the voice grew stronger and then sounded with amazing strength, “Brothers, if you find Parus, take heed of my warning, never leave the ship at all.” The woman who was speaking heaved a deep sigh and said, as though talking to herself, “I must find out about Kthon, I’ll come back and explain in detail.” Then came a click and the tape continued to unwind for about twenty minutes before it reached the end. The eager listeners waited in vain, the unknown woman had been unable to give any further details just as she had probably been unable to return.
Erg Noor switched off the apparatus and turned to his companions.
“Our brothers and sisters who died in Parus will save us! Can’t you feel the strong arm of the man of Earth! There’s a supply of anameson on the ship and we’ve been given a warning of the mortal danger that threatens us. I have no idea what it is but it’s undoubtedly some alien form of life. If it had been elemental. Cosmic forces, they’d have damaged the ship and not merely killed the people, It would be a disgrace if we could not save ourselves now that we have been given so much help; we must take our discoveries and those of Parus back to Earth. The great work of those who perished at their posts, their half-century’s struggle against the Cosmos, must not have been in vain.”
“How do you propose to get the fuel on board without leaving the ship?” asked Kay Bear.
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