Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale) вк-1

by Ivan Yefremov

  Suddenly something changed in that tiny world lost in the darkness and fearful cold. Darr Veter did not immediately realize that the planetship had switched on its searchlights. The darkness had become even blacker, the burning stars grew dull, leaving the platform and the hull in a sea of bright white light that divided them off from the gloom. A few minutes later Altai reduced the voltage and the light turned yellow and was less intense.

  The planetship was economizing current from its accumulators. The squares and ellipses that went to make up the walls of the hull, the latticed trusses that reinforced the structure, the cylinders and pipes of the reservoirs again moved about, finding their places in the skeleton of the satellite as though in daylight.

  Darr Veter felt for a cross beam, took hold of the handles of a roller car running on a ropeway, and with one hard push of his feet sailed up to Altai. Right in front of the planetship’s hatch he pressed the brake lever in his hand and halted just in time to prevent his crashing into a closed door.

  The air-lock was not kept at normal terrestrial pressure in order not to lose too much air with the coming and going of such a large number of workers. Darr Veter kept on his spacesuit until he was in a second, auxiliary air-lock, where he unscrewed his space helmet and battery.

  Flexing a body that was weary of the spacesuit, Darr Veter walked firmly along the deck of the ship, enjoying a return to almost normal gravity. The artificial gravitation of the planetship worked constantly. It was inexpressibly pleasant to feel yourself standing firmly on the ground as a man should stand and not be like a flea floundering in an unsteady, treacherous gulf! Soft light and warm air and a comfortable chair tempted him to stretch out in it and relax without having to think. Darr Veter was experiencing the pleasures of his distant ancestors that had once astonished him in old novels. It was in this way that people entered a warm house, a mud hut or a felt tent after long journeys through cold deserts, wet forests or icy mountains. And now as then a thin wall separated him from a huge, dangerous world, hostile to man, a wall that retained the warmth and light, gave him a chance to rest, gather fresh strength and think over what he was to do next.

  Darr Veter did not yield to the temptation of armchair and book. He had to contact Earth — the light burning all night at that height might cause alarm amongst those who were keeping the satellite under observation. It was also necessary to warn Earth that reinforcements would be needed ahead of time.

  There was good communication that day and Darr Veter talked with Grom Orme on the TVP and not in coded signals; the TVP was an extremely powerful one, such as was fitted to every spaceship. The old chairman was pleased with the progress made and said he would immediately see about new workers and extra materials.

  Darr Veter left the Altai’s control tower and passed through the library that had been re-equipped as a dormitory with two tiers of bunks. Cabins, dining-rooms, the cook’s galley, the side corridors and the forward engine room had all been fitted out with extra bunks. The planet-ship had been converted into a stationary base and was overcrowded. Scarcely able to drag his feet Darr Veter walked down the corridor panelled with plastics warm to the touch, and lazily opened and closed hermetically sealed doors.

  He was thinking of astronauts who spent dozens of years inside such a ship without any hope of leaving it before the appointed time, a cruelly long one. He had been living there six months and every day had left the narrow confines to work in the oppressive spaces of interplanetary vacuum. He was already longing for his beautiful Earth with its steppes and seas and the teeming life of the big centres in the inhabited zones. But Erg Noor, Nisa Greet and twenty other people would have to spend ninety-two dependent years or a hundred and forty terrestrial years in a spaceship before it brought them back to their own planet. Not one of them could possibly live so long! Their bodies would be cremated and buried away on the distant planets of the green zirconium star!

  Or they would die en route and their bodies enclosed in a funeral rocket would be sent out into the Cosmos just,as the funeral boats of their ancestors swept out to sea carrying dead warriors away with them. But such heroes as those who undertook life-long imprisonment in a spaceship without the hope that they, personally, would return, were unknown in the history of mankind. No, he was wrong, Veda would have rebuked him! How could he have forgotten the nameless fighters for the dignity and freedom of man in distant epochs who undertook even greater risks — horrible tortures and life-long imprisonment in damp dungeons. Yes, these heroes had been stronger and more worthy even than his contemporaries preparing to make their magnificent flight into the Cosmos to explore distant worlds!

  And he, Darr Veter, who had never been away from his native planet for any length of time, was a pygmy compared with them and by no means an angel of heaven, as his infinitely dear Veda Kong had called him!

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE STEEL DOOR

  The robot tunneller had been working for twenty, days in the damp and gloom before it had finally cleared away the roof fall and bolstered up the ceiling. The road down into the cave was open and could be used as soon as it had been tested for safety. Other robots, small cars on caterpillar tracks, operated by Archimedean screws moved noiselessly down into the depths. At every hundred metres the instruments on the cars sent back reports on temperature, humidity and the content of the air. The cars cleverly overcame all obstacles and went down to a depth of four hundred metres. Following behind them Veda Kong and a group of historians descended into the treasure cave. Ninety years before that, when tests for subsoil waters were being made, indicators had shown a large quantity of metal amongst sandstone and limestone deposits that are not, in general, associated with metallic ores. It was soon discovered that the place coincided with a description of the site of a cave, Halovkul, that had been mentioned in old legends. The name had originally been Hall of Culture in a language now dead. During a terribly devastating war, people who had believed themselves the most advanced in science and culture, hid the treasures of their civilization in a cave. In those distant days secrecy and mystery were very widespread.

  Veda was quite as excited as the youngest of her assistants as she slid down the wet, red clay that formed the floor of the sloping entrance tunnel.

  Her imagination drew pictures of magnificent halls, hermetically sealed safes containing films, drawings and maps, cupboards of tape recordings or the recordings of memory machines, shelves with jars of chemical compounds, alloys and medicines, stuffed animals, now extinct, in air- and water-tight glass-cases, prepared plants and skeletons put together from the fossilized bones of the past inhabitants of Earth. She even dreamed of slabs of silicoll in which the pictures of the most famous artists had been cast, whole galleries of sculptures of mankind’s best representatives, the most prominent people, skilful carvings of animals… models of famous buildings, inscriptions about outstanding events perpetuated in stone or metal….

  Lost in her dreams Veda Kong found herself in a huge cave between three and four thousand square metres in extent. The vaulted ceiling was lost in the darkness and long stalactites glistened in the electric light. The cave was truly magnificent and, in realization of Veda’s dreams, machines and cupboards had been placed in the countless niches formed in the walls by the ribs and ledges of limestone. With shouts of joy the archaeologists spread around the perimeter of the cave: many of the machines standing in the niches, some of them retaining the polish on their glass and metal parts, were motor-cars of the type that pleased our distant ancestors to such an extent and were considered the highest technical achievement of human genius in the Era of Disunity. In that period, for some unknown reason, people built large numbers of vehicles capable of carrying only a few passengers. The construction of the cars reached a high level of elegance, the engines and steering mechanisms were very ingenious but in all else these vehicles were senseless. Hundreds of thousands of them filled the city streets and country roads carrying people who lived far from the places where they wo
rked and hurried every day to reach their jobs and then get home again. The vehicles were dangerous to drive, killed a tremendous number of people every year and burned up millions and millions of tons of valuable organic substances accumulated in the geological past of the planet and in so doing poisoned the atmosphere with carbon monoxide. The archaeologists of the Great Circle Era were very disappointed when they discovered how much room had been devoted to these machines in the cave.

  On low platforms, however, there were more powerful steam engines, electric motors, jet, turbine and nuclear motors. In glass show-cases covered with a coating of limestone there were vertical rows of instruments of all kinds, most likely they were TV receivers, cameras, calculating machines and other similar devices. This museum of machines, some of which had quite rusted away but others were in a good state of preservation, was of great historical value as it illustrated the technical level of civilization at a distant date, the majority of whose records had been lost in political and military disturbances.

  Miyiko Eigoro, Veda’s faithful assistant who had again given up her beloved sea for the damp and darkness of underground exploration, noticed the black opening of a gallery at the far end of the cave, behind a big limestone pillar. The pillar turned out to be the limestone-covered skeleton of a machine and at its foot lay a heap of plastic dust, the remains of the door that had once covered the entrance to the gallery. Advancing step by step, guided by the red cable of the scouting machines, the archaeologists got into the second chamber that was almost at the same level and was filled with hermetically sealed cupboards of metal and glass. A long English inscription in big letters ran round the vertical walls that had, in places, collapsed. Veda had to stop for a moment to decipher it.

  With the boastfulness that was typical of the ancient individualists, the builders of the caves informed their descendants that they had reached the heights of knowledge and were preserving their magnificent achievements for posterity.

  Miyiko shrugged her shoulders contemptuously.

  “The inscription alone tells us that the Hall of Culture belongs to the end of the Era of Disunity, to the last years of the old type of social order. This foolish confidence in the eternal and unchanging continuation of their civilization, language, customs, morals and in the majesty of the so-called ‘white man’ is typical of the period!”

  “You have a clear conception of the past, but it is somewhat one-sided, Miyiko. Through the grim skeleton of moribund capitalism I see those who struggled for a better future. Their future is our ‘today.’ I see countless men and women seeking light in a narrow impoverished life — they had strength enough to fight their way out of its captivity and goodness enough to help their friends and not harden their hearts in the suffocating morals of the world around them. And they were brave, recklessly brave.”

  “But it was not they who hid their culture here,” objected Miyiko. “Just look, there is nothing but machines, technology, here. They wallowed in machines, paying no attention to their own moral and emotional degradation. They were contemptuous of the past and blind to the future!”

  Veda thought that Miyiko was right. The lives of the people who had filled those caves would have been easier if they had been able to compare that which they had achieved with that which still had to be done before the world and society could be really transformed. Then their dirty, sooty planet, with its felled forests and litter of paper and broken glass, bricks and rusty iron, would have been seen in its real light. Our ancestors would have had a better understanding of what still had to be done and would not have blinded themselves with self-praise.

  A narrow well, thirty-two metres deep, led down to the next cave. Veda sent Miyiko and two other assistants back for the gamma-ray apparatus to examine the contents of the cupboards and herself went to examine the third cave that had not been affected by lime and clay deposits. The low, quadrangular plate-glass show-cases were only misty from the damp that had penetrated into the cave. Pressing their faces against the glass the archaeologists saw the most remarkable articles of gold and platinum decorated with precious stones. Judging by the workmanship these ancient relics had been collected at a time when people still had more respect for the old than for the new, a habit that had come into being in very ancient days when people worshipped their ancestors. As Veda looked at the collection she felt the same disappointment in the people of olden days as she had done when she read the inscription on the wall: she was annoyed at the absurd self-confidence of the ancients who believed that their idea of values and their tastes would continue unchanged for dozens of centuries and would be accepted as canons by their descendants.

  The far end of the cave merged into a high, straight passage that sloped down to an unknown depth. The instruments on the explorer cars showed a depth of three hundred and four metres from the surface at the beginning of the corridor. Huge crevices divided the ceiling into a number of separate limestone blocks that probably weighed several thousand tons each. Veda felt alarmed: her experience in the exploration of many underground premises told her that the rocks at the foot of the mountain chain were certain to be in a state of instability. The mass of rock may have been shifted by an earthquake or by the general rise of the mountains that had grown at least fifty metres higher in the centuries that had elapsed since the caves had been sealed. An ordinary archaeological expedition had no means at its disposal to strengthen such a huge mass. Only an objective of importance to the planet’s economy would have justified the expenditure necessary for the job.

  At the same time historical secrets hidden in the deep cave might be of technical value, they might consist of such things as forgotten inventions that would be of value in modern times.

  It would have been nothing more than wise precaution to abandon all further exploration. But why should a historian be so very careful of his own person? When millions of people were carrying out risky experiments and doing risky jobs, when Darr Veter and his companions were working at a height of fifty-seven thousand kilometres above the Earth, when Erg Noor was preparing to start out on a voyage from which there would be no return! Neither of these men whom Veda admired would have hesitated… nor would she!

  They would take reserve batteries, an electronic camera, two oxygen apparatuses and would go alone, she and the fearless Miyiko, leaving their companions to study the third cave.

  Veda advised her workers to take a meal to keep up their strength. They got out their travellers’ cakes, slabs of pressed, easily assimilated proteins, sugars and preparations destroying the toxins of weariness mixed with vitamins, hormones and nerve stimulants. Veda, nervously impatient, did not want to eat. Miyiko appeared some forty minutes later, she had been unable to resist the temptation of examining the contents of some of the cupboards with her gamma-rays.

  The descendant of Japanese women divers thanked her principal with a glance and got herself ready in the twinkling of an eye.

  The thin red cables stretched down the centre of the passage. The pale light emanating from the phosphorescent crowns worn by the two women was insufficient to penetrate the thousand-year-old darkness that lay ahead of them where the slope grew steeper. Big drops of cold water dripped steadily and dully from the roof. To the sides and below them they could hear the gurgle of streams of water running in the crevices. The air, saturated with moisture, was as still as death in that enclosed underground chamber. The silence was such as exists only in caves where it is guarded by the dead and inert matter of Earth’s crust. Outside, no matter how great the silence may be, nature’s hidden life, the movement of water, air and light may always be assumed.

  Miyiko and Veda were unwittingly hypnotized by the cave that drew them into its black depths as though into the depths of a dead past that had been wiped out by time and lived only as figments of the imagination.

  The descent was rapid although there was a thick layer of sticky clay on the floor. Blocks of stone fallen from the walls at times barred the way and had to he climbed over, the w
omen crawling through the narrow space left between the fall and the roof. In half an hour Miyiko and Veda had descended another one hundred and ninety metres into the earth and reached a perfectly smooth wall at the foot of which the two explorer robots lay motionless. One flash of light was enough to show them that the smooth wall was a massive, hermetically sealed door of stainless steel. In the middle of the door were two convex circles with certain symbols on them, handles and gilded arrows. The lock opened when a pre-arranged signal had been selected. The two archaeologists knew of such safes belonging to an earlier period. After a short consultation Veda and Miyiko made a closer examination of the lode. It was very much like those malignantly clever constructions that people once used to keep other people’s hands off their property — in the Era of Disunity people were divided in that way into “us” and “others.” There had been a number of cases when an attempt to open such doors had caused an explosion or the emission of poisonous gases or deadly radiations, killing the unsuspecting investigators. The mechanism of such locks, made of non-oxidizing metals or plastics, was not affected by time: a large number of people had fallen victim to these steel doors before archaeologists had learned to render them harmless.

  It was obvious that the door had to be opened with special instruments. They would have to go all the way back from the very threshold of the cave’s main secret. Who could doubt that the locked door would hide the most important and valuable possession of the people of those distant times. Putting out their lamps and making do with the glow of their phosphorescent crowns, Veda and Miyiko sat down to rest and eat in order to be able to repeat their attempt.