Return From the Stars

by Stanisław Lem

  All this, however, took place on Earth or in its proximity. Afterward came a space not contrived and not created in the laboratory, a space that killed in fact, without pretending, and that sometimes spared — Olaf, Gimma, Thurber, myself, those seven from the Ulysses — and even let us return. Whereupon we, who longed most of all for peace, seeing our dream come true, and to perfection, immediately scorned it. I believe it was Plato who said, “O wretched one — you will have what you wanted.”

  SEVEN

  One night, very late, we lay spent; Eri’s head, turned to one side, rested in the crook of my arm. Raising my eyes to the open window, I saw the stars in the gaps among the clouds. There was no wind, the curtain hung frozen like some pale phantom, but now a desolate wave approached from the open ocean, and I could hear the long rumble announcing it, then the ragged roar of the breakers on the beach, then silence for several heartbeats, and again the unseen water stormed the night shore. But I hardly noticed this steadily repeated reminder of my presence on Earth, for my eyes were fixed on the Southern Cross, in which Beta had been our guiding star; every day I took bearings by it, automatically, my thoughts on other things; it had led us unfailingly, a never-fading beacon in space. I could almost feel in my hands the metal grips I would shift to bring the point of light, distinct in the darkness, to the center of the field of vision, with the soft rubber rim of the eyepiece against my brows and cheeks. Beta, one of the more distant stars, hardly changed at all when we reached our destination. It shone with the same indifference, though the Southern Cross had long since disappeared to us because we had gone deep into its arms, and then that white point of light, that giant star, no longer was what it had seemed at the beginning, a challenge; its immutability revealed its true meaning, that it was a witness to our transience, to the indifference of the void, the universe — an indifference that no one is ever able to accept.

  But now, trying to catch the sound of Eri’s breathing between the rumbles of the Pacific, I was incredulous. I said to myself silently: It’s true, it’s true, I was there; but my wonder remained.

  Eri gave a start. I began to move away, to make more room for her, but suddenly I felt her gaze on me.

  “You’re not asleep?” I whispered. And leaned over, wanting to touch her lips with mine, but she put the tips of her fingers on my mouth. She held them there for a moment, then moved them along the collarbone to the chest, felt the hard hollow between my ribs, and pressed her palm to it.

  “What’s this?” she whispered.

  “A scar.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had an accident.”

  She became silent. I could feel her looking at me. She lifted her head. Her eyes were all darkness, without a glimmer in them; I could see the outline of her arm, moving with her breath, white.

  “Why don’t you tell me anything?”

  “Eri… ?”

  “Why don’t you want to talk?”

  “About the stars?” I suddenly understood. She was silent. I did not know what to say.

  “You think I wouldn’t understand?”

  I looked at her closely, through the darkness, as the ocean’s roar ebbed and flowed through the room, and did not know how to explain it to her.

  “Eri…”

  I tried to take her in my arms. She freed herself and sat up in bed.

  “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. But tell me why, at least.”

  “You don’t know? You really don’t?”

  “Now, maybe. You wanted… to spare me?”

  “No. I’m simply afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t want to dig it all up. It’s not that I’m denying any of it. That would be impossible, anyway. But talking about it would mean — or so it seems to me — shutting myself up in it. Away from everyone, everything, from what is… now.”

  “I understand,” she said quietly. The white smudge of her face disappeared, she had lowered her head. “You think that I don’t value it.”

  “No, no,” I tried to interrupt her.

  “Wait, now it’s my turn. What I think about astronautics, and the fact that I would never leave Earth, that’s one thing. But it has nothing to do with you and me. Though actually it does: because we are together. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be, ever. For me — it means you. That is why I would like… but you don’t have to. If it is as you say. If you feel like that.”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  “But not today.”

  “Today.”

  “Lie back.”

  I fell on the pillows. She tiptoed to the window, a whiteness in the gloom. Drew the curtain. The stars vanished, there was only the slow roar of the Pacific, returning repeatedly with a dreary persistence. I could see practically nothing. The moving air betrayed her steps, the bed sagged.

  “Did you ever see a ship of the class of the Prometheus?”

  “No.”

  “It’s large. On Earth, it would weigh over three hundred thousand tons.”

  “And there were so few of you?”

  “Twelve. Tom Arder, Olaf, Arne, Thomas — the pilots, along with myself. And the seven scientists. If you think that it was empty there, you are wrong. Propulsion takes up nine-tenths of the mass. Photoaggregates. Storage, supplies, reserve units. The actual living quarters are small. Each of us had a cabin, in addition to the common ones. In the middle part of the body — the control center and the small landing rockets, and the probes, even smaller, for collecting samples from the corona…”

  “And you were over Arcturus in one of those?”

  “Yes. As was Arder.”

  “Why didn’t you fly together?”

  “In one rocket? It’s riskier that way.”

  “How?”

  “A probe is a cooling system. A sort of flying refrigerator. Just enough room to sit down in. You sit inside a shell of ice. The ice melts from the shield and refreezes on the pipes. The air compressors can be damaged. All it takes is a moment, because outside the temperature is ten, twelve thousand degrees. When the pipes stop in a two-man rocket, two men die. This way, only one. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  She put her hand on that unfeeling part of my chest.

  “And this… happened there?”

  “No, Eri; shall I tell you?”

  “All right.”

  “Only don’t think… No one knows about this.”

  “This?”

  The scar stood out under the warmth of her flngers — as if returning to life.

  “Yes.”

  “How is that possible? What about Olaf?”

  “Not even Olaf. No one knows. I lied to them, Eri. Now I have to tell you, since I’ve started. Eri… it happened in the sixth year. We were on our way back then, but in cloudy regions you can’t move quickly. It’s a magnificent sight; the faster the ship travels, the stronger the luminescence of the cloud. We had a tail behind us, not like the tail of a comet, more a polar aurora, thin at the sides, deep into the sky, toward Alpha Eridanus, for thousands and thousands of kilometers… Arder and Ennesson were gone by then. Venturi was dead, too. I would wake at six in the morning, when the light was changing from blue to white. I heard Olaf speaking from the controls. He had spotted something interesting. I went down. The radar showed a spot, slightly off our course. Thomas came, and we wondered what the thing could be. It was too big for a meteor, and, anyway, meteors never occur singly. We reduced speed. This woke the rest. When they joined us, I remember, Thomas said it had to be a ship. We often joked like that. In space there must be ships from other systems, but two mosquitoes released at opposite ends of the Earth would stand a better chance of meeting. We had reached a gap now in the cloud, and the cold, nebular dust became so dispersed that you could see stars of the sixth magnitude with the naked eye. The spot turned out to be a planetoid. Something like Vesta. A quarter of a billion tons, perhaps more. Extraordinarily regular, almost spherical. Which is quite rare.
Two milliparsecs off the bow. It was traveling, and we followed. Thurber asked me if we could get closer. I said we could, by a quarter of a milliparsec.

  “We drew nearer. Through the telescope it looked like a porcupine, a ball bristling with spines. An oddity. Belonged in a museum. Thurber started arguing with Biel about its origin, whether tectonic or not. Thomas butted in, saying that this could be determined. There would be no loss of energy, we hadn’t even begun to accelerate. He would fly there, take a few specimens, return. Gimma hesitated. Time presented no problem — we had some to spare. Finally he agreed. No doubt because I was present. Although I hadn’t said a thing. Perhaps because of that. Because our relationship had become… but that’s another story. We stopped; a maneuver of this kind takes time, and meanwhile the planetoid moved away, but we had it on radar. I was worried, because from the time we started back we had nothing but trouble. Breakdowns, not serious but hard to fix — and happening without any apparent reason. I’m not superstitious, but I believe in series. Still, I had no argument against his going. It made me look childish, but I checked out Thomas’s engine myself and told him to be careful. With the dust.”

  “The what?”

  “Dust. In the region of a cold cloud, you see, planetoids act like vacuum cleaners. They remove the dust from the space in their path, and this goes on over a long period of time. The dust settles in layers, which can double the size of the planetoid. A blast from a jet nozzle or even a heavy step is enough to set up a swirling cloud of dust that hangs above the surface. May not sound serious, but you can’t see a thing. I told him that. But he knew it as well as I did. Olaf launched him off the ship’s side, I went up to navigation and began to guide him down. I saw him approach the planetoid, maneuver, turn his rocket, and descend to the surface, like on a rope. Then, of course, I lost sight of him. But that was five kilometers…”

  “You picked him up on radar?”

  “No, on the optical, that is, by telescope. Infrared. But I could talk to him the whole time. On the radio. Just as I was thinking that I hadn’t seen Thomas make such a careful landing in a long time — we had all become careful on the way back — I saw a small flash, and a dark stain began to spread across the surface of the planetoid. Gimma, standing next to me, shouted. He thought that Thomas, to brake at the last moment, had hit the flame. That’s an expression we use. You give one short blast of the engine, naturally not in such circumstances. And I knew that Thomas would never have done that. It had to be lightning.”

  “Lightning? There?”

  “Yes. You see, any body moving at high speed through a cloud builds up charge, static electricity, from friction. There was a difference in potential between the Prometheus and the planetoid. It could have been billions of volts. More, even. When Thomas landed, a spark leapt. That was the flash, and because of the sudden heat the dust rose, and in a minute the entire surface was covered by a cloud. We couldn’t hear him — his radio just crackled. I was furious, mainly at myself, for having underestimated. The rocket had special lightning conductors, pronged, and the charge should have passed quietly into St. Elmo’s fire. But it didn’t. It was exceptionally powerful. Gimma asked me when I thought the dust would settle. Thurber didn’t ask; it was clear that it would take days.”

  “Days?”

  “Yes. Because the gravity was extremely low. If you dropped a stone, it would fall for several hours before hitting the ground. Think how much longer it would take dust to settle after being thrown up a hundred meters. I told Gimma to go about his business, because we had to wait.”

  “And nothing could be done?”

  “No. If I could be sure that Thomas was still inside his rocket, I would have taken a chance — turned the Prometheus around, got close to the planetoid, and blasted the dust off to all four corners of the galaxy — but I could not be sure. And finding him? The surface of the planetoid had an area equal to, I don’t know, that of Corsica. Besides, in the dust cloud you could walk right by him at arm’s length and not see him. There was only one solution. He had it at his fingertips. He could have taken off and returned.”

  “He didn’t do that?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I can guess. He would have had to take off blind. I could see that the cloud reached, well, not quite a kilometer above the surface, but he didn’t know that. He was afraid of hitting an overhang or a rock. He might have landed on the bottom of some deep gorge. So we hung there a day, two days; he had enough oxygen and provisions for six. Emergency rations. No I one was in a position to do anything. We paced and thought up ways of getting Thomas out of this mess. Emitters. Different wavelengths. We even threw down flares. They didn’t work, that cloud was as dark as a tomb. A third day — a third night. Our measurements showed that the cloud was settling, but I wasn’t sure it would finish coming down in the seventy hours left to Thomas. He could last without food far longer, but not without oxygen. Then I got an idea. I reasoned this way: Thomas’s rocket was made primarily of steel. Provided there were no iron ores on that damned planetoid, it might be possible to locate him with a ferromagnetic indicator — a device for finding iron objects. We had a highly sensitive one. It could pick up a nail at a distance of three-quarters of a kilometer. A rocket at several kilometers. Olaf and I went over the apparatus. Then I told Gimma and took off.”

  “Alone.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because without Thomas there were only the two of us, and the Prometheus had to have a pilot.”

  “And they agreed to it?”

  I smiled in the darkness.

  “I was the First Pilot. Gimma could not give rne orders, only suggest, I would weigh the chances and say yes or no. Most of the time, of course, I said yes. But in emergencies the decision was mine.”

  “And Olaf?”

  “Well, you know Olaf a little by now. As you might imagine, I couldn’t take off right away. But when it came down to it, I was the one who had sent Thomas out. Olaf couldn’t deny that. So I took off. Without a rocket, of course.”

  “Without a rocket… ?”

  “Yes, in a suit, with a gas shooter. It took a while, but not so very long. I had some trouble with the detector, which was practically a chest, awkward to handle. Weightless, of course, but when I was entering the cloud, I had to be careful not to hit anything. I ceased to see the cloud as I approached it; first the stars began to disappear, a few at a time, on the periphery, then half the sky got black; I looked back and saw the Prometheus glowing in the distance — she had special equipment that made the hull luminous. Looked like a long white pencil with a ball at one end, the photon headlight. Then everything winked out. The transition was so abrupt. Maybe a second of black mist, then nothing. My radio was disconnected; instead, I had the detector hooked up to the earphones. It took me only a few minutes to fly to the edge of the cloud, but over two hours to drop to the surface — I had to be careful. The electric flashlight was useless, as I had expected. I began the search. You know what stalactites look like in caves…”

  “Yes.”

  “Something like that, only more outlandish. I’m talking about what I saw later, when the dust settled, because during my search I couldn’t see a thing, as if someone had poured tar over the window of my suit. The box I had on straps. I moved the antenna and listened, then walked with both arms extended — I’d never stumbled so much in my life. No harm, thanks only to the low gravity. With just a little visibility, of course, a man could have regained his balance ten times over. But this way — it’s hard to explain to someone who’s never experienced it — the planetoid was all jagged peaks, with boulders piled up around them, and wherever I put my foot I began falling, in that drunken slow motion, and I couldn’t jump back up: that would send me soaring for a quarter of an hour. I simply had to wait, keep trying to walk on. The rubble slid beneath me, debris, pillars, shards of rock, everything was barely held in place, the force that held them was unusuall
y weak — which does not mean that if a boulder landed on a man, it would not kill him. The mass would act then, not the weight; there would be time to jump clear, of course, if you could see the thing falling… or at least hear it. But, then, there was no air, so it was only by the vibration under my feet that I could tell whether I had again sent some rock structure toppling, and I could do nothing but wait for a fragment to come out of the pitch-dark and begin to crush me… I wandered about for hours and no longer thought that my idea of using the detector was brilliant. I also had to be careful because now and then I would find myself in the air, that is, floating, as in some clownish dream. At last I caught a signal. I must have lost it eight times, I don’t remember exactly, but by the time I found the rocket, it was night on the Prometheus.

  “The rocket stood at an angle, half-buried in that fiendish dust. The softest, most delicate stuff you can imagine. Almost insubstantial. The lightest fluff on Earth would offer more resistance. The particles were so incredibly small… I checked inside the rocket; he was not there. I’ve said that it stood at an angle, but I wasn’t at all sure; it was impossible to find the vertical without using special equipment, and that would’ve taken at least an hour, and a conventional plumb line, weighing practically nothing, was useless, since the bob wouldn’t have held the string tight… I wasn’t surprised, then, that he hadn’t tried to take off. I entered. I saw immediately that he had jury-rigged something to determine the vertical but that it hadn’t worked. There was plenty of food left, but no oxygen. He must have transferred it all to the tank on his suit and left.”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why. He had been there three days. In that type of rocket you have only a seat, a screen, the control, levers, and a hatch at the rear. I sat there for a while. I realized that I would never be able to find him. For a second I thought that possibly he had gone out just as I landed, that he’d used his gas shooter to return to the Prometheus and was sitting on board now, while I wandered over these drunken stones… I jumped out of the rocket so energetically that I flew upward. No sense of direction, nothing. You know how it is when you see a spark in total darkness? The eyes fantasize, there are rays, visions. Well, with the sense of balance, something similar can happen. In zero gravity there’s no problem, a person accustoms himself. But when gravity is extremely weak, as on that planetoid, the inner ear reacts erratically, if not irrationally. You think you’re zooming up like a Roman candle, then plummeting, and so on, all the time. And then the sensations of spinning and shifting, of the arms, legs, torso — as if the parts of your body changed places and your head wasn’t where it belonged…