Stanislaw Lem: Return from the Stars

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.”

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.