Ivan Yefremov - The Heart of the Serpent

Over the eyes were straight, fine, black eyebrows that ran into the hair high over the temples and almost joined over the narrow bridge of the nose. The hairline on the forehead was sharply defined and in perfect symmetry with the line of the eyebrows, giving the forehead the shape of a horizontally extended diamond. The nose was short and flat, with two nostrils opening downward as in men from Earth. The strangers’ mouths were small, and their parted lilac-coloured lips revealed even rows of teeth of the same pure turquoise as the white of the eyes. Just below the eyes the faces narrowed sharply to a chin with angular lines, which made the top part of the face seem inordinately wide. The structure of their ears remained a mystery, for the headbands of gold braid they wore came down over their temples.

Some of them were evidently women, judging by their long, shapely necks, softer facial lines and fluffy, short-cropped hair. The men were taller and more muscular, and their chins were wider. The differences between them were comparable to the differences between the sexes on Earth.

It seemed to Afra that they had only four fingers in each hand. Besides, the fingers looked as if they had no joints at all, for they bent without forming angles.

What their feet were like was impossible to tell, for they sank deep into the soft carpet on the floor. Their clothing seemed to be dark-red in colour.

The longer the astronauts from Earth gazed at their counterparts from the fluorine planet the less odd their appearance seemed. More than that, they realized they were looking at beings that were endowed with a beauty of their own. The secret of the strangers’ charm lay mainly in their huge eyes which regarded the Earthmen with a warm glow of intelligence and goodwill.

“Look at those eyes!” Afra exclaimed. “It is easier to become human with eyes like those than with ours, though ours are wonderful too.”

“Why do you think so?” Tey asked in a whisper.

“The bigger the eye the more of the world it can take in.”

Tey nodded in agreement.

One of the strangers stepped forward and gestured with his hand. The light to which the Earthmen were accustomed went out on the other side of the partition.

“I should have thought of the lights!” Moot Ang groaned.

“I did,” Kari said, switching off the normal lighting and turning on two powerful lamps fitted with “430” filters.

“But it’ll make us look like corpses,” said Taina. “Humanity doesn’t look its best in this light.”

“You have no cause for worry,” Moot Ang said. “Their range of perfect vision extends far into the violet region, and perhaps even into the ultraviolet. That suggests that they are sensitive to a great many more shades and obtain a softer visual picture than we.”

“We probably look yellower to them than we really are,” Tey said after a moment’s thought.

“That’s better than the bluish colour of a corpse,” Taina said. “Just look around!”

The Earthmen took several photographs and then passed an osmin-crystal overtone speaker through a small airlock in the screen. The strangers took it and put it on a tripod. Kari directed a narrow beam of radio waves at the disc antenna and the speech and music of Earth could be heard in the fluorine planet’s space ship. A device for analysing the air and measuring the temperature and atmospheric pressure was passed through in the same way. As could have been expected, the temperature inside the white space ship turned out to be much lower — no more than seven degrees. The atmospheric pressure was higher than on Earth, and the force of gravity, almost the same.

“Their body temperature is probably higher,” Afra said. “Ours too is more than the Earth’s normal average of twenty degrees. I would say their body temperature is about fourteen of our degrees.”

The others also passed through some devices enclosed in two mesh containers which made it impossible to judge of their designation.

One of the containers emitted high-pitched intermittent sounds that seemed to vanish into the distance. From this the Earthmen gathered that the others could hear higher notes than they. If the range of their hearing was about the same, they probably could not hear the lower notes in our speech and music.

The strangers switched on terrestrial lighting again and the Earthmen turned off the blue light. Two of the strangers, a man and a woman, approached the transparent wall. They threw off their dark-red clothing and stood naked, hand in hand, before the Earthmen. The bodies of the strangers were even more similar to those of the people of Earth than their faces. The harmonious proportions fully accorded with the earthly concept of beauty. True, the lines were more sharply defined, more angular, producing a sculptured effect that was enhanced by the play of light and shadow on their grey skin.

Their heads sat proudly on their long necks. The man had the broad shoulders and general physique of a worker and fighter, while the wide hips of the woman in no way jarred with intellectual power that emanated from these inhabitants of an unknown planet.

When the strangers stepped back with the now familiar gesture of invitation and the yellow terrestrial lights went out, the Earthmen no longer hesitated.

At the commander’s request, Tey Eron and Afra Devi stepped up hand in hand before the transparent partition. In spite of the unearthly lighting which lent their bodies the cold blue tint of marble, their superb beauty caused a gasp of admiration to escape their comrades. The strangers too, dimly visible in the unlighted gallery, seemed similarly affected; they looked at one another in wonder and exchanged brief gestures.

At last the strangers finished photographing and turned on their own light.

“Now I have no doubt that they know what love is,” said Taina, “true, beautiful human love …since their men and women are so beautiful and so clever.”

“You are quite right, Taina, and that is all the more heartening since it means they will understand us in everything,” Moot Ang replied. “Look at Kari! See you don’t fall in love with that girl from the fluorine planet, Kari. That would be a real tragedy for you.”

The navigator started, and tore his eyes with difficulty away from the inhabitants of the white space ship.

“I could,” he confessed sadly. “I really could in spite of all the differences between us, in spite of the vast distances between our planets.” The young man turned back with a sigh to contemplate the smiling face of the woman from the other planet.

The strangers now moved a green screen up to the par-tion. On it tiny figures mounted a steep incline in a procession, carrying heavy loads. On reaching the flat top each dropped the load and threw himself down flat. Similar to animated cartoons as they were known on Earth, the picture clearly conveyed the idea of fatigue. The strangers were suggesting a break for rest. The Earthmen too were tired, for the many hours of tense anticipation of the encounter in space and the first impressions of the meeting had been exhausting indeed.

The inhabitants of the fluorine planet had obviously expected to meet men from other planets on their travels, and had prepared for such encounters by making pantomime films as a substitute for language. The Tellur had made no such preparations, but a way out was found nevertheless. Yas Tin, the ship’s artist, dashed off a series of sketches on a drawing screen that was moved up. First he drew figures expressive of exhaustion, and then a face with such an obviously questioning expression that there was a stir of animation among the people on the other side of the partition just as there had been when Tey and Afra appeared before them. Finally Yas drew a sketch of the Earth revolving around its axis as it coursed on its orbit around the Sun, divided the complete revolution into twenty-four equal parts and shaded half of the diagram. The others produced a similar diagram. Both sides set metronomes in motion which helped to establish the duration of the units of time. The Earthmen learned that the fluorine planet made one complete revolution around its axis in roughly fourteen terrestrial hours and circled its blue sun every nine hundred days. The break for rest which the strangers suggested was the equivalent of five terrestrial hours.