Ivan Yefremov: The Heart of the Serpent

Moot Ang ordered terrestrial lighting to be turned on, but the gallery on the other side was already empty.

“Outside group, get into your space suits to disconnect the gallery,” the captain’s voice broke the anguished silence. “Engine crew, to your stations. Astronavigator, to the control tower. All hands to take-off stations!”

The crew hastened out of the gallery, carrying the instruments and recording devices with them. Only Afra remained behind, standing still in the faint light coming through the door leading into the ship. It was as if she had been frozen by the intense cold of interstellar space.

“Afra, we’re closing the hatch,” shouted Tey Eron from the ship. “We want to see them set off.”

The young woman came to with a start.

“Wait, Tey, wait!” she cried and hurried after the captain. The astounded second-in-command was still standing there nonplussed when Afra came running back with Moot Ang.

“Tey, bring the projector back into the gallery,” the captain said. “Call the technicians and remount the screen!”

The orders were carried out in an instant and the powerful beam of the searchlight flashed on and off in the gallery at the same intervals as the locator of the Tellur when the ships first met. The strangers interrupted whatever they were doing and reappeared in the gallery. The Tellur switched on a blue light, filter “430,” and Afra bent trembling over the drawing board from which her sketches were cast onto the screen. Assuming that the spiral chains of the heredity patterns on the Earth and the fluorine planet were roughly the same, Afra drew them, and then sketched a diagram showing the metabolism of the human organism. With a glance at the immobile grey figures standing on the other side of the partition, she crossed out the symbol of the fluorine atom with its nine electrons that she had drawn and replaced it with a symbol of the oxygen atom.

The strangers started. Then their captain came forward and pressing his face close to the partition examined Afra’s rough sketches with his enormous eyes. Finally he raised his hands with fingers interlocked above his forehead and bowed down low to the woman of Earth.

The people of the fluorine planet had grasped the idea that had been born at the last moment in Afra’s mind under the stress of parting. Afra was thinking of a bold scheme to change the very process of chemical transformations that is the mainspring of the complex organism of the human being, to substitute oxygen for fluorine in the metabolic process through the agency of heredity! To preserve all the peculiarities, all the hereditary characteristics of the fluorine folk while making their bodies derive their energy from another source! The idea was too tremendous to be near realization; indeed it was still so remote that even the seven centuries the Tellur would be away from its native Earth — centuries of unceasing and cumulative scientific progress — would hardly bring it appreciably closer to fruition.

Yet how much could be achieved by the joint efforts of the two planets! Especially if thinking beings from other worlds were to join them. The fluorine planet’s human race need not be doomed to be a mere phantom-like glimmer blotted out in the vastness of the Universe.

When the people of countless planets of innumerable suns and island universes get together, as they inevitably would, the grey-skinned inhabitants of the fluorine planet need not be shut off from the rest by the accident of their physical structure.

Perhaps indeed the feeling of sadness at the finality of the parting which weighed down on the astronauts was unduly exaggerated. For though they were poles apart as regards the structure of their planets and their bodies, the people of Earth and the fluorine planet were alike in life, endowed with similar intellectual powers and knowledge. As Afra gazed into the eyes of the captain of the white space ship, she thought she could read all this in them. Or was it merely a reflection of her own thoughts?

Yet it seemed the strangers had just as much faith in the might of human reason as the people of Earth. No doubt it was because of the spark of hope struck by the biologist of the Tellur that their parting gestures were no longer expressive of separtion for ever, but of new meetings to come.

Slowly the two space ships cast loose and drifted apart cautiously so as not to damage each other by the blasts of their auxiliary engines.

The white ship’s engines went into action first. There was a great blinding flash and it was gone. Nothing but the blackness of space remained.

A minute later the Tellur moved off. After cautiously accelerating, it went into a warp — that bridge that cut across once insurmountable interstellar distances. Safely ensconced inside protective domes, the crew was no longer aware how the light quanta flying toward them were compressed and the distant stars ahead changed gradually from blue to a deeper and deeper violet. The space ship plunged into the impenetrable gloom of zero space beyond which the glowing life of Earth blossomed and awaited its return.

Parsec is the unit of measurement of interstellar distances equal to 3.26 light years.