Ivan Yefremov: The Heart of the Serpent

The patient slept peacefully while the ingenious automatic device did its work. Now the operation was over and it only remained for the doctor to remove the instrument.

The captain heaved a sigh of relief. Despite the force of medicine, unforeseen peculiarities of individual organisms often resulted in unexpected complications, for it was obviously impossible to establish in advance every deviation from the normal among all the thousands of millions of inhabitants of the Earth. And if these possible complications were nothing to worry about on Earth with its great medical institutions, they could very well be dangerous enough on expeditions like the present.

But everything had gone off well. With an easy mind Moot Ang returned to the now deserted library and sat down at the viono. But he did not play, though his hands rested on the keys. Instead his thoughts returned, as they had so many times before, to human happiness and the future.

This was his fourth voyage into the Cosmos. But never before had he embarked on a flight covering so much space and time. With man forging ahead at great speed from one accomplishment and discovery to another, with the sum total of knowledge mankind had accumulated, seven hundred years now could hardly be compared with an equal span of Earth-time in the days of the ancient civilizations. Then society’s progress was limited to opening up formerly uninhabited expanses of our planet to human habitation. In those distant days, time crawled and human progress was as slow as the movement of the Arctic and Antarctic glaciers. Time seemed to have stood still for centuries. What indeed did the human life-span amount to then, or a century, or ten centuries, for that matter?

What would the people of the ancient world have felt, Moot Ang thought with a shudder, had they known in advance how slow social development would be, had they foreseen that oppression, injustice and chaos were to remain man’s lot for so many years to come? You could sleep for seven hundred years in ancient Egypt and wake up to find the same slave system in existence, except for perhaps even more brutal exploitation. In ancient China seven-hundred-year spans began and ended with the same wars, the same dynasties, and Europe passed in like time only from the beginning of the Dark Ages to the height of the Inquisition.

But now the mere thought of the grand vistas that would be opened up by the next seven centuries — centuries packed with changes, improvements in life, ever new knowledge — staggered the imagination.

And if true happiness consists in movement, change, rapid progress, Moot Ang mused, who could be happier than he and his comrades? Yet things are not as simple as they might seem. Man’s nature is as complex as his environment. While reaching ever forward, we are always saddened by the passage of time, or rather by the loss of the fine things of the past — things that are hallowed by memory and that once gave rise to legends about golden ages vanished in the labyrinths of time.

Men could not help looking to whatever had been good in the past, and yearning for its return, for only the most clear-minded were able to foresee the inevitable coming of something better in the future. And ever since then there has persisted in the minds of men a deep regret for that which is gone, a nostalgic longing for what has ceased to be, a sadness one most poignantly feels when viewing ancient ruins and monuments to mankind’s past history. One felt all this more and more keenly as one grew older.

Moot Ang rose from his seat and squared his powerful shoulders.

Yes, all that had been vividly described in historical novels. But what was there to frighten the young men and women on board a space ship bound for the future? Loneliness? The loss of one’s relatives? The loneliness of a man projected into the future had often been described in old novels. It had meant being torn away from one’s kin. Yet these kinsfolk had been a handful of individuals linked only by the formal bond of blood. Were not all men brothers now, had not the old conventions and barriers between men everywhere on Earth been banished for ever?

What should he, the captain of the Tellur, tell his young colleagues? “We ol the Tellur have lost all those whom we hold near and dear on Earth. But the people awaiting us in the future are no less near and dear to us — their minds will be keener and their feelings richer than those of the contemporaries we have left behind…” Yes, that is what he must tell them.

In the meanwhile Tey Eron was at work in the control room. As usual, he had turned off all the unnecessary lights and in the half-gloom the large round chamber looked cosier. Humming a simple tune, he was checking the calculations over and over again. The ship was near-ing the farthest point on its journey, and today the course would have to be altered in the direction of Serpentarius in order to skirt the carbon star they were investigating. But it was still dangerous to approach it. The increasing pressure of its radiation was apt to wreck the ship moving at a speed close to that of light.

Sensing someone behind him, Tey Eron turned to face his commander.

Moot Ang leaned over his assistant’s shoulder to scan the summarized indicator readings flashed on in a row of little square windows along the lower edge of the control panel. Tey Eron looked up at him questioningly. The captain nodded. In response to a barely perceptible movement of Tey Eron’s fingers the intercommunication system sprang into action. There was a pealing of bells through the ship accompanied by the metallic words: “Attention all!”

Moot Ang pulled the microphone toward himself, knowing that all members of the crew were tensely waiting for the next words to come from the loudspeakers concealed in the walls.

“Attention all!” Moot Ang repeated. “Deceleration in fifteen minutes. All except those on duty should lie down in their cabins. The first phase of deceleration will end at 18:00 hours, the second phase at 6g will continue for 144 hours. Change in course after Collision Danger signal. That’s all!”

At 18:00 hours the captain rose from his seat, conscious of the usual deceleration pains in his back and the back of his head, and announced that he would retire to his cabin for the remaining six days of braking action ahead. The rest of the crew sat glued to their instruments for this was their last opportunity to observe the carbon star.

Tey Eron frowned as he watched the captain leave the control room. He would have felt better with the captain there beside him during the difficult manoeuvre. For although there was little comparison between a powerful cosmic ship like the Tellur and those flimsy shells called ships that plied the Earth’s seas, it too was nothing more than an egg-shell in the infinity of space.

Kari Ram started at the sound of Moot Ang’s merry laugh. A few days ago the crew had been greatly alarmed to learn that the captain had been suddenly taken ill. Only the doctor had been allowed to enter his cabin, and everyone had spoken in whispers when passing the tightly-closed door. With the captain laid up the task of bringing the ship around and accelerating again to get it away from the radiation zone of the carbon star and send it back toward the Sun and home had been left to Tey Eron.

Now Tey Eron was walking beside the captain with a faint smile on his lips. He had just learned that the latter had conspired with the doctor to leave the ship in Tey’s hands and force him to rely on himself alone. He would not confess to the agonized doubts that had assailed him just before he swung the ship around, but he reproached the captain for having unnecessarily alarmed the crew.

Moot Ang laughed it all off and assured Tey that the ship was perfectly safe in the great open spaces of the Cosmos. The instruments could not err, and the system of fourfold check-up of every computation excluded the possibility of mistakes. Nor could there be any belt of asteroids and meteorites in the vicinity of the carbon star: the pressure of radiation was too heavy.