Ivan Yefremov: The Heart of the Serpent

The locator of the Tellur too was now sending out intermittent signals; the thought that they were probably being received on board the unknown ship seemed utterly fantastic.

Moot Ang’s voice coming over the intercommunication system betrayed his agitation:

“Attention all! An unknown ship is approaching. We shall veer off course and begin emergency deceleration. All hands to landing stations!”

There wasn’t a second to lose. If the oncoming ship was running at roughly the same speed as the Tellur, the two were approaching each other almost at the speed of light, or some 294,000 kilometres per second. According to the locator the gap would close in no more than one hundred seconds. While Moot Ang was at the microphone, Tey Eron whispered something to Kari, whose hand flew to the locator panel.

“Excellent!” cried the captain as he watched the light ray playing on the control screen describe a curve to port and then go into a spiral.

In some ten seconds a glowing arrow-like shape appeared on the screen, curved over the right side of the black circle and also went into a spiral. A sigh of relief that was more like a groan broke from the three men in the control room. The strangers coming towards them from the unfathomed depths of the Cosmos had understood them. Just in time!

The caution signal went on again. This time it was not a locator ray but the solid hull of a space ship that was reflected on the main screen. In an instant Tey Eron had switched off the robot and turned the ship a fraction to port. The pealing stopped and the main screen was black again. The starboard scanner showed a mere streak of light moving aft. The two ships had passed each other at a staggering speed and were now hurtling farther and farther apart.

Several days would pass before they could meet again, but meet they would, for like the Tellur the strange ship would brake and swing around and return to the point of their meeting as determined by the precision instruments on board.

“Attention all! Emergency deceleration/ All stations signal readiness!” Moot Ang spoke into the microphone.

In response the row of lights above the now dead engine counter indicators turned green one after the other. The engines had stopped, and a tense air of expectation settled over the ship. The captain glanced quickly at the control panel and nodded toward the seats as he switched on the deceleration robot. His aides saw him bend grim-faced over the programme scale and turn the main switch to the figure “8.”

To swallow a pill to reduce heart action, drop into the seat and press the robot button was a matter of seconds.

The ship seemed to brace itself against the emptiness of space, throwing its crew into the depths of hydraulic seats and momentary unconsciousness, just as the racehorses of old would throw their riders as they dug their hooves into the ground to come to a sudden stop.

The crew of the Tellur had gathered in the library. Everybody was there except the man on duty at the electronic devices control post designed to signalize if anything went wrong with any of the circuits. The ship had cut its speed enough to put about, but not before it had travelled more than ten thousand million kilometres beyond the point where it had passed the space ship from another world. It was now moving at only one-twentieth absolute speed, held to the exact return course by the computing devices. At least eight terrestrial days would pass before the two ships could be expected to meet — provided the Tellur kept within the margin of error allowed for and the unknown space travellers also possessed equally precise navigation instruments and an equally reliable ship. If everything went well the two ships, two tiny specks in the infinity of the Cosmos, might be expected to come within locator range of each other.

When that happened, man, for the first time in his history, would meet his counterparts from another part of the Universe, thinking beings with comparable powers and aspirations whose existence had been foretold and established beyond all doubt by human reason. If hitherto the vast gulfs of time and space that separated different inhabited worlds had been insurmountable, now Earthmen would clasp the hands of other thinking beings and establish through them a link with still others as a token of the final triumph of thought and conscious labour over the elemental forces of Nature.

For billions of years minute droplets of living protoplasm had inhabited the dark warm waters of ocean gulfs, and hundreds of millions of years more passed before they developed into more complex organisms that finally emerged from the water to dry land. Then more millions of centuries passed in an elemental struggle for survival, in complete dependence on the forces of Nature, before the brain developed into a powerful instrument to guide the living creatures’ search for food and the battle they waged for survival.

The rate of development speeded up, the battle to exist grew more bitter and natural selection proceeded at an ever more rapid pace. And all along that long path there were countless victims — herbivorous animals devoured by carnivorous, carnivorous animals that perished from hunger, the weak and sick and old that succumbed, the males that were killed in battle over females, those that perished defending their young or in natural disasters…

This went on through the long course of blind, elemental evolution until some distant relative of the ape in the rigorous conditions of the great ice age replaced instinct with conscious labour in his search for sustenance. It was then that he became man after he first realized the mighty power of joint labour and rational experience.

But even after this thousands of years were still to pass in wars and suffering, hunger and oppression and ignorance; but always too there dwelt hope and faith in a better future.

That hope and faith were not betrayed. The radiant future men had looked forward to had come, and humanity, united in a classless society and free of fear and oppression, &ad reached heights of scientific and artistic achievement without equal in all previous history. What had seemed the most difficult of all — the conquest of space — was accomplished. And finally, as the culmination of this long and laborious ascent up the ladder of progress, the latest fruit of man’s accumulated knowledge and labour — the invention of the Tellur, this long-range space ship now exploring remote areas of the Universe. Now this supiems product of the development of matter on Earth and in the Solar System was about to contact what represented the crowning accomplishment of another, and probably no less tortuous and difficult, path of development that started thousands of millions of years ago in another corner of the Universe.

These were the thoughts that in one form or another occupied the minds of all the members of the Tellur crew. Even young Taina was awed by the tremendous significance of the moment. Would they, a handful of people representing all the thousands of millions inhabiting the Earth, prove worthy of their exploits in labour, their physical perfection, their intelligence and steadfastness? How was one to prepare oneself for the meeting? There was no better way than to review the great yet bitter battle humanity had waged for freedom of body and spirit.

At the moment, however, most exciting was the thought of the coming meeting with living creatures from another world. What would they be like? Monsters, or models of perfection, judged by Earth standards?

Afra Devi, the biologist, was the first to speak.

Flushed with excitement, she looked even more beautiful than usual. As she spoke her glance rested from time to time on the painting over the door — a coloured panorama in three-dimensional paint of a mountain scene in Equatorial Africa. The startling contrast between the sombre, forest-clad slopes and the shining splendour of the peak seemed to illustrate her thoughts.