The same power of intelligent labour with its ingenuity, skill, imagination and artistry was evident in everything — in dwellings, factories, machines and ships alike.
Perhaps the inhabitants of the fluorine planet in their turn saw with their enormous eyes more than the Earth-men did in the cold blue tones of their planet aivd had progressed farther in remaking their more monotonous nature?
We who were the product of an oxygen atmosphere which is hundreds of thousands of times more common in the Universe had found and would still find an enormous number of planets offering conditions favourable to life as we knew it, and would no doubt also find other living beings like us on other heavenly bodies. But would they be able to do likewise — they who were the product of rare fluorine, with their fluoric proteins and bones, their blood with the blue corpuscles that assimilated fluorine as our red corpuscles assimilated oxygen?
These people were confined within the limited space of their planet, and there was little doubt that they had long searched for other human beings like themselves, or at least for planets with a fluorine atmosphere suitable for them. But theirs was a formidable problem: to find such rare planets in the vast expanses of space, to reach them through distances of thousands of light years. One could easily understand their disappointment on meeting, and probably not for the first time, with oxygen-breathing humans.
In the strangers’ end of the gallery the views of the landscape of the fluorine planet were followed by enormous structures. The walls, which leaned inward, reminded one of Tibetan architecture. There were no angles, no horizontal lines. Transitions from the vertical to the horizontal followed helical lines. A dark opening, a twisted oval in shape, appeared in a wall in the distance. As it came closer the lower part of the spiral turned out to be a broad-winding road rising to a huge entrance that led into a building as big as a good-sized town. Over the entrance were series of red-bordered blue signs that had looked like ripples on water from the distance. The entrance came nearer still and the Earthlings gazing at it spellbound caught a glimpse of a great dimly-lit hall inside with walls that glowed like fluorescent fluorite.
Suddenly the picture vanished. The astronauts of the Tellur, who had felt themselves on the threshold of some tremendous revelation, stood stunned with disappointment. The gallery on the other side of the partition was now lit with the ordinary blue light. Some of the strangers appeared, but this time their movements were jerky and hurried.
A series of figures appeared on the screen in such rapid succession that the Earthlings could hardly follow them. At first a white space ship like the one lying alongside the Tellur was moving through the darkness of space; one clearly saw the whirling central ring casting gleaming rays in all directions. Suddenly the ring stopped and the ship hung motionless not far from a blue dwarf star. Thin pencil-lines of rays shot out from the ship and reached another one like it that appeared in the left corner of the screen suspended in space alongside a space ship which the Earthlings recognized as the Tellur. As soon as the white space ship received the message, it cast loose from the Tellur and disappeared into the black void of space.
Moot Ang sighed so loudly that his colleagues turned round to look at him.
“I’m afraid they’re going soon,” he said. “They are in contact with another of their ships somewhere very far away, although how they communicate over such vast distances is more than I can understand. Now something’s happened to the second ship and it has sent a call for help to our friends here.”
“Perhaps it hasn’t been damaged. Perhaps it’s found something very important,” Taina hardly breathed the words.
“Perhaps. Whatever the reason, they’re leaving. We must hurry up and photograph and record as much as possible before they go. Most important, of course, are the charts, their course and what they have encountered on their voyage. I have no doubt they have run across people who breathe oxygen like us.”
Further exchanges revealed that the strangers could still stay the equivalent of one terrestrial day. The crew of the Tellur, stimulated by special drugs, set to work with frenzied vigour no less than that of the strangers.
Textbooks with illustrations were photographed and recordings were made of each other’s language. Collections of minerals, fluids and gases packed in transparent containers were exchanged. The chemists of both planets pored over the meaning of symbols representing the composition of organic and inorganic substances. Afra, pale with fatigue, stood before diagrams of physiological processes, genetic charts and formulas, and a chart showing the embryonic development of the human organism on the fluorine planet. The endless chains of molecules of fluorine-resistant proteins were astoundingly similar to our protein molecules: there were the same energy filters, the same barriers arising from the battle of living matter with entropy.
Twenty hours later Tey and Kari, staggering with exhaustion, brought in rolls of stellar maps tracing the course of the Tellur from the Sun to the point where the two ships had met. The strangers worked harder still. The photo-magnetic tape of the Earthmen’s memory machines recorded the location of unknown stars with undeciphered designations of distances, and astrophysical data relating to the complex zigzag courses of the two white space ships. All this would have to be deciphered afterwards with the aid of the explanatory tables the strangers had prepared for the purpose.
Finally images were projected that elicited joyous exclamations from the Earthmen. Circles appeared around five of the stars on the screen with planets revolving inside them. At the same time the image of a clumsy-looking space ship with the bulge amidships was replaced by a whole fleet of others of a more elegant design. On the oval platforms let down from their bellies stood creatures in space suits that obviously were human beings. Over the depictions of the planets and space ships stood the sign of the atom with eight electrons — the oxygen atom. But only two of the planets were connected with the space ships. One was located near a red sun, and the other revolved around a bright golden-hued star of the F class. Evidently life on the remaining three planets, though deIvan Yefrernov. The Heart of the Serpent / 83
veloping in an oxygen atmosphere, had not reached a high enough level for space travel, or perhaps thinking beings had not yet had time to appear on them.
The Earthmen were not able to find out all these details, but they were in possession of priceless data on how to reach these inhabited worlds located hundreds of par-sees from the point where they had met the emissaries of the fluorine planet.
The time for parting had come.
The crews of the two space ships lined up to face each other on the two sides of the partition. The pale-bronze men from Earth and the grey-skinned men of the fluorine planet (the name of which, incidentally, remained unknown) bid farewell to each other with gestures and smiles whose message of friendship and sadness was equally understandable to both.
The crew of the Tellur were conscious of a feeling of sadness more poignant than they had ever experienced before — not even when they left their native Earth knowing they would return only seven centuries later. They could not endure the thought that in a few minutes from now these handsome, gentle though odd-looking people would vanish for ever in cosmic space to continue their lonely and all but hopeless search for other worlds with thinking life similar to their own.