Despite all the years I have been in the business, it still gives me a thrill to watch that line of light paint its picture on the screen as it spins in synchronism with the narrow beam of radio waves from the transmitter. I sometimes think of myself as a blind man exploring the space around him with a stick that may be a hundred million miles in length. For man is truly blind to the things I study; these great clouds of ionised gas moving far out from the sun are completely invisible to the eye and even to the most sensitive of photographic plates. They are ghosts that briefly haunt the solar system during the few hours of their existence; if they did not reflect our radar waves or disturb our magnetometers, we should never know that they were there.
The picture on the screen looked not unlike a photograph of a spiral nebula, for as the cloud slowly rotated it trailed ragged arms of gas for ten thousand miles around it. Or it might have been a terrestrial hurricane that I was watching from above as it spun through the atmosphere of Earth. The internal structure was extremely complicated, and was changing minute by minute beneath the action of forces which we have never fully understood. Rivers of fire were flowing in curious paths under what could only be the influence of electric fields; but why were they appearing from nowhere and disappearing again as if matter was being created and destroyed? And what were those gleaming nodules, larger than the moon, that were being swept along like boulders before a flood?
Now it was less than a million miles away; it would be upon us in little more than an hour. The automatic cameras were recording every complete sweep of the radar scan, storing up evidence which was to keep us arguing for years. The magnetic disturbance riding ahead of the cloud had already reached us; indeed, there was hardly an instrument in the Observatory that was not reacting in some way to the onrushing apparition.
I switched to the short-range scanner, and the image of the cloud expanded so enormously that only its central portion was on the screen. At the same time I began to change frequency, tuning across the spectrum to differentiate among the various levels. The shorter the wave length, the farther you can penetrate into a layer of ionised gas; by this technique I hoped to get a kind of X-ray picture of the cloud’s interior.
It seemed to change before my eyes as I sliced down through the tenuous outer envelope with its trailing arms, and approached the denser core. ‘Denser’, of course, was a purely relative word; by terrestrial standards even its most closely packed regions were still a fairly good vacuum. I had almost reached the limit of my frequency band, and could shorten the wave length no farther, when I noticed the curious, tight little echo not far from the centre of the screen.
It was oval, and much more sharp-edged than the knots of gas we had watched adrift in the cloud’s fiery streams. Even in that first glimpse, I knew that here was something very strange and outside all previous records of solar phenomena. I watched it for a dozen scans of the radar beam, then called my assistant away from the radio-spectrograph, with which he was analysing the velocities of the swirling gas as it spun toward us.
‘Look, Don,’ I asked him, ‘have you ever seen anything like that?’
‘No,’ he answered after a careful examination. ‘What holds it together? It hasn’t changed its shape for the last two minutes.’
‘That’s what puzzles me. Whatever it is, it should have started to break up by now, with all that disturbance going on around it. But it seems as stable as ever.’
‘How big would you say it is?’
I switched on the calibration grid and took a quick reading.
‘It’s about five hundred miles long, and half that in width.’
‘Is this the largest picture you can get?’
‘I’m afraid so. We’ll have to wait until it’s closer before we can see what makes it tick.’
Don gave a nervous little laugh.
‘This is crazy,’ he said, ‘but do you know something? I feel as if I’m looking at an amoeba under a microscope.’
I did not answer; for, with what I can only describe as a sensation of intellectual vertigo, exactly the same thought had entered my mind.
We forgot about the rest of the cloud, but luckily the automatic cameras kept up their work and no important observations were lost. From now on we had eyes only for that sharp-edged lens of gas that was growing minute by minute as it raced towards us. When it was no farther away than is the moon from Earth, it began to show the first signs of its internal structure, revealing a curious mottled appearance that was never quite the same on two successive sweeps of the scanner.
By now, half the Observatory staff had joined us in the radar room, yet there was complete silence as the oncoming enigma grew swiftly across the screen. It was coming straight toward us; in a few minutes it would hit Mercury somewhere in the centre of the daylight side, and that would be the end of it—whatever it was. From the moment we obtained our first really detailed view until the screen became blank again could not have been more than five minutes; for every one of us, that five minutes will haunt us all our lives.
We were looking at what seemed to be a translucent oval, its interior laced with a network of almost invisible lines. Where the lines crossed there appeared to be tiny, pulsing nodes of light; we could never be quite sure of their existence because the radar took almost a minute to paint the complete picture on the screen—and between each sweep the object moved several thousand miles. There was no doubt, however, that the network itself existed; the cameras settled any arguments about that.
So strong was the impression that we were looking at a solid object that I took a few moments off from the radar screen and hastily focused one of the optical telescopes on the sky. Of course, there was nothing to be seen—no sign of anything silhouetted against the sun’s pock-marked disc. This was a case where vision failed completely and only the electrical senses of the radar were of any use. The thing that was coming toward us out of the sun was as transparent as air—and far more tenuous.
As those last moments ebbed away, I am quite sure that every one of us had reached the same conclusion—and was waiting for someone to say it first. What we were seeing was impossible, yet the evidence was there before our eyes. We were looking at life, where no life could exist…
The eruption had hurled the thing out of its normal environment, deep down in the flaming atmosphere of the sun. It was a miracle that it had survived its journey through space; already it must be dying, as the forces that controlled its huge, invisible body lost their hold over the electrified gas which was the only substance it possessed.
Today, now that I have run through those films a hundred times, the idea no longer seems so strange to me. For what is life but organised energy? Does it matter what form that energy takes—whether it is chemical, as we know it on Earth, or purely electrical, as it seemed to be here? Only the pattern is important; the substance itself is of no significance. But at the time I did not think of this; I was conscious only of a vast and overwhelming wonder as I watched this creature of the sun live out the final moments of its existence.
Was it intelligent? Could it understand the strange doom that had befallen it? There are a thousand such questions that may never be answered. It is hard to see how a creature born in the fires of the sun itself could know anything of the external universe, or could even sense the existence of something as unutterably cold as rigid nongaseous matter. The living island that was falling upon us from space could never have conceived, however intelligent it might be, of the world it was so swiftly approaching.
Now it filled our sky—and perhaps, in those last few seconds, it knew that something strange was ahead of it. It may have sensed the far-flung magnetic field of Mercury, or felt the tug of our little world’s gravitational pull. For it had begun to change; the luminous lines that must have been what passed for its nervous system were clumping together in new patterns, and I would have given much to know their meaning. It may be that I was looking into the brain of a mindless beast in its last convulsion of fear—or of
a godlike being making its peace with the universe.
Then the radar screen was empty, wiped clean during a single scan of the beam. The creature had fallen below our horizon, and was hidden from us now by the curve of the planet. Far out in the burning dayside of Mercury, in the inferno where only a dozen men have ever ventured and fewer still come back alive, it smashed silently and invisibly against the seas of molten metal, the hills of slowly moving lava. The mere impact could have meant nothing to such an entity; what it could not endure was its first contact with the inconceivable cold of solid matter.
Yes, cold. It had descended upon the hottest spot in the solar system, where the temperature never falls below seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and sometimes approaches a thousand. And that was far, far colder to it than the Antarctic winter would be to a naked man.
We did not see it die, out there in the freezing fire; it was beyond the reach of our instruments now, and none of them recorded its end. Yet every one of us knew when that moment came, and that is why we are not interested when those who have seen only the films and tapes tell us that we were watching some purely natural phenomenon.
How can one explain what we felt, in that last moment when half our little world was enmeshed in the dissolving tendrils of that huge but immaterial brain? I can only say that it was a soundless cry of anguish, a death pang that seeped into our minds without passing through the gateways of the senses. Not one of us doubted then, or has ever doubted since, that he had witnessed the passing of a giant.
We may have been both the first and the last of all men to see so mighty a fall. Whatever they may be, in their unimaginable world within the sun, our paths and theirs may never cross again. It is hard to see how we can ever make contact with them, even if their intelligence matches ours.
And does it? It may be well for us if we never know the answer. Perhaps they have been living there inside the sun since the universe was born, and have climbed to peaks of wisdom that we shall never scale. The future may be theirs, not ours; already they may be talking across the light-years to their cousins in other stars.
One day they may discover us, by whatever strange senses they possess, as we circle around their mighty, ancient home, proud of our knowledge and thinking ourselves lords of creation. They may not like what they find, for to them we should be no more than maggots, crawling upon the skins of worlds too cold to cleanse themselves from the corruption of organic life.
And then, if they have the power, they will do what they consider necessary. The sun will put forth its strength and lick the faces of its children; and thereafter the planets will go their way once more as they were in the beginning—clean and bright… and sterile.
Cosmic Casanova
First published in Venture, May 1958
Collected in The Other Side of the Sky
This time I was five weeks out from Base Planet before the symptoms became acute. On the last trip it had taken only a month; I was not certain whether the difference was due to advancing age or to something the dietitians had put into my food capsules. Or it could merely have been that I was busier; the arm of the galaxy I was scouting was heavily populated, with stars only a couple of light-years apart, so I had little time to brood over the girls I’d left behind me. As soon as one star had been classified, and the automatic search for planets had been completed, it was time to head for the next sun. And when, as happened in about one case out of ten, planets did turn up, I’d be furiously busy for several days seeing that Max, the ship’s electronic computer, got all the information down on his tapes.
Now, however, I was through this densely packed region of space, and it sometimes took as much as three days to get from sun to sun. That was time enough for Sex to come tiptoeing aboard the ship, and for the memories of my last leave to make the months ahead look very empty indeed.
Perhaps I had overdone it, back on Diadne V, while my ship was being reprovisioned and I was supposed to be resting between missions. But a survey scout spends eighty per cent of his time alone in space, and human nature being what it is, he must be expected to make up for lost time. I had not merely done that; I’d built up considerable credit for the future—though not, it seemed, enough to last me through this trip.
First, I recalled wistfully, there had been Helene. She was blonde, cuddly, and compliant, though rather unimaginative. We had a fine time together until her husband came back from his mission; he was extremely decent about it but pointed out, reasonable enough, that Helene would now have very little time for other engagements. Fortunately, I had already made contact with Iris, so the hiatus was negligible.
Now Iris was really something. Even now, it makes me squirm to think of her. When that affair broke up—for the simple reason that a man has to get a little sleep sometime—I swore off women for a whole week. Then I came across a touching poem by an old Earth writer named John Donne—he’s worth looking up, if you can read Primitive English—which reminded me that time lost could never be regained.
How true, I thought, so I put on my spaceman’s uniform and wandered down to the beach of Diadne V’s only sea. There was need to walk no more than a few hundred metres before I’d spotted a dozen possibilities, brushed off several volunteers, and signed up Natalie.
That worked out pretty well at first, until Natalie started objecting to Ruth (or was it Kay?). I can’t stand girls who think they own a man, so I blasted off after a rather difficult scene that was quite expensive in crockery. This left me at loose ends for a couple of days; then Cynthia came to the rescue and—but by now you’ll have gotten the general idea, so I won’t bore you with details.
These, then, were the fond memories I started to work back through while one star dwindled behind me and the next flared up ahead. On this trip I’d deliberately left my pin-ups behind, having decided that they only made matters worse. This was a mistake; being quite a good artist in a rather specialised way, I started to draw my own, and it wasn’t long before I had a collection it would be hard to match on any respectable planet.
I would hate you to think that this preoccupation affected my efficiency as a unit of the Galactic Survey. It was only on the long, dull runs between the stars, when I had no one to talk to but the computer, that I found my glands getting the better of me. Max, my electronic colleague, was good enough company in the ordinary course of events, but there are some things that a machine can’t be expected to understand. I often hurt his feelings when I was in one of my irritable moods and lost my temper for no apparent reason. ‘What’s the matter, Joe?’ Max would say plaintively. ‘Surely you’re not mad at me because I beat you at chess again? Remember, I warned you I would.’
‘Oh, go to hell!’ I’d snarl back—and then I’d have an anxious five minutes while I straightened things out with the rather literal-minded Navigation Robot.
Two months out from Base, with thirty suns and four solar systems logged, something happened that wiped all my personal problems from my mind. The long-range monitor began to beep; a faint signal was coming from somewhere in the section of space ahead of me. I got the most accurate bearing that I could; the transmission was an unmodulated, very narrow band—clearly a beacon of some kind. Yet no ship of ours, to the best of my knowledge, had ever entered this remote neck of the universe; I was supposed to be scouting completely unexplored territory.
This, I told myself, is IT—my big moment, the payoff for all the lonely years I’d spent in space. At some unknown distance ahead of me was another civilisation—a race sufficiently advanced to possess hyper-radio.
I knew exactly what I had to do. As soon as Max had confirmed my readings and made his analysis, I launched a message carrier back to Base. If anything happened to me; the Survey would know where and could guess why. It was some consolation to think that if I didn’t come home on schedule, my friends would be out here in force to pick up the pieces.
Soon there was no doubt where the signal was coming from, and I changed course for the small yellow star that was
dead on line with the beacon. No one, I told myself, would put out a wave this strong unless they had space travel themselves; I might be running into a culture as advanced as my own—with all that that implied.
I was still a long way off when I started calling, not very hopefully, with my own transmitter. To my surprise, there was a prompt reaction. The continuous wave immediately broke up into a string of pulses, repeated over and over again. Even Max couldn’t make anything of the message; it probably meant ‘Who the heck are you?’—which was not a big enough sample for even the most intelligent of translating machines to get its teeth into.
Hour by hour the signal grew in strength; just to let them know I was still around and was reading them loud and clear, I occasionally shot the same message back along the way it had come. And then I had my second big surprise.
I had expected them—whoever or whatever they might be—to switch to speech transmission as soon as I was near enough for good reception. This was precisely what they did; what I had not expected was that their voices would be human, the language they spoke an unmistakable but to me unintelligible brand of English. I could identify about one word in ten; the others were either quite unknown or else distorted so badly that I could not recognise them.
When the first words came over the loud-speaker, I guessed the truth. This was no alien, nonhuman race, but something almost as exciting and perhaps a good deal safer as far as a solitary scout was concerned. I had established contact with one of the lost colonies of the First Empire—the pioneers who had set out from Earth in the early days of interstellar exploration, five thousand years ago. When the empire collapsed, most of these isolated groups had perished or had sunk back to barbarism. Here, it seemed, was one that had survived.
I talked back to them in the slowest and simplest English I could muster, but five thousand years is a long time in the life of any language and no real communication was possible. They were clearly excited at the contact—pleasurably, as far as I could judge. This is not always the case; some of the isolated cultures left over from the First Empire have become violently xenophobic and react almost with hysteria to the knowledge that they are not alone in space.