Explorers of Space Read online

  We never got below the outer levels on our first visit, so we met few of the scientific marvels which later expeditions discovered. That was just as well; the residential areas provided enough to keep us busy for several lifetimes. The globe we were exploring must once have been lit by artificial sunlight pouring down from the triple shell that surrounded it and kept its atmosphere from leaking into space. Here on the surface the Jovians (I suppose I cannot avoid adopting the popular name for the people of Culture X) had reproduced, as accurately as they could, conditions on the world they had left unknown ages ago. Perhaps they still had day and night, changing seasons, rain and mist. They had even taken a tiny sea with them into exile. The water was still there, forming a frozen lake three kilometers across. I hear that there is a plan afoot to electrolize it and provide Five with a breathable atmosphere again, as soon as the meteor holes in the outer shell have been plugged.

  The more we saw of their work, the more we grew to like the race whose possessions we were disturbing for the first time in five million years. Even if they were giants from another sun, they had much in common with Man, and it is a great tragedy that our races missed each other by what is, on the cosmic scale, such a narrow margin.

  We were, I suppose, more fortunate than any archaeologists in history. The vacuum of space had preserved everything from decay and—this was something which could not have been expected—the Jovians had not emptied their mighty ship of all its treasures when they had set out to colonize the Solar System. Here on the inner surface of Five everything still seemed intact, as it had been at the end of the ship’s long journey. Perhaps the travelers had preserved it as a shrine in memory of their lost home, or perhaps they had thought that one day they might have to use these things again.

  Whatever the reason, everything was here as its makers had left it. Sometimes it frightened me. I might be photographing, with Bill’s help, some great wall carving when the sheer timelessness of the place would strike into my heart. I would look around nervously, half expecting to see giant shapes come stalking in through the pointed doorways, to continue the tasks that had been momentarily interrupted.

  We discovered the art gallery on the fourth day. That was the only name for it; there was no mistaking its purpose. When Groves and Searle, who had been doing rapid sweeps over the southern hemisphere, reported the discovery we decided to concentrate all our forces there. For, as somebody or other has said, the art of a people reveals its soul, and here we might find the key to Culture X.

  The building was huge, even by the standards of this giant race. Like all the other structures on Five, it was made of metal, yet there was nothing cold or mechanical about it. The topmost peak climbed halfway to the remote roof of the world, and from a distance—before the details were visible—the building looked not unlike a Gothic cathedral. Misled by this chance resemblance, some later writers have called it a temple; but we have never found any trace of what might be called a religion among the Jovians. Yet there seems something appropriate about the name “The Temple of Art,” and it’s stuck so thoroughly that no one can change it now.

  It has been estimated that there are between ten and twenty million individual exhibits in this single building—the harvest garnered during the whole history of a race that may have been much older than Man. And it was here that I found a small, circular room which at first sight seemed to be no more than the meeting place of six radiating corridors. I was by myself (and thus, I’m afraid, disobeying the Professor’s orders) and taking what I thought would be a short-cut back to my companions. The dark walls were drifting silently past me as glided along, the light of my torch dancing over the ceiling ahead. It was covered with deeply cut lettering, and I was so busy looking for familiar character groupings that for some time I paid no attention to the chamber’s floor. Then I saw the statue and focused my beam upon it.

  The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured. In this case the subject matter made the effect all the more overwhelming. I was the first man ever to know what the Jovians had looked like, for here, carved with superb skill and authority, was one obviously modeled from life.

  The slender, reptilian head was looking straight toward me, the sightless eyes staring into mine. Two of the hands were clasped upon the breast as if in resignation; the other two were holding an instrument whose purpose is still unknown. The long, powerful tail—which, like a kangaroo’s, probably balanced the rest of the body—was stretched out along the ground, adding to the impression of rest or repose.

  There was nothing human about the face or the body. There were, for example, no nostrils—only gill-like openings in the neck. Yet the figure moved me profoundly; the artist had spanned the barriers of time and culture in a way I should never have believed possible. “Not human—but humane” was the verdict Professor Forster gave. There were many things we could not have shared with the builders of this world, but all that was really important we would have felt in common.

  Just as one can read emotions in the alien but familiar face of a dog or a horse, so it seemed that I knew the feelings of the being confronting me. Here was wisdom and authority—the calm, confident power that is shown, for example, in Bellini’s famous portrait of the Doge Loredano. Yet there was sadness also—the sadness of a race which had made some stupendous effort, and made it in vain.

  We still do not know why this single statue is the only representation the Jovians have ever made of themselves in their art. One would hardly expect to find taboos of this nature among such an advanced race; perhaps we will know the answer when we have deciphered the writing carved on the chamber walls.

  Yet I am already certain of the statue’s purpose. It was set here to bridge time and to greet whatever beings might one day stand in the footsteps of its makers. That, perhaps, is why they shaped it so much smaller than life. Even then they must have guessed that the future belonged to Earth or Venus, and hence to beings whom they would have dwarfed. They knew that size could be a barrier as well as time.

  A few minutes later I was on my way back to the ship with my companions, eager to tell the Professor about the discovery. He had been reluctantly snatching some rest, though I don’t believe he averaged more than four hours sleep a day all the time we were on Five. The golden light of Jupiter was flooding the great metal plain as we emerged through the shell and stood beneath the stars once more.

  “Hello!” I heard Bill say over the radio, “the Prof’s moved the ship.”

  “Nonsense,” I retorted. “It’s exactly where we left it.” Then I turned my head and saw the reason for Bill’s mistake. We had visitors.

  The second ship had come down a couple of kilometers away, and as far as my non-expert eyes could tell it might have been a duplicate of ours. When we hurried through the airlock, we found that the Professor, a little bleary-eyed, was already entertaining. To our surprise, though not exactly to our displeasure, one of the three visitors was an extremely attractive brunette.

  “This,” said Professor Forster, a little wearily, “is Mr. Randolph Mays, the science writer. I imagine you’ve heard of him. And this is—” He turned to Mays. “I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch the names.”

  “My pilot, Donald Hopkins—my secretary, Marianne Mitchell.”

  There was just the slightest pause before the word “secretary,” but it was long enough to set a little signal light flashing in my brain. I kept my eyebrows from going up, but I caught a glance from Bill that said, without any need for words: If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, I’m ashamed of you.

  Mays was a tall, rather cadaverous man with thinning hair and an attitude of bonhomie which one felt was only skin-deep—the protective coloration of a man who has to be friendly with too many people.

  “I expect this is as big a surprise to you as it is to me,” he said with unnecessary heartiness. “I certainly never expected to find anyone here before me; and I certainly didn’t expect to find all this.�
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  “What brought you here?” said Ashton, trying to sound not too suspiciously inquisitive.

  “I was just explaining that to the Professor. Can I have that folder please, Marianne? Thanks.”

  He drew out a series of very fine astronomical paintings and passed them around. They showed the planets from their satellites—a common-enough subject, of course.

  “You’ve all seen this sort of thing before,” Mays continued. “But there’s a difference here. These pictures are nearly a hundred years old. They were painted by an artist named Chesley Bonestell and appeared in Life back in 1944—long before space-travel began, of course. Now what’s happened is that Life has commissioned me to go around the Solar System and see how well I can match these imaginative paintings against the reality. In the centenary issue, they’ll be published side by side with photographs of the real thing. Good idea, eh?”

  I had to admit that it was. But it was going to make matters rather complicated, and I wondered what the Professor thought about it. Then I glanced again at Miss Mitchell, standing demurely in the corner, and decided that there would be compensations.

  In any other circumstances, we would have been glad to meet another party of explorers, but here there was the question of priority to be considered. Mays would certainly be hurrying back to Earth as quickly as he could, his original mission abandoned and all his film used up here and now. It was difficult to see how we could stop him, and not even certain that we desired to do so. We wanted all the publicity and support we could get, but we would prefer to do things in our own time, after our own fashion. I wondered how strong the Professor was on tact, and feared the worst.

  Yet at first diplomatic relations were smooth enough. The Professor had hit upon the bright idea of pairing each of us with one of Mays’s team, so that we acted simultaneously as guides and supervisors. Doubling the number of investigating groups also greatly increased the rate at which we could work. It was unsafe for anyone to operate by himself under these conditions, and this had handicapped us a great deal.

  The Professor outlined his policy to us the day after the arrival of Mays’s party.

  “I hope we can get along together,” he said a little anxiously. “A far as I’m concerned they can go where they like and photograph what they like, as long as they don’t take anything, and as long as they don’t get back to Earth with their records before we do.”

  “I don’t see how we can stop them,” protested Ashton. “Well, I hadn’t intended to do this, but I’ve now registered a claim to Five. I radioed it to Ganymede last night, and it will be at The Hague by now.”

  “But no one can claim an astronomical body for himself. That was settled in the case of the Moon, back in the last century.”

  The Professor gave a rather crooked smile.

  “I’m not annexing an astronomical body, remember. I’ve put in a claim for salvage, and I’ve done it in the name of the World Science Organization. If Mays takes anything out of Five, he’ll be stealing it from them. Tomorrow I’m going to explain the situation gently to him, just in case he gets any bright ideas.”

  It certainly seemed peculiar to think of Satellite Five as salvage, and I could imagine some pretty legal quarrels developing when we got home. But for the present the Professor’s move should have given us some safeguards and might discourage Mays from collecting souvenirs—so we were optimistic enough to hope.

  It took rather a lot of organizing, but I managed to get paired off with Marianne for several trips around the interior of Five. Mays didn’t seem to mind: there was no particular reason why he should. A spacesuit is the most perfect chaperon ever devised, confound it.

  Naturally enough I took her to the art gallery at the first opportunity, and showed her my find. She stood looking at the statue for a long time while I held my torch beam upon it.

  “It’s very wonderful,” she breathed at last. “Just think of it waiting here in the darkness of those millions of years! But you’ll have to give it a name.”

  “I have. I’ve christened it ‘The Ambassador.’ ”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because I think it’s a kind of envoy, if you like, carrying a greeting to us. The people who made it knew that one day someone else was bound to come here and find this place.”

  “I think you’re right. ‘The Ambassador’—yes, that was clever of you. There’s something noble about it, and something very sad, too. Don’t you feel it?”

  I could tell that Marianne was a very intelligent woman. It was quite remarkable the way she saw my point of view, and the interest she took in everything I showed her. But “The Ambassador” fascinated her most of all, and she kept on coming back to it.

  “You know, Jack,” she said (I think this was sometime the next day, when Mays had been to see it as well), “you must take that statue back to Earth. Think of the sensation it would cause.”

  I sighed.

  “The Professor would like to, but it must weigh a ton. We can’t afford the fuel. It will have to wait for a later trip.” She looked puzzled.

  “But things hardly weigh anything here,” she protested.

  “That’s different,” I explained. “There’s weight, and there’s inertia—two quite different things. Now inertia—oh, never mind. We can’t take it back, anyway. Captain Searle’s told us that, definitely.”

  “What a pity,” said Marianne.

  I forgot all about this conversation until the night before we left. We had had a busy and exhausting day packing our equipment (a good deal, of course, we left behind for future use). All our photographic material had been used up. As Charlie Ashton remarked, if we met a live Jovian now we’d be unable to record the fact. I think we were all wanting a breathing space, an opportunity to relax and sort out our impressions and to recover from our head-on collision with an alien culture.

  Mays’s ship, the Henry Luce, was also nearly ready for takeoff. We would leave at the same time, an arrangement which suited the Professor admirably, as he did not trust Mays alone on Five.

  Everything had been settled when, while checking through our records, I suddenly found that six rolls of exposed film were missing. They were photographs of a complete set of transcriptions in the Temple of Art. After a certain amount of thought I recalled that they had been entrusted to my charge, and I had put them very carefully on a ledge in the Temple, intending to collect them later.

  It was a long time before takeoff, the Professor and Ashton were canceling some arrears of sleep, and there seemed no reason why I should not slip back to collect the missing material. I knew there would be a row if it was left behind, and as I remembered exactly where it was I need be gone only thirty minutes. So I went, explaining my mission to Bill just in case of accidents.

  The floodlight was no longer working, of course, and the darkness inside the shell of Five was somewhat oppressive. But I left a portable beacon at the entrance, and dropped freely until my hand torch told me it was time to break the fall. Ten minutes later, with a sigh of relief, I gathered up the missing films.

  It was a natural-enough thing to pay my last respects to “The Ambassador”: it might be years before I saw him again, and that calmly enigmatic figure had begun to exercise an extraordinary fascination over me.

  Unfortunately, that fascination had not been confined to me alone. For the chamber was empty and the statue gone.

  I suppose I could have crept back and said nothing, thus avoiding awkward explanations. But I was too furious to think of discretion, and as soon as I returned we woke the Professor and told him what had happened.

  He sat on his bunk rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, then uttered a few harsh words about Mr. Mays and his companions, which it would do no good at all to repeat here.

  “What I don’t understand,” said Searle, “is how they got the thing out—if they have, in fact. We should have spotted it.”

  “There are plenty of hiding places, and they could have waited until there was no one around be
fore they took it up through the hull. It must have been quite a job, even under this gravity,” remarked Eric Fulton, in tones of admiration.

  “There’s no time for post-mortems,” said the Professor savagely. “We’ve got five hours to think of something. They can’t take off before then, because we’re only just past opposition with Ganymede. That’s correct, isn’t it, Kingsley?”

  Searle nodded agreement.

  “Yes. We must move around to the other side of Jupiter before we can enter a transfer orbit—at least, a reasonably economical one.”

  “Good. That gives us a breathing space. Well, has anyone any ideas?”

  Looking back on the whole thing now, it often seems to me that our subsequent behavior was, shall I say, a little peculiar and slightly uncivilized. It was not the sort of thing we could have imagined ourselves doing a few months before. But we were annoyed and overwrought, and our remoteness from all other human beings somehow made everything seem different. Since there were no other laws here, we had to make our own. . . .

  “Can’t we do something to stop them from taking off? Could we sabotage their rockets, for instance?” asked Bill.

  Searle didn’t like this idea at all.

  “We mustn’t do anything drastic,” he said. “Besides, Don Hopkins is a good friend of mine. He’d never forgive me if I damaged his ship. There’d be the danger, too, that we might do something that couldn’t be repaired.”

  “Then pinch their fuel,” said Groves laconically.

  “Of course! They’re probably all asleep, there’s no light in the cabin. All we’ve got to do is to connect up and pump.”

  “A very nice idea,” I pointed out, “but we’re two kilometers apart. How much pipeline have we got? Is it as much as a hundred meters?”

  The others ignored this interruption as though it were beneath contempt and went on making their plans. Five minutes later the technicians had settled everything: we only had to climb into our spacesuits and do the work.