Futility

hey did not feel the solemn moment when the ship touched the surface of the planet. There was no shock. One of the indicators simply flashed the sign for ‘Solid’ and that marked an end to the emptiness of interplanetary space.

Vamp looked at the Captain, but the latter betrayed no sign of satisfaction and it was impossible to tell how he was reacting to the end of their long travel.

From the combination of flickering dashes, dots and intersecting wave lines, it was evident that the environment in which their ship now stood was close to the conditions of life on their own planet - close, within allowable limits. Vamp passed the information on to the Captain, but this too seemed to make no particular impression on him.

‘I think we won’t find any higher forms of life here,’ he remarked gloomily. ‘Go and take a stroll, anyway.’ ‘Taking a stroll’ was what the Captain called it.

The edge of the low slope that Vamp climbed was overgrown in places with some sort of fine, twining vegetation. From the plateau below the ship looked like a big white balloon. A brownish plain stretched for miles on all sides. Only right at the broken and vague line of the horizon did it merge into rockpiles and cliffs. And that was all.

For such a landscape it was certainly not worth going far, but the very nature of their profession inevitably bound them to disillusionment of this kind. Their business was trade. They did not, it was true, bear much resemblance to their ancestors who had carried on the profession in ancient times. They travelled to distant worlds taking goods to where they would be of most value. They carried with them units of information locked away in a series of transparent crystals. This was the merchandise in highest demand on the caravan routes of the universe.

Each civilization developing along its own lines inevitably uncovered certain truths and made discoveries which were unknown to others. Their business was to trade discoveries for discoveries, theories for theories, information for information. Sometimes they came upon worlds which could offer them nothing in exchange. Then they liberally shared with primitive beings such facts as they were able to assimilate, for information was the one merchandise which could be exchanged or given away freely a limitless number of times and its quantity was never reduced in the process. Visitors to these worlds thousands of years later would find there rich fruits of the seeds which they were sowing today.

They were on their way home after a vast spiralling journey among the stars which had brought them a mass of remarkable knowledge. Many ships like theirs were ploughing the spaces of the universe, but not all of them came back. Often unexpected danger and death overtook them on strange, distant planets, planets which at first seemed just as empty and lifeless as this one. Vamp returned to the ship, and now it moved in a gigantic ever-increasing spiral over the surface of the planet. On to the screen flashed pictures of what they were passing below, but they weren’t watching the screen - what could there be down there that was new to these visitors to so many worlds?

They sat down to a game of draughts.

‘An empty world,’ the Captain remarked gloomily, ‘a dead planet.’

Vamp sacrificed one player and swallowed up two.

‘Let’s circle round a few more times,’ the Captain said, ‘and that’s enough.’

‘How far is that planet from the sun?’ Vamp moved a draught forward ready to make a king in the next move.

‘It’s the third.’ The Captain took the draught that was about to become a king. ‘The third from the sun. It’s down in our catalogues as “Earth”.’

The screen still showed the same chaos of rockpiled cliffs, and the brownish plain stretching to the distant, imprecise line of the horizon. No towns, no settlements, no sign of rational life.

‘Circle round a few more times and that’s enough,’ the Captain repeated.

They said no more because Vamp had got a king. The Captain always considered that he was the better player but that he made mistakes and that Vamp took unfair advantage of it. That’s how it was now. When only one or two moves remained to decide the issue, they were interrupted by the shrill sound of a buzzer. The ship had uncovered traces of some kind of civilization. The Captain impatiently jabbed a button and the buzzer stopped - only the infra-red eye of the indicator went on pulsing angrily.

They played a few more games.

‘Had enough for now?’ Vamp asked, badly concealing his triumph.

The Captain agreed gloomily.

A picture flashed on the screen and they saw a large, elongated metal body half buried in the sand.

‘Craft for conveyance into the planet’s space field,’ Vamp remarked.

‘Civilization no higher than second level.’ It seemed as if that circumstance gave the Captain some kind of malicious satisfaction. ‘A primitive world and for that reason an extinct one.’

‘Shall we have a look at the craft?’

But the Captain refused. Studying lost civilizations was not their business. For that there were the rat-catchers from the Cosmic Academy of Sciences.

‘And what if there are rational beings there?’

The Captain shook his head.

‘The craft crashed and has been empty a long time. You can go if you’re interested, but we’re leaving immediately afterwards - there’s nothing for us here.’

Close up the strange ship seemed bigger still. It was a large streamlined block of dark metal.

Vamp could see neither entry nor opening. On all sides there was only a smooth sheath of metal dulled by time. Then he noticed a wide black crack which seemed to cut the whole body in half. He looked in but could see nothing. Carefully squeezing between the black edges of the torn metal, Vamp lowered himself inside.

Seconds later a startled crowd of small fish flitted out of the crack and clustered over the dark gap made by the break. They were as oblivious of the many-fathomed depth of water above them as frivolous inhabitants of dry land might have been of the mythical ‘column of air’. The one thing which might, perhaps, still have felt the gigantic pressure of these depths was the lifeless submarine.

For some time the white balloon hung motionless over the half-concealed metal hulk below. There was no sign of Vamp. When he finally did begin to emerge, the little fish dancing near the edge of the crack scattered in all directions.

The balloon moved off and, gathering speed, disappeared behind the broken line of the horizon.

‘Anything interesting?’ the Captain asked, more out of politeness than curiosity.

Vamp shook his head. ‘The craft was of primitive construction - using energy from batteries and accumulators. The cause of the crash isn’t evident.’

‘Is that important?’

‘No of course it’s not ...’

‘We came to trade.’ The Captain said this as if Vamp had contradicted him. ‘Nothing else here concerns us. And, incidentally, even if we had found those who built such craft, in what could we have interested them?’

‘Protein synthesis, if they hadn’t mastered it, the harnessing of free energy from space ...’

‘You think so?’

‘On all the evidence, they’re fairly primitive. We could even offer them the formation of the synthetic personality or biological procedures towards immortality.’

‘Yes, of course. Second level. And what could they give us?’

Vamp held out a flat, rectangular object to the Captain. He had taken it off the wall of one of the cabins. It was an ordinary black and white photograph. Protected by glass it had scarcely suffered damage from the water. The photograph showed a man, a young man in a leather jacket holding a large Great Dane on a short lead. The Great Dane was obviously not very interested in the prospect of having its sad, canine muzzle preserved on film and he was looking impatiently to the side somewhere beyond the frame. The young man was standing beside a highway along which traffic was moving in both directions. A bus could be seen in the distance.

‘Odd,’ remarked the Captain.

‘Very,’ agreed Vamp. This was one of those rare times when he was in full agreement with his Captain.

‘They couldn’t even distinguish colours - it’s black and white.’

‘And that belt?’ Vamp indicated the highway.

‘It’s moving?’

‘So it seems. And carrying the objects arranged on it.’

The Captain nodded, ‘Very odd.’

‘And this?’ Vamp was talking about the man and the dog. ‘An obvious symbiosis.’

‘Of course. These two beings evidently possess a single thinking process and a single psyche. They are obviously conscious of themselves as a single personality.’

‘Look,’ Vamp pointed to the lead, ‘they are even joined by a rope of nerve fibres.’

‘Like the ascetics from Megera-XY?’

They discovered a few more submerged vessels, and then they came across the ruins of a town. And as before there was not a single sign of the rational beings whose hands had created all this.

‘A dead planet,’ asserted the Captain. ‘The inhabitants degenerated and died out.’

‘Why degenerated?’ Vamp himself didn’t know why he was so offended on behalf of the natives of this planet.

‘Extinction is simply the culmination of a process. If the race was not able to accommodate it, it must have degenerated.’ And he added impatiently, ‘We’re leaving’.

‘But you know, they, they ...’ Vamp no longer knew what more to say, he just felt for some reason that if this planet were struck off the list of inhabited worlds, it would be a mistake, a great mistake of some kind. ‘You know they ... what if they inhabit the higher regions?’ he blurted, himself realizing that he was talking foolishness.

This was so absurd that the Captain didn’t even get angry.

‘My dear Vamp, do I have to recite you the “Laws of Life”?’ A dull film dropped over his eyes, half closing them, and he began quoting: ‘“Life on the planets is only possible in areas protected from the fatal rays of the sun and cosmic radiation, that is on ocean beds. Higher forms of life can only arise and develop in areas of great pressure under great depths of water”.’

Vamp was silent because what the Captain said was indisputable.

‘What’s next on our list?’

Vamp looked up and glanced at the log: ‘Alpha Centauri’.

The Captain shifted some levers on the control panel and in a few seconds they were again surrounded by space.

Vamp stretched out ten green tentacles from under his armour and started setting up the draughts board.

Translated by D. Matias