QUEST
OF THE UNCREATED
Others
called their expedition a "wild ghost chase." But for Space Commodore
John Grimes and the beautiful Sonya Verrill who had
initiated the project, it was strictly scientific research. Their trip along
the rim of the galaxy in search of two men—two dead men—was also an investigation
of the long-puzzling phenomenon of the Rim Ghosts. They would do this by
penetrating into alternate universes.
There was only one real problem involved in
this study—how to report its results. For once the breakthrough to an
alternate world was achieved, there was no known way
of getting out....
Turn this book over for second complete
novel.
A.
BERTRAM CHANDLER, who
is both a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and the Chief Officer of
an Australian coastal steamer, writes of himself:
"I
have always been an avid reader of science-fiction and have always wanted to
write. Until in possession of my Master's Certificate, I always felt that my
spare time should be devoted to study rather than to writing. My first visit to
New York was after the entry of the U. S. into the war. Shortly after, having
passed for Master, I had no excuse for not writing, and I became a regular
contributor to the magazines in the field.
"After
the war I continued writing, but dropped out after promotion to Chief Officer.
After my emigration to Australia, I was bullied by my second wife into taking
up the pen again, and became once again a prolific writer of short stories.
Finally, I felt that the time was ripe for full-length novels. I have dropped
shorter pieces feeling that they gave insufficient scope for character
development. I think that science-fiction and fantasy are ideal vehicles for
putting over essential truths."
INTO THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE
A. BERTRAM CHANDLER
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
into the alternate universe
Copyright ©, 1964, by Ace
Books, Inc. All
Rights Reserved
For
my nose-to-grindstone keeper
the coils of time
Copyright ©, 1964, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed in U. S. A.
I
1 he
inevitable freezing
wind whistled thinly across the Port Forlorn landing field, bringing with it
eddies of gritty dust and flurries of dirty snow. From his office, on the top
floor of the Port Administration Building, Commodore Grimes stared out at
what, over the long years, he had come to regard as
his private kingdom. On a day such as this there was not much to see. Save for Faraway Quest, the Rim Worlds Government survey ship, the
spaceport was deserted, a state of affairs that occurred but rarely. Soon it
would resume its usual activity, with units of the Rim Runners' fleet dropping
down through the overcast, from Faraway, Ultimo and Thule, from the planets of
the Eastern Circuit, from the anti-matter systems to the Galactic West. But now
there was only the old Quest
in port, although a scurry
of activity around her battered hull did a little to detract from the
desolation of the scene.
Grimes stepped back from the window to the
pedestal on
which the
big binoculars swiveled on their universal mount. He swung the instrument until
Faraway Quest was centered in the field of view. He noted
with satisfaction that the bitter weather had done little to slow down the work
of refitting. The flare of welding torches around the sharp stem told him that
the new Mass Proximity Indicator was being installed. The ship's original
instrument had been loaned to Captain Calver for use
in his Outsider; and the Outsider, her Mannschenn Drive
unit having been rebuilt rather than merely modified, was now falling across
the incredibly wide and deep gulf of light years between the island universes.
And
I, thought Grimes
sullenly, am
stuck here. How long ago was my last expedition, when I took out the old Quest and surveyed the inhabited planets of what is now the Eastern Circuit,
and the anti-matter worlds to the Galactic West? But they say that I'm too
valuable in an administrative capacity for any further gallivanting, and so
younger men, like Calver and Listowel,
have all the fun, while I just keep the seat of my office chair warm....
"Commodore
Grimes!"
Grimes
started as the sharp female voice broke into his thoughts, • then stepped back
from the instrument, turning to face his secretary. "Yes, Miss
Willoughby?"
"Port Control called through to say that
they've just given landing clearance to Star Roamer." '
"Star
Roamer?" repeated
the Commodore slowly. "Oh, yes. Survey Service."
"Interstellar
Federation Survey Service," she corrected him.
He
smiled briefly, the flash of white teeth momentarily taking all the harshness
from his seamed, pitted face. "That's the only Survey Service that piles
on any gees." He sighed. "Oh, well, I suppose I'd better wash behind
the ears and put on a clean shirt. . . ."
"But your shirts are always clean, Commodore Grimes," the girl told him.
He
thought, I ivish you wouldn't take things so literally, and said, "Merely a figure of speech, my
dear."
"E.T.A. fifteen
minutes from now," she went on.
"And
that's the Survey Service for you," he said. "Come m at damn nearly
escape velocity, and fire the braking jets with one-and-a-half seconds to
spare. But it's the Federation's tax payers that foot the fuel bills, so why
should we worry?"
"You were in the Survey Service
yourself, weren't you?" she asked.
"Many, many years ago. But I regard myself as a Rim-worlder, even
though I wasn't born out here." He smiled again as he said, "After
all, home is where the heart is . . ." And silently he asked himself, But where is the heart?
He
wished that it was night and that the sky was clear so that he could see the
stars, even if they were only the faint, far luminosities of the Galactic Rim.
Star Roamer came in with the usual Survey Service éclat, her exhaust flare a dazzling star in the gray sky long before the
bellowing thunder of her descent reverberated among the spaceport buildings,
among cranes and gantries and conveyer belts. Then the long tongue of
incandescence licked the sparse drifts and frozen puddles into an explosion of
dirty steam that billowed up to conceal her shining hull, that was swept from
the needle of bright metal by the impatient wind, fogging the wide window of
Grimes' office with a fine drizzle of condensation.
She
sat there on the scarred concrete—only a little ship, and yet with a certain
air of arrogance. Already the beetlelike vehicles of
the port officials were scurrying out to her. Grimes thought sourly, / wish that they'd give our own ships the same
prompt attention. Remembering
his own
Survey Service days he felt a certain nostalgia. Damn it all, he
thought, J piled
on more gees as a snotty-nosed Ensign than as Astronautical
Superintendent of a shipping line and Commodore of the Rim Worlds Naval
Reserve. ...
He
stood by the window, from which the mist had now cleared, and watched the
activity around Star
Roomer. The
ground vehicles were withdrawing from her sleek hull, and at the very point of
her needle-sharp prow, the red light, almost painfully bright against the
all-surrounding gravness, was blinking. He heard Miss
Willoughby say, "She's blasting off again." He muttered in reply,
"So I see." Then, in a louder voice, "That was a brief call. It
must have been on some matter of Survey Service business. In that case, I
should have been included in the boarding party. As soon as she's up and away,
my dear, send word to the Port Captain that I wish to see him. At once."
There
was a flicker of blue incandescence under Star Roamers stern and then, as though fired from some invisible
cannon, she was gone, and the sudden vacuum of her own creation was filled with
peal after crashing peal of deafening thunder. Grimes was
aware that the speaker of the intercom was squawking, but could not make out
the words. His secretary did. Shouting to be heard over the
dying reverberations she cried, "Commander Verrill
to see you, sir!"
"I
should have washed behind the ears," replied Grimes. "But it's too
late now."
II
She hasn't changed much, thought Grimes, as she strode into his
office. She was wearing civilian clothes—a swirling, high-collared cloak in
dark blue, tapered black slacks, a white jersey of a material so lustrous that
it seemed almost luminous. And that outfit, went
on the Commodore to himself, would make a nasty hole in a year's salary. Rob Roy tweed and Altairian crystal silk . . . The Survey Service looks after
its own. Even
so, he looked at her with appreciation. She was a beautiful woman, and on her
an old flour sack would have looked almost as glamorous as the luxurious
materials that adomed her fine body. In her pale
blonde hair the slowly melting snow crystals sparkled like diamonds.
"Welcome aboard,
Commander," said Grimes.
"Glad to be aboard,
Commodore," she replied softly.
She
allowed him to take the cloak from her, accepted the chair that Miss Willoughby
ushered her towards. She sat down gracefully, watching Grimes as he carefully
hung up her outer garment.
"Coffee, Commander Verrill? Or something stronger?"
"Something stronger." A smile flickered over her full lips.
"As long as it's not your local rot-gut, that is."
"It's
not. I have my sources of supply. Nova Caledon
Scotch-on-the-rocks?"
"That
will do nicely. But please omit the rocks." She shivered a little,
theatrically, "What a vile climate you have here, Commodore."
"It's the only one we
have. Say when."
"Right up, please. I
need some central heating."
And
so you do, thought
Grimes, studying her face. So you do. And it's more than our weather that's to blame. You did what
had to be done insofar as that mess involving you and Jane and Derek Calver was concerned, but to every action there's an equal
and opposite reaction—especially once the glow of conscious nobility has worn
off.
She said, "Down the
hatch."
"Down the hatch,"
he replied. "A refill?"
"Thank you."
He
took his time about pouring the drinks, asking as he busied himself with
glasses and ice cubes and bottle, "You must be here on important business,
Commander. A courier ship all to yourself."
"Very
important," she replied, looking rather pointedly towards Miss Willoughby,
who was busying herself with the papers on her desk in a somewhat ostentatious
manner.
"H'm. Yes. Oh, Miss Willoughby, I'd like you to run along to
the Stores Superintendent, if you wouldn't mind, to straighten up the mess
about Rim Falcons requisition sheets."
"But
I still have to run through Rim Kestrel's repair
list, sir."
"Rim KestreVs not due in for a week yet, Miss Willoughby." - "Very well,
sir."
The
girl straightened the litter on her desk, got up and walked slowly and with
dignity from the office.
Sonya
Verrill chuckled. "Such sticky-beaking would never be tolerated in the Service,
Commodore."
"But
you don't have to put up with civilian secretarial staff, Commander. Come to
that, I well recall that when I was in the Service myself an occasional gift of
some out-world luxury to a certain Lieutenant Masson—she was old Admiral Hall's
secretary—could result in the premature release of all sorts of interesting
information regarding promotions, transfers and the like."
"Things are different
now, Commodore."
"Like
hell they are. Anyhow, Sonya, you can talk freely now. This office is regularly
debugged."
"Debugged, John?"
"Yes.
Every now and again high-ups in the various Ministries decide that they aren't
told enough of Rim Runners' affairs—of course, the Aeriel business made me very unpopular, and if Ralph Listowel
hadn't got results, serendipitous ones at that, I'd have been out on my arse. And then your people
manage to plant an occasional bug themselves."
"Come off it,
John."
"Still playing the
little, woolly lamb, Sonya?"
She
grinned. "It's part of my job. Perhaps the most important
part."
"And what's the job
this time?"
"There
won't be any job unless our Ambassador to the Rim Confederation manages to talk
your President into supplying help. But I think that he will. Relations have
been fairly friendly since your autonomy was recognized."
"If
you want a ship," said Grimes, "the charter rates will be favorable
to ourselves. But surely the Federation has tonnage to
spare. There are all the Commission's vessels as well as your own Survey
Service wagons."
"Yes,
we've plenty of ships," she admitted. "And plenty of personnel. But
it's know-how that we're after. You hardly need to be told that your people
have converted this sector of Space into your own backyard, and put up a big
sign, No Trespassing. Even so, we hear things. Such as Rim Ghosts,
and the winds of it that blew your pet Aeriel through about half a dozen alternative time tracks. And there was that
business of the wet paint on Kinsolving's Planet
years ago—but that, of course, was before you became autonomous, so we had the job of handling it. . .
"And the Outsiders'
ship . . ." supplied Grimes.
"No.
Not in the same class, John. She'd drifted in, or been placed there, by
visitors from another Galaxy. And, in any case, we're already in on that."
She held out her glass for a refill.
"You're welcome,
Sonya, but . . ."
"Don't worry John. Olga
Popovsky, the Beautiful Spy with hollow legs—that's
me." "You know your own capacity."
"Of course. Thank you. Now, as I was saying, our top brass is interested in all the
odd things that seem to happen only in this sector of Space, and the Rhine
Institute boys are interested too. It was decided that there was only one
Intelligence Officer in the Service with anything approaching an intimate
knowledge of the Rim. I needn't tell you who that is. It was decided, too, that
I'd work better if allowed to beg, borrow or steal Rim Worlds' personnel. Oh,
the Service can afford to pay Award rates, and above. Frankly, when I was
offered the job ,1 almost turned it down. I know the
Rim—but my memories of this sector of Space aren't all too happy . . ."
She leaned forward in her chair, put her slim hand on
Grimes' knee. "But . . ." "But what,
Sonya?"
"All
this business of Rim Ghosts, all these theories about the curtains between the
alternative universes wearing thin here, on the very edge of the expanding
Galaxy . . . You know something of my history, John. You know that there have
only been two men, real men, in my life. Bill Maudsley, who found the Outsiders' quarantine station, and
who paid for the discovery with his life. And Derek Calver,
whose first loyalties were, after all, to Jane . . . Damn it all, John, I'm no
chicken. I'm rather tired of playing the part of a lone wolf—or a lone bitch,
if you like. I want me a man—but the right man—and I want to settle down. I
shall be due a very handsome gratuity from the Service when I retire, and there
are still sparsely settled systems in this Galaxy where a little, one-ship
company could provide its owners and operators with a very comfortable living.
. . ."
"So?"
"So
it's bloody obvious. I've been put in charge of this wild goose chase—and with
any luck at all I shall catch me my own wild gander. Surely there must be some
alternative Universe in which I shall find either Bill or Derek, with no
strings attached."
"And what if you find them both at
once?" asked Grimes.
"As
long as it's in a culture that approves of polyandry," she grinned. Then
she was serious again. "You can see, John, that this—this research may
well fantastically advance the frontiers of human knowledge."
"And it may well," he told her,
"bring you to the haven where you would be." He raised his glass to
her. "And for that reason, Sonya, I shall do everything within my power to
help you."
Ill
After Sonya had left he pottered around his office for a
while, doing jobs that could have been done faster and better by Miss
Willoughby. When his secretary returned from her visit to the Stores
Superintendent and, with a display of efficiency, tried to take the work from
his hands, he dismissed her for the day. Finally, realizing that he was
accomplishing nothing of any value, he put the papers back in their files and,
having drawn himself a cup of coffee from the automatic dispenser, sat down to
smoke his battered pipe.
He felt sorry for Sonya Verrill.
He knew much of her past history—more, in fact, than she had told him. He was
sorry for her, and yet he envied her. She had been given fresh hope, a new goal
towards which to strive. Whether or not she met with success was not of real
importance. If she failed, there would be other goals, and still others. As an
officer of the Survey Service Intelligence Branch she was given opportunities
for travel denied even to the majority of professional spacemen and -women.
Grimes smiled at the cominess of the thought and
muttered, "Someday her prince will come . . ."
Yes,
he envied her. She, even within the framework of regulations that governed her
Service, had far more freedom of movement than he had. He strongly suspected
that she was in a position to be able to select her own assignments. And I, he thought, am
marooned for the rest of my natural —or, if I so desire, unnatural—life on this
dead-end world at the bitter end of sweet damn all. . .
Come
off it, Grimes, he
told himself. Come
off it, Grimes, Commodore Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve. Don't be so bloody
sorry for yourself. You've climbed to the top of your own private tree.
Even
so . . .
He
finished his coffee, poured himself another cup. He thought, I should have offered to put her up during
her stay on Lorn. And then he was glad that he had not made the
offer. She was used to luxury—luxury on a governmental expense account, but
luxury nonetheless—and surely would have been appalled by his messy widower's
establishment. His children were grown up, and had their own homes and, in any
case, incurable planetlubbers that they were, would
have little in common with one who, after all, was a professional adventuress.
So.
. .
So I
can enjoy adventures—although not in the same sense—vicariously, he thought. I'll do what I can for Sonija,
and hope to receive in return a first-hand account of all that happens to her.
She said that she would want a ship—well, she shall have Faraway Quest. It's time that the poor old girl was taken
for another gallop. And she'll be wanting a crew. I'll
put out the call for volunteers before I get definite word that the expedition
has been approved—fust
quietly, there's no need to get the politicians' backs up. Rimworld-ers,
she specified. Rimworlders born and bred. I can see why. People raised on the Rim are
far more likely to have counterparts in the alternative Universes than those of
us who have, like myself, drifted out here, driven out
here by the winds of chance. I shouldn't have much trouble in raising a team
of officers, but a Master will be the problem. Practically all our Captains are
refugees from the big, Earth-based companies, or from the Survey Service.
But there was no urgency, he told himself.
He
drew yet another cup of coffee and, carrying it, walked to the wide window.
Night had fallen and the sky had cleared and, work having ceased for the day,
there was no dazzle of lights from the spaceport to rob the vision of keenness.
Overhead
in the blackness was one bright star, the Faraway sun, and beyond it lay the faint, far nebulosities.
Low in the east the Lens was rising, the upper limb only visible, a parabola of
misty light. Grimes looked away from it to the zenith, to the dark immensities
through which Calver in his Outsider was falling, perhaps never to return. And
soon Sonya Verrill would be falling—but would she? could she? —through and. across even stranger, even more
fantastic gulfs, of Time as well as of Space.
Grimes
shivered. Suddenly he felt old and alone, although he loathed himself for his
self pity.
He
left his office, fell down the dropshaft (what
irony!) to the ground floor, got out his monocar from
the executives' garage and drove home.
Home was a large house on the outskirts of
Port Forlorn. Home was a villa, solid and well kept—the maintenance service to
which Grimes subscribed was highly efficient— but sadly lacking in the touches
of individuality, or imagination, that only a woman can supply.
The
commodore drove his car into his garage and, after having shut off the engine,
entered the house proper directly from the outbuilding. He did not, as he
usually did, linger for a few minutes in the conservatory that housed his
collection of exotic plants from a century of worlds. He went straight to his
lounge, where he helped himself to a strong whisky from the bar. Then he sat
down before his telephone console and, with his free hand, punched the number
for library service.
The
screen lit up, and in it appeared the head and shoulders of a girl who contrived
to look both efficient and beautiful. Crimes smiled, as he always did, at the
old-fashioned horn-rimmed spectacles that, some genius had decided, made the
humanoid robot look like a real human librarian. A melodious contralto asked,
"May I be of service, sir?"
"You
may, my dear," answered Grimes. (A little subtle— or not so
subtle—flattery worked wonders with often temperamental robots.) "I'd
like whatever available data you have on Rim Ghosts."
"Visual,
sir, or viva
voce?"
"Viva voce, please." (Even this tin blonde, with her phony
femininity, was better than no woman at all in the house.)
"Condensed or
detailed, sir?"
"Condensed, please. I can always ask you to elaborate as and if necessary."
"Very good, sir. The phenomenon of the Rim Ghosts occurs, as the name implies, only on
the Rim. Sightings are not confined to single individuals, so therefore cannot
be assumed to be subjective in nature. A pattern has been established regarding
these sightings. One member of a party of people will see himself, and be seen
by his companions, in surroundings and company differing, sometimes only
subtly, from those of actuality. Cases have been known in which an entire group
of people has seen its Rim Ghost counterpart.
"For
a while it was thought that the apparitions were prophetic in character, and
the orthodox explanation was that of precognition. With the collection of a
substantial body of data, however, it became obvious that prophetic visions
comprised only about 30% of the total. Another 30% seemed to be recapitulations
of past events, 20% had a definite here-and-now flavor, while the remaining 20%
depicted situations that, in our society, can never arise.
"It
was in the year 313 A.G. that Dr. Foulsham, of the Terran Rhine Institute, advanced his Alternative Universe
Theory. This, of course, was no more than the reformulation of the idea played
around with for centuries by speculative thinkers and writers, that of an
infinitude of almost parallel Time Tracks, the so-called Worlds of If.
According to Dr. Foulsham, on Earth and on the worlds
that have been colonized for many generations, the barriers between the
individual tracks are . . The robot paused.
"Go
on, my dear," encouraged Grimes. "This is only a condensation. You
needn't bother trying to break down fancy scientific terminology."
"Thank
you, sir. The barriers, as I was trying to say in suitable language, are both
high and thick, so that a breakthrough is almost impossible. But on the very
rim of the expanding Galaxy these barriers are . . . tenuous, so that very
often a fortuitous breakthrough does occur.
"An
example of such a breakthrough, but visual only, was that achieved by Captain
Derek Calver and his shipmates when he was serving
as Chief Officer of the freighter Lorn Lady. The ship was proceeding through deep space, under Mannschenn
Drive, when another vessel was sighted close alongside. In the control room of
the other spacecraft Calver saw himself—but he was
wearing Master's uniform-and most of the others who were with him in Lorn Lady's control compartment. He was able, too, to
make out the name of the strange ship. It was the Outsider. Some months later, having become the
recipient of a handsome salvage award, Calver and his
shipmates were able to buy a secondhand ship and to operate as a small tramp
shipping company. They christened her the Outsider. This, then, was obviously one of the
precognitive apparitions, and can be explained by the assumption that the
Alternative Universe in which Calver's career runs
almost parallel to his career in this Universe
possesses a slightly different time scale.
"Physical
breakthrough was inadvertently achieved by Captain Ralph Listowel
of the experimental light jammer Aeriel. Various members of his crew unwisely attempted to *break the light barrier'
and, when the ship was proceeding at a velocity only fractionally less than
that of light, discharged a jury rigged rocket hoping thereby to outrun the
photon gale. They did not, of course, and Aeriel's crew became Rim Ghosts themselves, experiencing life in a succession of
utterly strange cultures before, more by luck than judgment, returning to their
own. The unexpected result of this ill-advised experiment was the developing of
a method whereby atomic signs may be reversed, thereby making possible
intercourse between our planets and the anti-matter worlds.
"There
is no doubt that the Rim Ghost phenomenon is one deserving of thorough
investigation, but with the breakaway of the Rim Worlds from the Federation it
has not been possible to maintain full contact with either the Survey Service
or the Rhine Institute, which bodies, working in conjunction, would be
eminently capable of carrying out the necessary research . . ."
"You're out of date, duckie," chuckled Grimes.
"I beg your pardon,
sir?"
"You're
out of date. But don't let it worry you; it's not your fault. It's we poor,
inefficient humans who're to blame, for failing to feed new data into your
memory tanks."
"And may I ask, sir,
the nature of the new data?"
"Just
stick around," said Grimes, "and some day, soon, I may be able to
pass it on to you."
If
Sonya comes back to tell me, he thought, and his odd mood of elation evaporated.
rv
A week
passed, and for Commodore
Grimes it was an exceptionally busy one. Htm Mammoth—ex-Beta Geminorum—
had berthed, and that ship,
as usual, was justifying her reputation as the white elephant of Rim Runners'
fleet. A large consignment of fish had spoiled on the passage from Mellise to Lorn. The Chief
Reaction Drive Engineer had been beaten up in the course of a drunken brawl
with the Purser. The Second, Third and Fourth Officers had stormed into the Astronautical Superintendent's presence to aver that they
would sooner shovel sludge in the State Sewage Farm than lift as much as
another centimeter from a planetary surface under the command of the Mammoth's Master and Chief Officer.
Even
so, Grimes found time to intiate his preliminary inquiries.
To begin with, he had his secretary draw up a questionnaire, this asking for
all relevant data on the sighting of Rim Ghosts. It seemed to him that Sonya Verrill would require for her crew personnel who were in
the habit of sighting such apparitions. Then, having come to the reluctant
conclusion that a lightjammer would be the most
suitable research ship, he studied the schedules of such vessels as were in
operation, trying to work out which one could be withdrawn from service with
the minimal dislocation of the newly developed trade with the anti-matter
systems.
Rather
to his annoyance, Miss Willoughby issued copies of the questionnaire to the
crew of the only ship at the time in port—Rim Mammoth. The officers of that vessel were all in his
black books, and it had been his intention to split them up, to transfer them
to smaller and less well-appointed units of the fleet. Nonetheless, he studied
the forms with interest when they were returned. He was not surprised by what
he discovered. The Master and the Chief Officer, both of whom had come out to
the Rim from the Interplanetary Transport Commission's ships, had no sightings
to report-Captain Jenkins, in fact, had scrawled across the paper, Superstitious Rubbish! The Second, Third and Fourth Officers,
together with the Psionic Radio Officer, were all
third generation Rim Worlders, and all of them had
been witnesses, on more than one occasion, to the odd phenomena.
Grimes
ceased to be annoyed with Miss Willoughby. It looked as though the manning
problem was already solved, insofar as executive officers were concerned. The
Second, Third and Fourth Mates of Rim Mammoth were
all due for promotion, and Captain Jenkins' adverse report on their conduct and
capabilities could well result in the transfer of their names to the bottom of
the list. So there was scope for a little gentle blackmail. Volunteers wanted
for a Rim Ghost hunt! You, and you, and you!
But
there was a snag. None of them had any sail training. How soon would Sonya Verrill want her ship? Would there be time to put the
officers concerned through a hasty course in the handling of lighrjammers? No doubt he would be able to find a team of
suitably qualified men in the existing lightjammer
fleet, but all of them were too useful where they were.
It was while he was mulling this problem over
in his mind that Commander Verrill was announced. She
came into his office carrying a long envelope. She held it out to him,
grinning. "Sealed orders, Commodore."
Grims accepted the package, studying it
cautiously. It bore the crest of the Rim Confederation.
"Aren't you going to
open it?"
"What's the
rush?" he grunted.
But
he picked up the paper knife from his desk—it had been the deadly horn of a Mellisan sea unicorn—and slit the envelope, pulling out the
contents.
He skipped the needlessly complicated legal
language while, at the same time, getting the gist of it. As a result of talks
between the President of the Rim Worlds Confederation
anA the Ambassador of the Interstellar Federation, it
had been decided that the Confederation was to afford to the Federation's
Survey Service all possible assistance—at a price. One Commodore Grimes was
empowered to negotiate directly with one Commander Verrill
regarding the time charter of a suitable vessel and the employment of all
necessary personnel. ...
Grimes
read on—and then he came to the paragraph that caused him to raise his eyebrows
in surprise.
Commodore
Grimes was granted indefinite leave of absence from his post of Astro-nautical Superintendent of Rim Runners, and was to
arrange to hand over to Captain Farley as soon as possible. Commodore Grimes
was to sail as Master of the vessel chartered by the Survey Service, and at all
times was to further and protect the interests of the Rim Confederation. . . .
Grimes
grunted, looked up at the woman from under his heavy eyebrows. "Is this your doing, Sonya?"
"Partly. But in large measure it's due to the reluctance of your government to
entrust one of its precious ships to an outsider."
"But why me?"
She grinned again. "I said that if I
were obliged to ship a Rim Confederation sailing master, I insisted on
exercising some little control over the appointment. Then we all agreed that
there was only one Master of sufficiently proven reliability to meet the
requirements of all concerned . . ." She looked a little worried.
"Aren't you glad, John?"
"It's
rather short notice," he replied tersely and then, as he watched her
expression, he smiled. "Frankly, Sonya, before you blew in aboard Star Roamer I'd decided that I was sick and tired of
being a desk-borne Commodore. This crazy expedition of yours will be better
than a holiday." She snapped, "It's not crazy."
His eyebrows went up.
"No? An interstellar ghost hunt?"
"Come
off it, John. You know as well as I that the Rim Ghosts are objective
phenomena. It's a case of paranormal physics rather than paranormal psychology.
It's high time that somebody ran an investigation—and if you people are too
tired to dedigitate, then somebody else will."
Grimes
chuckled. "All right, all right. I've never seen
a Rim Ghost myself, but the evidence is too—massive?—to laugh away. So, while
Miss Willoughby starts getting my papers into something like order for Captain
Farley—he's on leave at present, so we won't have long to wait for him— we'll
talk over the terms of the charter party.
"To
begin with, I assume that you'll be wanting one of the
lightjammers. Cutty Sark will be available very shortly."
She told him, "No. I
don't want a lightjammer."
"I
would have thought that one would have been ideal for this . . .
research."
"Yes.
I know all about Captain Ralph Listowel and what
happened to him and his crew on the maiden voyage of Aeriel. But there's one big snag. When AerieTs people switched Time Tracks, they also, to a large extent, switched personalities.
When 7 visit the Universe next door I want to do it as me, not as a smudged
carbon copy."
"Then what sort of
ship do you want?"
She
looked out of the window. "I was hoping that your Faraway Quest would be available."
"As a matter of fact,
she is."
"And she has more gear than most of your
merchant shipping. A Mass Proximity Indicator, for example .
. ." "Yes."
"Carlotti Communication and Direction
Finding Equipment?"
"Yes."
Then,
"I know this is asking rather much—but could a sizeable hunk of that anti-matter iron be installed?"
He
grinned at her. "Your intelligence service isn't quite as good as you'd
have us believe, Sonya. The Quest has
no anti-matter incorporated in her structure yet—as you know, it's not allowed
within a hundred miles of any populated area. But there's a suitably sized
sphere of the stuff hanging in orbit, and there it stays until Faraway Quest goes upstairs to collect it. You know the
drill, of course—the antimatter, then an insulation of neutronium,
then a steel shell with powerful permanent magnets built into it to keep the
anti-matter from making contact with normal matter. A
neutrino bombardment and, presto!—anti-gravity. As a matter of fact the
reason for the Quest's
refitting was so that she
could be used for research into the problems arising from incorporating
anti-gravity into a ship with normal interstellar drive."
"Good.
Your technicians had better see to the installing of the anti-matter, and then
ours—there's a bunch of them due in from Elsinore in Rim Bison—will be making a few modifications to the Carlotti gear. Meanwhile, have you considered
manning?"
"I have. But, before we go any further,
just what modifications do you have in mind? I may as well make it clear now
that the Carlotti gear will have to be restored to an
as-was condition before the ship comes off hire."
"Don't worry, it will be. Or brand new
equipment will be installed." She paused and glanced meaningfully at the
coffee dispenser. Grimes drew her a cup, then one for
himself. "Well, John, I suppose you're all agog to learn what's going to
happen to your beloved Faraway
Quest, to say nothing of you
and me and the mugs who sail with us. Get this
straight, I'm no boffin. I can handle a ship and
navigate well enough to justify my Executive Branch commission, but that's all.
"Anyhow,
this is the way of it, errors and omissions expected. As soon as the necessary
modifications have been made to the ship, we blast off, and then cruise along
the lanes on which Rim Ghost sightings have been most frequent. It will help,
of course, if all members of the crew are people who've made a habit of seeing
Rim Ghosts . . ."
"That's been attended
to," said Grimes.
"Good.
So we cruise along quietly and peacefully—but keeping our eyes peeled. And as soon as a Ghost is sighted—Action Stations!"
"You aren't going to
open fire on it?" demanded Grimes.
"Of course not. But there will be things to be done, and done in a ruddy blush. The
officer of the watch will push a button that will convert the ship into an
enormously powerful electro-magnet, and the same switch will actuate the alarm
bells. Automatically the projector of the modified Carlotti
beacon will swing to bring the Ghost into its field. The boffins
tell me that what should
happen is that a bridge, a
temporary bridge, will be thrown across the gulf between the Parallel
Universes."
"I
see. And as Faraway
Quest is an enormously
powerful magnet, the other ship, the Ghost, will be drawn into our
Universe."
"No,"
she said impatiently. "Have you forgotten the antimatter, the
anti-gravity? The Quest
will have one helluva magnetic field, but no mass to speak of. She'll be
the one that gets pulled across the gap, or through the curtain, or however
else you care to put it."
"And how do we get back?"
asked Grimes.
"I'm not very clear on
that point myself," she admitted.
The
Commodore laughed. "So when I man the Quest it will have to be with people with no ties." He said softly,
"I have none."
"And neither have I, John," she
told him. "Not any longer."
V
Captain Fabley was somewhat disgruntled at being called back
from leave, but was mollified slightly when Grimes told him that he would be
amply compensated. As soon as was decently possible the Commodore left Farley
to cope with whatever problems relative to the efficient running of Rim Runners
arose—after all, it was Miss Willoughby who really ran the show—and threw
himself into the organizing of Sonya Verrill's
expedition. What irked him was the amount of time wasted on legal matters.
There was the charter, of course, and then there was the reluctance of Lloyds'
surveyors to pass as spaceworthy a ship in which Mannschenn Drive and anti-matter were combined, not to say
one in which the Carlotti gear had been modified
almost out of recognition. Finally Sonya Verrill was
obliged to play hell with a Survey Service big stick, and the gentlemen from
Lloyds withdrew, grumbling.
Manning,
too, was a problem. The Second, Third and Fourth Mates of Rim Mastodon agreed, quite willingly, to sign on Faraway Quest's articles as Chief, Second and Third. The Psionic Radio Officer was happy to come along with them. After a little prodding at the ministerial level the Catering and
Engineering Superintendents supplied personnel for their departments.
And then the Institute of Spacial Engineers stepped
in, demanding for its members the payment of Danger Money, this to be 150% of
the salaries laid down by the Award. Grimes was tempted to let them have
it—after all, it was the Federation's taxpayers who would be footing the
bill—and then, on second thoughts, laid his ears back and refused to play. He
got over the hurdle rather neatly, persuading the Minister of Shipping and the
Minister
for the Navy to have Faraway
Quest commissioned as an
auxiliary cruiser and all her officers—who were, oi course, reservists, called up for special duties. Like Lloyds, the
Institute retired grumbling.
As a
matter of fact, Grimes was rather grateful to them for having forced his hand.
Had the Quest
blasted off as a
specialized merchant vessel only, with her crew on Articles, his own status
would have been merely that of a shipmaster, and Sonya Verrill,
representing the Survey Service, would have piled on far too many gees. Now he
was a Commodore on active service, and, as such, well and truly outranked any
mere Commander, no matter what pretty badge she wore on her cap. It was, he
knew well, no more than a matter of male pride, but the way that things finally
were he felt much happier.
So,
after the many frustrating delays, Faraway Quest finally
lifted from her berth at the Lom spaceport. Grimes was rusty, and knew it, and allowed young Swinton— lately Second Officer of Rim Mammoth, now .Lieutenant Commander Swinton,
First Lieutenant of R.W.S. Faraway Quest—to take
the ship upstairs. Grimes watched critically from one of the spare acceleration
chairs, Sonya Verrill watched critically from the
other. Swinton—slight, fair-haired, looking like a
schoolboy in a grown-up's cut-down uniform—managed well in spite of his
audience. The old Quest
climbed slowly at first,
then with rapidly increasing acceleration, whistling through the overcast into
the clear air beyond, the fast thinning air, into the vacuum of Space.
Blast-off
time had been calculated with considerable exactitude—"If it had been more
exact," commented Grimes, "we'd have rammed our hunk of anti-matter
and promptly become the wrong sort of ghosts . . ."—and so there was the
minimum jockeying required to match orbits with the innocent-looking sphere of
shining steel. The Quest
had brought a crew of
fitters up with her, men with experience of handling similar spheres. Working
with an economy of motion that was beautiful to watch they gentled the thing in
through the special hatch that had been made for it, bolted it into its
seating. Then it was the turn of the physicists, who set up their apparatus and
bathed the andiron in a flood of neutrinos. While this operation was in
progress, two tanker rockets stood by, pumping tons of water into the extra
tanks that had been built into the Quest's structure.
This, Grimes explained to his officers, was to prevent her from attaining
negative mass and flying out of her orbit, repelled rather than attracted by Lom and the Lorn sun, blown out
of station before the landing of the assorted technicians and the loading of
final essential items of stores and equipment.
At
last all the preliminaries were completed. Faraway Quest was fully manned, fully equipped, and all the
dockyard employees had made their transfer to the ferry rocket. This time
Grimes assumed the pilot's chair. Through the viewports he could see the globe
that was Lorn, the globe whose clouds, even from this
altitude, looked dirty. Looking away from it, he told himself that he did not
care if he never saw it again. Ahead, but to starboard, a lonely, unblinking
beacon in the blackness, was the yellow spark that was the Mellise
sun. The commodore's stubby fingers played Iighdy
over his control panel. From the bowels of the ship came the humming of
gyroscopes, and as the ship turned on her short axis the centrifugal force gave
a brief illusion of off-center gravity.
The Lorn
sun was ahead now.
"Sound and alarm, Commander Swinton,"
snapped Grimes.
The
First Lieutenant pressed a stud, and throughout the ship there was the coded
shrilling of bells, a succession of Morse R's, short-long-short,
short-long-short. R is
for rocket, thought
Grimes. Better
than all this civilian yapping into microphones.
Abruptly the shrilling ceased.
With
deliberate theatricality Grimes brought his fist down on the firing button. The
giant hand of acceleration pushed the officers down into the padding of their
chairs. The Commodore watched the sweep-second hand of the clock set in the
center of the panel. He lifted his hand again— but this time it was with an
appreciable effort—again brought it down. Simultaneously, from his own control
position, Swinton gave the order, "Start Mannschenn Drive."
The
roar of the rockets cut off abruptly, but before there was silence the keening
song of the Drive pervaded the ship, the high-pitched complaint of the
ever-spinning, ever-pre-cessing gyroscopes. To the
starboard hand, the great, misty lens of the Galaxy warped and twisted, was
deformed into a vari-colored convolution at which it
was not good to look. Ahead, the Mellise sun had
taken the likelihood of a dimly luminous spiral.
Grimes
felt rather pleased with himself. He had a crew of
reservists, was a reservist himself, and yet the operation had been carried out
with naval snap and efficiency. He turned to look at Sonya Verrill,
curious as to what he would read in her expression.
She
smiled slightly and said, "May I suggest, sir, that we splice the mainbrace?" She added, with more than a hint of
cattiness, "After all, it's the Federation's taxpayers who're footing the
bill."
VI
The ship having been steadied on to her trajectory,
Grimes gave the order that Sonya Verrill had
suggested. All hands, with the exception of the watchkeeping
officers, gathered in Faraway
Quest's commodious
wardroom, strapping themselves into their chairs, accepting drinking bulbs
from the tray that Karen Schmidt, the- Catering Officer, handed around.
When
everybody had been supplied with a drink the Commodore surveyed his assembled
officers. He wanted to propose a toast, but had never possessed a happy, knack
with words. The only phrases that came to his mind were too stodgy, too
platitudinous. At last he cleared his throat and said gruffly, "Well,
gentlemen—and ladies, of course—you may consider that the expedition is under way, and the mainbrace is in the
process of being spliced. Perhaps one of you would care to say something."
Young
Swinton sat erect in his chair—in Free Fall, of
course, toasts were drunk sitting—and raised his liquor bulb. He declaimed,
trying to keep the amusement from his voice, "To the wild ghost chasel"
There
was a ripple of laughter through the big compartment—a subdued merriment in
which, Grimes noted, Sonya Verrill did not join. He
felt a strong sympathy for her. As far as she was concerned this was no matter
for jest, this pushing out into the unknown, perhaps the unknowable. It was,
for her, the fruition of months of scheming, persuading, wire-pulling. And yet,
Grimes was obliged to admit, the play on words was a neat one. "Very
well," he responded, "to the wild ghost chase it is."
He
sipped from his bulb, watched the others doing likewise. He reflected that
insofar as Rim Worlds personnel was concerned it would
have been hard to have manned the ship with a better crew—for this particular
enterprise. All of them, during their service in the Rim Runners' fleet, had
acquired reputations—not bad, exactly, but not good. Each of them had
exhibited, from time to time, a certain . . . scattiness? Yes, scattiness. Each
of them had never been really at home in a service that, in the final analysis,
existed only to make the maximum profit with the minimum expense. But now—the
Federation's taxpayers had deep pockets— expense was no object. There would be
no tedious inquiries into the alleged squandering of reaction mass and consumable
stores in general.
Insofar
as the Survey Service personnel—the Carlotti
Communications System specialists—were concerned, Grimes was not so happy. They
were an unknown quantity. But he relied on Sonya Verrill
to be able to handle them— after all, they were her direct subordinates.
He
signaled, to Karen Schmidt to serve out another round of drinks, then
unstrapped himself and got carefully to his feet, held to the deck by the
magnetized soles of his shoes. He said, "There's no need to hurry yourselves, but I wish to see all departmental heads in my
day room in fifteen minutes."
He
walked to the axial shaft, let himself into the tubular alleyway and, ignoring
the spiral staircase, pulled himself rapidly forward along the guideline. A
vibration of the taut wire told him that he was being followed. He turned to
see who it was, and was not surprised to see that it was Sonya Verrill.
She sat facing him across
his big desk.
She
said, "This is no laughing matter, John. This isn't just one big
joke."
"The
wild ghost chase, you mean? I thought that it was rather clever. Oh, I know
that you've your own axe to grind, Sonya—but you have to admit that most of us,
and that includes me, are along just for the hell of it. Your people, I
suppose, are here because they have to be."
"No. They're
volunteers."
"Then
don't take things so bloody seriously, woman. We shall all of us do our best—my
crew as well as yours. But I don't think that anybody, apart from myself, has any clue as to your private motives."
She smiled unhappily. "You're right, of
course, John. But . . ."
There
was a sharp rap at the door. "Gome in!"
called Grimes.
They
came in—Swinton, and the burly, redhaired
Calhoun, Chief Mannschenn Drive Engineer, and
scrawny, balding McHenry, Chief Reaction Drive Engineer. They were followed by
the gangling, dreamy Mayhew, Psionic Radio Officer,
by little, fat Petersham, the Purser, and by the
yellow-haired, stocky Karen Schmidt. Then came Tod-hunter, the dapper little Surgeon, accompanied by
Renfrew, the Survey Service Lieutenant in charge of the modified Carlotti gear.
They
disposed themselves on chairs and settees, adjusted their seat straps with
practiced hands.
"You
may smoke," said Grimes, filling and lighting his own battered pipe. He
waited until the others' pipes and cigars and ciagarettes
were under way, then said quietly, "None of you
need to be told that this is not a commercial voyage." He grinned.
"It is almost like a return to the bad old days of piracy. We're like the
legendary Black Bart, Scourge of the Spaceways, just
cruising along waiting for some fat prize to wander within range of our guns.
Not that Black Bart ever went ghost hunting. . . ."
"He
would have done, sir," put in Swinton, "if
there'd been money in it."
"There's
money in anything if you can figure the angle," contributed McHenry.
This
was too much for Sonya Verrill. "I'd have you
gentlemen know," she said coldly, "that the question of money
doesn't enter into it. This expedition is classed as pure scientific
research."
"Is
it, Commander Verrill?" Grimes' heavy eyebrows
lifted sardonically. "I don't think that we should have had the backing
either of your Government or of ours unless some farsighted politicians had
glimpsed the possibility of future profits. After all, trade between the
Alternative "Universes could well be advantageous to all concerned."
"If there are Alternative Universes," put in Calhoun.
"What
do you mean, Commander? I specified that the personnel of this ship was to be made up of those who have actually sighted Rim
Ghosts."
"That
is so, sir. But we should bear in mind the possibility —or the probability—that
the Rim Ghosts are ghosts—ghosts, that is, in the old-fashioned
sense of the word."
"We
shall bear it in mind, Commander," snapped Grimes. "And if it is so,
then we shall, at least have made a small contribution to the sum total of
human knowledge." He drew deeply from his pipe, exhaled a cloud of blue
smoke that drifted lazily towards the nearest exhaust vent. "Meanwhile,
gentlemen; we shall proceed, as I have already said, as though we were a pirate
ship out of the bad old days. All of you will impress upon your juniors the necessity
for absolute alertness at all times. For example, Commander Swinton, the practice of passing a boring watch by playing
three-dimensional noughts and crosses in the plotting
tank will cease forthwith." Swinton blushed.
This had been the habit of his that had aroused the ire of the Master and the
Chief Officer of Rim
Mastodon. "And,
Commander Calhoun, we shall both of us be most unhappy if the log desk in the
Mann-schenn Drive Room is found to be well stocked
with light reading matter and girlie magazines." It was Calhoun's turn to
look embarrassed. "Oh, Commander McHenry, the Reaction Drive was in first
class condition when we blasted off from Port Forlorn. A few hours' work should
suffice to restore it to that condition. I shall not expect to find the Reaction
Drive Engine Room littered with bits and pieces that will eventually be
reassembled five seconds before planet-fall." The Surgeon, the Purser and
the Catering Officer looked at each other apprehensively, but the Commodore
pounced next on the Psionic Radio Officer. "Mr.
Mayhew, I know that it is the standard practice for you people to gossip with
your opposite number all over the Galaxy, but on this voyage, unless I order
otherwise, a strict listening watch only is to be kept. Is that understood?"
"You're
the boss," replied Mayhew dreamily and then, realizing what he had said,
"Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Very
good, sir."
Grimes
let his glance wander over Todhunter, Petersham and Schmidt, sighed regretfully. He said, "I
think that is all. Have you anything to add, Commander Verrill?"
"You
seem to have cleared up all the salient points insofar as your own officers are
concerned," said the girl. "And I am sure that Mr. Renfrew is capable
of carrying out the orders that he has already been given."
"Which are, Commander?"
"As you already know, sir, to maintain his equipment in a state of
constant, manned readiness, and to endeavour to lock
on to a Rim Ghost as soon as one is sighted."
"Good.
In that case we all seem to know what's expected. We stand on, and stand on,
until . . ."
"I
still think, sir," said Calhoun, "that we
should be carrying a Chaplain—one qualified to carry out exorcism."
"To
exorcise the Rim Ghosts," Sonya Verrill told
him, "is the very last thing that we want to do."
VII
They
stood on . .. And on.
Second
by second, minute by minute, hour by hour the time was ticked away by the
ship's master chronometer; watch succeeded watch, day succeeded day. There was
normal Deep Space routine to keep the hands occupied, there were the frequent
drills—at first carried out at set times and then, as every officer learned
what was expected of him, at random intervals—to break the monotony. But
nothing was sighted, nothing was seen outside the
viewports but the distorted lens of the Galaxy, the faint, far, convoluted nebulosities that were the sparse Rim stars.
Grimes discussed matters
with Sonya Verrill.
He
said, "I've been through all the records, and I still can't discover a
pattern."
"But
there is a pattern," she told him. "On every occasion at least one
member of the group to sight a Rim Ghost has seen his own alternative
self."
"Yes,
yes. I know that. But what physical conditions must be established before a
sighting? What initial velocity, for example? What temporal precession rate? As
far as I can gather, such things have had no bearing on the sightings
whatsoever."
"Then they
haven't."
"But
there must be some specific combination of circumstances, Sonya."
"Yes.
But it could well be something outside the ship from which the ghost is
sighted, some conditions peculiar to the region of Space that she is
traversing."
"Yes, yes. But what?"
"That,
John, is one of the things we're supposed to find out."
Grimes
said, "You know, Sonya, I think that perhaps we are on the wrong track.
We're trying to do the job with technicians and machinery . . ."
"So?"
"How
shall I put it? This way, perhaps. It could be that
the best machine to employ would be the human mind. Or brain."
"What do you mean?"
"That Calhoun may have something after
all. It will not surprise you to leam that I have, on
microfilm, a complete dossier on every Rim Worlds' officer in this ship. I've
been through these dossiers, hoping to establish some sort of pattern. As you
know, every Rim Worlder in this ship has at least one
Rim Ghost sighting to his name. Now, our Mr. Calhoun, or Commander Calhoun if
you like—you recall his remarks at our first conference, just after we'd lined
up for the Mellise sun?"
"I
do. He was saying that the Rim Ghosts might be real— or should one say unreal?—ghosts."
"Yes.
Anyhow, Calhoun was born on the Rim. On Ultimo, to be exact.
But his parents were migrants. From Dunglass."
"Yes . . ."
"You know Dunglass?"
"I
was there once. An odd world. Ruled by a theocracy ... Or is 'theocracy' the right word? But
the United Reformed Spiritualist Church runs the show, after a fashion."
"Probably as well as any other government on any other world. Anyhow, the U.R.S.C., as no doubt you know,
has its share of heretics. Calhoun's parents were such. Apparently the house in
which they lived was haunted, and they employed a bootleg exorcist to lay the
ghost. This was frowned upon by the authorities, so much so that the Cal-houns decided to emigrate. Now, one can be a heretic
without being either an atheist or an agnostic. The Calhouns
still believe, although reserving the right to believe in
their own way. Their only son was brought up in their religion."
"And so what?"
"So—ignoring telepathy, telekinesis,
teleportation and the like—what proportion of psychic phenomena is due to the
activities of the dear departed, and what proportion is due to a .. . leakage—from
one Universe through to another?"
"H'm. I must
confess that this was a line of approach that never occurred to me. I don't
pretend to be an expert on so-called psychic matters, but if we did hold a seance, shouldn't we require a medium?" "We have
one—Mr. Mayhew."
"Yes.
But as you know, all these Rhine Institute graduates insist that there's
nothing supernatural about their psionic talents.
Furthermore, one can be telepathic without being clairvoyant."
"Can
one, Sonya? I'm not so sure. There are quite a few recorded cases of
clairvoyance, and many of them can be explained by telepathy. Even the
premonitory ones can be accounted for by assuming the reception of a telepathic
broadcast from a Universe with a slightly different Time Scale. There is no
need to assume that the Rim Ghosts are a supernatural phenomenon. If we do pay
lip service to one of the supernatural religions it will only be to create the
right conditions for our own experiments."
She
said, "You rank me, John, and you're in command of this ship and this
expedition. But I still don't like it."
"You
think that we're selling out, as it were, to the super-naturalists?"
"Frankly,
yes."
"I
don't see it that way. What is natural, and what is supernatural? Can you draw
a dividing line? I can't."
"All
right," She unstrapped herself and got to her feet, the slight effort
pushing her up and clear from the chair. She hung
there, motionless, until the feeble gravitational field of her shoe soles
pulled her back to the deck. Then, contact having been made with solidity, she flung her hands out in an appealing gesture.
"Do what you can, John, any way you like. But do it. You've guessed how
hard it was for me to persuade our top brass to pour time and money into what
your Commander Swinton called a wild ghost chase.
Unless we get results, there'll never be another one. And you know that I want
results. And you know the sort of results I want." Her hands fell to her
sides. "Only—only I've stood on my own flat feet for so long that it
rather hurts to have to call in outside assistance."
"It
won't be outside, assistance, Sonya. We shall be working with and through our
own people, aboard our own ship. All that we shall be trying to do will be the
creation of conditions favorable to a leakage from one Universe to
another."
"As you say. As you say." She laughed briefly.
"After all, men and women have been in the habit of selling their souls to
the Devil from the very beginnings of human history. Or mythology." She
paused. "No, history is the better word."
He
said, exasperated, "But we won't be selling our souls to the devil. If it
makes Calhoun any happier to think that he's gained a few converts to the odd
faith of his parents, what does it matter?" He reached out for his
telephone, pressed a numbered stud. "Mr. Mayhew? Commodore
here. Can you spare me a moment?" He pressed another stud.
"Commander Calhoun? Commodore here. Would you
mind stepping up to my quarters?"
Sonya
Verrill pulled herself back into her chair, buckled
herself in and she and Grimes sat back to wait.
Mayhew was first to arrive in Grimes' day
cabin. He was untidy as always, his uniform shirt sloppily buttoned, one shoulderboard hanging adrift, his wispy gray hair rumpled,
his eyes vague and unfocused. He stifled a yawn. "Yes,
sir?"
"Take
a seat, please, Mr. Mayhew." There was a sharp rap at the door. "Come
inl"
Calhoun
entered, somewhat ostentatiously wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He, too,
was told to be seated.
"Commander
Calhoun," said Grimes, "I believe that you were brought up in the
beliefs of the United Reformed Spiritualist Church?"
"No,
sir." The
engineer's reply was a stressed negative. "No, sir.
I was brought up in the beliefs of the United Primitive Spiritualist
Church." He seemed to realize that his answer had caused a certain confusion in Grimes' mind, so went on, "You
will know something of Dunglass, sir. You will know
that there were people, my parents among them, who advocated a return to the
old beliefs, the old, the only true faith. The right
to exorcise, for example . . ."
"Yes, Commander. I understand. But you believe in the existence of the Rim Ghosts?"
"Of course, sir—although it has yet to be determined if they are
good or evil manifestations. If they are evil, then exorcism should be practiced."
,"Yes, of course. As you are well aware, most of us in this ship do not hold the same
views as yourself regarding the phenomena of the Rim Ghosts. But you will agree
that it is desirable that contact be made with one or more of the
apparitions—after all, this is the purpose of this expedition. And if such
contact is made . . ." Grimes paused. "If such contact is made, it
might well be to the advantage of your church."
"That is so,
sir."
"Perhaps you might help us to make such
a contact."
"How, sir? I do not think that tampering with the Drive controls will achieve any
useful result."
"That
was not in my mind. But it had occurred to me, Commander, that there are
certain rites practiced by your Church . . ."
"A
séance, you
mean, Commodore? But I have no me-diumistic talents.
If such had been the case I should not be here now; I should have entered our
priesthood."
"But you know the drill?"
"Yes, sir. I am conversant with the rites and ceremonies. But without a medium
they are valueless."
"Here
is our medium," said Grimes, nodding towards the almost asleep Mayhew.
The Psionic Radio Officer jerked awake. "Come off
it!" he ejaculated. "I'm a technician, not a cheap fortune
teller!" Then, "I beg your pardon, sir. What I meant to say is that
the Rhine Institute has always been opposed to superstition."
"Religion
is not superstition, you half-witted teacup reader!" shouted Calhoun.
"Gentlemen, gentlemen . . ." soothed Grimes. "Need I remind you that we are under Naval discipline, and that I could order you, Commander
Calhoun, to organize a seance, and you Mr. Mayhew, to
officiate as medium?"
"Even
in the Navy, sir,"
said Calhoun, his freckles
standing out sharply against the suddenly white skin of his face, "there
are lawful and unlawful commands."
"And,"
Grimes told him coldly, "bearing in mind the
peculiar purpose of this expedition, such a command made by myself would be
construed as lawful by the Board of Admiralty. But many centuries ago, back in
the days when navies were made up of wooden ships sailing Earth's seas, there
used to be a saying: 'One volunteer is worth ten pressed men.' Surely,
Commander, you will not hesitate to volunteer to play your part in an
experiment that, when made public, could well result in a flood of converts to
your faith?"
"If
you put it that way, sir. But. . ."
"And
surely, Mr. Mayhew, you will not hesitate to play your part? After all, it
could well lead to a Fellowship of your Institute. . . ."
"But, sir, the superstition
. . ."
"If you dare to use that word again,
Mayhew . . threatened
Calhoun.
"Commander! Pease remember where you are. And Mr. Mayhew, I am asking you to
respect Commander Calhoun's beliefs. If that is ineffective I shall order you
to do so—with the usual penalties if the order is willfully disobeyed."
The pair of them lapsed
into a sulky silence.
Grimes
went on, "I shall leave matters in your hands, Commander. You are the only
person in the ship qualified to carry out the necessary organization. And you,
Mr. May-hew, will co-operate fully with Commander Calhoun." He smiled
briefly. "And now, gentlemen, perhaps a little refreshment before you engage yourself upon what are, after all, somewhat unusual
duties. . . ."
When
they were gone, mellowed by the alcohol, almost friendly towards each other,
Sonya Verrill said, "The big stick and the
carrot ... I hope the combination
gets results."
"I hope it gets the results we
want," replied Grimes. "We don't want to raise any ghosts of the
wrong sort."
"No," whispered Sonya, her face suddenly pale and strained. "No."
VIII
The preparations for the seance took
much longer than Grimes had anticipated. But it was obvious that Calhoun,
religiously as well as professionally, was a perfectionist. The most time-consuming
operation was the construction of a harmonium, during which the wardroom piano
was cannibalized for its keyboard, this being cut down from seven and a half
octaves to five. The engineers' workshop was able to turn out the necessary
bellows and treadles, and the brass vibrators or "reeds." The ivory
from the surplus keys was utilized in the manufacture of the various stops.
Grimes, watching with interest the fabrication of the archaic instrument,
listening wincingly to the caterwauling notes of its intitial
tests—"We must get the right wheezing quality
. . ." insisted Calhoun—was inclined to deplore the sacrifice of what had
been a well-cared-for and versatile music maker, the life and soul of many a
good party during previous expeditions in Faraway Quest. But the séance had been his idea initially, so he felt that he had no right to
criticize.
Then
the wardroom was stripped of its fittings. The comfortable, well padded chairs
were removed and replaced by hard metal benches. The paneling was covered by
dingy gray drapes—bedsheets that had been passed
through a dye concocted from peculiar ingredients by Dr. Todhunter
and Karen Schmidt. Dimmers were fitted to the light switches, and some of the
fluorescent tubes were removed and replaced by bulbs giving a peculiarly dingy
red illumination. And there were other accessories to be made: A tin speaking
trumpet, and a tambourine, both of which were decorated with lines and blobs of
luminous paint.
At last everything was
ready.
Grimes
sent for his First Lieutenant. "Commander Swin-ton,"
he said, "we shall hold our séance
at 2100 hours this evening,
ship's time. Please see to it that all departments are notified."
"Ay, ay, sir."
"And wipe that silly
grin off your f ace!"
"Sorry, sir. But you must admit that after that toast, when we spliced the mainbrace, this is turning out to be a wilder ghost chase
than any of us anticipated."
"From
Commander Calhoun's viewpoint it's somewhat less wild than it was, Swinton. As far as he's concerned we're dropping all the
scientific flummery and returning to the primitive methods, the tried and
trusted methods, of his religion. And all the evidence indicates that these
methods do work, after a fashion. They create the right atmosphere. They raise—something. From inside, a release of the wild talents
possessed by those present at the séance? From Outside? From the next Time Track
but three? I don't know, Swinton. I don't
know—yet."
"It will be an
interesting experiment."
"Yes. And I'm pleased that Mr. Mayhew
has been persuaded to look at it in that light."
"I suppose that he has got mediumisric talents, sir?"
"He
must have, Swinton. What is a medium but a tele-path?"
"Could
be, sir. Could be. But . . ."
"Don't say that Commander Calhoun has
converted you?"
"He's
tried hard enough, sir. Oh, I'm willing to believe that his Church, in either
the Primitive or the Reformed versions, has produced some interesting
phenomena, but I've yet to be convinced that they're supernatural, any more
than the Rim Ghosts are. I can't understand why the Rhine Institute hasn't done
more to investigate Spiritualism."
"Because,
my boy, it hasn't been allowed to. It's scientific. Every
time that one of its investigators sniffs around a Spiritualist Church he's
given either the cold shoulder or the bum's rush. You know the line of
talk—"There are some things that we aren't meant to know. Faith is all-important; knowledge is a device of the Devil.'
And so on. And so on."
"Then
I'm surprised that Calhoun was among the volunteers for this expedition."
"You
shouldn't be. Commander Calhoun has an axe to grind. He hopes that something
will be discovered that will be useful to his Primitive Church in its squabble
with the Reformed Church. Exorcism by remote control, for example . . ."
"But that would be
dragging in Science".
"As
a servant, not as a competitor."
"I
think I see . . ." The young man still looked dubious, however. "Will
that be all, sir?"
"Yes,
thank you, Commander Swinton . . . Oh, just one more
thing. As soon as this . . . experiment is over, please get
the wardroom looking like a wardroom, and not like a down-at-heels
meeting house."
"That, sir, will be a
pleasure."
Grimes
dined in his own quarters that night—the wardroom, as
it was at this time, was far too comfortless. Sonya Verrill
kept him company. They enjoyed their meal together. Although it was simple it
was well cooked and nicely served, and the wines from the Commodore's private
stock were an excellent accompaniment to the food. While they were eating they
chatted about minor matters and listened to the background music softly
tinkling from Grimes' playmaster.
And
then, after Grimes had produced two bulbs of vintage port and a box of fine
cigars imported from Caribbea, they talked more
seriously.
She
said, "I hate to admit it, John, but I'm rather frightened."
"You,
of all people?
Why, Sonya?"
"As
long as this expedition was being run on scientific lines it was . . . How
shall I put it? It was, in spite of my own private reasons for being here, fun. Something in it, as you said, of the old days of piracy—but only playing
at pirates. A Carlotti beacon
instead of a real gun or laser projector, and a sort of atmosphere about it all
of, "Bang! You're dead!" But now ... As I told you, I've been on Dunglass. It's a dreary world, with cities that are no more
than straggling towns, streets and streets of mean little houses and Meeting
Halls that are just sheds designed, one would think, with a deliberate
avoidance of pleasing proportion. And the feeling all the time that one is being
watched, disapprovingly, by the ghosts of all the. countless
millions who have gone before.
"I
went to one or two of their services. Partly out of curiosity,
and partly because it was my job, as an Intelligence Officer. Cold, cold
halls—with a chill that didn't seem to be natural—and dreary hymn singing by
drab people, and dim lights, and a voice that seemed to come from nowhere
giving adivce about the most trivial matters—and some
that weren't so trivial. . ..
"Yes,
I remember it well. There was this voice—a man's voice, deep, although the
medium was a skinny little woman. The man sitting next to me whispered that it
was Red Eagle, a Spirit Guide. He went on to say that this Red Eagle was, or
had been, a Red Indian, an American Indian. I wondered what Red Eagle was doing
so many light years away from home, but it occurred to me that Time and Space,
as we know them, probably mean nothing to spirits, so kept quiet. The voice
said, "There is a stranger here tonight, a woman from beyond the sky.'
Well, most of those present must have known who I was. The voice went on, T
have a message for the stranger. I see a ship. I see a ship falling through the
emptiness, far and far away . . .' Once again, so what? I was a spacewoman and
it was no secret. 'Far away, far away, where the stars are few and dim, far and
few . . . And I see the name of the ship, in gold letters on her prow ... I can read the name . . . Outsider . . .' And that meant nothing to me—then. T see the Captain, brave in his black and gold.
You know him. You will know him again . . .' And then
there was a description of the Captain's appearance, and I knew that it was
Derek Calver. As you are aware, I first met Derek
when he was Second Mate of the old Lorn Lady. 'There is another man. He is one of the officers, although he, too, has
been a Captain. He is afraid, and he is disgraced, and he is locked in his
cabin . . .' And once again there was the
description—even to the laser bum on the left buttock and the funny little mole
just above the navel. It was Bill all right. Bill Maudsley.
'He is sick, and he is afraid, and you are not with him, and he knows that he
has lost you forever. There is a bottle, and he drinks from it, and the spilled
fluid drifts around the air of the cabin in a mist, in a spray. He looks at the
empty bottle and curses, then smashes it on the wall.
The broken, splintered neck is still in his hand, and he brings the sharp,
jagged end of it across his throat. . .'
"I just sat there, in a sick, numb
silence. I wanted to ask questions, but I couldn't in front of all those
strangers. But there was nothing more. Nothing at all.
Red Eagle had said his piece as far as I was concerned, and passed on all sorts
of trivial messages to other members of the congregation,.
Billy Brown's grandmother was concerned because he wasn't wearing his long
underwear, and Jimmy Smith's Aunt Susan wanted to tell him that trade would
pick up next year, and so on, and so on.
"After the . . . meeting? Service? After the
service I stayed on to have a talk with the minister. He was very sympathetic,
and arranged for me to have a private sitting with the medium. It wasn't very
satisfactory. Red Eagle seemed to be somewhat peeved at being called away from
whatever it was that he was doing, and just told me that I should search long
and far, and that I should and should not find that for which I was searching.
"And what can be made
of that?
"Shall
I succeed in my search by becoming a ghost myself, before my time? I hope not.
I'm too fond of life, John-life on this gross physical plane. I like good food
and wine and tobacco and books and music and clothes and . . . and all the
other things that make life, in spite of everything, so well worth living.
There's far too much vagueness about what comes after. Oh, there are the stock
protestations— 'It is very beautiful here, and everybody is happy . . .'— but ... It could be faulty transmission and
reception, but I always get the impression that the After Life is lacking in
character, and color and, but of course, the good, lusty pleasures of the flesh
. . .
"Even so, I was
shaken. Badly shaken."
"It could be explained
by telepathy, Sonya."
"No,
John, it couldn't be. I was not thinking about Bill Maudsley
at the time—not until that message came through, and
even then I was thinking only about Derek Calver.
I
didn't know that Bill had shipped as his Mate. And as for . .
. And as for the shocking manner of his death, that I did not know about. I did not know about it
officially for a matter of months, which was the time it took for the news to
drift in from the Rim. But I checked up. I ran all available data through one
of our Master Computers, and got one of our Specialist Navigators to run his
own check, and there were no two ways about the answer. Bill must have taken
his own life at the very time that I was sitting in that dreary Meeting Hall in
Doylesville, on Dunglass. . . ."
"It
might be as well if you didn't attend the seance,
Sonya," Grimes told her.
"And
leave the show to you lousy secessionists?" she flared, with a flash of
her old spirit. "No sir!"
DC
When Grimes and Sonya Verrill
went down to the wardroom they found that all was in readiness for the stance.
The uncomfortable benches—it was fortunate, thought the Commodore, that the
ship was falling free so that the only contact between buttocks and an
unyielding surface was that produced by the gentle restriction of the seat
belts-had been arranged in rows, facing a platform on which were a table, three
chairs and the harmonium. Calhoun, contriving to look like a nonconformist
minister in spite of his uniform, occupied one of the chairs at the table. May
hew, his usual dreaminess replaced by an air of acute embarrassment, sat in
the other. Karen Schmidt was seated at the musical instrument.
As
soon as the Commodore and Sonya had taken a bench in the front row the
engineer, unbuckling his seat belt, got carefully to his feet. His voice, as he
made the initial announcement, was more of a street corner bray than a pulpit
bleat. "Brethren," he said, "we are here as humble seekers,
gathered in all humility, to beg that our loved ones on the Other Side will
shed light on our darkness. We pray to Them for
help—but we must, also, be prepared to help Them. We must cast out doubt, and
replace it by childlike faith. We must believe." He
went on in a more normal voice, "This, I assure you, is essential. We must
put ourselves in a receptive mood, throwing our minds and our hearts open to
the benevolent powers on the other side of the veil . . ." Then, the
engineer briefly ascendant over the lay preacher, "We must strive to
create the right conditions insofar as we are able ..."
Meanwhile,
one of his juniors was making his way along the tiers of benches distributing
mimeographed sheets. Grimes looked at his curiously. It was, he saw, a hymnal.
"Brethren!"
cried Calhoun, "we will join in singing the first hymn."
Karen
Schmidt was having trouble with the harmonium— the operation of treadles in the
absence of a gravitational field requires a certain degree of concentration. At
last, however, she got the thing going and suddenly and shockingly the
introductory chords blared out.
Then
they were all singing to the wheezing, gasping accompaniment:
"Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling
gloom,
"Lead Thou me on . . ."
The
hymn over, Calhoun prayed. Although himself an agnostic, Grimes was impressed
by the sincerity of the man. He began to wish that he could believe in
something.
There
was another hymn, and then the lights were dimmed until only the dull-glowing
red globes remained. The lines and blobs of luminous paint picking out the
simple apparatus—the speaking trumpet and the tambourine—on the table gleamed
eerily. Suddenly it was very quiet in the wardroom; the muted noises of
machinery, the sobbing of pumps and whizzing of fans, the thin, high keening of
the Mannschenn Drive, accentuated the silence rather
than diminished it. It was very quiet—and very cold.
Physical or psychological? Grimes
asked himself as he shivered.
His
eyes were becoming accustomed to the almost-darkness. He could see the dark
forms of Calhoun and Mayhew, sitting motionless at the table, and Karen Schmidt
hunched over the harmonium. He turned his head to look at Sonya. Her face was
so pale as to seem almost luminous. He put out his hand to grasp hers, gave it
a reassuring squeeze. She returned the pressure, and seemed reluctant to
relinquish the physical contact.
Mayhew
cleared his throat. He said matter-of-factly, "There's something coming
through. . . ."
"Yes?" whispered
Calhoun. "Yes?"
Mayhew
chuckled. "It's only a routine message, I'm afraid. Flora Macdonald . . ."
"But
you must have heard of her," insisted Calhoun in a low voice. "She
lived in the eighteenth century, on Earth. She was a Jacobite
heroine. . . ."
Mayhew
chuckled again. "Not this Flora Macdonald. She's
a Waverley Royal Mail cargo liner, and she's off Nova Caledon . . . All the
same, this is remarkable range I'm getting, with no amplifier. It must be that
the brains of all you people, in these somewhat peculiar circumstances, are
supplying the necessary boost. . .
"Mr. Mayhew, you are
ruining the atmosphere!"
"Commander
Calhoun, I consented to- take part in this experiment on the understanding that
it was to be treated as an experiment."
Something tinkled sharply.
At
the table, forgetting their disagreement, Calhoun and Mayhew were staring at
the tambourine. Grimes stared too, saw that something had broken its magnetic
contact with the steel surface, that it had lifted and
was drifting, swaying gently, carried by the air currents of the ventilation
system.
But
the exhaust ducts were in the bulkhead behind the platform, and the thing,
bobbing and jingling, was making its slow, unsteady way towards the intake
ports, on the other side of the wardroom.
Grimes
was annoyed. This was no time for practical jokes.
Telekinesis was an uncommon talent, for some reason not usually found among
spacemen, but not so uncommon as all that. There was,
the Commodore knew, one telekineticist in Faraway Quest's crew—and he would be on the carpet very shordy.
But.
. .
But
he was the Third Mate, and he was on watch and, in any case, all the tests that
he had undergone had proven his incapability of any but the most trivial
telekinetic feats.
So
this, after all, was no more than some freak of air circulation.
The harmonium wheezed
discordantly.
Calhoun
was on his feet, furious. "Can't you people take things seriously? This is
a religious service! Miss Schmidt, stop that vile noise at once! Stop it, I
say! Lights, somebody! Lights!"
The incandescent tubes flared into harsh brillance. The tambourine steadied and hung motionless, and
then behaved in the normal manner of a small object floating loose in Free
Fall, drifting very slowly with the air current towards the exhaust ducts. But
at the harmonium Karen Schmidt still twitched and shuddered, her feet
erratically pumping, her hands falling at random on the keyboard! Her eyes were
glazed and her face vacant; her mouth was open and little globules of saliva,
expelled by her stertorous breathing, hung about her
jerking head in a glistening cloud.
Grimes unsnapped his seat belt and got to his
feet. "Dr. Todhunterl See to Miss Schmidt, will
you?"
But all Calhoun's anger had
evaporated.
"No!" he shouted. "No! Be
seated, everybody!"
"Like that woman," Sonya Verrill was whispering tensely.
"Let
me pass!" It was Todhunter, trying to make his
way through the
packed rows of benches. "Let me pass."
And then Karen Schmidt
spoke.
But
it was not with her own voice. It was with the voice
of a man—deep, resonant. At first the words seemed to be an unknown language—a
strange but hauntingly familiar tongue. And then, with a subtle shift of stress
and tempo, they were understandable.
"Falling . . . falling
. . .
"Through
the night and through the nothingness you seek and you fall...
"But
I am the onlooker; I care not if you seek and find, if you seek and fail.
"I am the
onlooker."
Calhoun
was taking charge. "Who are you?" "I am the onlooker."
"Have you a message?"
"I have no message." There was
laughter that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. "Why should I
have a message?"
"But tell us. Shall we
succeed?"
"Why
should I tell you? Why should you succeed? What is success, and what is
failure?"
"But
there must^be a message!" The initial awe in Calhoun's
voice was being replaced by exasperation. Grimes was reminded of those
primitive peoples, sincere believers, who maltreat the images of their gods
should those deities fail to deliver the goods.
Again the uncanny laughter. "Little man, what message do you want? Would you know the day and
hour and manner of your death? Would live the rest of your life in fear and
trembling, striving to evade the unavoidable?" The hands of the medium
swept over the keyboard, and the instrument responded—not discordantly, not wheezingly, but with the tones of a great organ. And the
music was the opening bars of the "Dead March" in Saul. "Is this the message you crave?"
Sonya
Verrill, standing stiff and straight, cried, "Is
this all you have for us? Is that the limit of your powers—to tell us all what
we know already, that some day we must die?"
For
the last time there was the sound of laughter, and the voice said quietly,
"Here is your message."
And
then came the shrilling of the alarm bells, the repetition of the Morse symbol
A, short long, short long, short long . . .
Action
Stations.
X
She hung there on Faraway Quest's port beam, matching velocity and temporal
precession rate, a big ship, conventional enough in design, nothing at all
strange about her, except that both radar and mass proximity indicator screens
remained obstinately blank. Already the oddly twisted directional antenna of
the Quest's Carlotti apparatus was trained upon her, like the
barrel of some fantastic gun, already the whine of the emergency generators,
feeding power into the huge solenoid that was the ship, was audible over and
above the still ringing alarm bells, the sounds of orderly confusion.
"Nothing
showing on the screens, sir," the Third Officer was reporting. "And
the transceiver is dead."
Swinton was already at the huge mounted binoculars.
He
muttered, "I think I can read her name . . . Rim Ranger ..."
"And that," said Grimes, "is
what I had in mind for the next addition to our fleet. . . . Interesting
. . ." "Call her on the lamp, sir?"
"No.
If all goes well we shall soon be able to communicate through the usual
channels. Ready, Mr. Renfrew?"
"Ready
and standing by, sir," answered the Survey Service lieutenant.
"Good."
And then Grimes found that he was groping for words in which to frame his
order. He had almost said, "Fire!" but that was hardly applicable.
"Make contact!"
snapped Sonya Verrill.
Renfrew,
strapped into his seat at the controls of his apparatus, did look like a
gunner, carefully laying and training his weapon, bringing the target into the spiderweb sights. One of his juniors was snapping meter
readings: "Red twenty five, red fifty, red seventy five, eighty five . . .
Red ninety, ninety-five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight.
. . nine. . ."
There
was a long pause and the men around the modified Carlotti
gear were muttering among themselves. Swinton, who
was still watching the other ship, announced, "She's flashing. Morse, it
looks like . . ."
"Stand byl" shouted Renfrew. "Now!"
The Carlotti gear whined intolerably, whined and crackled, and
the men serving it sneezed as arc-engendered ozone stung their nostrils. There
was tension, almost unbearable strain, a psychological rending—and Grimes
realized that he was seeing double, that every person, every piece of apparatus
in the control room was visually duplicated. But it was more than a mere visual
duplication—that was the frightening part. One image of Swinton
was still hunched over the eyepieces of the binoculars,
the other had turned to stare at Renfrew and his crew. One image of Renfew still had both hands at the console of his apparatus, the other had one hand raised to stifle a sneeze.
And there was a growing confusion of sound as well as of sight. It was—the old,
old saying flashed unbidden into Grimes' mind—an Irish
parliament, with everybody talking and nobody listening.
And
it was like being stretched on a rack, stretched impossibly and
painfully—until something snapped.
The
other ship, Rim
Ranger, was
there still, looming large in the viewports, close, too close. A voice—it could
have been Swinton's—was yelping from the transceiver,
"What ship?" Then, "What the hell are you playing at, you
fools?"
Grimes
realized that he was in the Captain's chair, although he had no recollection
of having seated himself. His own control console was before him. There was
only one way to avoid collision, and that was by the use of rocket power. (And
he had given strict orders that the Reaction Drive was to be kept in a state of
readiness at all times.) There was a microsecond of hesitation as his hand
swept down to the firing key—the jettison of mass while the Mannschenn
Drive was in operation could have unpredictable consequences. But it was the
only way to avoid collision. Even with the solenoid cut off there was enough
residual magnetism to intensify the normal interaction due to the gravitational
fields of the two vessels.
But he was gentle, careful.
From
aft there was only the gentlest cough, and acceleration was no more than a
nudge, although heavy enough to knock unsecured personnel off balance and
tumble them to the deck.
And
outside the viewports there was nothing—no strange ship, no convoluted,
distorted Galactic lens, no dim and distant luminosities.
This was the Ultimate
Night.
XI
Some houbs later they came to the unavoidable conclusion
that they were alone in absolute nothingness. Their signaling equipment—both
physical and parapsychological—was useless, as were
their navigational instruments. There was nobody to talk to, nothing to take a
fix on. Presumably they were still falling free (through what?)— still, thanks to the temporal precession
fields of the Drive, proceeding at an effective velocity in excess of that of
light. But here— wherever here was—there
was no light. There was no departure point, no destination.
After
conferring with his senior officers Grimes ordered the Mannschenn
Drive shut down. They had nowhere to go, and there was no point in wasting
power or in subjecting the complexity of ever-precessing
gyroscopes to unnecessary wear and tear. And then he passed word for a general
meeting in the wardroom.
That
compartment was, of course, still wearing its drab camouflage as a meeting
house. The tin speaking trumpet adhered to the surface of the table still; the
tambourine clung to the bulkhead hard by one of the exhaust ducts. But this
time it was Grimes who took the main platform, seat, with Sonya Verrill at his side. Pale and shaken, still dazed after her
involuntary mediumism, Karen Schmidt seated herself
again at the harmonium. Grimes looked at her curiously, then
shrugged. She might as well sit there as anywhere else.
He
called the meeting to order. He said, "Gentlemen, you may carry on
smoking, but I wish to point out that it may be some little time before we are
able to lay in fresh supplies." He was grimly
amused as he noticed Todhunter, who was in the act of
selecting a fresh cigarette from his platinum case,
snap it hastily shut and return it to his pocket. He went on, "Gentlemen,
I accept the responsibility for what has happened. I know that the reduction
of the ship's mass while the Mannschenn Drive is in
operation may, and almost certainly will, have unpredictable consequences. I
was obliged to throw away reaction mass. And now we don't know where—or when—we are."
Sonya
Verrill interrupted him sharply. "Don't be
silly, John. If you hadn't used the rockets there'd be no doubt as to our
condition, or the condition of the people in the other ship. A collision, and none of us wearing suits . . ."
"She's
right," somebody murmured, and somebody else muttered something about
proposing a vote of confidence.
But
this, thought Grimes, was no time to allow democracy to raise its head. He had
nothing against democracy—as long as it stayed on a planetary surface. But in
Deep Space there must be a dictatorship—a dictatorship hedged around with
qualifications and safeguards, but a dictatorship nonetheless. Too, he was not
sure that he liked Sonya Verrill's use of his given
name in public. He said coldly, "I appreciate your trust in me, but I do
not think that any useful purpose would be served by putting the matter to the
vote. As commanding officer I am fully responsible for this expedition."
He allowed himself a brief smile. "But I am not omniscient. I assure you
that I shall welcome any and all explanations of our present predicament, and
any proposals as to ways and means of extricating ourselves from this . .
." he finished lamely, "mess."
Swinton, seated in the front row with the other departmental
heads, started to laugh. It was not hysterical laughter. Grimes glared at the
young officer from under his heavy brows, said icily, "Please share the
joke, Commander Swinton."
"I'm
sorry, sir, but it is rather funny. When we had the seance Miss Schmidt, at the console of that most peculiar
poor man's organ, played on the white keys, and on the black keys. But you, at your
console, played in the
cracks."
"What do you mean,
Commander Swinton?"
"That
we're in one of the cracks. We jumped tracks, but when we tried to jump back we
didn't make it. We fell into the crack."
"Very
neat, Swinton," admitted Grimes. "A very neat analogy. We've fallen into the gulf
between Universes. But how are we to climb out?"
"Perhaps
Commander Calhoun could help. . . ." suggested Renfrew. "When we
held the séance we got in touch with . . . something."
Karen
Schmidt cried, "Nol No! You've not had something
utterly alien taking charge of your mind and your body. I have, and I'll not go
through it again!"
Surprisingly
Calhoun also showed a lack of enthusiasm. He said carefully, "That . . .
entity was not at all helpful. If we had succeeded in making contact with one
of the regular Guides, all would have been well. But we didn't. And I fear that
should we succeed in getting in touch with that same entity we shall merely
expose ourselves to further derision."
"Well?"
asked Grimes, breaking the silence that followed Calhoun's little speech.
Once
again the Survey Service lieutenant spoke up. "I see it this way, sir. The
Mannschenn Drive got us into this mess, perhaps it
can get us out of it. Although the fact that my own apparatus
was functioning at the time has some bearing on it. But, putting it
crudely, it boils down to the fact that the mass of the ship was suddenly
reduced while two Time-twisting machines—the Mannschenn
Drive and the Carlotti Beacon—were in operation. As
you know, experiments have been made with both of them from the Time Travel
angle; no doubt you have heard of Fergus and the crazy apparatus he set up on
Wenceslaus, the moon of Carinthia. . . . Well, I shall want the services of the
Mannschenn Drive engineers and of
everybody in the ship with any mathematical training. I think I know what we can do to get out of
this hole, but it would be as well to work out the theory, as far as is
possible, first."
"And
what do you have in mind, Mr. Renfrew?" asked Grimes.
"Just this, sir. A duplication as far as possible of the conditions obtaining when, as
your Commander Swinton puts it, we fell into the
crack, but with those
conditions reversed in one respect."
"Which is?"
"The running of the Mannschenn
Drive in reverse." "It can't be done," stated Calhoun flatly. "It can be
done, Commander, although considerable modification will be necessary."
"We can give it a go," said Swinton.
"Yes,"
agreed Grimes. "We can give it a go. But it is essential that nothing be
done in practice until the theory has been thoroughly explored. I have no need
to tell you that a reversal of temporal precession might well age us all many
years in a few seconds. Or there is another possibility. We may be flung into
the far future—a future that could be extremely unhospitable.
A future in which the last of the suns of this Galaxy are
dying, in which the worlds are dead. Or a future in which one of the
non-humanoid races has gained supremacy—the Shaara,
for example, or the Darshans. Oh, we maintain
diplomatic relations with them, but they don't like us any more than we like
them."
"Mr.
Renfrew," said Sonya Verrill, "holds a Master's degree in Multi-Dimensional
Physics."
"And
I, Commander Verrill, hold a Master Astronaut's
certificate. I've seen some of the things that happen when a Mannschenn Drive unit gets out of control, and I've had
firsthand accounts of similar accidents, and I've a - healthy respect for the
brute."
"But it is essential that no time be
wasted," said Renfrew.
"Why,
Lieutenant? What Time is there in this . . . Limbo? Oh, there's biological
time, but as far as air, water and food are concerned the ship is a closed
economy. I regret that the bio-chemists failed to plant a cigarette tree in our
'farm,' but we still have the facilities for brewing and distilling."
"Then,
Commodore, at least I have your permission to make a start on the math?"
"Of
course."
Renfrew
spoke half to himself. "To begin with, all three executive officers are
qualified navigators. There is no reason why, with two of them working in
their watches below, the third one should not do his share of the
calculations."
"There is a very good
reason why not," remarked Swinton.
"Indeed,
Commander? I was forgetting that in spite of your status as a Reserve Officer
you are really a civilian. Would that be breaking your Award,
or something equally absurd?"
Swinton
flushed, but replied quietly. "As long as we are serving in what, legally
speaking, is a Rim Worlds warship, governed by the Articles of War, we are not
civilians. My point is this—that it is essential that a good lookout be kept at
all times, by all means. The officer of the watch must be fully alert, not
tangled up in miles of taped calculations spewing from the control room
computer."
"But we're in absolute
nothingness," growled Renfrew.
"Yes, but . . ."
"But
we're in a crack," finished Grimes for him, feeling a childish happiness
at having beaten his First Lieutenant to the draw. "And all sorts of odd
things have the habit of falling into cracks I"
XII
Faraway
Quest fell through the
nothingness, drifting from nowhere to nowhere, a tiny bubble of light and heat
and life lost in an infinite negation. Her electronic radio apparatus was
useless. And May hew, the Psionic Radio Operator,
crouched long hours in his cabin, staring into vacancy and listening,
listening. He resorted to drugs to step up the sensitivity of both himself and
the dog's brain that was his organic amplifier, but never the faintest whisper
from Outside disturbed the telepath's mind.
And
the work went on, the laborious calculations that, even with the ship's
computers fully employed, took days, longer in the programing
than in the actual reckoning. There were so many variables, too many variables.
There were so many unknown quantities. There were too many occasions when the
words Data Insufficient were typed on the long tapes issuing from the
slots of the instruments.
And
Grimes, albeit with reluctance, held himself aloof from the activity. He said
to Sonya, "Why keep a dog and bark yourself?" But he knew that he, at
least, should be free to make decisions, to take action at a second's notice if
needs be. He was grateful that the woman was able to keep him company. She,
like himself, could not afford to be tied down. She
was in command of the Survey Service personnel and directly subordinate to the
Commodore insofar as the overall command of the expedition was concerned. And
there were administrative worries too. Tempers were beginning to fray. The
latent hostility between members of different services, and between members of
different departments, was beginning to manifest itself. And as Grimes knew
full well, unless something happened soon there would be other worries.
They were castaways, just
as surely as though they had been the crew and passengers of a ship wrecked on
some hitherto undiscovered planet. There were thirty of them: eight Survey
Service officers, twenty two Rim Worlds Naval Reservists. Of the thirty, eight
were women. As long as this had been no more than a voyage—not a routine
voyage, to be sure, but a voyage nonetheless—sex had not been a problem. As
long as all hands were fully occupied with mathematical work and, eventually,
the modifications of the Mannschenn Drive, sex would
not be a problem. But if every attempt to escape from the crack in Time failed,
and if the ship were to drift eternally, a tiny, fertile oasis in a vast desert
of nothingness, then something would have to be done about it. Spacemen are not
monks, neither are spacewomen nuns.
"We
may have to face the problem, Sonya," said Grimes worriedly as the two of
them, cautiously sipping bulbs of Dr. Todhunter's
first experimental batch of beer, talked things over.
She
said* "I've already been facing it, John. The disproportion of the sexes
makes things awkward. Oh, I know that in one or two cases it doesn't matter—my
own Sub-Lieutenant Patsy Kent, for example. But even if she doesn't draw the
line at polyandry, there's no guarantee that her boyfriends will take kindly
to it."
He
said, "We may be crossing our bridges before we come to them, if we ever
do come to them. But that's one of the things that a commanding officer is paid
for. It looks as though we may have to devise some workable system of
polyandry. . . ."
"Include
me out," she said sharply. "By some people's standards I've led a far
from moral life, but I have my own standards, and they're the most important as
far as I'm concerned. If the microcosmic civilization aboard this ship
degenerates to a Nature red in tooth and claw sort of set-up, then I'm looking
after Number One. The best bet will be to become the private, personal popsy of the Old Man of the tribe."
He
looked at her carefully as she sat there in the armchair, contriving to loll
even in conditions of Free Fall. She was wearing uniform shorts and her smooth,
tanned legs were very long, and her carelessly buttoned shirt revealed the
division between her firm breasts. He looked at her and thought, The Old Man of the tribe . . . But it's a
figure of speech only. I'm not all that old. He said drily, "I suppose that rank
should have its privileges. And if I'm the Old Man of my tribe, then you're the Old Woman of yours."
She said, "You flatter
me, sir."
He
said, "In any case, all this talk is rather jumping the gun. Your Mr. Renfrew and my own bright boys may come up with the
answer."
She
said, "They may not—and a girl has to look after herself."
He
murmured, more to himself than to her, "I wish that there were some other
reason for your . . . proposition."
She
laughed, but tremulously, "And do you really think that there's not,
John?"
"But
these are exceptional circumstances," he said. "I know your reasons
for embarking on this expedition. There were two men in your life, in our own
Continuum, and you •lost both of them. You're hoping to find what you
lost."
"And
perhaps I have found it. We've been cooped up in this tin coffin together long
enough now. I've watched you, John, and I've seen how you've reacted to emergencies, how you've kept a tight rein on your people
without playing the petty tyrant. They all respect you, John, and so does my
own staff. And so do I."
He said, a little bitterly, "Respect
isn't enough."
"But
it helps, especially when respect is accompanied by other feelings. It would
help, too, if you were to regard me, once in a while, as a woman, and not as
Commander Verrill, Federation Survey Service."
He managed a grin.
"This is so sudden."
She
grinned back. "Isn't it?" And then she was serious again. "All right. I don't mind admitting that the jam we're
in has brought things to a head. We may never get back again—either to our own
Continuum or to any of the more or less parallel ones. We may all die if one of
our bright young men does something exceptionally brilliant. But let's ignore
the morbid—or the more morbid—possibility. Just suppose that we do drift for a
fair hunk of eternity on our little, self-sustaining desert island. As you
know, some of the old gaussjammers have been picked
up that have been adrift for centuries, with the descendants of their original crews
still living aboard them. . . .
"Well,
we drift. You're the boss of your tribe, I'm the boss
of my smaller tribe. Our getting together would be no more than a political
alliance."
He said, "How
romantic."
"We're rather too old
for romance, John."
"Like hell we
are."
He reached out for her, and
she did not try to avoid him.
He
reached out for her, and as he kissed her he wondered how long it was since he
had felt a woman's lips—warm, responsive—on his. Too long, he thought. And how long was it since he had
felt the rising tide of passion and let the softly thunderous breakers (her
heart and his, and the combined thudding loud in his ears) bear him where they
would? How long since he had felt the skin—firm, resilient, silken-soft—of a woman, and how long since the heat of his embrace was
answered with a greater heat?
Too long . . .
"Too
long . . ." she was murmuring. "Too long . . ." Then was silent
again as his mouth covered hers.
And outside the cabin was the ship, and
outside the ship was the black nothingness. . . .
But
there was warmth in the cabin, and glowing light, a light that flared to almost
unendurable brilliance and then faded, but slowly, slowly, to a comforting glow
that would never go out, that would flare again, and again. There was warmth in
the cabin and a drowsy comfort, and a sense of security that was all wrong in
these circumstances—and yet was unanswerably right.
Grimes
recalled the words of the medium—or the words of the entity that had assumed
control of her mind and body. "Through the night and through the nothingness you seek and you
fall. . ."
And he and Sonya had
sought, and they had found.
They
had sought, and they had found—not that for which they were seeking—or had
they? She had been seeking a lover, and he? Adventure?
Knowledge?
But
all that was worth knowing, ever, was in his arms. (He knew that this mood
would evaporate—and knew that it would return.)
She whispered something.
"What was that,
darling?"
She
murmured, "Now you'll have to make an honest woman of me."
"Of
course," he replied. "Provided that the Federation
taxpayers kick in with a really expensive wedding present."
She
cast doubts on his legitimacy and bit his ear, quite painfully, and they were
engaged in a wrestling match that could only have one possible ending when the
alarm bells started to ring.
This
time their curses were in earnest, and Grimes, pulling on his shorts, hurried
out of the cabin to the control room, leaving Sonya to follow as soon as she
was dressed.
But
it made no sense, he thought, no sense at all—Action Stations in this all
pervading nothingness.
XIII
Gbimes, whose quarters were immediately abaft the control
room, was in that compartment in a matter of seconds. He found there young
Larsen, the Third Mate, and with him was Sub-Lieutenant Patsy Kent, of the
Survey Service. Larsen flushed as he saw the Commodore and explained hastily,
"Miss Kent was using the computer, sir ..."
"Never
mind that.
What is the emergency?"
The
officer gestured towards the globe of darkness that was the screen of the Mass
Proximity Indicator. "I ... I
don't know, sir. But there's something. Something on our line
of advance."
Grimes stared into the
screen.
Yes,
there was something there. There was the merest spark just inside the surface of
the globe, and its range. . . . The Commodore flipped the switch of the range
indicator, turned the knob that expanded a sphere of a faint light from the
center of the screen, read the figure from -the dial. He muttered, "Twelve
and a half thousand miles . . ." and marveled at the sensitivity of this
new, improved model. But the target could be a planetoid, or a planet, or even
a dead sun. Somehow he had assumed that it was another ship, but it need not
be. Twelve and a half thousand miles, and Faraway Quest's initial velocity before proceeding under
Interstellar Drive had been seven miles a second. . . . (But was it still?
Where was a yardstick?) Contact in thirty minutes, give or take a couple or
three . . . But there should be ample time to compute the velocity of approach.
. . .
The
others were now in the control room: Swinton, and
Jones, the Second Mate, and Renfrew. And Sonya. He
could smell the faint, disturbing perfume of her and he asked himself, What am I doing here? He stared at the spark of light, brighter
now, and closer, with a certain resentment. Come off it, Grimes, he thought in self-admonishment, it's years since you were a rosy-cheeked,
snotty, sulking hard because a call to duty interfered with your very first
date. . . .
"Your orders, sir?" Swinton was asking
politely, yet with a touch of urgency.
"Action
Stations was sounded, and Action Stations it is. I take it that the laser
projectors and the missile launchers are closed up?"
"They are, sir."
"Good.
Mr. Jones, please work out velocity of approach and estimated time of contact.
Mr. Renfrew, please use the Carlotti gear for the
purpose for which it was originally invented and try to initiate radio
communication. Mr. Lar-sen, get on the blower to Mr. Mayhew and shake him up. Tell him
that there's something ahead—a ship? a planet?— and
that I want to know if it has a crew, or a population." Then, to Swinton, "I shall be going below for a few seconds,
Commander. If anything happens you will know where to find me."
He
dropped down the axial shaft to his day cabin, went through to his lavatory
cubicle and hastily tidied himself up. He dressed rapidly, but with care. If
this were to be a first contact with some alien race he would, at least, try to
look the part that he was playing, that of leader of an expedition of Earthmen
into the Unknown. He snared an undergarment of filmy crystal silk that was
drifting in the air currents, stowed it hastily in a convenient drawer. It was
just possible that he would be entertaining guests shortly.
Then,
back in the control room, he received the reports of his officers. Faraway Quest, they told him, was closing the target at
twelve miles a second. (So it, whatever
it was, was not hanging motionless in Space. Or
was it?) It had now been picked up by the radar, and the indications were that
it was a metallic structure, not overly large. Neither electronic nor psionic radio had been able to establish contact. So . . .
So
was it a dead ship, a vessel that years—or centuries? —ago had fallen out of
its own continuum, a ship whose crew had died, or whose descendants were no
longer able to operate any of the machinery except what was essential for the
maintenance of life? Or was it a ship in fighting trim manned by possibly hostile
beings with itchy trigger fingers, maintaining a cautious silence until the Quest was within range of the homing missiles, the flickering laser beams?
The
Commodore went to the telephone, pressed the selector stud. "Mr. Mayhew.
We are closing the target. Do you hear anything?"
"No,
sir."
"The
target appears to be a ship. Suppose that her Captain has ordered radio
silence, what then?"
"Any
unshielded mind must radiate, sir. Only trained tele-paths
can establish and maintain an effective shield, but even then there is leakage,
a gabble of scraps of nonsense verse, meaningless mathematical formulae and the
like."
"So you think that
there's nothing living there, Mayhew?"
"I'd bet on it,
sir."
"I
hope you're right." He snapped orders to the First Lieutenant.
"Commander Swinton, take the controls, please.
Match velocities with the target and maintain a range of one mile."
"Ay,
ay, sir." And then Swinton, seating himself in
the Master Pilot's chair, was -snapping his own orders, his manner assured and
competent, in startling contrast to his usual callow youthfulness.
Grimes, strapped into a convenient
acceleration chair, watched the young man appreciatively. He heard the whine of
the stabilizing gyroscopes and felt the vibration as the ship was turned end
for end—and it was odd for this maneuver to be carried out without, as a
visual accompaniment, the drift of stars (even the few, faint stars of the Rim)
across the viewports. And then, relatively speaking, the target was
astern—astern, but still closing rapidly. Faraway Quest's rocket drive coughed briefly, and coughed
again. The target was still closing—but slowly, slowly.
For
the last time there was the subdued rumble of the rockets, the gentle pressure
of deceleration, and Swinton announced, not without pride,
"Target abeam, sir. Velocities matched. Range one-point-oh-five of a mile."
Grimes
swiveled his chair so that he could look out of the viewports.
And outside there was
nothing but blackness.
In a matter of seconds the probing beam of
the searchlight found the target.
It
was a ship, but no ship such as any of those in the control room had ever seen.
There was a long hull that looked as though the conventional torpedo shape had
been sliced in two longitudinally. At one end of it there was what looked like
an assemblage of control surfaces. Grimes, out of his chair and monopolizing
the huge mounted binoculars, studied it carefully. There was a rudder, and
there were two screw propellers. It could be, he thought, a light-jammer,
similar to the ones that he himself had designed, capable of being handled in a
planetary atmosphere like an airship. But the rudder was too small, and those
propellers were too heavy and had too coarse a pitch to be airscrews.
But
there were the lofty masts, one forward and one aft, protruding from the flat
deck. . . . But that would be an unusual, and not very
practicable arrangement of spars to carry a lightjammer's
suit of sails. . . . And between the masts there was a structure,
white-painted, that looked more like a block of apartments, complete with
balconies, than part of a ship. Roughly in the middle of this there was another
mast. . . . No, decided Grimes, it wasn't a mast, it
was too thick, too short. It, too, was white-painted, but with a black top, and
carried a design in blue. Grimes studied it carefully, decided that it was
supposed to be some sort of grapnel or anchor.
He
relinquished the binoculars to Sonya Verrill. When
she had had time to study the weird derelict he asked, "Well, Commander,
what do you make of it?"
She
replied doubtfully, "It could be a
lightjammer, sir. But all those ports . . . It'd be
hard enough to make a thing like that watertight, let alone
airtight. . . ."
"H'm. But those ports seem to be on one half of the hull
only, the half with all the odd superstructures. . . . Like half a ship, and
half—something else ..."
"After
all, sir," put in Swinton, who had been studying
the thing with a smaller pair of binoculars, "there's no reason why a
spaceship should be symmetrical. As long as it never has to proceed through an
atmosphere it can be any shape at all that's convenient."
"True,
Swinton. True. But if that thing's designed for Deep
Space only, why those screw propellers? Aerodynamic-ally speaking it's a
hopeless mess, and yet it's equipped for atmospheric flight. . . ."
"But
is it?" queried Sonya Verrill. "Those
absurdly heavy screws with their fantastically coarse pitch . . ."
"So
you've noticed too," said Grimes. "But on one of the giant planets,
with a really dense atmosphere, they might be useful."
"But where's the
planet?" asked Swinton.
"Come
to that," countered Grimes, "where's our planet?" He added, "Who knows what odd combinations of circumstances
threw us here, dropped us into this crack in Time? Who knows what similar
combinations have occurred in the past?" And then, in a whisper, "But
we're such a long way from Earth . . ."
"Are
we?" asked Renfrew. "Are we? What does the word 'dimension' means in
this dimensionless Limbo?"
"So I could be
right," said Grimes.
"What are you driving
at, John?" demanded Sonya Verrill.
"I'd
rather not say, yet. It's too fantastic." He turned to his First
Lieutenant. "I'll leave you to hold the fort, Swinton.
I shall take away the boarding party."
XIV
They assembled in the after airlock of Faraway Quest: Grimes, and Sonya Verrill,
and Jones, and Dr. Todhunter. They waited until they
were joined by Calhoun and Mc-Henry. When the two senior engineers put in an
appearance they were hung around with an assortment of tools that would have
been impossible to carry in any appreciable gravitational field: hammers, and
wrenches and pinch bars and burning equipment. All members of the party, of
course, carried reaction pistols and, on Sonya Verrill's
insistence, all were armed—Grimes with the heavy projectile pistol that he
favored, the others with hand laser projectors. In addition, the Surgeon
carried a small battery of cameras.
They
put on their helmets and then Grimes, plugging the lead from his suit radio
microphone into the telephone socket, ordered Swinton,
in the control room, to evacuate the airlock. They watched the needle of the
gauge drop slowly, finally coming to rest on Zero. And then the valve opened.
The
strange ship hung out there in the absolute blackness, every detail picked out
by the harsh glare of the searchlight. Her colors were bright, garish—the red
that was almost purple, the broad band of pink paint, and then black, and then
the white of the superstructure and the yellow of that odd assemblage of spars,
of masts and booms.
She looked, thought Grimes,
out of context.
But
to any dweller in this nothingness—if there were any such dwellers—Faraway Quest would look out of context too.
With
an odd reluctance Grimes shuffled to the sill of the airlock door, made the
little jump that broke contact between his magnetic boot soles and the steel
deck. His reaction pistol was ready, and with, economical blasts he jetted
across the mile of emptiness. And then that odd-expanse of red-purple plating
was before him—and with a sudden shift of orientation he had the sensation of
falling towards it head first. He used his pistol to turn himself and then to
brake his speed. His landing was gentle, his boot soles making contact with the
metal with no more than the slightest of jars. They made contact and they held.
So, he thought, this
ship is made of iron, or steel. But if I am right, when she was built nobody
had thought of using aluminum as a structural material, and plastics had not
been dreamed of. . . .
He
felt the shock as Sonya Verrill landed beside him,
and then Jones came in, and Todhunter, and the two
engineers. Grimes waited until Calhoun and McHenry had sorted themselves
out—hampered as they were by their equipment, they had fallen clumsily—and then
led the way along the surface of painted metal.
It was not easy going.
A
spaceman's shuffle is a quite effective means of locomotion over a perfectly
flat and smooth surface—but when the surface is made up of overlapping, riveted
plates the feet must, frequently, be lifted, and there is the fear that, with
magnetic contact broken, a long fall through emptiness will ensue.
But they made progress, trudging towards a
near horizon that was a purple painted angle-bar, glowing dully against the
blackness.
Todhunter
called a halt, contorting himself so that his magnetic knee-pads touched the
plating. He said, "This is odd. It looks like clumps of some sort of
living organism growing on the plates. It's dead now, of course."
"What I
expected," Grimes told him.
"What you expected,
sir?"
"If
and when we get back to Port Forlorn, Doctor, you must read a few of the books
in my rather specialized library. ...
I remember that a bright young journalist from the Lorn Argus once did a feature article on it. She cooked up rather a neat title, From Dug-Out Canoe to Interstellar
Liner."
"I don't understand,
sir."
"Neither
do I, Doctor. But those barnacles will keep. They've
been keeping for one hell of a long time."
They negotiated the angle-bar—like a ridge, it was, like
the ridge of a roof with a pitch of 45 degrees—and beyond
it was more of the purple-painted plating, and beyond that
a stretch of pink paint, and beyond that was the
dull-gleam-
ing black. Grimes stopped at the border between the
two
colors, looked down at an odd, white-painted design—a cir-
cle, bisected by a line that had at one end the
letter L, at
the other the letter R. And from the righthand end of
this
line was another line at right angles to it, and this was
subdivided and lettered: TF, T, S, W, WNA_______
"So
this is—or was—one of our ships. . . ." Sonya Verrill's
voice was faint yet clear in his helmet phones. "Of course, those letters
could be odd characters from some utterly alien alphabet, but they don't look
like it to me."
"They're
not," Grimes told her. "The L and the R stand for Lloyds' Register.
TF is Tropical Fresh, T is Tropical, S is Summer, W is
Winter, and WNA is Winter North Atlantic."
"But what does it mean? And how do you
know?"
"I
know because the history of shipping—all shipping-has always fascinated me. I
should have recognized this ship at first glance, but I did not, because she
has no right here. (But have we,?) But here she is,
and here we are—and we're luckier than her people because we shall be able to
survive even if we can't find our way back. . . ."
And
then, still in the lead, he was shuffling over the black-painted plating until
he came to a section of white-painted rails. He threw his body forward, grasped
the rails with his gloved hands. He remained in this position until he had once
again oriented himself, until his "up" and "down" were the
"up" and "down" of the long-dead people of the dead ship.
He was looking into a promenade deck. There was the scrubbed planking, and
ahead of him was white-painted plating, broken by teakwood doors and brass
rimmed ports— and with dense, black shadows where the glare of the Quest's searchlights did not penetrate. With a nudge
of his chin he switched on his helmet lantern; he would be
needing it soon.
The
wooden deck would effectively insulate his boot soles from the steel plating
beneath it, so he made a scrambling leap from the rail to one of the open
doorways, pulled himself into the alleyway beyond it.
There were more doors —some open, some ajar and secured by stay hooks, some
shut. Grimes waited until the others had joined him, then
pulled himself along a sort of grab rail to the first of the partially open
doors. His gloved fingers fumbled with the stay hook, finally lifted it. The
door swung easily enough on its hingesr which were of
polished brass.
He let himself drift into the cabin, the
glare of his helmet light gleaming back at him from burnished metal, from
polished wood. There was a chest of drawers, and there were two light chairs
that seemed to be secured to the deck, and other were
two bunks, one above the other. The upper bunk was empty.
The
Commodore stared sadly at the pair of figures in the lower bunk, the man and
the woman held in place by the tangle of still-white sheets. He had seen Death
before, but never in so inoffensive a guise. The bodies, little more than
mummies, had been drained of all moisture by their centuries-long exposure to a
vacuum harder even than that of normal interstellar Space, or even that of
intergalactic Space, and yet lacked the macabre qualities of the true skeleton.
Todhunter's voice was hushed. "Do you think, sir, a
photograph?"
"Go ahead, Doctor. They won't mind."
7*'*
a long time, he thought, it's a long, long time since you minded
anything. . . . But how did it come to you? Was it sudden? Did the cold get you
first, or did you die when the air rushed out of your lungs in one explosive
burst? He turned to look at
Sonya, saw that her face was pale behind the visor of her helmet. He thought, We should be thankful. We were lucky. He said, "We shan't leam
much by looking in the other cabins."
"Then
where can we leam something?" asked Calhoun in a
subdued voice.
"In the control
room—although they didn't call it that."
He led the way along alleyways—in some of
which drifted dessicated bodies—and up companionways,
careful all the time to maintain the sense of orientation adapted to the
derelict. Through public rooms they passed, the glare
of their helmet lanterns, broken up into all the colors of the spectrum, flung
back at them from the omate crystal chandeliers. And
then, at last, they came out into the open again, on to a great expanse of
planking on either side of which the useless lifeboats were ranged beneath
their davits. All around them was the emptiness, and there was Faraway Quest, her searchlights blazing, no more than a
bright and lonely star in the black sky.
From
handhold to handhold they made their way, following the Commodore, until they
came to more ladders, leading to a bridge that spanned the fore part of the
superstructure. In the center of this bridge was a house of varnished timber
with big glass windows, and in the forward compartment of this house there was
the body of a man. He was standing there, held in position by the grip of his
hands on a big, spoked wheel, an omate
affair of polished wood and burnished brass. He was wearing an odd, flat blue
cap, and a blue, wide-collared jumper, and blue trousers that were tucked into
short black boots. The skeletal face still-after how many centuries?—wore an
expression of concentration as the eyes, no more than depressions in the taut
skin, stared sightlessly at the compass, at the lubber's line that had not
shifted a microsecond of arc from the quarter point in half a millenium. Eerily the card swung as Grimes looked at it,
pulled away from its heading by the magnetic field generated by his suit
transceiver.
Abaft
the wheelhouse there was another compartment. In it were two men, both attired
in uniforms that still, to a shipman, made sense. Grimes murmured, "Sorry,
Captain," and gently lifted the body of the tall, thin man, the
almost-skeleton with the neat gray beard and the four gold bands on the
sleeves, away from the chart table. He looked down at the chart, at the
penciled courseline, at the circled intersections of
cross bearings. "Yes," he whispered. "As I
thought. The South African coast . . ."
"And where is that, sir?" asked
Calhoun.
"On Earth. And the time?
Towards the beginning of the Twentieth Century . . ."
By his side Sonya Verrill
was looking at the open pages of the Log Book. She said, "The watchkeeper recorded thunder and exceptionally vivid
lightning, and also makes mention of an unusual display of
phosphorescence."
"But
who were they?" Todhunter was demanding.
"How did they get here?"
"I
can answer the first question," Grimes replied gravely. His gloved
forefinger indicated the heading of the log book path. "
'Waratah, from Durban towards Liverpool.' But she never got there."
XV
There were several big, glazed frames on the after bulkhead
of the chartroom, and in one of them was a detailed plan of the ship. Grimes
and his officers studied it with interest. McHenry said suddenly, "I'd
like to see what their engines are like."
"I can tell you now, Commander,"
Grimes told him. "Steam. Reciprocating.
Coal burning. As I remember the story, she put into
Durban for bunkers on her way home from Australia."
"But
I'd like to see them, sir." The engineer's forefinger was tracing out a
route on the plan. "As long as we keep amidships and carry on down we're
bound to come to the stokehole, and from there to the engineroom."
"Then
carry on," said Grimes. "But I don't want you to go by
yourself."
"I
shall be. with him," said Calhoun, and Jones said
that he wanted to make a further exploration of the derelict, and Todhunter wanted to take more photographs.
Grimes
and Sonya went out to the wing of the bridge, keeping a firm grasp on the
teakwood rail, and watched the two engineers, the Second Mate and the Surgeon
making their way along the boat deck, saw them open a door in the fiddley casing below and just forward of the funnel and
vanish, one by one, into the black opening.
He
heard the girl ask, "But how do you explain all this, John?"
"I
can't, Sonya—although this could be the explanation of a number of mysteries.
As you know, I'm something of an authority on the history of shipping. You'd
think that even as far back as the Twentieth Century it would be impossible to
lose, completely, anything so large as a ship. After
all, in those days there was quite efficient diving gear, and sonic sounding
apparatus—and, even though it was in its earliest infancy, there was radio.
"But ships did
vanish—and vanish without trace.
"Take
this Waratah, for example. She was a new ship, owned by the Blue Anchor Line, built for
the cargo-passenger trade between England and Australia. On her maiden voyage
she carried freight and passengers outwards, and then loaded more
freight—frozen meat and general cargo— in Australia for England, also embarking
passengers. She was scheduled to call at Durban on the homeward passage to
replenish her coal bunkers, also to disembark and to embark passengers. One odd
feature of the voyage was the number of intending travelers who experienced
premonitory dreams of a warning character and, as a result of these, canceled
their passages.
"Anyhow,
she arrived in Durban, and bunkered, and sailed. She exchanged visual signals
with another ship shortly afterwards. And that was all.
"Oh,
plenty of surface ships did founder, some of them with all hands, and the loss
of Waratah was explained away by the theory that she was extremely unstable, and
rolled so badly in a heavy swell that she capsized and went down suddenly. But
this was not in the loneliness of mid-ocean. This was in soundings, in
relatively shallow water, and on a well-frequented shipping route. But no
bodies were ever found, and not a single fragment of identifiable wreckage. . .
." He pointed to a lifebuoy in its rack, the white and scarlet paint
still bright, gleaming in the beams from Faraway Quest's searchlights,
the black lettering, Waratah,
Liverpool, clearly
legible. "Even if she had gone down suddenly something would have broken free and floated,
something with the ship's name on it. . . .
"She
was a passenger liner, and so she became better known than a smaller ship would
have done, and her name joined that of Mary Celeste on
the long list of unsolved ocean mysteries that, even to this day, are occasionally
rehashed by journalists as fillers for Sunday supplements. As a matter of fact
that wench from ,the Lorn
Argus who was writing up my
library said that she was going to do a series called Maritime Mysteries of Old- Earth and spent quite a few evenings browsing among
my books. . . .
"But
there was Waratah, and there was Anglo-Australian, and there was Cyclops. . . .And there were the ships like Mary Celeste, found drifting in perfect order without a
soul on board. . . .
"Well,
I suppose we've found out what happened.
But how? How?'
Sonya
said, "That analogy of playing on the black keys, and playing on the white
keys, and playing in the cracks, was a good one. But as an Intelligence Officer
I've had to do quite a deal of research into this sort of thing. Ocean going
ships have vanished, but so have aircraft, and so have spacecraft. And there
have been many, many cases of the inexplicable disappearances of people—the
crew of your Mary
Celeste, for
example, and the famous man who walked round the horses, and Ambrose Bierce,
and . . . and . . ."
"And?"
"I
suppose you're wondering why I haven't cited any modern cases. The trouble, of
course, is that Space Travel has given the explainers-away far too easy a time.
A ship goes missing on a voyage, say, from Port Forlorn to Nova Caledon, as the
Commission's Delta
Eridani did a couple of years back. But Space is so vast, and when you throw in
the extra dimensions added by the'use of any sort of
Interstellar Drive, it's vaster still. When a ship is overdue, you know as
well as I do that any search would be quite useless. And men and women still
go missing—but if they go missing on any of the frontier planets there are so
many possible causes—usually some hitherto undiscovered life form that's
gobbled them up, bones, boots and all." "Even so, records are kept."
"Of course. It takes a small city to house all the Intelligence Department's files
on the subject."
They
went back into the chartroom. Grimes looked at the dessicated
bodies of the Captain and his watch officer, wished that the two men were able
to speak, to tell him just what had happened. Perhaps, he thought, they would
be able to do so. Results, of a sort, had been achieved by that first seance aboard Faraway Quest. He
wondered, too, if Todhunter would be able to revive
any of Waratah's people, but he doubted it. In the early days
of intersteller expansion a deep freeze technique had
been used, but all of those making a long, long voyage in a state of suspended
animation had undergone months of preparation before what had been, in effect,
their temporary deaths—and in many cases, in far too many cases, the deaths had
been all too permanent. It was easy enough to say the words,
"Snap-freezing and dehydration," but the actual technique had never
been easy.
Carefully
Grimes examined the Log Book. The pages were brittle, all moisture leeched from
them by their centuries of exposure to hard vacuum. He deciphered the crabbed
handwriting in the Remarks
column. "Mod. beam sea, v. heavy beam swell. Vsl. rolling heavily. O'cast, with occ'l heavv rain and violent thunderstorms.
Abnormally bright phosphores-ence observed."
Thunder and lightning and
abnormally bright phosphor-ensence . . . So what?
He
muttered, "The electrical storm may have had something to do with it. . .
. And possibly there was some sort of disturbance of the Earth's magnetic field
in that locality, and something just right—or just
wrong—about the period of the roll of a steel hull. . ."
"Or
possibly," she said, "there was somebody aboard the ship who was a
sort of catalyst. Remember all the dreams, all the premonitory, warning visions, that were experienced just before her
disappearance? Perhaps there are people-in fact, our
researches hint that there are, and always have been such people—who can slip
from one Time Track to another, in many cases quite inadvertently. As well as
the records of inexplicable disappearances there are also the records of
equally inexplicable appearances—men and women who have turned up from,
literally, nowhere, and who have been strangers, lost and bewildered, in a
strange world. . . .
"In our own case, how much was due to
Mr. Renfrew's fancy apparatus and your own tinkering with anti-matter and
anti-gravity, and how much was due to the mediumistic powers of your Miss Karen
Schmidt?"
"Could
be . . ." he admitted. "Could be . . . It's a farfetched theory, but
..."
"Farfetched?"
she scoffed. "Here we are, marooned in this absolute nothingness, and you
have the nerve to accuse me of drawing a long bow!"
"Not
quite nothingness," he corrected her. "The indications are that we
may be in a sort of graveyard of lost ships. . .
"And lost people. The unfortunates who, somehow, have missed their footing from stepping
to one track to the next. . . As Waratah's people did."
"And as we did."
"But
we're lucky enough to have a self-sustaining economy."
Grimes
broke off the conversation to keep Swinton, back in
the control room of Faraway
Quest, up to date with what
was happening and what had been discovered, including in his report the
tentative theories that had been, so far, advanced. The First Lieutenant
acknowledged, then said, "I don't want to hurry
you, sir. But Mr. Mayhew informs me that he's receiving very faint signals from
somewhere. It could either be something or somebody extremely distant, or
something quite close but transmitting feebly."
"So
we aren't alone in the junkyard," said Grimes. Then, switching
frequencies, he succeeded in raising the Second Mate, the doctor and the two
engineers, who were still prowling in the bowels of the ship and who were most
reluctant to break off their explorations. He ordered them to report to the
bridge at once.
At
last they appeared, babbling of pistons and furnaces and boilers and
refrigerating machinery, carrying lumps of coal that they had taken from the
bunkers. Odd souvenirs, thought Grimes—and decided that if he were able he would acquire
something more useful, the books from the library, for example, or the grand
piano from the First Class Lounge. . . . And with the thought he looked at the
long dead Captain and whispered, "It's not theft. I know you wouldn't
object to making a gift to a fellow shipmaster."
"What was that,
sir?" asked Jones.
"Nothing,"
snapped Grimes. "Now let's get back to our own wagon and find out what
fresh surprises they've cooked up for us."
XVI
Once back aboard his own ship, Grimes went straight
from the airlock to the control room, pausing only to take off his helment. Swinton greeted him with
the words, "Mayhew is still picking it up, sir."
"Good. Can he get any
kind of directional fix on it?"
"He
says not. But you know what Mayhew is like, impossibly vague unless you can
nail him down."
Grimes
went to inspect the screens first of the radar, then of the Mass Proximity
Indicator. Both instruments had been reset for extreme long range. Both showed
nothing.
He
went to the nearest telephone, put out his hand to take the handset from the
rack, then changed his mind. He said, "I shall be
with Mr. Mayhew if you want me, Commander Swinton."
He made a beckoning nod to Sonya Verrill, who
followed him from the control room.
He
knew that it would be a waste of time tapping on the door to the Psionic Radio Officer's cabin, but did so nonetheless. He
waited for a decent interval and then slid the panel to one side, letting
himself and Sonya into the room. Mayhew had his back to them; he was strapped
in his seat, his body hunched as though it were being dragged from an upright
position by a heavy gravitational field. He was staring at the transparent
cylinder, nested in its wires and pipes, in which, submerged in the bath of
nutrient fluid, hung the small, gray-white mass, obscenely naked, that was the
living brain of one of the most telepathic of all animals, a dog, that was the
amplifier with the aid of which a skilled telepath could span the Galaxy.
They
may have made a slight noise as they entered; in any case Mayhew turned
slightly in his chair and looked at them with vague, unfocused eyes, muttering,
"Oh. It's you." And then, in a more alert voice, "What can I do
for you, sir?"
"Just carry on with what you are doing, Mr. Mayhew. But you can talk, I think, while keeping a listening
watch." "Of course, sir."
"This signal you've picked up, can it be
vocalised?"
The
telepath pondered, then said, "No, sir. It's
emotion rather than words. . . . It's a matter of impressions rather than a
definite message. . . ."
"Such as?"
"It's
hard to put into words, sir. It's dreamlike. A dim dream within a dream. . .
"
" 'And doubtful dreams of dreams . . .' quoted Grimes. "Yes, sir. That's
it."
"And
who, or what, is making the transmission? Is it human? Or
humanoid? Or a representative of one of the other
intelligent races?"
"There's
more than one, sir. Many more. But they're
human."
Sonya Verrill said,
"There's a chance, John, that there may be some flicker of life, the
faintest spark, still surviving in the brains of those people aboard Waratah. What are their dreams, Mr. Mayhew? Are they of cold, and darkness, and
loneliness?"
"No,
Miss Verrill. Nothing like that.
They're happy dreams, in a dim sort of way. They're dreams of warmth, and
light, and comfort, and ..." he
blushed ". . . love . . ."
"But it could still be Waratoh's people."
"No.
I probed her very thoroughly, very thoroughly. They're all as dead as the
frozen mutton on her holds."
"How did you know that?" demanded
Grimes sharply.
"It
was necessary, sir, to maintain telepathic contact with the boarding party. I
'overheard' what you were telling the others about Waratoh's last voyage."
"Sorry, Mr. Mayhew."
"And the only telepathic broadcast from
the derelict was made by you and your party, sir. With these other signals I
get the impression of distance—and a slow approach."
"But
who the hell is approaching whom?" exploded Grimes. Then, "I was
talking to myself. But we still don't know at what speed we're traveling, if we
are traveling. When we matched velocities with Waratah did we reverse our original motion, or did we merely come to rest, or
are we still proceeding the same way as we were when we fell into this bloody
crack?"
"I'm not a navigator,
sir," said Mayhew stiffly.
"None
of us is, until there's something to navigate with. But we're interrupting
you."
"Not
really, sir. This is no more than one of those pleasant dreams you have
sometimes between sleeping and waking. . . ." He stiffened. "There's
one coming through a little stronger than the others. . . . I'll try to isolate
it. . . . Yes . . .
"There
are blue skies, and white, fleecy clouds, and a river with green, grassy banks
. . . Yes, and trees . . . And I am sitting by the river, and I can feel the
warmth of the sun, and the breeze is bringing a scent that I know is that of
new-mown hay . . ." He paused, looked at the others with a wry grin.
"And I've never seen hay, let alone smelled it. But this is not my dream, of course. Yes. There's the smell of new-mown hay, and there's
the song of birds in the trees, and my pipe is drawing well, and my rod is
perfectly balanced in my hands, and I am watching the—the bait, the fly that I
tied myself, drifting on the smooth surface of the stream, and I know that
sooner or later a trout will rise to take it, but there is no hurry. I'm
perfectly happy where I am, doing what I am, and there's no hurry . . .
"But
there is. Behind it all, underneath it all, there is a sense of urgency. There's the guilty feeling, the guilty knowledge
that I'm late, that I've overslept, and that something dreadful will happen if
I don't wake up. . . ."
"Odd,"
commented Grimes. "Do you know Earth, May-hew?"
"No, sir."
"Do you know anything about dry
flies?" "What are they, sir?"
"You
were talking about tying one just now. They're a form of bait used by fishermen who do it for sport, not commercially.
The really keen anglers tie their own flies— in other words they fabricate from
feathers, wire, and the odd Gods of the Galaxy alone know what else, extremely
odd —but as long as the trout also think that they look edible, why
worry?"
"So,"
said Sonya, "we have a nostalgic dry fly fisherman from Earth, who's
dreaming about his favorite sport, marooned, like ourselves, in this crack in
Time-Space. Or Space-Time. But, for all we know, we
may he picking up this dream from Earth itself. Dimensions are meaningless
here. After all, there's Waratah. . ."
"She's
had a long time to drift," said Grimes. "But go on, Mr. Mayhew."
"He's
drifted back into the happy dream," murmured May-hew. "He's not
catching anything, but that doesn't worry him."
"And
can you isolate any of the others?" asked the Commodore.
"I'll
try, sir. But most of them are about long, timeless days in the air and the
warm sunshine . . . There is a man who is swimming, and he turns to look at the
girl beside him, and her body is impossibly beautiful, pearl-like in the clear,
green water ....
And there is a woman, sitting on velvet-smooth grass while her sun-browned
children play around her. . . .
"But they're getting closer, whoever
they are. They're getting closer. The dreams are more distinct, more vivid. . .
.
"The
air is thin and cold, and the hard-packed snow is crunching under my heavy,
spiked boots. It seems that I could reach out now to touch the peak with my
ice-axe. . . . It's close, close, sharp and brilliantly white against hard blue
sky. . . . There's a white plume streaming from it, like a flag of surrender. .
. . It's only snow, of course, wind-driven snow, but it if a white flag. It's never
been conquered—but in only a few hours I shall plant my flag, driving the
spiked ferrule deep into the ice and rock. . . . They said that it couldn't be
done without oxygen and crampon-guns and all the rest of it, but I shalldo it. . . ."
"It
would be quite a relief," remarked Sonya, half seriously, "if
somebody would dream about a nice, quiet game of chess in a stuffy room with
the air thick with tobacco smoke and liquor fumes."
Grimes
laughed briefly. He said, "I have a hunch that these are all hand-picked
dreamers, hearty open air types." The telephone buzzed sharply. He reached
out, took the instrument from its rest. "Commodore here . . . Yes . . .
Yes . . . Secure all for acceleration and prepare to proceed on an interception
orbit."
XVII
Outside the viewports there was nothing but blackness,
and the old steamship was no more than a spark of light, a dimming ember in the
screens of radar and Mass Proximity Indicator. A gleaming bead threaded on to
the glowing filament that was the extrapolation of Faraway Quest's orbit was the new target, the ship that had
drifted in from somewhere (nowhere?) on a track that would have carried her all
of a thousand miles clear of the Quest had
she not been picked up by the survey ship's instruments.
Grimes and his officers sat in their chairs,
acceleration pressing their bodies into the resilient padding. Swinton, as before, had the con, and handled the ship with
an ease that many a more experienced pilot would have envied. At a heavy four
gravities Faraway
Quest roared in on her
interception orbit and then, with split second timing, the rockets were cut and
the gyroscopes brought into play, spinning the vessel about her short axis. One
last brief burst of power and she, relative momentum killed, was herself drifting,
hanging in the emptiness a scant mile clear of the stranger.
The searchlights came on.
Faraway
Quest's people
stared through the ports at the weird construction, only Grimes evincing no
surprise. Her appearance confirmed his hunch. She was an affair of metal
spheres and girders—a small one, its surface broken by ports and antennae, a
large one, with what looked like conventional enough rocket lifecraft cradled about its equator, then another small
one, with a nest of Venturis protruding from the pole like a battery of
guns. There were no fins, no atmospheric control surfaces.
Swinton broke the silence. "What the hell is
that?"
"I
suggest, Commander, that you take a course in the history of astronautics. That
is a relic of the days of the First Expansion, when Man was pushing out toward
the stars, without any sort of reliable intersteller
drive to cut down the traveling time from centuries to weeks." He assumed
a lecture room manner. "You will observe that the ship was not designed
for blasting off from or landing on a planetary surface; she is, in fact, a
true spaceship. She was constructed in orbit, and stores and personnel were
ferried up to her by small tender rockets—quite possibly those same tenders that are secured about the central sphere.
"The small, leading sphere is, of
course, the control room.
The
central sphere contains the accommodation—if you can call it such. The after
sphere is the engineroom."
Swinton said thoughtfully, "And I suppose that
she's manned—no, 'inhabited' would be a better word—by the descendants of her
original crew and passengers. And they don't know how to use the radio. Judging
by all those antennae she's not hard up for electronic gadgetryl
And so they haven't heard our signals, or if they have
heard them they've not been able to answer. They probably don't even know that
we're around."
Grimes
laughed gently. "You haven't quite got it right, Commander. She was on a
long, long voyage—far longer than her designers anticipated!—but there was no
breeding en
route."
"But there's life aboard her, sir. All those queer psionic signals that
Mayhew's been picking up . . ." "Yes. There is life aboard her. Of a sort." "I'm
sorry, sir. I don't quite get you."
Grimes
relented. "As I said, she's a relic of the First Expansion. In those days,
thanks to the failure of anybody, in spite of ample forewarning, to do anything
about it, the Population Explosion had come to pass, and both Earth and the
habitable planets and satellites of the Solar System were overcrowded. But it
was known that practically every sun had its family of planets capable of
supporting our kind of life. So there was a siphoning off of surplus population—mainly
of those who could not and would not adapt to life in the densely populated
cities. Techniques for the suspension of animation were already in existence
and so each of the big ships was able to carry an enormous number of
passengers, stacked like the frozen mutton in the holds of that ancient
steamship. They also carried a large crew, the idea being that the spacemen
would keep watches —relatively short intervals of duty sandwiched between
decades of deep freeze—so that they, on arrival at their destination, would
have aged only a year or so. The passengers, of course, would not have aged at
all.
"Finally,
with the ship in orbit about the planet of her destination, everybody would be
revived and ferried down to the surface of their new home."
"I'm not sure that I'd
care for that, sir."
"Neither
should I. But they had no Interstellar Drive. And they didn't know, Commander,
as we now know, how many of those ships were to go missing. Some of them must
have fallen into suns or crashed on planetary surfaces. Others are still
wandering. . . ."
"The
Survey Service," put in Sonya Verrill, "has
satisfactorily accounted for all but thirteen of them."
"And
this one brings the number down to twelve," remarked the Commodore.
"But how did she
wander here?" demanded Sonya.
"We can find
out," Swinton told her.
"We can try to find
out," she corrected him gravely.
Grimes
stared through the big binoculars at the archaic interstellar ship, carefully
studied the forward sphere, the control compartment. He could make out what
looked like a manually operated airlock door on its after surface. It should be
easy enough, he thought, to effect an entrance.
"Surely the duty watch will have seen
the glare of our lights," Swinton was saying.
"I fear that the watch will have been
too long for them," said the Commodore quietly.
As
before, the boarding party was composed of Grimes, Sonya Verrill,
Jones, Calhoun, McHenry and Dr. Todhunter. This time,
thought Grimes, there would be something for the engineers and the Surgeon to
do. The big ship could be restored to running order, her thousands of people
rescued from a condition that was akin to death. And then?
wondered
Grimes. And then? But that bridge could be crossed when it was
reached, not before.
He
led the way across the emptiness between the two vessels—the sleek, slim Faraway Quest and the clumsy assemblage of spheres and
girders. He turned in his flight to watch the others—silver fireflies they were
in the beam of the Quest's
lights, the exhausts of
their reaction pistols feeble sparks in the all-pervading blackness. He turned
again, with seconds to spare, and came in to a clumsy landing on the
still-burnished surface of the control sphere, magnetized knee and elbow pads
clicking into contact with the metal. He got carefully to his feet and watched
the others coming in and then, when they had all joined him, moved slowly to
one of the big ports and shone the beam of his helmet lantern through the
transparency.
He
saw what looked like a typical enough control room of that
period: acceleration chairs, radar and closed circuit TV screens,
instrument consoles. But it was all dead, dead. There were no glowing pilot
lights—white and red, green and amber—to present at least the illusion of life
and warmth. There was a thick hoar frost that sparkled in the rays from the helmet
lanterns; there was ice that gleamed in gelid reflection. The very atmosphere
of the compartment had frozen.
He made his way from port to port. It was
obvious that the control room was deserted—but the control room occupied only
a relatively small volume of the forward globe. The rest of it would be
storerooms, and hydroponic tanks, and the living quarters for the duty watch.
He
said to Sonya, "We may find somebody in the accommodation. Somebody whom we can revive. And if we don't—there are the
thousands of dreamers in the main body of the ship. . . ."
He
led the way around the curvature of the metal sphere, found the door that he
had observed from Faraway
Quest.
He
stood back while McHenry and Calhoun went to work on it. They did not have to
use any of their tools; after a few turns of the recessed wheel it opened
easily enough, but the inner door of the airlock was stubborn. It was only
after the little party had so disposed itself in the cramped compartment that
maximum leverage could be exerted that it yielded, and then barely enough for
the Commodore and his compaions to squeeze through
one by one. It was a thick drift of snow, of congealed atmosphere, that had
obstructed the inward swinging valve. The snow and the frost were everywhere,
and the ice was a cloudy glaze over all projections.
They
proceeded cautiously through the short alleyway, and then through a hydroponics
chamber in which the ultraviolet and infra-red tubes had been cold for
centuries, in which fronds and fruit and foliage still glowed with the colors
of life but shattered at the merest touch. Grimes watched the explosion of
glittering fragments about his inquisitive, gloved finger, and imagined that he
could hear, very faintly, a crystalline tinkling. But there was no sound. The
interior of the ship was frighteningly silent. There was not even the vibration
of footsteps transmitted through metal plating and suit fabric; the omnipresent
snow and ice muffled every contact.
They came to a circular alleyway off which
numbered doors opened.
Grimes
tried the first one, the one with the numeral 4. It slid aside with only a hint
of protest. Beyond it was what had been a sleeping cabin. But it was not now.
It was a morgue. It held two bodies. There was a big man, and he held in his
right hand a knife, and the frozen film on it still glistened redly. There was a woman who was still beautiful. Todhunter's specialized knowledge was not required to
determine the cause of death. There was a clean stab wound under the woman's left
breast, and the man's jugular vein had been neatly slit.
They
went into the next cabin. Its occupants, lying together in the wide bunk,
could have been asleep—but in the clip on the bulkhead to which it had
carefully returned was a drinking bulb. It was empty—but the label, upon which
was a skull and crossbones in glaring scarlet, made it obvious what the
contents had been.
In
the third cabin there was shared death too. There was an ingenious arrangement
of wires leading from a lighting fixture to the double bunk, and a step-up
transformer. The end might have been sudden, but it had not been painless. The
two frozen bodies, entangled in the lethal webbing, made a Laocoon-like
group of statuary—but that legendary priest of Apollo had perished with his sons,
not with a woman.
And
in the fourth cabin there was only one body, a female one. She was sitting
primly in the chair to which she was strapped, and she was clothed, attired in
a black uniform that was still neat, that did not reveal the round bullet hole
over the breast until a close inspection had been made.
"Cabin
Number One . . ." said Calhoun slowly. "Could she have been the
Captain?"
"No,"
said Grimes. "This, like the others, is a cabin for two people. And
there's no sign of a weapon. . . ." Gently he brushed a coating of frost
from the woman's sleeve. "Gold braid on a white velvet backing . . . She
will have been the Purser."
They
found the Captain in a large compartment that lay inboard from the alleyway.
He, too, was formally clothed in gold-buttoned, gold-braided black. He was
huddled over a desk. The automatic pistol was still in his hand, the muzzle of
the weapon still in his mouth. Frost coated the exit wound at the back of his
head, robbing it of its gruesomeness. Before him was a typewriter and beside
the machine was a small stack of paper, held to the surface of the desk by a
metal clip.
Grimes
read aloud the heading of the first page:
"TO
WHOM IT MAY CONCERN ...
"IF
AND WHEN . ..
"WHEN
AND IF . . .
"IF EVER."
It was gallows humor, and it was not very
funny.
XVIII
"Just possibly (Grimes read) somebody, somewhere, may
stumble upon us. When we pushed off from Earth there was talk of an
interstellar drive that would enable ships to take short cuts through
sub-Space. I suppose that it's sub-Space that we're in now. But I don't know
how we got here, and I don't know how we can get out. If I did know I would not
have sanctioned the use of the Euthanol—and how was I
to know that all but one of the containers had leaked?—and, in the case of the Gallaghers, the Nakamur-as and
ourselves, the rather messy substitutes. We could have finished our watch, of
course, and then awakened Captain Mitchell and his staff so that they could have returned us to the state of suspended
animation—but we talked it over and we decided against it. Our dreams, during our
long sleep, our long watch below, would not have been happy ones. All the
others are dreaming happily of the lives that they will lead on the new world to which we are bound, the lives of which their
rationed vacations in Earth's fast dwindling Nature Reserves were brief
forecasts. But our dreams, now, would be full of anxiety, of cold and
loneliness, of the black emptiness into which we have fallen.
"But how?
"How?
"It's
the odd flotsam that we've sighted, from time to time, that has made up our
minds. What laws of motion are valid in this Limbo we do not know.
Perhaps there are no laws. But, appearing from nowhere, there was that corpse
that orbited for some hours about the control sphere. It was that of a man. He
was wearing archaic clothing: a gray top hat, a stock and cravat, a frock coat.
Mary Gallagher, whose hobby is—was, I
should say—history, said that his dress was that of the early Nineteenth
Century. And then there was an aircraft, a flimsy affair of fabric and stays
and struts. Centuries ago they must have fallen here— they and the other
briefly glimpsed men and women, and a surface ship from the days of steam on
Earth's seas, and a clumsy looking rocket (not that we can talk!) bearing on
its side characters that bore no resemblance to any Earthly alphabet.
"But
I feel that my time is running out. All the others are dead. Sarah asked me to
dispose of her, giving as her reason her nervousness with firearms. But the
others are dead. The Browns were lucky—when I dealt the cards she got the ace
of spades, and with it the only intact bulb of Euthanol. The rest of us could have shared the pistol, but
Nakamura preferred something more traditional (although, at the end, he didn't
use the knife in a traditional way) and Gallagher was an engineer to the end.
But my time is running out. When I have finished this I shall shut down the
machinery and then come back here to use the pistol on myself.
"So
here is the story—such as it is. If whoever finds it— and I feel that it will
be some castaway like ourselves—can read it, it might be of value.
"Fully
manned, provisioned and equipped, with a full load of passengers, we broke away
from orbit on January 3, 2005. (Full details will be found in the Log Books.)
Once we were on the trajectory for Sirius XIV, watches were set.
First
Captain Mitchell, as senior officer, did the first year, so that he and his
staff could make any necessary minor adjustments. The rest of us, after the
period of preparation, went into the Deep Freeze. First Captain Mitchell was
succeeded by Second Captain von Spiedel, and he was
succeeded by Third Captain Cleary. So it went on. It was a routine voyage, as
much as any interstellar voyage is routine.
"We relieved Captain
Cleary and his people.
"There
was a period of three weeks, as measured by the chronometer, during which we
were able to mingle socially with our predecessors, whilst Pamela Brown, in her
capacity as Medical Officer, worked with Brian Kent, Cleary's M.O., to restore
us to full wakefulness and to prepare the others for their long sleep. And
then, after Cleary and his team had been tucked away, we were able to get
ourselves organized. The control room watches, of course, were no more than a
sinecure. Routine observations were taken and told us that we were exactly on
course and that our speed of advance was as predicted. The last observation,
made at 1200 hours on the day that it happened, gave our position as 1.43754
Light Years out from Earth, and our velocity as 300 m.p.s.
Full details are in the Log Book.
"That
night—we divided our time, of course, into twenty-four hour periods—all
off-duty personnel were gathered in the wardroom. There was the usual rubber of
bridge in progress, and the playmaster was providing
light background music. Nakamura and Mary Gallagher were engaged in their
habitual game of chess. Brown had the watch and his wife was keeping him
company. It was typical, we all thought, of a quiet evening in Deep Space.
Those of us who were on duty were keeping the machines running,
those of us off duty were relaxing in our various ways.
"So
the sudden ringing of the alarm bells was especially shocking.
"I was first in the
control room, but only by a very short head. There was no need for Brown to
tell us what was wrong; it was glaringly obvious. No, not glaringly obvious. It was the absence of glare, of
light of any kind, that hit us like a blow. Outside
the viewports there was only a featureless blackness.
"We
thought at first that we had run into a cloud of opaque dust or gas, but we
soon realized that this hypothesis was untenable. Until the very moment of
black-out, Brown told us, the stars ahead had been shining with their usual
brilliance, as had been the stars all around the ship. Furthermore, one cannot
proceed through a cloud of dust or gas, however tenuous, at a speed of 300 m.p.s. without an appreciable rise
in skin temperature. An appreciable rise? By
this time the shell plating would have been incandescent and all of us
incinerated.
"I'll
not bore you, whoever you are (if there ever is anybody) with a full account of
all that we did, of all that we tried, of all the theories that we discussed.. Brown stuck to his story. At one microsecond the
viewports had framed the blazing hosts of Heaven, at the next there had been
nothing there but the unrelieved blackness. We thought that we might be able to
leam something from the radio, but it was dead,, utterly dead. We disassembled every receiver and
transmitter in the control sphere, checked every component, reassembled. And
still the radio was dead. There were no longer the faint signals coming in from
Earth and from other interstellar ships. There were no longer the signals
emanating from those vast broadcasting stations that are the stars.
"But there were no
stars.
"There are no stars
any more.
"And then, over the weeks, there were
the—apparitions?
"No.
Not apparitions. They were real enough. Solid. Brown
and Nakamura took one of the tenders out, and ran right alongside an
ocean-going ship out of Earth's past.
Her
name was Anglo-Australian,
and on her funnel was a
black swan on a yellow field. They were wearing their spacesuits, so they were
able to board her. They found-but could it have been otherwise?—that all of her
crew was dead. There were no entries in the Log Book to account for what had
happened to her. As in our case, it must have been sudden.
"There
was the flotsam—the bodies, some clothed in the fashions of bygone centuries,
some not clothed at all. The sea-going ships and the aircraft—and some of them
could never have come from Earth. There was the huge affair that consisted of a
long fuselage slung under what must have been an elongated balloon—but the
balloon had burst—with a crew of insects not unlike
giant bees. There was that other construction—a relatively small hull suspended
amid a complexity of huge sails. We never found out who or what had manned
her; as soon as we turned our searchlights on her she vanished into the
distance. A sailing ship of Deep Space she must have been—and we, unwittingly,
provided the photon gale that drove her out of our ken.
"And we worked.
"But
there was no starting point. We had fallen somehow into sub-Space—as had all
those others—but how? How?
"We
worked, and then there were weeks of alcoholic, sexual debauch, a reaction
from our days of wearisome, meaningless calculation and discussion. And when,
sated, we returned to sobriety we were able to face the facts squarely. We were
lost, and we did not possess the knowledge to find our way out of this desert
of utter nothingness. We considered calling the other watches—and then, in the
end, decided against it. They were happy in their sleep, with their dreams—but
we, we knew, could never be happy. We knew too much—and too little—and our
dreams would be long, long experiences of tortured anxiety. We could see no
faintest gleam of hope.
"And so we have taken the only way out.
"But
you, whoever you are (if there ever is anybody) will be able to help.
"The
other watches are sleeping in their own compartments in the northern
hemisphere of the main globe. The waking process is entirely automatic. Give
First Captain Mitchell my best wishes and my apologies, and tell him that I
hope he understands.
John Carradine,
Fourth Captain."
XIX
They left the control sphere then, and made their way
through an airlock to the tube that connected it with the large globe that was
the main body of the ship. They found themselves in a cylindrical space with a
domed deck head, in the center of which was the hatch through which they had
entered. In the center of the deck there was a similar hatch.
There
were doors equally spaced around the inside surface of the cylinder. All of
them were labeled, having stenciled upon them names as well as rank.
"First Captain Mitchell . . ." read Sonya Verrill.
"Chief Officer Alvarez . . . Second Officer Mainbridge
. . . Third Officer Hannahan . . . Bio-Technician
Mitchell . . ." She paused, then said, "I suppose that a husband-wife
set-up is the best way of manning a ship like this . . ."
Grimes slid the door aside.
The
helmet lanterns threw their beams onto eight tanks— a tier of four, and another
tier of four. They looked, thought the Commodore, like glass coffins, and the
people inside them like corpses. (Btrt corpses don't dream.)
Four of the tanks held men, four held women.
All of them were naked. All of them seemed to be in first-class physical
condition. Mitchell—his name was on a metal tag screwed to the frame of his
tank—was a rugged man, not young but heavily muscled, robust. He did not need a
uniform as a professional identification. Even in repose, even in the repose
that was almost death, he looked like a master of men and machines, a man of
action with the training and intelligence to handle efficiently both great masses
of complex apparatus and the mere humans that operated it.
Grimes
looked at him, ignoring the other sleepers. He wondered if Mitchell were the
fisherman whose pleasant dreams were being spoiled by the sense of anxiety, of
urgency. It could be so. It probably was so. Mitchell had been overdue to be
called for his watch for a matter of centuries, and his was the overall
responsibility for the huge ship and her cargo of human lives.
Todhunter was
speaking. There was a certain disappointment in his voice. "I don't have
to do anything. I've been reading the instructions, such as they are.
Everything is fully automated."
"All* right, Doctor. You can press the button. I only want First Captain Mitchell
awakened." He added softly, "After all, this is his ship. . . ."
"I've pressed the button," grumbled
Todhunter. "And nothing has happened."
McHenry laughed. "Of
course not. The dead Captain in the control sphere, in the wardroom,
said that he'd shut down all the machinery."
"As
I recall it," said Grimes, "these things were powered by a small
reactor. It will be right aft, in the machinery sphere. Carradine
was able to shut down by remote control, but we won't be able to restart the
same way. The batteries must be dead."
"As long as the Pile
is not," contributed McHenry.
"If it is, we shall send for power packs
from the Quest.
But I hope it's not."
So
they left Mitchell and his staff in their deep, frozen sleep and made their way
aft, through deck after deck of the glass coffins, the tanks of the motionless
dreamers. Jones paused to look at a beautiful girl who seemed to be suspended
in a web of her own golden hair, and murmured something about the Sleeping
Beauty. Before Grimes could issue a mild reprimand to the officer, McHenry
pushed him from behind, growling, "Get a move on! You're no Prince
Charming!"
And
Grimes, hearing the words, asked himself, Have we the right to play at being Prince
Charming? But the decision is not ours to make. It must rest with Mitchell. .
.
Then
there was the airlocked tube leading to the machinery
sphere, and there were the pumps and the generators that, said McHenry, must
have come out of Noah's Ark. "But this -is an Ark," said Jones.
"That last deck was the storage for the deep-frozen, fertilized ova of all
sorts of domestic animals. . . ."
There
were the pumps, and the generators and then, in its
own heavily shielded compartment, the Reactor Pile. McHenry consulted the
counter he had brought with him. He grunted, "She'll do."
Unarmored,
the people from Faraway
Quest could not have survived
in the Pile Room—or would not have survived for long after leaving it. But
their spacesuits gave protection against radiation as well as against heat and
cold and vacuum, and working with bad-tempered efficiency (some of the dampers
resisted withdrawal and were subjected to the engineer's picturesque cursing)
McHenry got the Pile functioning.
Suddenly
the compartment was filled with an opaque mist, a fog that slowly cleared. With
the return of heat the frozen air had thawed, had vaporized, although the carbon
dioxide and water were still reluctant to abandon their
solid state. !
McHenry
gave the orders—he was the Reaction Drive specialist, and as such was in
charge, aboard his own ship, of all auxiliary machinery..
McHenry gave the orders and Calhoun, assisted by the second Mate, carried them
out. There were gauges and meters to watch and, finally, valves to open.
Cooling fluid flashed into steam, and was bled carefully, carefully into piping
that had been far too cold for far too long a time. And then hesitantly,
complaining-ly, the first turbine was starting to
turn, slowly, then faster and faster, and the throbbing whine of it was audible
through their helmet diaphragms. Leaping from position to position like an
armored monkey, McHenry tended his valves and then pounced on the switchboard.
Flickering
at first, then shining with a steady brilliance, the
lights came on.
They
hurried back through the dormitory sphere to the compartment in which First
Captain Mitchell and his staff were sleeping. There Todhunter
took charge. He slid shut the door though which they had entered and then
pulled another door into place, a heavier one with a thick gasket and dogs all
around its frame. He borrowed a hammer from McHenry to drive these into place.
Grimes
watched with interest. Obviously the Surgeon knew what he was doing, had
studied at some time the history of the "deep freeze" colonization
ships, probably one written from a medical viewpoint. He remarked, "I can
see the necessity for isolating this compartment, but what was that button you
pressed when we first came in here? I thought that it was supposed to initiate
the awakening process."
Todhunter
laughed. "That was just the light switch, sir. But once we've got over
these few preliminaries everything will be automatic. But, - to begin with, I
have to isolate the other bodies. Each tank, as you see, is equipped with its
own refrigeration unit, although this transparent material is a highly
efficient insulation. Even so, it will be as well to follow the instructions to
the letter." He paused to consult the big, framed notice on the bulkhead,
then went to a control console and pressed seven of a set of eight buttons. On
seven of the eight coffins a green light glowed. ""Now . . .
heat." Another button was pressed, and the frost and ice in the
wedge-shaped compartment began to boil.
When
the fog had cleared, the Surgeon muttered, "So far, so good." He
studied the tank in which lay the body of First Captain Mitchell, put out a
tentative hand to touch lightly the complexity of wiring and fine piping that
ran from its sides arid base. He said, "You will
have noticed, of course, that the arrangements here are far more elaborate than
those in the main dormitory decks. When the passengers are awakened, they will
be awakened en
masse. . ."
"Get on with it,
Doctor!" snapped Sonya Verrill.
"These
things cannot be hurried, Commander. There is a thermostatic control, and until
the correct temperature is reached the revivification process cannot
proceed." He gestured towards a bulkhead thermometer. "But it should
not be long now."
Suddenly there was the whine of some
concealed machinery starting, and the stout body of the First Captain was
hidden from view as the interior of his tank filled with an opaque, swirling
gas, almost a liquid, that quite suddenly dissipated. It was replaced by a
clear amber fluid that completely covered the body, that slowly lost its
transparency as the pneumatic padding upon which Mitchell lay expanded and
contracted rhythmically, imparting a gentle agitation to the frame of the big
man. The massage continued while the fluid was flushed away and renewed, this
process repeated several times.
At last it was over.
The lid of the coffin lifted and the man in
the tank stretched slowly and luxuriously, yawned hugely.
He
murmured in a pleasant baritone, "You know, I've been having the oddest dreams ... I thought that I
hadn't been called, and that I'd overslept a couple or three centuries. . .
." His eyes opened, and he stared at the space-suited figures in the
compartment. "Who ore you?"
XX
Grimes put up his hands to his helmet, loosened the
fastenings and gave it the necessary half turn,
lifted it from the shoulders of his suit. The air of the compartment was chilly
still, and damp, and a sweet yet pungent odor made him sneeze.
"Gesundheit,"
muttered the big man in the
coffin.
"Thank
you, Captain. To begin with, we must apologize for having boarded your ship
uninvited. I trust that you do not object to my breathing your atmosphere, but
I dislike talking through a diaphragm when I don't have to."
"Never
mind all that." Mitchell, sitting bolt upright in his tank, looked
dangerously hostile. "Never mind all that Who the
hell are you?"
"My
name is Grimes. Commodore. Rim Worlds Naval Reserve.
These others, with the exception of the lady, are my officers. The lady is
Commander Verrill of the Federation Survey
Service."
"Rim Worlds? Federation?" He looked wildly at the
other tanks, the transparent containers in which his own staff were still sleeping.
"Tell me it's a dream, somebody. A bad dream."
"I'm
sorry, Captain. It's not a dream. Your ship has been drifting for
centuries," Sonya Verrill told him.
Mitchell
laughed. It was a sane enough laugh, but bitter. "And while she's been
drifting, the eggheads have come up with a practicable FTL drive. I suppose
that we've fetched up at the very rim of the Galaxy." He shrugged.
"Well, at least we've finally got some place. I'll wake my officers, and
then we'll start revivifying the passengers." His face clouded. "But
what happened to the duty watch? Was it von Spiedel? Or Cleary? Or Carradine?"
"It
was Carradine." Grimes paused, then went on softly, "He and all his people are dead.
But he asked to be remembered to you."
"Are
you mad, Commodore whatever your name is? How did you know that it was Carradine? And how can a man who's been dead for centuries
ask to be remembered to anybody?"
"He
could write, Captain. He wrote before he died—an account of what happened. . .
."
"What did happen, damn you? And how did he die?" "He shot
himself," Grimes said gravely. "But what happened?"
"He
didn't know. I was hoping that you might be able to help us."
"To help you? I don't get the drift of this, Commodore. First of all you tell me that
you've come to rescue us, and now you're asking for help."
"I'm
deeply sorry if I conveyed the impression that we were here to rescue you. At
the moment we're not in a position to rescue anybody. We're castaways like yourselves."
"What
a lovely, bloody mess to be woken up to!" swore Mitchell. He pushed
himself out of the tank, floated to a tall locker. Flinging open the door he
took out clothing, a black, gold-braided uniform, a light spacesuit. He dressed
with seeming unhurriedness, but in a matter of seconds was attired save for his
helmet. He snapped to McHenry, who was hung about with his usual assortment of
tools, "You with all the ironmongery, get ready
to undog the door, will you?" And to Grimes and
Sonya Verrill, "Get your helmets back on. I'm
going out. I have to see for myself . . ." And then he moved to the tank
beside the one that he had vacated, looked down at the still body of the mature
but lovely woman. He murmured, "I'd like you with me, my dear, but you'd
better sleep on. I'll not awaken you to this nightmare."
Mitchell
read the brief account left by Carradine, then went to the next level, the control room, to inspect
the Log Book. He stared out through a port at Faraway Quest, and Grimes, using his suit radio, ordered Swinton to switch off the searchlights and rum on the
floods. He stared at the sleek, graceful Quest, so
very different from his own ungainly command, and at last turned away to look
through the other ports at the unrelieved emptiness. His suit had a radio of
sorts, but it was A.M. and not F.M. He tried to talk with Grimes by touching
helmets, but this expedient was far from satisfactory. Finally the Commodore
told McHenry to seal off the control room and to turn on the heaters. When the
frozen atmosphere had thawed and evaporated it was possible for them all to
remove the headpieces of their suits.
"Sir,
I must apologize for my lack of courtesy," said the First Captain stiffly.
"It
was understandable, Captain Mitchell," Grimes told him.
"But
Captain Carradine should have called me,"
Mitchell went on.
"And
if he had, Captain, what could you have done? In all probability you would have
died as he died. As it is, you know now that you stand a chance."
"Perhaps, sir. Perhaps. But you haven't told me Commodore,
how you come to be marooned in this Limbo."
"It's a long
story," said Grimes doubtfully,
"And we've all the
time in the Universe to tell it, John," put in Sonya Verrill.
"Or all the time out of the Universe. What does it matter?"
"AH
right," said Grimes. "It's a long story, but you have to hear it, and
it could well be that you might be able to make some suggestion, that there is
some important point that has escaped us but that you, with a mind fresh to the
problem, will seize upon."
"That's
hardly likely," The First Captain said. "When I look at your ship out
there, and envisage all the centuries of research that have gone into her
building . . . But go ahead, sir. At least I shall be privileged with a glimpse
into the future—although it's not the future now."
Grimes
told the story, trying to keep it as short as possible, but obliged, now and
again, to go into technical details. He told the story, asking his officers to
supply their own amplifications when necessary. Mitchell listened attentively,
asking an occasional question.
"So,"
he said when at last the Commodore was finished, "we are not the only ones
to have fallen into this hole in Space-Time. There was the old surface ship
that you boarded; there was the suface ship that Carradine's people boarded. There were the aircraft that
Captain Carradine mentioned . . . That dirigible
airship, sir, with the crew of beelike beings. . .
?"
"The Shaara, Captain. They, too, have interstellar travel."
"There's
some sort of a connection, Commodore. You got here, you think, by the use of
your fantastic electronic gadgetry. But we didn't. And those old surface ships
and aircraft didn't . . . And those people, sighted by
Carradine, with no ships at all . . . These Shaara, Commodore, what are they like?"
"To
all intents and purposes, Captain, they're highly evolved honey bees."
"H'm. But they
have something that we have, otherwise they'd never have gotten here. Intelligence, of course. Technology.
The airship that Carradine saw,
and the spaceships that you say they have now . . . But there must be something
else."
"There is," stated Calhoun flatly.
"And what is that, Commander?" asked Grimes. "It's a matter of .
. . Well, I suppose you'd call it Psionics, sir."
"But the Shaara
are an utterly materialistic race."
"I
agree, sir. But they still possess certain abilities, certain talents that were
essential to their survival before they started to climb the evolutionary
ladder. Such as dowsing . . ."
"Dowsing, Commander Calhoun?"
"Yes.
According to some authorities, the ability of the honey bee on Earth, and on
the other worlds to which it has been introduced, to find nectar-laden blossoms
is akin to dowsing, for water or minerals, as practised
by human beings."
"H'm. This is the first time that I've heard that
theory." "It's not a new one, sir."
Mitchell
smiled for the first time since he had been awakened. It was not a happy smile,
but it brought a momentary easing of the stern lines of his face.
"Dowsing . . ." he whispered. "Yes. There could be a connection
. . ."
"Such as?" asked Sonya Verrill.
The
First Captain replied in a voice that was again doubtful, "I don't know.
But . . ." He went on, "As you must know,
this ship is one of the specialized vessels built for large scale colonization.
I've no doubt that in your day, Commander Verrill, newly discovered worlds are thoroughly surveyed before the
first shipment of colonists was made. But in my time this was not so. The big
ships pushed out into the unknown, heading for sectors of Space recommended by
the astronomers. If their first planetfall was
disappointing, then they proceeded to an alternative objective. And so on.
But
the crews and the passengers of the ships were themselves the survey teams.
"I
need hardly tell you what such a survey team would have to look for. Water, on worlds that were apparently completely arid. Necessary ores. Mineral oil. The
necessary electronic divining apparatus could have been carried, but in many
ways it was better to carry, instead, a certain number of men and women who, in
addition to their other qualifications, possessed dowsing ability."
"I
think I see what you're driving at, Captain," objected Sonya Verrill. "But those surface ships and aircraft would
not have carried dowsers as an essential part of their crews."
"Perhaps
not, Commander Verrill. But—"
Calhoun
broke in. "Dowsing ability is far more widespread than is generally
realized. Most people have it to some degree."
"So
the Shaara can dowse, and we can dowse," said
Grimes. "But what is the connection?"
"You
know where the dowsers among your passengers are berthed, Captain?" asked
Calhoun. "Or should I have said 'stowed'?"
"Stowed
is the better word," Mitchell admitted. "I don't know at the moment
where they are, but as soon as I've consulted the passenger list and the plans
. . ."
"I'm
sure that they've something to do with it," Calhoun stated firmly. Then,
to the Commodore, "I suggest that you tell Commander Swinton
to get Mr. Mayhew into a suit, and send him across here. As
soon as possible."
"Who is Mr.
Mayhew?" asked Mitchell.
"Our
Psionic Radio Officer. A trained telepath."
"So that idea was developed after all. There was talk of it in my time. So you
think he may be able to read the minds of my dowsers?"
"I
hope so," said Grimes. Then, "111 get Swinton
to send one of our suits across for you. It will make things easier if we're
able to speak with each other when we're suited up again." He put his
helmet back on, called his First Lieutenant aboard the Faraway Quest and gave him the orders.
XXI
They
did not have
long to wait for Mayhew.
They
watched him, accompanied by one of the junior engineers, jetting ' across the
emptiness between the two ships. Jones squeezed through the sphincter airlock
that sealed the hatch in the control room deck, and went down to the airlock
proper in the after-hemisphere of the globe. He must have flashed his helmet
lantern as a signal, as the two spacesuited figures
veered abruptly in midflight and, shortly thereafter, were lost to view from
the control room ports. Grimes, still wearing his helmet, heard Jones say,
"Mr. Mayhew and Mr. Trent are aboard, sir."
"Good. Bring them up
here, will you?"
The
diaphragm in the deck bulged and developed a hole in its center, through which
appeared the head of the Second Officer, and then his shoulders and finally,
after a deal of squirming on his part, the rest of his body. The transparency
of his helmet and the fabric of his suit were immediately bedewed with
condensation. He stood there to help Mayhew through the Sphincter and, when he
was in the control room, the junior engineer. They had been exposed to the cold
for a longer period, and the congealing atmospheric moisture clothed them in
glittering frost.
The
three men put up their gloved hands to remove their helmets.
"You wanted me, sir?" asked Mayhew
vaguely.
"Of course,"
Grimes bit back a sarcastic retort.
The
telepath ignored him, turned his attention to First Captain Mitchell.
"You're the fisherman. You were the one who was dreaming of sitting by a
sunlit stream with rod and line—"
"Never mind that
now," snapped the Commodore. "Just
listen to what we want, please."
"I already know, sir." 4
"H'm. Yes. I suppose you do. But isn't it rather against the
Institute's Code of Ethics to eavesdrop?"
"Not
in these circumstances, sir. My duty was to receive and to record every
impression emanating from the minds of the boarding party."
"Well,
it saves time. As you know, First Captain Mitchell, as soon as he's got himself
into the spare suit you brought, is going to take us into the dormitory sphere,
to where the team of dowsers is stowed. There may be some connection between
them and the transference of ships and people to this . . . What did you call
it, Captain? To this sub-Space."
Mitchell,
out of his own spacesuit but not yet into the one from Faraway Quest, was standing by an open filing cabinet, had
pulled from it a bulky folder. "C Level," he was muttering,
"Sector 8. Tanks 18 to 23 inclusive . . ." He put the folder back
into the cabinet and then was helped into the suit by Sonya Verrill.
With the Captain to guide them, it did not
take them long to find the tanks in which the dowsers slept. There were six of
them—two very ordinary looking men and four women, one of whom looked far from
ordinary. The telepath stood by the first of the transparent containers, staring
at the man inside it, his face behind the helmet view-plate wearing an
expression of deep concentration.
"This
man," he said at last, "is dreaming of food. ... I can see a table,
a table covered with a snow-white cloth, and an array of crystal goblets, and
gleaming silverware. There are other people around the table, but they are
blurred, indistinct. They are not important. But the waiter holding up the
bottle of wine for my inspection is . . . He is an elderly, portly man, with a
ruddy face and gray, mutton-chop whiskers. He smiles as he pours a few drops
from the * bottle into my glass. I sip it, It is a
white wine, very dry. I nod my approval.
"Another
waiter is bringing in the first course: the oysters, the brown bread and
butter, the lemon wedges . . ."
"Not much for us
there," interrupted Grimes.
"Oh,
all right. All right. But I was just beginning to
enjoy it. It was the first time that I'd seen oysters—me, I mean, not the man
who's having the dream—and I wanted to know what they taste like. But it's too
late now. Time is accelerated in dreams, and he's polished them off. . .
." He glowered moodily at the tank below the first one. "This man works in his dreams. He's striding up a hillside, over short, springy turf. He
is holding a forked twig in his hands. I can feel the odd, soft roughness of
it, the—the aliveness of it. There's a tension, a feeling of pleasurable
anticipation, and it comes from the twig itself, and from the ground over which
I am walking, and from me. . . . And I can feel the twig twitching, and I know
that it's water under my feet, running water. . . . But I carry on. There's no
urgency. I can feel
all the mineral wealth
beneath me, around me—the metals, the radio-actives . . ."
"No," said
Grimes. "That's not it."
"I
wish you'd let me finish a dream, sir, even though it's not my own."
Mayhew moved to the next
tank.
In
this one there was a woman, a tall, angular woman with a narrow face, sharp
features. There was a drabness about her—a drabness, Grimes somehow knew, that
would still have been there had she been awake and clothed, a coldness that was
more intense than the frigidity of her physical environment.
The telepath stared at her, his face
frightened. His lips moved, but no sound came. He muttered at last, "She's
dead. She's dead, but. . ."
"But what?"
demanded the Commodore sharply.
"There's . . . How
shall I put it? There's a—a record . .
"A ghost," said
Calhoun.
"No.
Not a ghost. There's the record of her last thoughts still in her brain. . . .
But I can't play it back. There's the sense—no, not even the sense, just a
hint—of some orgasmic experience, something that was too intense, something
that was too much for her mind. . . ."
Todhunter
said, "But there was no physical cause of death. In her condition there
couldn't have been. Perhaps we could still revivify her . . ." He turned
to Mitchell. "As I understand it, Captain, it would be impossible to deal
with people on these dormitory decks individually. If we revive one, we revive
them all."
"Yes," agreed the
First Captain. "That is so."
"Then
would you have any objection if we used the empty tank in your sleeping
quarters for this woman?"
"Yes,"
replied Mitchell. "I most certainly should." His manner softened.
"But there are eight empty tanks in Carra-dine's
compartment, and neither he nor his officers are in any state to object."
"Good."
"Check the other
dowsers first, Mr., Mayhew," said Grimes.
Mayhew
did so. The three remaining women were all alive—if their state of suspended
animation could be referred to as life—and all peacefully dreaming. The
pictures in their minds were pleasant, humdrum pictures of husbands and homes
and children.
The tank was opened, and the rectangular
block of solid-frozen gas in which was the woman's body lifted out quite
easily. Even so, it was an awkward burden, even under conditions of free fall. Todhunter and Jones maneuvered it through the tiers of
containers to the cylinder that was the axis of the globe, and then it had to carried from level to level until the final deck was
reached, the deck on which were the crew dormitories.
The
doctor left Jones in charge of the body, went with
Mitchell and Grimes and Sonya Verrill into what had
been the Fourth Captain's compartment. All the tanks, of course, were empty.
Mitchell satisfied himself that Carradine's container
was ready for occupancy, and the ice-encased corpse was brought in, lowered
into the rectangular box. Then, when all members of the party were in the
wedge-shaped room, the double door was dogged tight and the automatic revivification
process initiated.
There
was the gradual rise of temperature and the thawing and evaporation of the
frozen gases, and there was the thawing of the frozen gas in the coffin. There
was the influx and the drainage of the colored fluids, the rhythmic massaging
action of the pneumatic padding. Slowly the skin of the woman changed from
silvery gray to a yellowish pallor, and then was suffused with the faintest of
pink flushes. The eyelids flickered, and one leg began to twitch.
"She's not dead,"
murmured Grimes.
"But
she is," contradicted Mayhew. "And there's just a spark . . . Just a
spark, no more. And
1 don't like it."
The
lid of the casket lifted, and as it did so the woman slowly assumed a sitting
posture. Her eyes opened and she stared mindlessly. Her jaw hung slackly and
saliva dribbled from her mouth. She was making a coarse, disgusting grunting
noise.
"The blue sky . .
Mayhew whispered. "The clear sky, and the aching blue of it . . . And it's
rending, like a piece of cloth between two giant hands. . . . It's rending, and
the noise of its tearing is louder than the loudest thunder. . . . And beyond
it is the blackness, the dense blackness, i and it's empty. . . . But it's not empty. They are there, company
after company of them, robed in shining white and with great white wings that
span the heavens. . . . And they raise their golden trumpets to their hps, and the sound is high and sweet, high and impossibly
sweet, long, golden notes rolling down through that rent in the sky, and the
voices, the golden voices and the silver voices, and the flaming swords lifted
high to smite the unrighteous, and . . . And . . .
"And
that was all," he concluded. "She's gone now, finally gone. What's in
the box is no more than a mindless hunk of flesh. But she's gone . . ."
"So
that was what she dreamed?" asked Mitchell in an almost inaudible voice.
"So that was what she dreamed, and with such intensity as almost to drag
the ship with her through that rent in the blue sky. . . . But was it her?
Could it possibly have been her?"
"Have
you any better explanation?" countered the tele-path.
"Is it an
explanation?" asked Grimes tiredly.
xxn
It wasn't much of an explanation, but it was the only
one that they had had. What Faraway Quest's people
had achieved by a sophisticated juggling with the laws of physics (but the
juggling had not been sufficiently sophisticated, or the laws not properly
formulated) these others had achieved, inadvertently, by the function or
malfunction of parapsychological principles.
Throughout human history— and the history of other intelligent beings in the
Galaxy-dowsers had sought, and they had found. And some of these diviners, in
dream states, had sought for things and places beyond the bounds of Space and
Time. Perhaps some of them had attained their dream countries, but the majority
must have fallen into this Limbo, this gulf between the Universes, dragging, in
so many cases, their hapless shipmates with them.
"Commodore,"
whispered Mitchell, "that's how it must have been. Our ship isn't like
yours. She's just an ion drive rocket, archaic by your standards. We've no
fancy dimension-twisting gadgetry."
"That's
how it could have been," admitted Grimes guardedly, but already he was
considering ways and means, already he was trying to work out methods whereby
both ships, his own as well as First Captain Mitchell's, could be saved. He was
trying to recall all that he had read of the First Expansion, the Interstellar
Arks. As in the Ark of Biblical legend the passengers had boarded two by two,
an even distribution of the sexes being maintained. So ... he thought. So .
. . there's just a chance that I may be able to salvage this hunk of ancient
ironmongery and, at the same time, exact a fee for the operation. . . . He saw that Sonya was looking at him,
realized that already there was a strong bond between them, more than a hint of
the telepathy that springs into being between people in love. She was looking
at him, and an expression that could have been maternal pride flickered briefly
over her face.
"Out with it,
John," she murmured.
He
smiled at her and then turned to the Psionic Radio
Officer. "Mr. Mayhew, can you enter minds?"
"How
do you mean, sir?" countered the telepath cautiously.
"To
influence them."
"It's against the
rules of the Institute, sir."
"Damn
the Institute. Its rules may hold good throughout the
Galaxy, but we're not in the Galaxy. As far as our own ship is concerned, I am the law, just as Captain Mitchell is the Law in this vessel. Can you
enter another person's mind to influence it?"
"Sometimes, sir."
"The mind of one of the sleepers aboard this ship. One of the dreamers."
"That would be easy,
sir."
"Good.
Now, Captain Mitchell, this is what I have in mind. You have five diviners,
five dowsers, still dreaming happily in their tanks. Mr. Mayhew is going to—to tamper with the dreams of four of them. Mr. Mayhew is
a very patriotic Rim Worlder and thinks that Lorn is the next best place to Eden, and he's going to use
his talents to sell Lorn in a big way to the dreaming
dowsers. My idea is this. Each of them will dream that he is lost in a dark
emptiness—as, in fact, we all are. Each of them will dream that he has his rod
in his hand—his hazel twig, or his length of wire or whatever it is that he
favors. Each of them will dream that the wand is leading him, pulling him
towards a pearly globe set in the black sky. Hell know the name of it,
and Mayhew will be able to supply details of the outlines of seas and
continents. The sky isn't always overcast, and all of us have seen Lorn a few times from Outside with all details visible.
"I'm
not saying that this will work, Captain, but it just might. If it doesn't work
we shall none of us be any worse off. And if it does work—well, you'd better
get your rockets warmed up before Mr. Mayhew goes to work, so you'll be able to
throw yourself into a safe orbit."
"It
sounds crazy, Commodore," Mitchell said. "It sounds crazy, but no
crazier than all of us being here. I shall have to call my officers first so
that all stations are manned."
"Of
course. Dr.
Todhunter will lend you a hand."
Mitchell's
expression was still dubious. "Tell me, sir, why did you make it quite
plain that four of the dowsers are to be set to dreaming of Lorn?
Why not all five?"
"If
this works out, Captain, it will be an act of salvage. And I think that Faraway Quest will be entitied to
some reward. I know how the crew and passenger lists of these ships were made
up. Male and female, in equal numbers. Husbands and wives. There's a hunch of mine that the husband
of the mindless woman, the religious fanatic who got you into this mess, is one
of the five remaining dowsers."
"Ill
check the passenger list, Commodore."
Mitchell went to the
cabinet and pulled out the files.
"So
if it works," murmured Sonya, "we shall have our own dowser to do the
same for us."
"Yes."
Mitchell
put the papers back into their file. He said, "The mindless woman, as you
have called her, is—or was—Mrs. Carolyn Jenkins. Her husband, John Jenkins, is
also a member of the dowsing team. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'll see about
waking my staff." His face was somber. "I hope, for all our sakes,
that I'm not waking them for nothing."
They were down once more in the dormitory
sphere, on C Level, in Sector 8. There was Grimes, and there was Sonya Verrill, and there was First Captain Mitchell. There were Todhunter and McHenry, and there was Mitchell's Medical
Officer, a woman whose hard, competent features were visible behind the
transparency of her helmet and who, when awakened and apprised of the
situation, had wished to discuss medical matters with her opposite number from Faraway Quest. And, of couse,
there was Mayhew.
First
of all there was the tank in which slept Carolyn Jenkins' husband to disconnect
from its fittings. Jenkins was the man who had been dreaming about food, and
who was now dreaming about other pleasures of the flesh. Grimes felt more than
a little relieved. This dreamer would not object to his being press-ganged away
from his own ship and would not feel the loss of his wife too deeply. The
nature of his dreams told of years of hunger, of frustration.
McHenry and Todhunter
maneuvered the clumsy tank through the cramped space, vanished with it in the
direction of the control sphere. It was to be taken to the Faraway Quest, where the engineers would be able to set up
the apparatus for imintaining the sleeper in his
condition of suspended animation and for awakening him if Grimes' gamble paid
off.
And
then Mayhew went to the second of the male dowsers, the one who, in his dream,
was still engaged in the exercise of his talent. The telepath vocalized his
thoughts, and his voice was an eerie whisper in the helmet phones of his
companions.
"You are lost. . . .
"You
are lost. The sky is dark. There is no light anywhere. There is nothing anymore
anywhere . . . Nothing . . . Nothing . . . Emptiness around you, emptiness
underfoot . . . You are falling, falling, through the nothingness, and the rod
is dead in your hands. . . .
"You are falling,
falling . . .
"But
not for always. The rod twitches. You feel it twitch. Feebly, but it twitches.
That is all—now. That is all. But there will be more. In precisely one hundred
and twenty minutes there will be more. The rod will twitch strongly, strongly,
and pull you with it. You will see that it is pointing to a spark in the
darkness—a golden spark. And the spark becomes a globe, becomes a fair world
hanging there. There is the blue of seas, the green of continents, the gleaming
white of the polar ice caps, and on the night hemisphere the sparking lights of
great cities. . . . There is the blue of seas and the green of continents, and
the great land mass, hourglass-shaped, that sprawls
from pole to pole, with its narrow waist on the equator. . . . And the chain of islands that forms a natural breakwater to the
great, eastern bay . . . But you do not see it yet. The time must pass,
and then you will see it. Then the rod will come alive in your hands and will
draw you, pull you, to the fair world of Lorn, the
world of your fresh start, to the sunny world of Lorn
. . ."
Grimes
thought, I
hope that they aren't too disappointed. But even Lorn's
better than Limbo . .
And so it went on.
Each
of the four remaining dowsers was thoroughly indoctrinated, and by the time
that the indoctrination was finished only thirty minutes remained before the
posthypnotic command would take effect. Grimes and the others made their way
back to the control sphere.
Mitchell's
officers were in full charge now, and the pilot lights glowed over instrument
consoles. With the exception of Grimes, Sonya Verrill
and Mayhew, all of Faraway
Quest's people
were back aboard their own ship. The Commodore turned to Mitchell. "Ill leave you to it, Captain. If
things work out for all of us, I'll see you on the Rim."
Mitchell
grinned. "I hope so, sir. But tell me, are the Rim Worlds as marvelous as
your Mr. Mayhew makes out?"
Tou have to make allowances for local patriotism,
Captain."
"But
you needn't stay on the Rim," Sonya Verrill
broke in. "I am sure that my own Service will be happy to assume
responsibility for the settlement of your people on any world of their
choice."
"The
Federation's taxpayers have deep pockets," remarked Grimes.
"That joke is wearing
a little thin, John."
"Perhaps it is, Sonya.
But it's still true."
The
Commodore shook hands with Mitchell and then pulled on the gloves of his
spacesuit, snapping tight the connections. His helmet on, he watched Sonya Verrill and Mayhew resume their own armor and then, with
one of Mitchell's officers in attendance, the party made its way to the
airlock. They jetted across the emptiness to the sleek
Faraway
Quest, were admitted into
their own ship. They lost no time in making their way to the control room.
And
there they waited, staring at the contraption of globes and girders floating
there in the nothingness, bright metal reflecting the glare of the Quest's searchlights. They waited, and watched the
control room clock, the creeping minute hand and, towards the end, the sweep
second pointer.
Grimes consulted his own watch.
Mayhew
noticed the gesture. He said quietly, "I'm still in touch. They can see
the spark in the darkness now. They can feel the rods stirring strongly in
their hands. . . ."
"I don't see how it
can work," muttered Renfrew.
"They
got here without your gadgetry, Lieutenant," Calhoun told him sharply.
"They should be able to get out the same way."
And then there was nothing
outside the viewports.
Perhaps,
thought Grimes, our searchlights have failed. But even then
we should see a dim glimmer from her control room ports, a faint flicker from
her warmed-up drivers. . . .
"The screens are dead," announced Swinton.
"She
made it. . ." whispered Mayhew. "She made
it. Somewhere."
XXIII
So rr had
worked for First Captain
Mitchell and his Erector Set of an emigrant ship. It had worked for First
Captain Mitchell, and so it should work for Faraway Quest and her people. The shanghaied dowser was sleeping
in his tank, still dreaming orgiastic dreams, and Mayhew was working on him,
entering his mind, trying to introduce the first faint elements of doubt, of
discomfort, trying to steer his imaginings away from over-padded comfort to the
cold and
emptiness of the Limbo between the Universes. But it
was hard.
This
was a man who had lived in his dreams, lived for his dreams. This was a man
whose waking life was, at best, purgatorial—a man who "never knew in his
own home the sweet smoothness of flesh on flesh, a man who was denied even such
simple pleasures as a glass of cold ale, a meal more elaborate than a spoiled
roast and ruined, soggy vegetables. This was a man who lived in his dreams, and
who loved his dreams, and who had fled to them as the ultimate refuge from an
unspeakably drab reality.
Mayhew
persisted, and his whispering voice, as he vocalized his thoughts, brought a
chill of horror into the section of the auxiliary motor room in which the tank
had been set up. He persisted, and he worked cunningly, introducing tiny,
destructive serpents into the fleshly Eden—the tough steak and the blunt knife,
the corked wine, the too-young cheese and the rolls with their leathery crusts.
. . . The insufficiently chilled beer and the hot dog without the mustard . . .
The overdone roast of beef, and the underdone roast of pork . . .
Small things, trivial things perhaps, but adding up to a sadistic
needling.
And
then there was the blonde who, when she smiled, revealed carious teeth and
whose breath was foul with decay, and the voluptuous brunette who, undressed,
was living proof of the necessity for foundation garments. . . .
So it went on.
The
dream, perhaps, had not been a noble one, but it had been healthily hedonistic,
with no real vice in it. And now, thanks to Mayhew's probing and tinkerings, it was turning sour. And now the man Jenkins,
fleeing in disgust from the lewd embraces of a harridan in a decrepit hovel,
was staggering over a dark, windy waste, oppressed by a sense of guilt and of
shame, fearing even the vengeance of the harsh deity worshipped by his unloving
wife. He was fleeing oyer that dark, windy waste,
tripping on the tussocks of coarse grass, flailing with his arms at the
flapping sheets of torn,^ discarded newspaper that
were driven into his face by the icy gusts.
The cold and the dark . . .
The
cold and the dark, and the final stumble, and the helpless fall into the pit that
had somehow opened beneath his feet, the fall into Absolute Nothingness, a
negation worse than the fiery hell with which his wife had, on more than one
occasion, threatened him.
The
cold and the dark and the absolute emptiness, and the rod of twisted silver
wire to which he still clung desperately, the only proof of his identity, the
only link with sanity, the only guide back to Space and Time . . .
The
twisted wire, the twitching wire, and the insistent tug of it in his frozen
hands, and ahead of him in the darkness the faint yellow spark, but brighter,
brighter, golden now, no longer a spark but a fair world hanging there in the
blackness, a world of beautiful, willing women, of lush gardens in which glowed
huge, succulent fruit, a world of groaning tables and dim, dusty cellars in
which matured the stacked bottles of vintage years . . .
But not Lorn
. . .thought Grimes.
"But
not Lorn . . ." echoed Sonya.
"Lorn is hanging there in the darkness. . . ." Mayhew
was whispering. "A fair world, a beautiful world . . . And the divining
rod is rigid in your hands, a compass needle, pointing, pointing . . . You can
cross the gulf. . . . You can bridge the gulf from dream to reality . . . Follow
the rod. . . . Let the rod guide you, draw you, pull
you. . . . Follow the rod. ..."
"But where?" interrupted Grimes. "But where?"
"To
Lorn, of course," whispered Mayhew. And then, "To Lorn? But his
dreams are too strong, too strong . . ."
Shockingly
the alarm bells sounded, a succession of Morse "A"s.
Once again—Action Stations.
XXIV
There, to port, was the lens of the Galaxy, and to starboard
was the gleaming globe that was Lom, the great,
hourglass-shaped continent proof positive. From astern came the rumble of the
gentle blasts fired by Swinton, intent on his instruments, that would put Faraway Quest into a stable orbit about the planet. From
the speaker barked an oddly familiar voice, "What ship? What ship?
Identify yourself 'at once." And at the controls of the transceiver
Renfrew made the adjustments that would bring in vision as well as sound.
"What ship?"
demanded the voice. "What ship?"
From
his chair Grimes could see the screens of both radar and Mass Proximity
Indicator. He could see the bright and brightening blob of light that gave
range and bearing of another vessel, a vessel that was closing fast. She was
not yet within visual range, but that would be a matter of minutes only.
"What ship? What
ship?"
Grimes
accepted the microphone on its wandering lead, said, "Faraway Quest. Auxiliary Cruiser, Rim Worlds Confederation
Navy. What ship?"
The voice from the bulkhead speaker contrived
to convey incredulity with an odd snorting sound. "Faraway Quest? Rim Worlds Confederation? Never heard of you.
Are you mad—or drunk?"
"No," Sonya Verrill was whispering. "No. It can't be. . . ."
Grimes
looked at her, saw that her face was white, strained.
The big screen over the
transceiver was alive with swirling colors, with colors that eddied and
coalesced as the picture hardened. It showed the interior of another control
room, a compartment not unlike their own. It showed a
uniformed man who was staring into the iconoscope. Grimes recognized him. In
his, Grimes', Universe this man had been Master of Polar Queen, had smashed her up in a bungled landing at
Port Farewell, on Faraway. Grimes had been president of the Court of Inquiry.
And this man, too, had been an officer of the Intelligence Branch of the Survey
Service, his position as a tramp master being an excellent cover for his
activities. And he and Sonya ...
The
Commodore swiveled in his chair. He rather prided himself on the note of gentle
regret that he contrived to inject into his voice, He
said to the woman, "Well, your quest is over. It's been nice knowing
you."
She
replied, "My quest was over some time ago. It's nice knowing you."
"I've
got their picture," Renfrew was saying unnecessarily. "But I don't
think that they have ours yet."
"Starfarer to unknown ship. Starfarer to unknown ship. Take up orbit and prepare to receive
boarding party."
"You'd
better go and pretty yourself up," said Grimes to Sonya. He thought, It's a pity it
had to end like this, before it got properly started even. But I mustn't be
selfish.
"You'll be meeting . . . him. Again. Your second chance."
"Starfarer to unknown ship. Any hostile action will meet with instant
retaliation. Prepare to receive boarders."
"Commander
SwintonI" There was the authentic Survey Service
crackle in Sonya VerriU's voice. "Stand by Mann-schenn Drive. Random precession!"
"Ay,
ay, sir." The young man flushed". "Ma'am."
Then he swiveled to look at the Commodore. "Your orders sir?"
"John!"
Sonya's voice and maimer were urgent. "Get us
out of here."
"No. This was the chance you were
wanting, the second chance, and now you've got it."
She
grinned. "A girl can change her mind. I want my own Universe, where there's only you .
. ." She
laughed, pointing to the screen. A woman officer had come into StarfareT's control room, was standing behind the Captain's chair. He outranked her,
but her attitude was obviously proprietorial.
"Where there's only you," repeated Sonya, "and only one of me ..."
"Mannschenn Drive," ordered Grimes. "Random
precession."
"Ay,
ay, sir," acknowledged Swinton,
and with the thin, high keening of the processing gyroscopes the screen blanked,
the speaker went dead and, on the port hand, the Galactic lens assumed its
familiar distortion, a Klein flask blown by a drunken glass blower.
"Sir," growled Renfrew, obviously
in a mutinous mood, "they could have helped us to get back. And, even if
they couldn't, I'm of the opinion that the Rim Worlds under Federation Rule
would have been somewhat better than those same planets under your Confederacy."
"That
will do, Lieutenant," snapped Sonya, making it plain that she was capable
of dealing with her own subordinates. "Both the Commodore and myself
agreed upon our course of action."
"This
was supposed to be a scientific expedition, Commander," protested Renfrew.
"But it's been far from scientific. Seances, and dowsers .
. ." He
almost spat in his disgust.
"You can't deny that
we got results," muttered Calhoun.
"Of
a sort."
Grimes,
seated at the table on the platform in the still unreconverted
wardroom, regarded the squabbling officers with a tired amusement. He could
afford to relax now. He had driven the ship down the warped Continuum in an
escape pattern that had been partly random and partly a matter of lightning
calculation. He had interrogated Maudsley—the other Maudsley—after the Polar Queen disaster and had not formed
a very high opinion of that gentleman's capabilities as a navigator. And even
if this Maudsley were brilliantly imaginative, a ship in Deep
Space is a very small needle in a very big haystack. . . .
"Gentlemen,"
he said, "the purpose of this meeting is to discuss ways and means of
getting back to our own Space-Time. Has anybody any suggestions?"
Nobody had.
"The
trouble seems to be," Grimes went on, "that although the dowser
technique works, Mr. Mayhew is far too liable to look at his home world through
rose-colored spectacles. Unluckily he is the only one among us capable of
influencing the dreams of the hapless Mr. Jenkins. No doubt the Rim Worlds are
better off, in some respects, under Federation rule than under our Confederacy.
Weather control (which is far from inexpensive) for example,
and a much higher standard of living. But I've also no doubt that the
loss of independence has been a somewhat high price to pay for these
advantages. And, even you who are not Rim Worlders, would find it hard to get by in a Universe in
which somebody else, even if it is you, has
your job, your home, your wife.
"So—what are we to
do?"
"We still have
Jenkins," contributed Calhoun.
"Yes. We still have
Jenkins. But how can we use him?"
"And you still have your talent," said Sonya.
"My
talent?"
"Your hunches. And what is a hunch but a form of precognition?"
"My
hunches," Grimes told her, "are more a case of extrapolation, from
the past at that, than of precognition." And sitting there, held in his
chair by the strap, he let his mind wander into the past, was only dimly
conscious of the discussion going on around him. He recalled what had happened
when Faraway Quest had been drawn into the first of the
Alternative Universes before falling into Limbo. He remembered that odd
sensation, the intolerable stretching, the sudden snap. Perhaps . . . "Mr. Mayhewl" he said.
Tes?
Sorry. Yes, sir?"
"What sort of feeling do you have for
this ship?" "She's just a ship."
"You don't, in your mind, overglamorize her?" "Why the hell should I? Sir."
"Good.
Please come with me again to this man Jenkins, the dowser. I want you to take
charge of his dreams, the same way that you did before. I want you to lose him
in nothingness again, and then to let his talent guide him out of the emptiness
back to light and life and warmth".
"But you said that my vision of Lom was too idealistic."
"It is. It is. I want you to envisage Faraway Quest."
"Us, sir?"
"Who else?"
"The
cold . . ." Mayhew was whispering. "The cold, and
the dark, and the absolute emptiness. There's nothing, nothing. There's
not anything, anywhere, but that rod of twisted silver wire that you hold in
your two hands. . . . You feel it twitch. You feel the gentle, insistent tug of
it. . . And there's a glimmer of light ahead of you, faint, no more than a dim
glow. . . . But you can make out what it is. It's the pilot fights of
instrument panels, red and green, white and amber, and the fluorescent tracings
in chart tanks. . . . It's the control room of a ship, and the faint
illumination shows through the big, circular ports. By it you can just read the
name, in golden lettering, on her sharp stem, Faraway Quest."
And Mayhew went on to describe the ship in
detail, in amazing detail, until Crimes realized that he was drawing upon the
knowledge stored in the brains of all the technical officers. He described the
ship, and he described the personnel, and he contrasted the warmth and the
light and the life of her interior with the cold, empty dream-Universe in which
the dowser was floating. He described the ship and her personnel—and, Grimes
thought wrily, some of his descriptions were far
from flattering. But she was Home. She was a little world of men in the
all-pervading emptiness.
She
was Home, and Grimes realized that he, too, was feeling the emotions that
Mayhew was implanting in the sleeping dowser's mind. She was Home, and she was
close, and closer, an almost attained goal. She was Home, and Grimes knew that
he could reach out to touch her, and he reached out, and felt the comforting
touch of cool metal at his fingertips, the security of solidity in the vast,
empty reaches of Deep Space. . . .
She
was Home, and he was home at last, where he belonged, and he was looking
dazedly at the odd, transparent tank that had appeared from nowhere in the
Auxiliary Machinery Room, the glass coffin with a complexity of piping and
wiring extruded from its sides, the casket in which floated the nude body of a
portly man.
He
turned to Sonya Verrill, and he heard her say,
"Your hunch paid off, John."
He
remembered then. (But there were two sets of memories—separate and distinct.
There were the memories of Limbo, and all that had happened there, and there
were the memories of a boring, fruitless cruise after the first and only Rim
Ghost sighting and the failure to establish even a fleeting contact.) He
remembered then, and knew that some of the memories he must cling to, always.
They were all that he would ever have, now. There were no longer any special
circumstances. There was no longer the necessity for—how had she put it?—the
political marriage of the heads of two potentially hostile tribes.
He
muttered, unaware that he was vocalizing his thoughts, "Oh, well—it was
nice knowing you. But now . .."
"But now . . ."
she echoed.
"U
you'll excuse me, sir, and madam," broke in Mayhew, "I'll leave you
alone. Now that we're back in our own Universe I'm bound by the Institute's
rules again, and I'm not supposed to eavesdrop, let alone to tell either of you
what the other one is thinking." He turned to the Commodore. "But 111
tell -you this, sir. Ill tell
you that all the guff about political marriages was guff. It was just an excuse. Ill tell you that
the lady has found what she was looking for— or whom
she was looking for—and that his name is neither Derek Calver
nor Bill Maudsley."
"In
the Survey Service," remarked Sonya Verrill
softly, "he could be court martialed for
that."
"And
so he could be," Grimes told her, "in the Rim Confederacy Navy. But I
don't think that I shall press any charges."
"I
should be rather annoyed if you did. He told you what I should have gotten
around to telling you eventually, and he has saved us a great deal of
time."
They
did not kiss, and their only gesture was a brief contact of hands. But they
were very close together, and both of them knew it. Together they left the
compartment, making for the control room.
Grimes
supposed that it would be necessary to carry on the cruise for a while longer,
to continue going through the motions of what young Swinton
had termed a wild ghost chase, but he was no longer very interested. A long
life still lay ahead of him, and there were pleasanter worlds than these
planets of the far outer reaches on which to spend it.
For him, as for Sonya Verrill,
the faraway quest was over.