There were times—rather more frequent than he cared to admit—when Grimes was lucky. This was one of them. Part of his luck, perhaps, was in having a really outstanding navigator aboard his ship. Carnaby's last captain had said of him, "He could find a black cat in a coal mine at midnight in three seconds flat." This was not far from the truth.
There had been no need whatsoever for Faraway Quest to run a wearisome search pattern after the fifty light year plunge outward from the Lead Stars. Carnaby had applied this course correction and that course correction, each time a matter of seconds rather than of minutes or degrees, had played a complicated game of three dimensional—or four dimensional, even—noughts and crosses in the plotting tank, had overworked the ship's computer to such an extent that Williams had said to Grimes, "If the bloody thing had a real brain it would go on strike!"
And then the mass proximity indicator had picked up a target just inside its one light year maximum range. Almost directly ahead it was, a tiny spark, a minute bead on the thin, glowing filament that was the extrapolated trajectory. It was time to slow down, although there was no danger of collision. Two solid bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time—but when one of those solid bodies is proceeding under Mannschenn Drive it is in a time of its own.
Grimes took over personally as the range closed. The tiny spark in the screen slowly expanded to a globe, luminescent, with other tiny sparks in orbit about it. There could be no doubt as to what it was.
The Mannschenn Drive was shut down and Faraway Quest proceeded cautiously under inertial drive only, a run of about twelve hours at one G acceleration. The Commodore stayed in Control, smoking, drinking coffee, nibbling an occasional sandwich. His officers, their control room watches completed, stayed on with him. Sonya was there, of course, and so were Mayhew and Clarisse. Major Dalzell was there for most of the time, and even Druthen, uninvited, came up.
The Outsiders' Ship was within radar range now, it and the derelicts circling it. It was within radar range and it could be seen visually at last, a tiny, not very bright star in the blackness where no star had any right to be. The powerful telescope was trained on it, adjusted, and its picture glowed on the forward vision screen. It was. . . . There was only one word for it. It was fantastic. It shone with a light of its own, a cold luminosity, bright but not harsh. It was not a ship so much as a castle out of some old fairy tale, with towers and turrets, cupolas and minarets and gables and buttresses. It should have looked absurd, but it did not. It should have looked grotesque, and it did, but for all the grotesquerie it was somehow . . . right. Its proportions were the only possible proportions.
Grimes stared at the picture, the somehow frightening picture, as did the others. He felt Sonya's hand tighten on his shoulder. The very humanness of the gesture helped him, brought him back to the prosaic reality of the control room of his own ship. There were things to be done.
"Mr. Carnaby," he snapped, "let me have the elements of a stable orbit about this . . . thing. Mr. Hendrikson, see if you can ascertain how many derelicts there are in this vicinity. Plot their orbits."
"And have the weaponry in a state of readiness, sir?" asked Hendrikson hopefully.
"Use your tracking system for plotting those orbits," Grimes told him coldly. "It can be used for other things besides gunnery, you know."
Daniels, the radio officer, had not waited for specific orders. He was dividing his attention between the normal space time equipment and the Carlotti transceiver. He reported to Grimes: "I think there's the faintest whisper on the Carlotti, sir. I have it on broad band, but I'll try to get a bearing."
Grimes looked at the pilot antenna, at the ellipsoid Mobius strip rotating about its long axis and quivering, hunting, on its universal mount. There was something there, something, but it didn't know quite where. He was about to get up from his chair to join Daniels at the communications equipment when, to his annoyance, Druthen remarked, "So you got us here, Commodore." The tone of his voice implied more than mild surprise.
"Yes. I got us here. Excuse me, I'm busy. . . ."
"Sir. . . ." It was the navigator.
"Yes, Mr. Carnaby?"
"All ready, sir. But we'd better not bring her in closer than a couple of miles. That thing has the mass of a planetoid."
"Mphm." Carnaby was exaggerating, of course. It was one of his failings. Even so . . . an artificial gravitational field? A distortion of the framework of space itself?
"Sir, I think I have something . . ." broke in Daniels.
"Commander Williams, take over the pilotage, please. Be careful not to run into any of the derelicts that Mr. Hendrikson is using for his make-believe target practice!"
"Good-oh, Skipper."
Grimes unsnapped his seat belt, strode swiftly to the vacant chair beside Daniels, buckled himself in just as the inertial drive was stopped and the ship went into free fall. He saw that the pilot antenna had stopped hunting, was now steady on a relative bearing almost dead astern of Faraway Quest, a bearing that slowly changed as Williams began to put the ship into her orbit.
Yes, he could hear a whisper, no more than a faint, faraway muttering, even though the volume control was turned full on. He could not distinguish the words. He did not think that the speaker was using Standard English. He regretted, as he had done before, that he was and always had been so distressingly monolingual.
"New German, I think. . ." Daniels said slowly.
"Sonya," called Grimes, "see if you can get the drift of this!"
But when she joined her husband and Daniels the set was silent again. Perhaps, thought Grimes, Mayhew might be able to pick something up. It was not necessary for him to say it aloud.
"Yes, sir," the telepath almost whispered, "there is something, somebody. No, it's not the Waldegren warship you're expecting. . . . It's . . . it's. . . ."
"Damn it all, Commander, who the hell is it?" demanded Grimes.
Mayhew's voice, as he replied, held reproof. "You've broken the very tenuous contact that I'd just begun to make."
"Sorry. But do your best, Commander Mayhew."
"I'm . . . trying. . . ."
"Orbit established, Skipper," reported Williams.
"No dangerous approach to any of the other orbits, sir," reported Carnaby and Hendrikson, speaking as one.
"Yes, yes. Commander Mayhew?"
"I'm trying . . . to try." Mayhew's expression was both very faraway and more than a little pained. "But . . . so much interference. There's somebody we know. . . and there are strangers. . . ."
"Are they in these derelicts? Aboard The Outsider?"
"No, sir. If they were close, I should know. But they are distant still. But please, please try not to interrupt any more. . . ."
"Let him go into his trance and get on with the clairvoyance," sneered Druthen.
"Shut up, Doctor! Do you want to be ordered out of Control?" snarled Grimes.
The scientist subsided.
"Please . . ." pleaded Mayhew.
Then there was silence in the control room, broken only by the sibilant whisperings of such machines as, with the ship now in free falling orbit, were still in operation. The soughing of fans, the whining of generators, the very occasional sharp click of a relay. . . .
"Metzenther . . ." muttered Mayhew.
Grimes and Sonya exchanged glances. They were the only two, apart from the psionic communications officer, to whom the name meant anything.
"Trialanne. . . ." He was vocalizing his thoughts for Grimes' benefit. "Metzenther, Trialanne. . . . Where are you bound?" He seemed to find the answer amusing. "No, we haven't any company yet, apart from a half dozen or so derelict ships. . . . Be seeing you. . . . Or shall we . . .I wouldn't know, I'm not a physicist or a mathematician. . . . And can you pick up anybody else . . .? We think we heard a Waldegren ship on our Carlotti. . . . And I got the faintest mutter from somebody else. . . . No, not a telepath, just unconscious broadcasting. . . . A servant of some empire or other. . . . Not yours, by any chance . . . ? No . . .?"
"And are we to have the pleasure of meeting that big, blonde cow again?" demanded Sonya coldly.
"She was quite attractive, in a hefty sort of way," Grimes told her. "You would think so."
Mayhew grinned. "I rather think, Commander Verrill, that we shall shortly experience the pleasure of renewing our acquaintance with the ex-Empress Irene, and Captain Trafford, and all the rest of Wanderer's people."
"But they're on a different time track," said Sonya. "And thank all the odd gods of the galaxy for that!"
"Mphm," grunted Grimes. "Mphm." He gestured toward the viewport through which the Outsiders' Ship was clearly visible. "But here, I think, is where all the time tracks converge."
"I hope you're wrong," said Sonya. "I hope you're wrong. But I'm rather afraid that you're not."
"He's not," confirmed Mayhew.