Upon a Sea of Stars (23 page)
Read Upon a Sea of Stars Online
Authors: A. Bertram Chandler
Chapter 18
SLOWLY, CAUTIOUSLY
Corsair
dropped to the clearing, her incandescent rocket exhaust incinerating the grasslike vegetation, raising great, roiling clouds of smoke and steam. A human-built warship would have been fitted with nozzles from which, in these circumstances, a fire-smothering foam could be ejected. But
Corsair’s
builders would have considered such a device a useless refinement. Slowly she settled, then came to rest, rocking slightly on her landing gear. Up and around the control room ports billowed the dirty smoke and the white steam, gradually thinning. Except for a few desert areas, the climate of Stree was uniformly wet and nothing would burn for long.
Grimes asked Mayhew to—as he phrased it—take psionic soundings, but from his past experience of this planet he knew that it would be a waste of time. The evidence indicated that the Streen practiced telepathy among themselves but that their minds were closed to outsiders. But the saurians must have seen the ship land, and the pillar of cloud that she had created would be visible for many miles.
Slowly the smoke cleared and those in the control room were able to see, through the begrimed ports, the edge of the jungle, the tangle of lofty, fern-like growths with, between them, the interlacing entanglement of creepers. Something was coming through the jungle, its passage marked by an occasional eruption of tiny flying lizards from the crests of the tree ferns. Something was coming through the jungle, and heading towards the ship.
Grimes got up from his chair and, accompanied by Sonya, made his way down to the airlock. He smiled with wry amusement as he recalled his first landing on this world.
Then
he had been able to do things properly, had strode down the ramp in all the glory of gold braid and brass buttons, had even worn a quite useless ceremonial sword for the occasion.
Then
he had been accompanied by his staff, as formally attired as himself.
Now
he was wearing scanty, dirty rags and accompanied by a woman as nearly naked as he was. (But the Streen, who saw no need for clothing, had been more amused than impressed by his finery.)
The airlock door was open and the ramp was out. The Commodore and his wife did not descend at once to the still slightly smoking ground. One advantage of his dress uniform, thought Grimes, was that it had included half-Wellington boots. The couple watched the dark tunnel entrance in the cliff of solid greenery that marked the end of the jungle track.
A Streen emerged. He would have passed for a small dinosaur from Earth’s remote past, although the trained eye of a paleontologist would have detected differences. There was one difference that was obvious even to the untrained eye—the cranial development. This being had a brain, and not a small one. The little, glittering eyes stared at the humans. A voice like the hiss of escaping steam said, “Greetings.”
“Greetings,” replied the Commodore.
“You come again, man Grimes.” It was a statement of fact rather than a question.
“I have never been here before,” said Grimes, adding, “Not in this Space-Time.”
“You have been here before. The last time your body was covered with cloth and metal, trappings of no functional value. But it does not matter.”
“How can you remember?”
“I cannot, but our Wise Ones remember all things. What was, what is to come, what might have been and what might be. They told me to greet you and to bring you to them.”
Grimes was less than enthusiastic. On the occasion of his last visit the Wise Ones had lived not in the jungle but in a small, atypical patch of rocky desert, many miles to the north. Then he had been able to make the journey in one of
Faraway Quest’s
helicopters. Now he had no flying machines at his disposal, and a spaceship is an unhandy brute to navigate in a planetary atmosphere. He did not fancy a long, long journey on foot, or even riding one of the lesser saurians that the Streen used as draught animals, along a rough track partially choken with thorny undergrowth. Once again he was acutely conscious of the inadequacy of his attire.
The native cackled. (The Streen was not devoid of a sense of humor.) He said, “The Wise Ones told me that you would not be clad for a journey. The Wise Ones await you in the village.”
“Is it far?”
“It is where it was when you came before, when you landed your ship in this very place.”
“No more than half an hour’s walk,” began Grimes, addressing Sonya, then fell suddenly silent as an intense light flickered briefly, changing and brightening the green of the jungle wall, the gaudy colors of the flowering vines. Involuntarily he looked up, but the golden overcast was unbroken. There was another flare behind the cloud blanket, blue-white, distant, and then, belatedly, the thunder of the first explosion drifted down, ominous and terrifying.
“Missiles . . .” whispered the Commodore. “And my ship’s a sitting duck. . .”
“Sir,” hissed the saurian, “you are not to worry. The Wise Ones have taken adequate steps for your—and our—protection.”
“But you have no science, no technology!” exclaimed Grimes, realizing the stupidity of what he had said when it was too late.
“We have science, man Grimes. We have machines to pit against the machines of your enemies. But our machines, unlike yours, are of flesh and blood, not of metal—although our anti-missiles, like yours, possess only a limited degree of intelligence.”
“These people,” exclaimed Grimes to Sonya, “are superb biological engineers.”
“I know,” she said. “And I have little doubt that their air umbrella of pterodactyls will last longer than our furry friends’ supply of missiles. So I suggest that we leave them to it and go to see the Wise Ones.” She looked dubiously at the jungle, then turned to call to a woman inside the ship, “Peggy! Bring us out a couple of machetes!”
“You will not need them,” commented the Streen, “even though your skins are too soft.”
They did need them, even though their guide went ahead like a tank clearing the way for infantry. The vines and brambles were springy, reaching out with taloned tentacles as soon as the saurian had passed. Grimes and Sonya slashed until their arms were tired, but even so, their perspiration smarted painfully in the fresh scratches all over their bodies. They were far from sorry when they emerged into another clearing, a small one, almost completely roofed over with the dense foliage of the surrounding trees.
There were the usual huts, woven from still-living creepers. There was the steaming compost pile that was the hatchery. There were the domesticated lizards, large and small, engaged in their specialized tasks—digging the vegetable plots, weeding and pruning. There were the young of the Streen, looking absurdly like plucked chickens, displaying the curiosity that is common to all intelligent beings throughout the Galaxy, keeping a respectful distance from the visitors, staring at them from their black, unwinking eyes. There were the adults, equally curious, some of whom hustled the community’s children out of the path of the humans, clearing a way to the door of a hut that, by Streen standards, was imposing. From the opening drifted blue eddies of smoke—aromatic, almost intoxicating. Grimes knew that the use of the so-called sacred herbs, burned in a brazier and the smoke inhaled, was confined to the Wise Ones.
There were three of the beings huddled there in the semi-darkness, grouped around the tripod from the top of which was suspended the cage in which the source of the smoke smoldered ruddily. The Commodore sneezed. The vapor, as far as he could gather, was mildly euphoric and, at the same time, hallucinogenic—but to human beings it was only an irritant to the nasal membranes. In spite of his efforts to restrain himself he sneezed again, loudly.
The Streen around the tripod cackled thinly. The Commodore, his eyes becoming accustomed to the dim lighting, could see that they were old, their scales shabby and dulled with a lichenous growth, their bones protuberant beneath their armored skins. There was something familiar about them—sensed rather than visually recognized. One of them cackled, “Our dream smoke still makes you sneeze, man Grimes.”
“Yes, Wise One.”
“And what do you here, man Grimes? Were you not happy in your own here-and-now? Were you not happy with the female of your kind whom you acquired since last we met, otherwhen-and-where?”
“You’d better say ‘yes’ to that!” muttered Sonya.
Again the thin cackling. “We are lucky, man Grimes. We do not have the problems of you mammals, with your hot blood. . . .” A pause. “But still, we love life, just as you do. And we know that out there, falling about our world, are those who would end our lives, just as they would end yours.
Now
they have not the power, but it is within their grasp.”
“But would it matter to you?” asked Sonya. “I thought that you were—how shall I put it?—co-existent with yourselves in all the alternative universes. You must be. You remember John’s first landing on this planet—but that was never in
this
here-and-now.”
“You do not understand, woman Sonya. You cannot understand. But we will try to explain. Man Grimes—in
your
here-and-now what cargoes do your ships bring to Stree?”
“Luxuries like tea and tobacco, Wise One. And books. . . .”
“What sort of books, man Grimes?”
“History. Philosophy. Novels, even . . . poetry.”
“And your poets say more in fewer words than your philosophers. There is one whom I will quote to you:
And he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one shall die.
“Does that answer your question, woman Sonya?”
“I can
feel
it,” she murmured. “But I can’t understand it.”
“It does not matter. And it does not matter if you do not understand what you are going to do—as long as you understand how to do it.”
“And what is that?” asked Grimes.
“To destroy the egg before it hatches,” was the reply.
Chapter 19
ANYBODY
meeting the seemingly primitive Streen for the first time would never dream that these saurians, for all their obvious intelligence, are engineers. Their towns and villages are, to the human way of thinking, utterly innocent of machines. But what is a living organism but a machine—an engine that derives its motive power from the combustion of hydro-carbons in an oxygen atmosphere? On Stree, a variety of semi-intelligent lizards perform the tasks that on man-colonized worlds are performed by mechanisms of metal and plastic.
Yes, the Streen
are
engineers—biological and psychological engineers—of no mean caliber.
In their dim hut, what little light there was further obscured by the acrid fumes from the brazier, the Wise Ones talked and Grimes and Sonya listened. Much of what they were told was beyond them—but there was emotional rather than intellectual acceptance. They would not altogether understand—but they could
feel
. And, after all, the symbiosis of flesh-and-blood machine and machine of metal and plastic was not too alien a concept. Such symbiosis, to a limited extent, has been known ever since the first seaman handled the first ship, learning to make that clumsy contraption of wood and fiber an extension of his own body.
Then, convinced although still not understanding, the Commodore and his wife returned to the ship. With them—slowly, creakingly—walked Serressor, the most ancient of the Wise Ones, and ahead of them their original guide did his best, as before, to clear a way for them through the spiny growths.
They came to the clearing, to the charred patch of ground already speckled with the pale green sprouts of new growth. And already the air ferns had begun to take root upon protuberances from the ship’s shell plating, from turrets and sponsons and antennae; already the vines were crawling up the vaned tripod of the landing gear. Williams had a working party out, men and women who were hacking ill-humoredly at the superfluous and encroaching greenery.
From the corner of his eye the Executive Officer saw the approach of the Commodore, ceased shouting directions to his crew and walked slowly to meet his superior. He said, “The game’s crook, Skipper. What with lianas an’ lithophytes we’ll be lucky to get off the ground. An’ if we do, we’ve had it, like as not.”
“Why, Commander Williams?”
“Mayhew tells me that
They
have cottoned on to what their psionic amplifiers have been doing. So—no more psionic amplifiers. Period.”
“So we can’t give them false information through their own communications system,” said Sonya.
“You can say that again, Mrs. Grimes.”
Serressor croaked, “So you depend upon misdirection to make your escape from our world.”
“That is the case, Wise One,” Grimes told him.
“We have already arranged that, man Grimes.”
“You have?” Williams looked at the ancient saurian, seeing him for the first time. “You have? Cor stone the bleedin’ lizards, Skipper, what
is
this?”
“This, Commander Williams,” said Grimes coldly, “is Serressor, Senior Wise One of the Streen. He and his people are as interested in disposing of the mutants as we are. They have told us a way in which it may be done, and Serressor will be coming with us to play his part in the operation.”
“An’ how will you do it?” demanded Williams, addressing the saurian.
Serressor hissed, “Destroy the egg before it is hatched.”
Surprisingly, Williams did not explode into derision. He said quietly, “I’d thought o’ that myself. We could do it—but it’s iffy, iffy. Too bloody iffy. There’re all the stories about what happens when the Drive gets out o’ kilter, but nobody’s ever come back to tell us if they’re true.”
“If we’re going to use the Drive as Serressor suggests, it will have to be fitted with a special governor.”
“That makes sense, Skipper. But where’re we gettin’ this governor from?”
“We have it—or him—right here.”
“Better him than me. There’re better ways o’ dyin’ than bein’ turned inside out.” He shifted his regard to the working party, who had taken the opportunity to relax their efforts. “Back to yer gardenin’, yer bunch o’ drongoes! I want this hull clean as a baby’s bottom!”
“Shouldn’t you have said ‘smooth’, Commander?” asked Sonya sweetly.
Before an argument could start Grimes pulled her up the ramp and into the ship. Following them slowly came the aged and decrepit saurian.
Grimes and his officers were obliged to admit that the Streen had planned well and cunningly. When
Corsair
was ready for blasting off, a veritable horde of the winged lizards assembled above her, most of them carrying in their talons fragments of metal. Obedient to the command of their masters—it seemed that the Streen were, after all, telepathic, but only insofar as their own kind were concerned—the pterosaurs grouped themselves into a formation resembling a spaceship, flapped off to the eastward. To the radar operators of the blockading squadron it would appear that
Corsair
had lifted, was navigating slowly and clumsily within the planetary atmosphere.
There were missiles, of course.
Some were intercepted by the suicidal air umbrella above the decoys, some, whose trajectory would take them into uninhabited jungle regions, were allowed to continue their fall to the ground. They had been programmed to seek and to destroy a spaceship, winged lizards, even metal-bearing lizards, they ignored.
Meanwhile, but cautiously, cautiously, with frequent and random shifts of frequency,
Corsair’s
radio was probing the sky. It seemed that the mutants’ squadron had swallowed the bait. Ship after ship broke from her orbit, recklessly expending her reaction mass so as to be advantageously situated when
Corsair
, the pseudo-
Corsair
, emerged from the overcast into space.
And then the way out was as clear as ever it would be. The mutants’ cruisers were hull down, dropping below the round shoulder of the world. Aboard
Corsair
all hands were at their stations, and the firing chambers were warmed up in readiness.
Grimes took her upstairs himself. With a deliberately dramatic flourish he brought his hand down to the keys, as though he were smacking a ready and willing steed on the rump. It was more like being fired from a gun than a conventional blast-off. Acceleration thrust all hands deep into the padding of their chairs. The Commodore was momentarily worried by a thin, high whistling that seemed to originate inside the ship rather than outside her hull. Then, had it not been for the brutal down-drag on his facial muscles, he would have smiled. He remembered that the Streen, normally coldly unemotional, had always expressed appreciation of a trip in a space-vessel and had enjoyed, especially, violent maneuvers such as the one that he was now carrying out. If Serressor was whistling, then he was happy.
Corsair
whipped through the cloud blanket as though it had been no more than a chiffon veil, and harsh sunlight beat through the control room viewports like a physical blow. From the speaker of the transceiver came a shrill gabble of order and counter-order—evidently some alert radar operator had spotted the break-out. But
Corsair
was out of laser range from the blockading squadron, was almost out of missile range. And by the time the enemy were able to close her, she would be well clear of the Van Allens, would be falling into and through the dark, twisted dimensions created about herself by her own interstellar drive.
It was time to get Serressor along to the Mannschenn Drive room. Grimes handed over to Williams, waited until he saw the Commander’s capable hands resting on his own control panel, and then, slowly and painfully, levered himself out of his seat. He found it almost impossible to stand upright under the crushing pseudo-gravity—but speed had to be maintained, otherwise the ship would be englobed by her enemies. Already Carter was picking off the first missiles with his laser. The Commodore watched two burly Marines struggle to get the aged saurian to his feet. They were big men, and strong, but the task was almost beyond them.
Then, with every shuffling step calling for an almost superhuman effort, Grimes led the way to the interstellar drive compartment. There—and how long had it taken him to make that short journey?—he found Branson, Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer, with his juniors. And there was the ship’s doctor, and the telepath Mayhew. Extending from the complexity of rotors, now still and silent, was a tangle of cables, each one of which terminated in a crocodile clip.
The wall speaker crackled: “Commander to M.D. room. Calling the Commodore.”
“Commodore here, Commander Williams.”
“Clear of Van Allens. No immediate danger from enemy fire.”
“Then carry on, Commander. You know what you have to do.”
“Stand by for free fall. Stand by for course correction.”
The silence, as the rocket drive was cut, fell like a blow. Then, as the whining directional gyroscopes took over, the Doctor, assisted by Branson’s juniors, began to clip the cable ends to various parts of Serressor’s body.
The old saurian hissed gently, “You cannot hurt me, man Doctor. My scales are thick.”
And then it was Mayhew’s turn, and a helmet of metal mesh was fitted over his head. The telepath was pale, frightened-looking. Grimes sympathized with him, and admired him. He, as had every spaceman, heard all the stories of what happened to those trapped in the field of a malfunctioning Drive—and even though this would be (the Commodore hoped) a controlled malfunction, it would be a malfunction nonetheless. The telepath, when the situation had been explained to him, had volunteered. Grimes hoped that the decoration for which he would recommend him would not be a posthumous one.
The gentle, off-center gravitational effect of centrifugal force abruptly ceased, together with the humming of the directional gyroscope. Then the ship trembled violently and suddenly, and again. A hit? No, decided the Commodore, it was Carter firing a salvo of missiles. But the use of these weapons showed that the enemy must be getting too close for comfort.
Williams’ voice from the bulkhead speaker was loud, with a certain urgency.
“On course for Lorn, Skipper!”
“Mannschenn Drive on remote control,” ordered Grimes. “Serressor will give the word to switch on.”
Already the Doctor and the junior engineers had left the Mannschenn Drive room, making no secret of their eagerness to be out of the compartment before things started to happen. Bronson was making some last, finicking adjustments to his machinery, his heavily bearded face worried.
“Hurry up, Commander,” Grimes snapped.
The engineer grumbled, “I don’t like it. This is an interstellar drive, not a Time Machine. . . .”
Again came the violent trembling, and again, and again.
Bronson finished what he was doing, then reluctantly left his domain. Grimes turned to Serressor, who now looked as though he had become enmeshed in the web of a gigantic spider. He said, “You know the risk. . .”
“I know the risk. If I am . . . everted, it will be a new experience.”
And not a pleasant one, thought the Commodore, looking at Mayhew. The telepath was paler than ever, and his prominent Adam’s apple wobbled as he swallowed hard. And not a pleasant one. And how could this . . . this non-human philosopher, who had never handled a metal tool in his long life, be so sure of the results of this tampering with, to him, utterly alien machinery? Sure, Serressor had read all the books (or his other-self in Grimes’ own continuum had read all the books) on the theory and practice of Mannschenn Drive operation—but book knowledge, far too often, is a poor substitute for working experience.
“Good luck,” said Grimes to the saurian and to Mayhew.
He left the compartment, carefully shut the door behind him.
He heard the whine, the wrong-sounding whine, as the Drive started up.
And then the dream-filled darkness closed about him.