Upon a Sea of Stars (8 page)
Read Upon a Sea of Stars Online
Authors: A. Bertram Chandler
Chapter 14
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 McHenry. 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 had 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 toward 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-gleaming black. Grimes stopped at the border between the two colors, looked down at an odd, white-painted design—a circle, bisected by a line that had at one end the letter L, at the other the letter R. And from the right-hand end of this line was another line at right angles to it, and this was subdivided and lettered: IT, T, S, W, WNA. . . .
“So this is—or was—one of
our
ships. . . .” Sonya Verill’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 hinges, 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 there 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.”
It’s 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 learn much by looking in the other cabins.”
“Then where can we learn 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 ornate crystal chandeliers. And then, at last, they came out into the open again, on to a great expansive 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 ornate 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 phosphoresence.”
“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.”
Chapter 15
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 stokehold, and from there to the engine room.”
“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
Marie 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. Oceangoing 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 desiccated 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 heavy rain and violent thunderstorms. Abnormally bright phosphorescence observed.”
Thunder and lightning and abnormally bright phosphor-
escence . . .
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.”