Upon a Sea of Stars (9 page)
Read Upon a Sea of Stars Online
Authors: A. Bertram Chandler
Chapter 16
ONCE BACK ABOARD HIS OWN SHIP,
Grimes went straight from the airlock to the control room, pausing only to take off his helmet. 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
Waratah’s
people.”
“No. I probed her very thoroughly, very thoroughly. They’re all as dead as the frozen mutton in 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
Waratah’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, Mayhew?”
“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 be 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 Mayhew. “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 steaming from it, like a flag of surrender. . . . It’s only snow, of course, wind-driven snow, but it is 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 shall do 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.”
Chapter 17
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 interstellar 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 engine room.”
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 gadgetry! 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. The crew too spent most of the voyage frozen, 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.
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 companions 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.