Read Upon a Sea of Stars Online
Authors: A. Bertram Chandler
Upon a Sea of Stars (6 page)
Chapter 10
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 by!” 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 Renfrew 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.
Chapter 11
SOME HOURS 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—whatever
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 seance we got in touch with . . . something.”
Karen Schmidt cried, “No! 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 in 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 un-hospitable. 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!”
