Maybe here, everything he knew was wrong. Everything he had learned in a lifetime of dealing with his own world was open to question.
He had been thinking of his situation in terms of having stumbled into a science fiction story of some sort—something with spaceships and rayguns and monsters, but still grounded in logic and common sense. But if the laws of physics were different, then anything might be possible.
It wasn’t science fiction at all, it was fantasy. He might as well be in the twilight zone.
Or in a dream.
He backed away, then turned, all his confusion and frustration boiling up in him at once.
He found the elegant redhead standing there waiting for him. “Mr. Brown, is it?” she asked.
“Excuse me,” he said, pushing past her. Right now he did not want to talk to some stranger from another universe, no matter what she looked like.
She turned to stare, and the other strangers made way for him as he stamped across the room to Ted.
Ted, bemused, watched him come.
Pel grabbed the lawyer by his lapels.
“Listen,” he said, “what would it take to convince you that this is real, and not a dream? Would a punch in the nose do it? I mean, if it hurt, just like real life?”
Ted considered this quite seriously. He looked around the room, at the oddly but splendidly dressed passengers, at the dimming orange stars beyond the window, at the crystal chandelier and the brass railings.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’d probably just mean I fell out of bed. It might wake me up, though.”
Pel nodded.
“Let’s see,” he said, as he swung.
The steward was almost in time to stop him, and his restraining arm, flung up in front of Pel’s, slowed the impact; Ted staggered, nose red and starting to bleed, but he didn’t fall, and nothing broke. He made no protest, no defense, and no counter-attack. After the blow had landed he simply stood, staring blankly at Pel.
“Sir,” the steward began, shocked.
“Oh, shut up,” Pel replied, as he stalked off toward his cabin.
Chapter Eighteen
By the time they were two days out from Psi Cassiopeia Two, Pel understood why the original complement aboard the Princess had wanted to land there in the first place.
Space travel was boring.
It was very nearly as boring as, though far more comfortable than, sitting out in the desert waiting for the aircar to come back.
Obviously, anything that broke the monotony would be welcome, even if it was just a stopover somewhere like Town—which Pel, angrily remembering Ted’s words, had to admit probably did resemble the Pittsburgh bus station more than it did anything else.
So much for the romance and adventure of being in another universe.
The fact that none of them had so much as a toothbrush in the way of supplies didn’t help any. Having to either wear the same clothes constantly or borrow ill-fitting substitutes from condescending strangers was a constant irritation for them all; Amy and Susan had wound up with spare stewardess uniforms, but there hadn’t been enough of those to go around even for the women, so the crew and the original passengers had made donations to the poor, pitiful refugees.
“Condescending” was the politest word Pel could apply to their attitude. He would have paid his entire fortune for a well-packed suitcase—preferably one with a couple of paperbacks in it. A nice trashy novel would have been just right for passing the time.
Pel had initially assumed that the ship would have some sort of library, or a theater of some sort—just a VCR hooked to a TV would have been wonderful. This assumption had not panned out; some of the paying passengers had brought their own books, but there was no library, and none of the people native to this universe seemed to understand what he was talking about when he mentioned “TV,” or “video,” or “VCR.”
Movies they understood, films, motion pictures—though Pel had the impression that they only knew silents, that the Empire hadn’t yet developed talkies. In any case, there weren’t any films on board.
And books were too bulky. Keeping a good selection would have been, a steward told him, completely impractical; far better to let the passengers bring their own and swap.
None of the passengers seemed interested in simply loaning books to the refugees, and of course, the refugees had nothing to offer in trade.
This was not to say that there was nothing at all on board for entertainment; on the contrary, the Princess was, the stewards assured him, fully equipped in that regard. They carried a plentiful supply of playing cards, poker chips, backgammon boards, dice, and other gaming devices.
Pel was not quite ready to resort to such mundane pastimes—for one thing, he had no money with him, which really made poker and other gambling games rather pointless. He had never much liked backgammon, never even learned craps.
There were other card games, and he knew he would probably resort to them shortly, but for now he was still hoping to find something more exotic. He didn’t want to be like those people who go to Europe and eat at McDonald’s; he wanted to sample the local culture.
Unfortunately, the local culture was not cooperating. The native passengers, after the incident in the aft salon, avoided him even more than they avoided the other refugees. The crew spoke to him, but kept relations strictly businesslike and formal.
Nancy and Rachel had found something to occupy their time—caring for the two little people, who were growing weaker and weaker with no visible cause for their illness. The two of them were in constant pain now, and unable to move, and Nancy had taken it upon herself to stay with them and tend them as best she could, feeding them thin soup and aspirin, sponging off the heavy perspiration that bathed them, and talking to them soothingly. Rachel was acting as her mother’s messenger, running whatever errands needed to be run.
That was all very well, and in fact Pel was proud to see it, but there wasn’t room or need for another person in the storage compartment the little people occupied. That left him unable to help out, and without the company of his wife and daughter.
The others all seemed to have found ways to stay busy, as well—except for Ted, and Pel was avoiding him.
There wasn’t even anything to see out the ports; to the stern the stars had red-shifted into invisibility, while ahead they had blue-shifted into areas of the spectrum hazardous enough that the ports were kept closed.
This left him sufficiently desperate for entertainment to stand around asking stupid questions of the crew.
“How does anti-gravity work, anyway?” he said casually.
The navigator looked up from the periscope, annoyed. “What?” he asked.
Pel repeated his question.
“How the hell should I know?” the navigator snarled.
“Well, I just thought...” Pel began. “I mean, I don’t know anything about it, not even schoolboy stuff, we don’t have it where I come from.”
The navigator returned to the eyepiece, but said, “It’s simple enough. Matter absorbs gravitons, so that particles are drawn toward each other by the streams of gravitons flowing into them—that’s gravity, right?”
Pel made a noise of agreement, but was in fact bewildered; that was not at all the explanation he remembered from high school physics.
But then, why should it be? This was another universe, with its own laws.
“Well, anti-gravity makes solid matter spit the gravitons back out again, that’s all,” the navigator explained patiently, never moving his eyes from the periscope. “So it counteracts gravity. And if we make it spit the gravitons out all in one direction, we can use it like a rocket, only of course it’s far more powerful.”
“Oh,” Pel said.
It would appear, he thought, that gravity did not work here in anything like the way it did back home. No wonder Ruthless had dropped like a rock.
“How do you get matter to emit gravitons?” he asked.
The navigator let out an exasperate
d sigh and looked up from the lens. “You compress it until the space it occupies collapses, of course,” he said. “You take a lump of uranium, or something else really massive, and run a vibratory current through it to destabilize it, and then you apply pressure.”
Pel started to ask another question, then saw the navigator’s expression and thought better of it. “Thanks,” he said.
He started to turn away, and then something else occurred to him. “If we’re traveling faster than light,” he asked, “how can you see to navigate?”
“I’m not seeing anything,” the navigator said. “I’m reading the gravity fields.”
“Oh,” Pel said.
The whole thing sounded crazy. That bit about making the space an object occupied collapse sounded a little like black hole theory, but the rest of the explanation didn’t, and how would creating a miniature black hole result in anti- gravity? That didn’t make any sense.
It was clear that he had come upon this other universe’s version of quantum physics, and that he wasn’t going to make sense of it any time soon. He wandered off, baffled.
The navigator had at least answered him with more than monosyllables, however, so he drifted back an hour or two later and hovered nearby, trying to think of something intelligent to ask.
He was still working on the phrasing of a question about telling one star from another when the spectra had shifted when the navigator said, “Shit.”
This was almost the first time Pel had heard any citizen of the Galactic Empire use foul language. He blinked in surprise.
The navigator adjusted something and stared into the eyepiece, then repeated, somewhat louder, “Shit!”
“What is it?” Pel asked.
The navigator didn’t answer; instead he turned and pushed Pel aside as he reached for a button and pushed it hard. A bell chimed somewhere.
That done, the crewman looked at Pel as if only now discovering his presence.
“You’d better get to your cabin,” he said. “And lock the door. And if you have any weapons, get them.”
“Why?” Pel asked. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” the navigator said, “not for sure, but we’re slowing down. It looks like something’s got a gravity beam on us.”
“A gravity beam?” Pel was getting tired of feeling stupid and lost and asking dumb questions, but he couldn’t help himself. “What’s that mean?”
“It means someone’s slowing us down and pulling us in.”
Pel blinked. “It does?”
The navigator made a disgusted noise and pushed the button again. “Yes, it does,” he said.
“How does that work, though?”
“Where the hell are they?” the navigator asked, not speaking to Pel.
“Who?”
“The captain. It works... well, I told you we spit out a stream of gravitons from our main drive, right?”
Pel nodded.
“Well, you can spot that beam pretty easily, and track where it came from, and then if you fire a faster, more powerful beam back along the same line, it cancels out our main drive—and in fact...”
A buzzer sounded, and a distant, dull thump reverberated through the flooring beneath Pel’s feet. He felt suddenly lighter; his gorge rose in his throat, and his ears hurt.
“Damn!” the crewman said. “In fact, it can blow out the drive completely, which it just did, and then we’re just coasting until we can get it running again, and that gravity beam can reel us in like a fish on a line.”
Pel started to say something, and almost choked; the crewman glanced up and asked, “Feeling light-headed?”
Pel nodded.
“With the drive blown we don’t even have the full on-board gravity,” the man explained. “We’re on emergency power. Most ships don’t even have this sort of back-up, but the Princess is top of the line—on an ordinary ship you’d be drifting a foot off the floor right about now. And those bastards would probably like that just fine; we’d be even more helpless.”
“But why?” Pel asked, with his composure back but still utterly baffled, more confused than worried. “Who would want to do that?”
“Pirates,” the navigator said.
And then the alarms went off, and an officer chased Pel out of the room.
* * * *
Prossie had been asleep, afloat in the pleasant current of dreams, both her own and others she soaked up from her surroundings. She had picked up some wonderful imagery from somewhere nearby, from one of the non-telepaths aboard Emerald Princess, and had tangled it into the warm, comforting network of her own family. A faint touch of the pain and hurt and heat and worry from the forward storage locker had wormed its way into her sleeping thoughts, but so far it was just a little background noise, and had not turned the dreams into nightmares.
Then the alarm bell sounded, and she snapped awake, as much from the psychic shock of a score of other minds being startled as from the actual physical sound.
She felt the disciplined worry of the crew, the confusion of passengers, but the rule was “Don’t snoop,” so she didn’t snoop. She called Captain Cahn for orders.
He didn’t know what was going on, and latched onto her light contact.
“Find out,” he told her.
She thought a question.
“Just find out,” he replied. “No rules to get in the way until we know.”
She dropped the contact and reached out elsewhere. She found Captain Gifford, found the navigator—
And woke up Carrie, back at Base One, with her mental shout. Captain Cahn heard it, too.
Then she stopped worrying about anybody else for the next few minutes, as she found her uniform and began carefully searching for anything else that would mark her for what she was, an Imperial telepath. She had to hide it all, or better still, destroy it; had to remove all the evidence.
Because everybody knew what rebels and pirates and anyone else who feared the Empire did to telepaths. No outlaw could risk, even for a moment, having someone around who could relay their very thoughts to the Imperial military.
If the pirates reached Emerald Princess and spotted her for a telepath, killing her would be the first thing they did.
They wouldn’t even take the time to rape her first.
* * * *
Pel stood in the passageway, dazed, for several minutes, watching crewmen hurrying back and forth, most of them looking worried and determined and purposeful. A few looked angry, or frightened, or as dazed as Pel, instead. He kept himself pressed flat against one wall, out of the way.
After a time it occurred to him that there were probably better places to be. The navigator had told him to go to his cabin; that sounded like a good idea.
Pirates—had the man been serious?
Something was obviously wrong, and the navigator certainly hadn’t sounded as if he were joking, but pirates?
Space pirates?
That sounded so silly, like something out of a low-budget, straight-to-video movie, that Pel found it hard to believe it could be serious. Pirates?
Pirates were a childhood game, something out of kids’ adventure stories or old films. They were an absurd anachronism, a word that brought an image of peglegs and parrots and that ridiculous accent. Captain Hook and Errol Flynn and “Arr, me buckos”—those were pirates.
Pel smiled uneasily as he began inching toward his cabin, still keeping his back to the wall and staying out of the way of oncoming traffic in either direction. Pirates?
Ted wouldn’t believe in any pirates— but then, he didn’t believe in any of this. Raven and the rest from that world probably wouldn’t have any trouble with the concept, though, and Rachel might think it was exciting—or scary.
And he didn’t know about the other Earth people, Nancy and Amy and Susan...
Susan.
Susan Nguyen.
Pel grimaced. She probably wouldn’t think there was anything funny or unbelievable about pirates at all. Pel had no idea how she had gotten
to the U.S.—she might even be native-born, really—but she was obviously Vietnamese by ancestry, and plenty of Vietnamese refugees knew first-hand that pirates weren’t just something out of old adventure stories.
And Pel and his family were refugees now, like those boat people...
Suddenly Pel didn’t see anything particularly amusing about the idea of space pirates any more. He picked up his pace.
The cabin was empty, and he remembered belatedly that Nancy would still be tending to Grummetty and Alella. He turned back and headed that way.
At the door of the storage locker he found Rachel sitting against the bulkhead to one side, arms wrapped around her knees and her head down. She didn’t stir when he approached.
That wasn’t how she would react to the alarms, or to talk about pirates; Pel knew his daughter better than that.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her.
She shook her head and didn’t answer, didn’t look up.
“Rachel?”
She refused to speak, refused to move.
The locker door opened and Nancy peered out. “Oh, Pel,” she said. “It’s you.”
“Yeah,” Pel said. “What’s wrong?” He belatedly remembered why Nancy was there in the first place. “Are they worse?” he asked.
Nancy nodded. “Grummetty’s dead,” she said. “About ten minutes ago.” Her voice was unsteady.
Pel felt his own throat drying and tightening at the news.
“Oh,” he said helplessly. “I’m sorry.” He paused for a second or two, out of respect for the little man, and then said, “Listen, the ship’s in trouble.” He couldn’t bring himself to mention pirates, not yet; it still sounded stupid.
“I heard the bells,” Nancy said. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Pel said, “but the navigator said we’re under some kind of attack—something that shuts down the anti-gravity.”
“Is it Shadow?” Nancy asked. “Is it sending more of those creatures?”
Pel had not even thought of that; what if it was Shadow that was responsible, and not pirates?
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t think it could be the creatures, because they can’t live in this universe any more than Grummetty could, but it could be people working for Shadow, I guess.”
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