Catch the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  Breakfast over, I went back up to my quarters. Bindle brought me a morning paper; somebody in Rim Runners' dock office had been thoughtful enough to send copies on board. I lit a cigar, skimmed through it. It was deadly dull. (Other people's local rags are always dull—but this, The Port Forlorn Confederate, had been my local rag once . . .) I noted that Basset was listed in the Shipping Information column as having arrived. I noted, too, that the date of her departure was given as "indefinite". I knew that already.

  I read that the Confederacy's Department of Tourism was thinking about reestablishing the holiday resort on Eblis. I read about the Burns Night party that had been thrown by the Ambassador of the Empire of Waverley. Obviously he couldn't have been waiting for our consignment of Waverley scotch. I read about the Rim Rules Football match between the Port Forlorn Pirates and the Desolation Drovers. I found it hard to raise any interest in the account of the game. Even when I had been a Rim Worlder myself I hadn't been all that keen, and on most of the worlds of the Sirian Sector the game is Old Association, the only real football. Finally I found the crossword. It wasn't one of the cryptic variety, just a collection of absurdly simple clues that a retarded child of five could have solved in four minutes. It only took me three and a half.

  There was a knock at the door. I threw the paper aside, got out my chair to welcome Commodore Grimes.

  He took the seat I offered him, pulled out of his pocket an ancient and battered pipe that looked as though it was the very one that he had always smoked when I last knew him. It smelt like it, too. Sara Taine came in with a tray of coffee things. She seemed disposed to hang around with flapping ears, and looked hurt when I told her, "That will be all, thanks, Sara."

  Grimes said, "Quite comfortable quarters you have, Captain Rule."

  "Yes," I agreed. "Basset and her sister ships are an improvement on the Commission's basic Epsilon design. We have our own yards now in the Sector, of course, and build our own vessels . . ."

  "Passenger accommodation?" he asked.

  "I can take a dozen, in single berth cabins. More if people are willing to double up."

  "Mphm." He looked at me through the cloud of acrid smoke that he had just emitted. I countered with a smokescreen of my own. "Mphm. You know, of course, that we have our own Survey Ship, Faraway Quest . . . ."

  "I've heard of her, sir."

  "Well, the Quest's out of commission. Will be for some months yet. Oh, she's old, I admit, but even I didn't know that there were so many things wrong with her until she came up for Survey . . ." He relit his pipe, which had gone out, using one of the archaic matches that he still affected. "You know Kinsolving's Planet, of course?"

  "I know of it, Commodore. I've never been there."

  "I have," he told me. "Too often. The things that have happened to me there shouldn't happen to a dog. Well, the Port Forlorn University wants to send another expedition to Kinsolving. Normally I'd have been their bus driver, in Faraway Quest. But she, as I've told you, is grounded. And our Navy won't lay a ship on for a bunch of civilian scientists, psychic researchers at that. And all of our merchant tonnage, the Rim Runners fleet, is heavily committed for months to come. Do you get the picture?"

  "I'm beginning to," I admitted reluctantly.

  "Do I detect a certain lack of enthusiasm, Captain Rule? I can't say that I blame you. Oh, well, it shouldn't be hard to arrange a charter whereby we man the ship with our own personnel, while you and your boys and girls are put up in hotels at the Confederacy's expense."

  "I stay with my ship," I told him. "And I'm pretty sure that all my people will be of the same mind."

  "Good. I was expecting you to say that. So . . . If the charter is arranged—it's not definite yet—you'll be carrying half a dozen scientists, two qualified psionicists, the Kinsolving's Planet Advisor and his wife. The Advisor is me, of course. Sonya—my wife—doesn't like that world any more than I do, but she maintains that I'm far less liable to get into trouble if she's along . . ."

  "What is wrong with Kinsolving?" I asked.

  "You're a Rim Worlder born," he said. "You know the stories." Yes, I knew the stories, or some of them. Kinsolving had been colonized at the same time as the other Rim Worlds, but the colonization hadn't stuck. The people—those of them who hadn't committed suicide, been murdered or vanished without trace—were taken off and resettled on Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo and Thule.

  They all told the same story—oppressive loneliness, even in the middle of a crowd, continuous acute depression, outbreaks of irrational violence and, every night, dreams so terrifying that the hapless colonists dreaded going to bed. One theory that I remembered was that Kinsolving is the focal point of . . . forces, psychic forces. Another theory was that around the planet the fabric of our Universe is somehow strained, almost to breaking point, and that some of the alternate Universes aren't at all pleasant by our standards. But you don't have to go to Kinsolving to get the feeling that if you make an effort you'll be able to step into another Continuum; that sensation is common enough anywhere on the Rim. But it's on Kinsolving that you know that no effort at all is necessary, that a mere sneeze would suffice to blow you out of the known Universe into . . . Into Heaven? Maybe, but the reverse would be more likely.

  "Kinsolving," said Grimes softly, "is a sort of gateway . . . It's been opened quite a few times, to my knowledge. I'd as lief not be involved in its opening, but . . ." he shrugged . . . "it seems to be my fate always to be involved with the bloody planet."

  There was a heavy silence, which I thought I'd better break. "The professional psionicists you mentioned . . . ?"

  "Old friends of mine," he told me. "Ken Mayhew. One of a dying breed. He was a Psionic Communications Officer long before the Carlotti System was dreamed of. He still holds his commission in the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve. And Clarisse, his wife. A telepath and a teleporteuse. Both of them know Kinsolving."

  "And does this Mayhew," I asked, "still cart his personal amplifier around with him? I can remember the old-time PCOs and how they used to make pets of those obscene, disembodied dogs' brains . . ."

  "Ken used to keep his poodle's brain in aspic," said the Commodore, "but not any longer. He and Clarisse work as a team. She amplifies for him when he's sending or receiving, and he for her when she's teleporting."

  "And the scientists? Any weirdos among them?"

  "Oddly, enough, no. They study psychic phenomena without being in any way psychic themselves. They've cooked up some fantastically sensitive instruments, I understand, that can measure the slightest variations of temperature, atmospheric pressure, electrical potential and whatever. They have their own theory about Kinsolving, which is that the planet is actually haunted, in the good, old-fashioned way. And for a ghost to appear and speak and throw things around it must get energy from somewhere. A drop in temperature, for example, indicates that energy is being used." He laughed, rather mirthlessly. "It makes a change from all the other ideas about Kinsolving—multidimensional universes and all the rest of it . . ."

  "And what are your ideas about it, sir?" I asked.

  "Kinsolving," he said, "is a world where anything can happen and almost certainly will."

  The charter was arranged; our Canis Major Head Office was happy enough that profitable employment had been found for Basset. We, Basset's crew, were not so happy. We were all a long way from home, and too long a time out, and this excursion to Kinsolving would inevitably delay our departure from the Rim Worlds for the Sirian Sector.

  There was one slight consolation; we were not kept hanging around long on Lorn. One day sufficed for the discharge of our inward cargo. It was a matter of hours only to ready the passenger accommodations for occupancy. There was the routine overhaul of all machinery, which took four days, and while this was in progress extra stores were taken on and the crates and cases containing the scientists' equipment loaded. On the morning of the sixth day the passengers boarded.

  Ken and Clarisse Mayhew I had already met at Grimes' home, wher
e he and Sonya, his wife, had had us all to dinner. Ken was a typical telepath, one of the type with which I have become familiar in the days when the only FTL communication between ships and between ships and planet-bases stations was through the PCOs. He was tall, inclined to be weedy, with mousy hair, muddy eyes and an otherworldly appearance. Clarisse was another kettle of tea, not at all conforming to the popular idea of a psionicist. She was a very attractive girl with brown hair and brown eyes, strong featured, although a mite too solidly built for my taste. Sonya Grimes, however, was the sort of woman for whom I could fall quite easily; tall and slim, with a thin, slightly prominent nose and a wide mouth, remarkable violet eyes, sleek auburn hair. Her figure? She could have worn an old flour sack and made it look as though it had been imported at great expense from Paris, Earth.

  The commodore and his wife were guests in the control room during liftoff. Sonya was a spacewoman, I had learned earlier, and although married to a Rim Worlder she still retained both her Federation citizenship and her Survey Service commission. Grimes, I could see, was just itching to get his own paws on the controls. (He had confided to me that, at times, he found the life of a desk-borne commodore more than a little irksome.) But he sat in one of the spare chairs, well out of the way, watching. I don't think that he missed anything. Sonya was beside him. She laughed when we went through our own Dog Star Line ritual after the routine checks for spaceworthiness.

  The junior officer present—young Taylor, the Third—demanded in a portentously solemn voice, "What is the Word?"

  We all roared in reply, "Growl you may, but go you must!"

  Sonya, as I have said, was amused. She whispered to her husband, "I'm beginning to find out why this company's ships are called the chariots of the dogs . . ." I knew what she meant. That Twentieth Century book, Chariots of the Gods, is still regarded as a Bible by those people who believe in the Old Race who started all the present civilization extant in the Galaxy.

  Aerospace Control gave us clearance to lift, wished us bon voyage. We climbed into what was an unusual phenomenon for Lorn, a clear sky. Soon the spaceport was no more than a huddle of model buildings far below us, with three toy ships on the apron. (Rim Kestrel and Rim Wallaby had come in before our departure; Rim Osprey was due to leave, for the worlds of the Eastern Circuit, later in the day.)

  The little bitch was handling well. I took her up easily, not trying to break any records. I heard Sonya murmur, "George isn't like you, John. He doesn't show off using his auxiliary reaction drive when there's no need for it . . ." Grimes replied with a far from expressionless face.

  Lorn, with its wide, dreary (even in the sunlight) plains, its jagged, snow-capped mountains, diminished below us, became a mottled globe, grey-brown land, green-blue water, white snow. Still we drove upward, through and clear to the Van Allens.

  The inertial drive was shut down and the directional gyroscopes grumbled into life, swinging the ship about her axes, bringing her head around to point almost directly at the target star, the Kinsolving sun, a solitary spark in the empty blackness. On the ship's beam glowed the iridescent lens of the Galaxy, spectacular and, to those of us not used to seeing it from outside, frightening. I steadied her up on the target, making a small allowance for drift. I restarted the inertial drive and then started the Mannschenn Drive, the space-time-twister.

  As on every such occasion I visualized those gleaming rotors spinning, precessing, fading as they tumbled down the warped dimensions fading yet never vanishing, dragging the ship and all aboard her into that uncanny state where normal physical laws held good only within the fragile hull. There was the long second of déjà vu during which time seemed to run backward.

  Inside the control room colours sagged down the spectrum and perspective was distorted, and all sounds were as though emanating from a distant echo chamber. Then all snapped back to normal, although the thin, high whine of the drive was a constant reminder that nothing was or would be normal until we were at our destination. And there was nothing normal outside the ports, of course. Ahead the Kinsolving sun was a writhing, multicoloured nebulosity, and on the beam the Lens was a pullulating Klein flask blown by a drunken glass blower. It looked as though it were alive. Perhaps it was alive. Perhaps only with the Mannschenn Drive in operation do we see it as it really is . . .

  I dismissed the uneasy thought from my mind. I said to Bindle, "Deep Space routine, Mr. Mate."

  "But who will keep the dog watches?" asked Taylor.

  "You're all watchdogs," I replied.

  "More of your ritual?" asked Sonya interestedly.

  "Yes," I admitted, feeling absurdly embarrassed. "I suppose it does sound rather childish to an outsider . . ."

  Grimes laughed. "I remember one ship I was in when I was in the Survey Service. The cruiser Orion. We called her O'Ryan, of course, and everybody had to speak an approximation to Irish dialect, and our song, just as Doggy In The Window is your song, was The Wearin' Of The Green . . ."

  "Still rather childish," his wife said, but her smile took any sting out of the words.

  Grimes said, "Well, Captain Rule, are you coming down to meet the customers?"

  I said, "I suppose it's one of the things I'm paid for."

  * * *

  The customers—the passengers—were in their own saloon. Ken and Clarisse Mayhew I had already met, of course, the others, until now, had been no more than names on the passenger list. There was a Dr. Thorne—I never did get it straight what exactly he was a doctor of—and his wife.

  They were Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt in reverse, he a bearded, Falstaffian giant, she a grey, wispy sparrow. There were two, almost identical young men; mousey, studious, bespectacled. Their names were Paul Trentham and Bill Smith. The two young women could have been their sisters, but were not. One was Susan Howard, the other Mary Lestrange. They were friendly enough—not that they overdid it.

  Sara, ever efficient, had seen to it that the bar in the saloon was well stocked. Thorne took over as barman; the drinks soon dispelled the initial stiffness of this first meeting. I rather took to the leader of the expedition and he to me. I felt that I would be able, without giving offense, to ask him a question that had been bothering me slightly.

  "Tell me, Doctor," I put to him, "why don't you have any mediums along? You have two psionicists, sure, but they are, essentially, communications specialists, and by communications I don't mean communications with the dear departed."

  He laughed, a little ruefully. "One thing that our researches have taught us is this. There are many, many phoney mediums. Even the genuine ones sometimes, although not always intentionally so."

  "What do you mean, exactly?"

  "Look at it this way. A genuine medium is determined to deliver the goods. If the goods aren't forthcoming, because conditions aren't right, perhaps, then he or she would just hate to disappoint the customers. Quite possibly subconsciously—but now and again consciously—fake results are delivered. The main trouble, I suppose, is that the average medium doesn't have it drummed into him, all through a long training, that high standards of professional ethics must be maintained. A graduate of the Rhine Institute, however—such as Ken Mayhew—is bound by the Institute's code of ethics. He is therefore far more reliable than any medium."

  "But you do believe in spiritualism, don't you?"

  "I believe that there are hauntings. I believe that Kinsolving's Planet is haunted. I—we—want to find out by whom. Or what."

  "I seem to be spending my life finding out," grumbled Grimes. "But every time I get a different answer."

  "Perhaps you're a catalyst, Commodore," suggested Mrs. Thorne.

  "And perhaps Captain Rule is a dogalyst," said Sonya.

  I tried to laugh along with the rest at the vile pun—jokes about the Dog Star Line are all right when we make them, but . . .

  * * *

  The voyage was a relatively short one. It was like all other voyages, except that at the latter end of it we should not be landing at a proper s
paceport with all the usual radio-navigational aids. There would be no bored voice coming from the NST speaker, talking us down. There would be no triangle of beacons to mark our berth on the apron. Come to that, there would be no apron. The spaceport had become a sizeable crater when something had destroyed the Franciscan ship Piety a while ago.

  Grimes had brought his charts with him. Together we studied them. He advised me to make my landing in the old Sports Stadium, on the shore of Darkling Tarn, not far from the city of Enderston, the ruins of which stood on the east bank of the Weary River. Those colonists had shown a morbid taste in place names . . . That applied to all the Rim Worlds, of course, but Kinsolving took the prize for deliberately miserable nomenclature.

  The commodore acted as pilot when we finally made our approach; he had been on Kinsolving before, more than once, and he possessed the local knowledge. I handled the controls myself, of course, but he was in the chair normally occupied by Bindle, advising.

  We were making an early morning descent—always a wise policy when landing on a world without proper spaceport facilities. The lower the sun's altitude, the more pronounced the shadows cast by every irregularity of the ground. Too, when an expedition arrives at sunrise it has all the daylight hours to get itself organised. Left to myself, I'd have arrived when I arrived and not bothered about such niceties. It was Grimes, with his years of Survey Experience behind him, who had urged me to adopt Survey Service s.o.p.