Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  Grimes changed the subject. “And how do you find our scientific passengers? Dr. Druthen, I’m sure, regards you and Clarisse as sort of commissioned teacup readers.”

  “He would. But that’s one mind, John, that I wouldn’t care to pry into. The man just oozes bigotry. He’s a second-rater, and although he’d hate to admit it, he knows it. That accounts for his attitude toward the universe in general. He has this driving ambition to be on top, no matter what the cost to other people.”

  “And you haven’t pried?”

  “No. I have not pried. But every trained telepath is something of a psychologist—not that one needs to be one to figure out what makes a man like Druthen tick.”

  “Mphm.” Slowly Grimes filled and lit his pipe. “Well, thanks, Ken. There’re one or two things I’d like to check in Control. I’ll see you later.”

  He let himself out of the little cabin and then, by way of the axial shaft, made his way to the control room. He chatted there for a while with Billy Williams, then went to his own quarters to join Sonya for a drink or two before dinner.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked him.

  “There are times,” he told her, “when I realize how lucky I am.”

  Chapter 8

  THERE WERE TIMES—rather more frequent than he cared to admit—when Grimes was lucky. This was one of them. Part of his luck, perhaps, was in having a really outstanding navigator aboard his ship. Carnaby’s last captain had said of him, “He could find a black cat in a coal mine at midnight in three seconds flat.” This was not far from the truth.

  There had been no need whatsoever for Faraway Quest to run a wearisome search pattern after the fifty-light-year plunge outward from the Lead Stars. Carnaby had applied this course correction and that course correction, each time a matter of seconds rather than of minutes or degrees, had played a complicated game of three-dimensional—or four dimensional, even—noughts and crosses in the plotting tank, had overworked the ship’s computer to such an extent that Williams had said to Grimes, “If the bloody thing had a real brain it would go on strike!”

  And then the Mass Proximity Indicator had picked up a target just inside its one-light-year maximum range. Almost directly ahead it was, a tiny spark, a minute bead on the thin, glowing filament that was the extrapolated trajectory. It was time to slow down, although there was no danger of collision. Two solid bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time—but when one of those solid bodies is proceeding under Mannschenn Drive it is in a time of its own.

  Grimes took over personally as the range closed. The tiny spark in the screen slowly expanded to a globe, luminescent, with other tiny sparks in orbit about it. There could be no doubt as to what it was.

  The Mannschenn Drive was shut down and Faraway Quest proceeded cautiously under inertial drive only, a run of about twelve hours at one G acceleration. The commodore stayed in Control, smoking, drinking coffee, nibbling an occasional sandwich. His officers, their control room watches completed, stayed on with him. Sonya was there, of course, and so were Mayhew and Clarisse. Major Dalzell was there for most of the time, and even Druthen, uninvited, came up.

  The Outsiders’ Ship was within radar range now, it and the derelicts circling it. It was within radar range and it could be seen visually at last, a tiny, not very bright star in the blackness where no star had any right to be. The powerful telescope was trained on it, adjusted, and its picture glowed on the forward vision screen. It was . . . There was only one word for it. It was fantastic. It shone with a light of its own, a cold luminosity, bright but not harsh. It was not a ship so much as a castle out of some old fairy tale, with towers and turrets, cupolas and minarets and gables and buttresses. It should have looked absurd, but it did not. It should have looked grotesque, and it did, but for all the grotesquerie it was somehow . . . right. Its proportions were the only possible proportions.

  Grimes stared at the picture, the somehow frightening picture, as did the others. He felt Sonya’s hand tighten on his shoulder. The very humanness of the gesture helped him, brought him back to the prosaic reality of the control room of his own ship. There were things to be done.

  “Mr. Carnaby,” he snapped, “let me have the elements of a stable orbit about this . . . thing. Mr. Hendrikson, see if you can ascertain how many derelicts there are in this vicinity. Plot their orbits.”

  “And have the weaponry in a state of readiness, sir?” asked Hendrikson hopefully.

  “Use your tracking system for plotting those orbits,” Grimes told him coldly. “It can be used for other things besides gunnery, you know.”

  Daniels, the radio officer, had not waited for specific orders. He was dividing his attention between the normal space-time equipment and the Carlotti transceiver. He reported to Grimes: “I think there’s the faintest whisper on the Carlotti, sir. I have it on broad band, but I’ll try to get a bearing.”

  Grimes looked at the pilot antenna, at the ellipsoid Mobius Strip rotating about its long axis and quivering, hunting, on its universal mount. There was something there, something, but it didn’t know quite where. He was about to get up from his chair to join Daniels at the communications equipment when, to his annoyance, Druthen remarked, “So you got us here, Commodore.” The tone of his voice implied more than mild surprise.

  “Yes. I got us here. Excuse me, I’m busy. . . .”

  “Sir. . . .” It was the navigator.

  “Yes, Mr. Carnaby?”

  “All ready, sir. But we’d better not bring her in closer than a couple of miles. That thing has the mass of a planetoid.”

  “Mphm.” Carnaby was exaggerating, of course. It was one of his failings. Even so . . . an artificial gravitational field? A distortion of the framework of space itself?

  “Sir, I think I have something . . .” broke in Daniels.

  “Commander Williams, take over the pilotage, please. Be careful not to run into any of the derelicts that Mr. Hendrikson is using for his make-believe target practice!”

  “Good-oh, Skipper.”

  Grimes unsnapped his seat belt, strode swiftly to the vacant chair beside Daniels, buckled himself in just as the inertial drive was stopped and the ship went into free fall. He saw that the pilot antenna had stopped hunting, was now steady on a relative bearing almost dead astern of Faraway Quest, a bearing that slowly changed as Williams began to put the ship into her orbit.

  Yes, he could hear a whisper, no more than a faint, faraway muttering, even though the volume control was turned full on. He could not distinguish the words. He did not think that the speaker was using Standard English. He regretted, as he had done before, that he was and always had been so distressingly monolingual.

  “New German, I think . . .” Daniels said slowly.

  “Sonya,” called Grimes, “see if you can get the drift of this!”

  But when she joined her husband and Daniels the set was silent again. Perhaps, thought Grimes, Mayhew might be able to pick something up. It was not necessary for him to say it aloud.

  “Yes, sir,” the telepath almost whispered, “there is something, somebody. No, it’s not the Waldegren warship you’re expecting. . . . It’s . . . it’s. . . .”

  “Damn it all, Commander, who the hell is it?” demanded Grimes.

  Mayhew’s voice, as he replied, held reproof. “You’ve broken the very tenuous contact that I’d just begun to make.”

  “Sorry. But do your best, Commander Mayhew.”

  “I’m . . . trying. . . .”

  “Orbit established, Skipper,” reported Williams.

  “No dangerous approach to any of the other orbits, sir,” reported Carnaby and Hendrikson, speaking as one.

  “Yes, yes. Commander Mayhew?”

  “I’m trying . . . to try.” Mayhew’s expression was both very faraway and more than a little pained. “But . . . so much interference. There’s somebody we know. . . and there are strangers. . . .”

  “Are they in these derelicts? Aboard The Outsider?
”

  “No, sir. If they were close, I should know. But they are distant still. But please, please try not to interrupt any more. . . .”

  “Let him go into his trance and get on with the clairvoyance,” sneered Druthen.

  “Shut up, Doctor! Do you want to be ordered out of Control?” snarled Grimes.

  The scientist subsided.

  “Please . . .” pleaded Mayhew.

  Then there was silence in the control room, broken only by the sibilant whisperings of such machines as, with the ship now in free-falling orbit, were still in operation. The soughing of fans, the whining of generators, the very occasional sharp click of a relay. . . .

  “Metzenther . . .” muttered Mayhew.

  Grimes and Sonya exchanged glances. They were the only two, apart from the psionic communications officer, to whom the name meant anything.

  “Trialanne . . .” He was vocalizing his thoughts for Grimes’ benefit. “Metzenther, Trialanne . . . Where are you bound?” He seemed to find the answer amusing. “No, we haven’t any company yet, apart from a half dozen or so derelict ships. . . . Be seeing you . . . Or shall we . . . I wouldn’t know, I’m not a physicist or a mathematician. . . . And can you pick up anybody else . . .? We think we heard a Waldegren ship on our Carlotti. . . . And I got the faintest mutter from somebody else. . . . No, not a telepath, just unconscious broadcasting. . . . A servant of some empire or other. . . . Not yours, by any chance . . . ? No . . .?”

  “And are we to have the pleasure of meeting that big, blonde cow again?” demanded Sonya coldly.

  “She was quite attractive, in a hefty sort of way,” Grimes told her. “You would think so.”

  Mayhew grinned. “I rather think, Commander Verrill, that we shall shortly experience the pleasure of renewing our acquaintance with the ex-Empress Irene, and Captain Trafford, and all the rest of Wanderer’s people.”

  “But they’re on a different time track,” said Sonya. “And thank all the Odd Gods of the Galaxy for that!”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes. “Mphm.” He gestured toward the viewport through which The Outsiders’ Ship was clearly visible. “But here, I think, is where all the time tracks converge.”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” said Sonya. “I hope you’re wrong. But I’m rather afraid that you’re not.”

  “He’s not,” confirmed Mayhew.

  Chapter 9

  “MPHM.” Grimes made a major production of filling and lighting his foul pipe. “How long before your odd friends get here, Commander Mayhew?”

  “My friends, sir?”

  “Yes. Your friends. Metzenther and his ever-loving. You telepaths always seem to stick together.” Grimes grinned. “Frankly, I regarded that ex-empress woman and her bunch of Imperial Navy throwouts as a pain in the arse. . . .”

  Mayhew grinned back. “They thought about you and Commander Verrill in rather the same way.”

  “Good. But when do they get here?” The psionic communications officer shut his eyes, concentrated. He said slowly, “In about three hours fifteen minutes Standard.”

  “That gives us time . . . Commander Williams, I think you’ll find one or two Confederate ensigns in the flag locker. You’ll want one with wire stiffening, and a pole with a magnetic base. We’ll plant our colors on the . . . The Outsider. I doubt if the legality of the claim will be recognized in a court of interstellar law, but it will give us some sort of talking point.

  “Meanwhile, probably quite a few of you are wondering what this is all about. You know, Commander Williams, and Mayhew knows, but none of the rest of you will have heard the full story. It’ll be as well if I put you in the picture.” He turned to Williams. “You’d better get your flag planting under way, Commander, just in case Mayhew’s ETA is out. And could you lend Commander Williams a couple or three hands for the job, Major Dalzell? And Mr. Daniels, I shall want everything I say put through on the intercom. Thank you.”

  Williams and Dalzell left the control room. Grimes cleared his throat. He said into the microphone that Daniels handed him, “Attention, all hands. Attention, all hands. This is important. You will all have seen, in the public information screens, our objective, The Outsiders’ Ship. Most of you will have realized that we are now in orbit about it. Shortly you will see a landing party jetting off from this vessel toward The Outsider. They will be planting a flag on it. The reason for this is that we shall soon be having company. This will not be the Waldegren warship that we have been expecting—although she, probably, will be along before very long.

  “A few years ago,” Grimes continued, “I was instructed to take Faraway Quest out to investigate some strange, drifting wreckage—wreckage that, obviously, had not originated in this universe. It was the remains of a lifeboat that had belonged to a ship called Star Scout, and Star Scout had been a unit of the Imperial Navy. The only empire that we know is the Empire of Waverley, and its navy is officially called the Imperial Jacobean Navy. So . . .

  “So we were stooging around, trying to find a few further clues, when this ship, quite literally, appeared from nowhere. Her name was Wanderer. She was quite heavily armed, the equivalent to one of our destroyers, but she was privately owned. She had been the yacht of the Empress Irene. She was still owned by the ex-Empress Irene, who was married to her captain. She carried only a small crew—this Irene woman was mate, as well as owner; a Mr. Tallentire, who had been a gunnery officer in the Imperial Navy was second mate, and his wife, Susanna, had been lady-in-waiting to the empress, and was now radio-officer-cum-purser. The psionic communications officer was—and still is—a Mr. Metzenther, almost the double of our Commander Mayhew. This Metzenther had—has—an Iralian wife called Trialanne. We don’t have any Iralians on this time track. They were all wiped out by a plague. Bronheim was the engineer. He, too, had an Iralian wife—Denelleen . . .”

  “Not now he doesn’t,” Mayhew said soberly. “I’ve been catching up on past history with Metzenther. Do you mind if I take over, sir?”

  “Go ahead, Commander.”

  “Mayhew speaking. As you all will, by this time, have gathered, I am in psionic touch with the yacht Wanderer. She was thrown, somehow, onto this time track when she attempted the passage of the Horsehead Nebula. She was pursued by two New Iralian cruisers—the New Iralians being insurgents. She was carrying Iralian passengers, some of whom were in sympathy with the rebels. With our help she shook off pursuit, and then tried to get back into her own universe by running back through the Nebula. She was overtaken, but came out on top in the running fight. But the rebels among the passengers tried to take over the ship. Denelleen was one of them. . . . Anyhow, the mutineers were defeated. And that’s about all.”

  “That was then,” said Grimes. “What are these people doing here now?”

  “You may remember, sir,” Mayhew told him, “that when we last met them they were on charter to an organization called GLASS—Galactic League Against Suppression and Slavery. They’re still on charter to GLASS. GLASS has the idea that the science and technology in The Outsiders’ Ship will be useful to them in their work.”

  “So they: the ex-empress, GLASS and all the rest of ’em have an Outsiders’ Ship in their universe. So—as I’ve already guessed—it’s not a different one, but the same one as we have. So the time tracks meet and mingle right here.” The commodore laughed. “Who else shall we meet, I wonder. . . .”

  Sonya said flatly, “Williams has planted the flag.”

  “And so we, more or less legally, own it,” said Grimes. He added softly, “Unless it owns us.”

  “Rubbish!” sneered Druthen.

  Grimes ignored the man.

  Chapter 10

  “I JUST MIGHT,” suggested Daniels diffidently, “be able to establish Carlotti contact with Wanderer. I think that the time tracks will almost have converged by now.”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes, giving thought to the possibility. Technologically his universe and the universe of the ex-Empress Irene were almost twins. At the ti
me of his previous encounter with the so-called yacht she had possessed Carlotti equipment almost identical to his own. “Mphm.” Then, “No, Mr. Daniels. Concentrate on that Waldegren destroyer. She’s our main worry.” He looked out through the viewport and was relieved to see that Williams and the two marines, silvery figures trailing luminous blue exhausts, were almost back to the ship.

  “Looks like being quite a party,” commented Sonya. “The big, fat blonde, Irene, with her playmates, and our dear friends from Waldegren. . . .”

  “No friends of mine,” growled Grimes. “I was at the Battle of Dartura. . . . Remember?”

  “Long before my time, dearie,” she commented.

  “Commodore! Sir!” broke in Carnaby. “A target, on the radar!”

  “Not one of the derelicts, Mr. Carnaby?”

  “No. It just appeared out of nothingness. It’s closing on us, fast.”

  “Mr. Hendrikson—all weapons to bear. Do not open fire without orders. Mr. Daniels, try to establish contact. Commander Mayhew—is it Wanderer?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then who the hell . . . or what the hell . . . ?”

  “Locked on, sir,” reported Hendrikson.

  “Good.”

  “Range still closing, but less rapidly. We should have her visually in a few seconds.” said Carnaby.

  “Thank you. Commander Williams, the telescope.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper!”

  “No contact, sir,” murmured Daniels. “But I can hear the Waldegren ship again. She’s still distant.”

  “I’ve got her in the telescope,” drawled Williams. “Odd-looking bitch . . . she’s on the screen now, if you care to take a butcher’s.”

  Grimes took a “butcher’s hook,” reflecting that life was already sufficiently complicated without his second-in-command’s rhyming slang. The strange ship was there, exactly in the center of the circle of blackness, a silver moth pinned against the backdrop of the night. As she approached, her image expanded rapidly. She was a gleaming disc—but, Grimes realized, he was looking at her head on—from which sprouted a complexity of antennae. And then, slowly, she turned, presenting her profile. Apart from that veritable forest of metallic rods she was not unlike the Survey Service courier that had been Grimes’ first command long ago, so very long ago, one of the so-called “flying darning needles.” As yet she had made no hostile move. But, assuming that she was alien, captained by a nonhuman or, even, by a nonhumanoid, would a hostile move be recognized as such before it was too late?