Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  Grimes made the little jump required to break magnetic contact between boot soles and deck plating, at the same time actuating his suit propulsion unit. He knew, without turning to watch, that the others were following him. Swiftly he crossed the narrow moat of nothingness, turning himself about his short axis at just the right time, coming in to a landing on an area of The Outsider’s hull that was clear of turrets and antennae. He felt rather than heard the muffled clang as his feet hit the flat metal surface. Sonya came down beside him, then Williams, then Dalzell.

  The commodore looked up at his ship, hanging there in the absolute blackness, faint light showing from her control room viewports, a circle of brighter light marking the reopened airlock door. He could see four figures jumping from it—the sergeant of marines and three privates. Next would be Mayhew, with Engineer Commander Davis; Brenda Coles, the assistant biochemist; and Ruth Macoby, assistant radio officer. It was a pity, thought Grimes, that he had not crewed his ship with more specialist officers; but it had been assumed, of course, that Dr. Druthen and his scientists and technicians would fill this need. But Druthen and his people, together with von Donderberg and his surviving junior officer, were prisoners in the empty cargo hold in which Faraway Quest’s crew had been confined.

  “We’re being watched,” whispered Sonya, her voice faint from the helmet transceiver.

  They were being watched. Two of the antennae on the border of the clear area were turning, twisting. They looked unpleasantly like cobras poised to strike.

  “Not to worry,” Grimes assured her. “Calver mentioned the very same thing in his report.”

  The sergeant and his men were down now. The eight humans were tending to huddle. “Break it up!” Dalzell was barking. “Break it up! We’re too good a target like this!”

  “So is the ship, Major.” Grimes told him.

  “Sorry, sir.” The young marine did not sound very penitent. “But I think we should take all precautions.”

  “All right,” said Grimes. “Scatter—within reason.” But he and Sonya stayed very close together.

  Mayhew, Davis, Coles and Macoby came in. The telepath identified Grimes by the badges of rank on his space suit, came to stand with him and Sonya.

  “Well, Ken?” asked the commodore.

  “It . . . it knows we’re here. It . . . it is deciding. . . .”

  “If it doesn’t make its mind up soon,” said Grimes, “I’ll burn my way in.”

  “Sir!” Mayhew sounded horrifed.

  “Don’t worry,” Sonya told him. “It’s opening up for us.”

  Smoothly, with no vibrations, a circular door was sliding to one side. Those standing on it had ample time to get clear of the opening, to group themselves about its rim. They looked down into a chamber, lit from no discernible source, that was obviously an airlock. From one of its walls, rungs spaced for the convenience of human beings extruded themselves. (And would those rungs have been differently spaced for other, intelligent, space-faring beings? Almost certainly.)

  Grimes reported briefly by his suit radio to Hendrikson who had been left in charge. He knew without asking that Mayhew would be making a similar report to Clarisse. Then he said, “All right. We’ll accept the invitation.” He lowered himself over the rim, a foot on the first rung of the ladder.

  The Outsider’s artificial gravity field was functioning, and down was down.

  There was ample room in the chamber for all twelve of them. They stood there silently, watching the door slide back into place over their heads. Dalzell and his marines kept their hands just over the butts of their handguns. Grimes realized that he was doing the same. He was wearing at his belt a pair of laser pistols. He spoke again into his helmet microphone. His companions could hear him, but it became obvious that they were now cut off from communication with the ship. Captain Calver, he remembered, had reported the same phenomenon. It didn’t really matter. Mayhew said that he could still reach Clarisse and that she could reach him.

  “Atmosphere, Commodore,” said the biochemist, looking at the gauge among the other gauges on her wrist. “Oxygen helium mixture. It would be safe to remove our helmets.”

  “We keep them on,” said Grimes.

  Another door in the curving wall was opening. Beyond it was an alleyway, a tunnel that seemed to run for miles and flooded with light. As was the case in the chamber there were no globes or tubes visible. There was nothing but that shadowless illumination and that long, long metallic tube, like the smooth bore of some fantastically huge cannon.

  Grimes hesitated only briefly, then began to stride along the alleyway. Sonya stayed at his side. The others followed. Consciously or unconsciously they fell into step. The regular crash of their boots on the metal floor was echoed, reechoed, amplified. They could have been a regiment of the Brigade of Guards, or of Roman legionaries. They marched on and on, along that tunnel with no end. And as they marched the ghosts of those who had been there before them kept pace with them—the spirits of men and of not-men, from only yesterday and from ages before the Terran killer ape realized that an antelope humerus made an effective tool for murder.

  It was wrong to march, Grimes dimly realized. It was wrong to tramp into this . . . this temple in military formation, keeping military step. But millennia of martial tradition were too strong for him, were too strong for the others to resist (even if they wanted to do so). They were men, uniformed men, members of a crew, proud of their uniforms, their weapons and their ability to use them. Before them—unseen, unheard, but almost tangible—marched the phalanxes of Alexander, Napoleon’s infantry, Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Behind them marched the armies yet to come.

  Damn it all! thought Grimes desperately. We’re spacemen, not soldiers. Even Dalzell and his Pongoes are more spacemen than soldiers.

  But a gun doesn’t worry about the color of the uniform of the man who fires it.

  “Stop!” Mayhew was shouting urgently. “Stop!” He caught Grimes’ swinging right arm, dragged on it.

  Grimes stopped. Those behind him stopped, in a milling huddle—but the hypnotic spell of marching feet, of phantom drum and fife and bugle, was broken.

  “Yes, Commander Mayhew?” asked Grimes.

  “It’s . . . Clarisse. A message . . . Important. I couldn’t receive until we stopped marching. . . .”

  “What is it?” demanded Grimes.

  “The . . . ship . . . and Clarisse and Hendrikson and the others. . . . They’re prisoners again!”

  “Druthen? Von Donderberg?”

  “Yes.”

  Grimes turned to his second-in-command. “You heard that, Commander Williams?”

  “Yair. But it ain’t possible, Skipper. Nary a tool or a weapon among Druthen an’ his mob. We stripped ’em all to their skivvies before we locked ’em up, just to make sure.”

  “How did it happen?” Grimes asked Mayhew sharply.

  “The . . . the details aren’t very clear. But Clarisse thinks that it was a swarm of fragments, from one of the blown-up derelicts, on an unpredictable orbit. The Quest was holed badly, in several places . . . including the cargo hold. Mr. Hendrikson opened up so the prisoners could escape to an unholed compartment.”

  “Any of us would have done the same,” said Grimes slowly. He seemed to hear Sir Dominic Flandry’s mocking laughter. “But what’s happening now?”

  “Von Donderberg has all the Quest’s weapons trained on The Outsider, on the airlock door. If we try to get out we shall be like sitting ducks.”

  “Stalemate . . .” said the commodore. “Well, we’ve a breathable atmosphere in here—I hope. So that’s no worry. There may even be water and food suitable for our kind of life. . . .”

  “But they’re coming after us. The airlock door has opened for them! They’re here now!”

  “Down!” barked Dalzell, falling prone with a clatter. The others followed suit. There were dim figures visible at the end of the tunnel, dim and very distant. There was the faraway chatter of some automatic projectile weap
on. The major and his men were firing back, but without apparent success.

  And at the back of Grimes’ mind a voice—an inhuman voice, mechanical but with a hint of emotion—was saying. No, no. Not again. They must learn. They must learn.

  Then there was nothingness.

  Chapter 30

  GRIMES SAT ON THE HILLTOP, watching Clarisse work.

  She, clad in the rough, more-or-less-cured pelt of a wolflike beast, looked like a cavewoman, looked as her ancestors on this very world must have looked. Grimes looked like what he was—a castaway. He was wearing the ragged remnants of his long johns. His space suit, together with the suits of the others who had been so armored, was stowed neatly in a cave against the day when it would be required again—if ever. Other members of the party wore what was left of their uniforms. They were all here, all on what Grimes had decided must be Kinsolving’s Planet, twenty men and thirteen women.

  And, some miles away, were Druthen and von Donderberg and their people. They were still hostile—and in their tribe were only five women, two of them past childbearing age. They had their weapons still—but, like Faraway Quest’s crew, were conserving cartridges and power packs. Nonetheless, three nights ago they had approached Grimes’ encampment closely enough to bring it within range of their trebuchet and had lobbed a couple of boulders into the mouth of the main cave before they were driven off by Dalzell and his marines.

  All of them were on Kinsolving’s Planet.

  It was Kinsolving’s Planet ages before it had been discovered by Commodore Kinsolving, ages before those mysterious cavemen had painted their pictures on the walls of the caves. (Perhaps the ancestors of those cavemen were here now. . . .) The topography was all wrong. But by the time that Man pushed out to the rim of the galaxy, old mountain ranges would have been eroded would have sunk, seas would roll where now there were plains, wrinklings of the world’s crust would bring new, towering peaks into being.

  But that feeling of oddness that Grimes had known on his previous visit (previous, but in the far distant future) to this planet still persisted. On Kinsolving anything could happen, and most probably would.

  Was it some sort of psionic field induced by The Outsiders’ Ship? Or had The Outsider been drawn to that one position in space by the field? Come to that—who (or what) were the Outsiders? Do-gooders? Missionaries? Beings whose evolution had taken a different course from that of Man, of the other intelligent races of the Galaxy?

  And we, thought Grimes, are descendants of the killer ape, children of Cain. . . . What would we have been like if our forebears had been herbivores, if we had not needed to kill for food—and to protect ourselves from other predators? What if our first tools had been tools, peaceful tools, and not weapons? But conflict is essential to the evolution of a species. But it could have been conflict with the harsh forces of Nature herself rather than with other creatures, related and unrelated. Didn’t some ethologist once refer to Man as the Bad Weather Animal?

  But They, he thought, as he watched Clarisse, squatting on her hunkers, scratching industriously away with a piece of chalky stone on the flat, slate surface of the rock, but They have certainly thrown us back to our first beginnings. We didn’t pass the test. First of all there was the naval battle—and I wonder what happened to Wanderer, Vindictive, the other Quest and Adler. . . First of all there was the naval battle, and then the brawl actually within the sacred precincts. Calver and his crew must have been very well behaved to have been accepted, nonetheless. Perhaps, by this time, the stupid pugnacity is being bred out of Man, perhaps Calver was one of the new breed. . . .

  “Stop brooding!” admonished Sonya sharply.

  “I’m not brooding. I’m thinking. I’m still trying to work things out.”

  “You’d be better employed trying to recall every possible, smallest detail of your beloved Quest. Clarisse knows damn all about engineering, and if she’s to succeed she must have all the help we can give her.”

  “If she succeeds. . . .”

  “John!” Her voice betrayed the strain under which she was living. “I’m not cut out to be an ancestral cavewoman, or any other sort of cavewoman. I was brought up to wear clean clothes, not filthy rags, to bathe in hot water, not a stream straight off the ice, to eat well-cooked food, not greasy meat charred on the outside and raw inside. . . . Perhaps I’m too civilized—but this is no world for me.” She paused. “And here we are, all of us, relying on the wild talent of a witch, a teleporteuse, who’s been at least half poisoning herself by chewing various wild fungi which might—or might not—have the proper hallucinogenic effect . . .” She laughed bitterly. “All right—the artists in her ancestry did have the power to pull food animals to them. She has it too, as well we know. But will it work with a complex construction such as a spaceship?”

  “It worked,” Grimes told her, “with complex constructions such as human beings. And Clarisse is no more an anatomist or a physiologist than she is an engineer.”

  “Commodore,” Mayhew was calling. “Clarisse needs your help again!”

  Grimes got to his feet. Before he walked to where the artist was at work he slowly looked from his vantage point around his little kingdom. To the north were the jagged, snowcapped peaks, with their darkly forested foothills. To the south was the sea. To east and west were the rolling plains, with their fur of coarse, yellowish grass, their outcroppings of stony hillocks and boulders. From behind one of the distant hills drifted the blue smoke of Druthen’s fires.

  “Commodore!” called Mayhew again.

  “Oh, all right.”

  He walked over the rocky hilltop to that slab of slate, to where Davis, Williams, Hendrikson and Carnaby were clustered around Clarisse. The sketch of Faraway Quest was taking shape, but it was vague, uncertain in outline. How many attempts had there been to date? Grimes had lost count. Earlier drawings had been obliterated by sudden vicious rain showers, had been rubbed out in fits of tearful anger by the artist herself. Once, and once only, it had seemed that a shimmering ship shape, almost invisible, had hung in the air for a microsecond.

  Grimes looked at the faces of his officers, his departmental heads. All showed signs of strain, of overmuch concentration. Williams, who was responsible for maintenance, must have been making a mental tally of every rivet, every welded seam in the shell plating. Davis would have been visualizing machinery; Hendrikson, his weapons; Carnaby, his navigational instruments.

  But . . .

  But, Grimes suddenly realized, none of them had seen, had felt the ship as a smoothly functioning whole.

  “Ready?” he asked Clarisse.

  “Ready,” she replied in a tired, distant voice.

  And Grimes remembered. He remembered the first commissioning of Faraway Quest and all the work that had gone into her, the maintenance and the modifications. He relived his voyage of exploration to the Galactic East: his landings on Tharn, Grollor, Mellise and Stree. He recalled, vividly, his discovery of the antimatter systems to the Galactic West, and that most peculiar voyage, during which he and Sonya had come together, which was made as part of the research into the Rim ghost phenomena.

  All this he remembered, and more, and his mind was wide open to Clarisse as she scratched busily away with her rough piece of chalk—and hers was open to him. It was all so vivid, too vivid for mere imagination, for memory. He could actually have been standing in his familiar control room. . . .

  He was standing in his familiar control room.

  But that was impossible.

  He opened his eyes, looked around in a slow circle.

  He saw the jagged, snowcapped peaks to the north, with their darkly forested foothills. He saw the glimmering sea to the south. To east and west were the rolling plains, with their fur of coarse, yellowish grass, their outcroppings of stony hillocks and boulders. From behind one of the distant hills drifted the blue smoke of Druthen’s fires.

  But . . .

  But he was seeing all this through the wide viewports of Faraway Ques
t.

  He walked, fast, to the screen of the periscope, adjusted the controls of the instrument so that he had an all-round view around the ship. Yes—his people, his crew were there, all of them staring upward. He did not need to increase the magnification to see the wonder on their faces.

  “Mphm,” he grunted. He went to the panel on which were the controls for the airlock doors. He punched the necessary buttons. The illuminated indicators came on. OUTER DOOR OPEN. INNER DOOR OPEN. RAMP EXTRUDING—to be replaced by RAMP DOWN.

  Meanwhile . . .

  He put his eyes to the huge binoculars on their universal mounting. Druthen and von Donderberg must have seen the sudden appearance of the ship. She would mean a chance of escape for them. Yes, there they were, two dozen of them, running. The sun glinted from the weapons they carried—the guns with their hoarded ammunition, their carefully conserved power packs.

  It was a hopeless sortie; but desperate men, more than once, have achieved miracles.

  Grimes sighed, went to the gunner’s seat of the bow 40-millimeter cannon. He put the gun on manual control. It would be the best one for the job; a noisy projectile weapon has far greater psychological effect than something silent and much more deadly. He flipped the selector switches for automatic and H.E. He traversed until he had the leaders of the attackers in the telescopic sights. Druthen was one of them, his bulk and his waddling run unmistakable. Von Donderberg was the other.

  Grimes sighed again. He was genuinely sorry for the Waldegrener. In many ways he and Grimes were the same breed of cat. Only Druthen then . . .

  He shifted his sights slightly. But the explosion of a high-explosive shell might kill, would probably injure von Donderberg. Solid shot? Yes. One round should be ample, if Grimes’ old skill with firearms still persisted. And it would be a spectacular enough deterrent for the survivors of Druthen’s party.