Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  We were under the telephone cable—a filament stretching upwards into . . . nothingness. We were under the waiting Doggy. The high-pitched whine that she was emitting set my teeth on edge. Down! I thought imperatively. Down!

  She dropped slowly. With fumbling fingers I caught the dangling harness, strapped Sara in and then myself.

  Up . . . Up . . . Lift, you bitch! Lift!

  We could feel the tension in the straps but our feet were still firmly on the ground. And something was happening in the cavern. Lights were flashing all around us and the “sky” was a terrifying sheet of multicoloured flame.

  Lift! I commanded. Lift! The bodies of the other explorers, the long-dead beings who had preceded us, were on their feet, animated by some force that had taken control of them, were shambling towards us, stiffly, jerkily. The naked, skeletal man and woman . . . the centaurs . . . a thing like a big-headed dinosaur . . . the giant arthropod. Like robots they advanced, walking at first, then crawling as the stream of tracer from Sara’s gun hosed into them, knocking them from their feet, shattering fragile limbs. And then only the great crab was left, its carapace split in a dozen places, but three of its spindly legs still functional and one horrid claw raised menacingly.

  Doggy was whining and straining but she still could not lift our weight.

  I pulled my laser pistol again. I hated having to do it. It was like (I imagine) flogging a faithful, willing but utterly exhausted horse. I let her have a burst of energy in the belly. She screamed. But we were rising at last, slowly at first then faster, faster, through a darkness that was utter emptiness rather than the mere absence of a light source. We were lifting. We . . .

  With a dreadful certainty, I knew that we were falling again. Again I used my laser pistol. Again Doggy screamed.

  And Sara screamed. An arm, attenuated, enormously long, was reaching for us, the fingers of the hand writhing like tentacles. She was swinging her gun around to bear upon this apparition. Just in time to prevent her from firing I caught her wrist. In spite of the distortion I had recognized the unusual ring on one of the fingers, a wide band cut from Carinthian black opal on which was mounted a spiral nebula in silver filigree. Sonya’s ring.

  Other arms stretched out for us, other hands. They caught hold of us, of the harness. They dragged us away from the altar, into the temple. We saw them standing around us, their faces pale, strained.

  “Unbuckle yourselves!” Grimes shouted. “Hurry! Hurry!”

  And there was need for haste. Doggy screamed for the last time as fire flashed from her miniature ports, from the tips of her vanes. She fell heavily, with a clattering crash, just missing Sara and myself as we scrambled clear from the tangle of webbing. There was a trickle of blue smoke from her, bearing the acridity of hot metal.

  Grimes said, his voice shaky, “I thought you’d had it . . .” He went on, “But you’re back . . .”

  “Thanks to Doggy,” I said. I looked down at the pitiful little heap of wreckage. “You know, if we get out of this mess I’m going to keep her at home, with my other souvenirs, in a glass case . . .”

  “Doggy in the window,” said Sara.

  I was the only one who didn’t think it funny.

  Grimes and the Gaiji Daimyo

  KITTY KELLY, BY THIS TIME, did not need to be told to make herself at home in Grimes’ day cabin aboard Faraway Quest. The old ship had now been a long time, too long a time, on Elsinore while repair work on her inertial drive unit dragged on, and on, and on. Shortly after the Quest’s arrival at Port Fortinbras, Kitty had interviewed Grimes for Station Yorick and had persuaded him to tell one of his tall—but true—stories. The commodore, sitting at ease with pipe and glass to hand, had gone over well with Station Yorick’s viewers. Soon he became a regular guest on Kitty’s Korner, as Ms. Kelly’s programme was called.

  “And still you’re here,” she remarked brightly as she set up her recording apparatus, adjusting lenses and microphones.

  “A blinding glimpse of the obvious!” he growled. Still, he thought, watching the raven-haired, blue-eyed, creamy-skinned girl in the emerald green dress that left very little to the imagination, there were compensations, or at least one compensation—and she was it. He would feel a strong twinge of regret when, at long last, Faraway Quest was again spacewordly and on her way.

  “That’s it,” she said finally, getting briefly to her feet and then subsiding into an easy chair, facing Grimes in his, stretching her long, shapely legs before her. “Ready to roll. But pour me a drink first, Johnnie boy.”

  Grimes had learned not to wince at this appellation. (After all, during a long and, according to some, misspent life, he had often been called worse.) He went to his liquor cabinet, poured an Irish whisky for Kitty and constructed a pink gin for himself.

  “Here’s mud in your eye!” she toasted, raising her glass.

  “And in yours,” he replied.

  After what was more of a gulp than a ladylike sip she switched on the audio-visual recorder. “And now, Commodore,” she said, “can you tell us, in nontechnical language if possible, why your ship, the Rim Worlds Confederacy’s survey vessel, Faraway Quest, has been so long on Elsinore?”

  “Because my inertial drive is on the blink,” he said.

  “In what way?”

  “First of all it was the governor. There were no spares available here. Too, the inertial drive unit is a very old one; it came with the ship—and she’s no chicken! So there were no spares anywhere at all for this model. A new governor was fabricated in our workshops at Port Forlorn, on Lorn. It was shipped out here. Then my engineers had to turn down the shaft so that it would fit the bearings. The drive was tested—and the main thruster fell to pieces. And so on, and so on . . .”

  “I’m only a planet lubber,” she said, “but it seems to me that much time and money would have been saved if your Faraway Quest’s inertial drive unit had been renewed, in its entirety, long before it got to the state that it’s in now. After all, the Rim Worlds Navy, to which your Quest belongs, is not some penny-pinching star tramp outfit.”

  Grimes laughed. “Except in times of war, navies are as expert at penny-pinching as any commercial shipowner! And I often think that the only bastard who really wants to keep the old Quest running is me.”

  “You have been in her a long time, haven’t you, Commodore?”

  “Too right. She started life as one of the Interstellar Transport Commission’s Epsilon Class freighters. When she became obsolescent, by the Commission’s rather high standards, she was put up for sale. I happened to be in the right place at the right time—or the wrong place at the wrong time!—on the world about which her lay-up orbit had been established. Very temporarily I had too much money in my bank account. So I bought her, changing her name from Epsilon Scorpii to Sister Sue. She became the flagship—and the only ship—of my own star tramp company, Far Traveller Couriers. She replaced a deep space pinnace that I’d been running single-handedly, called Little Sister. Well, I tramped around for quite a while, making not-too-bad a living. It helped that the Federation Survey Service, into which I’d sort of been dragged back with a reserve commission, organized the occasional lucrative charter for me. And then, while I was trying to weather a rather bad financial storm, I drifted out to the Rim Worlds. At that time Rim Runners, the Confederacy’s merchant fleet, were going through a period of expansion. They were buying anything—anything!—that could clamber out of a gravity well and still remain reasonably airtight. They offered me a good price for the ship and offered, too, to absorb myself and my people with no loss of rank or seniority while guaranteeing repatriation to those who did not wish to become RimWorlders . . .”

  “But you became a RimWorlder, Commodore.”

  “Yes, Kitty. And the ship was renamed again—to Rim Scorpion. For a while I stayed in command of her. Then, at about the same time that I got a shore job, as Rim Runners astronautical superintendent, the ship had another change of name, to Faraway Quest. She was converted i
nto a survey ship. Every time that she was required for survey work—which wasn’t all that often—Rim Runners would second me to the Navy, in which I held, and still hold, a reserve commission. After all, I know the ship and, too, held command in the Federation Survey Service before I became an owner-master.”

  Kitty laughed sympathetically. “We can understand very well how much this ship means to you, Commodore.” She laughed again. “Now I’m talking off the top of my head—but what a pity it is that you can’t modify your Mannschenn Drive unit, your Time-twister, to take the ship back into the Past so that she can be refitted with a suitable inertial drive at a pre-inflation price. After all, there was that first story you told me, about the Siege of Glenrowan, when a modified Mannschenn Drive was used to send you back to 1880, Earth Old Reckoning, so that you could change the course of history.”

  “I didn’t change the course of history,” said Grimes stiffly. “I prevented the course of history from being changed.”

  “Ensuring,” snapped Kitty, “that my ancestor, the sainted Ned himself, was awarded a hemp necktie.”

  “In any case,” Grimes told her, “there was no physical Time travel. I was just sent back to occupy the mind of one of my own ancestors who was among those present at the siege.”

  “And so even though your interstellar drive, your Mannschenn Drive, does odd things to the Space-Time Continuum, even though FTL flight is achieved by having the ship, as you told me once, going astern in Time while going ahead in Space, physical Time-travel is impossible? But isn’t it true that most governments have forbidden research into possible techniques for using the Mannschenn Drive for real Time-travel, physical as well as psychological?

  “Have you ever been involved in such research?” She grinned. “After all, Commodore, there’s not much that you haven’t been involved in.”

  Grimes made a major production of refilling and lighting his pipe. He replenished Kitty’s glass, and then his own. He settled back in his chair.

  He said, “There was one rather odd business in which I played my part. In this very ship . . .”

  She asked sweetly, “And did you interfere as you did at Glenrowan, changing the course of history?”

  “I did not change the course of history on either occasion. I kept history on the right tracks.”

  “But have you ever thought that these are the wrong tracks, that we’re living in an alternative universe that could never have come into being but for your interference?”

  “I like being me,” he told her, “and I’m pretty sure that you like being you. And we are us only because our history has made us what we are. In an alternative universe we might have no existence at all.”

  She laughed. “We’re neither of us cut out to be philosophers, Commodore. Just do us all a favour and wear your storyteller’s hat for the next hour or so.”

  “You’re the boss,” said Grimes. He got up, recharged glasses, refilled and lit his pipe, then settled down back in his chair. “You want a story. Here it is.”

  It was quite a few years ago, he said, more than just a few. It was when this ship was still called Sister Sue and I was both her master and her owner. It was during that period when the Federation Survey Service was still throwing charters my way like bones to a hungry dog. Very often I’d be carrying Survey Service cargoes from Earth to the various Survey Service bases throughout the Galaxy.

  This was such an occasion. A cargo of sake and soy sauce and assorted pickles to Mikasa Base, the personnel of which was then, and probably still is, Japanese. Rather unusually I was loading not at Port Woomera in Australia but at the new spaceport just outside Yokohama in Japan. I still think that spaceports should be well away from heavily populated areas but the Japanese wanted one of their very own and they got it. Of course there were very strict regulations—inertial drive only, when landing or lifting off. No, repeat and underscore no, use of reaction drive when in the spaceport vicinity. But my inertial drive wasn’t in the same mess that it’s in now and I was reasonably sure that shouldn’t need a squirt of superheated steam in an emergency.

  It was my Mannschenn Drive that got me into trouble.

  Well, even though Japan is a very small target compared to Australia, I found it without any trouble, and found the spaceport and set down in the middle of the triangle formed by the marker beacons. And then, as so often happens, especially when governmental agencies are involved, it was a case of hurry up and wait. The cargo wasn’t ready for me. This pleased me rather than otherwise. The ship was on pay, which meant that myself and my officers were on pay. I treated myself to a couple or three weeks leave and booked on a JAL airship from Narita to Sydney, changing there to a Qantas flight to Alice Springs. My parents were pleased to see me. My mother was her charming, hospitable self and my father, as always, was both a good listener and a good talker—and could he talk on his pet subject, history! As I’ve told you before he was an author of historical romances and always prided himself on the thoroughness of his research.

  He asked me about my impressions of Japan and told me that he had visited that country, doing research for one of his novels, a few weeks prior to my arrival. “Yokohama,” he said, “is handy for two shrines that you will find worth a visit. There’s Admiral Togo’s flagship Mikasa, in which he defeated the Russian Navy during the Russo-Japanese War, preserved for posterity as the English have preserved Nelson’s Victory. And, on a hilltop on the Miura Peninsular, is the tomb of Will Adams and his Japanese lady wife . . .”

  “Will Adams?” I asked. “But that’s not a Japanese name, surely? Why should a foreigner be honoured by having his grave regarded as a shrine?” My father laughed. “Oh, Will Adams was a gaijin, a foreigner, when he first set foot on Japanese soil. He was the first Englishman—although not the first European—in Japan. He was an Elizabethan—the first Elizabeth, of course—sea dog. He was pilot major—senior navigator—of a small fleet of Dutch ships that sailed to Japan in an attempt to get some share of the trade that had become the monopoly of the Portuguese. Only one ship, Adams’ ship, reached Japan. Adams was sort of adopted by the Shogun, the real ruler—the Emperor was little more than a figurehead—and was made a Samurai, and then a Daimyo, which translates roughly to Baron. He was known as the Anjin-sama—Pilot-lord—and as the Miura Anjin, after the estates on the Miura Peninsular that he was granted. He held the rank of admiral in the Japanese Navy . . .”

  I said, “He must have been quite a character . . .”

  “He was,” agreed my father. “I hope to use him in my next novel. He’s been used before, of course, but I think that I shall be able to introduce a new twist. But if you find out anything interesting about him when you’re back in Yokohama, let me know, will you?”

  “I will,” I told him. “I’ll ask Yoshi Namakura what she knows about him.”

  “Yoshi Namakura?” he asked.

  “My chief Mannschenn Drive engineer. Oddly enough, in spite of her name, this is her first time in Japan. Her first time on Earth, too. I engaged her in Port Southern, on Austral, where her family have lived for generations. An attractive wench and clever with it. A list of letters after her name as long as my arm. Doctorates in mathematics and physics and the Odd Gods of the Galaxy alone know what else. And ardently Japanese. Knowing Yoshi I’m sure that she’ll have been making the rounds of the local shrines, pouring libations and clapping her hands and bowing . . .”

  “I have often wished, John,” said my mother, “that you did not have such a casual attitude towards religion.”

  “But I’ve always had the impression, Matilda,” I told her, “that you’re an agnostic.”

  “I am. But I try to avoid giving offence.”

  “Except when you want to,” muttered my father.

  “That’s different, George,” she snapped.

  “I suppose that I was rather making fun of Yoshi,” I admitted. “But she’s such a serious person. But as far as Shinto is concerned I have far more respect for it than for many other fa
iths and I quite approve of the honouring of distinguished ancestors.”

  “You’d better honour me,” said my father, “or I’ll come back and haunt you!”

  And that was that. The rest of my leave passed very pleasantly and it was with mixed emotions that, eventually, I made my way back to Yokohama. Mixed emotions? Yes. One’s boyhood home holds a large place in one’s affections but so does a ship, especially a ship that one both commands and owns.

  It was early evening when I got back to the Yokohama spaceport. Sister Sue was the only ship on the ground. The loading gantries had been set up about her but were still idle. She stood there in black silhouette against the odd, lemon-yellow sky, a dark tower surrounded by an elaborate tracery of metal, looking like one of those intricate Japanese ideographs that you see on ornamental scrolls and screens.

  Security was fairly tight and I had to identify myself to the spaceport gatekeeper and then, again, to the guard on duty at the foot of the ramp. Port regulations required that I employ him so I was pleased to find that he was taking his job seriously. In any case the charters, the Survey Service, would be picking up the bill for his wages. Once I was in the airlock I looked at the indicator screen to see who was aboard. The third officer was the shipkeeper. Normally, especially in a rather exotic port such as this, he would have been sulking in solitary state, feeling very hard done by. But, it seemed, he was not alone. Neither the chief Mannschenn Drive engineer nor the communications officer was off painting the town red. But surely Yoshi would have made friends in Yokohama or, even, discovered distant relatives. Perhaps, I thought, she was entertaining some such or one such on board.

  I took the elevator up from the airlock to my quarters. On its way it passed the Mannschenn Drive compartment. And the Drive was running—the oscillating whine that it made whilst operational was unmistakable. Perhaps, I thought, Yoshi was recalibrating the controls, a job that can be done only when the ship is at rest on a planetary surface. Recalibration should not be carried out without the permission of the master. But so what? Billy Williams, my chief officer, had the authority to issue such permission during my absence. But I was uneasy nonetheless.