Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Good. So we cruise along quietly and peacefully—but keeping our eyes peeled. And as soon as Ghost is sighted—Action Stations!”

  “You aren’t going to open fire on it?” demanded Grimes.

  “Of course not. But there will be things to be done, and done in a ruddy blush. The officer of the watch will push a button that will convert the ship into an enormously powerful electro-magnet, and the same switch will actuate the alarm bells. Automatically the projector of the modified Carlotti beacon will swing to bring the Ghost into its field. The boffins tell me that what should happen is that a bridge, a temporary bridge, will be thrown across the gulf between the Parallel Universes.”

  “I see. And as Faraway Quest is an enormously powerful magnet, the other ship, the Ghost, will be drawn into our Universe.”

  “No,” she said impatiently. “Have you forgotten the anti-matter, the anti-gravity? The Quest will have one helluva magnetic field, but no mass to speak of. She’ll be the one that gets pulled across the gap, or through the curtain, or however else you care to put it.”

  “And how do we get back?” asked Grimes.

  “I’m not very clear on that point myself,” she admitted.

  The Commodore laughed. “So when I man the Quest it will have to be with people with no ties.” He said softly, “I have none.”

  “And neither have I, John,” she told him. “Not any longer.”

  Chapter 5

  CAPTAIN FARLEY was somewhat disgruntled at being called back from leave, but was mollified slightly when Grimes told him that he would be amply compensated. As soon as was decently possible the Commodore left Farley to cope with whatever problems relative to the efficient running of Rim Runners arose—after all, it was Miss Willoughby who really ran the show—and threw himself into the organizing of Sonya Verrill’s expedition. What irked him was the amount of time wasted on legal matters. There was the charter, of course, and then there was the reluctance of Lloyd’s surveyors to pass as space-worthy a ship in which Mannschenn Drive and antimatter were combined, not to say one in which the Carlotti gear had been modified almost out of recognition. Finally Sonya Verrill was obliged to play hell with a Survey Service big stick, and the gentlemen from Lloyd’s withdrew, grumbling.

  Manning, too, was a problem. The Second, Third and Fourth Mates of Rim Mastodon agreed, quite willingly, to sign on Faraway Quest’s articles as Chief, Second and Third. The Psionic Radio Officer was happy to come along with them. After a little prodding at the ministerial level the Catering and Engineering Superintendents supplied personnel for their departments. And then the Institute of Spacial Engineers stepped in, demanding for its members the payment of Danger Money, this to be 150% of the salaries laid down by the Award. Grimes was tempted to let them have it—after all, it was the Federation’s taxpayers who would be footing the bill—and then, on second thoughts, laid his ears back and refused to play. He got over the hurdle rather neatly, persuading the Minister of Shipping and the Minister for the Navy to have Faraway Quest commissioned as an auxiliary cruiser and all her officers—who were, of course, reservists, called up for special duties. Like Lloyd’s, the Institute retired grumbling.

  As a matter of fact, Grimes was rather grateful to them for having forced his hand. Had the Quest blasted off as a specialized merchant vessel only, with her crew on Articles, his own status would have been merely that of a shipmaster, and Sonya Verrill, representing the Survey Service, would have piled on far too many gees. Now he was a Commodore on active service, and, as such, well and truly outranked any mere Commander, no matter what pretty badge she wore on her cap. It was, he knew well, no more than a matter of male pride, but the way that things finally were he felt much happier.

  So, after the many frustrating delays, Faraway Quest finally lifted from her berth at the Lorn spaceport. Grimes was rusty, and knew it, and allowed young Swinton—lately Second Officer of Rim Mammoth, now Lieutenant Commander Swinton, First Lieutenant of R.W.S. Faraway Quest—to take the ship upstairs. Grimes watched critically from one of the spare acceleration chairs, Sonya Verrill watched critically from the other. Swinton—slight, fair-haired, looking like a schoolboy in a grown-up’s cut-down uniform—managed well in spite of his audience. The old Quest climbed slowly at first, then with rapidly increasing acceleration, whistling through the overcast into the clear air beyond, the fast thinning air, into the vacuum of Space.

  Blast-off time had been calculated with considerable exactitude—“If it had been more exact,” commented Grimes, “we’d have rammed our hunk of anti-matter and promptly become the wrong sort of ghosts . . .”—and so there was the minimum jockeying required to match orbits with the innocent-looking sphere of shining steel. The Quest had brought a crew of fitters up with her men with experience of handling similar spheres. Working with an economy of motion that was beautiful to watch they gentled the thing in through the special hatch that had been made for it, bolted it into its seating. Then it was the turn of the physicists, who set up their apparatus and bathed the anti-iron in a flood of neutrinos. While this operation was in progress, two tanker rockets stood by, pumping tons of water into the extra tanks that had been built into the Quest’s structure. This, Grimes explained to his officers, was to prevent her from attaining negative mass and flying out of her orbit, repelled rather than attracted by Lorn and the Lorn sun, blown out of station before the landing of the assorted technicians and the loading of final essential items of stores and equipment.

  At last all the preliminaries were completed. Faraway Quest was fully manned, fully equipped, and all the dockyard employees had made their transfer to the ferry rocket. This time Grimes assumed the pilot’s chair. Through the viewports he could see the globe that was Lorn, the globe whose clouds, even from this altitude, looked dirty. Looking away from it, he told himself that he did not care if he never saw it again. Ahead, but to starboard, a lonely, unblinking beacon in the blackness, was the yellow spark that was the Mellise sun. The commodore’s stubby fingers played lightly over his control panel. From the bowels of the ship came the humming of gyroscopes, and as the ship turned on her short axis the centrifugal force gave a brief illusion of off-center gravity.

  The Lorn sun was ahead now.

  “Sound an alarm, Commander Swinton,” snapped Grimes.

  The First Lieutenant pressed a stud, and throughout the ship there was the coded shrilling of bells, a succession of Morse R’s short-long-short, short-long-short. R is for rocket, thought Grimes. Better than all this civilian yapping into microphones.

  Abruptly the shrilling ceased.

  With deliberate theatricality Grimes brought his fist down on the firing button. The giant hand of acceleration pushed the officers down into the padding of their chairs. The Commodore watched the sweep-second hand of the clock set in the center of the panel. He lifted his hand again—but this time it was with an appreciable effort—again brought it down. Simultaneously, from his own control position, Swinton gave the order, “Start Mannschenn Drive.”

  The roar of the rockets cut off abruptly, but before there was silence the keening song of the Drive pervaded the ship, the high-pitched complaint of the ever-spinning, ever-precessing gyroscopes. To the starboard hand, the great, misty lens of the Galaxy warped and twisted, was deformed into a vari-colored convolution at which it was not good to look. Ahead, the Mellise sun had taken the likelihood of a dimly luminous spiral.

  Grimes felt rather pleased with himself. He had a crew of reservists, was a reservist himself, and yet the operation had been carried out with naval snap and efficiency. He turned to look at Sonya Verrill, curious as to what he would read in her expression.

  She smiled slightly and said, “May I suggest, sir, that we splice the mainbrace?” She added, with more than a hint of cattiness, “After all, it’s the Federation’s taxpayers who’re footing the bill.”

  Chapter 6

  THE SHIP having been steadied on to her trajectory, Grimes gave the order that Sonya Verrill had suggested.
All hands, with the exception of the watch-keeping officers, gathered in Faraway Quest’s commodious wardroom, strapping themselves into their chairs, accepting drinking bulbs from the tray that Karen Schmidt, the Catering Officer, handed around.

  When everybody had been supplied with a drink the Commodore surveyed his assembled officers. He wanted to propose a toast, but had never possessed a happy knack with words. The only phrases that came to his mind were too stodgy, too platitudinous. At last he cleared his throat and said gruffly, “Well, gentlemen—and ladies, of course—you may consider that the expedition is under way, and the mainbrace is in the process of being spliced. Perhaps one of you would care to say something.”

  Young Swinton sat erect in his chair—in Free Fall, of course, toasts were drunk sitting—and raised his liquor bulb. He declaimed, trying to keep the amusement from his voice, “To the wild ghost chase!”

  There was a ripple of laughter through the big compartment—a subdued merriment in which, Grimes noted, Sonya Verrill did not join. He felt a strong sympathy for her. As far as she was concerned this was no matter for jest, this pushing out into the unknown, perhaps the unknowable. It was, for her, the fruition of months of scheming, persuading, wire-pulling. And yet, Grimes was obliged to admit, the play on words was a neat one. “Very well,” he responded, “to the wild ghost chase it is.”

  He sipped from his bulb, watched the others doing likewise. He reflected that insofar as Rim Worlds personnel was concerned it would have been hard to have manned the ship with a better crew—for this particular enterprise. All of them, during their service in the Rim Runners’ fleet, had acquired reputations—not bad, exactly, but not good. Each of them had exhibited, from time to time, a certain . . . scattiness? Yes, scattiness. Each of them had never been really at home in a service that, in the final analysis, existed only to make the maximum profit with the minimum expense. But now—the Federation’s taxpayers had deep pockets—expense was no object. There would be no tedious inquiries into the alleged squandering of reaction mass and consumable stores in general.

  Insofar as the Survey Service personnel—the Carlotti Communications System specialists—were concerned, Grimes was not so happy. They were an unknown quantity. But he relied on Sonya Verrill to be able to handle them—after all, they were her direct subordinates.

  He signaled to Karen Schmidt to serve out another round of drinks, then unstrapped himself and got carefully to his feet, held to the deck by the magnetized soles of his shoes. He said, “There’s no need to hurry yourselves, but I wish to see all departmental heads in my day room in fifteen minutes.”

  He walked to the axial shaft, let himself into the tubular alleyway and, ignoring the spiral staircase, pulled himself rapidly forward along the guideline. A vibration of the taut wire told him that he was being followed. He turned to see who it was, and was not surprised to see that it was Sonya Verrill.

  She sat facing him across his big desk.

  She said, “This is no laughing matter, John. This isn’t just one big joke.”

  “The wild ghost chase, you mean? I thought that it was rather clever. Oh, I know that you’ve your own axe to grind, Sonya—but you have to admit that most of us, and that includes me, are along just for the hell of it. Your people, I suppose, are here because they have to be.”

  “No. They’re volunteers.”

  “Then don’t take things so bloody seriously, woman. We shall all of us do our best—my crew as well as yours. But I don’t think that anybody, apart from myself, has any clue as to your private motives.”

  She smiled unhappily. “You’re right, of course, John. But . . .”

  There was a sharp rap at the door. “Come in!” called Grimes.

  They came in—Swinton, and the burly, redhaired Calhoun, Chief Mannschenn Drive Engineer, and scrawny, balding McHenry, Chief Reaction Drive Engineer. They were followed by the gangling, dreamy Mayhew, Psionic Radio Officer, by little, fat Petersham, the Purser, and by the yellow-haired, stocky Karen Schmidt. Then came Todhunter, the dapper little Surgeon, accompanied by Renfrew, the Survey Service Lieutenant in charge of the modified Carlotti gear.

  They disposed themselves on chairs and settees, adjusted their seat straps with practiced hands.

  “You may smoke,” said Grimes, filling and lighting his own battered pipe. He waited until the others’ pipes and cigars and cigarettes were under way, then said quietly, “None of you need to be told that this is not a commercial voyage.” He grinned. “It is almost like a return to the bad old days of piracy. We’re like the legendary Black Bart, Scourge of the Spaceways, just cruising along waiting for some fat prize to wander within range of our guns. Not that Black Bart ever went ghost hunting. . . .”

  “He would have done, sir,” put in Swinton, “if there’d been money in it.”

  “There’s money in anything if you can figure the angle,” contributed McHenry.

  This was too much for Sonya Verrill. “I’d have you gentlemen know,” she said coldly, “that the question of money doesn’t enter into it. This expedition is classed as pure scientific research.”

  “Is it, Commander Verrill?” Grimes’ heavy eyebrows lifted sardonically. “I don’t think that we should have had the backing either of your Government or of ours unless some farsighted politicians had glimpsed the possibility of future profits. After all, trade between the Alternative Universes could well be advantageous to all concerned.”

  “If there are Alternative Universes,” put in Calhoun.

  “What do you mean, Commander? I specified that the personnel of this ship was to be made up of those who have actually sighted Rim Ghosts.”

  “That is so, sir. But we should bear in mind the possibility—or the probability—that the Rim Ghosts are ghosts—ghosts, that is, in the old-fashioned sense of the word.”

  “We shall bear it in mind, Commander,” snapped Grimes. “And if it is so, then we shall, at least have made a small contribution to the sum total of human knowledge.” He drew deeply from his pipe, exhaled a cloud of blue smoke that drifted lazily towards the nearest exhaust vent. “Meanwhile, gentlemen, we shall proceed, as I have already said, as though we were a pirate ship out of the bad old days. All of you will impress upon your juniors the necessity for absolute alertness at all times. For example, Commander Swinton, the practice of passing a boring watch by playing three-dimensional noughts and crosses in the plotting tank will cease forthwith.” Swinton blushed. This had been the habit of his that had aroused the ire of the Master and the Chief Officer of Rim Mastodon. “And, Commander Calhoun, we shall both of us be most unhappy if the log desk in the Mannschenn Drive Room is found to be well stocked with light reading matter and girlie magazines.” It was Calhoun’s turn to look embarrassed. “Oh, Commander McHenry, the Reaction Drive was in first class condition when we blasted off from Port Forlorn. A few hours’ work should suffice to restore it to that condition. I shall not expect to find the Reaction Drive Engine Room littered with bits and pieces that will eventually be reassembled five seconds before planetfall.” The Surgeon, the Purser and the Catering Officer looked at each other apprehensively, but the Commodore pounced next on the Psionic Radio Officer. “Mr. Mayhew, I know that it is the standard practice for you people to gossip with your opposite number all over the Galaxy, but on this voyage, unless I order otherwise, a strict listening watch only is to be kept. Is that understood?”

  “You’re the boss,” replied Mayhew dreamily and then, realizing what he had said, “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Very good, sir.”

  Grimes let his glance wander over Todhunter, Petershamm and Schmidt, sighed regretfully. He said, “I think that is all. Have you anything to add, Commander Verrill?”

  “You seem to have cleared up all the salient points insofar as your own officers are concerned,” said the girl. “And I am sure that Mr. Renfrew is capable of carrying out the orders that he has already been given.”

  “Which are, Commander?”

  “As you already know
, sir, to maintain his equipment in a state of constant, manned readiness, and to endeavour to lock on to a Rim Ghost as soon as one is sighted.”

  “Good. In that case we all seem to know what’s expected. We stand on, and stand on, until . . .”

  “I still think, sir,” said Calhoun, “that we should be carrying a Chaplain—one qualified to carry out exorcism.”

  “To exorcise the Rim Ghosts,” Sonya Verrill told him, “is the very last thing that we want to do.”

  Chapter 7

  THEY STOOD ON . . .

  And on.

  Second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour the time was ticked away by the ship’s master chronometer; watch succeeded watch, day succeeded day. There was normal Deep Space routine to keep the hands occupied, there were the frequent drills—at first carried out at set times and then, as every officer learned what was expected of him, at random intervals—to break the monotony. But nothing was sighted, nothing was seen outside the viewports but the distorted lens of the Galaxy, the faint, far, convoluted nebulosities that were the sparse Rim stars.

  Grimes discussed matters with Sonya Verrill.

  He said, “I’ve been through all the records, and I still can’t discover a pattern.”

  “But there is a pattern,” she told him. “On every occasion at least one member of the group to sight a Rim Ghost has seen his own alternative self.”

  “Yes, yes. I know that. But what physical conditions must be established before a sighting? What initial velocity, for example? What temporal precession rate? As far as I can gather, such things have had no bearing on the sightings whatsoever.”

  “Then they haven’t.”

  “But there must be some specific combination of circumstances, Sonya.”

  “Yes. But it could well be something outside the ship from which the ghost is sighted, some conditions peculiar to the region of Space that she is traversing.”