Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Finished with engines, Mr. Denham,” said Grimes coldly.

  “Finished with engines, sir.” The young man put the lever to that position. There was a jangling of bells drifting up from below.

  “Mr. Denham . . .”

  “Sir?” The officer’s voice was an almost inaudible squeak. He looked frightened, and, thought Grimes, well he might be.

  “Mr. Denham, I am well aware that in your opinion I’m an outsider who should never have been appointed to command of this vessel. I am well aware, too, that in your opinion, at least, your local knowledge far surpasses mine. Even so, I shall be obliged if you will carry out my orders, although you will still have the right, the obligation, in fact, to query them—but not when I’m in the middle of berthing the bloody ship!” Grimes simmered down. “For your information, Mr. Denham, even I realized that slow astern would not be sufficient. I was about to order more stern power, then saw that you had taken matters into your own possibly capable but definitely unqualified hands.”

  “But, sir . . .”

  Grimes’s prominent ears had reddened. “There are no ‘buts.’ ”

  “But, sir, I tried to put her to slow astern. The lever jerked out of my hand to full.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Denham,” said Grimes at last. He knew that the young man was not lying. “You’d better see the Engineer, or the Electrician, and get those controls fixed. The next time they might do the wrong thing, instead of the right one.”

  He went through the chartroom and then down to his quarters. Sonya, who had watched the berthing from the lower bridge, was there waiting for him. She got up from her chair as he entered the day cabin and stood there, tall and slim and graceful. Her right hand snapped up to the widow’s peak of her shining auburn hair.

  She said, “I salute you, Cap’n. A masterly piece of ship handling.”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes.

  “But, John, it was like something out of one of your own books.” She went to the case on the bulkhead in which were both privately owned volumes and those considered by the Winneck Line to be fit and proper reading for its masters. From the Company’s shelf she lifted The Inter-Island Steamer Express. by John Grimes. She read aloud, “. . . These captains, maintaining their timetables and berthing and unberthing their big, seagoing passenger ferries in the most appalling weather conditions, were, without doubt, among the world’s finest ship handlers . . .”

  “The weather conditions this morning aren’t appalling,” said Grimes. “In any case, that was on Earth. This is Aquarius.”

  Aquarius, as its name implies, is a watery world.

  It lies in toward the center from the Rim Worlds, fifty or so light-years to the galactic east of the Shakespearean Sector. It is Earth-type insofar as gravitation, atmosphere and climate are concerned, but geographically is dissimilar to the “home planet.” There are no great land masses; there are only chains of islands: some large, some small, some no more than fly specks on even a medium scale chart. In this respect it is like Mellise, one of the planets of the Eastern Circuit. Unlike Mellise, it possesses no indigenous intelligent life. Men colonized it during the Second Expansion—and, as was the case with most Second Expansion colonizations, it was discovery and settlement by chance rather than by design. Time and time again it happened, that disastrous, often tragic sequence of events. The magnetic storm, the gaussjammer thrown light millennia off course, her pile dead and the hungry emergency diesels gulping precious hydrocarbons to feed power to the Ehrenhaft generators, the long plunge into and through the Unknown; the desperate search for a world, any world, that would sustain human life . . .

  Lode Messenger stumbled upon Aquarius and made a safe landing in the vicinity of the North Magnetic Pole. Like all the later ships of her period she carried a stock of fertilized ova, human and animal, a wide variety of plant seeds and an extensive technical library. (Even when the gaussjammers were on regular runs, as Lode Messenger had been, there was always the possibility that their people would finish up as founders of a new colony.) When the planet was rediscovered by Commodore Shakespeare, during his voyage of exploration out toward the Rim, the settlement was already well established. With the Third Expansion it accepted its quota of immigrants, but insisted that all newcomers work for a probationary period in the merchant or fishing fleets before, if they so wished, taking up employment ashore. Somebody once said that if you wanted to emigrate to Aquarius you had to hold at least an “Able-bodied seaman’s” papers. This is not quite true, but it is not far from the truth. It has also been said that Aquarians have an inborn dislike and distrust of spaceships but love seagoing ships. This is true.

  Grimes, although not an immigrant, was a seaman of sorts. He was on the planet by invitation, having been asked by its rulers—the Havenmaster and the Master Wardens—to write a history of the colony. For that he was well qualified, being acknowledged as the leading maritime historian, specializing in Terran marine history, in the Rim Worlds. His books: The Inter-Island Steamer Express, The Flag Of The Southern Cross, The Western Ocean Greyhounds, Times of Transition—had sold especially well on Aquarius, although in the worlds of the Rim Confederacy they were to be found mainly only in libraries, and in very few libraries at that.

  And Commodore Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, Master Astronaut, was more than just a writer about the sea. He held the rank of admiral—honorary, but salt water admiral nonetheless—in the Ausiphalian Navy, on Tharn. Captain Thornton, the Havenmaster, had said, “Legally speaking, that commission of yours entitles you to a Certificate of Competency as a Master Mariner. Then you can sail in command of one of our ships, to get the real feel of life at sea.”

  “I’m not altogether happy about it, Tom,” Grimes had objected, not too strongly.

  “I’m the boss here,” Thornton assured him. “And, in any case, I’m not turning you loose until you’ve been through crash courses in navigation, seamanship, meteorology, cargo stowage and stability.”

  “I’m tempted . . .” Grimes had admitted.

  “Tempted?” scoffed Sonya. “He’s just dying to strut his bridge like the ancient mariners he’s always writing about. His only regret will be that you Aquarians didn’t re-create the days of sail while you were about it.”

  “Now and again I regret it myself,” admitted the Havenmaster. “Fore and aft rig, a diesel auxiliary, electrical deck machinery—there’d be something quite fast enough for some of our trades and economical to boot. But I’m well known as an enemy of progress—progress for its own sake, that is.”

  “A man after my own heart,” said Grimes.

  “You’re just a pair of reactionaries,” Sonya had told them.

  I suppose I am a reactionary, Grimes had thought. But he enjoyed this world. It was efficiently run, but it was always recognized that there are things more important than efficiency. There was automation up to a certain point, but up to that certain point only. (But the Havenmaster had admitted that he was fighting a rearguard action to try to keep control of the ships in the hands of the seamen officers . . .) There was a love of and a respect for the sea. It was understandable. From the first beginnings of the colony these people had grown up on a watery world, and the books in their technical library most in demand had been those on shipbuilding, seamanship and navigation. Aquarius was poor in radioactives but rich in mineral oil, so the physicists had never been able, as they have on so many worlds, to take charge. The steam engine and the diesel engine were still the prime movers, even in the air, where the big passenger-carrying airships did the work that on other planets is performed by jet planes and rockets.

  The surface ships were, by modern standards, archaic. Very few of them ran to bow thrusters—and those only ferries, cargo and passenger, to whom the strict adherence to a timetable was of paramount importance, whose masters could not afford to make a leisurely job of backing into a roll-on-roll-off berth and therefore required the additional maneuvering aid. There was some containerization, but it was not carri
ed to extremes, it being recognized that the personnel of the cargo carriers were entitled to leisure time in port. Self-tensioning winches and, for cargo handling, cranes rather than derricks cut down the number of hands required on deck, and engine rooms were almost fully automated, with bridge control for arrival and departure maneuvers.

  There were electronic navigational aids aplenty—radar, echometer, loran, shoran, an inertial system, position fixing by artificial satellite—but these the Havenmaster frowned upon, as did most of the senior shipmasters. He quoted from Grimes’s own book, Times Of Transition, “The electronic wizards of the day, who were not seamen, failed to realize that a competent navigator, armed only with sextant, chronometer and ephemeris, together with a reasonably accurate log, can always fix the position of his ship with reasonable accuracy provided that there is an occasional break in the clouds for an identifiable celestial body to shine through. Such a navigator is never at the mercy of a single fuse . . .”

  “And that, John, is what I’m trying to avoid,” said Thornton. “Unless we’re careful our ships will be officered by mere button pushers, incapable of running a series of P/Ls. Unluckily, not all the Master Wardens think as I do. Too many of them are engineers, and businessmen—and in my experience such people have far less sales resistance than we simple sailors.”

  “And what pups have they been sold?” asked Grimes.

  “One that’s a real bitch from my viewpoint, and probably from yours. You’ve heard of Elektra?”

  “Yes,” broke in Sonya. “Carinthian Sector. Third Expansion colonization.” She grinned a little unkindly. “It’s a planet where the minimum qualification for immigration is a doctorate in one of the sciences, preferably physics. But they have to let in occasional chemists, biologists and the like to keep the dump habitable.”

  “And they have quite a few, now, with degrees in salesmanship,” went on the Havenmaster. “One of them was here a few years back.”

  “And he sold you this female pup,” said Grimes.

  “He did that. The Purcell Navigator. It’s named, I suppose, after its inventor. It’s a sealed box, with the gods know what sort of mess of memory fields and the like inside it. It’s hooked up to all the ship’s electronic navigational gear: gyro compass, radar, echometer, loran, shoran . . . Just name a pie and it’s got a finger in it. Or a tentacle. It knows just where the ship is at any given second. If you ask it nicely it might condescend to tell you.”

  “You don’t like it,” said Grimes.

  “I don’t like it. To begin with, some of the shipowners—and this is a private enterprise planet, remember—feel that now the bridge can be automated to the same extent as the engine room, with just one man, the Master, in charge, snoring his head off on the chartroom settee and being awakened by an alarm bell just in time to rub the sleep out of his eyes and take his ship into port. But that’s not the worst of it. Now the Institute of Marine Engineers is saying, ‘If navigation is only a matter of pushing buttons, we’re at least as well qualified as deck officers.’ ”

  “I’ve heard that often enough,” said Grimes. “Even in space.”

  “Does anybody know how these Purcell Navigators work?” asked Sonya.

  “No. One of the terms of sale is that they must be installed by technicians from the world of manufacture, Elektra. Another is that they must not, repeat not, be tampered with in any way. As a matter of fact the Chief Electrician of the Carrington Yard did try to find out what made one tick. He was lucky to lose only a hand.”

  “It seems,” said Grimes, “that I came here just in time.”

  “What do you mean, John?”

  “Well, I shall be able to enjoy the last of the old days, the good old days, on Aquarius, and I shall have the material for a few more chapters to my Times Of Transition.”

  “He likes being morbid,” said Sonya. “Almost as much as he likes being reactionary.”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes. “Old-fashioned sounds better.”

  He got up from his chair, walked soundlessly over the carpeted floor to the bookshelves that formed a space divider in the huge, circular room that was called the Havenmaster’s Lookout. He stared at the rows of books, most of them old (but in recent printings), only a few of them new. And they were real books, all of them, not spools of microfilm. There were the standard works on the old arts of the seaman, hopelessly out of date on most worlds, but not (yet) on this one. Brown, Nicholl, Norie, Riesenberg . . . Lecky . . . Thomas . . . And the chronicles of the ancient explorers and navigators: Hakluyt, Dampier, Cook, Flinders, Bligh . . . Then there were the novels: Conrad (of course), McFee, Monsarrat, Herman Wouk, Forester . . . Grimes’s hand went out to Melville’s Moby Dick, and he remembered that odd Hall of Fame to which he had been whisked from the mountaintop on Kinsolving, and felt regret that he had not been able to meet Lieutenant Commander Queeg, Admiral Hornblower and Captain Ahab. (Were there any white whales in the Aquarian seas?)

  He turned, saw that his wife and Captain Thornton had risen from their own seats, were standing staring out through the huge window that formed the entire outer wall of the Lookout that, in its turn, was the top level of the two thousand foot high Havenmaster’s Control Tower. Above it was only the mast from which sprouted antennae, radar scanners, anemometers and the like, that was topped by the powerful, group-flashing Steep Island light.

  Grimes walked slowly to join Sonya and his host, gazed out through the clear glass into the darkness. At regular intervals the beam of the light, a sword of misty radiance, swept overhead. Far to the south, a loom of luminescence on the distant sea horizon, was Port Stellar, and to east and west, fainter still, were other hazy luminosities, island cities, island states. Almost directly below was a great passenger liner, from this height no more than a gaudy, glittering insect crawling over the black carpet of the sea.

  In spite of the insulation, the soundproofing, the thin, high whine of the wind was evident.

  Sonya shivered. “The winds of change are blowing,” she whispered.

  “A seaman should be able to cope with the wind,” said the Havenmaster. Then, to Grimes, “I wonder how you’ll cope, John? I’ve arranged for you to take over Sonya Winneck at Port Stellar tomorrow.”

  “I’ll get by,” said Grimes.

  “He always does,” said Sonya. “Somehow.”

  Grimes fell in love with Sonya Winneck from the very start. She was, of course, his first sea command; nonetheless, she made an immediate appeal to the eye, even to the eye of one who, for all his admiral’s commission, had very little practical knowledge of oceangoing ships. The lady was a tramp, but the tramp was also a lady.

  Five hundred feet long overall, she was, with a seventy-foot beam. Bridge and funnel—the latter scarlet, with a black top and two narrow black bands—were amidships. Her upperworks and deck cranes were white, her hull green with a yellow ribbon. The boot-topping was red.

  There is more to a ship than outward appearance, however. And Grimes, himself a shipmaster of long standing, knew this as well as the most seasoned master mariner on the oceans of Aquarius. But she had, he discovered, a fair turn of speed, her diesel-electric drive pushing her through the water at a good twenty knots. She was single screw, with a right-handed propeller. Her wheelhouse and chartroom reminded him almost of the spaceships that he was accustomed to command, but the electronic gadgetry was not unfamiliar to him after the sessions he had put in on the various simulators in the Havenmaster’s Control Tower. The only thing that he did not like was the Purcell Navigator squatting like a sinister octopus in its own cage abaft the chartroom. Oh, well, he would make sure that his young gentlemen had no truck with the electronic monster. He hoped.

  “I don’t like it either,” said the tall, skinny, morose Captain Harrell, whom Grimes was relieving. “But it works. Even I have to admit that. It works.”

  Then Harrell led Grimes down to the big, comfortable day cabin where the two wives—Mrs. Harrell very dumpy and mousy alongside the slender Sonya�
�were waiting. The Harrells’ baggage, packed and ready to be carried ashore, was against one bulkhead. On a table stood bottles and glasses, a bowl of cracked ice. The officers came in then, neat in their slate grey shirt-and-shorts uniforms, their black, gold-braided shoulderboards, to say good-bye to their old captain, to greet their new one. There was Wilcox, Chief Officer, a burly, blond young (but not too young) giant. There was Andersen, the Second, another giant, but red-haired. There was Viccini, the Third, slight and dark. And Jones, the Engineer, a fat, bald man who could have been any age, came up to be introduced, and with him he brought Mary Hales, the Electrician, a fragile, silver-headed little girl who looked incapable of changing a fuse. Finally there came Sally Fielding, Stewardess-Purser, plump and motherly.

  Glasses were charged. “Well, Captain,” began Harrell. “Or should I say Commodore, or Admiral?”

  “Captain,” Grimes told him.

  “Well, Captain, your name’s on the Register and the Articles. You’ve signed the Receipt for Items Handed Over. You’ve a good ship, and a good team of officers. Happy sailing!”

  “Happy sailing,” everybody repeated.

  “Thank you, Captain,” replied Grimes. “And I’m sure that we all wish you an enjoyable leave.”

  “And how are you spending it, Mrs, Harrell?” asked Sonya.

  “We’ve a yacht,” the other woman told her. “Most of the time we shall be cruising around the Coral Sea.”

  “A busman’s holiday,” commented Grimes.

  “Not at all,” Harrell told him, grinning for the first time. “There’ll just be the two of us, so there’ll be no crew problems. And no electronic gadgetry to get in my hair either.”

  “Happy sailing,” said Grimes, raising his glass.

  “Happy sailing,” they all said again.

  And it was happy sailing at first.

  It did not take Grimes long to find his feet, his sea legs. “After all,” he said to Sonya, “a ship is a ship is a ship . . .” He had been afraid at first that his officers and crew would resent him, an outsider appointed to command with no probationary period in the junior grades—but there hung about him the spurious glamour of that honorary admiral’s commission, and his reputation as a maritime historian earned him respect. Sonya Winneck’s people knew that he was on Aquarius to do a job, a useful job, and that his sailing as master of her was part of it.