First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  The silence was so thick as to be almost tangible. Grimes decided that it was incumbent upon himself to break it.

  “Sir?”

  “Nonetheless, Lieutenant Commander, your continued presence at Base is something of an embarrassment, especially since a party of VIPs, political VIPs at that, is due here very shortly. Some commission or other, touring the galaxy at the taxpayer’s expense. I don’t want you around so that politicians can ask you silly questions—to which, I have no doubt, you would give even sillier answers.

  “Furthermore, this whole Spartan affair has blown up into a minor crisis in interplanetary politics. Both the Duchy of Waldegren and the Empire of Waverley are talking loudly about spheres of influence.

  ”The admiral allowed himself the suspicion of a smile. “In any sort of crisis, Grimes, there is one thing better than presence of mind . . . .”

  “And that is, sir?” asked Grimes at last.

  “Absence of body. Ha. So I’m doing you a good turn, sending you out in Seeker, on a Lost Colony hunt. There have been persistent rumors of one out in the Argo Sector. Go and find it—or get lost yourself. I’m easy.”

  “Maintenance, sir . . .” said Grimes slowly. “Repairs . . . stores . . . manning . . . .”

  “They’re your business, Captain. No, I’m not promoting you, merely according you the courtesy title due to the commanding officer of a ship. You look after those no doubt boring details. And”—he made a major operation of looking at his watch—“I want you off Lindisfarne by sixteen-hundred hours local time tomorrow.”

  Grimes looked at his own watch. He had just seventeen hours, twelve minutes and forty-three seconds in which to ensure that his ship was, in all respects, ready for space. Maintenance, he knew, was well in hand. There were no crew deficiencies. Taking aboard essential stores would not occupy much time.

  Even so . . .

  “I’d better be getting on with it, sir,” he said.

  “You’d bloody well better. I’ll send your orders down to you later.”

  Grimes put on his cap, saluted smartly and strode out of the admiral’s office.

  2

  She was a survey ship rather than a warship, was Seeker. The Survey Service, in its first beginnings, had been just that—a survey service. But aliens being what they are—and humans being what they are—police work, on large and small scales, had tended to become more important than mere exploration and charting. The Survey Service, however, had not quite forgotten its original function. It maintained a few ships designed for peaceful rather than warlike pursuits, and Seeker was a member of this small squadron. Nonetheless, even she packed quite a wallop.

  Lieutenant Commander John Grimes was her captain. His last assignment, during which he had stumbled upon a most peculiar Lost Colony, had been census taking. Now he had been actually sent out to find a Lost Colony. He suspected that anything might happen, and probably would. It wasn’t that he was accident prone. He was just a catalyst.

  Nothing had happened yet; after all, it was early in the voyage. He had lifted from Lindisfarne exactly on time, driving through the atmosphere smoothly and easily, maintaining his departure trajectory until he was clear of the Base Planet’s Van Allens. Then, with the inertial drive shut down, the ship had been turned about her short axis until she was lined up, with due allowance for drift, on the target star. The Mannschenn Drive had been started, the inertial drive restarted—and passage was commenced.

  Satisfied, he had filled and lit his pipe, and when it was going well had ordered, “Deep space routine, Mr. Saul.” He had made his way to his quarters below and abaft the control room and then, ensconced in his easy chair, had opened the envelope containing his orders.

  The first sheet of the bundle of papers had contained nothing startling. You will proceed to the vicinity of the star Gamma Argo and conduct a preliminary survey of the planets in orbit about same, devoting especial attention to any of such bodies capable of supporting human life. “Mphm . . . “he grunted. The rest of the page consisted of what he referred to as “the usual guff.”

  At the head of the next page was the sentence that brought an expression of interest to his face.

  We have reason to believe that there is a humanoid—or possibly human—settlement on the fourth planet of this system. Should this settlement exist it is probable that it is a hitherto undiscovered Lost Colony. You are reminded that your duties are merely to conduct an investigation, and that you are not, repeat not, to interfere in the internal affairs of the colony.

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes again. Noninterference was all very well, but at times it was hard to maintain one’s status as a mildly interested spectator.

  Appended hereto are reports from our agents at Port Llangowan, on Siluria, at Port Brrooun, on Drroomoorr, at Port Mackay, on Rob Roy, at Port Forinbras, on Elsinore, at . . .

  “Mphm.” The Intelligence Branch seemed to be earning its keep, for a change. Grimes turned to the first report and read:

  From Agent X1783 (Commander, I.B.,F.S.S.)

  Dated at Port Llangowan, May 5, Year 171 Silurian (17113157 TS)

  To O.I.C. Intelligence, Federation’s Survey Service, Port Woomera, Centralia, Earth.

  Sir,

  POSSIBLE LOST COLONY IN ARGO SECTOR

  I have to report the possibility that there is a hitherto undiscovered Lost Colony in the Argo Sector, apparently on a planet in orbit about Gamma Argo.

  It is my custom, whilst stationed on this world, to spend my evenings in the Red Dragon tavern, a hostelry that seems to be the favorite drinking place of whatever merchant spacemen are in port.

  On the evening of May 3 several officers from the Dog Star Line’s Pomeranian were lined up at the bar, and were joined there by officers of the same company’s Corgi, newly berthed. As was to be expected, the personnel of the two vessels were old friends or acquaintances.

  The table at which I was seated was too far from the bar for me to overhear the conversation, but I was able to make use of my Mark XVII recorder, playing the recording back later that night in the privacy of my lodgings. The spool has been sent to you under separate cover, but herewith is a suitably edited transcript of what was said, with everything of no importance—e.g. the usual friendly blasphemies, obscenities and petty company gossip—deleted.

  First Mate of Pomeranian: And where the hell have you been hiding yourselves? You should have been in before us. I suppose that you got lost.

  Second Mate of Corgi: I never get lost.

  First Mate of Pomeranian: Like hell you don’t. I remember when you got your sums wrong when we were together in the old Dalmatian, and we finished up off Hamlet instead of Macbeth . . . But what’s twenty light-years between friends?

  Second Mate of Corgi: I told you all that the computer was on the blink, but nobody would listen to me. As for this trip, we had to deviate.

  First Mate of Corgi: Watch it, Peter!

  Second Mate of Corgi: Why?

  First Mate of Corgi: You know what the old man told us.

  Second Mate of Corgi: Too bloody right I do. He’s making his own report to the general manager, with copies every which way. Top Secret. For your eyes only. Destroy by fire before reading. He’s wasted in the Dog Star Line. He should have been in the so-called Intelligence Branch of the clottish Survey Service.

  First Mate of Pomeranian: What did happen?

  First Mate of Corgi: Nothing much. Mannschenn Drive slightly on the blink, so we had to find a suitable planet on which to park our arse while we recalibrated.

  Second Mate of Corgi: And what a planet! You know how I like sleek women . . . .

  First Mate of Corgi: Watch it, you stupid bastard!

  Second Mate of Corgi: Who’re you calling a bastard? You can sling your rank around aboard the bloody ship, but not here. If I’d had any sense I’d’a skinned out before the bitch lifted off. Morrowvia’ll do me when I retire from the Dog Star Line! Or resign . . .

  First Mate of Corgi: Or get fired—as
you will be, unless you pipe down!

  Second Mate of Corgi: You can’t tell me . . .

  First Mate of Corgi: I can, and I bloody well am telling you! Come on, finish your drink, and then back to the ship!

  At this juncture there are sounds of a scuffle as Corgi’s chief officer, a very big man, hustles his junior out of the Red Dragon.

  Third Mate of Pomeranian: What the hell was all that about?

  First Mate of Pomeranian: Search me.

  The rest of the recorded conversation consists of idle and futile speculation by Pomeranian’s officers as to the identity of the world landed upon by Corgi.

  To date I have been unable to identify this planet myself. There is no Morrowvia listed in the catalogue, even when due allowance is made for variations in spelling. Also I have checked the Navy List, and found that the master of Corgi is not, and never has been, an officer in the FSS Reserve. None of his officers hold a Reserve commission. It may be assumed, therefore, that the master’s report on the discovery of what appears to be a Lost Colony will be made only to his owners. Corgi, when she deviated, was bound from Darnstadt to Siluria. Her normal trajectory would have taken her within three light-years of Gamma Argo. The planetary system of Gamma Argo was surveyed in the early days of the Second Expansion, and no indigenous intelligent life was found on any of its worlds . . . .

  “Mphm . . .” Grimes refilled and relit his pipe. This was interesting reading.

  He turned to the report from the agent at Port Brrooun. He, the shipping advisor to the Terran Consul, had been spending most of his free evenings in an establishment called the Beer Hive. Brrooun had been Corgi’s next port of call after Llangowan. Her second officer had confined his troubles to a sympathetic Shaara drone. At Port Mackay, on Rob Roy, he had gotten fighting drunk on the local whiskey and had beaten up the chief officer and publicly abused the master. Normally such conduct would have led to his instant dismissal—but Captain Danzellan, Corgi, had been most reluctant to leave the objectionable young man behind, in the hands of the civil authorities. The Intelligence Officer at Port Mackay, although knowing nothing of the Lost Colony, had been intrigued by the failure of the master to rid himself of an obvious malcontent and had wondered what was behind it. His own theories, for what they were worth, included a Hanoverian plot against the Jacobean royal house of Waverley . . . . It was from Port Fortinbras, on Elsinore, that the next really interesting report came. The agent there was a woman, and worked as a waitress in the Poor Yorick, a tavern famous for its funereal decor. The agent, too, was famous insofar as the Intelligence Branch of the Survey Service was concerned, being known as the Bug Queen. Her specialty was recorders printed into the labels on bottles.

  Transcript of conversation between Harold Larsen, owner-manager of Larsen’s Repair Yard, and Peter Dalquist, owner of Dalquist’s Ship Chandlery:

  Dalquist: An’ how are things at the yard, Harald?

  Larsen: Can’t complain, Pete, can’t complain. Southerly Buster’s havin’ a face lift.

  Dalquist: Drongo Kane . . .

  Larsen: You can say what you like about Drongo—but he always pays his bills . . .

  Dalquist: Yeah. But he drives a hard bargain first.

  Larsen: You can say that again.

  Dalquist: An’ what is it this time? General maintenance? Survey?

  Larsen: Modifications. He’s havin’ his cargo spaces converted into passenger accommodation—of a sort. An’ you remember those two quick-firin’ cannon I got off that derelict Waldegren gunboat? Drongo’s havin ‘em mounted on the Buster.

  Dalquist: But it ain’t legal. Southerly Buster’s a merchant ship.

  Larsen: Drongo says that it is legal, an’ that he’s entitled to carry defensive armament . . . . Some o’ the places he gets to, he needs it! But I checked up with me own legal eagles just to make sure that me own jets are clear. They assured me that Drongo’s within his rights.

  Dalquist: But quick-firin’ cannon, when every man-o’-war is armed to the teeth with laser, misguided missiles an’ only the Odd Gods of the Galaxy know what else! Doesn’t make sense.

  Larsen: Maybe it doesn’t—but Drongo’s got too much sense to take on a warship.

  Dalquist: What if a warship takes on him?

  Larsen: That’s his worry.

  Dalquist: But he must be thinkin’ of fightin’ somebody . . . . Any idea who it might be?

  Larsen: I haven’t a clue. All that I know is that his last port, before he came here, was Brrooun, on one o’ the Shaara worlds. He told me—he’d had rather too much to drink himself—that he’d fed a couple of bottles of Scotch to a talkative drone. He said that he’ll buy drinks for anybody—or anything—as long as he gets information in return. Anyhow, this drone told Drongo what he’d been told by the drunken second mate of a Dog Star tramp.

  Dalquist: Which was?

  Larsen: Drongo certainly wasn’t telling me, even though he’d had a skinful. He did mutter something about Lost Colonies, an’ finders bein’ keepers, an’ about the Dog Star Line havin’ to be manned by greyhounds if they wanted to get their dirty paws into this manger . . .

  Dalquist: An’ was that all?

  Larsen: You said it. He clammed up.

  Unfortunately Captain Kane and his officers, unlike the majority of spacemen visiting Port Fortinbras, do not frequent the Poor Yorick, preferring the King Claudius. On the several occasions that I have been there as a customer, at the same times as Southerly Buster’s personnel, I have been unable to learn anything of importance. Attempts made by myself to strike up an acquaintance with Captain Kane, his mates and his engineers have failed.

  Grimes chuckled. He wondered what the Bug Queen looked like. It seemed obvious that she owed her success as an agent to her skill with electronic gadgetry rather than to her glamour. But Kane? Where did he come into the picture? The man was notorious—but, to date, had always managed to stay on the right side of the law.

  But it was time that he, Grimes, put his senior officers into the picture.

  3

  They were all in Grimes’s day cabin—his departmental heads and his senior scientific officers. There was Saul, the first lieutenant, a huge, gentle, very black man. There was Connery, chief engineer. The two officers in charge of communications were there—Timmins, the electronicist, and Hayakawa, the psionicist. There were Doctors Tallis, Westover and Lazenby—biologist, geologist and ethologist respectively—all of whom held the rank of full commander. Forsby—physicist—had yet to gain his doctorate and was only a lieutenant. There were Lieutenant Pitcher, navigator, Lieutenant Stein, ship’s surgeon and biochemist, and Captain Philby, officer in charge of Seeker’s Marines.

  Grimes, trying to look and to feel fatherly, surveyed his people. He was pleased to note that the real spacemen—with the exception of Hayakawa—looked the part. Ethnic origins and differentiation of skin pigmentation were canceled out, as it were, by the common uniform. With the exception of Maggie Lazenby the scientists looked their part. They were, of course, all in uniform—though it wasn’t what they were wearing but how they were wearing it that mattered. To them uniform was just something to cover their nakedness, the more comfortably the better. And to them beards were merely the means whereby the bother of depilation could be avoided. The growths sprouting from the faces of Tallis, Westover and Forsby contrasted shockingly with the neat hirsute adornments sported by Connery and Stein. The only one of the scientists at whom it was a pleasure to look was Doctor Lazenby—slim, auburn-haired and wearing a skirt considerably less than regulation length.

  Grimes looked at her.

  She snapped, “Get on with it, John.” (Everybody present knew that she was a privileged person.)

  “Mphm,” he grunted as he carefully filled his pipe. “Help yourselves to coffee—or to something stronger from the bar, if you’d rather.” He waited until everybody was holding a glass or a cup, then said, “As you all know by this time, this is a Lost Colony expedition . . . .”

&nb
sp; Forsby raised his hand for attention. “Captain, forgive my ignorance, but I’ve only just joined the Survey Service. And I’m a physicist, not a historian. Just what is a Lost Colony?”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes again. He shot a dirty look at Maggie Lazenby as he heard her whispered “Keep it short!” He carefully lit his pipe. He said, “The majority of the so-called Lost Colonies date from the days of the Second Expansion, of the gaussjammers. The gaussjammers were interstellar ships that used the Ehrenhaft Drive. Cutting a long and involved story short, the Ehrenhaft generators produced a magnetic current—a current, not a field—and the ship in which they were mounted became, in effect, a huge magnetic particle, proceeding at a speed which could be regulated from a mere crawl to FTL along the ‘tramlines,’ the lines of magnetic force. This was all very well—but a severe magnetic storm could throw a gaussjammer light-years off course, very often into an unexplored and uncharted sector of the galaxy . . . .”

  “FTL?” demanded Forsby in a pained voice. “FTL?”

  “A matter of semantics,” Grimes told him airily. “You know, and I know, that faster-than-light speeds are impossible. With our Mannschenn Drive, for example, we cheat—by going astern in time as we’re going ahead in space. The gaussjammers cheated too—by coexisting with themselves all along the lines of magnetic force that they were on. The main thing was—it worked. Anyhow, visualize a gaussjammer after a magnetic storm has tangled the lines of force like so much spaghetti and drained the micro-pile of all energy. The captain doesn’t know where he is. But he has got power for his main engines.”

  “You said that the micro-pile was dead.”

  “Sure. But those ships ran to emergency generators—diesel generators. They churned out the electricity to drive the Ehrenhaft generators. The ship’s biochemist knew the techniques for producing diesel fuel from whatever was available—even though it meant that all hands would be on short rations. So, for as long as she could, the ship either tried to make her way back to some known sector or to find a planet capable of being settled . . . .”