To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga

by A Bertram Chandler

  “I have the utmost confidence in Miss Freeman’s abilities, Frankie,” Grimes told him sweetly.

  Delamere snarled wordlessly.

  Una Freeman said, “You’re the expert, John—for the first part of it, anyhow. Shall we require space-suits?”

  “Too right we shall,” said Grimes. “To begin with, Mr. Tarban has probably evacuated the atmosphere from the after hold by now. And we don’t know whether or not there’s any atmosphere inside the derelict or if it’s breathable. We’d better get changed.”

  Before he left the control room he went to the binoculars for the last look at the abandoned liner. She looked innocent enough, a great, dull-gleaming torpedo shape. Suddenly she didn’t look so innocent. The word “torpedo” has long possessed a sinister meaning.

  Chapter 6

  Everything was ready in the after hold when Grimes and Una got down there. The lashings had been removed from the boat and its outer airlock door was open. The inertial drive was ticking over, and somebody had started the mini-Mannschenn, synchronizing its temporal precession rates to those of the much bigger interstellar drive units in Skink and Delta Geminorum. A cargo port in the ship’s side had been opened, and through it the liner was visible.

  “She’s all yours, sir,” said the First Lieutenant.

  “Thank you,” replied Grimes.

  Delamere’s irritated voice came through the helmet phones, “Stow the social chit-chat, Mr. Tarban. We’ve wasted enough time already!”

  “Shut up, Frankie!” snapped Una Freeman.

  Grimes clambered into the boat, stood in the chamber of the little airlock. Una passed up a bag of tools and instruments. He put it down carefully by his feet, then helped the girl inboard. He pressed a stud, and the outer door shut, another stud and the inner door opened.

  He went forward, followed by Una. He lowered himself into the pilot’s seat. She took the co-pilot’s chair. He ran a practiced eye over the control panel. All systems were GO.

  “Officer commanding boarding party to officer commanding Skink,” he said into his helmet microphone, “request permission to eject.”

  “Eject!” snarled Delamere.

  “He might have wished us good luck,” remarked Una.

  “He’s glad to see the back of us,” Grimes told her.

  “You can say that again!” contributed Delamere.

  Grimes laughed as nastily as he could manage, then his gloved fingers found and manipulated the inertial drive controls. The little engine clattered tinnily but willingly. The boat was clear, barely clear of the chocks and sliding forward. She shot out through the open port, and Grimes made the small course correction that brought the liner dead ahead, and kept her there. She seemed to expand rapidly as the distance was covered.

  “Careful,” warned Una. “This is a boat we’re in, not a missile. . . .”

  “No back seat driving!” laughed Grimes.

  Nonetheless, he adjusted trajectory slightly so that it would be a near miss and not a direct hit. At the last moment he took the quite considerable way off the boat by applying full reverse thrust. She creaked and shuddered, but held together. Una said nothing, but Grimes could sense her disapproval. Come to that, he had his own disapproval to contend with. He realized that he was behaving with the same childish flashiness that Frankie Delamere would have exhibited.

  He orbited the spaceship. On the side of her turned away from Skink the cargo ports were still open. It all looked very unspacemanlike—but why bother to batten down when the ship is going to be destroyed minutes after you have left her? She hadn’t been destroyed, of course, but she should have been, would have been if some firing device had not malfunctioned.

  He said, “I’ll bring us around to the after airlock. Suit you?”

  “Suits me. But be careful, John. Don’t forget that there’s an armed bomb aboard that ship. Anything, anything at all, could set it off.”

  “Yes, teacher. I’ll be careful, very careful. I’ll come alongside so carefully that I wouldn’t crack the proverbial egg.” He reached out for the microphone of the Carlotti transceiver; at this distance from the courier, with Mannschenn Drive units in operation, the N.S.T. suit radios were useless. He would have to inform Frankie Delamere and his own officers of progress to date and of his intentions. With his chin he nudged the stud that would cause the faceplate of his helmet to flip open. His thumb pressed the transmit button. And then it happened.

  Aboard the ship, for many, many months, the miniaturized Carlotti receiver had been waiting patiently for the signal that, owing to some infinitesimal shifting of frequencies, had never come. The fuse had been wrongly set, perhaps, or some vibration had jarred it from its original setting, quite possibly the shock initiated by the explosion of either of the two warning bombs. And now here was a wide-band transmitter at very close range.

  Circuits came alive, a hammer fell on a detonator, which exploded, in its turn exploding the driving charge. One sub-critical mass of fissionable material was impelled to contact with another sub-critical mass, with the inevitable result.

  As a bomb it lacked the sophistication of the weaponry of the armed forces of the Federation—but it worked.

  Grimes, with the dreadful reality blinding him, remembered his prevision of the light too bright to be seen. He heard somebody (Una? himself?) scream. This was It. This was all that they would ever be. He was a dead leaf caught in the indraught of a forest fire, whirling down and through the warped dimensions to the ultimate, blazing Nothingness.

  Chapter 7

  She said, “But we shouldn’t be alive . . .”

  He said, “But we are.” He added, glumly, “But for how long? This boat must be as radioactive as all hell. I suppose that it was the bomb that went off.”

  “It was,” she told him. “But there’s no radioactivity. I’ve tested. There is a counter in my bomb disposal kit.”

  He said, “It must be on the blink.”

  “It’s not. It registers well enough with all the normal sources—my wristwatch, against the casing of the fusion power unit, and so on.”

  He said doubtfully, “I suppose we could have been thrown clear. Or we were in some cone of shadow. . . . Yes, that makes sense. We were toward the stern of the ship, and the shielding of her power plant must have protected us.”

  She asked, “What now?”

  Grimes stared through the viewports of the control cabin. There was no sign of Skink. There was no sign of any wreckage from Delta Geminorum. The stars shone bright and hard in the blackness; the mini-Mannschenn had stopped and the boat was adrift in the normal Continuum.

  He said, “We stay put.”

  She said, “Shouldn’t Delamere be sniffing around to pick up the pieces?”

  “Delamere’s sure that there aren’t any pieces,” he told her, “just as I should be sure if I were in his shoes. And, in any case, he’s in a hurry to get to Olgana. He knows we’re dead, vaporized. But he’ll have used his Carlotti to put in a report to Base, giving the coordinates of the scene of the disaster. When anything of this kind happens a ship full of experts is sent at once to make an investigation.” He laughed. “And won’t they be surprised when they find us alive and kicking!”

  “Can’t we use our radio to tell them?”

  “We can’t raise Skink on the N.S.T. transmitter while she’s running on Mannschenn Drive. We can’t raise the Base, either. Oh, they’d pick up the signal eventually—quite a few months from now. And you’ve seen the mess that our Carlotti set is in . . .”

  “So we just . . . wait?”

  “S.O.P. for shipwrecked spacemen,” said Grimes. “We haven’t a hope in hell of getting anywhere in our lifetimes unless we use Mannschenn Drive—and, looking at the mess the mini-Mannschenn is in, I’d sooner not touch it. We’ve survived so far. Let’s stay that way.”

  “Couldn’t you fix the Carlotti transceiver to let Base know that we’re here?”

  “I’m not a Carlotti technician, any more than I’m an exper
t on Mannschenn Drives.”

  “H’m.” She looked around the quite commodious interior of the boat. “Looks like we have to set up housekeeping for a few days, doesn’t it? We could be worse off, I suppose. Much worse off. . . . We’ve food, water, air, light, heat . . . Talking of heat, I may as well get into something more comfortable . . .”

  Grimes, never one to look such a magnificent gift horse in the mouth, helped her off with her spacesuit. She helped him off with his. In the thick underwear that they were wearing under the suits they might just as well still have been armored. She came into his arms willingly enough, but there was no real contact save for mouth to mouth.

  She whispered, “I’m still too warm . . .”

  He said, “We’d better take our longjohns off, until we want them again. No point in subjecting them to needless wear and tear . . .”

  “Are you seducing me, sir?”

  “I wouldn’t think of it!” lied Grimes.

  “I don’t believe you, somehow. Oh, John, how good it is to get away from that horrid Base and Frankie’s nasty little ship! I feel free, free!” She pulled the zip of her longjohns down to the crotch. Her released breasts thrust out at him, every pubic hair seemed to have a life of its own, to be rejoicing in its freedom from restraint. Grimes smelled the odor of her—animal, pungent—and his body responded. His underwear joined hers, floating in mid-cabin in a tangle of entwining limbs. Within seconds he and the girl were emulating the pose of the clothing that they had discarded. Stirred by the air currents the garments writhed in sympathy with the movements of their owners.

  Chapter 8

  “The Survey Service looks after its own,” said Grimes.

  “Then it’s high time that it started doing so,” she said.

  “You can’t organize a Search and Rescue Operation in five minutes,” he told her.

  “All right, all right. We can’t expect any help from Skink, We’ve already agreed on that. But Frankie will have informed Base of the destruction of the derelict. In the unlikely event of Skink’s having been destroyed herself—you said that she was well out of effective range of the explosion—Base will have been wondering why no reports have been coming in from anybody. And how long have we been here now? Over three weeks.”

  “If the Carlotti transceiver hadn’t been smashed . . .” he began. “And the mini-Mannschenn. . . .”

  “The Normal Space Time transceiver is working—you say, and we hope. Surely by now there’d be somebody in this vicinity, sniffing around for wreckage—and not, therefore, running under interstellar drive. Even I know that. How many days did it take from Lindisfarne Base to the interception?”

  “Twenty.”

  “And this is our twenty-third day in this tin coffin. For most of the time we’ve maintained a continuous listening watch as well as putting out distress calls at regular intervals. I suppose somebody might just pick them up a few years from now.”

  “Space is vast,” said Grimes.

  “You’re telling me, Buster! But surely Delamere was able to give accurate coordinates for the position of the derelict when we boarded her—when we tried to board her, rather—even if he didn’t want to risk his own precious hide investigating. . . .”

  “We’ve been over all this before,” said Grimes.

  “Then we’ll go over it again, lover boy.”

  “Nobody survives a nuclear explosion at Position Zero, as we were,” said Grimes.

  “Are you trying to suggest that we’re dead and in some sort of spaceman’s heaven? Ha, ha. It certainly ain’t no policewoman’s paradise!”

  Grimes ignored this. In any case, the double negative made her meaning unclear (he told himself). He went on, “And Delamere had his schedule to maintain. . . .” Even so, Delamere must have reported the destruction of Delta Geminorum to Base. And Base must have dispatched a properly equipped vessel to the scene of the disaster to gather whatever evidence, no matter how little, remained, even though it was only radioactive dust and gases.

  But why had the boat, and its occupants, not been reduced to that condition?

  She broke into his thoughts, remarking, “As I’ve said before, I’m not a spaceman.”

  He looked across the table at her spectacular superstructure. “Insofar as gender is concerned, how very right you are!”

  She pointedly ignored this. “I’m not a spaceman, but I do remember some of the things that you people have condescended to tell me, from time to time, about the art and science of astronautics. More than once people have nattered to me about the peculiar consequences of changing the mass of a ship while the Mannschenn Drive is in operation.”

  “Old spacemen’s tales!” scoffed Grimes.

  “Really? Then how is it that in every ship that I’ve traveled in people have regarded that cock-eyed assemblage of precessing gyroscopes with superstitious awe? You’re all scared of it. And what about the odd effects when the Drive is started, and the temporal precession field builds up, not when it’s stopped, and the field fades? The feeling of déjà vu . . . The flashes of precognition . . .” She started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I had a real beaut aboard Skink. I saw you out of uniform. When I saw you for the first time out of uniform, in actuality, it was in this boat. But I’d already seen that scar you have on your right thigh. But that isn’t the funny part. In my . . . vision you were not only naked, but riding a bicycle . . .”

  “Very funny. As a matter of fact I saw you the same way. But bicycles are one article of equipment that this boat doesn’t run to.”

  “All right. Let’s forget the bicycles. Maybe someday we’ll enjoy a holiday on Arcadia together. I suppose the Arcadians ride bicycles as well as practicing naturalism. But Delta Geminorum. . . . She was running under interstellar drive when she blew up. So were we, maintaining temporal synchronization with her.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m only a glorified cop, John, but it’s obvious, even to me, that a few thousand tons of mass were suddenly converted into energy in our immediate vicinity. So, Mr. Lieutenant Commander Grimes, where are we?”

  Grimes was beginning to feel badly scared. “Or when . . . ?” he muttered.

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  He said, “Brace yourself for yet another lecture on the Mannschenn Drive. The Mannschenn Drive warps the Continuum—the space-time continuum—about the ship that’s using it. Putting it very crudely, such a ship is going astern in time while going ahead in space. . . .”

  “So. . . . So we could be anywhere. Or anywhen. But you’re a navigator. You should be able to find out something from the relative positions of the stars.”

  “Not so easy,” he told her. “The Carlotti transceiver, which can be used for position finding as well as communicating, is bust. We do carry, of course, a Catalogue of Carlotti Beacons—but in these circumstances it’s quite useless.”

  “Especially so,” she pointed out, “when we don’t even know if there are any Carlotti Beacons in this space-time. So, lover boy, what are you doing about it?”

  Grimes’ prominent ears flushed angrily. She was being unfair. She shared the responsibility for getting them into this mess. She, the bomb-disposal expert, should have warned him of the possible consequences of using a Carlotti transmitter in close proximity to the derelict. He rose from the table haughtily. It was no hardship for him to leave his unfinished meal. He stalked, insofar as this was possible when wearing only magnetic sandals in Free Fall, to the forward end of the boat. He stared out through the control cabin viewports at the interstellar immensities. There was no star that he could identify, no constellation. Had he been made a welcome visitor in Skink’s control room he would have known how the stars should look in this sector of Space. As it was. . . . He shrugged. All that he could be sure of was that they were in a universe, not necessarily the universe. At least the boat hadn’t fallen down some dark crack in the continuum.

  He turned away from the port, looked aft.
He saw that Una Freeman had taken the broken, battered Carlotti transceiver from the locker in which it had been stowed, was picking up and looking at the pieces intently. Nude with Moebius Strip, he thought sardonically.

  She waved the twisted antenna at him. “Are you sure you can’t do anything with this lot?” she demanded.

  “Quite sure. I’m not a radio technician.”

  “Then you can’t be sure that it is a complete write-off.” Her wide, fun mouth was capable of quite spectacular sneering. “Get the lead out of your pants, lover boy—not that you’re wearing any. You’ve been having a marvelous holiday for the last three weeks; it’s high time that you started work again.”

  “Mphm?”

  “I thought, in my girlish innocence. . . .”

  “Ha, ha.”

  She glared at him. “I thought, in my girlish innocence that all you spacefaring types were men of infinite resource and sagacity, able to make repairs, light years from the nearest yard, with chewing gum and old string. I’d like to see some proof of it.”

  He said, “I might be able to straighten out the antenna and get it remounted. But the printed circuits are a mess.”

  She said, “There’re soldering irons in the workshop.”

  “I know. But have you had a good look at those trays?”

  “Of course. Trays of circuitry. Since simple soldering seems to be beyond your capabilities. . . .”

  “And yours.”

  “I’m not the skilled, trained, qualified spaceman, lover boy. You are. But let me finish. As a Sky Marshal I had to do quite a few courses on general spacemanship, including Deep Space communications. One of the things I learned was that quite a few circuit trays are interchangeable between NST and Carlotti transceivers. Since it’s obvious now that we shall not be needing the NST transceiver—we cannibalize. After that’s been done, lover boy, all we have to do is home on the Lindisfarne Beacon.”