To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga

by A Bertram Chandler

  “I wish I knew,” he said at last. “I wish I knew. . . .”

  Chapter 11

  They had a drink, helping themselves generously from one of the bottles of medicinal brandy. They felt that they needed it, even if they didn’t deserve it. They had another drink after they had helped each other off with their spacesuits. After the third one they decided that they might as well make a celebration of it and wriggled out of their longjohns.

  Then Una had to spoil everything.

  She said, “All right, lover boy. Let us eat, drink and make merry while we can. But this is one right royal mess that you’ve gotten us into!”

  If anybody had told Grimes in the not-too-distant past that he would ever be able to look at an attractive, naked woman with acute dislike Grimes would have told him, in more or less these words, Don’t be funny. But now it was happening. It was the injustice of what she was saying that rankled.

  He growled, at last, “You were there too!”

  “Yes, Buster. But you’re the expert. You’re the commissioned officer in the Federation’s vastly over-ballyhooed Survey Service.”

  “You’re an expert too, in your own way. You should have warned me about using the Carlotti transceiver.”

  “Don’t let’s go over all that again, please. Well, apart from what’s on your mind . . .” She looked down at him and permitted herself a sneer. “Apart from what was on your mind, what do you intend doing next?”

  “Business before pleasure, then,” said Grimes. “All that we can do is find some other likely transmission and home on that.”

  “What about those skeleton spheres, like the one that attacked us on the devastated planet? Was it after us actually—or was it, too, homing on the signal from the alien spaceship?”

  “Alien spaceship?” queried Grimes. “I don’t know when or where we are—but we could be the aliens.”

  “Regular little space lawyer, aren’t you, with all this hair-splitting. . . . Alien, schmalien. . . . As it says in the Good Book, one man’s Mede is another man’s Persian. . . . Don’t be so lousy with the drinks, lover boy. Fill ‘er up.”

  “This has to last,” Grimes told her. “For emergenshies . . .”

  “This is so an emergency.”

  “You can shay—say—that again,” he admitted.

  She was beginning to look attractive once more. In vino veritas, he thought. He put out a hand to touch her. She did not draw back. He grabbed her and pulled her to him. Her skin, on his, was silkily smooth, and her mouth, as he kissed her, was warm and fragrant with brandy. And then, quite suddenly, it was like an implosion, with Grimes in the middle of it. After he, himself, had exploded they both drifted into a deep sleep.

  When they awoke, strapped together in one of the narrow bunks, she was in a much better mood than she had been for quite a long time. And Grimes, in spite of his slight hangover, was happy. Their escape from—at the very least—danger had brought them together again. Whatever this strange universe threw at them from now on they, working in partnership, would be able to cope—he hoped, and believed.

  She got up and made breakfast, such as it was—although the food seemed actually to taste better. After they had finished the meal Grimes went to play with the Carlotti transceiver. He picked up what seemed to be a conversation between two stations and not, as had been the other signal upon which they had hopes, a distress call automatically repeated at regular intervals. He said, “This seems to be distant, but not too distant. What about it?”

  She replied, “We’ve no place else to go. Get her lined up, lover boy, and head that way.”

  He shut down the mini-Mannschenn briefly, turned the boat until its stem was pointed toward the source of the transmissions, then opened both the inertial drive and the interstellar drive full out. It was good to be going somewhere, he thought. Hope springs eternal . . . he added mentally. But without hope the human race would have died out even before the Stone Age.

  For day after day after day they sped through the black immensities, the warped continuum. Day after day after day the two-way conversation in the unknown language continued to sound from the speaker of the Carlotti transceiver. There were words that sounded the same as some of the words used in the first transmission. Tarfelet . . . Over? wondered Grimes. Over and out?

  On they ran, on—and the strength of the signals increased steadily. They were close now to the source, very close. Unfortunately the lifeboat did not run to a Mass Proximity Indicator, as it seemed that the transmissions did not emanate from a planetary surface but from something—or two somethings—adrift in space. The ship—or ships—would be invisible from the boat unless, freakishly, temporal precession rates were synchronized. That would be too much to hope for. But if neither the boat nor the targets were proceeding under interstellar drive they could, if close enough, be seen visually or picked up on the radar.

  Grimes shut down the mini-Mannschenn.

  He and Una looked out along the line of bearing. Yes, there appeared to be something there, not all that distant, two bright lights. He switched on the radar, stared into the screen.

  “Any joy?” asked Una.

  “Yes. Targets bearing zero relative. Range thirty kilometers.” He grinned. “We’d better get dressed again. We may be going visiting—or receiving visitors.”

  They climbed into their longjohns and spacesuits. After a little hesitation they belted on their pistols. Back in the pilot’s chair Grimes reduced speed, shutting down the inertial drive until, instead of the usual clangor, it emitted little more than an irritable grumble. In the radar screen the twin blips of the target slid slowly toward the center.

  It was possible now to make out details through the binoculars. There were two ships there, both of them of the same conical design as the one they had seen in the ruined city. But these were not dead ships; their hulls were ablaze with lights—white and red and green and blue. They looked almost as if they belonged in some amusement park on a man-colonized planet—but somehow the illumination gave the impression of being functional rather than merely of giving pleasure to the beholder.

  The speaker of the transceiver came suddenly to life. “Quarat tambeel?” There was an unmistakable note of interrogation. “Quarat tambeel? Tarfelet.”

  “They’ve spotted us,” said Grimes. “Answer, will you?”

  “But what shall I say?” asked Una.

  “Say that we come in peace and all the rest of it. Make it sound as though you mean it. If they can’t understand the words, the tune might mean something to them.”

  “Quarat tambeel? Tarfelet.”

  What ship? Over, guessed Grimes.

  Una spoke slowly and distinctly into the microphone. “We come in peace. We come in peace. Over.” She made it sound convincing. Grimes, as a friendly gesture, switched on the boat’s landing lights.

  “Tilzel bale, winzen bale, rindeen, rindeen. Tarfelet.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Una said. “It is a pity that our visiscreens don’t work. If they did, we could draw diagrams of Pythagoras’ Theorem at each other. . . .” But the way she sounded she could have been making love to the entity at the other end.

  Grimes looked at the little radar repeater on the control panel. Ten kilometers, and closing. Nine . . . Eight . . . Seven . . . He cut the drive altogether. He could imagine, all too clearly, what a perfect target he would be to the gunnery officers aboard the strange ships. If they had gunnery officers, if they had guns, or their equivalent, that was. But it seemed unlikely that all life on that devastated planet had been wiped out by natural catastrophe. There had been a war, and a dreadful one.

  But many years ago, he told himself, otherwise the level of radioactivity would have been much higher. And possibly confined to the worlds of only one planetary system . . .

  Five kilometers, and closing still. . . .

  Four. . . .

  He restarted the inertial drive, in reverse. This was close enough until he had some idea of what he was runni
ng into.

  Una was still talking softly into the microphone. “We mean you no harm. We need help. Tarfelet.”

  The use of that final word brought an excited gabble in reply.

  Three point five kilometers, holding. Three point five . . . Three point six.

  Grimes stopped the inertial drive.

  “Go on talking,” he said. “Get them used to your voice. Maybe they’ll send a boat out to us.”

  “You’re not going in?”

  “Not yet. Not until I’m sure of a friendly reception, as the wise fly said to the spider.”

  “And what happened to him in the end? The fly, I mean.”

  “I can’t remember,” said Grimes. There are so many ways in which flies die, and most of them unconnected with spiders.

  Chapter 12

  They hung there, maintaining their distance off the two conical spaceships. Grimes was almost convinced that they were friendly. Almost. The boat was within easy range of any of the weapons with which he was familiar. It would be foolish to assume that a spacefaring race did not possess arms at least as good as those mounted by the warships of the Federation. Of course, the strange ships could be merchantmen. Their crews might have at their disposal nothing better (or worse) than hand weapons. They might just be waiting for Grimes and Una to board one of the vessels, when they would overpower them by force of numbers.

  If only, thought Grimes, they could get some sort of a picture on the vision screen of the Carlotti transceiver, things would be very much easier. Or, better still, if Una or himself were a graduate of the Rhine Institute, a licensed telepath. . . . He had often, in the past, relied heavily on the services of Psionic Communications Officers. It was a great pity that he did not have one along now.

  Una said, “I’m sure that it would be safe to go in.”

  “Sure? How can you be sure?”

  “Training,” she told him. “In my job we soon pick up the knack of being able to know if the other person is lying . . . I’ve been listening to their voices. There’ve been at least three of them talking to us. I bet you anything you like that they’re our sort of ‘people’.”

  “And that makes them just wonderful, doesn’t it?”

  “Don’t be so bloody cynical.”

  “In any case, what experience have you had with dealing with aliens?”

  “Very little. Why?”

  “Because very often facial expressions, and verbal intonations, can be misleading. What we take for a friendly grin could very well be a snarl of hatred. And so on.”

  “Even so, I think we should go in. We’ve nothing to lose.”

  “All right, then.”

  Grimes restarted the inertial drive. While he was watching the pilot lights on the control panel he heard Una cry out. He looked up, and out through the control cabin ports. They—the lifeboat and the two spaceships—were no longer alone. Shimmering into full visibility were at least a dozen of the weird, skeletal spheres, latticework globes containing odd, spinning bulks of machinery. They were big, far bigger than the one that had attacked them on the devastated world.

  The conical ships were armed after all.

  From the nearer of them shot a salvo of missiles, none of which reached their target. All of them exploded harmlessly well short of the sphere at which they had been aimed. Both ships were firing now—and both ineffectually. It wasn’t Grimes’ fight, but he deeply regretted not being able to take sides. He regarded the spherical ships as the enemy. He had to sit there, watching helplessly. But there was something odd about the battle. Apart from the way in which they were closing in, with mathematical precision, to completely surround the conical vessels, they were not attacking. They were using whatever armament they possessed—laser, or something similar?—only to detonate the warheads of the rockets before they hit.

  “Isn’t it time we were getting out of here?” demanded Una.

  Yes, it was time, and more than time. Once the mini-Mannschenn was restarted the boat would slip out of the normal dimensions of space, would be untouchable unless any enemy succeeded in synchronizing temporal precession rates. But Grimes could not bring himself to flee until he knew how it all came out. Like the majority of humankind he numbered Lot’s wife among his ancestors.

  Still the battle continued. The flare of exploding missiles glowed fitfully through the clouds of smoke that were dissipating slowly in the nothingness. Slashing beams, heating gas molecules to brief incandescence, were visible now. Oddly, the englobed vessels made no move to escape. They could have actuated their own interstellar drives to do so, but they did not. Perhaps they could not. Perhaps, Grimes realized, the spheres, between them, had set up some sort of inhibiting field.

  “Isn’t it time that we were getting out of here?” shouted Una.

  “Too right it is,” agreed Grimes, but reluctantly. It had occurred to him that the inhibiting field might affect the boat’s mini-Mannschenn. He cursed himself for not having left it running, precessionless. Valuable seconds would be wasted while he restarted it. But, especially with the miniaturized drives with their overly delicate controls, the precessionless state could be maintained only by constant attention.

  He switched on the boat’s interstellar drive. The pilot lights on the console came alive. There was nothing further that he could do until the requisite RPS had built up. He looked out of the viewports again. The battle was still going on, although with diminished fury. The rocket salvos were coming at longer and longer intervals, the smoke was thinning fast. From the skeleton spheres long, long tentacles of metallic rope were extending, reaching out for the trapped ships.

  Then it happened.

  One of the conical vessels suddenly burgeoned into a great flower of dreadful, blinding incandescence, expanding (it seemed) slowly (but the field of the mini-Mannschenn was building up, distorting the time perception of Grimes and Una), dissolving the other ship into her component atoms, engulfing the nearer of the surrounding spheres.

  The scene faded, slowly at first, then faster.

  It flickered out.

  The boat fell through the warped continuum, alone again.

  Chapter 13

  “So now what do we do?” asked Una.

  They were sitting over one of the nutritious but unappetizing meals. After this last escape they had not broken out a bottle of brandy, had not celebrated in any other way. They were, both of them, far too frightened. They were alone, utterly alone. Each of them, in the past, had derived strength from the big organizations of which they were members. Each of them—and especially Grimes—had known racial pride, had felt, deep down, the superiority of humans over all other breeds. But now, so far as they knew, now and here, they were the sole representatives of humanity, just the two of them in a little, unarmed boat.

  “You tell me,” he retorted glumly.

  “We can, at least, try to sort things out, John,” she said. “If we know what we’re up against we might, just possibly, be able to deal with it. You’re the spaceman. You’re the Survey Service officer. You’ve been around much more than I have. What do you make of it all?”

  “To begin with,” he said, “there has been a war. It certainly seems that there still is a war. As far as the planet we landed on is concerned, the war finished a long time ago. But it’s still going on, nonetheless. A war between two different geometrical forms. Between the cones and the geodesic spheres. The people who build conical ships against those who build spherical ones. Which side is in the right? We don’t know. Which side is in the wrong? We don’t know that, either.”

  She remarked quietly, “In human history, quite a few wars have been fought with neither side in the right—and quite a few have been fought over causes as absurd as the distinction between geometrical shapes. Even so, I still stick to my assertion that the people in the conical ships are—were, rather—our kind of people . . .”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out now,” he told her.

  “Of course we shall. There are other
worlds, other ships. We’re still picking up signals on the Carlotti, from all over.”

  “Mphm. Yes. So we pick up something promising, again, and home on it.”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  He spooned a portion of the reconstituted mush into his mouth, swallowed it. At least it slipped down easily. He said, “It would be good to find somebody who could treat us to a square meal.”

  “We aren’t starving.”

  “Maybe not. Even so. . . .” The Carlotti speaker emitted a series of coded buzzes. “Mphm. Each time that we’ve homed on a plain language transmission we’ve landed up in the cactus. Each time telephony has let us down. What about giving telegraphy a go?”

  “Why not?”

  He got up from the table, walked to the Carlotti transceiver. He waited for the next burst of code, got a relative bearing. He went forward to the controls, shut down both the inertial and the interstellar drives, turned the boat on to the new heading. He restarted the motors. Looking aft, at Una, he experienced a brief flash of prevision as the temporal precession field built up again. He saw her naked, astride a graceful, glittering machine. A bicycle.

  He thought, There’s hope for us yet. It looks as though we shall be enjoying that nudist holiday on Arcadia after all.

  Yes, there was hope.

  There was hope that whoever was responsible for those frequent signals in what seemed to be some sort of alien Morse Code would be able to help them, might even be able to get them back to where they belonged. Surely the craziness that they had twice, so far, encountered was not spread all over this galaxy. In their own universe, no matter what irrational wars were fought, there was always that majority of people—too often dumb, too often conformist, but essentially decent—who, when the shooting was over, quietly picked up the pieces and set about rebuilding civilization.

  So it must be here, said Grimes.