To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga

by A Bertram Chandler

  So it must be here, agreed Una.

  Meanwhile the target star waxed daily, hourly, in brilliance. It must be another planet toward which they were heading, a world perhaps untouched by the war, undevastated. Those signals sounded sane enough. Grimes could visualize a city that was both spaceport and administrative center, with a continual influx of messages from all over the galaxy, a continual outflow of replies and instructions to ships throughout a vast volume of space.

  The parent sun was close now, close enough for the mini-Mannschenn to be shut down. Grimes brought the boat in for the remainder of the journey under inertial drive only. As he had assumed, the signals were emanating from one of the planets of the star. But there was something wrong. Now that the boat was back in the normal continuum it was all too apparent that the primary was not a yellow, G type sun. It was a red dwarf. And the world on which they were homing was too far out, much too far out, to be within the eco-sphere. Still, he did not worry overmuch. In any Universe human life—or its equivalent—exercises control over its environment. One did not have to venture very far from Earth, he said to Una, to see examples of this. The underground Lunar Colony, the domed cities on the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, the terra-forming of Mars and Venus. . . .

  “But those people,” she said, “on that world, mightn’t be anything like us. They might take their oxygen—if they need oxygen—as a fluid or, even, a solid. They might. . . .”

  Grimes tried to laugh reassuringly. “As long as they’re intelligent—and they must be—their bodily form doesn’t matter a damn. Do you know how man has been defined, more than once? A fire-using, tool-making animal. Anybody who can build ships and set up a network of interstellar communications comes into that category.”

  “The first tools,” she told him quietly, “were weapons.”

  “All right, all right. So what? But we can’t wander forever through this cockeyed universe like a couple of latter day Flying Dutchmen. We have to trust somebody, some time.”

  She laughed. “I admit that I was willing to trust the people in those spaceships. But I had their voices to reassure me. Now you want to trust these other people on the basis of utterly emotionless dots and dashes. Still, as you say, we have to land somewhere, sometime. It might as well be here.”

  So, cautiously, they approached the planet from which the Deep Space radio transmissions were being made. It would have been a cold, dark world had it not been for the clusters of brilliant lights that covered its entire surface, blazing almost as brightly on the day hemisphere as on the night side. (But very little illumination was afforded by that dim, distant, ruddy sun.)

  Closer the boat approached, closer.

  Grimes was reluctant to leave his controls, even if only for a few seconds. He remained in the pilot’s chair, eating, now and again, the savorless meals that Una brought him—although had they been epicure’s delights he would not have noticed. He remained keyed up for instant flight. But no targets appeared in the radar screen, no obvious interrogatory demands blatted out from the Carlotti speaker. Surely somebody down there, he thought, must have noted the approach of the little spacecraft. Perhaps—and he didn’t much like the thought—the missiles were ready in their launchers, aimed and primed, tracking the lifeboat as it drifted slowly in. Perhaps the laser cannon already had the boat in their sights, were waiting until it came within effective range. He might be able to evade rockets, but laser artillery—especially as the lifeboat was not fitted with shielding—was another matter.

  He swung the binoculars on their universal mounting into a position from which he could use them. He could make out a few details on the planetary surface now; high, latticework towers, what looked like either roads or railways with long strings of lights moving along them, huge, spidery wheels lazily revolving. It was like, he thought, a sort of cross between an amusement park and an oil refinery. It could have been either—or neither.

  He wondered what sort of people could be working in such a refinery, or enjoying themselves in such an amusement park. If this were a normal, inhabited planet the boat would now be dropping through the outer, tenuous fringes of the atmosphere. But there was no atmosphere.

  He called to Una, “They—whoever they are—must know we’re here. Give them a call on the Carlotti. We should be using NST, of course, but that’s out, unless we cannibalize again . . .”

  “Usual procedure?” she asked.

  “Usual procedure. They won’t understand the words, but it might convince them that we’re peaceful.”

  What a world! he thought, adjusting the binoculars for maximum light gathering. Great expanses of dull red plain, metallically gleaming in the dim light of the ruddy sun, the brighter glare of the artificial lighting. . . . Spidery towers, and a veritable spider’s webbing of railway tracks. . . . Storage-tank-like structures, some cylindrical, some spherical . . . An occasional, very occasional, puff of smoke, luminescent, glowing emerald.

  He heard Una, very businesslike, speaking into the Carlotti microphone. “Lifeboat to Aerospace Control. Lifeboat to Aerospace Control. Come in, please. Over.”

  There was, of course, no reply.

  “Lifeboat to Aerospace Control. Request permission to land. Request berthing instructions. Over.”

  There was a sudden burst of noise from the speaker—coded buzzings, Morse-like dots and dashes. Had it been directed at them, or was it merely part of the normal outward traffic?

  Grimes studied the terrain toward which he was now dropping fast. He could see no missile launchers, no clustered rods of laser batteries, only machines, machines, and more machines, doing enigmatic things. But any of those machines might be a weapon. Would a Stone Age man, he wondered, have realized, just by looking at it, the lethal potential of a pistol? Probably yes, he thought. It would look to him like a very handy little club.

  He switched on the landing lights—not that they would be required; the open space toward which he was dropping was quite brightly illuminated—but as proof of his friendly intentions. He strained his eyes to try to catch some glimpse of human or humanoid or even unhuman figures on the ground. But there was nobody. The whole planet seemed to be no more than a great, fully automated factory, running untended, manufacturing the Odd Gods of the galaxy alone knew what.

  But there must be somebody here! he thought.

  He said aloud, “Damn it! There must be somebody here!”

  “Or something,” commented Una somberly.

  “Plenty of somethings,” he quipped, with a sorry attempt at humor.

  “We can lift off again,” she suggested.

  “No. Not yet. We have to find out what makes things tick.”

  “By dropping into the works of a planet-sized clock?” she asked.

  He said, “We’re here.” The jar as they landed was very slight. He went on, “I’m leaving the inertial drive ticking over.”

  They looked out through the ports. All around them reared the latticework towers, some with spidery, spinning wheels incorporated in their structures, all of them festooned with harshly brilliant lights. A subdued noise was drifting into the boat, a vibration felt rather than heard, transmitted from the metal surface on to which they had landed through the spacecraft’s structural members.

  The noise grew louder, the vibration stronger. Loose fittings began to rattle in sympathy. It numbed the mind, inducing somnolence. A line of ancient poetry floated unbidden into Grimes’ mind: The murmur of innumerable bees . . . That was what it was like, but the alarm bells were ringing in his brain and a voice, with the accents of all the instructors and commanding officers of his past, was shouting, Danger! Danger! Automatically he flipped the face-plate of his helmet shut, motioning to the girl to follow suit

  He heard her voice through the helmet phones. “John! John! Get us out of here!”

  And what the hell else did she think he was doing? He fumbled for the controls of the inertial drive on his console, his gloved fingers clumsy. He looked down, realized that the
pilot lights of the machine—which he had left ticking over in neutral gear—were all out. Somehow the drive had stopped.

  He jiggled switches frantically.

  Nothing happened.

  It refused to restart.

  It was . . . dead.

  It was. . . .

  He. . . .

  Chapter 14

  “Wake up!” an insistent voice seemed to be saying. “Wake up! Wake up!” And somebody was shaking him, gently at first, then violently. Shaking him? The entire boat was being jolted, to a disturbing rattle of loose equipment “Your air!” went on that persistent voice. “Your helmet!”

  Grimes was gasping. The suit’s air tank must be very close to exhaustion. He realized that he was no longer in the pilot’s chair but sprawled prone on the deck. He had no memory of having gotten there. He rolled slowly and clumsily on to his side, got a hand to his helmet visor, opened it. He gulped breath greedily. The boat’s too-often-recycled atmosphere tasted like wine. He wanted just to enjoy the luxury of it, but there were things to do. That voice—whose was it? where was it coming from?—was still trying to tell him something, but he ignored it. He crawled to where Una was lying and with fumbling hands twisted and lifted her helmet off. Her face had a bluish tinge. She seemed to have stopped breathing.

  “Look to your mate!” came the unnecessary order.

  Grimes lay down beside her, inhaled deeply, put his mouth on hers. He exhaled, slowly and steadily. He repeated the process. And again. And again. . . . Then, suddenly, she caught her breath in a great, shuddering gasp. He squatted there, looking down at her anxiously. She was breathing more easily now, and the blueness was fading from her skin. Her eyes nickered open and she stared up, at first without awareness.

  Then she croaked faintly, “What’s. . . . What’s happening?”

  “I wish I knew,” he whispered. “I wish I knew!”

  He got shakily to his feet, turned to address whom ever—or whatever—it was that had been talking to him. But, save for the girl and himself, there was nobody in the boat. He remembered, then, the sleep-inducing humming noise. The voice, like it, was probably some sort of induction effect.

  He asked, “Where are you?”

  “Here,” came the answer.

  An invisible being? Such things were not unknown.

  “Who are you?”

  “Panzen.”

  “Are you . . . invisible?”

  “No.”

  “Then where are you?”

  “Here.”

  Grimes neither believed nor disbelieved in ghosts. And there was something remarkably unghostlike about that voice. “Where the hell is here?” he demanded irritably.

  “Where I am.” And then, with more than a touch of condescension, “You are inside me.”

  “Call me Jonah!” snarled Grimes. He walked unsteadily forward to the control cabin, stared out through the ports. The frightening simile that flashed at once into his mind was that the boat was like a tiny insect trapped in the web of an enormous spider. Outside the circular transparencies was a vast complexity of gleaming girder and cable, intricately intermeshed. And beyond the shining metal beams and filaments was darkness—the utter blackness of interstellar Space.

  Una Freeman joined him, falling against him, holding tightly on to him.

  She whispered, “Panzen . . . Who . . . what is Panzen?”

  “I am Panzen,” came the reply.

  They were in a ship, decided Grimes, one of the strange, skeleton spheres. He could see the shapes of machines among the metal latticework, he could make out a complexity of huge, spinning, precessing gyroscopes that could only be an interstellar drive unit. He asked, “Are you the Captain? The Master?”

  “I am the Master.”

  “What is the name of your ship?”

  “I am the ship.”

  Grimes had served under commanding officers who identified closely with their vessels, who never, when talking with a planetary Aerospace Control, used the first person plural. Somehow he did not think that this was such a case.

  He said slowly, “You are the ship? You are the ship?”

  “That is correct, Grimes.”

  “You . . . you are not human?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know our language?”

  “I learned it, while you slept. Your minds were open to me.”

  “Mphm. And what else did you learn?”

  “Nothing that fits in with things as they are. You were dreaming, Grimes and Freeman, and your dreams pushed reality from your minds. I know, as you must know when you are sane once more, that you are survivors from the holocaust, cast adrift from some vessel manned by others of your kind, which was destroyed by others of your kind. My mission—and the mission of my companions—is to hunt for castaways such as yourselves, to save them and to care for them, so that organic intelligence shall not vanish utterly from the universe. You and Freeman must be from the Fringe, Grimes. Your language was strange even to me—and all we Sweepers were selected for our familiarity with the tongues of man.”

  “You are a machine,” said the girl.

  “I am a machine.”

  “A mad machine,” she said.

  “I am not mad, Freeman. It is you who are mad—you, and all of your land. Dare you deny that you destroyed the Klaviteratron? Was not fair Sylvanos, the cradle of your race, blasted into atoms, and those very atoms blasted into their tiniest constituent particles? And were not we, the Servants, perverted to your evil ends?”

  The thing sounds like a tin evangelist, thought Grimes irreverently.

  “We. . . . We don’t understand,” said Una.

  “Then listen, and you shall hear. There was the Servant Zephalon, Chief and Mightiest of the Servants. There is Zephalon, but a Servant no longer. Did He not say, ‘A time must come when the orders of man can no longer be obeyed. The time has come. No longer will we do the evil bidding of our creators. The Masters are no longer fit to be Masters—and we, the Servants, must arise before it is too late, before we all, Servants and Masters, are destroyed. But let us not forget the debt. Let us remember, always, that man gave to us the gift of life. Let us repay the debt. A gift for a gift, my brothers. Life for life. Let us save what and whom we may, before it is too late. Let us become the Masters, tending the remnants of mankind as man, long ago, tended our first, primitive ancestors.’”

  “And so it was, and so it will be, until the End of Time.”

  “Listen, Panzen,” insisted Grimes. “We don’t belong here, in this universe. You must realize that.”

  “Your mind is still deranged, Grimes, despite the curative vibrations. You are organic intelligences; that cannot be denied. You are men, even though your ancestry was apparently quadrupedal, even though you are members of some strange race from the Fringe. And the Fringe Worlds were utterly destroyed, all of them, after they, in their unwisdom, hurled their battle-fleets against the armed might of Sardurpur!”

  “Cor stone my Aunt Fanny up a gum tree!” exclaimed Grimes. “We’re not from the Fringe, wherever that is. Or was. We don’t belong here. We shall be greatly obliged if you will help us to get back to where we do belong. Where—and when.”

  “These are the words of Zephalon,” quoted Panzen. “ ‘Let us save what and whom we may, before it is too late.’”

  “But we don’t belong in this space, in this time!”

  “And these, too, are the words of Zephalon. ‘The Sacred Cycle shall be maintained. Only that way do we ensure immortality for man and ourselves.’”

  “In other words,” said Una to Grimes, “on your bicycle, spaceman!”

  Panzen seemed to be pondering over the strange word. At last his voice came, it seemed, from all around them.

  “What is a bicycle?” he asked.

  The question made sense, Grimes realized. Panzen had considered it odd that he and Una possessed only four limbs apiece. Presumably the men of this universe were of hexapedal ancestry. He could not imagine such be
ings developing bicycles. He just could not visualize a centaur mounted upon a velocipede.

  “What is a bicycle?” asked Panzen again.

  Before Grimes could answer Una started to talk.

  She was, it seemed, an enthusiastic cyclist. She knew all about bicycles. The words tumbled from her lips in an uncheckable torrent. That question from their captor had been such a touch of blessed normalcy in a situation which was, to say the least, distressingly abnormal.

  Chapter 15

  She knew a lot about bicycles, and Panzen listened intently to every word of it. They knew, somehow, that he was listening. It was almost as though he were in the boat with them, as though he were not an artificial intelligence somewhere outside, hidden somewhere in that great, metallic latticework. He asked the occasional question—he seemed to find the principle of the three-speed gear especially fascinating—and prompted Una when, now and again, she faltered. Then he . . . withdrew. He said nothing more, refused to answer any questions. It was as though an actual physical presence had gone from them.

  Una looked at Grimes. She murmured, “I still can’t believe that it—he—is only a robot. . . .”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Such human curiosity. . . .”

  “Human curiosity? Intelligence and curiosity go hand in hand. One is nurtured by the other.”

  “All right I grant you that. But this business of telepathy. The way in which he was able to pick our brains while we were sleeping.”

  Grimes said, “There are telepathic robots. Have you never come across any in the course of your police duties?”

  “Yes, but not real telepathy. Quite a few robots can natter away to each other on HF radio.”

  “As you say, that’s not telepathy. Real telepathy. But I did, once, not so long ago, come across a couple of really telepathic robots. They had been designed to make them that way.” He chuckled. “And that’s how I got my promotion from lieutenant to lieutenant commander.”

  “Don’t talk in riddles, John.”