The Rim Gods

by A Bertram Chandler

  He grunted as he wriggled forward. Somehow he negotiated her buttocks; then his fingers were on her shoulders. He pulled himself ahead, more rapidly now. He spat out a mouthful of hair, then slid his hands along her upreaching bare arms. And then there was metal, blessedly hard and solid to the touch—and touch was the only sense that he and to guide him.

  Was this an air lock door? He did not know; he had only her word for it. And if it were, indeed, an air lock door, was it of the standard pattern? It had to be; otherwise the situation was utterly hopeless. Cramped as he was, Grimes could never get his laser pistol out of its holster—and even if he could its employment in this confined space might well prove fatal to himself and the others.

  His fingers groped, scrabbled, feeling nothing at first but smooth, seamless metal. He had almost given up hope when he found what he was looking for: the neat little hole, large enough to admit a space-gloved digit. He had to squirm and contort himself to get his hand to the right angle. Under him Melinee whimpered a little, but did not complain.

  The tip of his index finger crept over the faired rim of the hole, pushed into it, at first encountering nothing at all and then, after what seemed an eternity, smooth plastic. Grimes pushed, felt the surface give. He maintained the pressure, relaxed it, pushed again, and again, making "O" in Morse Code—"O" for "Open."

  He heard the faint whir of machinery, a noise that suddenly became louder. The inward opening door almost took his finger with it. And then he was in the air lock, closely followed by Sanderson.

  Melinee had vanished.

  * * *

  Slowly Grimes and Sanderson walked through the silent, the too silent alleyways of the ship, fighting the lassitude that threatened to close down upon them, forcing their way through air that seemed to possess the viscosity of cold treacle. But they were not alone. In their ears—or in their minds?—sounded the croaking voice of the Frog Prince, the tinkling soprano of the Fairy Lynnimame, the husky whisper of Melinee. "You must not give in. You have come so far; you must not give in. Waken the Princess. Waken the Princess." And there was Blunderbore's urgent muttering, and the faint voices of the River Queen's captain and purser. "Wake the Princess. Wake the Princess."

  They stumbled on, weakening, through the gelid air, the internal atmosphere that didn't even smell right, that didn't smell at all, that lacked the familiar taints of hot oil and machinery, of tobacco smoke and women's perfume, the clean, garden scents of the hydroponics deck. They staggered on, through alleyways and up companionways, fighting every inch of the way, sustained somehow by the fairytale characters whom they had encountered.

  And Grimes knew what was wrong, knew the nature of the stasis that must, soon, make them part of itself, unless they reached the Mannschenn Drive room in time. He had read of, but had never until now experienced, the almost impossible balance of forces, the canceling out of opposing temporal precession fields that would freeze a ship and all her people in an eternal Now, forever adrift down and between the dimensions. That had been one of the theories advanced to account for the vanishing, without trace, of that Waverley Royal Mail liner ten standard years ago—the ship aboard which the writer Clay Wilton had been a passenger.

  Grimes could remember, vividly, the blurb on the dust jacket of the book that he had bought as a present for the small daughter of a friend. "The last of the dreamers," the author had been called. He had skimmed through it, had laughed at the excellent illustrations and then, to his amazement, had been gripped by the story. It was about a world that never was and was never could be, a planet where sorcery was everyday practice, where talking animals and good fairies and wicked witches interfered in the affairs of men and women.

  "You are beginning to understand," whispered Lynnimame.

  There was the door ahead of them, with MANNSCHENN DRIVE in shining metal letters above it. The door was closed, stubborn; it would not yield. Human muscles were powerless against the stasis; human muscles with strength flowing into them from outside, somehow, were still powerless. The handle snapped off cleanly in Grimes's hand.

  "Let me, sir," Sanderson was saying. "Let me try."

  The Commodore stepped slowly to one side, his motions those of a deep-sea diver. He saw that the young man had his laser weapon out of its holster, was struggling to raise it against the dreadful inertia.

  He pressed the firing stud.

  Slowly, fantastically, the beam of intense light extruded itself from the muzzle, creeping toward that immovable door. After an eternity it made contact, and after another eternity the paint began to bubble. Aeons passed, and there was a crater. More aeons dragged by—and the crater was a hole. Still Sanderson, his face rigid with strain, held the weapon steady. Grimes could imagine that luminous, purple worm crawling across the space from the door to the switchboard. Then Sanderson gasped, "I can't keep it up!" and the muzzle of the pistol wavered, sagged until it was pointing at the deck.

  We tried, thought Grimes. Then he wondered, Will Wilton add us to his permanent cast of characters?

  Suddenly there was sound again—the dying, deepening whine of a stopped Mannschenn Drive unit, of spinning, processing gyroscopes slowing to final immobility. Like a bullet fired from a gun deflected after the pulling of the trigger, the laser beam had reached its target. There was sound again: fans, and pumps, the irregular throbbing of the Inertial Drive, and all the bubble and clamor of a suddenly awakened ship. From bulkhead speakers boomed a voice, that of the captain of the river steamer. "Whoever you are, come up to the main saloon, please. And whoever you are—thank you."

  * * *

  Grimes sprawled comfortably in an easy chair, a cold drink ready to hand. He had decided to stay aboard this ship, the Princess of Troon, having persuaded her captain to set trajectory for Lorn. After all, he was already ten years late—a few more weeks would make very little difference. During the voyage the Commodore would be able to question the Princess' personnel still further, to work on his report. He was keeping young Sanderson with him. Drakenberg had not been at all pleased when deprived of the service of a watch officer, but the Commodore piled on far more G's than he did.

  Already Grimes was beginning to wonder if his report would be believed, in spite of all the corroborative evidence from the personnel of both ships, Rim Jaguar and Princess of Troon. He recalled vividly the scene in the passenger liner's main saloon when he and Sanderson had made their way into that compartment. The stasis must have been closed down while everybody was at dinner; dishes on the tables were still steaming.

  They had all been there: the frog-like Grollan, the old lady who had been the peasant woman encountered on the towpath, the pretty fragile blonde whose name should have been Lynnimame, but was not; all of them looking like the characters in the illustrations to the Clay Wilton books. And there was the big—but not all that big—Negro, who was a physicist, not an ogre and the captain, and the purser. There was the beautiful woman who could have been the model for the Melinee in the pictures and who was, in fact, Mrs. Wilton. There were other officers, other passengers, and among them was Clay Wilton himself. He had the beginnings of a black eye, and a trickle of blood still dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Ship's staff had formed a protective cordon about him, but made it quite obvious that this was only because they had been ordered to do so.

  After the first excitement there had been the conference, during which all concerned tried to work out what had happened, and why. Blundell, the big physicist—it had been hard not to think of him as Blunderbore—had said, "I've my own ideas, Commodore Grimes. But you, sir, are the recognized authority on Rim phenomena. . . ."

  Grimes was flattered, and tried not to show it. He made a major production of filling and lighting his pipe. After he had it going he said, "I can try to explain. The way I see it is this. The ship went into stasis, and somehow drifted out from the Waverley sector toward the Rim. And out here, at the very edge of the expanding galaxy, there's always an . . . oddness. Time and space are not inclined to
follow the laws that obtain elsewhere. Too, thought seems to have more power—physical power, I mean—than in the regions more toward the center. It's all part and parcel of the vagueness—that's not quite the right word—of . . . of everything. We get along with it. We're used to it.

  "Look at it this way. You were all frozen in your ever-lasting Now, but you could still think, and you could still dream. And who was the most expert dreamer among you? It had to be Clay Wilton; after all, his publishers refer to him as 'the last of the dreamers.' Mr. Wilton dreamed out the story that he was working on at the time when your Mannschenn Drive went on the blink. Then he dreamed of the next story in the series, and the next, and the next. . . . Somehow a world shaped itself about his dreams. Out here, on the Rim, there must be the raw material for the creation of new galaxies. Somehow that world shaped itself, a solid world, with atmosphere, and vegetation, and people. It was real enough to register on all Rim Jaguar's instruments, even though it vanished when this ship came out of stasis. It was real enough, but, with a few exceptions, the people weren't real. They were little more than mobile scenery. The exceptions, of course, were those characters drawn from real life. And they led a sort of double existence. One body here, aboard the ship, and another body on the surface of that impossible planet, dancing like a puppet as Mr. Wilton manipulated the strings. Toward the end, the puppets were getting restive. . . ."

  "You can say that again, Commodore," grinned Blundell.

  "Yes, the puppets were getting restive, and realized that they, too, could become puppet-masters, could use Mr. Sanderson and myself to break the stasis. And, at the same time, Mr. Wilton was trying to work us into his current plot." Grimes turned to the writer. "And tell me, sir, did you intend to kill us?"

  "Nobody dies in my stories," muttered the man. "Not even the baddies."

  "But there has to be a first time for everything. That dragon of yours was far too enthusiastic. And so was your destruction of Blunderbore's castle."

  "I'd gotten kind of attached to the place, too," grumbled the physicist.

  "I meant no harm." Wilton's voice was sullen.

  "Don't you believe him!" flared Mrs. Wilton—Melinee, the Wicked Witch. "He has a nasty, cruel streak in him, and only writes the sweetness and light fairy-tale rubbish because it makes good money. But that trick of his with my mirror will be grounds for divorce. Any judge, anywhere, will admit that it was mental cruelty."

  "But what did you do to me?" demanded the weedy little man, taking a pitiful offensive. "You destroyed my world."

  But did we? Grimes was wondering. Did we?

  Sanderson and the fragile little blonde had come into the small smoking room, had not noticed him sitting there; they were sharing a settee only a few feet from him.

  "The really fantastic thing about it all, Lynnimame—I like to call you that; after all, it was your name when I first met you. You don't mind, do you?" Sanderson was saying.

  "Of course not, Henry. If you like it, I like it."

  "Good. But as I was saying, the really fantastic thing about it all, the way that I fitted into old Wilton's story, is that I am a prince. . . ."

  "But I think," said Grimes coldly as he got up from his chair, "that the Wicked Witch will be able to vouch that you're not a fairy prince."

  And would they all live happily ever after? he wondered as he made his way to his cabin. At least he was finally on his way home.

  Grimes At Glenrowan

  Captain Chandler reports that he wrote his first story after meeting John W. Campbell, the late, great editor of Astounding/Analog SF, during WWII. During the war years, the author became a regular contributor to the SF magazines, but almost dropped out of the field when he was promoted to Chief Officer in the British-Australian steamship service. His second wife, Susan, encouraged him to take up writing again; the Rim Worlds and the Rim Runners series is a result.

  Commodore John Grimes of the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, currently Master of the survey ship Faraway Quest, was relaxing in his day cabin aboard that elderly but trustworthy vessel. That morning, local time, he had brought the old ship down to a landing at Port Fortinbras, on Elsinore, the one habitable planet in orbit about the Hamlet sun. It was Grimes's first visit to Elsinore for very many years. This call was to be no more—and no less—than a showing of the flag of the Confederacy. The Quest had been carrying out a survey of a newly discovered planetary system rather closer to the Shakespearian Sector than to the Rim Worlds and Grimes's lords and masters back on Lorn had instructed him, on completion of this task, to pay a friendly call on their opposite numbers on Elsinore.

  However, he would be seeing nobody of any real importance until this evening, when he would attend a reception being held in his honour at the President's palace. So he had time to relax, at ease in his shipboard shorts and shirt, puffing contentedly at his vile pipe, watching the local trivi programmes on his playmaster. That way he would catch up on the planetary news, learn something of Elsinorian attitudes and prejudices. He was, after all, visiting this world in an ambassadorial capacity.

  He looked with wry amusement into the screen. There he was or, to be more exact, there was Faraway Quest—coming down. Not bad, he admitted smugly, not bad at all. There had been a nasty, gusty wind at ground level about which Aerospace Control had failed to warn him—but he had coped. He watched the plump, dull-silver spindle that was his ship sagging to leeward, leaning into the veering breeze, then settling almost exactly into the centre of the triangle of bright flashing marker beacons, midway between the Shakespearian Line's Oberon and the Commission's Epsilon Orionis. He recalled having made a rather feeble joke about O'Brian and O'Ryan. (His officers had laughed dutifully.) He watched the beetle-like ground cars carrying the port officials scurry out across the grey apron as the Quest's ramp was extruded from her after airlock. He chuckled softly at the sight of Timmins, his Chief Officer, resplendent in his best uniform, standing at the head of the gangway to receive the boarding party. Although only a reservist—like Grimes himself—that young man put on the airs and graces of a First Lieutenant of a Constellation Class battlewagon, a flagship at that. But he was a good spaceman and that was all that really mattered.

  After a short interval, filled with the chatter of the commentator, he was privileged to watch himself being interviewed by the newsman who had accompanied the officials on board. Did he really look as crusty as that? he wondered. And wasn't there something in what Sonya, his wife, was always saying—and what other ladies had said long before he first met her—about his ears? Stun's'l ears, jughandle ears. Only a very minor operation would be required to make them less outstanding, but . . . He permitted himself another chuckle. He liked him the way that he was and if the ladies didn't they had yet to show it.

  The intercom telephone buzzed. Grimes turned to look at Timmins's face in the little screen. He made a downward gesture of his hand towards the playmaster, and his own voice and that of the interviewer at once faded into inaudibility. "Yes, Mr. Timmins?" he asked.

  "Sir, there is a lady here to see you."

  A lady? wondered Grimes. Elsinore was one of the few worlds upon which he had failed to enjoy a temporary romance. He had been there only once before, when he was a junior officer in the Federation's Survey Service. He recalled (it still rankled) that he had had his shore leave stopped for some minor misdemeanor.

  "A lady?" he repeated. Then, "What does she want?"

  "She says that she is from Station Yorick, sir. She would like to interview you."

  "But I've already been interviewed," said Grimes.

  "Not by Station Yorick," a female voice told him. "Elsinore's purveyors of entertainment and philosophy."

  Timmins's face in the little screen had been replaced by that of a girl—a woman, rather. Glossy black hair, short cut, over a thin, creamily pale face with strong bone structure and delicately cleft chin . . . a wide, scarlet mouth . . . almost indigo blue eyes set off by black lashes.

  "Mphm," grunted Grimes
approvingly. "Mphm . . ."

  "Commodore Grimes?" she asked in a musical contralto. "The Commodore Grimes?"

  "There's only one of me as far as I know," he told her. "And you?"

  She smiled whitely. "Kitty, of Kitty's Korner. With a `K'. And I'd like a real interview for my audience, not the sort of boring question-and-answer session that you've just been watching."

  "Mphm," grunted Grimes again. What harm could it do?, he asked himself. This would be quite a good way of passing what otherwise would be a dull afternoon. And Elsinore was in the Shakespearian Sector, wasn't it? Might not he, Grimes, play Othello to this newshen's Desdemona, wooing her with his tall tales of peril and adventure all over the Galaxy? And in his private grog locker were still six bottles of Antarean Crystal Gold laid aside for emergencies such as this, a potent liquor coarsely referred to by spacemen as a leg-opener, certainly a better loosener of inhibitions than the generality of alcoholic beverages. He would have to partake of it with her, of course, but a couple or three soberups would put him right for the cocktail party.