Into the Alternate Universe

by A Bertram Chandler

  "So the sudden ringing of the alarm bells was especially shocking.

  "I was first in the control room, but only by a very short head. There was no need for Brown to tell us what was wrong; it was glaringly obvious. No, not glaringly obvious. It was the absence of glare, of light of any kind, that hit us like a blow. Outside the viewports there was only a featureless blackness.

  "We thought at first that we had run into a cloud of opaque dust or gas, but we soon realized that this hypothesis was untenable. Until the very moment of black-out, Brown told us, the stars ahead had been shining with their usual brilliance, as had been the stars all around the ship. Furthermore, one cannot proceed through a cloud of dust or gas, however tenuous, at a speed of 300 m.p.s. without an appreciable rise in skin temperature. An appreciable rise? By this time the shell plating would have been incandescent and all of us incincerated.

  "I'll not bore you, whoever you are (if there ever is anybody) with a full account of all that we did, of all that we tried, of all the theories that we discussed. Brown stuck to his story. At one microsecond the viewports had framed the blazing hosts of Heaven, at the next there had been nothing there but the unrelieved blackness. We thought that we might be able to learn something from the radio, but it was dead, utterly dead. We disassembled every receiver and transmitter in the control sphere, checked every component, reassembled. And still the radio was dead. There were no longer the faint signals coming in from Earth and from other interstellar ships. There were no longer the signals emanating from those vast broadcasting stations that are the stars.

  "But there were no stars.

  "There are no stars any more.

  "And then, over the weeks, there were the—apparitions?

  "No. Not apparitions. They were real enough. Solid. Brown and Nakamura took one of the tenders out, and ran right alongside an ocean-going ship out of Earth's past. Her name was Anglo-Australian, and on her funnel was a black swan on a yellow field. They were wearing their spacesuits, so they were able to board her. They found—but could it have been otherwise?—that all of her crew was dead. There were no entries in the Log Book to account for what had happened to her. As in our case, it must have been sudden.

  "There was the flotsam—the bodies, some clothed in the fashions of bygone centuries, some not clothed at all. The sea-going ships and the aircraft—and some of them could have come from Earth. There was the huge affair that consisted of a long fuselage slung under what must have been an elongated balloon—but the balloon had burst—with a crew of insects not unlike giant bees. There was that other construction—a relatively small hull suspended amid a complexity of huge sails. We never found out who or what had manned her; as soon as we turned our searchlights on her she vanished into the distance. A sailing ship of Deep Space she must have been—and we, unwittingly, provided the photon gale that drove her out of our ken.

  "And we worked.

  "But there was no starting point. We had fallen somehow into sub-Space—as had all those others—but how? How?

  "We worked, and then there were weeks of alcoholic, sexual debauch, a reaction from our days of wearisome, meaningless calculation and discussion. And when, sated, we returned to sobriety we were able to face the facts squarely. We were lost, and we did not possess the knowledge to find our way out of this desert of utter nothingness. We considered calling the other watches—and then, in the end, decided against it. They were happy in their sleep, with their dreams—but we, we knew, could never be happy. We knew too much—and too little—and our dreams would be long, long experiences of tortured anxiety. We could see no faintest gleam of hope.

  "And so we have taken the only way out.

  "But you, whoever you are (if there ever is anybody) will be able to help.

  "The other watches are sleeping in their own compartments in the northern hemisphere of the main globe. The waking process is entirely automatic. Give First Captain Mitchell my best wishes and my apologies, and tell him that I hope he understands.

  "John Carradine,

  Fourth Captain."

  XIX

  They left the control sphere then, and made their way through an airlock to the tube that connected it with the large globe that was the main body of the ship. They found themselves in a cylindrical space with a domed deck head, in the center of which was the hatch through which they had entered. In the center of the deck there was a similar hatch.

  There were doors equally spaced around the inside surface of the cylinder. All of them were labeled, having stenciled upon them names as well as rank "First Captain Mitchell . . ." read Sonya Verrill. "Chief Officer Alvarez . . . Second Officer Mainbridge . . . Third Officer Hannahan . . . Bio-Technician Mitchell . . ." She paused, then said, "I suppose that a husband-wife set-up is the best way of manning a ship like this . . ."

  Grimes slid the door aside.

  The helmet lanterns threw their beams onto eight tanks—a tier of four, and another tier of four. They looked, thought the Commodore, like glass coffins, and the people inside them like corpses. (But corpses don't dream.)

  Four of the tanks held men, four held women. All of them were naked. All of them seemed to be in first-class physical condition. Mitchell—his name was on a metal tag screwed to the frame of his tank—was a rugged man, not young but heavily muscled, robust. He did not need a uniform as a professional identification. Even in repose, even in the repose that was almost death, he looked like a master of men and machines, a man of action with the training and intelligence to handle efficiently both great masses of complex apparatus and the mere humans that operated it.

  Grimes looked at him, ignoring the other sleepers. He wondered if Mitchell were the fisherman whose pleasant dreams were being spoiled by the sense of anxiety, of urgency. It could be so. It probably was so. Mitchell had been overdue to be called for his watch for a matter of centuries, and his was the overall responsibility for the huge ship and her cargo of human lives.

  Todhunter was speaking. There was a certain disappointment in his voice. "I don't have to do anything. I've been reading the instructions, such as they are. Everything is fully automated."

  "All right, Doctor. You can press the button. I only want First Captain Mitchell awakened." He added softly, "After all, this is his ship . . . ."

  "I've pressed the button," grumbled Todhunter. "And nothing has happened."

  McHenry laughed. "Of course not. The dead Captain in the control sphere, in the wardroom, said that he'd shut down all the machinery."

  "As I recall it," said Grimes, "these things were powered by a small reactor. It will be right aft, in the machinery sphere. Carradine was able to shut down by remote control, but we won't be able to restart the same way. The batteries must be dead."

  "As long as the Pile is not," contributed McHenry.

  "If it is, we shall send for power packs from the Quest. But I hope it's not."

  So they left Mitchell and his staff in their deep, frozen sleep and made their way aft, through deck after deck of the glass coffins, the tanks of the motionless dreamers. Jones paused to look at a beautiful girl who seemed to be suspended in a web of her own golden hair, and murmured something about the Sleeping Beauty. Before Grimes could issue a mild reprimand to the officer, McHenry pushed him from behind, growling "Get a move on! You're no Prince Charming!"

  And Grimes, hearing the words, asked himself, Have we the right to play at being Prince Charming? But the decision is not ours to make. It must rest with Mitchell . . .

  Then there was the airlocked tube leading to the machinery sphere, and there were the pumps and the generators that, said McHenry, must have come out of Noah's Ark "But this is an Ark," said Jones. "That last deck was the storage for the deep-frozen, fertilized ova of all sorts of domestic animals . . . ."

  There were the pumps, and the generators and then, in its own heavily shielded compartment, the Reactor Pile. McHenry consulted the counter he had brought with him. He grunted, "She'll do."

  Unarmored, the peo
ple from Faraway Quest could not have survived in the Pile Room—or would not have survived for long after leaving it. But their spacesuits gave protection against radiation as well as against heat and cold and vacuum, and working with bad-tempered efficiency (some of the dampers resisted withdrawal and were subjected to the engineer's picturesque cursing) McHenry got the Pile functioning.

  Suddenly the compartment was filled with an opaque mist, a fog that slowly cleared. With the return of heat the frozen air had thawed, had vaporized, although the carbon dioxide and water were still reluctant to abandon their solid state.

  McHenry gave the orders—he was the Reaction Drive specialist, and as such was in charge, aboard his own ship, of all auxiliary machinery. McHenry gave the orders and Calhoun, assisted by the second Mate, carried them out. There were gauges and meters to watch and, finally, valves to open. Cooling fluid flashed into steam, and was bled carefully, carefully into piping that had been far too cold for far too long a time. And then hesitantly, complainingly, the first turbine was starting to turn, slowly, then faster and faster, and the throbbing whine of it was audible through their helmet diaphragms. Leaping from position to position like an armored monkey, McHenry tended his valves and then pounced on the switchboard.

  Flickering at first, then shining with a steady brilliance, the lights came on.

  * * *

  They hurried back through the dormitory sphere to the compartment in which First Captain Mitchell and his staff were sleeping. There Todhunter took charge. He slid shut the door through which they had entered and then pulled another door into place, a heavier one with a thick gasket and dogs all around its frame. He borrowed a hammer from McHenry to drive these into place.

  Grimes watched with interest. Obviously the Surgeon knew what he was doing, had studied at some time the history of the "deep freeze" colonization ships, probably one written from a medical viewpoint. He remarked, "I can see the necessity for isolating this compartment, but what was that button you pressed when we first came in here? I thought that it was supposed to initiate the awakening process."

  Todhunter laughed. "That was just the light switch, sir. But once we've got over these few preliminaries everything will be automatic. But, to begin with, I have to isolate the other bodies. Each tank, as you see, is equipped with its own refrigeration unit, although this transparent material is a highly efficient insulation. Even so, it will be as well to follow the instructions to the letter." He paused to consult the big, framed notice on the bulkhead, then went to a control console and pressed seven of a set of eight buttons. On seven of the eight coffins a green light glowed. "Now . . . heat." Another button was pressed, and the frost and ice in the wedge-shaped compartment began to boil.

  When the fog had cleared, the Surgeon muttered, "So far, so good." He studied the tank in which lay the body of First Captain Mitchell, put out a tentative hand to touch lightly the complexity of wiring and fine piping that ran from its sides and base. He said, "You will have noticed, of course, that the arrangements here are far more elaborate than those in the main dormitory decks. When the passengers are awakened, they will be awakened en masse . . ."

  "Get on with it, Doctor!" snapped Sonya Verrill.

  "These things cannot be hurried, Commander. There is a thermostatic control, and until the correct temperature is reached the revivification process cannot proceed." He gestured towards a bulkhead thermometer. "But it should not be long now."

  Suddenly-there was the whine of some concealed machinery starting, and the stout body of the First Captain was hidden from view as the interior of his tank filled with an opaque, swirling gas, almost a liquid, that quite suddenly dissipated. It was replaced by a clear amber fluid that completely covered the body, that slowly lost its transparency as the pneumatic padding upon which Mitchell lay expanded and contracted rhythmically, imparting a gentle agitation to the frame of the big man. The massage continued while the fluid was flushed away and renewed, this process repeated several times.

  At last it was over.

  The lid of the coffin lifted and the man in the tank stretched slowly and luxuriously, yawned hugely.

  He murmured in a pleasant baritone, "You know, I've been having the oddest dreams . . . I thought that I hadn't been called, and that I'd overslept a couple or three centuries . . . ." His eyes opened, and he stared at the spacesuited figures in the compartment. "Who are you?"

  XX

  Grimes put up his hands to his helmet, loosened the fastenings and gave it the necessary half turn, lifted it from the shoulders of his suit. The air of the compartment was chilly still, and damp, and a sweet yet pungent odor made him sneeze.

  "Gesundheit," muttered the big man in the coffin.

  "Thank you, Captain. To begin with, we must apologize for having boarded your ship uninvited. I trust that you do not object to my breathing your atmosphere, but I dislike talking through a diaphragm when I don't have to."

  "Never mind all that." Mitchell, sitting bolt upright in his tank, looked dangerously hostile. "Never mind all that. Who the hell are you?"

  "My name is Grimes. Commodore. Rim Worlds Naval Reserve. These others, with the exception of the lady, are my officers. The lady is Commander Verrill of the Federation Survey Service."

  "Rim Worlds? Federation?" He looked wildly at the other tanks, the transparent containers in which his own staff were still sleeping. "Tell me it's a dream, somebody. A bad dream."

  "I'm sorry, Captain. It's not a dream. Your ship has been drifting for centuries," Sonya Verrill told him.

  Mitchell laughed. It was a sane enough laugh, but bitter. "And while she's been drifting, the eggheads have come up with a practicable FTL drive. I suppose that we've fetched up at the very rim of the Galaxy." He shrugged. "Well, at least we've finally got some place. I'll wake my officers, and then we'll start revivifying the passengers." His face clouded. "But what happened to the duty watch? Was it von Spiedel? Or Geary? Or Carradine?"

  "It was Carradine." Grimes paused, then went on softly, "He and all his people are dead. But he asked to be remembered to you."

  "Are you mad, Commodore whatever your name is? How did you know that it was Carradine? And how can a man who's been dead for centuries ask to be remembered to anybody?"

  "He could write, Captain. He wrote before he died—an account of what happened . . . ."

  "What did happen, damn you? And how did he die?"

  "He shot himself," Grimes said gravely.

  "But what happened?"

  "He didn't know. I was hoping that you might be able to help us."

  "To help you? I don't get the drift of this, Commodore. First of all you tell me that you've come to rescue us, and now you're asking for help."

  "I'm deeply sorry if I conveyed the impression that we were here to rescue you. At the moment we're not in a position to rescue anybody. We're castaways like yourselves."

  "What a lovely, bloody mess to be woken up to!" swore Mitchell. He pushed himself out of the tank, floated to a tall locker. Flinging open the door he took out clothing, a black, gold-braided uniform, a light spacesuit. He dressed with seeming unhurriedness, but in a matter of seconds was attired save for his helmet. He snapped to McHenry, who was hung about with his usual assortment of tools, "You with all the ironmongery, get ready to undog the door, will you?" And to Grimes and Sonya Verrill, "Get your helmets back on. I'm going out. I have to see for myself . . ." And then he moved to the tank beside the one that he had vacated, looked down at the still body of the mature but lovely woman. He murmured, "I'd like you with me, my dear, but you'd better sleep on. I'll not awaken you to this nightmare."

  * * *

  Mitchell read the brief account left by Carradine, then went to the next level, the control room, to inspect the Log Book. He stared out through a port at Faraway Quest, and Grimes, using his suit radio, ordered Swinton to switch off the searchlights and turn on the floods. He stared at the sleek, graceful Quest, so very different from his own ungainly command, and at last turne
d away to look through the other ports at the unrelieved emptiness. His suit had a radio of sorts, but it was A.M. and not F.M. He tried to talk with Grimes by touching helmets, but this expedient was far from satisfactory. Finally the Commodore told McHenry to seal off the control room and to turn on the heaters. When the frozen atmosphere had thawed and evaporated it was possible for them all to remove the headpieces of their suits.

  "Sir, I must apologize for my lack of courtesy," said the First Captain stiffly.

  "It was understandable, Captain Mitchell," Grimes told him.

  "But Captain, Carradine should have called me," Mitchell went on.

  "And if he had, Captain, what could you have done? In all probability you would have died as he died. As it is, you know now that you stand a chance."

  "Perhaps, sir. Perhaps. But you haven't told me Commodore, how you come to be marooned in this Limbo."

  "It's a long story," said Grimes doubtfully.