Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  Mayhew started to laugh. It was not hysterical mirth. It was genuine amusement.

  “Share the joke, Ken,” snapped Sonya. “We need something to cheer us up.”

  “That last salvo,” said the telepath, “consisted of four missiles . . .”

  “I counted only three explosions,” Carnaby told him.

  “There were only three explosions, James. The fourth missile was a dud.”

  “So what?” demanded the navigator. “None of them came near us.”

  “That is so. But . . . But Hendriks is the gunnery specialist, and Dalzell is only a glorified infantryman. Hendriks told the major that the first round was the ranging shot—which it most certainly was. Then, to the observers in the ship, the bursts of the second salvo, well in the clouds and practically simultaneous, looked like a single explosion. The radar showed something falling out of control and tracked it down to the sea. Hendriks knew that it was his dud missile. Dalzell thought, as he was meant to think, that it was us . . .”

  “If Hendriks is so bloody loyal,” growled Williams, “why isn’t he here?”

  “Because he doesn’t want to be, Billy. He thinks he has a future on Earth . . .”

  Grimes, who had been listening, chuckled. “And so he could have. After all his given name is Thor . . .”

  “Very far-fetched,” commented Sonya. “And what about the others? Do none of them go down in history? Or mythology . . .”

  “Those two hulking marine privates . . .” suggested Brenda Cole. “Those twin brothers . . . Their name is Rome . . .”

  “Romulus and bloody Remus? Oh, no. No.”

  “And why not, Sonya?” asked Grimes. “Come to that, the Second Engineer’s name is Caine. William Caine or Bill Caine . . . Tubal Cain or Vulcan?”

  His wife snorted inelegantly. “At least,” she said, “you will not realize your secret ambition. You will not go down in history as Zeus, father of the gods. Let us be thankful for small mercies.”

  The commodore sighed. He realized wryly that his display of regret was at least half genuine. He checked the instruments, then set the controls of the boat on automatic. She would fly herself now, driving up and clear through and out of the atmosphere, until such time as course could be set. He motioned Carnaby to the seat next to his. He pointed out through the wide forward viewport to where Mars gleamed ruddily, almost a twin to the equally ruddy Antares only a few degrees to the south.

  He said, “There she is, James. We’ve a toy computer that’s little more than an electric abacus and precious little else in the way of navigational gear. We haven’t even got an ephemeris. Do you think you can get us there?”

  “I do, sir,” replied Carnaby confidently.

  “But why Mars?” demanded Sonya. “We should be safe enough from Dalzell and his mob in Earth’s southern hemisphere—especially since he thinks that we’ve all been killed . . .”

  “Hendriks knows that we haven’t been. He’s given us our chance, but he wouldn’t welcome us back. Am I correct, Ken?”

  “You are, John. I’ll tell you what he was thinking. ‘And that’s the last I’ll see of that cantankerous old bastard! He’ll not do much good for himself among the Australian aborigines . . .’”

  “So Australia is definitely out,” said Grimes. “And the Martians may be willing to help us.”

  “That’ll be the sunny Friday, Skipper,” said Williams. “But we’ll give it a go.”

  “We’ll give it a go,” agreed Grimes.

  Chapter 23

  A LIFEBOAT IS DESIGNED to save and to sustain life; comfort is a minor consideration. Nonetheless, Grimes and his seven companions were lucky. The boat was certified to accommodate fifty persons; there were only eight people aboard it, so there was room to stretch and for the maintenance of some degree of privacy. There were six toilets—two forward, two aft and two amidships—all of them part and parcel of the boat’s life-support systems. In this respect the loyalists were almost as well off as they had been aboard the ship. There was a stock of the versatile, all-purpose plastic sheeting in one of the lockers, more than enough for the improvisation of separate sleeping quarters. Grimes did mutter something about “bloody gypsy tents,” but nobody took him seriously. The initial supply of fresh water—which would be cycled and recycled many times before planetfall—was ample for all requirements. The food supply—mainly dehydrated concentrates—was adequate, highly nutritious and boring.

  The power cells, always kept fully charged, had provided the energy needed to push the boat up clear of the atmosphere and into orbit. The initiation of the fusion reaction which was the craft’s main power source took time, care and patience. The reactor’s controls were so designed that anybody able to read and to follow instructions would be capable of starting the thing going, however—an absolute necessity in a vehicle which might well (as on this occasion) number no qualified engineers among its crew.

  There was, of course, a powerful inertial drive unit, but neither reaction drive nor interstellar drive. But there was Carlotti equipment in addition to the normal space time transceiver. The boat was incapable of making an interstellar voyage, although any deep space ship picking up the initial distress call (if any) from the parent vessel or from the boat itself would be able to home on the Carlotti transmitter. Voyages within a planetary system, however, were quite practicable. That from Earth to Mars, Carnaby estimated, would occupy a mere fifty days.

  He told the others this while they were eating—“enjoying” would be the wrong word—their first meal in the lifeboat.

  “A mere fifty days?” exploded Sonya. “In this sardine can!”

  “Don’t complain,” Grimes told her. He went on to speak of the much longer voyages, in much worse conditions, that had been made in open boats on Earth’s seas. “And at least,” he concluded, “there’s no danger of our having to resort to cannibalism.”

  “Isn’t there?” demanded Sonya. She looked with distaste at the pallid mess in the bowl of her spoon. “Isn’t there? After a few weeks of this . . . goo we might feel like it!”

  “Cheer up, Sonya,” Williams admonished her. “The first fifty years are the worst!”

  “I said ‘days,’ not ‘years,’ Commander,” corrected Carnaby.

  “Fifty days . . .” said Grimes thoughtfully. “Ample time to get ourselves organized—but not too much time. To begin with we must try to get it through to the Martians that we come in peace. That’s your department, Ken and Clarisse. Try to get in touch with that local telepath again. Play the poor, helpless castaway angle for all you’re worth!”

  “And poor, helpless castaways is just what we are,” commented Sonya.

  “Mphm. Not so helpless, as long as we have a ship of sorts under us. But there’s no point in telling the Martians that. Now, has anybody else any suggestions?” He added, looking at his wife, “Constructive ones, that is.”

  “I was rather wondering, sir,” asked Ruth Macoboy diffidently, “if I should try to get in touch too. Our NST transceiver, on a tight beam, has a very long range . . .”

  Grimes considered this. He said at last, “We’re up against the language barrier, Ruth. Ken and Clarisse, working with ideas rather than words, aren’t . . . Mphm. But a beamed signal, even if it’s no more than a repetition of a Morse symbol, will tell them that we’re coming, that we aren’t trying to slink up on them, as it were . . .”

  “Assuming that they are tuned in and listening,” said Sonya.

  “They probably will be,” said Grimes, “once the telepathic contact has been established.” He thought, It doesn’t matter, anyhow. The main consideration is keeping as many people as possible fully employed on a voyage like this. In some ways—in one way—Bligh was lucky. During his boat voyage after the Bounty mutiny he charted everything along his track.

  “Can’t anything be done about the food?” asked Sonya.

  Grimes turned to Brenda Coles. “That’s your department, Brenda. What has Faraway Quest’s Assistant bio-chemist to
suggest?” He grinned. “My apologies. As far as this boat is concerned, you’re the bio-chemist.”

  The small, plump blonde smiled back at him. “This is rather grim, isn’t it? But I hope that the next meal will be better. There’s a supply of flavoring essences in the galley—chicken, steak, lobster, and coffee, chocolate, vanilla . . . The trouble is that I’ve never been much of a cook . . .”

  “Your department, then, Sonya,” said Grimes. “Ruth will measure out for each meal what we need in the way of proteins, vitamins and whatever to keep us functioning. You will try to turn these basic requirements into something palatable.”

  “Chicken mole . . .” murmured Sonya thoughtfully.

  “And what’s that?” demanded Williams. “I’ve heard rabbit referred to as underground chicken . . .”

  “Really, Bill,” she said reprovingly. “Chicken mole is a Mexican dish. Chicken with mole sauce. The mole sauce is made mainly from bitter chocolate.”

  “Gah!” exclaimed Williams.

  “And the other main ingredient of the sauce,” Grimes told him, “is dried chicken blood. Mphm. I don’t think, somehow, that we shall be having chicken mole on the menu. Anyhow, do your best, ladies. And remember that there’s no risk of the customers deciding to patronize another restaurant . . .”

  “There’s always the risk of their murdering the chef!” said Williams cheerfully.

  But it wouldn’t come to that, Grimes hoped. His people would be keeping themselves occupied during the seven long weeks of the voyage. Williams there was no need to worry about—he would always find something useful to do. And as long as Carnaby could navigate, he would be happy. And if time did hang heavily, in spite of everything, there was the games locker, with chess, Scrabble and the like, as well as packs of playing cards and sets of dice. This would be no luxury cruise, but it could have been a lot worse.

  Chapter 24

  IT WAS A LONG, long drag from Earth to Mars.

  They had made much longer voyages, all of them, but in conditions which, compared to those in the lifeboat, were fantastically luxurious. There had been organized entertainment and ample facilities for self-entertainment. There had been a well-varied menu and meals had been occasions to look forward to. In the boat meals were something to be gotten through as expeditiously as possible. In spite of the skill of Sonya and Brenda, in spite of the wide variety of flavorings, the goo was still goo. Texture is as important as taste and appearance.

  Of them all, Carnaby was the happiest. Grimes almost regretted that the navigator had been one of the officers remaining loyal to him. He, the commodore, had always loved navigation, had always maintained that it was an art rather than a science. But he had always maintained, too, that it is rather pointless to keep a dog and to bark oneself. So . . . So Carnaby was the navigating officer. Carnaby was a direct descendant of those navigators who, in the days of sail on Earth’s seas, had been called “artists.” Grimes helped Carnaby when he was asked to, but this was not very often.

  Out from Earth’s orbit, in a widely arcing trajectory, swept the boat, its inertial drive unit hammering away with never a missed beat. Through the interplanetary emptiness—the near-emptiness—it flew, with the ruddy spark that was Mars at first wide on the bow but, with every passing day, the bearing closing. Carnaby was shooting at a moving target and, ideally, his missile (of which he was part) would arrive at Point X at precisely the same second as its objective. From a mere spark the red planet expanded to an appreciable disc, even to the naked eye. Astern, on the quarter, the blazing sun diminished appreciably.

  Meanwhile Ken and Clarisse Mayhew rarely stirred from the little tent of plastic sheeting that they had made their private quarters—but they were not idle. Now and again Grimes would hear their soft voices as they vocalized their thoughts, their psionic transmissions. Castaways calling Mars . . . Castaways calling Mars . . . Do you hear me? Come in please. Come in . . . Come in . . . The radio-telephonic jargon sounded strange in these circumstances, but its use was logical enough.

  On they drove, on, and on.

  Mars was a globe now, an orange beach ball floating in the black sea of space, its surface darkly mottled, the polar frost cap gleaming whitely. It was time, Carnaby announced, for deceleration. He and Grimes took their places at the controls, turned the lifeboat about its short axis until the thrust of the drive was pushing them away from the planetary objective instead of towards it. It would be days, however, before the braking effect was fully felt.

  And then Mayhew came out from his tent and said, “John, I have them. I have the same man that I had before, when they gave us the bum’s rush . . .”

  Grimes made the last adjustment to his set of controls, said to Carnaby, “She’s all yours, James.” Then, to Mayhew, “Any joy, Ken?”

  “I . . . I think so, John. They aren’t overjoyed to learn that we’re on our way to them, but they realize, I think, that we have no place else to go. We can land, they say, as long as we don’t get underfoot.”

  “Decent of them. No, I’m not being sarcastic. After the exhibition that Hendriks put on the last time that we were out this way it’s not surprising that they don’t want to know us. Mphm. Well, I suggest that you go into a huddle with Ruth—frequencies and all that—and try to get them to set up some sort of radio beacon for us to home on. We’ll set this little bitch down exactly where they want us to . . .”

  “Into the jaws of a trap, perhaps,” suggested Sonya pessimistically.

  “No, Sonya. They aren’t that sort of people,” Mayhew told her.

  “I sincerely hope that you’re right.”

  “I am right,” he said shortly. “In fact, now that they have learned quite a lot about us, they are hinting that they may be able to help us. After all, their level of technology is a high one.”

  “From you,” she said, “that is praise.”

  “Machines have their uses,” he admitted.

  And Grimes thought, Can they get us back to where and when we belong? Science or black magic—what does it matter as long as it gets the right results . . .

  Chapter 25

  SLOWLY THE BOAT DROPPED DOWN through the clear Martian sky, its inertial drive muttering irritably, riding the beam of the radio beacon that had been set up on the bank of one of the minor canals. The line of approach took them well clear of any city, although a sizeable metropolis could just be seen, a cluster of fragile towers on the far northern horizon. There were no villages within view, no small towns. There was only the desert, ochre under the bright sunlight, with a broad, straight band of irrigation sweeping across it from north to south, a wide, dark green ribbon down the center of which ran a gleaming line of water.

  In some ways this Mars was not unlike the terraformed Mars that Grimes had known (would know). The air was a little thinner, perhaps, and there was less water—but it was, even so, utterly dissimilar to the almost dead world upon which the first explorers from Earth had made their landing. Nonetheless, this was a dying world. There was an autumnal quality in the light, bright though it was . . . Rubbish! he told himself angrily. But the feeling persisted.

  The commodore had the controls, and Carnaby was visibly sulking. Grimes was more amused than otherwise by his navigator’s reaction to his taking charge at the finish. Meanwhile, he watched the needle of the improvised radio compass, keeping the boat exactly on course. Carnaby had done well, he thought, very well—but he, Grimes, was entitled to his fun now and again. Carnaby had done well, and so had all of the others. Clarisse and Ken Mayhew were mathematical morons, but the minds of Carnaby and Ruth Macoboy had been opened to them, and the telepaths, working with their opposite numbers on Mars, had been able to cope with the task of setting up a radio-navigational system. Fortunately mathematics is a universal language, and the basic laws of physics are valid anywhere in the known Galaxy . . .

  “There’s a light!” called Carnaby, who was in the co-pilot’s seat, pointing.

  Yes, there was a light, winking, brilliantl
y scarlet against the dark green. The commodore switched his attention from the radio compass to the visual mark. With his free hand he picked up the binoculars, studied the landing place. There were buildings there, he saw, although they seemed to be little more than plastic igloos. But there was no sign of an airstrip or a landing apron. This did not much matter, as the boat would be set down vertically—but Grimes was reluctant to crush what looked like a crop of food plants during his landing.

  “It’s all right, John,” said Mayhew. “They aren’t worried about this last harvest. They will not be needing it.”

  “Mphm?” But if Mayhew said so, then this was the way it was.

  Grimes reduced speed as he lost altitude, coming in at little more than a crawl. The downthrust of the drive produced a wake of crushed vegetation. This effect could have been avoided by coming in over the canal itself—but it was too late to think about that now. In any case, he had Mayhew’s word for it that it didn’t matter. Finally he dropped the boat to the ground no more than a meter from the flashing beacon. He looked out through the ports at the cluster of plastic domes. What now?

  A circular doorway appeared in the skin of the nearer one. A figure appeared in the opening. It was not unmanlike, but was unhumanly thin and tall, and the shape of the head was cylindrical rather than roughly spherical. But it had two arms, two legs, two eyes and a mouth.

  “Dwynnaith,” said Mayhew. “He is here to meet us . . .”

  “Where’s the red carpet?” demanded Williams.

  Mayhew ignored this. “His people may be able to help us. But, first, he wishes to inspect the boat.”

  “Tell him,” said Grimes, “that this is Liberty Hall, that he can—”

  “I’m rather tired of that expression,” interrupted Sonya.

  “Just convey the correct impression, then,” Grimes said. “And tell him that we’re sorry not to be able to receive him on board with the proper hospitality.”