Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  “That,” Mayhew assured the commodore, “is the very least of their worries. At this particular point of their history they regard us as a nuisance. Luckily, some of their mathematicians are intrigued by our predicament and have decided to help us.” He smiled slightly. “By helping us they are also getting us out of their hair.”

  Grimes pushed the buttons that would open the door and extrude the ramp. He remarked, as he did so, “I was brought up never to look a gift horse in the mouth. As long as they help us I shall be grateful, and not worry about their motivation.”

  Dwynnaith clambered into the boat. He was all arms and legs, and his garments of metal and plastic gleamed like the chitinous integument of an insect. He exuded a vaguely unpleasant dry, musty odor. He creaked as he moved. He ignored Grimes, Williams, Carnaby, Sonya, Ruth Macoboy and Brenda Coles, went straight to Mayhew and Clarisse. He extended a three-fingered hand on the end of a spidery arm, touched first Mayhew and then Clarisse lightly on the forehead. They responded, although they had to reach up to return the salutation.

  Escorted by the human telepaths, he made his slow way aft until he came to the boat’s Carlotti transceiver. He stared at the instrument with his huge lidless eyes for at least a minute, then touched the antenna with his left hand. The elliptical Mobius Strip rotated slowly about its long axis in response to the impulse of his thin finger. He looked at it, standing in motionless silence, for about five minutes. It was impossible to read any expression on that almost featureless face.

  “Well?” asked Grimes at last. “Well?”

  “I—we—think that it is well, John,” said Mayhew. “He is reporting what he is observing to his colleagues in the city. They, in turn, are passing the information on to the mathematicians . . .”

  But what the hell, Grimes asked himself, has our Carlotti transceiver to do with their helping us? Then he remembered—or did the picture come from outside his mind?—the towers of the city they had seen, each of which had what looked like a Carlotti antenna at its highest point.

  Mayhew spoke again. “We are to stay here, John, until sent for. We can live aboard the boat or in the temporary dwellings, as we please. Meanwhile they would like to take our Carlotti set to the city to study it and—as far as I can gather—make the necessary modifications. If Ruth will unbolt it from the bulkhead . . .”

  “Modifications?” demanded Grimes. “What modifications? And what for?”

  “I’m no wiser than you are, John. All that I know is that it’s somehow important. They must have it if they’re to help us. They haven’t the time to produce a similar, suitably miniaturized instrument of their own.”

  “Do as the man says, Ruth,” ordered Grimes. “Or do as the Martian says.”

  As Mayhew and Clarisse escorted Dwynnaith from the boat she had assembled her tools ready to start work.

  Chapter 26

  DWYNNAITH returned to the city in a blimplike airship that came out for him. Carnaby, watching the clumsy-seeming contraption approaching, said, “A gasbag? A dirigible balloon? I thought these people were highly advanced, but . . .”

  “And what’s wrong with it, James?” Grimes asked him. “Why consume power just to stay aloft when, with aero-static lift, you do it for free?”

  “But the speed of the thing . . . Or the lack of speed, rather . . .”

  “If you’re in no great hurry,” said the commodore, “an airship is at least as good as any other form of transport.”

  The Martian, still silent, was obviously communing with Mayhew. Then the telepath said, “He wants us to keep well away from the beacon, John.”

  “Why, Ken?”

  “I’m . . . I’m not quite sure. Some mechanical technicality about anchoring . . .”

  It was a pity, thought Grimes, that Mayhew was such a moron in all matters concerning machinery. But, probably, the airship would be lowering some kind of grapnel. It made sense. He and the others moved well away from the immediate vicinity of the still-flashing beacon.

  The airship was by no means as primitive as it had seemed from a distance. As it approached it lost altitude, and Grimes could see the silvery mesh that enclosed the ballonnettes tightening, compressing the gasbags, reducing buoyancy. Here was no wasteful valving of gas. The ship came in very slowly at the finish, its single, pusher airscrew just ticking over. When it was almost directly over the beacon it stopped. There was a loud thung! and a metal projectile shot out and down from the gondola, burying itself in the soil. As it did so the grapnel arms opened, to grip firmly. The mooring line—a flexible wire, pencil-thin—tightened as a winch in the airship took the strain, hauling it down for the last few meters. Then it floated there, riding quietly to the slight breeze, the skids of its undercarriage just clear of the tops of the green plants.

  Dwynnaith stood a little apart from the humans, issuing what sounded like a rapid-fire stream of orders. So he could speak, and so the airship’s crew were not telepaths, thought Grimes. His voice was painfully shrill, as were the voices that answered him from inside the gondola. It was like the chirping of insects, or of birds. Like birds? wondered the commodore, the beginning of a wild surmise taking vague shape in his mind. Like birds? Somehow that tied in with the autumnal feel in the air. There was some correlation—but what?

  Dwynnaith clambered with anthropoidal agility up a short ladder that was extended from the open door of the gondola. Grimes noted that as his weight came on it the gasbag was allowed to expand in compensation. He stood in the doorway which, although narrow, was quite wide enough to accommodate both himself and one of the crew members. The two attenuated beings were obviously waiting for something.

  “The Carlotti transceiver . . .” said Mayhew.

  The dismantled instrument was handed up and taken inside. The door slid shut. Abruptly the anchor jerked from the ground, its blades retracting. The airship bounded upwards, turning in a wide arc as it did so, flew steadily northwards. Soon it was no more than an almost invisible dot in the clear sky.

  “And what happens now?” asked Carnaby.

  “We wait,” said Mayhew.

  “For what?” demanded Sonya.

  “If I knew, I’d tell you,” replied the telepath testily.

  So they waited.

  They decided to live in the plastic domes that had been set up for their use; the temporary, inflatable dwellings offered far more comfort and privacy than the cramped quarters of the lifeboat. The furniture—beds and chairs and tables of a sort, also inflatable—must have teen especially made with human proportions in mind. There was no heating, although this did not much matter as the double skin formed adequate insulation against the coldness of the Martian night, and there was a good supply of blankets woven from some synthetic fibre. There was no lighting, but portable lamps could be brought in from the boat. There were no cooking facilities, but the lifeboat’s galley could be used for the preparation of meals. No food was provided, but the boat’s stores were very far from being exhausted.

  There was food growing all around them, of course. The boat carried the means whereby spacemen stranded on an alien planet could test local foodstuffs to determine their suitability or otherwise for human consumption, and Brenda Coles was a qualified biochemist. She announced that the beanlike crop among which they were sitting was not only edible; it was highly nutritious. Unfortunately the flavor was vile, and nothing could be done to kill the taste.

  Grimes said, after an experimental nibble and hasty spitting out, “Perhaps we would have been better off in Australia . . . Even witchety grubs’d taste better than this!”

  He was not, after the first day or so, happy. There was so little to do. He would have liked to have taken the boat to make a detailed exploration of the countryside—but this, Mayhew assured him, would most certainly not be approved by the Martians. “We must stay here, John,” he said firmly. “We must be ready to go to the city as soon as they send for us. Bear in mind that we are uninvited guests and that we must do nothing, nothing at all, to ant
agonize our hosts.”

  “But they will help us?”

  “They think that they will be able to help us.”

  And with that Grimes had to be satisfied.

  Of them all, only Brenda Coles seemed to be reasonably content. She was only a biochemist, not a xenobiologist, but she possessed a smattering of xenobiology and occupied herself by attempting to catalogue the flora and fauna in the vicinity of the camp. Carnaby helped her, although not with over-much enthusiasm. He complained, out of her hearing, “Damn it all, I’m a navigator, not a butterfly hunter!”

  Not that the butterflies, so-called, were butterflies. They were winged arthropods of a sort—but arthropods are not warm-blooded, and these things were. In spite of this they had not survived the millennia prior to Man’s first landing on Mars—but neither had much of anything else, plant or animal. Perhaps the great meteor shower which formed the craters had wiped out practically all life on the Red Planet—or would wipe out all life.

  “But what about the cities?” asked Grimes, when this theory was advanced. “You can’t tell me that each meteor had the name of a city written on it. There must have been something left for men to find.”

  “But there wasn’t,” said Williams.

  “No. There wasn’t—save for a couple or three dubious artifacts.”

  “I think . . .” began Mayhew hesitantly, “I think that we arrived just before some sort of mass migration . . . An old world, senescent, and its people moving on to greener, fresher pastures . . .”

  Carnaby picked up the home-made butterfly net that he had been using, pretended to strum it as though it were a guitar.

  “I’ve laid around and played around, this old town too long,” he sang.

  “Summer almost gone, winter comin’ on . . .

  “I’ve laid around and played around this old town too long,

  “And I feel I gottagotta travel on . . .”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes. “Yes, there is that sort of feel in the air. But . . .” Then he, too, sang, in spite of Sonya’s protests.

  “There’s a lonesome train at six oh eight a-comin’ through the town,

  “A-comin’ through the town, an’ I’ll be homeward bound,

  “There’s a lonesome train at six oh eight a-comin’ through the town . . .

  “An’ I feel I gotta travel on . . .”

  “No one’s stopping you,” said his wife acidly.

  “You don’t get the point. When you board that lonesome train you don’t take the town with you. You leave it behind. You leave town, in fact.”

  “What are you drivin’ at, Skipper?” asked Williams.

  “I . . . I don’t quite know. When I was a kid, when I was a cadet at the Survey Service Academy, we were supposed to read selected twentieth century science fiction. Wild stuff, most of it, and well off the beam most of the time. And yet, after years, some of it sticks in my memory. There was one story about an invention called, I think, the spindizzy. It was a sort of antigravitational device that lifted entire cities and sent them whiffling around the Galaxy as enormous spaceships with closed economies . . .

  “What if the Martians have something of the kind in mind? What if those antennae on the towers of their cities, like Carlotti antennae, aren’t for communication but are something on the same general lines as our Mannschenn Drive? After all, both the Mannschenn Drive and the Carlotti Communication System do funny things to Space and Time . . . Mphm. It could be that they’ve taken our Carlotti set so they can modify it so it can be used as an interstellar drive for the boat . . .”

  “And if they have, if they can,” asked Sonya, “where do we go to? And, come to that, why?”

  Carnaby started to sing again.

  “Sheriff an’ police a-comin’ after me,

  “Comin’ after me, a-comin’ after me . . .

  “Sheriff an’ police a-comin’ after me,

  “An’ I feel I gotta travel on . . .”

  Nobody thought that it was very funny.

  Chapter 27

  THE SUMMONS CAME an hour before sunrise.

  Mayhew woke Grimes and Sonya, while Clarisse called the others.

  Grimes asked, struggling into his clothes, “So this is it?”

  “This is it, John.”

  “What is this it?” demanded Sonya grumpily.

  “I . . . I don’t know. They seem determined not to let me have a detailed picture. But you must be able to feel it . . . An atmosphere of tense expectancy . . . The bustle of embarkation . . .”

  Sonya sniffed audibly, then said, “Fort Sumter has been fired upon. My regiment marches at dawn.”

  “I don’t get it . . .” said Mayhew, after a puzzled pause.

  “I do,” Grimes told him. “But get into the boat, Ken. And we’ll leave none of our own gear behind. Come to that, we may as well take these blankets. They might come in useful . . .”

  Grimes and Sonya, muffled against the cold, emerged from the dome into the pre-dawn darkness. There was a thin, chill wind, and overhead the sky was clear, the stars bitterly bright. To the east the horizon was black against the first pale flush of day and a bright planet blazed with a greenish effulgence. Earth . . . And what were the mutineers doing, wondered the commodore. And what was happening, what would happen, to his ship, to the old Quest? Grimes looked away from the distant home world to the west, where tiny Phobos was slowly rising. Deimos, even tinier, was among the stars somewhere, undistinguishable from them. He had no time to waste determining its exact location. And to the north was the glare of the city lights.

  Lights were coming on in the lifeboat. The loud grumbling of the inertial drive unit shattered the early morning calm. Williams must be already aboard, ensuring that all was in a state of readiness.

  Grimes and Sonya hurried to the boat, clambered in through the open door. Yes, Williams was there, in the co-pilot’s seat, and Clarisse, Mayhew, Carnaby, Brenda and Ruth were in their places.

  “All right,” said the commodore. “Let’s go.” He eased himself into his chair. “To the city, I suppose, Ken?”

  “To the city. We are to land in the central plaza.”

  The hammering of the inertial drive became louder as Grimes lifted the boat. She lurched, steadied. Below her the canal was a ribbon of faintly gleaming silver in the starlight. Ahead the city was a star cluster on the black horizon, individual lights now visible through the dim-glowing haze.

  As they flew on, the rosy pallor in the east spread slowly over the entire sky and the ocherous desert reflected the growing luminosity. Abruptly, a point of dazzling light appeared over the low hills, expanded rapidly. The sun was up, and the towers of the city stood stark and black in the pearly morning mist, but only for an instant; the clarity of their first appearance dimmed to a quivering insubstantiality. Grimes remembered again that story which he had read so long ago; what was its title? Cities in Flight? Something like that. He laughed briefly. Just a trick of the light, he told himself.

  They flew on—and, quite suddenly, were rattling over the pinnacles of the outermost towers. On each of them gleamed the elliptical Mobius strip, but the antennae were motionless. Over broad avenues they flew, slowly now, over the graceful bridges that spanned the wide streets, that connected tower to tower in a complex mesh. There was traffic abroad—beetlelike vehicles, small knots of pedestrians, most of whom paused briefly to look upwards at the noisy flying boat.

  They came to the central plaza, which was circular in plan, paved with lustrous pink stone, and ornamented by a central fountain and a profusion of flowering shrubs. To the north of the fountain a space had been cleared for them—shrubs removed, their beds flattened. So that there could be no mistake, a little red-flashing beacon indicated their landing site.

  “I suppose this is where they want us,” said Grimes.

  “It is,” Mayhew told him.

  “Mphm. I think I can wriggle us in without knocking anything over,” said Grimes.

  Cautiously he brought the boat
down. There was just room for her between the beds of shrubs and the stone benches. When her landing gear crunched on the paving he cut the drive. He said, unnecessarily, “Well, we’re here.”

  Sonya muttered something about a blinding glimpse of the obvious but she, with the others, was staring out through the viewports. From ground level the towers were even more impressive than they had appeared from the air. They soared like fountains, flash-frozen to immobility. They, and the connecting bridges, were an arching spray of intricately interlacing stone and metal. Over all, glittering gold in the sunlight, were those enigmatic antennae.

  “Company,” announced Williams prosaically.

  Grimes pulled his regard away from the fantastic architecture, looked to where the commander was pointing. Walking slowly towards the boat came a small procession, six Martians, all of them tall, attenuated, all with those almost featureless elongated heads, all of them looking more like insects than men. Two of them carried between them the Carlotti transceiver. It looked just as it had when it had been dismantled, but it was impossible to see what changes had been made to the components concealed by the casing.

  “Dwynnaith is with them,” said Mayhew. His lips went on moving, silently, as he put his thoughts into words. Then, “We are to accompany him to the assembly hall. The others will fit the . . . the apparatus back into the boat.”

  “Very well,” said Grimes at last. He did not like the idea of letting strangers, aliens, loose in the lifeboat without himself or one of his people there to see what was being done, but realized that he had no option. “Very well.”

  Mayhew and Clarisse were first out of the boat. They went through the head-touching ceremony with Dwynnaith. The other Martians looked at the humans with an apparent lack of curiosity, conversed among themselves in eerie, chittering voices. Grimes was last on the ground. He waited until the telepaths seemed to have completed their silent conversation, then said, “We’re all ready, Ken.”