Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

“New Bedford to master,” replied Murgatroyd. “You are exactly in position. Over.”

  “Rim Arquebus to Commodore Grimes,” put in Welldean. “Do you wish me to take any action when the EE surfaces?”

  “Haab to Grimes. You are only an observer. And that goes for your navy, too. Over.”

  “The old man gets tensed up,” remarked Murgatroyd, with the faintest hint of apology in his voice.”

  “Rim Arquebus to Commodore Grimes. My weaponry is manned and ready,” persisted Welldean.

  “So is mine.” Murgatroyd chuckled, waving a big hand over his fire-control console.

  The minutes, the seconds, ticked by. Grimes watched the sweep second hand of the clock. He had noted the time of Moebius Dick’s disappearance. The half-hour was almost up. When that red pointer came around to 37 . . .

  “Now!” yelled the mate.

  Moebius Dick was back. The enormous circle of gyrating luminescence had reappeared in the center of the square formed by the chasers. From the NST speaker came the low-pitched buzz and crackle of interference as the solenoids were energized. The energy eater hung there, quivering, seeming to shrink within itself. Then it moved, tilting like a processing gyroscope.

  Haab’s voice could be heard giving orders: “Increase to six hundred thousand gausses. To six-fifty—seven hundred—”

  From one of the chasers came a bright, brief flare and from the speaker a cry of alarm: “Captain, my coil has blown!”

  “Master to second and fourth mates—triangular formation.”

  Moebius Dick was spinning about a diametric axis, no longer a circle of light but a hazy sphere of radiance. The energy eater was rolling through the emptiness, directly toward one of the three still-functioning chasers. The small craft turned to run. Rim Arquebus stabbed out with a barrage of laser beams. In New Bedford’s control room Murgatroyd swore, added his fire to that from the frigate. It was ineffective—or highly effective in the wrong way. The monster glowed ever more brightly as it absorbed the energy directed at it, moved ever faster. The chaser turned and twisted desperately, hopelessly. The other chasers could not pursue for fear of running into the fire from the ships. There was nothing that they could have done, in any case.

  “The old man’s boat—” muttered Murgatroyd. “I guess it’s the way he wanted to go—” His hand fell away from the firing stud. Moebius Dick was rolling over Haab’s small and fragile craft.

  Grimes, on the NST VHF, was ordering, “Hold your fire, Rim Arquebus! Hold your fire!”

  Welldean’s voice came back: “What the hell do you think I’m doing?” Adding, as a grudging afterthought: “Sir.”

  The lights of the chaser flared briefly through the luminous, swirling haze that enveloped them, flared and died. But something, somebody, broke through the living radiance. It was the space-suited Haab, using his personal propulsion unit to drive him back to his ship.

  He broke through and broke away and for a second or so it seemed that he would succeed. Then Moebius Dick was after him, overtaking him, enveloping him. From the NST speaker came a short, dreadful scream. The globe of flame that was the energy eater seemed to swell, was swelling, visibly and rapidly, assuming the appearance of a gigantic, spherical fire opal. The three surviving chasers retreated rapidly.

  Dark streaks suddenly marred the iridescent beauty of the sphere, spread, rapidly covering the entire surface. Where Moebius Dick had been there was only nothingness.

  No, not nothingness.

  Floating in the darkness, illumined by the searchlights of the three small craft, was the lifeless, armored figure of Captain Haab.

  “They’ll bring him in,” muttered Murgatroyd. “I’ll take him back to Earth for burial. Those were his wishes.”

  “Rim Arquebus to New Bedford,” came Welldean’s voice. “Do you require medical assistance? Shall I send a boat with my surgeon—”

  “We’ve a Quack of our own,” snarled Murgatroyd, “and a good one. But even he won’t be able to do anything. The old man is dead.”

  “It was his leg that saved him,” said Grimes to Sonya when, back at Port Forlorn, he was telling her the story of the hunt.

  “How do you make that out?”

  “Well, perhaps it wasn’t his leg, but all of us came to the conclusion that it was, as it were, the last straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  “Make your mind up, John. I’d gotten used to the idea that Moebius Dick was a sort of latter-day white whale—and now you refer to him as a camel!”

  “You know what I mean—I’m talking about the item that finally made him lose control. Moebius Dick had been feeding well over a period of quite some weeks. Every time Rim Arquebus heaved a torpedo at him he’d skim the cream off the fireball and then vanish, being too intelligent to overeat. But all life forms tend to act unintelligently when infuriated and he was no exception. When he broke out of Haab’s electromagnetic net he was no more than a dangerous, vicious animal. He was being pumped full of photons by the concentrated laser fire from the two ships—and it meant as little to him as a stream of bullets means to a charging carnivore. He ‘killed’ Haab’s chaser, gulping all the energy from its machinery. He would have killed Haab himself—Haab was in a state of complete paralysis when he was brought on board—if he hadn’t started his meal on the Captain’s leg.

  “You know that the Tanganorans are famous for their powered prosthetic limbs, don’t you? Haab’s right leg was a beautiful machine with its own, built-in power plant—cells with a working life of a least twenty Standard Years after installation, a slow, rigidly controlled fission process. Moebius Dick got that twenty years’ worth of energy in one bite.”

  “Critical mass or critical charge—or whatever?” murmured Sonya. “But Haab’s anagrammatic namesake wasn’t as lucky with his peg leg.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Or was he more than just a namesake?”

  “I still don’t get you.”

  “You must remember that talk we had with the Reverend Madam Swithin about reincarnation. How she told us that—according to the tenets of her Church—some souls have to wait around for centuries until the shuffling of chromosomes and genes produces just the right body, with just the right brain and psychological make-up, for their next embodiment. It makes an odd sort of sense, doesn’t it? Captain Ahab, the whaler—Captain Haab, the hunter—”

  “But Ahab was only a fictional character!” Grimes, protested to his wife.

  “Aren’t we all finally?” she asked reasonably. “Those of us who deserve being made into legends?”

  Chapter 1

  COMMODORE GRIMES sat at his desk, looking down at the transcript of a Carlottigram from Port Listowel. Lord of the Isles, one of the lightjammers on the run between the Rim Worlds and the Llanithi Consortium, was overdue. She, using her own Carlotti equipment, had beamed a final message to Port Forlorn before breaking the light barrier. Once the speed of light had been exceeded she was in a weird, private universe of her own—stranger even than the private universes of ships running under the space-time-twisting Mannschenn Drive—and unable to communicate with any planetary base or any other ship. Toward the end of her voyage she had made her routine reduction of speed to a sublight velocity and had started to send her ETA to the Carlotti Station on Llanith. She had gotten as far as giving her name and then, according to the Llanithi Carlotti operator on watch, had experienced what seemed to be interference on the band in use. Nothing more had been heard from her. And now she was all of ten days overdue.

  The communicator buzzed sharply.

  Grimes pressed the button that would admit the incoming call. The screen lit up and on it appeared the fleshy, ruddy face of Admiral Kravitz.

  “Ah, Grimes.”

  The commodore repressed the temptation to counter with, And whom the hell else did you expect? Legally speaking, the admiral was not his superior officer except when Grimes was called back to Active Duty with the Rim Worlds Navy, but there would be no sense
in antagonizing the man.

  “Sir?” Grimes replied curtly.

  “This Lord of the Isles business, Grimes?”

  “You have a transcript of the signal from Port Listowel, sir?”

  “Of course. We do have an Intelligence Branch, you know. What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t like it. Especially coming right after the vanishing of Sea Witch under very similar circumstances.”

  “What are you doing about it, Grimes?”

  “I could ask you the same question, sir.”

  “We cleaned up the energy eaters for you, Grimes, and we made a clean sweep. Rim Culverin has been maintaining a patrol ever since the conclusion of Operation Rimhunt and has reported no further invasion of our territorial space by those entities.” The admiral paused, then went on: “I’m not altogether happy about those lightjammers of yours, Grimes. As you know, we’re having some built for the Navy, but I’m beginning to feel like trying to get the program canceled. They aren’t safe. Sailing ships, indeed, in this day and age?”

  “They’re the only ships we have capable of trading with the Llanithi Consortium.”

  “At the moment, Grimes, at the moment. But our boffins are working on some other, simpler way of achieving a reversal of atomic charges.”

  “With what success, sir?” asked Grimes innocently.

  Kravitz flushed. “None so far. But give them time, give them time. Meanwhile—”

  “Sir?”

  “Meanwhile, Grimes, I am recalling you to Active Duty. As long as the so-called ships of the line are still on our drawing boards we have to maintain an interest in sailing vessels. Furthermore, I have learned from your employers—from Rim Runners—that all further sailings of the lightjammers have been suspended until such time as the mystery of the disappearance of Lord of the Isles and Sea Witch has been cleared up. They are agreeable to the requisitioning and commissioning of Pamir as an auxiliary cruiser. You will sail in her.”

  Grimes grinned. “Thank you, sir. But I have to tell you that I’m not qualified in sail.”

  “Pamir’s people are—and they all, like yourself, hold reserve commissions. Listowel’s a full commander, isn’t he? You’ll be in overall charge of the ship and the expedition, but he can be your sailing master. We’ll be putting aboard regular Navy personnel—gunnery specialists and the like. Satisfied?”

  “Gunnery specialists?”

  “You never know when weapons are going to come in handy, Grimes. It’s better to have them than to be without them.”

  Grimes had to agree. He knew as well as anybody that the Universe was not peaceful and that Man was not its only breaker of peace.

  Not at all reluctantly Grimes handed over his astronautical superintendent’s duties to Captain Barsac, one of Rim Runners’ senior masters. But it was with a certain degree of reluctance that he left his comfortable home in Port Forlorn for Port Erikson, the lightjammers’ terminal. Sonya refused to accompany her husband. She detested cold weather. Port Forlorn’s climate was barely tolerable. Only Esquimaux, polar bears or penguins—assuming that the immigration or importation of these from Earth could be arranged—would feel at home at Coldharbor Bay in Lorn’s Antarctica.

  Pamir was alongside at Port Erikson. The cargo she had brought from Llanith had been discharged but she had not commenced to load for the return voyage. As yet the advance party from the Admiralty Yards was still to arrive, although accommodations—looking like black, partially inflated balloons grounded in the snow—had been set up for them.

  Grimes, accompanied by Captain Rowse, the Port Erikson harbormaster, went aboard Pamir. He was received by Ralph Listowel, the lightjammer’s master.

  “Glad to have you aboard, sir,” said Listowel.

  “Glad to be aboard, Commander.”

  Listowel scowled. “That’s right, sir. Rub it in. I suppose you’ll be taking over my quarters.”

  Grimes grinned. “No. You’re to be my sailing master—and, as far as I’m concerned, this is still your ship and you’re still the master of her. You’ve quite palatial passenger accommodations. That’ll do me.”

  Listowel’s scowl faded from his lean, dark face. “Thank you, sir. But what is going on?”

  “Your ship has been requisitioned—and you and your officers have been called up for Active Duty in the Rim Worlds Navy.”

  “I know that. But what is going on?”

  “I was hoping that you’d be able to tell me.”

  Listowel waved his visitors to seats, took a chair himself. He said, “Let’s face it, Commodore. To date the lightjammers have been lucky, fantastically lucky. Even in Flying Cloud, where we had to make up the rules as we went along, we all came through in one piece. But sooner or later luck runs out.”

  “You think that’s what happened to Sea Witch and Lord of the Isles?”

  “There are so many things that could happen. When we’re running under sail, building up to a velocity just short of that light, we could hit something—”

  “And the flare of the explosion would be seen from Llanith.”

  “All right, all right. Something could go wrong with the magnetic suspension of the sphere of anti-iron—”

  “And with matter and antimatter canceling each other out the burst of released energy would be even more spectacular.”

  “Yes, Commodore. But what if it happened at trans-light speed? We know very little of conditions outside the ship at that velocity. Would the explosion be witnessed in this universe—or in the next universe but three?”

  “Mphm. You have something there, Listowel. Even so, we’ve two ships missing, one after the other. There’s an old saying: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

  “There hasn’t been a third time,” said Listowel.

  “Yet,” pointed out Grimes. “But there’s still the apparent jamming of Lord of the Isles’ last call to be considered.”

  Back in Rowse’s office Grimes asked for the manifests of the cargoes carried by the two missing ships. It was possible that there had been some item of freight which, at trans-light speeds and with the reversal of atomic charges, had become chemically or physically unstable with fatal consequences. This was an idea worth considering. But no radioactives had been listed. No industrial chemicals, dangerous or otherwise, had been listed. Mainly the freight carried in each ship had consisted of luxury goods—preserved foodstuffs, liquor, fine textiles and the like. A few shipments of machine tools and some drugs had also been part of the cargoes.

  One drug in particular—Antigeriatridine—caught Grimes’ attention. The substance was not manufactured on any of the Rim Worlds. It came from Marina, a planet in the Pleiades Sector. It was an extract from the glands of an indigenous sea slug and could not be synthesized. It was fantastically expensive and, on most worlds, was controlled by the state, rationed out only to deserving citizens. It was Marina’s main source of income, exported to any planet that could afford to pay for it. In recent years the Llanithi Consortium had been placed on Marina’s list of customers. Transshipment for Llanith was made from Lorn.

  Grimes’ memory carried him back to the long ago days when he had been a newly commissioned ensign in the Federation Survey Service. He had played a part in bringing the pirates who had captured the merchant vessel Epsilon Sextans to book. Epsilon Sextans had been carrying Antigeriatridine, which had made her a worthwhile prey.

  Perhaps Admiral Kravitz’s insistence that Pamir be armed made sense.

  But piracy?

  It was not the continued existence of the crime itself that Grimes found hard to comprehend, but rather the actual mechanics of it. Piracy was not unknown along the spaceways, but both predators and victims had always been conventional starships, with inertial drive and Mannschenn Drive and auxiliary rocket power for use in emergencies. Under inertial drive only, maintaining a comfortable one G acceleration, a ship could build up almost to the speed of light if she took long enough about it. But, as soon as possibl
e, she usually ran under Mannschenn Drive which, in effect, gave her FTL velocity. In these conditions she was untouchable unless the vessel attacking her succeeded in synchronizing her own rate of temporal precession. The captains of warships—and of such vessels as have from time to time sailed on the plundering account—were reasonably competent in the practice of this art.

  But it would be impossible for a ship proceeding under inertial drive only to match velocities with a lightjammer under sail. And a ship running under Mannschenn Drive would have to return to the normal space-time continuum before her weapons could be brought to bear on a lightjammer—and, once again, the matching of velocities would be impossible.

  Hijacking was a form of piracy, of course.

  Grimes turned from the missing ships’ cargo manifests to their passenger lists. The names meant nothing to him, neither those of Rim Worlds citizens nor of Llanithans. No doubt the police could help him in this respect. Perhaps one or more of those passengers had a criminal record. But the hypothesis made little appeal to him. He just could not imagine the officers of either of the vessels submitting meekly—and he could not imagine any passenger being able to handle a lightjammer. Sail spacemanship was an art rather than a science and the only practitioners of the art—Grimes told himself—consisted of the handful of Rim Runners’ personnel trained and qualified for lightjammers.

  He filled and lit his pipe, looked down at the manifests and passenger lists on the desk. He had a hunch that the manifests meant more than the passenger lists—no more than a hunch, but his hunches were often right. Any ship—even a pirate ship—anywhere in space between Lorn and Llanith and in position to receive the beamed Carlotti transmissions from one planet to the other, would be able to read the routine signals sent immediately after the lift-off of one of the lightjammers. Date and time of departure—passengers carried—a listing of freight aboard. Nothing was encoded. There had never been any need for secrecy until now.

  Only the actual mechanics of attack, seizure and boarding puzzled him.