Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  He called Sonya and told her that she had better come to Port Erikson. “You’re the intelligence officer in this family,” he said. “This job calls for intelligence.” Reluctantly she agreed to join him.

  The following morning he stood in the Port Erikson control tower, looking out through the wide windows at the bleak landscape. Pamir was alongside at her wharf, a great, dull-gleaming torpedo shape on the dark water. The sleekness of her lines was broken only by the pods that housed her airscrews and their engines. Out on Coldharbor Bay a small tug, Bustler, was chuffing busily back and forth, functioning as an icebreaker, keeping the harbor clear of any accumulation of ice heavy enough to impede surface maneuvers. Grimes had decided that Pamir must keep to her original schedule, which meant that her conversion to an auxiliary cruiser would be a skimpy one. There would be time for the installation of an extra generator and the fitting of two batteries of laser cannon, but no more.

  A familiar voice issued from the traffic controller’s transceiver. “Pinnace Firefly to Port Erikson. Do you read me? Over.”

  “Loud and clear, Firefly. Pass your message. Over.”

  Grimes went to stand by the traffic control officer. He heard Sonya say, “My ETA Port Erikson oh-nine-four-five hours, your time. Over.”

  So neither she—nor Admiral Kravitz—had wasted any time. And Sonya was doing her own piloting, which was typical of her.

  “I have her on the screen, sir,” announced the radar operator.

  Grimes went to the window overlooking the Nullarbor Plain, almost featureless under the blanket of snow. It was one of the rare clear days, and on the horizon stood the distant, jagged battlements of the Great Barrens. And was that a tiny, glittering speck in the pale sky? Yes. It expanded rapidly and even in the control tower, through the thick glass of the windows, the irritated snarl of an inertial drive unit operating at maximum capacity was distinctly audible.

  “That’s her,” said Captain Rowse.

  “That’s her,” agreed Grimes. He shrugged into his heavy cloak, put on his cap and went down to the airstrip to meet Sonya.

  “The trouble with you, John,” she said, “is that you’ve read too much of the wrong kind of history. Wooden ships and iron men and all that sort of thing. Pieces of eight. Broadsides of carronades. The Jolly Roger. Oh, there have been space pirates, I admit. But I still get my share of the bumf issued by the Federation Survey Service’s Intelligence Branch—and I can tell you that today there just aren’t any pirates. Not that sort of pirate, anyway. There’s still the occasional hijacking.”

  Grimes’ prominent ears flushed. He indicated with his hand the passenger lists. He said, “I’ve asked the Port Forlorn chief of police if any of these people have criminal records. He assures me that none of them have and that everybody aboard Lord of the Isles and Sea Witch was a little, innocent woolly lamb—”

  “He’d know, wouldn’t he?” She herself was flushed, her fine features literally glowing under the glossy auburn hair. “And you have all these bright ideas and drag me out here, where all the brass monkeys are singing falsetto, to join you in this comfortless shack to help you think.”

  “Not comfortless,” said Grimes. The quarters that he had been given were commodious and comfortable enough, although lacking in character. accommodation, married couple, for the use of . . .

  “Well, what do you intend doing? Put me in the picture.”

  “Pamir will sail on time, having loaded the cargo that’s been booked for her. That will include a shipment of Antigeriatridine. The usual routine signals will be made once she has lifted off. And then we wait to see what happens next.”

  “We?”

  “I suppose you’ll be coming along.”

  “I might as well get a free trip to Llanith out of it.”

  “All right. You. Me. Ralph Listowel and his officers. The gunnery officer from the Navy who’ll be looking after the laser batteries. The two dozen or so marines who’ll be traveling as passengers.”

  “Anybody would think that you were contemplating embarking on a career of piracy yourself.”

  Grimes laughed. “Why not? After all, one of my ancestors sailed on the account.”

  “And what happened to him?”

  “He was eventually hanged from his own yardarm.”

  She joined him in his laughter. “Then you’d better be careful. After all, the lightjammers are the only ships that run to masts and yards!”

  Chapter 2

  PAMIR WAS READY FOR SPACE.

  The extra generator had been installed, as had been the batteries of laser cannon. Stores for the voyage and the cargo had been loaded. The passengers were embarked. Grimes and Sonya, together with Major Trent, the marine officer, and Lieutenant Fowler, the gunnery officer, sat with Listowel and his wife, Sandra, in the master’s day cabin.

  Listowel sipped his coffee rather glumly. He asked Grimes stiffly, “Have I your permission to cast off, sir, at the arranged time?”

  “Of course, Listowel. You’re the master still. The rest of us are just along for the ride.”

  “It’s a ride I’m looking forward to,” put in Fowler enthusiastically. He was a young giant with short-cropped yellow hair, the perpetual schoolboy so common in all the armed services. “It’ll give me some time in sail and I’ll be all set for our own ships of the line when they come out.”

  “It’s not a free ride we’re here for,” commented the major sourly.

  “More coffee anybody?” asked Sandra cheerfully.

  “No thanks,” replied Listowel, looking at his watch. “It’s time we got the show on the road.”

  “Can I come up to Control, sir?” asked Fowler.

  “Of course, Lieutenant. You’re welcome on the bridge. And so are you, Major.”

  Grimes and Sonya went along with the others. They had witnessed Pamir’s departure from the control position before, but it was so unlike the lift-off of a conventional spaceship as to remain fascinating. This time there was no need to use the tug, no need for the transverse thrust of the airscrews. The wind, what little there was of it, was northerly, blowing the ship bodily off from the wharf, the brash ice piling up along her lee side but not impeding her. When she was well out into the bay water, ballast was dumped and—the sphere of antimatter giving her positive buoyancy—she went up like a balloon or a rocket—silently. Within seconds she was driving through the low cloud ceiling and then had broken through into the clear upper air. Fast she rose—and faster—into blackness, while below her Lorn became an opalescent globe hanging in nothingness.

  The directional gyroscopes rumbled and whined, rumbled again and then lapsed into silence. She was steadied on course now, with Lorn to one side and the Lorn sun astern. The tiny cluster of stars—the antimatter suns around which revolved the planets of the Llanithi Consortium—was directly ahead.

  The control room guests crowded to the side ports of the bridge, looking aft to watch as Listowel made sail. The stubs of the telescopic masts extended themselves rapidly, sprouting yards as they elongated. The yards and the great sails, spreading to catch the star wind, the royals, the topgallants, the upper topsails and the lower topsails, the main courses . . . The polarized glass of the viewports dimmed the glare of the sun and black against it stood the driving surfaces, filling to the photon gale. The inertialess ship was already scudding before it and the Doppler Log was clicking and flashing like a clock gone mad.

  “Roll and go,” murmured Listowel.

  “Wonderful!” breathed Fowler.

  Major Trent only grunted, then said, “I’d better get down to see to my men.”

  Fowler said, “And I’d better check my cannon.”

  “We’ll not be needing them yet,” Grimes told him.

  The ship drove on, steadily accelerating.

  It was like the first voyage that Grimes and Sonya had made in Pamir—and yet, in some ways, unlike. The atmosphere on board was different, mainly because there were no civilian passengers. Major Trent and his marine
s were passengers of a sort, of course—there was little that they could do about the ship until such time as their professional services would be required. But Trent maintained his own standards of discipline and there was altogether too much heel-clicking and saluting. And Listowel’s officers were all too conscious of their temporary standing as commissioned personnel of the Rim Worlds Navy, serving aboard an auxiliary cruiser of that same service. Their captain didn’t like it.

  He complained to Grimes over a quiet drink in the commodore’s quarters: “Damn it all, sir, I’m just a shipmaster and my people are my mates and engineers and all the rest of it. But now I have Mr. bloody Willoughby putting on airs and graces and expecting to be addressed as Lieutenant Commander every time anybody talks to him.”

  Grimes chuckled. “It doesn’t matter. He can call himself what he likes—he’s still a very good chief officer.”

  “Even so—” Then Listowel managed a wry chuckle of his own. “All right. I’ll let him and the others have their fun. But it still reminds me of small boys playing at pirates.”

  “Talking of pirates—” Grimes pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked a drawer of the desk that was part of the cabin’s furniture. “I asked you in for a talk as well as a drink. You remember that coded Carlottigram that came through for me on the teletype this morning?” He took a sheet of paper out of the drawer.

  “This contains the decode, top secret—your eyes only. To Be Destroyed By Fire Before Reading—and all the rest of it. When it comes to playing childish games the Admiralty is at least as bad as anybody else. And this message concerns us all in this vessel.

  “Navy has an intelligence service, you know. According to Sonya it’s not a patch on the Intelligence Branch of the Federation Survey Service, but its officers do flap their ears and twitch their little pink noses now and again. Unluckily, Admiral Kravitz didn’t get his paws on their reports concerning the Duchy of Waldegren until after we’d sailed.”

  “Waldegren?”

  “Yes. It seems that our people managed to plant some monitor buoys in the territorial space of the Duchy. I’ve heard those gadgets described as miracles of miniaturization. See all, hear all, and punch it all back to Port Forlorn on tight-beam Carlotti in one coded parcel before the automatic self-destruction. And that, of course, occurs when anything approaches within ten kilometers.

  “Well, there’s been something going on around Darnstadt—the fortress planet, so-called. There’s a photograph of a lightjammer under sail. There are monitored signals—both Carlotti and NST.” He tapped the sheet of paper. “Kravitz sent me translations of some of the messages. ‘Clear of atmosphere, making sail.’ ‘Arrange berthage for prize.’ The sort of things you send just after departure and just prior to arrival.”

  “I don’t take any prizes, Commodore.”

  “You might yet.” Grimes looked at his watch. “Time we went to see Mr. Fowler get a prize for good shooting.”

  “Didn’t you specialize in gunnery yourself, sir, when you were in the Survey Service?”

  “At one time, yes. But I never had a practice shoot at point eight the speed of light. This should be interesting.”

  “Surely no more so than any other practice shoot, Commodore. As far as the target rocket and the ship are concerned, there’ll be no great relative velocities. The target will just run parallel to us once it’s been launched. If it took evasive action it would drop astern too fast for Fowler to get a shot at it. We’re still accelerating, you know.”

  “Mphm?” Grimes locked away the message. “Let’s go to watch the fireworks.”

  The watchkeeper—Denby, the second officer—and all off-duty officers were in the control room. Sonya was there, too, as was Sandra. Major Trent was there, accompanied by his sergeant. Wallasey, the third officer, was assisting Lieutenant Fowler. The gunnery officer sat at his fire control console. Young Wallasey was at the smaller set of controls, part of the ship’s normal equipment, from which signal and sounding rockets were handled. He was managing to look at least as important as Fowler.

  “Let battle commence!” whispered Grimes to Sonya.

  Fowler overheard this and scowled. But he said nothing. Commodores, even commodores on the Reserve List, were entitled to their pleasantries at the expense of mere lieutenants.

  “Targets in readiness, Mr. Fowler,” reported Wallasey.

  “Thank you, Mr. Wallasey,” replied Fowler stiffly. Then, to Grimes: “Permission to commence practice shoot, sir?”

  “This is Captain Listowel’s ship, Mr. Fowler,” said Grimes.

  The young man flushed and repeated his question to Listowel.

  “Carry on, Mr. Fowler.”

  “Fire one,” he ordered.

  “Fire one,” repeated Wallasey.

  Grimes, looking aft with the others, saw the gout of blue flame, intensely bright against the black backdrop with its sparse scattering of stars, as the missile was ejected from its launching tube. It fell away from the ship on a slightly divergent course, pulling ahead, but slowly, at first.

  “Open the range, Mr. Wallasey,” ordered Fowler.

  “Range opening. One kilometer. Two. Four. Ten—”

  The rocket now was only a bright spark against the darkness.

  Fowler worked at his console. Abaft the control room but forward of the masts and sails the quadruple rods of the starboard laser battery turned and wavered like the hunting antennae of some huge insect.

  “Fire—” muttered Fowler to himself. A faint glow showed at the tips of the rods, nothing more. Here there was no air, with its floating dust motes, to be heated to incandescence. Out to starboard the bright spark persisted, neither extinguished nor flaring into sudden explosion.

  Fowler muttered something about the calibration of his sights, then ordered, “Close the range.”

  “Range closing, Mr. Fowler. Ten. Nine. Eight—damn!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Burnout.” The bright spark had vanished now.

  “All right. Fire two.”

  “Fire two.”

  The second missile was thrown from its tube.

  “Range, Mr. Wallasey?”

  “One kilometer. Opening.”

  “Hold at one kilometer.” Then, to himself: “It’s right in the sights. I can’t miss—”

  “But you’re doing just that,” remarked Grimes.

  “But I can’t be!” Fowler sounded desperate. “With a single cannon, perhaps. But not with a battery of four. And the sights can’t be out.”

  Grimes grunted thoughtfully. Then: “Tell me, Mr. Fowler, has anybody ever tried to use laser in these conditions before?”

  “From a lightjammer, you mean, sir? From a ship traveling at almost the speed of light?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know that this is the first time, sir.”

  “And it’s been an interesting experiment, hasn’t it? Oh, I could be wrong, but I have a sort of vision of photons being dispersed like water from the spray nozzle of a hose. Perhaps if the ship were not accelerating the tight, coherent beam would be maintained . . . Is there a physicist in the house?”

  “You know there’s not,” said Sonya sharply.

  “Unfortunate, but true. So in these conditions our laser is about as effective as a searchlight and we’ve nobody to tell us what to do about it.”

  Fowler was slumped in his seat, a picture of dejection. He was a gunnery officer whose weapons were as lethal as toy pistols. “Cheer up,” Grimes told him. “I’ve a job for you.”

  “But what is there for me to do, sir? As you’ve pointed out already, I’m not a physicist.”

  “But you are a weapons specialist.” Grimes turned to Wallasey. “How many rockets have you left?”

  “Six, sir.”

  “Then I suggest that you and Mr. Fowler, assisted by the engineering staff, convert them into weapons.”

  “What about warheads?”

  Grimes sighed heavily. “You’d never have made a living as a cann
oneer in the early days of artillery, Mr. Fowler. Those old boys used to cast their own cannon and mix their own powder—and they didn’t have the ingredients that we have aboard this ship. Ammonium nitrate, for example—one of the chemical fertilizers we use in the hydroponic tanks. We should be able to cook up something packing far more of a wallop than gunpowder.”

  “You’re convinced that we shall need weapons, John?” put in Sonya.

  “I’m not convinced of anything. But somebody once said—Cromwell, wasn’t it?—‘Trust in God, and keep your powder dry.’ Furthermore, my dear, this vessel is rated as an auxiliary cruiser, a unit of the Rim Worlds Navy. Our lords and masters of the Admiralty have, in their wisdom, equipped her with weaponry. We have discovered that this weaponry is useless. So—we improvise.”

  “I’m surprised,” she said, “that you don’t follow in the footsteps of your piratical ancestor and fit Pamir out with a couple of broadsides of muzzle-loading cannon.”

  A slow smile spread over Grimes’ rugged features. “Why not?” he murmured happily. “Why not?”

  All deep space ships carry a biochemist. In large passenger vessels and warships he is a departmental head, but usually he is one of the officers who has been put through a crash course and looks after the life-support systems in addition to his other duties. Pamir’s biochemist was Sandra Listowel, who was also purser and catering officer. Even a full-time, fully qualified biochemist is not an industrial chemist. Sandra most certainly was not. Nonetheless, she succeeded—losing her eyebrows and a little more than half of her blond hair in the process—in brewing up a batch of what Grimes referred to as sort-of-kind-of amatol. After all, cooking oil is not toluene. Lieutenant Fowler, given the freedom of the engineer’s workshop, was told to produce a half-dozen impact fuses. He was a good worker and not unintelligent but sadly lacking, Grimes concluded, in initiative. He was a good gunnery officer only when he had all the resources of a naval arsenal behind him.