Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Range closing,” Denby was saying, over and over again. “Range closing. Range closing.”

  “Reaction drive!” ordered Grimes. “Get us out of here!” He could visualize the end of that long spar driving through Pamir’s shell plating and piercing the vacuum chamber in which the sphere of antimatter was suspended in the strong magnetic fields. It was not a nice thing to think about.

  Listowel made no reply. The captain was slumped in his seat, unmoving.

  Sandra was shaking her husband violently. “Ralph! Wake up! Wake up!” Then, snarling wordlessly, she pulled him from his chair, letting him drift to the deck. Before she was properly seated in his place her long fingers were on the controls. She snarled again, then snapped, “Something’s wrong, Commodore!”

  “Starboard broadside,” ordered Grimes into the intercom microphone. “Fire!” That should push them away and clear from their dying attacker.

  “The guns are off their mounts,” came a hysterical voice. “We have casualties—”

  Denby was still calling out range figures—in meters now—but it was not necessary. The shattered, burning raider was too close and was getting closer.

  “Roll her, Sandra!” shouted Grimes.

  “But our east mast is some protection—”

  “It’s not. Roll her, damn you!”

  “Roll her,” repeated Sonya. “He knows what he’s doing.” She added quietly, “I hope.”

  The gyroscope controls and the gyroscopes themselves were still working. There was the initial rumble as the flywheels started to turn, then the low hum. The drifting wreck slid slowly from view, dipping below the starboard viewport rims—but if Denby’s radar readings were to be credited disaster was now only millimeters distant.

  Grimes ordered, “Rotate through ninety degrees. Let me know when you’re on eighty-five.”

  The next few seconds could have been twice that many years.

  “Eighty-five,” stated Sandra at last.

  “Port battery—fire.”

  Again Pamir was slammed by that giant hand and was swatted clear of the dying raider’s murderous sidelong advance. The tracks of the two ships diverged—but not fast enough, thought Grimes. He said urgently, “I don’t care how you do it, Sandra, but get some of our sails trimmed to catch the light from Llanith. We must get out of here, and fast!”

  “But we should board,” said Sonya. “There may be survivors. There will be evidence. The fire will burn itself out once the atmosphere in the ship is exhausted.”

  “Not that sort of fire. Do something, Sandra.”

  Using the gyroscopes she turned the ship, at last getting the sails of the one surviving mast trimmed to the photon gale. Astern the wreck dwindled in a second to the merest point of light—and then, briefly, became a speck of such brilliance as to sear the retinas of those who watched. It had happened as Grimes had been sure that it must happen. The casing of the sphere of antimatter had been warped by the heat of the fire—or, perhaps, had been buckled by an explosion. Contact with normal matter had been inevitable.

  The pirate was gone, every atom of her structure canceled out.

  The pirate was gone and Pamir was drifting, crippled. It was the time for the licking of wounds, the assessment of damage before, hopefully, limping into port under jury rig. Men aboard Pamir had been injured, perhaps killed. It had been an expensive victory. And Grimes knew that it would not have been so expensive had he remembered to fire the guns of his broadside in succession instead of all at once.

  He realized that Fowler, the gunnery officer, was saying something to him. “It was brilliant, sir, brilliant, the way you fought the action—”

  He replied slowly, “We won. But—”

  “But?” The young man’s face wore a puzzled expression.

  “But you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” contributed Sonya rather too brightly.

  “But you should be able to make one without blowing up the kitchen,” was all that Grimes was able to manage in way of reply.

  Rim Change

  I’M A SORT OF EXCEPTION that proves the rule.

  And that, oddly enough, is my name—George Rule, currently master in the employ of the Dog Star Line, one of the few independent shipping companies in the Federation able to compete successfully with the state-owned Interstellar Transport Commission. When I was much younger I used to be called, rather to my embarrassment, Golden Rule. That was when my hair, which I tend to wear long, and my beard were brightly blond. But, given time, everything fades, and my nickname has faded away with my original colouring. In uniform I’m just another tramp master—and the Odd Gods of the Galaxy know that there are plenty of such in the Universe!—and out of uniform I could be the man come to fix the robochef. It’s odd—or is it?—how those engaged in that particular branch of robotics tend to run to fat . . .

  But this exception business . . .

  The space services of the Rim Confederacy are literally crawling with officers who blotted their copy books in the major shipping lines of the Federation and various autonomous kingdoms, republics and whatever, and even with a few who left certain navies under big black clouds. The famous Commodore Grimes, for example, the Rim Worlds’ favourite son, isn’t a Rim Worlder by birth; he was emptied out of the Federation Survey Service after the Discovery mutiny. (It was Grimes, by the way, who got me emptied out of Rim Runners, the Confederacy’s state shipping line, many years ago.)

  I am a Rim Worlder by birth. I’m one of the very few spacemen who was born an Outsider and who now serves in the Insiders’ ships, the very opposite to all those Insiders who, for reasons best known to themselves, came out to the Rim. I was one of the first cadets to pass through the Confederacy’s space training college at Port Last, on Ultimo. I started my space-going career as Fourth mate of the old Rim Mammoth and then, after I gained my Second Mate’s Certificate, was appointed third mate of Rim Tiger. Captain—as he was then—Grimes was master of her. He was a real martinet in those days.

  Now that I’m master myself I can appreciate his reasons for wanting to run a taut ship. The affair aboard Discovery must still have been vivid in his mind and probably he was thinking that if he’d been less easy going the mutiny would never have happened. I didn’t take kindly to the sort of discipline that he tried to impose. Rim Mammoth had been a very happy ship; the Tiger was far from it. Looking back on it all, any third mate of mine who tried to get away with the things that I tried to get away with would get a rough passage and a short one.

  Anyhow—it was after I’d scrambled aboard at Port Fortinbras, very much the worse for wear, about two microseconds prior to lift-off—I was called into the Sacred Presence. Before he could start on me I told him what he could do with his Survey Service ideas. Then I told him what he could do with his ship. I told him that I wasn’t at all surprised that Discovery’s officers had done what they did . . . And so on.

  I don’t blush easily, but the memory of that scene induces a hot flush from my scalp to the tips of my toes. I was lucky, bloody lucky, not to have been pushed out through an airlock without a spacesuit. (At the time we were, of course, well on our way to Port Forlorn.) Oh, I was escorted to the airlock after our landing on Lorn, taken to the shipping office and paid off, and told that it was extremely unlikely that Rim Runners would ever require my services again.

  But I was lucky:

  I got a job.

  I got a job that took me away from the Rim.

  I got a job that exercised a certain civilizing influence (badly needed, I admit now) on me.

  You may remember when Trans-Galactic Clippers used to include the Rim Worlds in the itinerary of their Universal Tours. One of their big ships—Sobraon—was in, and her fourth officer, who had incurred multiple injuries in a rented air car crash, was in hospital. The post was mine, I was told, until such time as a regular TG man was available to relieve me.

  I took it, of course, hastily affixing my autograph to Sobraon’s Articles of Agreement before
Captain Grimes could breathe a few unkind words into the ear of Captain Servetty, who was to be my new boss. And it was with great relief that I watched, from the Clipper’s control room, the lights of Port Forlorn fading below us as we lifted. I decided, then, to make the most of this second chance. I decided, too, that I’d not return to the Rim Worlds, ever.

  There was nothing to hold me; I was an orphan, and had never gotten on with the various aunts and uncles on either side of my family. I’d had a girl, but she’d ditched me, some time back, to marry a wind turbine maintenance engineer. This broken romance had been one of the reasons—the main reason, perhaps—why I’d been such a pain in the neck to old Grimes. As the Universal Tour proceeded, everything that I saw—the glamorous worlds such as Caribbea, Electra and all the rest of them—stiffened my resolution. The Rim Worlds were so dreary, and the planets of the Shakespearean Sector were little better.

  This was before Grimes, commanding Faraway Quest, had discovered the worlds of what is now known as the Eastern Circuit—Tharn, Mellise, Grollor and Stree. All that we had then were Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo and Thule—and, of course, Kinsolving’s Planet and Eblis. But nobody ever went near either of those.

  Sobraon knocked quite a few corners off me. There’s a saying that you often hear, especially in star tramps, that Trans-Galactic Clippers is an outfit where accent counts for more than efficiency. Don’t you believe it. Those boys may convey the impression of taking a cruise in daddy’s yacht, but they’re superb spacemen. They play hard at times—but they work hard.

  I played with them—and I like to think that I pulled my weight when it was time to work. I was genuinely sorry when I paid off at Canis Major—Dogtown to we Sirians—the capital city of the Sirian Sector. There was a new fourth mate, a Company boy, waiting for us there, so Captain Servetty had to take him on. He told me, though, that if I cared to fill in a TG Clippers application form he’d see to it that it received special consideration. I thanked him, of course, and I thought about it. I didn’t have to think very hard about the repatriation to the Rim Worlds to which I was entitled. I took the money in lieu and decided to treat myself to a holiday.

  It was while I was enjoying myself at New Capri that I met Jane. She too was on holiday—on annual leave, as a matter of fact. She was at that time a purser with the Dog Star Line. It was largely because of her that I became a kennelman myself; I became a naturalized Sirian citizen shortly after we married. She gave up spacefaring when our first child was on the stocks.

  Oh well, it’s nice having your wife aboard ship with you—but it’s also nice to have a home, complete with wife and children, to come back to. You can’t have it both ways. And most of the time I got ships that never wandered far from Dogtown, and was contented enough as I rose slowly—but not too slowly—through the ranks from third to second, from second to chief and, finally, from chief officer to master.

  But now, after all these years, I was coming back to the Rim.

  The Dog Star Line ships spend most of the time sniffing around their own backyard, but now and again they stray. Basset had strayed, following the scent of commerce clear across the Galaxy. At home, on Canis Major, I’d loaded a big consignment of brassards and self-adjusting sun hats for Arcadia. I must find out some time how those brassards sold. They were made with waterproof pockets for smoking requirements, small change, folding money &c &c. The Arcadians, who practice naturism all the year round, have always seemed to manage quite well with a simple bag slung over one shoulder.

  At Ursa Major (the Arcadians have a childish love of puns) I filled up with the so-called Apples of Eden, a local fruit esteemed on quite a few worlds. These were consigned to New Maine. And what would one load in Port Penobscot? Need you ask? Smoked and pickled fish, of course, far less fragrant than what had been discharged. This shipment was for Rob Roy, one of the planets of the Empire of Waverley.

  The cargo we loaded on Rob Roy was no surprise either. The Jacobeans, as they call themselves, maintain that their whisky is superior to the genuine article distilled in Scotland. It may be, it may not be; whisky is not my tipple. But the freight charges from the Empire of Waverley to the Rim Confederacy are far less than those from Earth to the Rim.

  So Basset had followed the scent of profit clear from the Dog Star to the Rim, and now it looked as though the trail was petering out. On the other legs of the voyage, Head Office, by means of Carlotti radio, had kept me well informed as to what my future movements would be. On my run from Rob Roy to Lorn they had remained silent. And Rim Runners, my agents on Lorn, had replied to my ETA with only a curt acknowledgement. I didn’t like it. None of us liked it: we’d all been away from home too long.

  Probably I liked it less than my officers. I knew the Rim Worlds; I could think of far nicer planets to sit around awaiting orders.

  We found the Lorn sun without any trouble—not that we should have had any trouble finding that dim luminary. Even if we hadn’t been equipped with the Carlotti Direction Finder, and even if the Rim Worlds hadn’t been able to boast the usual layout of Carlotti Beacons, we’d have had no trouble. There’s the Galactic Lens, you see, and it doesn’t thin out gradually towards its edges; the stars in the spiral arms are quite closely packed. (I use the word “closely” in a relative way, of course. If you had to walk a dozen or so light years you wouldn’t think it was all that close.) And then there’s that almost absolute nothingness between the galaxies. Almost absolute . . .

  There’s the occasional hydrogen atom, of course, and a few small star clusters doing their best to convey the impression that they don’t really belong to the galactic family. The Rim Confederacy is one such cluster. There are the Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo, Thule, Eblis and Kinsolving suns. To the Galactic East there’s a smaller cluster, with Tharn, Grollor, Mellise and Stree. To the west there’s a sizeable antimatter aggregation, with a dozen suns. So, as long as you’re headed in roughly the right direction when you break out of the Lens, you have no difficulty identifying the cluster you want.

  You have the Galactic Lens astern of you. When the space-time-twisting Mannschenn Drive is running it looks like an enormous, slowly squirming, luminescent amoeba. Ahead there’s an uncanny blackness, and the sparse, glimmering, writhing nebulosities that are the Rim suns seem to make that blackness even blacker, even emptier. And that emptiness still looks too damned empty even when the interstellar drive’s shut down and the ship’s back in the normal Continuum.

  I could tell that my officers were scared by the weird scenery—or lack of it. I was feeling a bit uneasy myself; it was so many years since I’d been out here. But we got used to it after a while—as much as one can get used to it—and here we were at last, dropping down through the upper atmosphere of Lorn. The landing was scheduled for 0900 hours, Port Forlorn Local Time. We couldn’t see anything of Port Forlorn yet, although we had clearance from Aero-Space Control to enter and were homing on the radio beacon. Beneath us was the almost inevitable overcast, like a vast snowfield in the sunlight, and under the cloud ceiling there would be, I knew, the usual half-gale (if not something stronger) probably accompanied by rain, snow, hail or sleet. Or all four.

  “How does it feel to be coming home, sir?” asked my chief officer sarcastically.

  “My home’s in Canis Major!” I snapped. Then I managed a grin. “If you’ll forgive my being corny, home is where the heart is.”

  “You can say that again, Captain,” he concurred. (He was recently married and the novelty hadn’t worn off yet.)

  I took a last, routine look around the control room, just to make sure that everybody was where he was supposed to be and that everything was working. Soon I’d have to give all my attention to the inertial drive and attitude controls and to the periscope screen; inevitably I’d have to do some fancy juggling with lateral and downthrusts. Rugged, chunky Bindle, the chief officer, was strapped in the co-pilot’s chair, ready to take over at once if I suffered a sudden heart attack or went mad or something. Loran, the second, was hunc
hed over the bank of navigational instruments, his long, skinny frame all awkward angles and the usual greasy black cowlick obscuring one eye. His job was to call out to me the various instrument readings if, for some reason, such data failed to appear on the periscope screen. Young Taylor, the third, an extraordinarily ordinary-looking youth, was manning the various telephones, including the NST transceiver with which we were in communication with Aero-Space Control. In most Dog Star Line’s vessels this was the radio officer’s job, but I had found that our Sparks, Elizabeth Brown (Betty Boops, we called her) was far too great a distraction. Even when she was wearing a thickly opaque uniform blouse (she preferred ones which were not), her abundant charms were all too obvious.

  We fell steadily, the inertial drive grumbling away in its odd, broken rhythm, healthily enough. We dropped into the upper cloud levels, and at first pearly gray mist alternated with clear air outside our viewports. And then, for what seemed like a long time, there was only dark, formless vapour. The ship shuddered suddenly and violently as turbulence took her in its grip. The changing code of the blips from the radio beacon told me that I was off course, but it was early yet to start bothering about corrections.

  We broke through the cloud ceiling.

  Looking into the screen, stepping up the magnification, I could see that there had been few changes during my long absence. The landscape, as always, was gray rather than green, almost featureless, although on the horizon the black, jagged peaks of the Forlorn Range loomed ominously. There were the wide fields in which were grown such unglamorous crops as beans and potatoes. There was the city, which had grown only a little, with the wind turbine towers and the factory chimneys in the industrial suburbs, each smokestack with its streamer of dirty white and yellow vapour. Yes, it was blowing down there all right.