Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  Swinton, seated in the front row with the other departmental heads, started to laugh. It was not hysterical laughter. Grimes glared at the young officer from under his heavy brows, said icily, “Please share the joke, Commander Swinton.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but it is rather funny. When we had the seance Miss Schmidt, at the console of that most peculiar poor man’s organ, played on the white keys, and on the black keys. But you, at your console, played in the cracks.”

  “What do you mean, Commander Swinton?”

  “That we’re in one of the cracks. We jumped tracks, but when we tried to jump back we didn’t make it. We fell into the crack.”

  “Very neat, Swinton,” admitted Grimes. “A very neat analogy. We’ve fallen into the gulf between Universes. But how are we to climb out?”

  “Perhaps Commander Calhoun could help. . . .” suggested Renfrew. “When we held the seance we got in touch with . . . something.”

  Karen Schmidt cried, “No! No! You’ve not had something utterly alien taking charge of your mind and your body. I have, and I’ll not go through it again!”

  Surprisingly Calhoun also showed a lack of enthusiasm. He said carefully, “That . . . entity was not at all helpful. If we had succeeded in making contact with one of the regular Guides, all would have been well. But we didn’t. And I fear that should we succeed in getting in touch with that same entity we shall merely expose ourselves in further derision.”

  “Well?” asked Grimes, breaking the silence that followed Calhoun’s little speech.

  Once again the Survey Service lieutenant spoke up. “I see it this way, sir. The Mannschenn Drive got us into this mess, perhaps it can get us out of it. Although the fact that my own apparatus was functioning at the time has some bearing on it. But, putting it crudely, it boils down to the fact that the mass of the ship was suddenly reduced while two Time-twisting machines—the Mannschenn Drive and the Carlotti Beacon—were in operation. As you know, experiments have been made with both of them from the Time Travel angle; no doubt you have heard of Fergus and the crazy apparatus he set up on Wenceslaus, the moon of Carinthia. . . . Well, I shall want the services of the Mannschenn Drive engineers and of everybody in the ship with any mathematical training. I think I know what we can do to get out of this hole, but it would be as well to work out the theory, as far as is possible, first.”

  “And what do you have in mind, Mr. Renfrew?” asked Grimes.

  “Just this, sir. A duplication as far as possible of the conditions obtaining when, as your Commander Swinton puts it, we fell into the crack, but with those conditions reversed in one respect.”

  “Which is?”

  “The running of the Mannschenn Drive in reverse.”

  “It can’t be done,” stated Calhoun flatly.

  “It can be done, Commander, although considerable modification will be necessary.”

  “We can give it a go,” said Swinton.

  “Yes,” agreed Grimes. “We can give it a go. But it is essential that nothing be done in practice until the theory has been thoroughly explored. I have no need to tell you that a reversal of temporal precession might well age us all many years in a few seconds. Or there is another possibility. We may be flung into the far future—a future that could be extremely un-hospitable. A future in which the last of the suns of this Galaxy are dying, in which the worlds are dead. Or a future in which one of the non-humanoid races has gained supremacy—the Shaara, for example, or the Darshans. Oh, we maintain diplomatic relations with them, but they don’t like us any more than we like them.”

  “Mr. Renfrew,” said Sonya Verrill, “holds a Master’s degree in Multi-Dimensional Physics.”

  “And I, Commander Verrill, hold a Master Astronaut’s certificate. I’ve seen some of the things that happen when a Mannschenn Drive unit gets out of control, and I’ve had firsthand accounts of similar accidents, and I’ve a healthy respect for the brute.”

  “But it is essential that no time be wasted,” said Renfrew.

  “Why, Lieutenant? What Time is there in this . . . Limbo? Oh, there’s biological time, but as far as air, water and food are concerned the ship is a closed economy. I regret that the bio-chemists failed to plant a cigarette tree in our ‘farm,’ but we still have the facilities for brewing and distilling.”

  “Then, Commodore, at least I have your permission to make a start on the math?”

  “Of course.”

  Renfrew spoke half to himself. “To begin with, all three executive officers are qualified navigators. There is no reason why, with two of them working in their watches below, the third one should not do his share of the calculations.”

  “There is a very good reason why not,” remarked Swinton.

  “Indeed, Commander? I was forgetting that in spite of your status as a Reserve Officer you are really a civilian. Would that be breaking your Award, or something equally absurd?”

  Swinton flushed, but replied quietly. “As long as we are serving in what, legally speaking, is a Rim Worlds warship, governed by the Articles of War, we are not civilians. My point is this—that it is essential that a good lookout be kept at all times, by all means. The officer of the watch must be fully alert, not tangled up in miles of taped calculations spewing from the control room computer.”

  “But we’re in absolute nothingness,” growled Renfrew.

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “But we’re in a crack,” finished Grimes for him, feeling a childish happiness at having beaten his First Lieutenant to the draw. “And all sorts of odd things have the habit of falling into cracks!”

  Chapter 12

  FARAWAY QUEST fell through the nothingness, drifting from nowhere to nowhere, a tiny bubble of light and heat and life lost in an infinite negation. Her electronic radio apparatus was useless. And Mayhew, the Psionic Radio Operator, crouched long hours in his cabin, staring into vacancy and listening, listening. He resorted to drugs to step up the sensitivity of both himself and the dog’s brain that was his organic amplifier, but never the faintest whisper from Outside disturbed the telepath’s mind. And the work went on, the laborious calculations that, even with the ship’s computers fully employed, took days, longer in the programming than in the actual reckoning. There were so many variables, too many variables. There were so many unknown quantities. There were too many occasions when the words Data Insufficient were typed on the long tapes issuing from the slots of the instruments.

  And Grimes, albeit with reluctance, held himself aloof from the activity. He said to Sonya, “Why keep a dog and bark yourself?” But he knew that he, at least, should be free to make decisions, to take action at a second’s notice if needs be. He was grateful that the woman was able to keep him company. She, like himself, could not afford to be tied down. She was in command of the Survey Service personnel and directly subordinate to the Commodore insofar as the overall command of the expedition was concerned. And there were administrative worries too. Tempers were beginning to fray. The latent hostility between members of different services, and between members of different departments, was beginning to manifest itself. And as Grimes knew full well, unless something happened soon there would be other worries.

  They were castaways, just as surely as though they had been the crew and passengers of a ship wrecked on some hitherto undiscovered planet. There were thirty of them: eight Survey Service officers, twenty-two Rim Worlds Naval Reservists. Of the thirty, eight were women. As long as this had been no more than a voyage—not a routine voyage, to be sure, but a voyage nonetheless—sex had not been a problem. As long as all hands were fully occupied with mathematical work and, eventually, the modifications of the Mannschenn Drive, sex would not be a problem. But if every attempt to escape from the crack in Time failed, and if the ship were to drift eternally, a tiny, fertile oasis in a vast desert of nothingness, then something would have to be done about it. Spacemen are not monks, neither are spacewomen nuns.

  “We may have to face the problem, Sonya,” said Grimes
worriedly as the two of them, cautiously sipping bulbs of Dr. Todhunter’s first experimental batch of beer, talked things over.

  She said, “I’ve already been facing it, John. The disproportion of the sexes makes things awkward. Oh, I know that in one or two cases it doesn’t matter—my own Sub-Lieutenant Patsy Kent, for example. But even if she doesn’t draw the line at polyandry, there’s no guarantee that her boyfriends will take kindly to it.”

  He said, “We may be crossing our bridges before we come to them, if we ever do come to them. But that’s one of the things that a commanding officer is paid for. It looks as though we may have to devise some workable system of polyandry. . . .”

  “Include me out,” she said sharply. “By some people’s standards I’ve led a far from moral life, but I have my own standards, and they’re the most important as far as I’m concerned. If the microcosmic civilization aboard this ship degenerates to a Nature red in tooth and claw sort of set-up, then I’m looking after Number One. The best bet will be to become the private, personal popsy of the Old Man of the tribe.”

  He looked at her carefully as she sat there in the armchair, contriving to loll even in conditions of Free Fall. She was wearing uniform shorts and her smooth, tanned legs were very long, and her carelessly buttoned shirt revealed the division between her firm breasts. He looked at her and thought, The Old Man of the tribe . . . But it’s a figure of speech only. I’m not all that old. He said drily, “I suppose that rank should have its privileges. And if I’m the Old Man of my tribe, then you’re the Old Woman of yours.”

  She said, “You flatter me, sir.”

  He said, “In any case, all this talk is rather jumping the gun. Your Mr. Renfrew and my own bright boys may come up with the answer.”

  She said, “They may not—and a girl has to look after herself.”

  He murmured, more to himself than to her, “I wish that there were some other reason for your . . . proposition.”

  She laughed, but tremulously, “And do you really think that there’s not, John?”

  “But these are exceptional circumstances,” he said. “I know your reasons for embarking on this expedition. There were two men in your life, in our own Continuum, and you lost both of them. You’re hoping to find what you lost.”

  “And perhaps I have found it. We’ve been cooped up in this tin coffin together long enough now. I’ve watched you, John, and I’ve seen how you’ve reacted to emergencies, how you’ve kept a tight rein on your people without playing the petty tyrant. They all respect you, John, and so does my own staff. And so do I.”

  He said, a little bitterly, “Respect isn’t enough.”

  “But it helps, especially when respect is accompanied by other feelings. It would help, too, if you were to regard me, once in a while, as a woman, and not as Commander Verrill, Federation Survey Service.”

  He managed a grin. “This is so sudden.”

  She grinned back. “Isn’t it?” And then she was serious again. “All right. I don’t mind admitting that the jam we’re in has brought things to a head. We may never get back again—either to our own Continuum or to any of the more or less parallel ones. We may all die if one of our bright young men does something exceptionally brilliant. But let’s ignore the morbid—or the more morbid—possibility. Just suppose that we do drift for a fair hunk of eternity on our little, self-sustaining desert island. As you know, some of the old gaussjammers have been picked up that have been adrift for centuries, with the descendants of their original crews still living aboard them. . . .

  “Well, we drift. You’re the boss of your tribe, I’m the boss of my smaller tribe. Our getting together would be no more than a political alliance.”

  He said, “How romantic.”

  “We’re rather too old for romance, John.”

  “Like hell we are.”

  He reached out for her, and she did not try to avoid him.

  He reached out for her, and as he kissed her he wondered how long it was since he had felt a woman’s lips—warm, responsive—on his. Too long, he thought. And how long was it since he had felt the rising tide of passion and let the softly thunderous breakers (her heart and his, and the combined thudding loud in his ears) bear him where they would? How long since he had felt the skin—firm, resilient, silken-soft—of a woman, and how long since the heat of his embrace was answered with a greater heat?

  Too long . . .

  “Too long . . .” she was murmuring. “Too long . . .” Then was silent again as his mouth covered hers.

  And outside the cabin was the ship, and outside the ship was the black nothingness. . . .

  But there was warmth in the cabin, and glowing light, a light that flared to almost unendurable brilliance and then faded, but slowly, slowly, to a comforting glow that would never go out, that would flare again, and again. There was warmth in the cabin and a drowsy comfort, and a sense of security that was all wrong in these circumstances—and yet was unanswerably right.

  Grimes recalled the words of the medium—or the words of the entity that had assumed control of her mind and body. “Through the night and through the nothingness you seek and you fall . . .”

  And he and Sonya had sought, and they had found.

  They had sought, and they had found—not that for which they were seeking—or had they? She had been seeking a lover, and he? Adventure? Knowledge?

  But all that was worth knowing, ever, was in his arms. (He knew that this mood would evaporate—and knew that it would return.)

  She whispered something.

  “What was that, darling?”

  She murmured, “Now you’ll have to make an honest woman of me.”

  “Of course,” he replied. “Provided that the Federation taxpayers kick in with a really expensive wedding present.”

  She cast doubts on his legitimacy and bit his ear, quite painfully, and they were engaged in a wrestling match that could only have one possible ending when the alarm bells started to ring.

  This time their curses were in earnest, and Grimes, pulling on his shorts, hurried out of the cabin to the control room, leaving Sonya to follow as soon as she was dressed.

  But it made no sense, he thought, no sense at all—Action Stations in this all pervading nothingness.

  Chapter 13

  GRIMES, whose quarters were immediately abaft the control room, was in that compartment in a matter of seconds. He found there young Larsen, the Third Mate, and with him was Sub-Lieutenant Patsy Kent, of the Survey Service. Larsen flushed as he saw the Commodore and explained hastily, “Miss Kent was using the computer, sir . . .”

  “Never mind that. What is the emergency?”

  The officer gestured towards the globe of darkness that was the screen of the Mass Proximity Indicator. “I . . . I don’t know, sir. But there’s something. Something on our line of advance.”

  Grimes stared into the screen.

  Yes, there was something there. There was the merest spark just inside the surface of the globe, and its range . . . The Commodore flipped the switch of the range indicator, turned the knob that expanded a sphere of a faint light from the center of the screen, read the figure from the dial. He muttered, “Twelve and a half thousand miles . . .” and marveled at the sensitivity of this new, improved model. But the target could be a planetoid, or a planet, or even a dead sun. Somehow he had assumed that it was another ship, but it need not be. Twelve and a half thousand miles, and Faraway Quest’s initial velocity before proceeding under Interstellar Drive had been seven miles a second . . . (But was it still? Where was a yardstick?) Contact in thirty minutes, give or take a couple or three . . . But there should be ample time to compute the velocity of approach . . .

  The others were now in the control room: Swinton, and Jones, the Second Mate, and Renfrew. And Sonya. He could smell the faint, disturbing perfume of her and he asked himself, What am I doing here? He stared at the spark of light, brighter now, and closer, with a certain resentment. Come off it, Grimes, he thought in s
elf-admonishment, it’s years since you were rosy-cheeked, snotty, sulking hard because a call to duty interfered with your very first date. . . .

  “Your orders, sir?” Swinton was asking politely, yet with a touch of urgency.

  “Action Stations was sounded, and Action Stations it is. I take it that the laser projectors and the missile launchers are closed up?”

  “They are, sir.”

  “Good. Mr. Jones, please work out velocity of approach and estimated time of contact. Mr. Renfrew, please use the Carlotti gear for the purpose for which it was originally invented and try to initiate radio communication. Mr. Larsen, get on the blower to Mr. Mayhew and shake him up. Tell him that there’s something ahead—a ship? a planet?—and that I want to know if it has a crew, or a population.” Then, to Swinton, “I shall be going below for a few seconds, Commander. If anything happens you will know where to find me.”

  He dropped down the axial shaft to his day cabin, went through to his lavatory cubicle and hastily tidied himself up. He dressed rapidly, but with care. If this were to be a first contact with some alien race he would, at least, try to look the part that he was playing, that of leader of an expedition of Earthmen into the Unknown. He snared an undergarment of filmy crystal silk that was drifting in the air currents, stowed it hastily in a convenient drawer. It was just possible that he would be entertaining guests shortly.

  Then, back in the control room, he received the reports of his officers. Faraway Quest, they told him, was closing the target at twelve miles a second. (So it, whatever it was, was not hanging motionless in Space. Or was it?) It had now been picked up by the radar, and the indications were that it was a metallic structure, not overly large. Neither electronic nor psionic radio had been able to establish contact.