Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  He said, “I’m all right.”

  “You’re not,” she told him. “And there’s no need for you to put on the big, tough space captain act in front of me.”

  “If you can stand it . . .”

  “What if I can, my dear? I haven’t led such a sheltered life as you have. I’ve knocked around in little ships more than I have in big ones, and I’m far more used to going places in a hurry than you.”

  He lowered himself to a bench and she sat beside him. He sipped his coffee, then asked her, “Do you think, then, that we should be in more of a hurry?”

  “Frankly, no. Salvage work is heavy work, and if we maintain more than one and a half Gs over a quite long period we shall all of us be too tired to function properly, even that tough Mate of yours.” She smiled. “I mean the Mate who’s on Articles as such, not the one you’re married to.”

  He chuckled. “But she’s tough, too.”

  “Only when I have to be, my dear.”

  Grimes looked at her, and thought of the old proverb which says that there is many a true word spoken in jest.

  Chapter 4

  THE STRANGE VESSEL was a slowly expanding speck of light in the globular screen of the Mass Proximity Indicator; it was a gradually brightening blip on Mamelute’s radar display that seemed as though it were being drawn in towards the tug by the ever decreasing spiral of the range marker. Clearly it showed up on the instruments, although it was still too far distant for visual sighting, and it was obvious that the extrapolation of trajectory made by Station 3 was an accurate one. It was falling free, neither accelerating nor decelerating, its course determined only by the gravitational forces within the Lorn Star’s planetary system, and left to itself must inevitably fall into the sun. But long before its shell plating began to heat it would be overhauled by the salvage ship and dragged away and clear from its suicide orbit.

  And it was silent. It made no reply to the signals beamed at it from Rim Mamelute’s powerful transmitter. Bennett, the Radio Officer, complained to Grimes, “I’ve tried every frequency known to civilized man, and a few that aren’t. But, so far, no joy.”

  “Keep on trying,” Grimes told him, then went to the cabin that Mayhew, the telepath, shared with his organic amplifier.

  The Psionic Radio Officer was slumped in his chair, staring vacantly at the glass tank in which, immersed in its cloudy nutrient fluid, floated the obscenely naked brain. The Commodore tried to ignore the thing. It made him uneasy. Every time that he saw one of the amplifiers he could not help wondering what it would be like to be, as it were, disembodied, to be deprived of all external stimuli but the stray thoughts of other, more fortunate (or less unfortunate) beings—and those thoughts, as like as not, on an incomprehensible level. What would a man do, were he so used, his brain removed from his skull and employed by some race of superior beings for their own fantastic purpose? Go mad, probably. And did the dogs sacrificed so that Man could communicate with his fellows over the light years ever go mad?

  “Mr. Mayhew,” he said.

  “Sir?” muttered the telepath.

  “As far as electronic radio is concerned, that ship is dead.”

  “Dead?” repeated Mayhew in a thin whisper.

  “Then you think that there’s nobody alive on board her?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I told you before we started that Lassie’s not a well dog. She’s old, Commodore. She’s old, and she dreams most of the time, almost all of the time. She . . . she just ignores me. . .” His voice was louder as he defended his weird pet against the implied imputation that he had made himself. “It’s just that she’s old, and her mind is getting very dim. Just vague dreams and ghostly memories, and the past more real than the present, even so.”

  “What sort of dreams?” asked Grimes, stirred to pity for the naked canine brain in its glass cannister.

  “Hunting dreams, mainly. She was a terrier, you know, before she was . . . conscripted. Hunting dreams. Chasing small animals, like rats. They’re good dreams, except when they turn to nightmares. And then I have to wake her up—but she’s in such a state of terror that she’s no good for anything.”

  “I didn’t think that dogs have nightmares,” remarked Grimes.

  “Oh, but they do, sir, they do. Poor Lassie always has the same one—about an enormous rat that’s just about to kill her. It must be some old memory of her puppy days, when she ran up against such an animal, a big one, bigger than she was. . . .”

  “H’m. And, meanwhile, nothing from the ship.”

  “Nothing at all, sir.”

  “Have you tried transmitting, as well as just maintaining a listening watch?”

  “Of course, sir.” Mayhew’s voice was pained. “During Lassie’s lucid moments I’ve been punching out a strong signal, strong enough even to be picked up by non-telepaths. You must have felt it yourself, sir. Help is on the way. But there’s been no indication of mental acknowledgement.”

  “All we know about the ship, Mayhew, is that she seems to be a derelict. We don’t know who built her. We don’t know who mans her—or manned her.”

  “Anybody who builds a ship, sir, must be able to think.”

  Grimes, remembering some of the unhandier vessels in which he had served in his youth, said, “Not necessarily.”

  Mayhew, not getting the point, insisted, “But they must be able to think. And, in order to think, you must have a brain to think with. And any brain at all emits psionic radiation. Furthermore, sir, such radiation sets up secondary radiation in the inanimate surrounding of the brain. What is the average haunt but a psionic record on the walls of a house in which strong emotions have been let loose? A record that is played back given the right conditions.”

  “H’m. But you say that the derelict is psionically dead, that there’s not even a record left by her builders, or her crew, to be played back to you.”

  “The range is still extreme, sir. And as for this secondary psionic radiation, sir, sometimes it fades rapidly, sometimes it lingers for years. There must be laws governing it, but nobody has yet been able to work them out.”

  “So there could be something . . .”

  “There could be, sir. And there could not.”

  “Just go on trying, Mr. Mayhew.”

  “Of course, sir. But with poor Lassie in her present state I can’t promise anything.”

  Grimes went along to the galley. He seated himself on the bench, accepted the cup of coffee that Sonya poured for him. He said, “It looks, my dear, as though we shall soon be needing an Intelligence Officer as well as a Catering Officer.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  He told her of his conversation with Mayhew. He said, “I’d hoped that he’d be able to find us a few short cuts—but his crystal ball doesn’t seem to be functioning very well these days . . . If you could call that poodle’s brain in aspic a crystal ball.”

  “He’s told me all about it,” she said. “He’s told everybody in the ship all about it. But once we get the derelict in tow, and opened up, we shall soon be able to find out what makes her tick. Or made her tick.”

  “I’m not so sure, Sonya. The way in which she suddenly appeared from nowhere, not even a trace on Station 3’s M.P.I. beforehand, makes me think that she could be very, very alien.”

  “The Survey Service is used to dealing with aliens,” she told him. “The Intelligence Branch especially so.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “And now, as I’m still only the humble galley slave, can I presume to ask my lord and master the E.T.C.?”

  “Unless something untoward fouls things up, E.T.C. should be in exactly five Lorn Standard Days from now.”

  “And then it will be Boarders Away!” she said, obviously relishing the prospect.

  “Boarders Away!” he agreed. “And I, for one, shall be glad to get out of this spaceborne sardine can.”

  “Frankly,” she said, “I shall be even gladder to get out of this bloody galley so that I can do the real wor
k for which I was trained.”

  Chapter 5

  SLOWLY THE RANGE CLOSED, until the derelict was visible as a tiny, bright star a few degrees to one side of the Lorn Sun. The range closed, and Rim Mamelute’s powerful telescope was brought into play. It showed very little; the stranger ship appeared to be an almost featureless spindle, the surface of its hull unbroken by vanes, sponsons or antennae. And still, now that the distance could be measured in scant tens of miles, the alien construction was silent, making no reply to the signals directed at it by both the salvage tug’s communications officers.

  Grimes sat in the little control room, letting Williams handle the ship. The Mate crouched in his chair, intent upon his tell-tale instruments, nudging the tug closer and closer to the free-falling ship with carefully timed rocket blasts, matching velocities with the skill that comes only from long practice. He looked up briefly from his console to speak to Grimes. “She’s hot, Skipper. Bloody hot.”

  “We’ve radiation armor,” said Grimes. The words were question rather than statement.

  “O’ course. The Mamelute’s ready for anything. Remember the Rim Eland disaster? Her pile went critical. We brought her in. I boarded her when we took her in tow, just in case there was anybody still living. There wasn’t. It was like bein’ inside a radioactive electric fryin’ pan . . .”

  A charming simile . . . thought Grimes.

  He used the big, mounted binoculars to study the derelict. They showed him little more than had the telescope at longer range. So she was hot, radioactive. It seemed that the atomic blast that had initiated the radiation had come from outside, not inside. There were, after all, protuberances upon that hull, but they had been melted and then re-hardened, like guttering candle wax. There were the remains of what must have been vaned landing gear. There was the stump of what could have been, once, a mast of some kind, similar to the retractable masts of the spaceships with which Grimes was familiar, the supports for Deep Space radio antennae and radar scanners.

  “Mr. Williams,” he ordered, “we’ll make our approach from the other side of the derelict.”

  “You’re the boss, Skipper.”

  Brief accelerations crushed Grimes down into the padding of his chair, centrifugal force, as Mamelute’s powerful gyroscopes turned her about her short axis, made him giddy. Almost he regretted having embarked upon this chase in person. He was not used to small ships, to the violence of their motions. He heard, from somewhere below, a crash of kitchenware. He hoped that Sonya had not been hurt.

  She had not been—not physically, at any rate. Somehow, even though the tug was falling free once more, she contrived to stamp into the control room. She was pale with temper, and the smear of some rich, brown sauce on her right cheek accentuated her pallor. She glared at her husband and demanded, “What the hell’s going on? Can’t you give us some warning before indulging in a bout of astrobatics?”

  Williams chuckled to himself and made some remark about the unwisdom of amateurs shipping out in space tugs. She turned on him, then, and said that she had served in tugs owned by the Federation Survey Service, and that they had been, like all Federation star ships, taut ships, and that any officer who failed to warn all departments of impending maneuvers would soon find himself busted down to Spaceman, Third Class.

  Before the Mate could make an angry reply Grimes intervened. He said smoothly, “It was my fault, Sonya. But I was so interested in the derelict that I forgot to renew the alarm. After all, it was sounded as we began our approach. . . .”

  “I know that. But I was prepared for an approach, not this tumbling all over the sky like a drunken bat.”

  “Once again, I’m sorry. But now you’re here, grab yourself the spare chair and sit down. This is the situation. All the evidence indicates that there’s been some sort of atomic explosion. That ship is hot. But I think that the other side of the hull will be relatively undamaged.”

  “It is,” grunted Williams.

  The three of them stared out of the viewports. The shell plating, seen from this angle, was dull, not bright, pitted with the tiny pores that were evidence of frequent passages through swarms of micrometeorites. At the stern, one wide vane stood out sharp and clear in the glare of Mamelute’s searchlights. Forward, the armor screens over the control room ports were obviously capable of being retracted, were not fused to the hull. There were sponsons from which projected the muzzles of weapons—they could have been cannon or laser projectors, but what little was visible was utterly unfamiliar. There was a telescopic mast, a-top which was a huge, fragile-seeming radar scanner, motionless.

  And just abaft the sharp stem there was the name.

  No, thought Grimes, studying the derelict through the binoculars, two names.

  It was the huge, sprawling letters, crude daubs of black paint, that he read first. Freedom, they spelled. Then there were the other symbols, gold-embossed, half obscured by the dark pigment. There was something wrong about them, a subtle disproportion, an oddness of spacing. But they made sense—after a while. They did not belong to the alphabet with which Grimes was familiar, but they must have been derived from it. There was the triangular “D”, the “I” that was a fat, upright oblong, the serpentine “S” . . .

  “Distriyir. . .” muttered Grimes. “Destroyer?” He passed the glasses, on their universal mount, to Sonya. “What do you make of this? What branch of the human race prints like that? What people have simplified their alphabet by getting rid of the letter ‘E’?”

  She adjusted the focus to suit her own vision. She said at last, “That painted-on-name is the work of human hands all right. But the other . . . I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before. There’s a certain lack of logicality—human logicality, that is. Oh, that stylized ‘D’ is logical enough. But the substitution of ‘I’ for ‘E’—if it is a substitution . . . And then, as far as we are concerned, a destroyer is a class of ship—not a ship’s name . . .”

  “I seem to recall,” Grimes told her, “that there was once a warship called Dreadnought—and the dreadnoughts have been a class of warship ever since the first ironclads were launched on Earth’s seas.”

  “All right, Mr. amateur naval historian—but have you ever, in the course of your very wide reading on your favorite subject, come across mention of a ship called Destroyer—and spelled without a single ‘E’? There are non-humans mixed up in this somewhere—and highly intelligent non-humans at that.”

  “And humans,” said Grimes.

  “But we’ll never find out anything just by talking about it,” grumbled the Mate. “An’ the sooner we take this bitch in tow, the shorter the long drag back to Port Forlorn. I’d make fast alongside—but even here, in the blast shadow, that hull is too damn’ hot. It’ll have to be tow wires from the outriggers—an’ keep our fingers crossed that they don’t get cut by our exhaust . . .”

  “Take her in tow, then board,” said Sonya.

  “O’ course. First things first. There’ll be nobody alive inside that radioactive can . . .”

  The intercommunication telephone was buzzing furiously. Grimes picked up the instrument. “Commodore here.”

  “Mayhew, sir.” The telepath’s voice was oddly muffled. He sounded as though he had been crying. “It’s Lassie, sir. She’s dead. . . .”

  A happy release, thought Grimes. But what am I supposed to do about it?

  “One of her nightmares, sir,” Mayhew babbled on. “I was inside her mind, and I tried to awaken her. But I couldn’t. There was this huge rat—and there were the sharp yellow teeth of it, and the stink of it. . . . It was so . . . it was so real, so vivid. And it was the fear that killed her—I could feel her fear, and it was almost too much for me. . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Mayhew,” said Grimes inadequately. “I’m sorry. I will see you later. But we are just about to take the derelict in tow, and we are busy.”

  “I . . . I understand, sir.”

  And then Grimes relaxed into the padding of his chair
, watching, not without envy, as Williams jockeyed the salvage tug into position ahead of the derelict, then carefully matched velocity. The outriggers were extruded, and then there was the slightest shock as the little missiles, each with a powerful magnetic grapnel as its warhead, were fired.

  Contact was made, and then Williams, working with the utmost care, eased Rim Mamelute around in a great arc, never putting too much strain on the towing gear, always keeping the wires clear of the tug’s incandescent exhaust. It was pretty to watch.

  Even so, when at last it was over, when at last the Lorn Star was almost directly astern, he could not resist the temptation of asking, “But why all this expenditure of reaction mass and time to ensure a bows-first tow, Mr. Williams?”

  “S.O.P., Skipper. It’s more convenient if the people in the towed ship can see where they’re going.”

  “But it doesn’t look as though there are any people. Not live ones, that is.”

  “But we could be putting a prize crew aboard her, Skipper.”

  Grimes thought about saying something about the radio-activity, then decided not to bother.

  “You just can’t win, John,” Sonya told him.

  Chapter 6

  IN THEORY one can perform heavy work while clad in radiation armor. One can do so in practice—provided that one has been through a rigorous course of training. Pendeen, Second Engineer of Rim Mamelute, had been so trained. So, of course, had been Mr. Williams—but Grimes had insisted that the Mate stay aboard the tug while he, with Sonya and the engineer, effected an entry into the hull of the derelict. Soon, while the boarding party was making its exploratory walk over the stranger ship’s shell plating, he had been obliged to order Williams to cut the drive; sufficient velocity had been built up so that both vessels were now in free fall away from the sun.