Then, convinced although still not understanding, the Commodore and his wife returned to the ship. With them—slowly, creakingly—walked Serressor, the most ancient of the Wise Ones, and ahead of them their original guide did his best, as before, to clear a way for them through the spiny growths.
They came to the clearing, to the charred patch of ground already speckled with the pale green sprouts of new growth. And already the air ferns had begun to take root upon protuberances from the ship’s shell plating, from turrets and sponsons and antennae; already the vines were crawling up the vaned tripod of the landing gear. Williams had a working party out, men and women who were hacking ill-humoredly at the superfluous and encroaching greenery.
From the corner of his eye the Executive Officer saw the approach of the Commodore, ceased shouting directions to his crew and walked slowly to meet his superior. He said, “The game’s crook, Skipper. What with lianas an’ lithophytes we’ll be lucky to get off the ground. An’ if we do, we’ve had it, like as not.”
“Why, Commander Williams?”
“Mayhew tells me that They have cottoned on to what their psionic amplifiers have been doing. So—no more psionic amplifiers. Period.”
“So we can’t give them false information through their own communications system,” said Sonya.
“You can say that again, Mrs. Grimes.”
Serressor croaked, “So you depend upon misdirection to make your escape from our world.”
“That is the case, Wise One,” Grimes told him.
“We have already arranged that, man Grimes.”
“You have?” Williams looked at the ancient saurian, seeing him for the first time. “You have? Cor stone the bleedin’ lizards, Skipper, what is this?”
“This, Commander Williams,” said Grimes coldly, “is Serressor, Senior Wise One of the Streen. He and his people are as interested in disposing of the mutants as we are. They have told us a way in which it may be done, and Serressor will be coming with us to play his part in the operation.”
“An’ how will you do it?” demanded Williams, addressing the saurian.
Serressor hissed, “Destroy the egg before it is hatched.”
Surprisingly, Williams did not explode into derision. He said quietly, “I’d thought o’ that myself. We could do it—but it’s iffy, iffy. Too bloody iffy. There’re all the stories about what happens when the Drive gets out o’ kilter, but nobody’s ever come back to tell us if they’re true.”
“If we’re going to use the Drive as Serressor suggests, it will have to be fitted with a special governor.”
“That makes sense, Skipper. But where’re we gettin’ this governor from?”
“We have it—or him—right here.”
“Better him than me. There’re better ways o’ dyin’ than bein’ turned inside out.” He shifted his regard to the working party, who had taken the opportunity to relax their efforts. “Back to yer gardenin’, yer bunch o’ drongoes! I want this hull clean as a baby’s bottom!”
“Shouldn’t you have said ‘smooth’, Commander?” asked Sonya sweetly.
Before an argument could start Grimes pulled her up the ramp and into the ship. Following them slowly came the aged and decrepit saurian.
Grimes and his officers were obliged to admit that the Streen had planned well and cunningly. When Corsair was ready for blasting off, a veritable horde of the winged lizards assembled above her, most of them carrying in their talons fragments of metal. Obedient to the command of their masters—it seemed that the Streen were, after all, telepathic, but only insofar as their own kind were concerned—the pterosaurs grouped themselves into a formation resembling a spaceship, flapped off to the eastward. To the radar operators of the blockading squadron it would appear that Corsair had lifted, was navigating slowly and clumsily within the planetary atmosphere.
There were missiles, of course.
Some were intercepted by the suicidal air umbrella above the decoys, some, whose trajectory would take them into uninhabited jungle regions, were allowed to continue their fall to the ground. They had been programmed to seek and to destroy a spaceship, winged lizards, even metal-bearing lizards, they ignored.
Meanwhile, but cautiously, cautiously, with frequent and random shifts of frequency, Corsair’s radio was probing the sky. It seemed that the mutants’ squadron had swallowed the bait. Ship after ship broke from her orbit, recklessly expending her reaction mass so as to be advantageously situated when Corsair, the pseudo-Corsair, emerged from the overcast into space.
And then the way out was as clear as ever it would be. The mutants’ cruisers were hull down, dropping below the round shoulder of the world. Aboard Corsair all hands were at their stations, and the firing chambers were warmed up in readiness.
Grimes took her upstairs himself. With a deliberately dramatic flourish he brought his hand down to the keys, as though he were smacking a ready and willing steed on the rump. It was more like being fired from a gun than a conventional blast-off. Acceleration thrust all hands deep into the padding of their chairs. The Commodore was momentarily worried by a thin, high whistling that seemed to originate inside the ship rather than outside her hull. Then, had it not been for the brutal down-drag on his facial muscles, he would have smiled. He remembered that the Streen, normally coldly unemotional, had always expressed appreciation of a trip in a space-vessel and had enjoyed, especially, violent maneuvers such as the one that he was now carrying out. If Serressor was whistling, then he was happy.
Corsair whipped through the cloud blanket as though it had been no more than a chiffon veil, and harsh sunlight beat through the control room viewports like a physical blow. From the speaker of the transceiver came a shrill gabble of order and counter-order—evidently some alert radar operator had spotted the break-out. But Corsair was out of laser range from the blockading squadron, was almost out of missile range. And by the time the enemy were able to close her, she would be well clear of the Van Allens, would be falling into and through the dark, twisted dimensions created about herself by her own interstellar drive.
It was time to get Serressor along to the Mannschenn Drive room. Grimes handed over to Williams, waited until he saw the Commander’s capable hands resting on his own control panel, and then, slowly and painfully, levered himself out of his seat. He found it almost impossible to stand upright under the crushing pseudo-gravity—but speed had to be maintained, otherwise the ship would be englobed by her enemies. Already Carter was picking off the first missiles with his laser. The Commodore watched two burly Marines struggle to get the aged saurian to his feet. They were big men, and strong, but the task was almost beyond them.
Then, with every shuffling step calling for an almost superhuman effort, Grimes led the way to the interstellar drive compartment. There—and how long had it taken him to make that short journey?—he found Branson, Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer, with his juniors. And there was the ship’s doctor, and the telepath Mayhew. Extending from the complexity of rotors, now still and silent, was a tangle of cables, each one of which terminated in a crocodile clip.
The wall speaker crackled: “Commander to M.D. room. Calling the Commodore.”
“Commodore here, Commander Williams.”
“Clear of Van Allens. No immediate danger from enemy fire.”
“Then carry on, Commander. You know what you have to do.”
“Stand by for free fall. Stand by for course correction.”
The silence, as the rocket drive was cut, fell like a blow. Then, as the whining directional gyroscopes took over, the Doctor, assisted by Branson’s juniors, began to clip the cable ends to various parts of Serressor’s body.
The old saurian hissed gently, “You cannot hurt me, man Doctor. My scales are thick.”
And then it was Mayhew’s turn, and a helmet of metal mesh was fitted over his head. The telepath was pale, frightened-looking. Grimes sympathized with him, and admired him. He, as had every spaceman, heard all the stories of what happened to
those trapped in the field of a malfunctioning Drive—and even though this would be (the Commodore hoped) a controlled malfunction, it would be a malfunction nonetheless. The telepath, when the situation had been explained to him, had volunteered. Grimes hoped that the decoration for which he would recommend him would not be a posthumous one.
The gentle, off-center gravitational effect of centrifugal force abruptly ceased, together with the humming of the directional gyroscope. Then the ship trembled violently and suddenly, and again. A hit? No, decided the Commodore, it was Carter firing a salvo of missiles. But the use of these weapons showed that the enemy must be getting too close for comfort.
Williams’ voice from the bulkhead speaker was loud, with a certain urgency.
“On course for Lorn, Skipper!”
“Mannschenn Drive on remote control,” ordered Grimes. “Serressor will give the word to switch on.”
Already the Doctor and the junior engineers had left the Mannschenn Drive room, making no secret of their eagerness to be out of the compartment before things started to happen. Bronson was making some last, finicking adjustments to his machinery, his heavily bearded face worried.
“Hurry up, Commander,” Grimes snapped.
The engineer grumbled, “I don’t like it. This is an interstellar drive, not a Time Machine. . . .”
Again came the violent trembling, and again, and again.
Bronson finished what he was doing, then reluctantly left his domain. Grimes turned to Serressor, who now looked as though he had become enmeshed in the web of a gigantic spider. He said, “You know the risk. . .”
“I know the risk. If I am . . . everted, it will be a new experience.”
And not a pleasant one, thought the Commodore, looking at Mayhew. The telepath was paler than ever, and his prominent Adam’s apple wobbled as he swallowed hard. And not a pleasant one. And how could this . . . this non-human philosopher, who had never handled a metal tool in his long life, be so sure of the results of this tampering with, to him, utterly alien machinery? Sure, Serressor had read all the books (or his other-self in Grimes’ own continuum had read all the books) on the theory and practice of Mannschenn Drive operation—but book knowledge, far too often, is a poor substitute for working experience.
“Good luck,” said Grimes to the saurian and to Mayhew.
He left the compartment, carefully shut the door behind him.
He heard the whine, the wrong-sounding whine, as the Drive started up.
And then the dream-filled darkness closed about him.
Chapter 20
IT IS SAID that a drowning man relives his life in the seconds before final dissolution.
So it was with Grimes—but he relived his life in reverse, experienced backwards the long history of triumphs and disasters, of true and false loves, of deprivations and shabby compromises, of things and people that it was good to remember, of things and people that it had been better to forget. It was the very unreality of the experience, vivid though it was, that enabled him to shrug it off, that left him, although badly shaken, in full command of his faculties when the throbbing whine of the ever-precessing gyroscopes ceased at last.
The ship had arrived.
But where?
When?
Ahead in Space and Astern in Time—that was the principle of the Mannschenn Drive. But never Full Astern—or, never intentionally Full Astern. Not until now. And what of the governors that had been fitted to the machine, the flesh-and-blood governors—the human telepath and the saurian philosopher, with his intuitive grasp of complexities that had baffled the finest mathematical brains of mankind?
What of the governors? Had they broken under the strain?
And what of himself, Grimes? (And what of Sonya?)
He was still Grimes, still the Commodore, with all his memories (so far as he knew) intact. He was not a beardless youth (his probing hand verified this). He was not an infant. He was not a tiny blob of protoplasm on the alleyway deck.
He opened the door.
Serressor was still there, still entangled in the shining filaments. But his scales gleamed with the luster of youth, his bright eyes were unfilmed. His voice, as he said, “Man Grimes, we were successful!” was still a croak, but no longer a senile croak. “We did it!” confirmed Mayhew, in an oddly high voice.
The telepath was oddly shrunken. The rags that had been his loin clout were in an untidy bundle about his bare feet. No, shrunken was not the word. He was smaller, younger. Much younger.
“That was the hardest part,” he said. “That was the hardest part—to stop the reversal of biological time. Serressor and I were right in the field, so we were affected. But the rest of you shouldn’t be changed. You still have your long, gray beard, Commodore.”
But my beard wasn’t gray, thought Grimes, with the beginning of panic. Neither was it long. He pulled a hair from it, wincing at the sudden pain, examined the evidence, (still dark brown) while Serressor cackled and Mayhew giggled.
“All right,” he growled. “You’ve had your joke. What now?”
“We wait,” Mayhew told him. “We wait, here and now, until Sundowner shows up. Then it’s up to you, sir.”
Sundowner, thought Grimes. Jolly Swagman . . . Waltzing Matilda. Names that belonged to the early history of the Rim Worlds. The battered star tramps of the Sundowner Line that had served the border planets in the days of their early colonization, long before secession from the Federation had been even dreamed of, long before the Rim Worlds government had, itself, become a shipowner with the Rim Runners fleet.
Sundowner. . . She had been (Grimes remembered his history) the first ship to bring a cargo of seed grain to Lorn. And that was when this alternative universe, this continuum in which Grimes and his people were invaders, had run off the historical rails. Sundowner . . . Serressor knew his history too. The Wise One had planned this rendezvous in Space and Time, so that Grimes could do what, in his universe, had been accomplished by plague or traps, or, even, cats or terrier dogs.
“I can hear her. . . .” murmured Mayhew distantly. “She is on time. Her people are worried. They want to get to port before their ship is taken over by the mutants.”
“In this here-and-now,” said Serressor, “she crashed—will crash?—in the mountains. Most of the mutants survived. But go to your control room, man Grimes. And then you will do what you have to do.”
They were all very quiet in the control room, all shaken by the period of temporal disorientation through which they had passed. Grimes went first to Williams, hunched in his co-pilot’s chair. He said softly, “You are ready, Commander?”
“Ready,” answered the Executive Officer tonelessly.
Then the Commodore went to sit beside his wife. She was pale, subdued. She looked at him carefully, and a faint smile curved her lips. She murmured, “You aren’t changed, John. I’m pleased about that. I’ve remembered too much, things that I thought I’d forgotten, and even though it was all backwards it was . . . shattering. I’m pleased to have you to hold on to, and I’m pleased that it is you, and not some puppy. . . .”
“I shouldn’t have minded losing a few years in the wash,” grunted Grimes.
He looked at the officers at their stations—radar, gunnery, electronic radio. He stared out of the ports at the Lorn sun, its brightness dimmed by polarization, at the great, dim-glowing Galactic lens. Here, at the very edge of the Universe, the passage of years, of centuries was not obvious to a casual glance. There were no constellations in the Rim sky that, by their slow distortions, could play the part of clocks.
“Contact,” announced the radar officer softly.
The Commodore looked into his own repeater screen, saw the tiny spark that had appeared in the blackness of the tank.
The radio officer was speaking into his microphone. “Corsair to Sundowner. Corsair to Sundowner. Do you read me? Over.”
The voice that answered was that of a tired man, a man who had been subjected to considerable strain. It was u
nsteady, seemed on the edge of hysteria. “I hear you, whoever you are. What the hell did you say your name was?”
“Corsair. This is Corsair, calling Sundowner. Over.”
“Never heard of you. What sort of name is that, anyhow?” And there was another, fainter voice, saying, “Corsair? Don’t like the sound of it, Captain. Could be a pirate.”
“A pirate? Out here, on the Rim? Don’t be so bloody silly. There just aren’t the pickings to make it worth while.” A pause. “If she is a pirate, she’s welcome to our bloody cargo.”
“Corsair to Sundowner. Corsair to Sundowner. Come in, please. Over.”
“Yes, Corsair. I hear you. What the hell do you want?”
“Permission to board.”
“Permission to board? Who the bloody hell do you think you are?”
“R.W.C.S. Corsair. . .”
“R.W.C.S.?” It was obvious that Sundowner’s Captain was addressing his Mate without bothering either to switch off or to cover his microphone. “What the hell is that, Joe?” “Haven’t got a clue,” came the reply.
Grimes switched in his own microphone. He did not want to alarm Sundowner, did not want to send her scurrying back into the twisted continuum generated by her Mannschenn Drive. He knew that he could blow the unarmed merchantman to a puff of incandescent vapor, and that such an action would have the desired result. But he did not want to play it that way. He was acutely conscious that he was about to commit the crime of genocide—and who could say that the mutated rats were less deserving of life than the humans whom, but for Grimes’ intervention, they would replace?—and did not wish, also, to have the murder of his own kind on his conscience.
“Captain,” he said urgently, “this is Commodore Grimes speaking, of the naval forces of the Rim Worlds Confederacy. It is vitally important mat you allow us to board your ship. We know about the trouble you are having. We wish to help you.”
“You wish to help us?”
“If we wished you ill,” said Grimes patiently, “we could have opened fire on you as soon as you broke through into normal Space-Time.” He paused. “You have a cargo of seed grain. There were rats in the grain. And these rats have been multiplying. Am I correct?”
Upon a Sea of Stars Page 21
