Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  She was leaning closer to him, almost against him. Her robe was falling open in front. She was wearing nothing underneath it. She said, “Aren’t you hot? Why not take your jacket off?”

  “Later, perhaps.” He managed a quite creditable leer, “after all, we’ve all night.”

  “Why waste time?” Her mouth was slightly parted in frank invitation. What the hell? thought Grimes, and accepted. Her body was pliant in his arms, her lips on his warm and moist. But his mind, his cold, calculating mind, was still in full command of the situation. He heard the door open softly, heard feet sliding over the thick carpet. He pushed the girl away from him, from the corner of his eye saw her fall to the floor, a delectable sprawl of exposed, gleaming body and limbs.

  “So,” snarled Jeff Petersen. “So this is what you get up to, Mr. Commodore Dirty Old Man Grimes! What did you promise her, you swine? Promotion and a transfer to a better station?”

  Petersen, Grimes noted, was not a slave to this instincts any more than he, Grimes, had been. Superficially his voice was that of the wronged, jealous lover, but there was an artificial quality in his rage.

  Grimes said equably, “I can explain. . . .”

  “Yes.” Petersen was advancing slowly. “You can explain after I’ve torn off your right arm and beaten your brains out with it.”

  Suddenly the tiny pistol was in Grimes’s right hand. It cracked once, and once only, a sound disproportionate to its dimensions. Petersen halted, staggered, staring stupidly. He swayed on his feet for long seconds and then crashed to the floor, overturning the low table, spilling wine over the sprawling body of the girl. She exploded up from the carpet like a tigress, all teeth and claws. Grimes was hampered by the chair in which he was confined but fought her off somehow. He did not want to use the gun again.

  “You bastard!” She was sobbing. “You ruthless bastard! You killed him. And we were careful not to kill—not even the natives!”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Grimes managed to say at last, after he had imprisoned her hands behind her back, after he had clasped her legs between his own. “I didn’t kill him. This pistol is loaded with anesthetic needles. He’ll be out for twelve hours—no more, no less.”

  “He’s not . . . dead?”

  “Do dead men snore?” asked Grimes practically.

  “I . . . I suppose not.” Her manner changed abruptly. “Well, he asked for it, John, and this time he got it. Poor Jeff.” There was little sympathy in her voice. “So . . .”

  “So what?”

  “So we might as well be hung for sheep as lambs. We might as well have the game as well as the name.”

  He said admiringly, “You’re a cold-blooded bitch, aren’t you?”

  “Just realistic.” She bent her head forward, but it was not to bite. After the kiss Grimes released her. She pulled slowly away from him, walked undulatingly to the door of the bedroom, shedding the torn remnants of her robe as she went.

  Grimes sighed, then got up and followed.

  She said, “That was good. . . .”

  “It was.”

  “Stay there, darling, and I’ll make us some coffee. We don’t want to waste time sleeping.”

  A sleep, thought Grimes, is just what I would like. The sleep of the just—the just after.

  He sprawled at ease on the wide couch, watched her appreciatively as she left him, as she walked gracefully to the door. In the subdued light she was all rosy bronze. In any sort of light she was, as he knew, beautiful. He heard a slight clattering from the kitchenette, imposed upon the still stertorous snores of the hapless Jeff. After a while she came back with a tray on which were a pot and two cups. She poured. “Sugar, darling? Cream?” The steam from the coffee was deliciously fragrant. He reached out for his cup, accidentally? put his fingers on the handle of hers. She gently pushed his hand away. “Mine hasn’t sugar,” she told him.

  “You’re sweet enough as you are,” he said, asking himself, How corny can you get?

  So he took three sips of the coffee that was intended for him, and at once felt the onset of heavy drowsiness, even though there was no warning flavor. He mumbled, “Like a smoke. . . . Would you mind, Lynn? In my pocket . . . on chair . . .”

  She reached out to his clothing, produced the packet of cigarillos and his lighter. She, he already knew, did not smoke herself, which was just as well. She handed him the packet. In his condition, in the dim lighting, he could hardly make out the distinguishing mark. He hoped that he had the right one. Here and now, the special effects of the other one would be more spectacular than useful.

  She lit the cigarillo for him, smiling condescendingly down at him. He inhaled the smoke, retained it for long seconds before blowing it out. He took one more sip of coffee, then let a dribble of the hot fluid fall on to his naked chest. He was careful not to wince. He mumbled indistinctly, then fell back against the pillows. His right hand, with the little smoldering cylinder between his fingers, fell limply onto his belly. He could smell the acridity of burning body hair, felt the sharp beginnings of pain. With a great effort of will he remained in his relaxed posture.

  He heard her mutter, “I should let the old bastard burn, but. . .” Her cool, slim fingers removed the miniature cigar from his hand. He felt very grateful to her.

  He heard her dressing, heard her walk rapidly from the bedroom. He heard, eventually, the front door open and shut. He gave her time to get clear of the house.

  When he got down from the bed he expected to feel sick and dizzy, with drug and antidote still at war within his system. But he did not, although he was conscious of the minor burns. He dressed rapidly, checked his possessions. He was pleased to find that the Minetti was still in his pocket; probably whatever it was in the coffee was supposed to put him under for a longer period than the anesthetic needle-bullet that he had used on Jeff Petersen.

  The street outside the house was deserted. Everybody was indoors, and everybody seemed to be having a party. He grinned. He had had one too. He walked briskly away from the spaceport, in the direction of the beach where he had first met Lynn Davis. The signs that had been affixed to the trunks of trees were a help. By what moonlight there was he could read, PRIVATE. LADIES ONLY. And how would she have managed, he wondered, if the other human ladies on Mellise had shared her views on outdoor nudity?

  The beach was deserted. Backing the narrow strip of sand were the trees, and between their boles was undergrowth, affording effective cover. Grimes settled down to wait. He slipped the magazine from his automatic, exchanged it for the other one; the needle-bullets in this one were no more lethal than the first had been, but they differed from them in one or two respects. He took the remaining marked cigarillo from its packet, put it carefully into his breast pocket. This one had a friction fuse.

  At last she came, walking barefooted over the sand, her shoes in her left hand, a heavy case in the other. She dropped the shoes, put the case down carefully. She opened it, then pulled out a silvery telescopic antenna to its full extent. She squatted down, making even this normally ungainly posture graceful, appeared to be adjusting controls of some sort. There was a high, barely audible whine.

  Something was coming in from the sea. It was not a native. It came scuttling ashore like a huge crab—like a huge, five-legged crab. Then there was another, and another, and another, until two dozen of the beasts stood there waiting. For orders—or programming?

  Grimes walked slowly and deliberately out from the shadows, his Minetti in his right hand. He said quietly, “I’m sorry, Lynn, but the game’s up.”

  She whirled grotesquely like a Russian dancer.

  “You!” she snarled, making it seem like a curse.

  “Yes. Me. If you come quietly and make a full confession I’ll see to it that things go easy for you.”

  “Like hell I will!”

  She turned swiftly back to the transmitter, kicking up a flurry of sand. The whining note abruptly changed to an irregular beat. And then the starfish were coming for him, slow
ly at first, but faster and faster. He swatted out instinctively at the leading one, felt the skin of his hand tear on metal spines. In his other hand was the gun. He fired—almost a full burst. The minute projectiles tore though the transmitter. Some of them, a few of them, were bound to sever connections, to shatter transistors. They did. There was a sputtering shower of blue sparks. The metal monsters froze into immobility.

  But Lynn did not. She had her own gun out, a heavier weapon than Grimes’s own. He felt the wind of her first bullet. And then, with one of the few remaining rounds in his magazine, he shot her.

  He stood there, looking down at her. She was paralyzed, but her eyes could still move, and her lips, and her tongue. She was paralyzed—and when the drug took hold properly she would feel the compulsion to talk.

  She asked bitterly, “How long will this last?”

  “Days, unless I let you have the antidote.”

  She demanded, “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t know. I guessed, and I added two and two to make a quite convincing and logical four. Suppose I tell you—then you can fill in the details.”

  “That’ll be the sunny Friday!”

  “Will it?” Grimes squatted down beside her. “You had things easy here, didn’t you? You and Jeff Petersen. Such a prize bunch of nongs and no-hopers, from the Ambassador and the port captain on down. I shouldn’t have said that; I forgot that this is being recorded.

  “Well, one thing that started to make me suspicious of you, especially, was that lie you told me about the solar flares. I checked up; there are very complete records of all phenomena in this sector of space in my office at Port Forlorn. Then there was the shortage of spares for your equipment—I remembered that the requisitions for electronic bits and pieces have been abnormally heavy ever since you and Mr. Petersen were appointed here. There was that ornamental tank of little starfish—and that so-called mobile almost alongside it. Petersen’s hobby. The construction that, I realized later, looked very much like the tin starfish I saw raiding the pearl beds. There was the behavior of these same tin starfish: the way in which they attacked the bivalves with absolute viciousness but seemed very careful not to hurt the Mellisans.

  “That tied in with the few weeks that Petersen spent on El Dorado.

  “They have watchbirds there, Lynn, and similar semi-robots that function either on the ground or in the water. Animal brains in metal bodies. Absolute faithfulness and obedience to their human masters. As a skilled technician, Petersen would have been able to mingle, to a certain extent, with the gifted amateurs who play around with that sort on El Dorado. He must have picked up some of their techniques, and passed them on to you. You two modified them, probably improved upon them. A starfish hasn’t any brain to speak of, so probably you have the entire animal incorporated into your destructive servants. Probably, too, there’s an electronic brain built in somewhere, that gets its orders by radio and that can be programmed.

  “You were going to recall the local . . . flock, pack, school? What does it matter? . . . tonight, weren’t you? For reprogramming. Some preset course of action that would enable them to deal with the threat of spears with explosive warheads. It wouldn’t do to have tin tentacles littering the ocean floor, would it? When the Mellisans brought in the evidence even the Ambassador would have to do something about it.

  “And, tonight being the night, I had to be got out of the way. Plan A failed, so you switched to Plan B. Correct?”

  “Correct,” she muttered.

  “And for whom were you working?” he asked sharply and suddenly.

  “T-G.” The answer had slipped out before she could stop it.

  “Trans-Galactic Clippers. . . . Why does T-G want Mellise?”

  “A tourist resort.” She was speaking rapidly now, in obvious catharsis. “We were to destroy the economy, the trade with the Confederacy. And then T-G would step in, and pay handsomely for rights and leases.”

  “And you and Mr. Petersen would be suitably rewarded. . . .” He paused. “Tell me, Lynn. . . did you enjoy tonight? Between the disposal of Jeff and the disposal of myself, I mean.”

  “Yes,” she told him.

  “I’m glad you said that. It makes what I’m going to do a lot easier. I was going to do it in any case; I always like to pay my bills.” As he spoke, he pulled the cigarillo from his breast pocket, scratched the friction fuse with his thumbnail. The thing ignited at once, fizzed, ejected a bright blue pyrotechnic star. “I’m letting you go free,” Grimes went on, “both of you. You will have to resign, of course, from the Rim Runners’ service, but as T-G is your real employer that shouldn’t mean any hardship. The records I have made”—he tapped the two buttons of his jacket—“stay with me. To be used, if required. Meanwhile my friends”—he turned to wave to Wunnaara and a dozen other natives who were wading up from the sea—“will dispose of the evidence. The story will be that they, without any outside aid, have succeeded in coping with the starfish plague. You will furnish them, of course, with transmitters like the one you used tonight so that your pets in other parts of the sea can be rounded up.”

  “Haven’t much option, have I?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “There’s just one thing I’d like to say. That question you asked me, about my enjoying myself . . . I’m damned sorry this truth drug of yours made me give the right answer.”

  “I’m not,” said Grimes.

  It was nice while it lasted, thought the Commodore, but I’m really not cut out for these James Bond capers, any more than I would be for the odd antics of any of the other peculiar heroes of twentieth century fiction. He filled and lit his pipe—he preferred it to the little cigars, even to those without the built-in devices—and looked out over the blue sea. The sun was warm on his naked body. He wished that Sonya were with him. But it wouldn’t be long now.

  Part 4

  The Last Dreamer

  JOHN GRIMES was really homeward bound at last.

  On both Tharn and Mellise he had been obliged to leave the ships in which he had taken passage when requested by the rulers of those planets to assist them in the solution of rather complicated problems. He had not minded at all; he had welcomed the prospect of action after too long a time as a desk-borne commodore. But now he was beginning to become a little impatient. Sonya, his wife, would be back soon from her galactic cruise and then the major city of Lorn would be—as far as Grimes was concerned—forlorn in name only. He was pleased that Rim Jaguar would be making a direct run from Mellise to Port Forlorn with no time-expanding calls en route. All being well, he would have a few days in which to put things in order prior to Sonya’s homecoming.

  It promised to be an uneventful voyage—and in deep space uneventful voyages are the rule rather than the exception. Rim Jaguar was one of the more modern units of Rim Runners’ fleet, built for them to modified Epsilon Class design. She was well found, well manned and reasonably happy. Grimes was the only passenger, and as Rim Runners’ Astronautical Superintendent he was given the run of the vessel. He did not abuse the privilege. He would never have dreamed of interfering, and he made suggestions only when asked to do so. Nonetheless he enjoyed the long hours that he spent in the control room, yarning with the officer of the watch, looking out through the wide viewports at the great, distant Galactic Lens, unperturbed by its weird, apparent distortion, the result of the warped space-time through which the ship was falling. He was Earth-born but, like so many spacemen who had made their various ways to this frontier of the dark, he belonged on the Rim, had come to accept that almost empty sky—the sparsely scattered, unreachable island universes, the galaxy itself no more than a dim-glowing ellipsoid—as being altogether right and proper and, somehow, far more natural than worlds in toward the center.

  He was sitting in Rim Jaguar’s control room now, at ease in his acceleration chair, his seamed, pitted face and his still youthful gray eyes almost obscured by the cloud of acrid smoke from his vile, battered pipe. He was listening tolerantly
to the third officer’s long list of grievances; shortly after departure from Mellise he had made it quite plain that he wouldn’t bite and also that anything told to him by the ship’s people would not be taken down and used as evidence against them.

  “And annual leave, sir,” the young man was saying. “I realize that it isn’t always possible to release an officer on the exact date due, but when there’s a delay of two, or even three months . . .”

  “We just haven’t enough personnel, Mr. Sanderson,” Grimes told him, “to ensure a prompt relief. Also, when it comes to appointments I try to avoid putting square pegs into round holes. You know what that can lead to.”

  “The Rim Griffon business, sir?”

  “Yes. Everybody hating everybody, and the ship suffering in consequence. A very sorry affair.”

  “I see your point, sir, but—” An alarm pinged sharply. “Excuse me.”

  It was the Mass Proximity Indicator that had sounded off, the only piece of navigational equipment, apart from the Carlotti Direction Finder, that was functional while the Interstellar Drive was in operation. Grimes swiveled his chair so that he could look at the globular tank that was the screen of the device. Yes, there was something there all right, something that had no business to be there, something that, in the screen, was only a little to one side of the glowing filament that was the extrapolation of the ship’s trajectory.

  Sanderson was speaking briskly into the telephone. “Control Room here, sir. Unidentified object 000 01.5, range 3,000, closing. Bearing opening.”

  Grimes heard Captain Drakenberg’s reply. “I’ll be right up, Mr. Sanderson.”

  Drakenberg, an untidy bear of a man, looked into the screen and grunted. He turned to Grimes. “And what do you make of it, sir?”

  “It’s something. . . .”

  “I could have told you that, Commodore.”

  Grimes felt his prominent ears redden. Drakenberg was a highly competent shipmaster, popular rather than otherwise with his officers, but at times lacking in the social graces.