Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Yes,” admitted Grimes.

  Watson intervened. “It will be a simple matter, Holmes, to sterilize it. Just a jet of steam from a boiling kettle, back in our lodgings . . .”

  “Very well, Watson. Let us proceed with the purification rites forthwith.”

  The two men walked rapidly away, their forms becoming indistinct in the mist. Grimes heard Watson say, “And when I chronicle this case, I shall call it ‘The Adventure of the Missing Meerschaum . . .’ ”

  And what about ‘The Case of the Kidnapped Commodore’? wondered Grimes. But before he could start in pursuit of the great detective and his friend another figure had appeared, blocking his way.

  He, too, was English, most respectably dressed in the style of the early twentieth century, in black jacket and trousers with a gray waistcoat, a stiff white collar and a black necktie. He was inclined to stoutness, but the ladies of the servants’ hall must often have referred to him—but never in his dignified hearing—as “a fine figure of a man.”

  He raised his bowler hat, and Grimes had sufficient presence of mind to bring the edge of his right hand to the peak of his cap to return the salute. He said, his voice deferential but far from servile, “Welcome aboard, sir.” He contrived to enclose the words between quotation marks.

  “Er . . . Thank you.”

  “Perhaps, sir, you will accompany me. I am the only member of my profession in this place, and so it has become my duty—and my pleasure, sir—to welcome new arrivals and to arrange for their accommodation.”

  “That’s very good of you, er . . .”

  “Jeeves, sir. At your service. This way, Commodore—I take it that the braid on your epaulettes still has the same significance as in my time—if you please.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “I took the liberty, sir, of arranging for your accommodation at the Senior Service Club. There are other naval gentlemen in residence. There is Admiral—Lord Hornblower, that is. You must have heard of him. And there is Commander Bond—a very likable young gentleman, but not quite my idea of what a naval officer should be. And . . .” a flicker of distaste crossed Jeeves’s plump face . . . “a certain Lieutenant Commander Queeg, who somehow appointed himself club secretary. He even tried to have Captain Ahab evicted from the premises. How did he put it?” Jeeves’s voice acquired a nasal twang. “ ‘How can I run a taut ship with that damned whaling skipper stomping around the decks on his peg leg? He’ll be putting that pet whale of his in the swimming bath next. I kid you not.’ But the Admiral—he’s president; although old Captain Noah is the senior member he’s really not much interested in anything—asked my advice. So Commander Bond was ordered to act as a one-man press gang—a form of activity for which he seemed well qualified—and, after Captain Ahab had been pressed into the King’s service he was promptly commissioned by Lord Hornblower. As an officer of the Royal Navy he was really more entitled to Club membership—it’s a very British institution—than Commander Queeg . . .”

  “Very ingenious,” commented Grimes.

  “I am always happy to oblige, sir.” Jeeves raised his hat to a tall woman who had appeared out of the mist, a striking brunette, barefooted, wearing a long white nightgown. “Good morning, Your Ladyship.”

  She ignored him but concentrated on Grimes. She glared at him from slightly mad, dark eyes, and all the time her hands were making peculiar wringing motions. “Ye havena brought any decent soap wi’ ye?” she demanded.

  “Soap, madam?”

  “Aye, soap, ye lackwitted Sassenach!”

  “I’m afraid not. If I’d known that I was coming here . . .”

  The woman brushed past him, muttering, “Will nothing wash these white hands?”

  “I have tried to help her, sir,” said Jeeves, “But I can only do so much. After all, I am not a qualified psychiatrist. But many of the guests in this establishment are more odd than otherwise.” He gestured toward a break in the mist, through which Grimes glimpsed lush greenery, vivid flowers, a veritable jungle. And surely that was the coughing roar of a lion, followed by the shrill chattering of disturbed tropical birds . . . “Lord Greystoke lives there, sir, with his wife, the Lady Jane. They have a house in a big tree, and they consort with apes . . . And the people next door, in the next estate—like an English woodland, it is—live in a gamekeeper’s cottage. A Mr. Mellors and a Lady Constance Chatterley. You would think that with their mutual love of nature the two couples would be on very friendly terms. But no. Lady Chatterley said to me once when I mentioned it—it was when I had invited her and Mr. Mellors to my quarters for a real English afternoon tea, and we were discussing the Greystokes—‘The only nature I’m interested in, Jeeves, is human nature.’ ” Again he raised his hat. “Good morning, Colonel.”

  “Who was that?” asked Grimes, staring after the figure in the fringed buckskin shirt, with a revolver slung at each hip.

  “Colonel William Cody, sir. I feel sorry for the gentleman. You see, he isn’t really one of us. As well as living an actual life on the printed page he was also a flesh and blood person. As I understand it, a New York publishing house of his time commissioned a writer to produce a series of stories about the Wild West, and this writer, instead of creating a character, used one who was already in existence in the flesh and blood world, calling him Buffalo Bill. And this, you will understand, makes him, insofar as we are concerned, illegitimate. But he is not the only one. There are the Greek ladies and gentlemen—Helen, and Cassandra, and Odysseus, and Achilles, and Oedipus . . . And others. And, of course, there is the Prince, although His Highness claims that he was cribbed from an earlier work of fiction and not from what the flesh and blood people call real life.”

  “So I’m not real?” demanded Grimes.

  “But you are, sir, otherwise you could never have come here. You are, like the rest of us, a creation, a product of the imagination of some gifted writer.” He stopped suddenly, and Grimes stopped with him. “But, sir, are you an enduring product?” He walked around the Commodore like a tailor inspecting the fit and cut of a new uniform. “This is indeed unfortunate, sir. Already I detect a hint of insubstantiality . . .” He paused, turned to face a newcomer, bowed. “Good morning, Your Highness.”

  The tall, thin, pale man in form-fitting black, with the white lace at throat and cuffs, did not reply to the salutation. Instead he said in a sonorous voice, “To be or not to be, that is the question . . .”

  “Too right,” agreed Grimes.

  The Prince of Denmark looked down at the age-mottled skull that he held in his right hand. “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well . . .” He stared at the Commodore. “But you I do not know.” He turned on his heel, strode away.

  “Good night, sweet Prince,” said Grimes bitterly.

  “Do not mind His Highness,” said Jeeves. “He has a sardonic sense of humor.”

  “Maybe he has. But you must have had other . . . characters here who were not, as you put it, enduring products. What happened to them?”

  “They . . . faded, sir. There was a young man dressed up in old woman’s clothing who called himself ‘Charley’s Aunt.’ He lasted quite a few years, Earth Time, but he’s vanished now. And there have been many gentlemen like yourself, spacemen. None of them lasted long.”

  “But what happens to them? To us?”

  “I cannot say, sir. When the last book in which you appeared has crumbled into dust, when your last reader has gone to wherever the flesh and blood people go, what then?”

  “There must be some way,” muttered Grimes. Then, aloud “All right. I’m scared. I admit it. But my own case is different. All you others came here, I suppose, after the death of your authors. You’re immortality—perhaps—for the men who created you. But I was brought here before my time. I was the victim of a plot cooked up—and what more unlikely fellow conspirators could there ever be!—by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Faustus. And Mephistopheles.”

  Jeeves laughed quietly. “I knew that Mr. Holmes had lost hi
s pipe. I offered to assist him in its recovery; but he, of course, was too proud to accept my humble services. He always likes to do things his own way. And you, sir, I take it, are the innocent victim.”

  “You can say that again. I was shanghaied away from my own universe to this . . . limbo . . .”

  “We prefer, sir, to call it the Hall of Fame.”

  “And I’m not the only victim. Back there I’ve a wife, and a ship . . . I must get back to them.”

  “I appreciate your anxiety, sir, and I admit that there could be need for haste. Time is measured differently here than elsewhere, sir, and already you are becoming quite diaphanous . . .”

  Grimes held out his hand, looked at it. He could see the marble flooring through skin and flesh and blood and bone.

  “Hurry, sir,” urged Jeeves.

  They hurried. Nonetheless, Grimes retained a confused memory of their nightmarish gallop. Men and women stopped to stare at them; and some of them Grimes recognized; and some were hauntingly familiar; and a very few struck no chords in his memory whatsoever. There were occasional rifts in the eddying mists to afford fleeting glimpses of buildings, and, like the clothing of the people, the architecture was of all historical periods. Turreted Camelot, its towers aflutter with gay pennons, they sped by; and beyond its walls was a barren and dusty plain whereon a solitary knight, a scarecrow figure astride a skeletal horse, tilted at windmills. Then there was Sherwood Forest, where the outlaws in Lincoln green paused in their archery practice to cheer on the two runners.

  And for a while there was the shambling monstrosity that lurched along beside them, keeping pace, like a large, unlovely dog trying to make friends. Grimes glanced at this giant, who seemed to have been put together from not quite matching parts pilfered from the graveyard, then looked hastily away, sickened by the sight of him and by the charnel stench that emanated from the crudely humanoid form. Then there was the other monster, the handsome man in nineteenth century dress finery who hovered above them on black bat’s wings. Jeeves, who did not suffer from lack of wind, muttered something uncomplimentary about Eastern European aristocracy.

  At last there loomed before them the house that was their destination. All high gables it was, and oak beams, with narrow, diamond-paned windows. Set high on the stout, iron-bound door was the black, iron knocker—metal cast in the form of an inverted crucifix. Jeeves reached for it, rapped smartly.

  Slowly the door creaked open. An old, graybearded man peered out at them suspiciously. He was dressed in a rusty black robe upon which cabalistic symbols gleamed with a dull luster and a tall, conical, black hat. His blue eyes were so faded as to be almost white.

  He demanded querulously, “Who disturbs my rest?”

  “It is I, Jeeves, Herr Doktor . . .”

  “And this other? This . . . phantasm?”

  “The innocent victim, Dr. Faustus, of the peculiar machinations set in motion by yourself and Mr. Holmes.”

  “What is done cannot be undone.” He glared at Grimes, through Grimes. “And do you cry, ‘Oh, Lord, put back Thy Universe, and give me back my yesterday’?”

  “I have done so,” whispered Grimes. “As who has not?”

  “I cannot help you.” The door was starting to close.

  But Jeeves had inserted a stout, highly polished shoe into the narrowing opening. “Do not forget that I have helped you, Dr. Faustus. Have I not sent patients to you?” He added nastily, “Although Achilles still limps, and Oedipus still chases after older women . . .”

  “My name is Faustus, not Freud,” grumbled the old man.

  “Furthermore,” continued Jeeves, “both you and your partner rely upon me for the supply of the luxuries that were unavailable in your own day and age.”

  The door opened abruptly. “Come in!” snarled the old doctor.

  Inside it was dark, the only light coming from a brazier over which a cauldron bubbled. The room was a large one, but it was so cluttered with a fantastic miscellany of objects that it was hard to move without fouling something. Grimes ducked hastily to avoid striking his head on a stuffed crocodile that hung from the low ceiling, then almost tripped over a beautiful—but woefully inaccurate—celestial globe that stood on the stone floor. He would have tripped had his body been solid, but his shadowy leg passed through the obstacle with no more than the faintest hint of resistance.

  Grumbling, the old man shuffled to a bench littered with the apparatus of alchemy. “Chalk . . .” he muttered, “for the pentagram . . . Where did I put it? And the sulphur candles . . .”

  “There’s no time for that, Doctor. Can’t you see? This gentleman needs help urgently.”

  “But He will not like it if I do not observe protocol.”

  “He won’t like it if he has to go thirsty from now on.”

  “Very well, very well. But I warn you—He will be bad tempered.”

  Dr. Faustus tottered to a low table upon which stood a large, stuffed owl. He lifted the bird, which was hollow, revealing a jarringly anachronistic telephone. He handed the owl to Jeeves, who regarded it with some distaste, then took the handset from its rest, punched a number.

  “Yes,” he croaked into the instrument. “At once.” There was a pause. “Yes, I know that you always insist that the proper procedure be followed, but Mr. Jeeves says that this is urgent.” There was another pause. “You’d better come, unless you want to do without your brandy and cigars . . .”

  This time there was no thunder, no crimson lightning, no clouds of black, sulphurous smoke. But Mephistopheles was standing there, his arms folded over his muscular chest, scowling down at Grimes. “Yes?” he demanded shortly. “Yes, my man?”

  The Commodore, his voice a barely audible whisper, said, “Take me back to where I belong.”

  The Commodore stepped silently forward, peered over the writer’s shoulder. He read, He was standing in a ship’s cabin. The carpeted deck swayed and lurched under his feet . . . Then the carpeted deck lurched really heavily. Grimes put out a hand, to the back of the other man’s chair, to steady himself.

  The writer started violently, exclaimed, “What the hell!” He twisted in his seat, stared at Grimes. His pipe fell from his mouth, clattered to the deck. “No . . .” he said slowly. “No. It can’t be. Go away.”

  “I wish that I could,” Grimes told him.

  “Then why the hell don’t you?”

  “You, sir, should know the answer to that question,” said Grimes, reasonably enough. He looked curiously at the other man, his . . . creator? His . . . parent? But there was no physical resemblance to himself. He, Grimes, was short and stocky, and his ears were his most prominent facial feature. The writer was tall, with normal enough ears, but too much nose.

  “You, sir, should know the answer to that question,” repeated Grimes.

  “I’m sorry, Commodore, but I don’t. Not yet, anyhow.” Then, in a tone of forced cheerfulness, “But this is only a silly dream. It must be.”

  “It’s not, Captain.” The man’s gold-braided epaulettes and the uniform cap, with the scrambled egg on its peak, hanging on a hook just inside the curtained door made this a safe enough guess. “It’s not, Captain. Pinch yourself.”

  “Damn it! That hurt.”

  “Good. Do you mind if I sit down?” Carefully, Grimes eased himself on to the settee that ran along one bulkhead of the day cabin. He feared at first that he was going to sink through the cushion, but it had substance (or he had substance) and supported him, although only just. He shut his eyes for a moment, trying to dispel the faintness that was creeping over him. It was the result of shock, he realized, of shock and of disappointment. He had expected to find himself aboard his own ship, the old, familiar, tried and trusted Faraway Quest, to be welcomed back by his wife. But where was he now? When was he? On Earth, the mother world of humankind? Aboard some sort of surface vessel?

  The writer answered the unspoken questions. He said, “I’ll put you in the picture, Commodore. You’re aboard the good ship Kantara,
which same plies between Melbourne and the port of Macquarie, on the wild west coast of Tasmania. We load pyritic ore in Macquarie for Melbourne, and make the return trip (as we are doing now) in ballast. I doubt very much if you have anything like this trade in your day and age, sir. Macquarie’s one of those places that you can’t get into when you’re outside, and that you can’t get out of when you’re inside. To begin with, the tides are absolutely unpredictable, and it’s safe to work the entrance—it’s called Hell’s Gates, by the way—only at slack water. If you tried to come in against a seven knot ebb you’d be in trouble! And the Inner Bar and the Outer Bar are always silting up, and with strong north westerlies—which we’ve been having—Outer Bar breaks badly. I’ve been riding out a howling westerly gale, keeping well to seaward, as I just don’t like being caught on a lee shore in a small, underpowered and underballasted ship. But the wind’s backed to the south’ard and is moderating, and the glass is rising, and all the weather reports and forecasts look good. So I’m standing in from my last observed position—P.M. star sights—until I’m just inside the extreme range of Cape Sorell light, and then I’ll just stand off and on until daylight, keeping within easy reach of the port. Come the dawn, I’ll have a natter with the harbor master on the radio telephone, and as soon as he’s able to convince me that conditions are favorable I’ll rush in.”