Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  But—such was the impression that his dream had made upon him—he had to be sure. (All cats are gray in the dark.) Without too much fumbling he found the stud of the light switch on his side of the bed. His reading lamp came on. Its light was soft, subdued—but it was enough to wake Sonya.

  She looked up at him irritably, her lean face framed by the auburn hair that somehow retained its neatness, its sleekness, even after sleep. She demanded sharply, “What is it, John?”

  He said, “I’m sorry. Sorry I woke you, that is. But I had to be sure.”

  Her face and voice immediately softened. “That dream of yours again?”

  “Yes. The worst part of it is knowing that you are somewhere, somewhen, but that I shall never meet you.”

  “But you did.” She laughed with him, not at him. “And that’s your bad luck.”

  “My good luck,” he corrected. “Our good luck.”

  “I suppose that we could have done worse . . .” he admitted.

  Grimes was awakened again by the soft chiming of the alarm. From his side of the bed he could reach the service hatch in the bulkhead. He opened it, revealing the tray with its silver coffee service.

  “The usual?” he asked Sonya, who was making a lazy attempt to sit up in bed.

  “Yes, John. You should know by this time.”

  Grimes poured a cup for his wife—black, unsweetened—then one for himself. He liked sugar, rather too much of it, and cream.

  “I shall be rather sorry when this voyage is over,” said Sonya. “Jimmy is doing us well. We shouldn’t be pampered like this in an Alpha Class liner.”

  “After all, I am a Commodore,” said Grimes smugly.

  “Not in the Survey Service, you aren’t,” Sonya told him.

  In that dream, that recurring nightmare, Grimes was still an officer in the Federation’s Survey Service. But he had never gotten past Commander, and never would. He was passing his days, and would end his days, as commanding officer of an unimportant base on a world that somebody had once described as a planetwide lower middle class suburb.

  “Perhaps not,” Grimes admitted, “but I pile on enough Gees to be accorded V.I.P. treatment aboard a Survey Service ship.”

  “You do? I was under the impression that it was because of me that Jimmy let us have the V.I.P. suite.”

  “Not you. You’re only a mere Commander, and on the Reserve list at that.”

  “Don’t be so bloody rank conscious!”

  She took a swipe at him with her pillow. Grimes cursed as hot coffee splashed onto his bare chest. Then, “I don’t know what your precious Jimmy will think when he sees the mess on the sheets.”

  “He’ll not see it—and his laundrobot won’t worry about it. Pour yourself some more coffee, and I’ll use the bathroom while you’re drinking it.” Then, as she slid out of the bed, “And go easy on the sugar. You’re getting a paunch . . .”

  Grimes remembered the fat and slovenly Commander of Zetland Base.

  Commander James Farrell, the Captain of Star Pioneer, prided himself on running a taut ship. Attendance at every meal was mandatory for his officers. As he and Sonya took their seats at the captain’s table, Grimes wondered how Farrell would cope with the reluctance of middle watch keepers aboard merchant vessels to appear at breakfast.

  All of Star Pioneer’s officers were here, in their places, except for those actually on duty. Smartly uniformed messgirls circulated among the tables, taking orders, bringing dishes. Farrell sat, of course, at the head of his own table, with Sonya to his right and Grimes to his left. At the foot of the table was Lieutenant Commander Malleson, the Senior Engineering Officer. There was little to distinguish him from his captain but the badges of rank. There was little to distinguish any of the officers one from the other. They were all tall young men, all with close-cropped hair, all with standardized good looks, each and every one of them a refugee from a Survey Service recruiting poster. In my young days, thought Grimes, there was room for individuality . . . He smiled to himself. And where did it get me? Oh you bloody tee, that’s where.

  “What’s the joke, John?” asked Sonya. “Share it, please.”

  Grimes’s prominent ears reddened. “Just a thought, dear.” He was saved by a messgirl, who presented the menu to him. “Nathia juice, please. Ham and eggs—sunny-side up—to follow, with just a hint of French fries. And coffee.”

  “You keep a good table, Jimmy,” Sonya said to Farrell. Then, looking at her husband, “Rather too good, perhaps.”

  “I’m afraid, Sonya,” Farrell told her, “that our meals from now on will be rather lacking in variety. It seems that our Esquelian passengers brought some local virus aboard with ‘em. The biologists in the first survey expeditions found nothing at all on Esquel in any way dangerous to human life, so perhaps we didn’t take the precautions we should have done when we embarked the King and his followers. Even so, while they were on board their excretory matter was excluded from the ship’s closed ecology. But after they were disembarked on Tallis the plumbing wasn’t properly disinfected . . .”

  Not a very suitable topic of conversation for the breakfast table, thought Grimes, sipping his fruit juice. “So?” asked Sonya interestedly.

  “So there’s been a plague running its course in the ‘farm.’ It’s just been the tissue culture vats that have been affected, luckily. We could make do indefinitely on yeasts and algae—but who wants to?” He grinned at Grimes, who was lifting a forkload of yolk-coated ham to his mouth. “Who wants to?”

  “Not me, Captain,” admitted Grimes.

  “Or me, Commodore. The beef’s dead, and the pork, and the chicken. The quack says that the lamb’s not fit for human consumption. So far the mutton seems to be unaffected, but we can’t even be sure of that.”

  “You’ll be able to stock up when we get to Port Forlorn,” said Grimes.

  “That’s a long way off.” Farrell looked steadily at Grimes as he buttered a piece of toast. “I’ve a job for you, Commodore.”

  “A job for me, Commander Farrell?”

  “Yes, you, Commodore Grimes. By virtue of your rank you represent the Rim Worlds Confederacy aboard this vessel. Kinsolving’s Planet, although no longer colonized, is one of the Rim Worlds. I want to put down there.”

  “Why?” asked Grimes.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Commodore, but I understand that the original settlers introduced Earth-type flora and fauna, some of which have not only survived, but flourished. It’s not the flora that I’m interested in, of course—but I’ve heard that there are the descendants of the original rabbits, pigs, cattle and hens running wild there.”

  “No cattle,” Grimes told him. “And no hens. Probably the pigs did for ‘em before they could become established.”

  “Rabbit’s a good substitute for chicken,” said Farrell.

  “Jimmy,” reproved Sonya, “I do believe that you like your tummy.”

  “I do, Sonya, I do,” said the young man.

  “And so do I,” said Lieutenant Commander Malleson, who until now had been eating in dedicated silence.

  “But I don’t like Kinsolving,” grumbled Grimes. “And, in any case, we shall have to get permission to land.”

  “You will get it, John,” said Sonya firmly.

  Later that ship’s morning, Farrell discussed the proposed landing on Kinsolving with Grimes and Sonya.

  “Frankly,” he told them, “I’m glad of an excuse to visit the planet. Not so long ago the Survey Service released a report on the three expeditions, starting off with that odd wet paint affair . . .”

  “That was over a hundred and fifty years ago,” said Grimes.

  “Yes. I know. And I know, too, that you’ve been twice to Kinsolving—the first time as an observer with the neo-Calvinists, the second time in command of your own show . . .”

  “And both times,” admitted Grimes, “I was scared. Badly.”

  “You don’t frighten easily, Commodore, as well I know. But what actually did happe
n? The official reports that have been released to the likes of us don’t give much away. It was hinted—no more, just hinted—that the neo-Calvinists tried to call up the God of the Old Testament, and raised the entire Greek pantheon instead. And you, sir, attempted to repeat the experiment, and got tangled with a Mephistopheles straight out of Gounod’s Faust.”

  “Cutting extraneous cackle,” said Grimes, “that’s just what did happen.”

  “What I’m getting at, Commodore, is this. Were your experiences objective or subjective?”

  “That first time, Commander, the neo-Calvinists’ ship, Piety, was destroyed, as well as her pinnaces. Their leaders—the Presbyter, the Rector, the Deaconess and thirteen others, men and women—completely vanished. That was objective enough for anybody. The second time—I vanished.”

  “I can vouch for that,” stated Sonya.

  “But you came back. Obviously.”

  “More by luck than judgment.” Grimes laughed, without humor. “When you do a deal with the Devil it’s as well to read the small print.”

  “But at no time was there any actual physical harm to anybody.”

  “There could have been. And we don’t know what happened to the neo-Calvinist boss cockies . . .”

  “Probably being converted to hedonism on Mount Olympus,” said Sonya.

  “But we don’t know.”

  Farrell grinned. “And aren’t those very words a challenge to any officer in the Survey Service? You used to be one of us yourself, sir, and Sonya is still on our Reserve list. Kinsolving is almost directly on the track from Tallis to Lorn. I have a perfectly valid excuse to make a landing. And even in these decadent days . . .” He grinned again at the Commodore . . . “my Lords Commissioners do not discourage initiative and zeal on the part of their captains.”

  Reluctantly, Grimes grinned back. It was becoming evident that Farrell possessed depths of character not apparent on first acquaintance. True, he worked by the book—and had Grimes done so he would have risen to the rank of Admiral in the Survey Service—but he was also capable of reading between the lines. A deviation from his original cruise pattern—the evacuation of the King and his supporters from Esquel—had brought him to within easy reach of Kinsolving; he was making the most of the new circumstances. Fleetingly Grimes wondered if the destruction of the ship’s fresh meat supply had been intentional rather than accidental, but dismissed the thought. Not even he, Grimes, had ever done a thing like that.

  “Later,” said Farrell, “if it’s all right with you, sir, we’ll go over the official reports, and you can fill in the gaps. But what is it that makes Kinsolving the way it is?”

  “Your guess is as good as anybody’s, Commander. It’s just that the atmosphere is . . . odd. Psychologically odd, not chemically or physically. A terrifying queerness. A sense of impending doom . . . Kinsolving was settled at the same time as the other Rim Worlds. Physically speaking, it’s a far more desirable piece of real estate than any of them. But the colonists lost heart. Their suicide rate rose to an abnormal level. Their mental institutions were soon overcrowded. And so on. So they pulled out.

  “The reason for it all? There have been many theories. One of the latest is that the Kinsolving system lies at some intersection of . . . of stress lines. Stress lines in what? Don’t ask me. But the very fabric of the continuum is thin, ragged, and the dividing lines between then and now, here and there, what is and what might be are virtually nonexistent . . .”

  “Quite a place,” commented Farrell. “But you’re willing to visit it a third time, sir?”

  “Yes,” agreed Grimes after a long pause. “But I’m not prepared to make a third attempt at awakening ancient deities from their well-earned rest. In any case, we lack the . . . I suppose you could call her the medium. She’s on Lorn, and even if she were here I doubt if she’d play.”

  “Good. I’ll adjust trajectory for Kinsolving, and then we’ll send Carlottigrams to our respective lords and masters requesting permission to land. I don’t think that they’ll turn it down.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Grimes, but the faint smile that lightened his craggy features belied the word.

  Slowly, cautiously Farrell eased Star Pioneer down to the sunlit hemisphere of Kinsolving, to a position a little to the west of the morning terminator. Grimes had advised a landing at the site used by the Confederacy’s Rim Sword and, later, by his own Faraway Quest. The destruction of the neo-Calvinists’ Piety had made the spaceport unusable. This landing place was hard by the deserted city of Enderston, on the shore of the Darkling Tarn. It had been the Sports Stadium.

  Conditions were ideal for the landing. The sounding rockets, fired when the ship was descending through the first tenuous fringes of the atmosphere, had revealed a remarkable absence of turbulence. The parachute flares discharged by them at varying altitudes were falling straight down, each trailing its long, unwavering streamer of white smoke.

  Grimes and Sonya were in the control room. “There’s Enderston,” the Commodore said, “on the east bank of the Weary River. We can’t see much from this altitude; everything’s overgrown. That’s the Darkling Tarn . . .” With a ruler that he had picked up he pointed to the amoebalike glimmer of water among the dull green that now was showing up clearly on the big approach screen. “You can’t miss it. That fairly well-defined oval of paler green is the Stadium . . .”

  The inertial drive throbbed more loudly as Farrell made minor adjustments and then, when the Stadium was in the exact center of the screen, settled down again to its almost inaudible muttering.

  At Farrell’s curt order they all went to their acceleration chairs, strapped themselves in. Grimes, with the others, watched the expanding picture on the screen. It was all so familiar, too familiar, even to the minor brush fire started by the last of the parachute flares. And, as on the previous two occasions, there was the feeling that supernatural forces were mustering to resist the landing of the ship, to destroy her and all aboard her.

  He looked at Farrell. The young Captain’s face was pale, strained—and this, after all, was a setting down in almost ideal conditions. There were not, it is true, any ground approach aids. But neither was there wind, or cloud, or clear air turbulence. And Survey Service officers were trained to bring their ships down on worlds with no spaceport facilities.

  So Farrell was feeling it too. The knowledge made Grimes less unhappy. Now you begin to know what it’s like, Jimmy boy, he thought smugly.

  But she was down at last.

  There was almost no shock at all, and only an almost inaudible complaint from the ship’s structure, and a faint sighing of shock absorbers as the great mass of the vessel settled in the cradle of her tripodal landing gear. She was down. “Secure main engines,” ordered Farrell at last. Telegraph bells jangled sharply, and the inertial drive generators muttered to themselves and then were still. She was down, and the silence was intensified by the soft soughing of the ventilation fans.

  Grimes swiveled in his chair, gazed out through the viewport toward the distant mountain peak, the black, truncated cone hard and sharp against the pale blue sky. “Sinai,” Presbyter Cannon had named it. “Olympus,” Grimes had labeled it on his new charts of the planetary surface. But that name was no longer apt. On its summit the neo-Calvinists had attempted to invoke Jehovah—and Zeus had answered their call. On its summit Grimes had tried to invoke the gods of the Greek pantheon—and had been snatched into an oddly peopled Limbo by Mephistopheles himself.

  This time on Kinsolving the Commodore was going to be cautious. Wild horses—assuming that there were any on this planet, and assuming that they should be possessed by such a strange ambition—would not be able to drag him up to the top of the mountain.

  Nonetheless, Grimes did revisit the mountaintop, taken there by the tamed horsepower of Star Pioneer’s pinnace rather than by wild horses. Nothing happened. Nothing could happen unless Clarisse, descendant of the long dead artist-magicians, was there to make it happen. There was nothing to
see, except the view. All that remained of the two disastrous experiments was a weathered spattering of pigments where the witch girl’s easel had stood.

  Everybody visited the famous caves, of course, and stared at and photographed the rock paintings, the startlingly lifelike depiction of beasts and their hunters. And the paint was dry, and the paintings were old, old, even though some faint hint of their original magic still lingered.

  Even so, this was an uneasy world. Men and women never walked alone, were always conscious of something lurking in the greenery, in the ruins. Farrell, reluctant as he was to break the Survey Service’s uniform regulations, issued strict orders that everybody ashore on any business whatsoever was to wear a bright scarlet jacket over his other clothing. This was after two hunting parties had opened fire upon each other; luckily nobody was killed, but four men and three women would be in the sick bay for days with bullet wounds.

  Grimes said to Farrell, “Don’t you think it’s time that we were lifting ship, Captain?”

  “Not for a while, Commodore. We have to be sure that the new tissue cultures will be successful.”

  “That’s just an excuse.”

  “All right, it’s just an excuse.”

  “You’re waiting for something to happen.”

  “Yes. Damn it all, Commodore, this sensation of brooding menace is getting me down; it’s getting all of us down. But I want to have something definite to report to my Lords Commissioners . . .”

  “Don’t pay too high a price for that fourth ring on your sleeve, James.”

  “It’s more than promotion that’s at stake, sir, although I shall welcome it. It’s just that I hate being up against an enemy that I can’t see, can’t touch. It’s just that I want to accomplish something. It’s just that I don’t want to go slinking off like a dog with his tail between his legs.”