Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  “The original colony did just that.”

  “But they . . .” Farrell stopped abruptly.

  “I’ll finish it for you, James. But they were only civilians. They weren’t wearing the Survey Service badge on their caps, Survey Service braid on their sleeves or shoulders. They weren’t disciplined. And how long do you think your ship’s discipline is going to stand up to the strain, gold braid and brass buttons notwithstanding?”

  “For long enough.”

  Sonya broke in. “This is Jimmy’s show, John. He makes the decisions. And I agree with him that we should stay on Kinsolving until we have something to show for our visit.”

  “Thank you, Sonya,” said Farrell. Then, “You must excuse me. I have things to attend to.”

  When the young man had left their cabin, Sonya turned to her husband. “You’re getting too old and cautious, John. Or are you sulking because you’re not running things?”

  “I don’t like this world, my dear. I’ve reasons not to.”

  “You’re letting it get you down. You look as though you haven’t slept for a week.”

  “I haven’t. Not to speak of.”

  “Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “It’s so damned silly. It’s that bloody nightmare of mine—you know the one. Every time I shut my eyes it recurs.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I should have done.” He got slowly to his feet. “Probably some good, healthy exercise will make me sleep better. A long walk . . .”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  She fetched from the wardrobe the scarlet jackets that they had been given. Grimes took from a drawer his deadly little Minetti, put it in one pocket, a spare clip of cartridges in the other. Heavier handguns and miniaturized transceivers they would collect from the duty officer at the airlock.

  Within a few minutes they were walking down the ramp to the path that had been hacked and burned and trodden through the encroaching greenery, the trail that led to the ruined city.

  It was early afternoon. The sun was still high in the pale sky, but the breeze, what there was of it, was chilly. And the shadows, surely, were darker here than on any other world that Grimes had ever visited, and seemed to possess a life of their own. But that was only imagination.

  They walked steadily but carefully, watching where they put their feet, avoiding the vines and brambles that seemed deliberately to try to trip them. On either side of the rough track the vegetation was locked in silent, bitter warfare: indigenous trees and shrubs, importations from Earth and other worlds, and parasites upon parasites. In spite of the overly luxuriant growth the overweening impression was of death rather than of life, and the most readily identifiable scent on the chill air was that of decay.

  They came to the outskirts of the city, picking their way over the tilted slabs of concrete, thrust up and aside by root and trunk, that had once been a road. Once the buildings between which it ran had been drably utilitarian; now the madly proliferating and destructive ivy clothed them in somber, Gothic splendor. An abandoned ground car, the glass of its headlights by some freak of circumstances unobscured, glared at them like a crouching, green-furred beast.

  Grimes tried to imagine what this place had been like before its evacuation. Probably it had been very similar to any sizable town on Lorn or Faraway, Ultimo or Thule—architecturally. But there had been one difference, and a very important one. There had been the uncanny atmosphere, that omnipresent premonition of . . . Of . . . ? That fear of the cold and the dark, of the Ultimate Night. Other cities on other worlds had their haunted houses; here every house had been haunted.

  He said, “The sooner young Farrell lifts ship off this deserted graveyard, the better.”

  “At least it’s not raining,” Sonya told him, with an attempt at cheerfulness.

  “Thank the odd gods of the galaxy for one small mercy,” grumbled Grimes.

  “Talking of odd gods . . .” she said.

  “What about them?”

  “Sally Veerhausen, the Biochemist, told me that there’s a very odd church on a side street that runs off the main drag.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. It’s to the right, and it’s little more than an alley, and you turn into it just before you get to a tall tower with a latticework radio mast still standing on top of it. . .”

  “That it there, to the right?”

  “Must be. Shall we investigate?”

  “What is there to investigate?” he asked.

  “Nothing, probably. But I seem to recall a period when you exhibited a passion for what you referred to as freak religions. This could be one to add to your collection.”

  “I doubt it,” he told her.

  But after a few minutes’ careful walking they were turning off the main street, making their way along an alley between walls overgrown with the ubiquitous ivy that had been brought to the world by some long dead, homesick colonist.

  The church was there.

  It was only a small building, a masonry cube with its angles somehow and subtly wrong. And it was different from its neighbors. Perhaps the stone, natural or synthetic, from which it had been constructed possessed some quality, physical or chemical, lacking in the building materials in more general use. Its dull grey facade was unmarked by creeper, lichen or moss. Its door, grey like the walls, but of metal, was uncorroded. Over the plain rectangle of the entrance were the embossed letters in some matte black substance—TEMPLE OF THE PRINCIPLE.

  Grimes snorted almost inaudibly. Then, “What Principle?” he demanded. “There have been so many.”

  “Perhaps,” said Sonya seriously, “the greatest and most mysterious one of all.”

  “The Golden Way? The greatest, I admit . . .”

  “No. Sally got her paws onto such records as still exist—the vaults in the city hall kept their contents quite intact—and found out that there was a cult here that worshipped, or tried to worship, the Uncertainty Principle . . .”

  “Mphm. Could have been quite a suitable religion for this world. Inexplicable forces playing hell with anything and everything, so, if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.”

  “Or get the hell out.”

  “Or get the hell out. But—who knows?—this freak religion might just have worked. Shall we go inside?”

  “Why not?”

  The door opened easily, too easily. It was almost as though they had been expected. But this, Grimes told himself, was absurd thinking. The officers from the ship who had found this place must have oiled the hinges. And had they done something about the lighting system too? It should have been dark inside the huge, windowless room, but it was not. The gray, subtly shifting twilight was worse than darkness would have been. It accentuated the wrongness of the angles where wall met wall, ceiling and floor. It seemed to concentrate, in a formless blob of pallid luminescence, over the coffin-shaped altar that stood almost in the middle of the oddly lopsided hall. Almost in the middle . . . Its positioning was in keeping with the rest of the warped geometries of this place.

  “I don’t like it,” said Grimes. “I don’t like it at all.”

  “Neither do I,” whispered Sonya.

  Yet neither of them made any attempt to retreat to the comparative light and warmth and sanity of the alley outside.

  “What rites did they practice?” whispered the Commodore. “What prayers did they chant? And to what?”

  “I’d rather not find out.”

  But still they did not withdraw, still, hand in hand, they advanced slowly toward the black altar, the coffin-shaped . . . coffin-shaped? No. Its planes and angles shifted. It was more of a cube. It was more than a cube. It was. . .

  Grimes, knew, suddenly, what it was. It was a tesseract. And he knew, too, that he should never have come again to this world. Twice he had visited Kinsolving before, and on the second occasion had become more deeply involved than on the first. Whatever the forces were that ruled this planet, he was becoming more and more attuned to them.


  And this was the third time.

  “John!” he heard Sonya’s distant voice. “John!”

  He tightened the grasp of his right hand, but the warmth of hers was no longer within it.

  “John . . .”

  It was no more than a fading whisper. “John . . .”

  “Grmph . . .” He didn’t want to wake up. Full awareness would mean maximum appreciation of his nagging headache. His eyes were gummed shut, and he had the impression that small and noisome animals had fought and done other things inside his mouth.

  “John!”

  Blast the woman, he thought.

  “JOHN!” She was shaking him now.

  He flailed out blindly, felt one fist connect with something soft, heard a startled gasp of pain. “Never touch an officer,” he enunciated thickly. “ ’Gainst regulations.”

  “You . . . You hit me. You brute.”

  “Own fault.”

  “Wake up, damn you!”

  He got his eyes open somehow, stared blearily at the plump, faded woman in the shabby robe who was staring down at him with distaste.

  Who are you? he demanded silently. Who are you? The memory of someone slim, sleek and elegant persisted in his befuddled brain. Then—Where am I? Who am I?

  “You’ve got a job to do,” the woman told him in a voice that was an unpleasant whine. “You’d better get your stinking carcass out of that bed and start doing it. I like to go on eating, even if you don’t.”

  A starvation diet would do you the world of good, he thought. He said, “Coffee.”

  “Coffee what? Where’s your manners?”

  “Coffee, please.”

  She left him then, and he rolled out of the rumpled bed. He looked down with distaste at his sagging drinker’s paunch, then got to his feet and walked unsteadily to the bathroom. He was surprised at the weakness he felt, the near nausea, the protests of a body allowed to degenerate into a state of general unfitness. It all seemed wrong. Surely he had always taken pride in maintaining himself in good condition.

  He stood under the shower, and gradually the mists cleared from his brain. In a little while John Grimes, Officer Commanding the Zetland Base, passed over Commander, would be ready to begin his dreary day.

  Nobody quite knew why the Federation maintained a base on Zetland. Once, a long time ago, the planet had been strategically important when it seemed possible that the Federation and the expanding Shaara Empire might clash, but the Treaty of Danzenorg, respected by both cultures, had neatly parceled up the entire galaxy into spheres of influence. True, there were other spacefaring races who belonged neither to the Federation nor the Empire, but their planets were many, many light years distant from Zetland and their trade routes passed nowhere near this world.

  There was a base on Zetland. There always had been one; there always would be one. The taxpayer had bottomless pockets. There were spaceport facilities, of a sort. There were repair facilities, also of a sort. There was a Carlotti beacon, which was an absolutely inessential part of the navigational network in this sector of space, and relay station. The whole setup, such as it was, could have been run efficiently by a lieutenant junior grade, with a handful of petty officers and ratings. But a base commander must have scrambled egg on the peak of his cap. The Commander of a base like Zetland is almost invariably on the way up or the way down

  Commander John Grimes was not on the way up.

  Nonetheless, he did have that scrambled egg on the peak of his cap. There was also a smear of egg yolk at the corner of his mouth, and a spatter of it on the lapel of his jacket. His enlisted woman driver, waiting for him in the ground car outside the Base Commander’s bungalow, looked at him with some distaste—apart from anything else, she had been there for all of twenty minutes—clambered reluctantly out of the vehicle (her legs, noted Grimes, were too thick and more than a little hairy) and threw him a salute that almost, but not quite, qualified as “dumb insolence.” Grimes returned it contemptuously. She opened the rear door of the car for him. He got in, thanking her as an afterthought, sagged into the seat. She got back behind the controls, clumsily stirred and prodded the machine into reluctant motion.

  It was only a short drive to the military spaceport. The Commander thought, as he had thought many times before, that he should walk to his office rather than ride; the exercise would do him good. But somehow he never felt up to it. He stared unseeingly through the dirty windows. The view was as it always was: flat fields with an occasional low farmhouse, uninteresting machines trudging through the dirt on their caterpillar treads sowing or reaping or fertilizing the proteinuts which were Zetland’s only export—and that only to worlds too poverty-stricken to send anything worthwhile in exchange. Ahead was the base—administration buildings, barracks, control tower and the lopsided ellipsoid that was the Carlotti beacon, slowly rotating.

  The car rolled over the concrete apron, jerked to a halt outside the control tower. The girl driver got out clumsily, opened the Commander’s door. Grimes got out, muttered, “ ’K you.”

  She replied sweetly, “It was a pleasure, sir.”

  Saucy bitch, thought Grimes sourly.

  He did not take the elevator to his office on the top level of the tower. Thoughts about his lack of physical fitness had been nagging him all morning. He used the stairs, taking them two at a time at first. He soon had to abandon this practice. By the time that he reached the door with BASE COMMANDER on it in tarnished gilt lettering he was perspiring and out of breath and his heart was hammering uncomfortably.

  Ensign Mavis Davis, his secretary, got up from her desk as he entered the office. She was a tall woman, and very plain, and old for her junior rank. She was also highly efficent, and was one of the few persons on this world whom Grimes liked.

  “Good morning, Commander,” she greeted him, a little too brightly.

  “What’s good about it?” He scaled his cap in the general direction of its peg, missed as usual. “Oh, well, it’s the only one we’ve got.”

  She said, holding out a message flimsy, “This came in a few minutes ago . . .”

  “Have we declared war on somebody?”

  She frowned at him. She was too essentially good a person to regard war as a joking matter. “No. It’s from Draconis. She’s making an unscheduled call here . . .”

  A Constellation Class cruiser, thought Grimes. Just what I need . . . He asked, “When is she due?”

  “Eleven hundred hours this morning.”

  “What?” Grimes managed a grin. “The fleet’s in port, or almost in port, and not a whore in the house washed . . .”

  “That’s not funny, Commander,” she said reprovingly.

  “Indeed it’s not, Mavis,” he agreed. Indeed it wasn’t. He thought of the huge cruiser, with all her spit and polish, and thought of his own, slovenly, planet-based command, with its cracked, peeling paint, with dusty surfaces everywhere, with equipment only just working after a fashion, with personnel looking as though they had slept in their uniforms—as many of them, all too probably, had. He groaned, went to the robot librarian’s console, switched on. “Fleet List,” he said. “Draconis. Name of commanding officer.”

  “Yes, sir.” The mechanical voice was tinny, absolutely unhuman. “Captain Francis Delamere, O.G.C., D.C.O., F.M.H. . . .” Grimes switched off.

  Franky Delamere, he thought. A lieutenant when I was a two and a half ringer. A real Space Scout, and without the brains to come in out of the rain, but a stickler for regulations. And now he’s a four ring captain . . .

  “John . . .” There was sympathy in the Ensign’s voice.

  “Yes, Mavis?”

  She was abruptly businesslike. “We haven’t much time, but I issued orders in your name to get the place cleaned up a bit. And the Ground Control approach crew are at their stations, and the beacons should be in position by now . . .”

  Grimes went to the wide window. “Yes,” he said, looking down at the triangle of intensely bright red lights that had been
set out on the gray concrete of the apron, “they are. Thank you.”

  “Do you wish to monitor G.C.A.?”

  “Please.”

  She touched a switch, and almost immediately there was the sound of a crisply efficient voice. “Draconis to Zetland Base. E.T.A., surface contact, still 1100 hours. Is all ready?”

  “All ready, Draconis,” came the reply in accents that were crisp enough.

  “Just one small thing, John,” said Mavis. She stood very close to him, and with a dampened tissue removed the flecks of egg yolk from the corner of his mouth, from his uniform. “Now, let ‘em all come,” she declared.

  “Let ‘em all come,” he echoed.

  He remembered a historical romance he had read recently. It was about a famous English regiment whose proud epitaph was, They died with their boots clean.

  Living with your boots clean can be harder.

  Draconis was heard long before she was seen, the irregular throb of her inertial drive beating down from beyond the overcast. And then, suddenly, she was below the cloud ceiling, a great, gleaming spindle, the flaring vanes of her landing gear at her stern. Grimes wondered if Francis Delamere were doing his own pilotage; very often the captains of these big ships let their navigating officers handle the controls during an approach. He thought smugly that this was probably the case now; when Delamere had served under Grimes he had been no great shakes as a ship handler.

  Whoever was bringing the cruiser down, he was making a good job of it. Just a touch of lateral thrust to compensate for the wind, a steady increase of vertical thrust as altitude diminished, so that what at first had seemed an almost uncontrolled free fall was, at the moment of ground contact, a downward drift as gentle as that of a soap bubble.

  She was tall, a shining metallic tower, the control room at her sharp stem well above the level of Grimes’s office. Abruptly her inertial drive was silent. “Eleven oh oh oh seven . . .” announced Mavis Davis.