Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes.

  He retrieved his cap from the floor, let the Ensign, who had found a clothes brush somewhere, brush its crown and peak. He put it on. He said to the girl, “Look after the shop. I have to go visiting.” He left his office, took the elevator down to ground level. He was joined by the Base Supply Officer, the Base Medical Officer and the Base Engineering Officer. All three of them, he noted, looked reasonably respectable. Grimes in the lead, they marched out to the ramp that was just being extended from Draconis’s after airlock.

  It was good to be boarding a ship again, thought Grimes, even one commanded by a man who had once been his junior and who was now his senior. As he climbed the ramp he threw his shoulders back and sucked in his belly. He returned the salute of the junior officer at the airlock smartly and then, followed by his own officers, strode into the elevator cage. The woman operator needed no instructions; in a very few seconds the party from the base was being ushered into the Captain’s day room.

  “Ah,” said Delamere, “Commander Grimes, isn’t it?” He had changed little over the years; his close-cropped hair was touched with gray, but he was as boyishly slim and handsome as ever. The four gold rings gleamed bravely on each sleeve, and the left breast of his uniform was gaudy with ribbons. “Welcome aboard, Commander.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” Grimes had no intention of addressing the other as “sir.”

  “You’re putting on weight, John,” said the Specialist Commander who was one of the group of officers behind Delamere.

  “Maggie!”

  “Commander Lazenby,” said the Captain stiffly, “this touching reunion can be deferred until such time as the Base Commander and I have discussed business.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” snapped Margaret Lazenby, just a little too crisply.

  Delamere glared at her, John Grimes looked at her wistfully. She hadn’t put on weight. She had hardly changed since they had been shipmates in the census ship Seeker. Her red hair gleamed under her cap, her figure was as slim and trim as ever. But . . .

  But she was not the slender, auburn-haired woman who haunted his dreams.

  “Commander Grimes,” said Delamere. Then, more loudly, “Commander Grimes!”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Perhaps we can get the introductions over with, and then you and I can get down to business.”

  “Certainly, Captain. This is Lieutenant Commander Dufay, the Base Medical Officer. Lieutenant Danby, Supplies. Lieutenant Roscoe, Engineering.”

  Delamere introduced his own people, and then the specialist officers went below, leaving the Captain to conduct business with Grimes.

  “A drink, Commander?”

  “Please, Captain. Gin, if I may.”

  “You may. Sit down, Grimes.” Delamere poured the drinks, took a chair facing the other. “Down the hatch.”

  “Down the hatch.”

  The Captain grinned. “Well, Grimes, I don’t seem to have caught you with your pants down. Frankly, I was rather hoping I would . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t forgotten that bad report you put in on me . . .”

  “It was truthful,” said Grimes. “You were a lousy ship handler.” Then, “By the way, who brought Draconis in?”

  “None of your business,” snapped Delamere, an angry flush on his face. After a second or so he continued. “For your information, Grimes, an economy wave is sweeping the Service. There is a cutting out of deadwood in progress. Certain ships, Draconis among them, have been selected by our lords and masters to make the rounds of bases such as this one, and to report upon them. My last call was at Wuggis III. The Base Commander who was in charge is now on the retired list. His G.C.A. was in such a state that I was obliged to use the commercial spaceport.”

  “How nice for you,” commented Grimes.

  The Captain ignored this. “I’m giving you fair warning, Commander. You’d better be prepared. For the purposes of this exercise a state of war is deemed to exist. Draconis has limped into your base with 75% casualties, including all technical officers. These same technical officers are, even now, arranging a simulation of extensive damage. The Mannschenn Drive, for example, will require a new governor and will have to have its controls recalibrated. Only one inertial drive unit is functional, and that is held together with spit and string. My laser cannon are burned out. My yeast, algae and tissue culture vats contain only slimy, dead messes utterly unfit for human—or even unhuman—consumption.” He laughed. “All the parts that have been removed from machinery and weapons are, of course, securely locked in my storerooms, where your people won’t be able to get their greasy paws on them. You, Grimes, starting from scratch, using your people, your workshops, starting from scratch, will have to bring Draconis back to a state of full fighting efficiency, as soon as possible if not before.”

  “Then I’d better get cracking,” said Grimes. He got to his feet, glanced briefly and regretfully at his almost untouched glass. It was good liquor, far better than any that could be obtained locally—but, even now, he was rather fussy about whom he drank with.

  “You’d better,” agreed Delamere. “Oh, you haven’t finished your drink, Commander.”

  “Your ship’s in such a sorry simulated state,” Grimes told him, “that we’ll make believe that you need it yourself.”

  He forgot to salute on the way out.

  “I knew something like this would happen,” complained Marian tearfully. “What shall we do, John? What can we do? A commander’s pension is not much.”

  “Too right it isn’t.” He looked thoughtfully at the half inch of oily gin remaining in his glass, brought it to his mouth and swallowed it, gagging slightly. He reached for the bottle, poured himself another generous shot.

  “You drink too much,” flared his wife.

  “I do,” he agreed, looking at her. She was almost passable when alcohol had dimmed the sharp edges of his perception. He murmured:

  “Malt does more than Milton can

  To justify God’s ways to Man . . .”

  “What?”

  “Housman,” he explained. “A poet. Twentieth century or thereabouts.”

  “Poetry!” she sneered contemptuously. “But what are you doing about Captain Delamere? He was such a nice young man when he was one of your officers, when we were all happy at Lindisfarne Base . . .”

  “Yes, Franky was always good at sucking up to captains’ and commodores’ and admirals’ wives.”

  “But you must have done something to him, John. Couldn’t you apologize?”

  “Like hell,” growled Grimes. “Like adjectival, qualified hell.”

  “Don’t swear at me!”

  “I wasn’t swearing.”

  “You were thinking it.”

  “All right, I was thinking it.” He finished his drink, got up, put on his cap. “I’d better get down to the ship to see what sort of mess my butterfly-brained apes are making of her.”

  “What difference will your being there make?”

  “I’m still Commander of this bloody base!” he roared.

  He looked back at her briefly as he reached the door, felt a spasm of pity. She was such a mess. She had let herself go. (As he had let himself go.) Only faint traces remained of the attractive Ensign Marian Hall, Supply Branch, whom he, on the rebound, had married. Physically there was no longer any attraction. Mentally there was—nothing. She read only trash, was incapable of intelligent conversation, and could never join Grimes in his favorite pastime of kicking ideas around to see if they yelped. He wondered how things would have worked out if he and Maggie Lazenby had made a go of things. But to have Maggie here, on this world, at this juncture, was too much.

  He walked to the military spaceport. The night was mild, not unpleasant in spite of the wisps of drizzle that drifted over the flat landscape. Now and again Zetland’s twin moons appeared briefly in breaks in the clouds, but their light was faint and pallid in comparison to the glare of the workin
g floods around Draconis.

  He tramped slowly up the ramp to the airlock, returned the salute of the O.O.D., one of Delamere’s men. The elevator was unmanned—but, after all, the ship had suffered heavy simulated casualties, so ratings could not be spared for nonessential duties. He went first to the “Farm.” The vats had been cleaned out, but the stink still lingered. The cruiser’s Biochemist had carried out his “sabotage under orders” a little too enthusiastically. He exchanged a few words with Lieutenant Commander Dufay, in charge of operations here, then went down a couple of decks to the inertial drive room. He looked at the confusion without understanding it. Roscoe and his artificers had bits and pieces scattered everywhere. It was like a mechanical jigsaw puzzle.

  “She’ll be right, Commander,” said the Engineer Lieutenant. He didn’t seem to be convinced by his own words. Grimes certainly wasn’t.

  “She’d better be right,” he said.

  Somebody else was using the elevator, so he decided to take the companionway up to Control—he did know more than a little about navigational equipment—rather than wait. His journey took him through Officers’ Country. He was not altogether surprised when he was accosted by Commander Lazenby.

  “Hi, John.”

  “Hi, Maggie.”

  “Are you busy?”

  He shrugged. “I should be.”

  “But we haven’t seen each other for years. Come into my dogbox for a drink and a yarn. It’s all right—the Boy Wonder’s being wined and dined by the Governor in Zeehan City.”

  “He might have told me.”

  “Why should he? In any case, he’s on the Simulated Casualty List. He’s probably awarded himself a posthumous Grand Galactic Cross.”

  “With golden comets.”

  “And a platinum spiral nebula.” She laughed. “Come in, John. Take the weight off your feet.” The door to her day cabin opened for her. “This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”

  “You haven’t changed, Maggie,” he said ruefully, looking at her. “I wish . . .”

  She finished it for him. “You wish that you’d married me instead of that little commissioned grocer’s clerk. But you were always rather scared of me, John, weren’t you? You were afraid that you, a spacehound pure and simple, wouldn’t be able to cope with me, a qualified ethologist. But as an ethologist I could have seen to it that things worked out for us.”

  She sat down on her settee, crossing her slim, sleek legs. Her thin, intelligent face under the red hair was serious. He looked at her wistfully. He murmured—and it was as much a question as a statement—”It’s too late now.”

  “Yes. It’s too late. You’ve changed too much. You did the wrong thing, John. You should have resigned after that court martial. You could have gone out to the Rim Worlds to make a fresh start.”

  “I wanted to, Maggie. But Marian—she’s incurably Terran. She made it quite plain that she’d not go out to live among the horrid, rough colonials. As far as she’s concerned, everywhere there’s a Survey Service Base there’s a little bit of Old Earth, with society neatly stratified. Mrs. Commander is just a cut above Mrs. Lieutenant Commander, and so on down.” He fumbled for his pipe, filled and lit it. “She had the idea, too, that My Lords Commissioners would one day forgive me and that she’d finish up as Mrs. Admiral Grimes . . .”

  “My heart fair bleeds for you both,” she said drily. “But mix us drinks, John. You’ll find the wherewithal in that locker.”

  “For you?”

  “The same as always. BVG, with just a touch of lime.”

  There was a hologram over the grog locker, a little, brightly glowing window onto another, happier world. It was a beach scene: golden sand, creamy surf, blue sea and sky, and the golden brown bodies of the naked men and women.

  Grimes asked, “Do you still spend your long leaves on Arcadia, Maggie?”

  “Too right I do. It’s the only possible planet for an ethologist who takes the ‘Back To Nature’ slogan seriously.”

  “You look happy enough in this hologram . . .” Grimes inspected the three-dimensional picture more closely. “Who is that with you?”

  “Peter Cowley. He’s a Senior Biochemist with Trans-Galactic Clippers.”

  “No. Not him. The woman.”

  She got up to come to stand beside him. “Oh, her. That’s Sonya Verrill. Yet another of the Commanders with whom the Survey Service is infested. She’s Intelligence. Do you know her?”

  Grimes stared at the depiction of the nude woman. She was like Maggie Lazenby in many ways, her figure, her coloring, her facial features, could almost have been her sister. He looked more closely. There should be a mole on her left hip. There was.

  “Do you know her?” asked Maggie again.

  “Yes . . . No . . .”

  “Make your mind up.”

  I don’t know her, thought Grimes. I have never met her. But I have dreamed about her. I thought it was Maggie in my dreams, a somehow different Maggie, but she hasn’t a mole anywhere on her body . . .

  He said, “No, I don’t know her. But she is like you, isn’t she?”

  “I can’t see any resemblance. You know, she was almost going to call here; she’s sculling around this neck of the woods in one of those little, fully automated armed yachts. Some hush-hush Intelligence deal. But when she heard that this was one of the Boy Wonder’s ports of call she decided to play by herself somewhere.”

  “Has he met her?” asked Grimes, feeling absurdly jealous.

  “Yes. They do not, repeat not, like each other.”

  “Then there must be some good in her,” said Grimes, with a quite irrational surge of relief.

  “Never mind her. What about me? I’m thirsty.”

  “All right, all right,” said Grimes, mixing the drinks.

  When he got home Marian was waiting up for him. “You’ve been drinking,” she accused him.

  “And so, to coin a phrase, what?”

  “I don’t mind that so much. But you’ve been with that . . . bitch, that Maggie Lazenby.”

  “I had a couple of drinks with her, that was all.”

  “Don’t lie to me!”

  “I’m not lying.”

  No, he wasn’t lying. Maggie, in her woman’s way, had offered him more than a drink, but he had turned it down. Even now he was not sure why he had done so. Or he was sure, but would not admit it to himself. It was all so crazy, so utterly crazy. He had been loyal to a woman whom he had never met, whose hologram he had seen for the first time, in Maggie’s day cabin.

  “After all I’ve done for you, and you going sniffing around that carroty alley cat. You’re no good, you’re just no good. You never were, and you never will be . . .”

  Grimes brushed past her, into the living room, the Service severity of which had been marred by his wife’s tasteless attempts at interior decoration.

  “Say something, damn you! Say something, you waster. Haven’t you even the guts to defend yourself?”

  The telephone buzzed urgently. Grimes went to it, flipped down the switch. The screen came alive and the plain, almost ugly face of Mavis Davis looked out at him. “Commander, there’s an emergency . . .”

  “Yes?” And what was it? Had his fumbling repair squads wreaked some irreparable damage upon the cruiser? He’d better start packing his bags.

  “A Mayday.”

  “Who?” he demanded. “Where?”

  “The armed yacht Grebe. In solar orbit between Zetland and Freiad.” She rattled off coordinates. “Meteor swarm. Extensive hull and machinery damage. Loss of atmosphere. Orbit decaying.”

  “Mavis, send a car for me. At once.”

  “Wilco, Commander.”

  “And what can you do?” his wife sneered. “Captain Delamere’s got a cruiser and hundreds of really efficient men and women. What have you got?”

  “Out of my way!” he snarled.

  “John! You can’t go. I forbid you!” She clung to his sleeve but, brutally, he shook her of
f. She followed him for a little way as he strode out of the house, along the dark road, then gave up. “John!” she called. “John!”

  The lights of the car were ahead, approaching rapidly. It passed him, turned, braked. Mavis Davis was driving. He got in beside her.

  She said, as she restarted the vehicle. “Husky?”

  Of course, it had to be the base’s space tug Husky. Delamere’s cruiser was out of commission and the tug at the civilian spaceport was, Grimes knew, undergoing annual survey. Husky was the only ship on Zetland capable of getting upstairs in a hurry.

  And she was Grimes’s toy, his pet. She was more than a toy, much more. In her he could feel the satisfaction of real command, or symbiosis with his ship. She was the only piece of equipment on the base in absolutely first class condition—and Grimes and Mavis, working with their own hands, had kept her so. She was referred to as “the Old Man’s private yacht.”

  “I told Petty Officer Willis to warm her up,” said Mavis.

  “Good girl.”

  “Can . . . Can I come with you?”

  “I’d like you to.” She was a clerical officer, trained as such, but she should have been an engineer. She possessed the inborn skills, the talents and a keen mathematical mind. Often she had accompanied Grimes on his short jaunts outside the atmosphere. “You know the little bitch better than anybody else on the base.”

  “Thank you, John.”

  The car screamed on to the apron, circled the great, useless, floodlit hulk of Draconis. Husky was in her own berth, tucked away behind the workshops, a dull metal ovoid standing in her tripodal landing gear like a gray egg in an egg-cup. A circle of yellow light marked her airlock door.

  As the car stopped Grimes heard a noise in the sky. It was a jet, coming in fast. The shriek of its exhaust varied in pitch as its turret drive was used first to brake and then to ease the aircraft to a vertical touchdown. The aircraft slammed to the concrete just a few feet from the car.

  A man jumped out of the cabin, confronted Grimes. It was Delamere, still in his mess dress, starched white linen, black bow tie, tinkling miniatures and all.