The Dark Dimensions

by A Bertram Chandler

  "How did it happen?" Grimes asked Mayhew sharply.

  "The . . . the details aren't very clear. But Clarisse thinks that it was a swarm of fragments, from one of the blown up derelicts, on an unpredictable orbit. The Quest was holed badly, in several places . . . including the cargo hold. Mr. Hendrikson opened up so the prisoners could escape to an unholed compartment."

  "Any of us would have done the same," said Grimes slowly. He seemed to hear Sir Dominic Flandry's mocking laughter. "But what's happening now?"

  "Von Donderberg has all the Quest's weapons trained on The Outsider, on the airlock door. If we try to get out we shall be like sitting ducks."

  "Stalemate . . ." said the Commodore. "Well, we've a breathable atmosphere in here—I hope. So that's no worry. There may even be water and food suitable for our kind of life. . . ."

  "But they're coming after us. The airlock door has opened for them! They're here now!"

  "Down!" barked Dalzell, falling prone with a clatter. The others followed suit. There were dim figures visible at the end of the tunnel, dim and very distant. There was the faraway chatter of some automatic projectile weapon. The Major and his men were firing back, but without apparent success.

  And at the back of Grimes' mind a voice—an inhuman voice, mechanical but with a hint of emotion—was saying. No, no. Not again. They must learn. They must learn.

  Then there was nothingness.

  30

  Grimes sat on the hilltop, watching Clarisse work.

  She, clad in the rough, more-or-less cured pelt of a wolflike beast, looked like a cavewoman, looked as her ancestors on this very world must have looked. Grimes looked like what he was—a castaway. He was wearing the ragged remnants of his long Johns. His space suit, together with the suits of the others who had been so armored, was stowed neatly in a cave against the day when it would be required again—if ever. Other members of the party wore what was left of their uniforms. They were all here, all on what Grimes had decided must be Kinsolving's Planet, twenty men and thirteen women.

  And, some miles away, were Druthen and von Donderberg and their people. They were still hostile—and in their tribe were only five women, two of them past childbearing age. They had their weapons still—but, like Faraway Quest's crew, were conserving cartridges and power packs. Nonetheless, three nights ago they had approached Grimes' encampment closely enough to bring it within range of their trebuchet and had lobbed a couple of boulders into the mouth of the main cave before they were driven off by Dalzell and his marines.

  All of them were on Kinsolving's Planet.

  It was Kinsolving's Planet ages before it had been discovered by Commodore Kinsolving, ages before those mysterious cavemen had painted their pictures on the walls of the caves. (Perhaps the ancestors of those cavemen were here now. . . .) The topography was all wrong. But by the time that Man pushed out to the rim of the galaxy, old mountain ranges would have been eroded would have sunk, seas would roll where now there were plains, wrinklings of the world's crust would bring new, towering peaks into being.

  But that feeling of oddness that Grimes had known on his previous visit (previous, but in the far distant future) to this planet still persisted. On Kinsolving anything could happen, and most probably would.

  Was it some sort of psionic field induced by the Outsiders' Ship? Or had The Outsider been drawn to that one position in space by the field? Come to that—who (or what) were the Outsiders? Do-gooders? Missionaries? Beings whose evolution had taken a different course from that of Man, of the other intelligent races of the galaxy?

  And we, thought Grimes, are descendants of the killer ape, children of Cain. . . . What would we have been like if our forebears had been herbivores, if we had not needed to kill for food—and to protect ourselves from other predators? What if our first tools had been tools, peaceful tools, and not weapons? But conflict is essential to the evolution of a species. But it could have been conflict with the harsh forces of Nature herself rather than with other creatures, related and unrelated. Didn't some ethologist once refer to Man as the Bad Weather Animal?

  But They, he thought, as he watched Clarisse, squatting on her hunkers, scratching industriously away with a piece of chalky stone on the flat, slate surface of the rock, but They have certainly thrown us back to our first beginnings. We didn't pass the test. First of all there was the naval battle—and I wonder what happened to Wanderer, Vindictive, the other Quest and Adler. . . First of all there was the naval battle, and then the brawl actually within the sacred precincts. Calver and his crew must have been very well behaved to have been accepted, nonetheless. Perhaps, by this time, the stupid pugnacity is being bred out of Man, perhaps Calver was one of the new breed. . . .

  "Stop brooding!" admonished Sonya sharply.

  "I'm not brooding. I'm thinking. I'm still trying to work things out."

  "You'd be better employed trying to recall every possible, smallest detail of your beloved Quest. Clarisse knows damn' all about engineering, and if she's to succeed she must have all the help we can give her."

  "If she succeeds. . . ."

  "John!" Her voice betrayed the strain under which she was living. "I'm not cut out to be an ancestral cavewoman, or any other sort of cavewoman. I was brought up to wear clean clothes, not filthy rags, to bathe in hot water, not a stream straight off the ice, to eat well-cooked food, not greasy meat charred on the outside and raw inside. . . . Perhaps I'm too civilized—but this is no world for me." She paused. "And here we are, all of us, relying on the wild talent of a witch, a teleporteuse, who's been at least half poisoning herself by chewing various wild fungi which might—or might not—have the proper hallucinogenic effect. . ." She laughed bitterly. "All right—the artists in her ancestry did have the power to pull food animals to them. She has it too, as well we know. But will it work with a complex construction such as a spaceship?"

  "It worked," Grimes told her, "with complex constructions such as human beings. And Clarisse is no more an anatomist or a physiologist than she is an engineer."

  "Commodore," Mayhew was calling. "Clarisse needs your help again!"

  Grimes got to his feet. Before he walked to where the artist was at work he slowly looked from his vantage point around his little kingdom. To the north were the jagged, snowcapped peaks, with their darkly forested foothills. To the south was the sea. To east and west were the rolling plains, with their fur of coarse, yellowish grass, their outcroppings of stony hillocks and boulders. From behind one of the distant hills drifted the blue smoke of Druthen's fires.

  "Commodore!" called Mayhew again.

  "Oh, all right."

  He walked over the rocky hilltop to that slab of slate, to where Davis, Williams, Hendrikson and Carnaby were clustered around Clarisse. The sketch of Faraway Quest was taking shape, but it was vague, uncertain in outline. How many attempts had there been to date? Grimes had lost count. Earlier drawings had been obliterated by sudden vicious rain showers, had been rubbed out in fits of tearful anger by the artist herself. Once, and once only, it had seemed that a shimmering ship shape, almost invisible, had hung in the air for a microsecond.

  Grimes looked at the faces of his officers, his departmental heads. All showed signs of strain, of overmuch concentration. Williams, who was responsible for maintenance, must have been making a mental tally of every rivet, every welded seam in the shell plating. Davis would have been visualizing machinery; Hendrikson, his weapons; Carnaby, his navigational instruments.

  But. . . .

  But, Grimes suddenly realized, none of them had seen, had felt the ship as a smoothly functioning whole.

  "Ready?" he asked Clarisse.

  "Ready," she replied in a tired, distant voice.

  And Grimes remembered. He remembered the first commissioning of Faraway Quest and all the work that had gone into her, the maintenance and the modifications. He relived his voyage of exploration to the Galactic East: his landings on Tharn, Grollor, Mellise and Stree. He recalled, vividly, his discove
ry of the antimatter systems to the Galactic West, and that most peculiar voyage, during which he and Sonya had come together, which was made as part of the research into the Rim Ghost phenomena.

  All this he remembered, and more, and his mind was wide open to Clarisse as she scratched busily away with her rough piece of chalk—and hers was open to him. It was all so vivid, too vivid for mere imagination, for memory. He could actually have been standing in his familiar control room. . . .

  He was standing in his familiar control room.

  But that was impossible.

  He opened his eyes, looked around in a slow circle.

  He saw the jagged, snowcapped peaks to the north, with their darkly forested foothills. He saw the glimmering sea to the south. To east and west were the rolling plains, with their fur of coarse, yellowish grass, their outcroppings of stony hillocks and boulders. From behind one of the distant hills drifted the blue smoke of Druthen's fires.

  But. . . .

  But he was seeing all this through the wide viewports of Faraway Quest.

  He walked, fast, to the screen of the periscope, adjusted the controls of the instrument so that he had an all-round view around the ship. Yes—his people, his crew were there, all of them staring upward. He did not need to increase the magnification to see the wonder on their faces.

  "Mphm," he grunted. He went to the panel on which were the controls for the airlock doors. He punched the necessary buttons. The illuminated indicators came on. OUTER DOOR OPEN. INNER DOOR OPEN. RAMP EXTRUDING—to be replaced by RAMP DOWN.

  Meanwhile. . . .

  He put his eyes to the huge binoculars on their universal mounting. Druthen and von Donderberg must have seen the sudden appearance of the ship. She would mean a chance of escape for them. Yes, there they were, two dozen of them, running. The sun glinted from the weapons they carried—the guns with their hoarded ammunition, their carefully conserved power packs.

  It was a hopeless sortie; but desperate men, more than once, have achieved miracles.

  Grimes sighed, went to the gunner's seat of the bow 40 millimeter cannon. He put the gun on manual control. It would be the best one for the job; a noisy projectile weapon has far greater psychological effect than something silent and much more deadly. He flipped the selector switches for automatic and H.E. He traversed until he had the leaders of the attackers in the telescopic sights. Druthen was one of them, his bulk and his waddling run unmistakable. Von Donderberg was the other.

  Grimes sighed again. He was genuinely sorry for the Waldegrener. In many ways he and Grimes were the same breed of cat. Only Druthen then. . . .

  He shifted his sights slightly. But the explosion of a high explosive shell might kill, would probably injure von Donderberg. Solid shot? Yes. One round should be ample, if Grimes' old skill with firearms still persisted. And it would be a spectacular enough deterrent for the survivors of Druthen's party.

  Still Grimes hesitated. The hijackers would be marooned on Kinsolving; nothing would make him change his mind about that. But even if they didn't deserve a chance their children, their descendants did.

  And, on a primitive world such as this, the more outstandingly bad bastards contributing to the gene pool the better.

  Again he flipped the ammunition selector switch, then lowered his sights. He stitched a neat seam of bursting incendiary shells across the savannah, well ahead of Druthen and von Donderberg. The long grass was highly and satisfactorily flammable. The raiding party retreated in panic. By the time that those of them who possessed space armor got back to their camp to put it on, no matter how they hurried, Faraway Quest would be gone.

  "All aboard, Skipper," reported Williams from behind Grimes. "Take her up?"

  "Take her up, Commander Williams," ordered the Commodore.

  31

  "Set trajectory, Sir?" asked Carnaby.

  Grimes looked out through the viewports, toward the opalescent sphere that was Kinsolving, toward the distant luminosity of the Galactic Lens.

  "We have to go somewhere, John," said Sonya sharply.

  "Or somewhen," murmured Grimes. He said, in a louder voice, "We'd better head for where The Outsider was, or will be, or is. We have unfinished business."

  But it didn't really matter. For the time being, nothing really mattered.

  He had his ship again.

  THE END

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