First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  The Far Traveler fell through the dark dimensions, the warped continuum, a micro-society that, despite its smallness, contained all the essentials—a man, a woman, a computer. Even though the members of this tiny community weren’t exactly living in each other’s pockets they weren’t actually fighting among themselves—and that was something to be thankful for.

  One morning—according to The Far Traveler’s clocks— Grimes was awakened indecently early. Big Sister, exercising her newly developed sense of humor, used an archaic bugle call, Reveille, instead of the usual chimes to call him. He opened his eyes, saw that the stewardess was placing the tray with his coffee on the bedside table. She said, in Big Sister’s voice, “There is no urgency, Captain Grimes, but I should like you in the control room.”

  Grimes swung his legs out of the bed. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  “Nothing is wrong, Captain, but a situation has arisen for which I am not programmed.” She added, as Grimes opened the wardrobe door and reached for a clean uniform shirt, “As I have said, there is no urgency. Please finish your coffee and then shower and depilate before coming to Control. You know very well that Her Excellency does not tolerate scruffiness.”

  “So this is not exactly Action Stations,” said Grimes. “Not yet,” agreed Big Sister.

  Grimes showered and depilated. He dressed. He made his way to the control room after he had smoked a soothing pipe, knowing that the Baroness objected to the use of tobacco or other smouldering vegetable matter in her presence. She was in Control, waiting for him. She had not troubled to put on her usual, for this locality, insignialess uniform shirt and shorts. She was wearing a transparent rather than translucent white robe. She smelled of sleep. She regarded Grimes coldly and said, “You took your time, Captain.”

  Grimes said, “Big Sister told me that there was no immediate urgency, Your Excellency.”

  She said, “Big Sister told me the same. But I am the Owner, and your employer. I came straight here as soon as I was called—while you, obviously, sat down to enjoy your eggs and sausages and bacon, your buttered toast and honey. You might, at least, have had the decency to wipe the egg off your face.”

  The back of Grimes’ hand came up automatically to his mouth. Then he said stiffly, “I had no breakfast, Your Excellency. And, I repeat; I was told by Big Sister that there was no need to hurry.”

  Big Sister’s voice came from the transceiver. “That is correct. There was no need to hurry.”

  “Pah!” The Baroness was flushed with temper—all the way down to her navel, Grimes noted with clinical interest. “Who owns this ship, this not inconsiderable investment, may I ask? Neither of you! And now, Captain Grimes, it would seem that there is a target showing up in the screen of the Mass Proximity Indicator. According to extrapolation we shall close it—whatever it is—just over one hour from now. Big Sister has condescended to inform me that this target is probably a ship and that it is not proceeding under any form of interstellar drive. I think that we should investigate it.”

  Grimes said, “In any case, we are required to do so by Interstellar Law, Your Excellency.”

  “Are we? As far as this vessel is concerned, I am the law. Nonetheless I am curious. If I were not naturally so I should not have undertaken this cruise. And so, Captain, I shall be vastly obliged if you will bring us to a rendezvous with this unidentified vessel. Please inform me when you are ready to board.”

  She swept out of the control room.

  Grimes pulled his pipe and tobacco pouch out of his pocket, began to fill the charred, dottle-encrusted bowl. Big Sister stepped up the revolutions of an exhaust fan, said, “I shall deodorize before she returns.”

  Grimes said, “Thank you.” He lit up, peered through exhaled smoke into the tank of the Mass Proximity Indicator. In the sphere of darkness floated a tiny green spark, well away from the center. To a ship not proceeding under the space- and time-twisting Mannschenn Drive it would have been weeks distant. As it was . . . His fingers went to the controls to set up calibration and extra-potation but Big Sister saved him the trouble.

  “Contact fifty-three minutes, forty-five seconds from . . . now,” she told him. “If you are agreeable I shall shut down our Mannschenn Drive when ten kilometers from target, leaving you to make the final approach on inertial drive and to match velocities. As soon as we have broken through into the normal continuum I shall commence calling on NST radio and also make the Morse signal, What ship! by flashing light. As you are aware, attempts to communicate by Carlotti radio have not been successful.”

  “I wasn’t aware,” said Grimes, “but I am now.” He realized that he was being childishly sulky and asked, in as friendly a voice as he could manage, “Do you know of any ships missing, presumed lost, in this sector of Space, Big Sister? With the enormous fund of information in your data bank you might well do so . . .”

  She replied, “I have already extrapolated the assumed trajectories of missing vessels over the past two hundred years. What we see in our screen could not be any of them. Allowances must be made, however, for incomplete data.”

  “So this thing,” said Grimes, “could be an ancient gaussjammer or even one of the deep freeze ships . . .”

  “It could be,” said Big Sister, “anything.”

  Chapter 35

  There was little for Grimes to do until The Far Traveler had closed the strange ship, the derelict. Big Sister had his breakfast brought up to the control room. He enjoyed the meal—but it was only on very rare occasions that he did not appreciate his food. He used the Carlotti transceiver to put out his own call; it was not that he did not trust Big Sister to handle such matters but he liked to feel that he was earning his keep. There was no reply to his reiterated demand, “Far Traveler to vessel in my vicinity. Please identify yourself.” He stared out of the viewports along the bearing of the unidentified object. There was nothing to be seen, of course— nothing, that is, but the distant stars, each of which, viewed from a ship proceeding under interstellar drive, presenting the appearance of a pulsating iridescent spiral nebula.

  Then Big Sister said, “In precisely five minutes we shall be ten kilometers from the target. I have informed Her Excellency.”

  The Baroness came into Control, looking crisply efficient in her insignialess uniform. She asked, “Are you ready for the final approach, Captain?”

  “Yes,” said” Grimes. “Your Excellency.”

  “Permission to shut down Mannschenn Drive?” asked Big Sister formally.

  “Yes,” replied Grimes and the Baroness simultaneously. She glared at him. He turned away to hide his own expression. He went to his chair, strapped himself in. She did likewise. He held his hands poised over the controls although it was unlikely that he would have to use them yet; Big Sister was quite capable of carrying out the initial maneuvers by herself.

  The arhythmic beat of the inertial drive slowed, muttered into inaudibility. Even with the straps holding the two humans into their chairs the cessation of acceleration was immediately obvious. Then the thin, high whine of the ever-precessing rotors of the Mannschenn Drive changed frequency, deepened to a low humming, ceased. Colors sagged down the spectrum and perspective was briefly anarchic. There was disorientation, momentary nausea, evanescent hallucinatory experience. It seemed to Grimes that he was a child again, watching on the screen of the family playmaster a rendition of one of the old fairy tales, the story of the Sleeping Beauty. But there was something absurdly wrong. It was the Prince who was supine on the bed, under the dust and the cobwebs, and the Princess who was about to wake him with a kiss . . . And it was strange that this lady should bear such a striking resemblance to that aunt who had run away with the spaceman.

  “When you have quite finished dreaming, Captain Grimes,” said the Baroness coldly, “I shall be obliged if you will take charge of the operation.”

  The radar was on now, more accurate than the mass proximity indicator had been. Big Sister had done very well. The Far Traveler was a me
re 10.35 kilometers from the target, which was almost ahead. Even though the inertial drive was still shut down, the range was slowly closing. Grimes shifted his attention from the radar screen to that of the telescope. At maximum magnification he could just see the stranger—a very faint glimmer of reflected starlight against the blackness of interstellar space.

  He restarted the inertial drive. Acceleration pressed him down into the padding of his seat. He said, “Big Sister, put out a call on NST, please.”

  He heard her voice, more feminine than metallic but metallic nonetheless, “Far Traveler to vessel in my vicinity. Identify yourself. Please identify yourself.” There was no reply.

  Grimes was conscious of the flashing on the fringe of his vision; The Far Traveler’s powerful searchlight was being used as a signalling lamp. A succession of Morse “A”s, then, “What ship? What ship?” But there was only the intermittent glimmer of reflected radiance from the stranger.

  Big Sister ceased her futile flashing but maintained a steady beam. It was possible now to make out details in the telescope screen. The object was certainly a ship—but no vessel such as Grimes had ever seen, either in actuality or in photographs. The hull was a dull-gleaming ovoid covered with excrescenes, whip-like rods, sponsons and turrets. Communications antennae, thought Grimes, and weaponry. But none of those gun muzzles—if guns they were—were swinging to bring themselves to bear on The Far Traveler.

  Grimes made a minor adjustment of trajectory so as to run up alongside the stranger, began to reduce the yacht’s acceleration. His intention was to approach to within half a kilometer and then to match velocities, cutting the drive so that both vessels were falling free. He was thankful that neither the Baroness nor Big Sister was in the mood for back seat driving.

  He was thankful too soon. “Aren’t you liable to overshoot, Captain Grimes?” asked the lady.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “I do!” she snapped. “I think that Big Sister could do this better.”

  Surprisingly Big Sister said, “I have told you already, Your Excellency, that I am not yet programmed for this type of operation.”

  “I am looking forward,” said the Baroness nastily, “to meeting your programmers again.”

  And then Grimes was left alone. Doing a job of real space-manship he was quite happy. He would have been happier still if he could have smoked his pipe—but even he admitted that the foul male comforter was not essential. Finally, with the inertial drive shut down, he drew alongside the stranger. He applied a brief burst of reverse thrust. And then the two ships were, relative to each other, motionless—although they were falling through the interstellar immensities at many kilometers a second.

  He said to Big Sister, “Keep her as she goes, please.” He knew that the inertial drive would have to be used, now and again, to maintain station—transverse thrust especially to prevent the two ships from gravitating into possibly damaging contact. Had the stranger’s hull been as featureless as that of The Far Traveler it would not have mattered—but, with all those protrusions, it would have been like some sleek and foolishly amorous animal trying to make love to a porcupine.

  “And what do we do now?” asked the Baroness.

  “Board, Your Excellency,” said Grimes. “But, first of all, I shall send a team of robots to make a preliminary survey.”

  “Do that,” she said.

  They sat in their chairs, watched the golden figures, each using a personal propulsion unit, leap the fathomless gulf between the ships. They saw the gleaming, mechanical humanoids land on the stranger’s shell plating, carefully avoiding the antennae, the turrets. Then the robots spread out over the hull—like, thought Grimes, yellow apes exploring a metal forest. Save for two of them they moved out of sight from the yacht but the big viewscreen displayed what they were seeing during their investigation.

  One of them, obviously, was looking down at what could only be an airlock door, a wide circle of uncluttered, dull-gleaming metal, its rim set down very slightly from the surrounding skin. At a word from Grimes this robot turned the lamp in its forehead up to full intensity but there was no sign of any external controls for opening the valve.

  Another robot had made its way forward and was looking in through the control room viewports. The compartment was untenanted, looked, somehow, as though it had been untenanted for a very long time. There were banks of instrumentation of alien design that could have been anything. There were chairs—and whoever (whatever) had sat in them must have approximated very very closely to the human form, although the back of each was bisected by a vertical slit. For tails? Why not? Grimes had heard the opinion expressed more than once that evolution had taken a wrong turn when Man’s ancestors lost their prehensile caudal appendages. But he knew of no spacefaring race that possessed these useful adjuncts to hands.

  He said, “We shall have to cut our way in. Big Sister, will you send a couple of robots across with the necessary equipment? And have my stewardess get my spacesuit ready.”

  “And mine,” said the Baroness.

  “Your Excellency,” said Grimes, “somebody must remain in charge of the ship.”

  “And why should it be me, Captain? In any case, this isn’t one of your Survey Service tubs with a computer capable of handling only automatic functions. Big Sister’s brain is as good as yours. At least.”

  Grimes felt his prominent ears burning as he flushed angrily. But he said, “Very well, Your Excellency.” He turned to the transceiver—he still found it necessary to think of Big Sister’s intelligence as inhabiting some or other piece of apparatus—and said, “You’ll mind the store during our absence. If we get into trouble take whatever action you think fit.”

  The electronic entity replied ironically, “Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

  The Baroness sighed audibly. Grimes knew that she was blaming him for the sense of humor that Big Sister seemed to have acquired over recent weeks, was equating him with the sort of person who deliberately teaches coarse language to a parrot or a lliri or any of the other essentially unintelligent life-forms prized, by some, for their mimicry of human speech. Not that Big Sister was unintelligent . . . He was tempted to throw in his own two bits’ worth with a crack about a jesting pilot but thought better of it.

  The robot stewardess had Grimes’ spacesuit ready for him when he went down to his quarters, assisted him into the armor. He decided to belt on a laser pistol—such a weapon could also be used as a tool. He also took along a powerful flashlight; a laser handgun could be used as such but there was always the risk of damaging whatever it was aimed at.

  The Baroness—elegantly feminine even to her space armor—was waiting for him by the airlock. She had a camera buckled to her belt. With her were two of the general purpose robots, each hung around with so much equipment that they looked like animated Christmas trees.

  Grimes and his employer passed through the airlock together. She did not, so far as he could tell, panic at her exposure to the unmeasurable emptiness of interstellar space. He gave her full marks for that. She seemed to have read his thoughts and said, “It’s all right, Captain. I’ve been outside before. I know the drill.”

  Her suit propulsion unit flared briefly; it was as though she had suddenly sprouted a fiery tail. She sped across the gap between the two ships, executed a graceful turnover in mid-passage so that she could decelerate. She landed between two gun turrets. Grimes heard her voice from his helmet radio, “What are you waiting for?”

  He did not reply; he was delaying his own jump until the two GP robots had emerged from the airlock, wanted to be sure that they did so without damaging any of the equipment with which they were burdened. As soon as they were safely out he jetted across to join the Baroness. He landed about a meter away from her.

  He was pleased to discover that the shell plating was of some ferrous alloy; the magnetic soles of his boots, once contact had been made, adhered. He said, “Let us walk around to the airlock, Your Excellency.”

  Sh
e replied, “And what else did we come here for?”

  Grimes lapsed into sulky silence, led the way over the curvature of the hull, avoiding as far as possible the many projections. The side on which they had landed was brilliantly illuminated by The Far Traveler’s searchlights but the other side was dark save for the working lamps of the robots—and their sensors did not require the same intensity of light as does the human eye.

  At an order from Grimes the robots turned up their lights. It was fairly easy then to make a tortuous way through and around the protrusions—the turrets, the whip antennae, the barrels of guns and missile launchers. This ship, although little bigger than a Survey Service Star Class destroyer, packed the wallop of a Constellation Class battle cruiser. Either she was a not so minor miracle of automation or her crew—and who had they been—must have lived in conditions of Spartan discomfort.

  Grimes and the Baroness came to the airlock door. The robots stood around it, directing the beams of their lights down to the circular valve. Grimes walked carefully on to the dull-gleaming surface, fell to his knees for a closer look, grateful that the designer of his suit had incorporated magnetic pads into every joint of the armor. The plate was utterly featureless. There were no studs to push, no holes into which fingers or a key might be inserted. Yet he was reluctant to order the working robots to go to it with their cutting lasers. He had been too long a spaceman, had too great a respect for ships. But, he decided, there was no other way to gain ingress.

  One of the robots handed him a greasy crayon. He described with it a circle on the smooth plate then rose to his feet and walked back, making way for the golden giant holding the heavy duty laser cutter. The beam of coherent light was invisible but metal glowed—dull red to orange, to yellow, to white, to blue—where it impinged. Metal glowed but did not flow and there was no cloud of released molecules to flare into incandescence.