To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga

by A Bertram Chandler

  “And how many years will it take us?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Oh, I forgot. After you’ve fixed the Carlotti set you fix the mini-Mannschenn.”

  Chapter 9

  There was a Radio Technician’s Manual in the boat’s book locker. Grimes got it out. Unluckily the writer of it had assumed that anybody reading it would possess at least a smattering of knowledge concerning Deep Space radio. Grimes was not such a person. He knew that the Carlotti equipment propagated signals which, somehow, ignored the normal three dimensions of Space and, by taking a shortcut of some kind, arrived at the receiving station, no matter how many light years distant, practically instantaneously. In any ship that he had been in the thing had worked. There had always been fully qualified officers to see that it worked. Had the complete boarding party been in the boat when she pushed off from Skink there would have been such an officer among her crew. (But, thought Grimes, had he taken the full boarding party with him he would not have been alone with Una.)

  He and the girl puzzled over the text and the diagrams. They could make neither head nor tail of the latter, but they discovered that printed circuit tray #3 of NST transceiver Mark VII could be substituted for tray #1 of Carlotti transceiver Mark IVA, and so on and so on. It began to look as though Una’s idea would work.

  Before commencing operations he started up the inertial drive. He was not, as yet, going anywhere in particular, but physical work is more easily carried out in a gravitational field—or under acceleration—than in free fall conditions. Then, with Una assisting, he pulled the circuit trays out of the Carlotti set. Number one, obviously, would have to be replaced. That presented no problem. Number two was obviously nonfunctional. Number two from the NST transceiver was the recommended substitute. Number three appeared to be undamaged. Number four was in almost as big a mess as number one—and none of the NST circuits could be used in its stead.

  So, soldering it had to be.

  Grimes carried the tray to the little workshop that shared space with the boat’s power plant and propulsive units, put it on the bench. He had the Manual open at the proper page, thought that he would be able to patch things up. He was a messy solderer and soon discovered that clothing is worn for protection as well as for adornment or motives of prudery. Una—who was annoyingly amused—applied first aid; then Grimes got into his longjohns before continuing.

  When he was finished—a few hours and several burns later—the tray still looked a mess, but Grimes was reasonably confident that the circuits were not anywhere shorted. He carried the tray back to the transceiver—which had been set up in its proper position—and slid it carefully into place. He switched on. The pilot lights lit up. There would be neither transmission nor reception, however, until the antenna was remounted and operational.

  They had a hasty meal, then returned to the workshop. The antenna was a metal Moebius Strip, oval rather than circular, on a universal bearing which, in turn, was at the head of a driving shaft. The shaft had been snapped just below the bearing, and the antenna itself had been bent out of its elliptical configuration. Fortunately there was among the motor spares a steel rod of circular section and exactly the right diameter. It had to be shortened by about five centimeters, but with the tools available that was no hardship. The broken shaft was removed from the transceiver, the new one shipped. The antenna—back in shape, Grimes hoped—was, on its bearing, secured to the projecting end of the shaft with a set screw.

  “Will it work?” asked Una skeptically.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Grimes told her. He switched on again, set the Direction Finding controls to hunt. In theory (and, hopefully, in practice) the aerial array would now automatically line up on the strongest incoming Carlotti signal.

  The shaft began to rotate slowly, the Moebius Strip antenna wobbled on its universal bearing. It seemed to be questing as it turned. Abruptly it steadied, although still turning about its long axis. From the speaker came not the Morse sequence of a Beacon but something that sounded like somebody speaking. It was in no language that either of them knew, and the voice did not sound human. Suddenly it stopped, but Grimes had noted relative bearing and altitude.

  He looked at Una, his eyebrows raised. She looked at him dubiously.

  “Something . . .” he said slowly.

  “Not . . . somebody?”

  “All right. Somebody. Somebody capable of constructing—or, at least, using—Deep Space communications equipment.”

  “Should we put out a call now that this contraption’s working?”

  “No,” he decided. He laughed harshly. “I like to see whom I’m talking to before I talk to them. We’ll let the direction finder go on hunting for a while. Maybe it will pick up something a little more promising. . . .”

  But it did not.

  At intervals of exactly twenty-three minutes and fourteen seconds it steadied on the transmission in the unknown language, on the same relative bearing.

  Grimes remembered an engineer officer in a big ship in which he had served as a junior watchkeeper. He had watched this gentleman while he overhauled the mini-Mannschenn of one of the cruiser’s boats. It had been a job requiring both patience and a remarkably steady hand. After a spindle had slipped out of its bearing for the fifteenth time the specialist had sworn, “Damn it all, I’m an engineer, not a bloody watchsmith!” He then went on to say, “The ship’s Mannschenn Drive unit, with all its faults, is a machine. This fucking thing’s only an instrument!” He told the little story to Una. She said, “That’s no excuse. Somebody assembled it once. You can assemble it again. Nothing seems to be damaged. It’s just a question of getting all the rotors turning and precessing freely.”

  “Quite simple, in fact.”

  “Quite simple,” she said, ignoring the sarcasm.

  “Perhaps you’d like to try.”

  “I’m a policewoman, not a watchsmith.”

  “Ha, ha. Now. . . . Get in there, damn you!” Click. “That’s it.”

  “You’ve a little wheel left over,” she pointed out. “And you’ll have to remove the one you just got in to get it back.”

  “Not if I precess it . . . so. . . .”

  “One of the other rotors has fallen out now.” Then she went away and left him to it, and without his audience he got along much better. At last the reassembled mini-Mannschenn was ready for use. It looked like a complex, glittering toy, an assemblage of tiny, gleaming flywheels, every axle of which was set at an odd angle to all of the others. Once it was started the ever-precessing, ever-tumbling rotors would drag the boat and its crew down and through the dark dimensions, through a warped continuum in which space and time were meaningless concepts. He touched one of the rotors tentatively with a cautious forefinger. It spun on its almost frictionless bearings and the others turned in sympathy. Although there was, as yet, almost no precession, the shining wheels glimmered and winked on the very edge of invisibility.

  He called out, “We’re in business!”

  “Then get the show on the road,” retorted Una. “We’ve been sitting here on our arses, doing sweet fuck all, for too bloody long!”

  Grimes used the single directional gyroscope to line the boat up on the last bearing from which the mysterious call had come. Then he switched on the mini-Mannschenn. To judge from the brief temporal disorientation, the sensation of déjà vu, the thing was working perfectly.

  Chapter 10

  At intervals of exactly twenty-three minutes and fourteen seconds the signal continued to come through. It was the same message every time, the same words spoken in the same high-pitched, unhuman voice. Dizzard waling torpet droo. Contabing blee. Contabing uwar. Contabing dinzin. Waling torpet, waling droo. Tarfelet, tarfelet, tarfelet. It was in no language that either of them knew or, even, knew about.

  There were other signals, weaker, presumably more distant. Some were spoken, in the same or in another unknown language. Some were coded buzzings. The Carlotti transceiver was fitted with a visiscre
en, but this was useless. Either these people—whoever they were—did not use visiscreens, or the system they employed used a different principle from that used by humans.

  The boat ran on, and on. Soon it became obvious that they were heading for a star, a G type sun. That star would possess a family of planets, and it must be from one of these that the signals were emanating. The interstellar drive was shut down briefly while a navigational check was made. The target star, when viewed through the control cabin binoculars, showed as a disc. This concurred with the strength of the signal now being received.

  The drive was restarted, but Grimes stood in cautiously now. Every twenty-three minutes and fourteen seconds he was obliged to shut down again to correct trajectory. The source of the signal was, obviously, in orbit about the sun. That star was now almost as big as Sol seen from Earth, its limbs subtending an angle of over fifty degrees. With the final alteration of course it was broad on the boat’s starboard beam.

  The interstellar drive was now shut down permanently. Ahead gleamed the world from which the signals were being sent, a tiny half moon against the darkness. Slowly it expanded as the little spacecraft, its inertial drive hammering flat out, overhauled it in its orbit. “A stern chase is a long chase,” philosophized Grimes, “but it’s better than a head-on collision!”

  It was a barren world, they saw, as they drew closer, an apparently dead one. There were no city lights gleaming from the night hemisphere. There were clouds in the atmosphere, but, glimpsed through them were neither the blues of seas nor the greens of vegetation; neither were there polar icecaps nor the sparkling white chains of snow-covered mountain peaks. This was odd, as the planet lay well within the ecosphere.

  Before going into orbit about it Grimes decided on a resumption of clothing. Anything might happen, he said, and he did not want to be caught with his pants down. “Or off,” said Una, struggling into her own longjohns.

  “Or off. Have you checked the boat’s armament?”

  “Such as it is. Four one millimeter laser pistols, fully charged. Four ten millimeter projectile pistols, each with a full magazine of fifteen rounds. Spare ammo for the popguns—one eighty rounds.”

  “Hardly enough to start a war with,” said Grimes, zippering up his spacesuit. He put on his helmet, but left the faceplate open.

  “Or enough to finish one with?” asked Una quietly. She beckoned him to the big, mounted binoculars. “Look down there, through that break in the clouds.”

  He looked. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I see what you mean.” Before the dim vapors swept over the patch of clarity he was able to catch a glimpse of formations too regular to be natural in an expanse of red desert, a geometrical pattern that marked what could have been once the streets of a city. Then, from the speaker of the Carlotti transceiver, came the by-this-time-too-familiar words: Dizzard waling torpet droo . . .

  “Almost below us,” whispered Una.

  “Then we’re going down.” He managed a grin. “At least we shall be adhering to Survey Service S.O.P.; that city’s almost right on the terminator. Our landing will be very shortly after sunrise.”

  He eased himself into the pilot’s chair. Una took her place by his side. He put the boat into a steep, powered dive. The shell plating heated up appreciably as they plunged into and through the outer atmosphere. Abruptly the viewpoints were obscured by swirling masses of brown cloud, evil and ominous, but Una reported that, so far, there was no marked increase in radioactivity.

  The boat fell rapidly, buffeted now and again by turbulence. She broke through the overcast. The city was almost directly beneath them, its once tall, ruined buildings standing up like guttered candles. Dust devils played among and between the half-melted stumps.

  There was a central plaza, a circular expanse surrounded by the remains of once-proud towers. On the sunlit side of this something gleamed metallically, a conical structure, apparently undamaged. A ship . . . thought Grimes. Then, I hope the bastards don’t open fire on us. Una voiced the same thought aloud.

  He said, “If they were going to shoot they’d have blown us out of the sky as soon as we entered the atmosphere. . . .”

  Dizzard waling torpet droo . . . came deafeningly from the Carlotti speaker. Contabing blee . . . “I wish they’d change the record!” shouted Una. Waling torpet. Waling droo. Tarfelet, tarfelet, tarfelet. . . .

  “Is there anybody alive to change the record?” he asked.

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Just that. But I’ll land, just the same. We should be able to find something out.”

  He brought the boat down to the fine, red dust, about two hundred meters from the ship.

  They snapped shut the visors of their helmets, tested the suit radios. The boat contained equipment for sampling an atmosphere, but this they did not use. It would have taken too much time, and it seemed unlikely that the air of this world would be breathable, although the level of radioactivity was not high. Una belted on one laser pistol and one projectile pistol, each of which had a firing stud rather than a trigger so it could be used while wearing a spacesuit. Grimes followed her example.

  They stood briefly in the airlock chamber while pressures equalized—that outside the boat was much lower than that inside—and then, as soon as the outer door opened, jumped down to the ground. Their booted feet kicked up a flurry of fine, red dust, then sank to the ankle. They looked around them. The view from ground level was even more depressing than that from the air had been. The gaping windows in the tall, truncated buildings were like the empty eye sockets of skulls. The omnipresent red dust lay in drifts and the beginnings of dunes. From one such a tangle of bleached bones protruded, uncovered by the wind.

  “The End of the World . . .” murmured Una, almost inaudibly.

  “The end of a world,” corrected Grimes, but it wasn’t much of an improvement.

  He began to walk slowly toward the huge, metal cone. It had been there a long time. Although its surface still held a polish it had been dulled by erosion, pitted by the abrasive contact, over many years, of wind-driven particles of dust. It sat there sullenly, its base buried by the red drifts. There were complexes of antennae projecting from it toward its apex, what could have been radar scanners, but they were motionless. At the very top it was ringed with big, circular ports, behind which no movement could be detected.

  The wind was rising now, whining eerily through and around the ruined towers, audible even through the helmets of the spacesuits, smoothing over the footprints that they had left as they walked from the boat. The surface of the dust stirred and shifted like something alive, clutching at their ankles.

  “Let’s get out of here!” said Una abruptly.

  “No, not yet. There must be an airlock door somewhere toward the base of that ship.”

  “If it is a ship.”

  “And we should explore the buildings.”

  “What’s that?” she demanded.

  Grimes stared at the motionless antennae. Had she seen something?

  “No. Not there. In the sky. Can’t you hear it?”

  There was a pervasive humming noise beating down from above, faint at first, then louder and louder. Grimes looked up. There was nothing to be seen at first—nothing, that is, but the ragged, dun clouds that were driving steadily across the yellow sky. And then, in a break, he spotted something. It was distant still, but big—and seemingly insubstantial. It was a glittering latticework, roughly globular in form. It was dropping fast.

  “Back to the boat!” Grimes ordered.

  He ran; she ran. It was a nightmarish journey. Every step was hampered by the clinging dust and the weight of the wind, into which they were directly heading, slowed their progress to little better than a crawl. And all the time that steady humming sounded louder and ever louder in their ears. They dare not look up; to have done so would have wasted precious time.

  At last they reached the airlock. While Una was clambering into the chamber Grimes managed a hasty look up and back. The thi
ng was close now, a skeleton globe inside which the shapes of enigmatic machines spun and glittered. From its lower surface dangled writhing tentacles, long, metallic ropes. The tip of one was reaching out for Grimes’ shoulder. Hastily he drew his laser pistol, thumbed it to wasteful, continuous emission and slashed with the beam. Five meters of severed tentacle fell to the ground and threshed in the dust like an injured earthworm. He slashed again, this time into the body of the thing. There was a harsh crackle and a blue flare, a puff of gray smoke.

  He jumped into the chamber. It seemed an eternity before the foul air of the planet was expelled, the clean atmosphere of the boat admitted. He stood there beside Una, unable to see what was happening outside, waiting for the bolt that would destroy them utterly.

  But it did not come.

  The inner door opened. He ran clumsily to the control cabin, hampered by his suit. He looked through the starboard ports, saw that the skeleton sphere had landed, was between the boat and the conical spaceship. It seemed to be having troubles, lifting a meter or so then falling back to the dust. But its tentacles were extending, a full dozen of them, and all of them writhing out in only one direction, toward the boat. The nearer of them were less than a meter away, the tips of them uplifted like the heads of snakes.

  Grimes was thankful that he had left the inertial drive ticking over; there was no time lost in restarting it. The boat went up like a bullet from a gun, driving through the dun clouds in seconds, through the last of the yellow atmosphere, into the clean emptiness of Space.

  At last he felt that he could relax. He missed his pipe, which he had left aboard Skink. He thought that he would be justified—as soon as he was satisfied that there was no pursuit—in breaking out the medicinal brandy.

  “What was all that about?” asked Una in a subdued voice.