The Rim Gods

by A Bertram Chandler

  "And who belongs to these?" asked Grimes.

  "Me," she replied.

  "Is marine biology your hobby?"

  "I'm afraid not, Commodore. I just keep these because they're ornamental. They add something to the decor."

  "Yes," he agreed. "Starfish." He walked to a bench where there was an intricacy of gleaming wire. "And what the hell's this?"

  "A mobile," she told him. "Jeff Petersen, the met. officer, has artistic ambitions."

  "And where is Mr. Peterson?"

  "He's away. The crowd setting up the weather control station on Mount Llayilla asked Captain Stacey for the loan of him."

  "Hmm. Well, I can't help feeling, Miss Davis, that if you and Mr. Peterson devoted more time to your work and less time to your hobbies you'd give incoming ships far better service."

  She flared. "We never play around with our hobbies in our employer's time. And there's so little social life here that we must have something to occupy us when we're off duty."

  "I'm not denying that, Miss Davis."

  She switched on that smile again. "Why don't you call me Lynn, Commodore? Everybody else does."

  He found himself smiling in reply. "Why not, Lynn?"

  "Isn't that better? And, talking of social life, I'd like it very much if you came to my place some evening for dinner." She grinned rather than smiled this time. "I'm a much better cook than Mrs. Stacey."

  That wouldn't be hard, thought Grimes. The Port Captain's wife, as he had learned that morning at breakfast, couldn't even fry an egg properly.

  "Try to keep an evening open for me," she said.

  "I'll try," he promised. He looked at his watch. "But I must go. I have an appointment with the Ambassador."

  * * *

  The Confederacy's Ambassador was a thin, languid and foppish man. In spite of the disparity in physical appearance he was cut from the same cloth as Captain Stacey. He was one of the barely competent, not quite bad enough to be fired but too lazy and too disinterested to be trusted with any major appointment. He drawled, "I can't order you not to stay, old man, any more than I can order you to stay. Let's face it—you pile on a few more G's (as you spacefaring types put it) than I do. But I still think that you're wasting your time. The natives'll have to pull their socks up, that's all. And tighten their belts for the time being—not that they have any belts to tighten. Ha, ha! You may have been first on this world, Commodore, but you haven't lived with these people as I have. They're a lazy, shiftless bunch. They won't stir a finger to help themselves as long as the Confederacy's handy to do it for them."

  "And if the Confederacy won't," said Grimes flatly, "there's the Empire of Waverley. Or the Shakespearians. Or the Federation. Even the Shaara might find this planet interesting."

  "Those communistic bumblebees? It might do the Mellisans a world of good if they did take over." He raised a slim, graceful wrist and looked at his watch. "Old Wunnaara's due about now. I don't encourage him—it takes days to get the fishy stink out of the Embassy—but he insisted."

  "You could," pointed out Grimes, "have a room specially fitted for the reception of local dignitaries, something that duplicates, as far as possible, the conditions that they're used to."

  "You don't understand, old man. It's taken me years, literally, to get this shack fitted and decorated the way that it should be. The battles I've had to fight with Appropriations! It's all a matter of keeping up a front, old man, showing the flag and all that. . . ."

  A smartly uniformed Marine entered the elegant, too elegant salon.

  "Chief Wunnaara, your Excellency."

  "Show him in, Sergeant. Show him in. And attend to the air-conditioning, will you?"

  Wunnaara was dressed for the occasion. His ungainly (on dry land) body was clad in a suit of what looked like coarse sacking, and riding high on a complicated harness-like framework was a tank, the contents of which sloshed as he walked. From this tank depended narrow tubes, connected to his clothing at various points. They dripped—both upon the cloth and upon the Ambassador's carpet. A goggled mask, water-filled, covered his eyes and the upper part of his face. The smell of fish was very evident.

  "Your Excellency," he mewed. "Meelongee, Grimes Wannarbo, meelongee."

  "Greetings," replied the Ambassador, and, "Meelongee," replied Grimes.

  "Your Excellency, Grimes Wannarbo has agreed to help. He come with me now, I show him trouble."

  "Do you want to go through with this, old man?" the Ambassador asked Grimes. "Really?"

  "Of course. Would you know of any scuba outfits on this island? I've already asked Captain Stacey, and he says that the only ones here are privately owned."

  "That is correct, Commodore. I could ask the sergeant to lend you his."

  "Not necessary, Grimes Wannarbo," interjected the chief. "Already waiting on beach we have ship, what you call submarine."

  "Good," said Grimes.

  "You'd trust yourself to that contraption?" demanded the Ambassador in a horror-stricken voice. "It'll be one of the things that they use to take stores and equipment down to their farms."

  "They work, don't they?"

  "Yes, old man. But . . ."

  "But I'd have thought, on a world like this, that the Ambassador would have his own, private submarine."

  "I'm a diplomat, old man, not a sailor."

  Grimes shrugged. He said formally. "With your permission, your Excellency, I shall accompany Chief Wunnaara."

  "Permission granted, old man. Don't get your feet wet."

  * * *

  The submarine had been pulled up on the beach, onto a ramp that had been constructed there for that purpose, that ran from the water to a low warehouse. Apart from its wheeled undercarriage it was a conventional enough looking craft, torpedo-shaped, with a conning tower amidships and rudder and screw propeller aft, with hydroplanes forward and amidships. A wooden ladder had been placed on the ramp to give access to the conning tower. Wunnaara gestured to Grimes to board first. The Commodore clambered up the ladder with a certain lack of agility; the spacing of the rungs was adapted to the Mellisan, not the human, frame. He had the same trouble with the metal steps leading into the submarine's interior.

  When he was down in what was obviously the craft's control room he looked about him curiously. It was easy enough to get a general idea of what did what to which; the Mellisans, with no written language of their own, had adopted Terran English to their requirements. There were depth gauges, steering, hydroplane and engine controls, a magnetic compass. Inside an aluminum rather than a steel hull it should, thought Grimes, function quite satisfactorily. What had him puzzled was a bundle of taut bladders, evidently taken from some sea plant. Beside them, in a rack on the bulkhead, was a sharp knife. And he did not quite approve of the flowerpot that was hanging to one side of the steering gear, in which was growing a vividly blue, fernlike plant. He recalled the conversation that he had had with Lynn Davis on the subject of hobbies.

  Apart from these rather peculiar fittings the little ship was almost as she had been when built to Mellisan specifications at the Seacraft Yard on Thule: the original electric motors, a big bank of heavy-duty power cells, a capacious cargo hold (now empty) and no accommodation whatsoever. He had noticed, on his way down through the conning tower, that the compartment, with its big lookout ports, could still be used as an air lock.

  Wunnaara joined him, accompanied by another native dressed as he was. The younger Mellisan went straight to the wheel, from which all the other controls were easily accessible. Wunnaara asked Grimes to return with him to the conning tower. The upper hatch, he saw, was shut now, but there was an unrestricted view all around from the big ports. And although the lower hatch remained open there was ample room, on the annular platform, to walk around it. Wunnaara yelped some order down through the opening. Slowly at first, then faster, the submarine started to move, sliding astern down the ramp on her wheels. She slipped into the water with hardly any disturbance, and when she was afloat at least half
of her hull was above the surface. Electric motors hummed and she backed away from the beach, her head swinging to starboard as she did so. She came around well and easily, and when she was broadside on to the shore, starting to roll uncomfortably in the swell, the coxswain put the engines ahead and the wheel hard over to complete the swing. Then, after surprisingly little fuss and bother, she was headed seaward, pitching easily, her straight wake pearly white on the blue water under the noonday sun.

  * * *

  A red marker buoy indicated the location of the pearl beds. Quietly, without any fuss, the ship submerged, dropping down below the surface as her ballast tanks were filled. Grimes went back to the control room; always keenly interested in ships—the ships of the sea as well as the ships of space—he wanted to see how this submersible was handled. He was alarmed when, as he completed his cautious descent down the ladder, the coxswain snatched that nasty looking knife from the rack on the bulkhead. But the Mellisan ignored him, slashed swiftly and expertly at one of the seaweed bladders. It deflated with a loud hiss. Behind Grimes, Wunnaara hooted with laughter. When he had the Commodore's attention he pointed to the absurd potted plant hanging almost over the compass. Its fronds had turned scarlet, but were already slowly changing back to blue. Grimes chuckled as he realized what was being done. This was air regeneration at its most primitive, but still effective. These submarines, when built, had been fitted with excellent air regeneration plants but, no doubt, the Mellisans preferred their own. The oxygen released from the bladder brought with it a strong smell of wet seaweed which, to them, would be preferable to the odorless gas produced by the original apparatus.

  Grimes watched the coxswain until Wunnaara called him back to the conning tower. He was impressed by the Mellisan's competence. He was doing things that in a human operated submarine would have required at least four men. Could it be, he wondered, that a real sea man must, of necessity, be also a first-class seaman? He toyed, half humorously, with the idea of recruiting a force of Mellisan mercenaries, to be hired out to those few nations—on those few worlds where there was still a multiplicity of nations—which still relied upon sea power for the maintenance of their sovereignty.

  Back in the conning tower he forgot his not-quite-serious money-making schemes. The submarine—as he already knew from his inspection of the depth gauges—was not running deep, but neither was she far from the sandy bottom. Ahead, astern and on either side were the pearl beds, the orderly rows of the giant bivalves. Among them worked Mellisans—who, like similar beings on other planets, including Earth, were able to stay under water for a very long time on one lungful of air. Some of them, explained Wunnaara, were planting the irritant in the mantle of the shellfish. Others were harvesting the pearls from mollusks that had been treated months previously. These were taken to the underwater depot for cleaning and sorting and, eventually, would be loaded into the submarine for carriage to the spaceport. But, said the Chief, this would be a poor harvest. . . .

  From his vantage point he conned the ship, yelping orders down to the coxswain. Finally they were drifting over a long row of opened bivalves. Considerable force had been employed in this opening, the not typical Mellisan care. They could extract the pearl without inflicting permanent injury upon the creature inside the paired shells; in many cases here the upper valve had been completely shattered. In most cases no more than a few shreds of tattered flesh remained. And in all cases what had been a pearl was now only a scattering of opalescent dust.

  Now the submarine was approaching the high wire net fence that had been erected to protect the pearl farm. It looked stout enough to stop a ship of this class—but something had come through it. Something had uprooted metal posts embedded in concrete; something had snapped wire rope like so much sewing thread. It was not something that Grimes was at all keen to meet, not even in the comparative safety of this well-designed and -built submersible.

  "You see?" mewed the Chief. "You see, Grimes Wannarbo?"

  "Yes. I see."

  "Then what do, Grimes Wannarbo? What do?" Under stress, the old Mellisan's English tended to deteriorate.

  "I . . . I don't know. I shall have to see some of the starfish. Have you any in captivity, or any dead ones?"

  "No. No can catch. No can kill."

  There was a steady thumping sound, transmitted through the water, amplified by the hull plating.

  "Alarm!" Wunnaara cried. "Alarm! Alarm!" He shouted something in his own language to the coxswain. The submarine changed course, her motors screaming shrilly as speed was increased to full—or a little over. She skimmed over the flat sandy bottom, raising a great cloud of disturbed particles astern of her.

  Ahead there was a commotion of some kind—a flurry of dark, almost human figures, an occasional explosion of silvery air bubbles, a flashing of metallic-seeming tentacles, a spreading stain in the water that looked like a frightened horse as she came full astern—and then she hung there, almost motionless, on the outskirts.

  There were half a dozen of the . . . things, the starfish, and a dozen Mellisans. Through the now murky water could be seen the wreckage of practically an entire row of the bivalves—shattered shells, crushed pearls, torn, darkly oozing flesh. The odd thing about it all was the gentleness of the marauders. They seemed to be trying to escape—and they were succeeding—but at the same time were avoiding the infliction of serious injury upon the guardians of the beds.

  And they were such flimsy things. Or they looked flimsy, as though they had been woven from fragile metallic lace. They looked flimsy, but they were not. One of them was trapped in a net of heavy wire handled by three Mellisans. Momentarily it was bunched up, and then it . . . expanded, and the wires snapped in a dozen places. One of them received a direct hit from a harpoon—and the weapon, its point blunted and broken, fell harmlessly to the bottom.

  They were free and clear now, all of them, looking more like gigantic silvery snowflakes than living beings. They were free and clear, swimming toward the breached barrier, their quintuple, feathery arms flailing the water. They were free and clear, and although the Mellisans gave chase there was nothing that anybody could do about them.

  "You see?" said the Chief.

  "I see," said Grimes.

  He saw, too, what he would have to do. He would make his own report, of course, to Rim Runners' head office, recommending that something be done on a government level to maintain the flow of commerce between Mellise and the Confederacy. And he would have to try to persuade that pitiful nong of an ambassador to recommend to his bosses that a team qualified to handle the problem—say marine biologists and professional fishermen from Thule—be sent at once to Mellise. But it would not be at once, of course. Nobody knew better than Grimes how slowly the tide runs through official channels.

  But. . . .

  What could he, Grimes do? Personally, with his own two hands, with his own brain?

  There had been something oddly familiar about the appearance of those giant Astersidea, about their actions. There had been something that evoked memories of the distant past, and something much more recent. What was it? Lynn Davis' gaudy pets in the brightly lit aquarium? They swam, of course, and these giant mutants (if mutants they were) were swimmers, but there the similarity ceased.

  "What do, Grimes Wannarbo?" Wunnaara was insistent. "What do?"

  "I . . . I don't know," replied the Commodore. "But I'll do something," he promised.

  But what?

  * * *

  That night, back in his room in the port captain's residence, he did his homework. He had managed to persuade Captain Stacey to let him have the files on all Rim Runners' personnel employed on Mellise, and also had borrowed from the Ambassador's library all six volumes of Trantor's very comprehensive Mellisan Marine Life. (Trantor should have been here now, but Trantor was dead, drowned two years ago in a quite stupid and unnecessary accident in the Ultimate Sea, on Ultimo, a body of water little larger than a lake.) Grimes skimmed through Trantor's work first, paying par
ticular attention to the excellent illustrations. Nothing, nothing at all, resembled the creatures that he had seen, although most of the smaller starfish, like the ones he had seen in Lynn Davis' tank, subsisted by making forcible entry into the homes of unfortunate bivalves.

  Then he turned to the files.

  About half the spaceport employees were true Rim Worlders—born out on the Rim. The other half—like Grimes himself—were not, although all of them were naturalized citizens. Judging from the educational qualifications and service records of all of them, none of them would be capable of inducing a mutation. Grimes had hoped to turn up a biological engineer, but he was disappointed. And biological engineering is not the sort of thing that anybody takes up as a hobby; in addition to the years of study and training there is the quite expensive license to practice to obtain, and the qualifications for that are moral rather than academic or practical. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a permanent fixture in Man's mythology.