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"And who," demanded Commodore Grimes, "will it be this time?" He added, "Or what?"
"I don't know, sir, I'm sure," simpered Miss Walton.
Grimes looked at his new secretary * with some distaste. There was no denying that she was far more photogenic than her predecessor, and that she possessed a far sweeter personality. But sweetness and prettiness are not everything. He bit back a sarcastic rejoinder, looked again at the signal that the girl had fust handed him. It was from a ship, a vessel with the unlikely name of Piety. And it was not a word in some alien language that could mean anything—the name of the originator of the message was Terran enough, Anglo-Terran at that. William Smith. And after that prosaic apel-lation there was his title—but that was odd. It was not the usual Master, Captain, Officer Commanding or whatever. It was, plainly and simply, Rector.
Piety … Rector… That ship's name, and that title of rank, had an archaic ring to them. Grimes had always been a student of naval history, and probably knew more about the vessels that had sailed Earth's oceans in the dim and distant past than anybody on the Rim Worlds and, come to that, the vast majority of people on the home planet itself. He remembered that most of the ancient sailing ships had been given religious names. He remembered, too, that rector had once been the shipmaster's official title.
So what was this ship coming out to the Rim, giving her ETA, details of last clearance, state of health on board and all the rest of it? Some cog, some caravel, some galleass? Grimes smiled at his own fancy. Nonetheless, strange ships, very strange ships, had drifted out to the Rim.
"Miss Walton…* he said.
"Yes, Commodore," she replied brightly.
"This Piety … see what details Lloyd's Register has on her."
"Very good, sir."
The Commodore—rugged, stocky, short, iron-gray hair over a deeply tanned and seamed face, ears that in spite of suggestions made by two wives and several mistresses still protruded—paced the polished floor of his office while the little blonde punched the buttons that would actuate the Port Forlorn robot librarian. Legally, he supposed, the impending arrival of the Piety was the port captain's pigeon. Grimes was Astronautical Superintendent of Rim Runners, the Confederacy's shipping line. But he was also the officer commanding the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve and, as such, was concerned with matters of security and defense. He wished that Sonya, his wife, were available so that he could talk things over with her. She, before her marriage to him, had held the rank of Commander in the Intelligence branch of the Interstellar Federation's Survey Service and, when it came to mysteries and secrets of any kind, displayed the aptitudes of a highly intelligent ferret. But Sonya, after declaring that another week on Lorn would have her climbing up the wallpaper, had taken off for a long vacation—Waver-ley, Caribbea, Atlantia and points inward—by herself. She, when she returned, would be sorry to have missed whatever odd adventures the arrival of this queerly named ship presaged—and Grimes knew that there would be some. His premonitions were rarely, if ever, wrong.
He turned away from the banked screens and instruments that made his office look like an exceptionally well fitted spaceship's control room, walked to the wide window that took up an entire wall, which overlooked the port. It was a fine day—for Lorn. The almost perpetual overcast was thin enough to permit a hint of blue sky to show through, and the Lorn sun was a clearly defined disk rather than the usual fuzzy ball. There was almost no wind. Discharge of Rim Leopard, Grimes noted, seemed to be progressing satisfactorily. There was a blue flare of welding arcs about the little spacetug Rim Mamelute, presently undergoing her annual survey. And there, all by herself, was the ship that Grimes—to the annoyance of his wife—often referred to as his one true love, the old, battered Faraway Quest. She had been built how many (too many) years ago as a standard Epsilon Class tramp for the Interstellar Transport Commission. She had been converted into a survey ship for the Rim Worlds' government. In her, Grimes had made the first landings on the inhabited planets to the Galactic East, the worlds now referred to as the Eastern Circuit. In her he had made the first contact—but not a physical one— with the anti-matter systems to the Galactic West.
And would the arrival of the good ship Piety lead to her recommissioning? Grimes hoped so. He liked his job-it was interesting work, carrying both authority and responsibility—but he was often tired of being a deskborne commodore, and had always welcomed the chance to take the old Quest up and out into deep space again. As often in the past he had a hunch, a strong one. Something was cooking, and he would have a finger in the pie.
Miss Walton's childish treble broke into his thoughts. "Sir, I have the information on Piety…"
"Yes?"
"She was built as Epsilon Crucis for the Interstellar Transport Commission fifty Terran standard years ago. She was purchased from them last year, Terran reckoning, by the Skarsten Theological Institute, whose address is listed as Nuevo Angeles on Francisco, otherwise known as Beta Pup-pis VI____"
"I've visited Francisco," he told her. "A pleasant world, in many ways. But an odd one."
"Odd? How, sir?"
"I hope I'm not treading on any of your corns, Miss Walton, but the whole planet's no more than a breeding ground for fancy religions."
"I'm a Latter Day Reformed Methodist myself, sir," she told him severely. "And that's not fancy."
"Indeed it's not, Miss Walton." And I'm a cynical^ more or less tolerant agnostic, he thought. He went on, "And does Lloyds condescend to tell us the category in which this renamed Epsilon Crucis is now listed? A missionary ship, perhaps?"
"No, sir. A survey ship."
"Oh," was all that Grimes could say.
Two days later Grimes watched, from his office window, Piety come in. Whatever else this Rector William Smith might or might not be he was a good ship handler. There was a nasty wind blowing across the spaceport, not quite a gale, but near enough to it; nonetheless the ship made a classic vertical descent, dropping to the exact center of the triangle formed by the berth-marker beacons. It was easy enough in theory, no more than the exact application of lateral thrust, no more than a sure and steady hand on the remote controls of the Inertial Drive. No more—and no less. Some people get the feel of ships; some never do.
This Piety was almost a twin to Grimes's own Faraway Quest. She was a newer (less old) ship, of course, but the design of the Epsilon Class tramps, those trusty workhorses of the Commission, had changed very little over the years. She sat there in her assigned berth, a gray, weathered spire, the bright scarlet beacons still blinking away just clear of the broad vanes of her tripedal landing gear. From her stem a telescopic mast extended itself, and from the top of the metal staff a flag broke out, whipped to quivering rigidity by the wind. The Commodore picked up his binoculars through which to study it. It was not, as he had assumed it would be, the national ensign of Francisco, the golden crux ansata and crescent on a scarlet ground; even with the naked eye he could see that. This was a harshly uncompromising standard: a simple white cross on a black field. It must be, decided Grimes, the houseflag of the Skars-ten Institute.
The after air lock door opened and the ramp extended from it, and to it drew up the beetle-like cars of the various port officials—port captain, customs, immigration, health. The boarding party got out of their vehicles and filed up the gangway, to where an officer was waiting to receive them. They vanished into the ship. Grimes idly wondered whether or not they would get a drink, and what the views of these Skarsten people were on alcohol. He remembered his own visit to Francisco, as a junior officer in the Federation's Survey Service, many years ago. Some of the religious sects had been rigidly abstemious, maintaining, that alcohol was an invention of the devil. Others had .held that wine symbolized the more beneficent aspects of the Almighty. But it was hardly a subject worthy of speculation. He would find out for himself when, after the arrival formalities were over, he paid his courtesy call on the ship's captain.
He* went back to his desk, busied himself with the paper work that made a habit of accumulating. An hour or so later he was interrupted by the buzzing of his' telephone. "Grimes here!" he barked into the instrument. "Commodore Grimes," said a strange voice. It was a statement rather than a question. "This is William Smith, Commodore, Rector of Piety. I request an appointment."
"It will be my pleasure, er, Rector." Grimes glanced at his watch. It was almost time for his rather dreary coffee and sandwich lunch. It was not the sort of meal that one asked visitors to share. He said, "Shall we say 1400 hours, our time? In my office?"
"That will do very nicely, sir. Thank you."
"I am looking forward to meeting you," said Grimes, replacing the handset in its rest. And shall I send Miss Walton out for some sacramental wine? he asked himself.
William Smith was a tall man, thin, with almost all of his pale face hidden by a bushy black beard, from above which a great nose jutted like the beak of a bird of prey. His eyes under the thick, black brows were of a gray so pale as to be almost colorless, and they were cold, cold. A plain black uniform covered his spare frame, the buttons concealed by the fly front of the tunic, the four bands of of black braid on the sleeves almost invisible against the cloth. There was a hint of white lace at his throat.
"I have been told, sir," he said, sitting rigidly in his chair, "that you are something of an expert on the queer conditions that prevail here, on the Rim."
"Perhaps, Rector," said Grimes, "you will tell me first the purpose of your visit here."
"Very well, sir." The man's baritone voice was as cold and as colorless as his eyes. "To begin with, we have the permission of your government, your Rim Worlds Confederacy, to conduct our survey on certain of the planets under your jurisdiction."
"A survey, Rector? The Rim Worlds have been very well surveyed—even though I say it myself."
"Not our kind of survey, Commodore. I shall, as you would say, put you in the picture. We of the Skarsten Institute are Neo-Calvinists. We deplore the godlessness, the heresy that is ever more prevalent throughout the galaxy-yes, even upon our own' planet. We feel that Mankind is in sore and pressing need of a new Revelation, a new Sinai…"
"And you honestly believe that you will find your Sinai here, out on the Rim?"
"We believe that we shall find our Sinai. If not here, then elsewhere. Perhaps, even, beyond the confines of this galaxy."
"Indeed? But how can 7 help you, Rector?"
"You, we were told, know more about the odd distortions of the Continuum encountered here than anybody else on these planets."
"Such is fame." Grimes sighed and shrugged. "Very well, Rector, you asked for it. I'll tell you what little I know. To begin with, it is thought by many of our scientists that here, at the very edge of the expanding galaxy, the fabric of time and space is stretched thin. We have long become used to the phenomena known as Rim Ghosts, disconcerting glimpses into alternative universes."
"I believe that you, sir, have personally made the transition into these universes."
"Yes. Once when the Federation's Survey Service requested our aid in the investigation of the Rim Ghost phenomena. No doubt your people have read the Survey Service report."
"We have."
"The second time was when we, the Confederacy, took our own steps to deal with what we decided was a very real menace—an alternative universe in which our worlds were ruled by particularly unpleasant mutants, with human beings in a state of slavery. And then there was Captain Listowel, who was master of the first experimental lightjam-mer. He tried to exceed the speed of light without cheating —as we do with our Mannschenn Drive—and experienced quite a few different time tracks."
"And tell me, sir, did you or this Captain Listowel ever feel that you were on the point of being granted the Ultimate Revelation?"
"Frankly, no, Rector. We had our bad moments—who in Space, or anywhere else, doesn't?—and anyone who has indulged in time track switching often wonders, as I do, about the reality, the permanence of both himself and the universe about him. For example, I have Vague memories of ships that were equipped with only reaction drive for blastoffs and landings and short interplanetary hauls. Absurd, isn't it, but those memories are there. And my wife—I'm sorry you can't meet her, but she's off on a trip—seems to have changed. I have this half recollection of her when she first came out to the Rim, which is there in my mind alongside the real one—but what is real? She was working for the Federation's Intelligence Service then. Anyhow, in one memory she's small and blonde, in one she's tall and blonde, snd in one she's tall and red-headed, as she is today. Damn it—that's three memories!"
"Women have been known to change their hair styles and colorations, Commodore."
"Right. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she returns with her crowning glory a bright green! But that doesn't explain the coexistent memories."
"Perhaps not." Smith's voice was bitter as he went on. "But it seems such a waste of opportunities. To have been privileged to visit the many mansions of our Father's house, and to come back only with confused recollections of the color of a woman's hair!"
"And quite a few scars, Rector. Physical and psychological."
"No doubt." The man's voice was unpleasantly ironic.
"But tell me, sir, what do you know of Kinsolving's Planet?"
"Not much. I suppose that we shall settle it if we're ever faced with a population explosion, which is doubtful."
"I am referring, sir, to the man who appeared there, the Stone Age savage from the remote past."
"Yes, that was a queer business. Well before my time. Nothing like that has happened there in recent years, although there is still an uneasy, brooding atmosphere about that world that makes it undesirable as a piece of real estate. The original theory is that somehow the—the loneliness of the people out here on the Rim, hanging, as it were, by their fingernails over the abyss of the Ultimate Night, became focused on that one particular planet. NoW the theory is that the fabric of Time and Space is stretched extremely thin there, and that anything or anybody is liable to fall through, either way. The rock paintings are still in the caves, but there haven't been any new ones and the paint is never wet any more."
"The Stone Age savage," said Smith, "eventually became a Franciscan citizen, and a Neo-Calvinist. He died at a very ripe old age, and among his effects was the manuscript of his life story. His great-granddaughter presented it to the Institute. It was thought, at first, that it was a work of fiction, but the surviving relatives insisted that it was not. And then I, when I made a voyage to Earth, was able to obtain access to the Survey Service records."
"And so?" asked Grimes.
"So Kinsolving's Planet is to become our new Sinai," Smith told him.
"You'd better go along, Grimes," Admiral Kravitz told him, "just to see fair play. Anyhow, it's all been arranged. You will be recalled to the active list—pay, etc., as per regulations—and ship out in this Piety of theirs as Rim Worlds' government observer."
"But why me, sir? If I were taking my own ship, if the old Quest were being recommissioned, with myself in command, it'd be different. But I don't like being a passenger."
"You'll not be a passenger, Grimes. Captain—sorry, Rec-
for—Smith has indicated that he'll appreciate having you along as a sort of pilot…"
"In a ship full of sky pilots—and myself a good agnostic!" He saw the bewildered expression on the Admiral's face and explained his choice of words. "In the old days, before there were any real sky pilots, seamen used to refer to ministers of religion as such."
"Did they, now? And what would those tarry-breeked ruffians of whom you're so fond have thought of a captain calling himself 'Rector'?"
"In the early days of sail they'd have thought nothing of it. It was the master's usual title."
"I doubt if anybody'll ever call you 'Bishop,' " remarked the Admiral. "Anyhow, you'll be aboard primarily to observe.
And to report. In the unlikely event of anything occurring that will affect Rim Worlds' security you are to take action."
"Me—and what squad of Marines?"
"We could send a detachment of the Salvation Army with you," joked the Admiral.
"I doubt that they'd be allowed on board. As far as I can gather, these Neo-Calvinists are somewhat intolerant. Only on a world as tolerant as Francisco would they have been allowed to flourish."
"Intolerant, yes," agreed Kravitz. "But scrupulously honest. And moral."
"In short," said Grimes, "no redeeming vices." "Piety lifts ship at 1800 hours tomorrow, Commodore Grimes," said the Admiral. "You will be aboard."
"Aye, aye, sir," replied Grimes resignedly.
Grimes had never enjoyed serving in a "taut ship" himself, and had never commanded one. Nonetheless, he respected those captains who were able to engender about themselves such a state of affairs. Piety, as was obvious from the moment that he set foot on the bottom of the ramp, was a taut ship. Everything was spotless. Every metal fitting and surface that was supposed to be polished boasted a mirror-like sheen. All the paintwork looked as though it was washed at least twice daily—which, in fact, it was. The atmosphere inside the hull bore none of the usual taints of cookery, tobacco smoke or—even though there was a mixed crew—women's perfume. But it was too chilly, and the acridity of some disinfectant made Grimes sneeze.
The junior officer who met him at the head of the ramp showed him into the elevator cage at the foot of the axial shaft. Grimes thanked him and assured the * presumably young man—the full beard made it hard to determine his age —that he knew his way around this class of vessel. A captain, no matter what he calls himself or is called, is always accommodated as closely as possible to the center of control. The elevator worked smoothly, noiselessly, carrying the Commodore speedily up to the deck just below the control room. There, as in his own Faraway Quest, was the semicircular suite of cabins. Over the door was a brass plate with the title kector.
As Grimes approached this entrance it slid open. Smith stood there and said formally, "Welcome aboard, Commodore."
"Thank you, Rector."
"Will you come in, sir?"
There were other people in the day cabin: a tall, stout, white-headed and -bearded man dressed in clothing that was very similar to Smith's uniform; a woman in a long-sleeved, high-necked, ankle-length black dress, her hair completely covered by a frilly white cap. They looked at Grimes, obviously disapproving of his gold-braided, brass-buttoned, beribboned finery. They did not get up.
"Commodore Grimes," said Smith. "Presbyter Cannan. Sister Lane."
Reluctantly the Presbyter extended his hand. Grimes took it. He was not surprised that it was cold. Sister Lane nodded slightly in his general direction.
Smith gestured stiffly toward a chair, sat down himself. Grimes lowered himself to his own seat incautiously. He should have known that it would be hard. He looked curiously at the two civilians. The Presbyter was an old edition of Rector Smith. The sister… ? She had him puzzled. She belonged to a type that been common enough on Francisco when he had been there—the Blossom People, they had called themselves. They preached and practiced a sort of hedonistic Zen, and claimed that their use of the wide range of drugs available to them put them in close communication with the Cosmic All. Prim she was, this Sister Lane, prim and proper in her form-concealing black, but the planes of her face were not harsh, and her un-painted lips were full, and there was a strange gentleness in her brown eyes. Properly dressed—or undressed—thought Grimes, she would be a very attractive woman. Suddenly it was important that he hear her voice.
He pulled his battered pipe out of his pocket, his tobacco pouch and lighter. He asked, addressing her, "Do you mind if I smoke?"
But it was the Presbyter who replied. "Certainly we mind, sir. As you should know, we are opposed to the use of any and all drugs."
"All drugs?" murmured the woman, with a sort of malicious sweetness. Her voice was almost a baritone, but it could never be mistaken for a male one.
"There are exceptions, Sister Lane," the old man told her harshly. "As you well know."
"As I well know," she concurred.
"I take it," said Grimes, "that nicotine is not among those exceptions."
"Unfortunately," she stated, "no."
"You may leave us, Sister," said Presbyter Cannan. "We have no further business to discuss with you."
"Thank you, sir." She got gracefully to her feet, made a curtsey to Cannan, walked out of the door. Her ugly clothing could not hide the fluid grace of her movements.
"Your Nursing Sister, Rector?" asked Grimes when she was gone.
"No," answered Cannan. And, Who's running this ship? thought Grimes irritably. But evidently the Presbyter piled on more gravs than did the ship's lawful master.
Smith must have noticed the Commodore's expression. "Sister Lane, sir," he explained, "is a member of the Presbyter's staff, not of mine."
"Thank you, Rector." Grimes rewarded him with what was intended to be a friendly smile. "I'm afraid that it will take me some time to get your ranks and ratings sorted out."
"I have no doubt," said Cannan, "that it must be confusing to one who relies upon gaudy fripperies for his authority rather than inner grace."
"Your baggage must be aboard and stowed by now, Commodore," Smith said hastily. He turned to his spiritual superior. "May I suggest, sir, that you and your people retire to your quarters? Lift-off"—he glanced at his watch— "will be in fifteen minutes."
"Very well, Rector." The old man got up, towering over the two spacemen. Smith got up. Grimes remained seated until Smith returned from seeing the Presbyter out.
He said, "I'd better be getting below myself. If you could have somebody show me to my stateroom, Rector."
"I was hoping, Commodore, that you would be coming up to Control for the lift-off."
"Thank you, Rector Smith. It will be my pleasure."
Smith led the way out of his quarters, up the short ladder that brought the two men to the control room. Grimes looked about him. The layout was a standard one: acceleration chairs before which were banks of instruments, screens, meters, chart tank, mass proximity indicator, Car-lotti Beacon direction finder. All seemed to be in perfect order, and much of the equipment was new. Evidently the Skarsten Theological Institute did not believe in spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar.
The Rector indicated a chair, into which Grimes strapped himself, then took his own seat. The officers were already at their stations. All those bearded men, thought the Commodore, looked too much alike, and their black-on-black insignia of rank made it hard to tell who was what. But this wasn't his ship, and she had managed to come all the way out from Francisco without mishap.
The departure routine went smoothly enough, with the usual messages exchanged between control room and spaceport control tower. The Inertial Drive started up, and there was that brief second of weightlessness before the gentle acceleration made itself felt. The ship lifted easily, falling upward to the cloud ceiling. Briefly Grimes was able to look out through the viewports at Port Forlorn and at the dreary countryside spread out around the city like a map.
And then there was nothing but gray mist outside—mist that suddenly became a pearly, luminescent white and then vanished. Overhead was a steely sun glaring out of a black sky, its light harsh even though the ports were polarized.
There was free fall for a little while, and then the gyroscopes swung the ship's head to the target star. The Inertial Drive came on again, its irregular throbbing beat a bass background for the thin, high keening of the Mannschenn Drive. Ahead, save for the iridescent spiral that was the target sun, there was only blackness. Lorn was to starboard —a vast, writhing planetary amoeba that was falling astern, that was shrinking rapidly. And out to port was the Galactic Lens, distorted by the temporal precession field of the Drive to a Klein flask blown by a drunken glass-blower.
Grimes wondered, as he had wondered before, if anybody would ever come up with another simile. But this one was so apt.
Grimes didn't like this ship.
She was beautifully kept, efficiently run, and with her cargo spaces converted to passenger accommodation she comfortably housed her crew and all the personnel from the Skarsten Institute. But she was… cold. She was cold, and she was too quiet. There was none of the often ribald laughter, none of the snatches of light music that lent warmth to the atmosphere of a normal vessel. There were, he noted, playmasters in all the recreation rooms; but when he examined the spools of the machine in the senior officers' mess he found that they consisted entirely of recordings of sermons and the gloomier hymns. The library was as bad. And, socially, there was complete segregation of the sexes. Deaconesses and sisters were berthed aft, and between them and the male crew and passengers were the storerooms and the "farm."
The food was not bad, but it was plain, unimaginative. And there was nothing to drink but water, and even that had a flat taste. The conversation at table was as boring as the provender. Too, Grimes was annoyed to find out that the Rector did not sit at the head of the board in the senior officers' mess; that place of honor was reserved for the Presbyter. And he talked, almost non-stop, about the Institute's internal politics, with the ship's captain interjecting an occasional quiet affirmative as required. The chief officer, surgeon and purser gobbled their meals in silence, as did Grimes, very much the outsider at the foot of the table. They were served by a young stewardess who would have been pretty in anything but that ugly, all-concealing black, who seemed to hold the domineering old man—but nobody else —in awe.
After the evening meal Grimes made his excuses and retired to his cabin. It was little more than a dogbox, and was a comedown after his suite aboard the Quest. He was pleased that he had brought his own reading matter with him, and pleased that he had exercised the forethought to make provision for his other little comforts. Before doing anything else, he filled and lit his pipe and then, moving slowly and easily through the blue haze of his own creation, undipped the larger of his cases from its rack, pulled it out and opened it. He was lifting out the shirts that had acted as shock-proof packing for certain breakables when he heard a light tap at his door. He groaned. A passenger is bound by ship's regulations as much as is any crew member. But he was damned if he was going to put out his pipe. "Come in," he called.
She came in. She pulled the ugly white cap off her lustrous brown hair, tossed it on to the bunk. Then she turned back to the door, snapped on the spring lock. She tested its security, smiled, then flopped down into the one chair that the cabin possessed.
Grimes looked at her, with raised eyebrows. "Yes, Sister Lane?" he asked.
"Got a smoke, spaceman?" she growled.
"There are some cigars…" he began doubtfully.
"I didn't expect pot. Although if you have any… ?"
"I haven't." Then Grimes said virtuously, "In any case, such drugs are banned on the Rim Worlds."
"Are they? But what about the cigar you promised me?"
Grimes got a box of panatellas out of his case, opened't, offered it to her. She took one, accepted his proffered light. She inhaled luxuriously. She said, "All I need now is a drink."
"I can supply that."
"Good on you, Admiral!"
There was the bottle of absolute alcohol, and there was the case with its ranked phia'Is of essences. "Scotch?" asked Grimes. "Rum? Brandy? Or… ?"
"Scotch will do."
. The Commodore measured alcohol into the two glasses over the washbasin, added to each a drop of essence, topped up with cold water from the tap. She murmured, "Here's mud in your eye," and gulped from hers as soon as he handed it to her.
"Sister Lane," said Grimes doubtfully. "You can call me Clarisse."
"Clarisse… Should you be doing this?"
"Don't tell me that you're a wowser, like all those Bible-punchers."
"I'm not. But this is not my ship…"
"And it's not mine, either."
"Then what are you doing here?"
"It's a long story, dearie. And if you ply me with liquor, I might just tell it to you." She sighed and stretched. "You've no idea what a relief it is to enjoy a drink and a talk and a smoke with somebody who's more or less human."
"Thank you," said Grimes stiffly.
She laughed. "Don't be offended, duckie." She put up her hands, pulled her hair back and away from her face. "Look at my ears."
Grimes looked. They were normal enough organs—save for the fact that they were pointed, and were tufted with hair at the tips.
"I'm only more or less human myself," she told him. "More rather than less, perhaps. You know about the man Raul, the caveman, the Stone Age savage, who was pulled, somehow, from the remote past on Kinsolving's Planet to what was then the present. He was my great-grandfather."
"He was humanoid," said Grimes. "Not human."
"Human-schuman!" she mocked. "There is such a thing as parallel evolution, you know. And old Raul was made something of a pet by the scientists back on Earth, and when he evinced the desire to father a family the finest genetic engineers in the Galaxy were pressed into service. No, not the way that you're thinking, Commodore. You've got a low mind."
"Sorry."
"I should think so. Just for that, you can pour me another drink."
And Grimes asked himself if his liquor ration would last out until his return to Lorn.
"What are you doing here?" he asked bluntly. "In this ship?"
"At this very moment I'm breaking at least ninety-nine percent of the regulations laid down by the Presbyter and enforced by the Rector. But I know what you mean." Her voice deepened so that it was like Grimes's own. "What is nasty girl like you doing in a nice place like this?"
"I wouldn't call you nasty," said Grimes.
"Thank you, sir. Then stand by for the story of my life, complete and unexpurgated. I'll start off with dear old great-granddaddy, the Noble Savage. He was an artist, you know, in his proper place and time, one of those specialists who practiced a form of sympathetic magic. He would paint or draw pictures of various animals, and the actual beasts would be drawn to the spot, there to be slaughtered by the hunters. He said that it worked, too. I can remember, when I was a little girl, that he'd put on demonstrations. He'd draw a picture of, say, the cat—and within seconds pussy would be in the room. Oh, yes—and he was a telepath, a very powerful transceiver.
"After many years on Earth, where he was latterly an instructor at the Rhine Institute, he emigrated, with his wife and children, to Francisco, where he was psionic radio officer in charge of the Port Diego Signal Station. It was there that he got religion. And with all the religions to choose from, he had to become a Neo-Calvinist! His family was converted with him—and I often wonder how much part his undeniable psychic powers played in their conversion! And the wives of his sons had to become converts, and the husbands of his daughters—yea, even unto the third and fourth generations."
She grinned. "One member of the fourth generation kicked over the traces. Me. From the Neo-Calvinists to the Blossom People was a logical step. Like most new converts I overdid things. Drinks, drugs, promiscuity—the works. The Neo-Calvinists picked me up, literally, from the gutter and nursed me back to health in their sanatorium—and, at the same time, made it quite clear that if I was predestined to go to Hell I should go there. And then, when they checked up on great-grandfather's autobiographical papers, they realized that I was predestined for something really important—especially since I, alone of his descendants, possess something of his powers."
"You mean that you can… ?"
There was a violent knocking on the door, and a voice shouting, "Open up! Open up, I say!"
"They know I'm here," muttered Clarisse sullenly. She got out of her chair, operated the sliding panel herself.
Rector Smith was standing outside, and with him was a tall, gaunt woman. She stared at Sister Lane in horror and snarled, "Cover your nakedness, you shameless hussy!" Clarisse shrugged, picked up the ugly cap from where it was lying on the bunk, adjusted it over her hair, tucking all loose strands out of sight.
"Will you deal with Sister Lane, Deaconess?" asked Smith. "That I shall, Rector."
"Miss Lane and I were merely enjoying a friendly talk," said Grimes.
"A friendly talk!" The Deaconess' voice dripped scorn. "Smoking! Wine-bibbing! You—you gilded popinjay!"
Smith had picked up the bottle of alcohol, his obvious intention being to empty it into the washbasin. "Hold it!" said Grimes slowlv and nastily. "Hold it!"
Smith hesitated. Unhurriedly Grimes took the bottle from his hand, restoppered it, put it in the rack over the basin.
Then the Rector started to bluster. "Sir, I must remind you that you are a guest aboard my ship. A passenger. You are obliged to comply with ship's regulations."
"Sir," replied Grimes coldly, "I have signed no articles of agreement, and no ticket with the back covered with small print has been issued to me. I am surprised that a shipmaster should have been so neglectful of the essential legalities, and were you in the employ of the company of which I am astronautical superintendent I should find it my duty to reprimand you."
"Not only a gilded popinjay," observed the Deaconess harshly, "but a space lawyer."
"Yes, madam, a space lawyer—as any master astronaut should be." He was warming up nicely. "But I must remind you, both of you, that I do have legal standing aboard this vessel. I am here ift my capacity as official observer for the Rim Worlds Confederacy. Furthermore, I was called back to active duty in the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, with the rank of Commodore."
"Meaningless titles," sneered the Deaconess. "A Commodore without a fleet!"
"Perhaps, madam. Perhaps. But I must remind you that we are proceeding through Rim Worlds' territorial space. And I must make it plain that any interference with my own personal liberties—and the infliction by yourselves of any harsh punishment on Miss Lane—will mean that Piety will be intercepted and seized by one of our warships." He thought, 7 hope the bluff isn't called.
Called it was.
"And just how, Mr. Commodore Grimes, do you propose to call a warship to your aid?" asked the woman.
"Easily, Deaconess, easily," said Clarisse Lane. "Have you forgotten that I am a telepath—and a good one? While this ship was on Lorn I made contact with Mr. Mayhew, Senior Psionic Radio Officer of the Rim Worlds Navy. Even though we never met physically we became close friends. He is an old friend and shipmate of the Commodore, and asked me to keep in touch to let him know if Commodore Grimes was in any danger."
"And you will tell him, of course," said Grimes, "if you are subjected to any harm, or even discomfort."
"He will know," she said quietly.
"Yes," agreed Grimes. "He will know."
He was familiar with telepaths, was Grimes, having com-menced his spacefaring career before the Carlotti direction finding and communications system began to replace the psionic radio officers with its space- and time-twisting beamed radiations. He was familiar with telepaths, and knew how it was with them when, infrequently, one of them found a member of the opposite sex with the same talents attractive. Until this happened—and it rarely did—they would lavish all their affection on the disembodied canine brains that they used as amplifiers.
Rector Smith was the first to weaken. He muttered, "Very well, Commodore."
"And is this harlot to go unpunished?" flared the Deaconess.
"That's right, she is," Grimes told her.
She glared at him—and Grimes glared back. He regretted deeply that this was not his ship, that he had no authority aboard her.
"Rector Smith…" she appealed.
"I'm sorry, Deaconess," Smith told her. "But you have heard what these people have told us."
"And you will allow them to flout your authority?"
"It is better than causing the success of our mission to be jeopardized." He stiffened. "Furthermore, I order you not to lay hands upon Sister Lane, and not to order any of the other sisters to do so."
"And I suppose she's to be free to visit this—this vile seducer any time that she sees fit."
"No," said Smith at last. "No. That I will not sanction. Commodore Grimes claims that I cannot give orders to him, but my authority is still absolute insofar as all other persons aboard this vessel are concerned. Sister Lane will not be ill-treated, but she will be confined to the women's quarters until such time as her services are required."
"The Presbyter shall hear of this," said the woman. "Indeed he shall. I shall be making my own report to him. Meanwhile, he is not, repeat not, to be disturbed." He added, "And those are his orders."
"Very well, then," snapped the Deaconess. And to Clarisse Lane, "Come."
"It was a good try, Commodore," said the girl, looking back wistfully at her unfinished drink, her still smoldering cigar. "It was a good try, but it could have been a better one, as far as I'm concerned. Good night."
It was a good try, thought Grimes. Period. He had gone as far as he could go without undermining the Master's— the Rector's—authority too much. As for the girl, he was sure that she would not, now, be maltreated, and it would do her no harm to revert to the abstemious routine of this aptly named ship.
"Good night," he said.
"May I have a word with you, sir?" asked Smith when the two women were gone.
"Surely. Stick around, Rector. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard."
Smith looked, but did not voice, his disapproval of the figure of speech. He shut the door, snapped the lock on. Then, with a penknife taken from his pocket, he made a little adjustment to one of the securing screws of the mirror over the washbasin.
"Bugged?" asked Grimes interestedly.
"Of course—as is every compartment in the ship. But there are speakers and screens in only two cabins—my own and the Presbyter's. His Reverence, I know, took sleeping pills before retiring, but he might awaken."
"I suppose the ladies' showers are bugged, too?" asked Grimes.
A dull flush covered what little of the Rector's face was not hidden by his beard. He growled, "That, sir, is none of your business."
"And what, sir, is your business with me?"
"I feel, Commodore Grimes, that you should know how important that unhappy woman is to the success of our mission; then, perhaps, you will be less inclined, should the opportunity present itself again, to pander to her whims." Smith cleared his throat; then he went on. "This business upsets me, sir. You will know, as you, yourself, were once a shipmaster, how unpleasant it is to have to assert your authority."
"And talking," said Grimes, who had his telepathic moments, "is thirsty work."
"If you would be so kind, sir," said Smith, after a long moment of hesitation. "I believe that brandy has always been regarded as a medicine."
Grimes sighed, and mixed fresh drinks. He motioned Smith to the single chair, sat down on the bunk. He thought of shocking the other man with one of the more obscene toasts, but merely said, "Down the hatch." The Rector said, "I needed that."
"Another, Rector Smith?"
"No, thank you, sir."
You want me to twist your arm, you sanctimonious bastard, thought Grimes, but I'm not going to do it. He put the bottle of alcohol and the little case of essences away. "And now," he said, "about Miss Lane…"
"Yes, Sister Lane. As she has told you, she was one of us. But she backslid, and consorted with the fornicaters and wine-bibbers who call themselves the Blossom People. But even this was in accordance with the Divine scheme of things. Whilst consorting with those—those pagans she became accustomed to the use and the abuse—but surely the use is also abuse!—of the psychedelic drugs. Already she possessed considerable psychic powers, but those vile potions enhanced them.
"You will realize, sir, that it would have been out of the question for any of our own Elect to imperil his immortal soul by tampering with such powerful, unseen and unseeable forces, but—"
"But," said Grimes, "Clarisse Lane has already demonstrated that she is damned, so you don't mind using her as your cat's-paw."
"You put it very concisely, sir," agreed Smith.
"I could say more, but I won't. I just might lose my temper. But go on."
"Sister Lane is not entirely human. She is descended from that Raul, the Stone Age savage who was brought to Earth from Kinsolving's Planet. Many factors were involved in his appearance. It could be that the very fabric of the Continuum is worn thin, here on the Rim, and that lines of force, or fault lines, intersect at that world. It could be, as the Rhine Institute claimed at the time, that the loneliness and the fear of all the dwellers on the colonized Rim Worlds are somehow focused on Kinsolving. Be that as it may, it happened. And it happened too that, in the fullness of time, this Raul was accepted into the bosom of our Church.
"Raul, as you may know, was more than a mere telepath. Much more. He was a wizard, one of those who, in his own age, drew animals to the hunters' spears by limning their likenesses on rock."
Grimes interrupted. "Doesn't the Bible say, somewhere, that thou shalt not suffer a witch to live?"
"Yes. It is so written. But we did not know of the full extent of Raul's talents when he was admitted into our Fold. We did not know of them until after his death, when his papers came into our possession."
"But what are you playing at?" demanded Grimes. "Just what you are playing at in our back garden?" He had the bottle out again, and the little phial of cognac-flavored essence, and was mixing two more drinks. He held out one of them, the stronger, to Smith, who absentmindedly took it and raised it to his lips.
The Rector said, "Sir, I do not approve of your choice of words. Life is not a game. Life, death and the hereafter are not a game. We are not playing. We are working. Is it not written, 'Work, for the night is coming'? And you, sir, and I, as spacemen, know that the night is coming—the inevitable heat death of the Universe…" He gulped more of his drink.
"You should visit Darsha some time," said Grimes, "and their Tower of Darkness. You should see the huge clock that is the symbol of their God." He added softly, "The clock is running down."
"Yes, the clock is running down, the sands of time are running out. And there is much to be done, so much to be done…"
"Such as?"
"To reestablish the eternal verities. To build a new Sinai, to see the Commandments graven afresh on imperishable stone. And then, perhaps, the heathen, the idolators, will take heed and tremble. And then, surely, the rule of Jehovah will come again, before the End."
Grimes said reasonably enough, "But you people believe in predestination, don't you? Either we're damned or we aren't, and nothing we do makes any difference."
"I have learned by bitter experience," Smith told him, "that it is impossible to argue with a heretic—especially one who is foredoomed to eternal damnation. But even you must see that if the Commandments are given anew to Man then we, the Elect, shall be elevated to our rightful place in the Universe."
"Then God save us all," said Grimes.
Smith looked at him suspiciously, but went on. "It is perhaps necessary that there should be a sacrifice, and, if that be so, the Lord has already delivered her into our hands. No, sir, do not look at me like that. We shall not kill her, neither by knife nor fire shall we slay her. But, inevitably, she will be the plaything of supernal powers when she, on the planet of her ancestral origin, her inherited talents intensified by drugs, calls to Jehovah, the true God, the God of the Old Testament, to make Himself known again to sinful men."
There were flecks of white froth on Smith's beard around his lips, a dribble of saliva down the hair on his chin. His eyes were glaring and bloodshot. Grimes thought, in vino veritas. He said, with a gentleness he did not feel, actuated only by self-interest, "Don't you think that you've had enough, Rector? Isn't it time that we both turned in?"
"Eh, what? When'm ready. But you understand now that you must not interfere. You must not interfere."
"I understand," said Grimes, thinking, Too much and not enough. He found a tube of tablets in his suitcase, shook one into the palm of his hand. "Here," he said, offering it. "You'd better take this."
"Wha's it for?"
"It'll sweeten the breath and sober you up. It'll be too bad for you if the Presbyter sees the state you're in." And too had for me, he thought.
" 'M not drunk."
"Of course not. Just a little—unsteady."
"Don' really need… But jus' to oblige, y'understan'."
Smith swallowed the tablet, his Adam's apple working convulsively. Grimes handed him a glass of cold water to wash it down. It acted almost immediately. The bearded man shuddered, then got steadily to his feet. He glared at Grimes, but it was no longer a fanatical glare. "Good night, sir," he snapped.
"Good night, Rector," Grimes replied.
When he was alone he thought of playing back the record of the evening's conversations, but thought better of it. For all he knew, Smith might be able to switch the hidden microphone and scanner back on from his own quarters— and the less he knew of the tiny device hidden in the starboard epaulet of his white mess jacket, the better.
He got out of his clothes and into his bunk, switched off the light; but, unusually for him, his sleep was uneasy and nightmare-ridden. He supposed that it was Clarisse Lane's fault that she played a leading part in most of the dreams.
The voyage wore on, and on, and even as the ever-pre-cessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive tumbled and receded down the dark infinities, so did the good ship Piety fall through the twisted Continuum. On one hand was the warped convoluted Galactic Lens and ahead, a pulsating spiral of iridescent light against the ultimate darkness, was the Kinsolving sun.
And this ship, unlike other ships of Grimes's wide experience, was no little man-made oasis of light and warmth in the vast, empty desert of the night. She was cold, cold, and her atmosphere carried always the faint acridity of disinfectant, and men and women talked in grave, low voices and did not mingle, and never was there the merest hint of laughter.
Clarisse Lane was not being maltreated—Grimes made sure of that—and was even allowed to meet the Commodore for a daily conversation, but always heavily chaperoned. She was the only telepath in the ship, which, while the interstellar drive was in operation, depended entirely upon the Carlotti equipment for deep space communication. But the Rector and the Presbyter did not doubt that she was in constant touch with Mayhew back at Port Forlorn—and Grimes did not doubt it either. She told him much during their meetings—things about which she could not possibly have known if there had not been a continual interchange of signals. Some of this intelligence was confirmed by messages addressed to Grimes and received, in the normal way, by the ship's electronic radio officer.
So they were obliged to be careful, these Neo-Calvinists. The chosen instrument for their experiment in practical theology was now also an agent for the Rim Worlds Confederacy. "But what does it matter?" Smith said to Grimes on one of the rare occasions that he spoke at length to him. "What does it matter? Perhaps it was ordained this way. Your friend Mayhew will be the witness to the truth, a witness who is not one of us. He will see through her eyes, hear with her ears, feel with every fiber of her being. The Word propagated by ourselves alone would be scoffed at. But there will be credence given it when it is propagated by an unbeliever."
"If anything happens," said Grimes.
But he couldn't argue with these people, and they couldn't argue with him. There was just no meeting of minds. He remembered a theory that he had once heard advanced by a ship's doctor. "Long ago," the man had said, "very long ago, there was a mutation. It wasn't a physically obvious one, but as a result of it Homo Sapiens was divided into two separate species: Homo credulens, those capable of blind faith in the unprovable, and Homo incredulens, those who aren't. The vast majority of people are, of course, hybrids."
Grimes had said, "And I suppose that all the pure Homo incredulens stock is either atheist or agnostic."
"Not so." The doctor had laughed. "Not so. Agnostic-yes. But don't forget that the atheist, like the theist, makes a definite statement for which he can produce no proof whatsoever."
An atheist would have been far less unhappy aboard this ship than a tolerant agnostic like Grimes.
But even the longest, unhappiest voyage comes to an end. A good planetfall was made—whatever they believed, Piety's people were excellent navigators—and, the Mann-schenn Drive switched off, the Inertial Drive ticking over just enough to produce minimal gravitational field, the ship was falling in orbit about the lonely world, the blue and green mottled sphere hanging there against the blackness.
The old charts—or copies of them—were out, and Grimes was called up to the control room. "Yes," he told Smith, stabbing a finger down on the paper, "that's where the spaceport was. Probably even now the apron's-not too overgrown for a safe landing. Captain Spence, when he came down in Epsilon Eridani, reported creepers over everything, but nothing heavy."
"It is a hundred and fifty standard years since he was here," said Smith. "At least. I would suggest one of the beaches."
"Risky," Grimes told him. "They shelve very steeply and according to our records violent storms are more frequent than otherwise." He turned to the big screen upon which a magnification of the planet was appearing. "There, just to the east of the sunrise terminator. That's the major continent— Farland, it was called—where the capital city and the spaceport were situated. You see that river, with the S bend? Step up the magnification, somebody…"
Now there was only the glowing picture of the island continent, filling all the screen, and that expanded, so that there was only the sprawling, silvery S, and toward the middle of it, on either bank, a straggle of buildings was visible.
"The spaceport should be about ten miles to the west," said Grimes.
"Yes," agreed Smith, taking a long pointer to the screen. "I think that's it."
"Then make it Landing Stations, Rector," ordered Presbyter Cannan.
"Sir," demurred Smith, "you cannot put a big ship down as though she were a dinghy."
"Lord, oh Lord," almost prayed the Presbyter. "To have come so far, and then to be plagued by the dilatoriness of spacemen!"
I wish that this were my control room, thought Grimes.
But Piety's crew worked well and efficiently, and in a very short space of time the intercom speakers were blatting strings of orders: "Secure all for landing stations!"
"All idlers to their quarters!" and the like. Gyroscopes hummed and whined and the ship tilted relative to the planet until its surface was directly beneath her, and the first of the sounding rockets, standard equipment for a survey expedition but not for landing on a world with spaceport control functioning, were fixed.
Parachutes blossomed in the upper atmosphere and the flares, each emitting a great streamer of smoke, ignited. Somebody was singing. It was the Presbyter.
"Let the fiery, cloudy pillar Guide me all my journey through…"
Even Grimes was touched by the spirit of the occasion. What if this crazy, this impious (for so he was beginning to think of it) experiment did work? What would happen? What would be unleashed upon the worlds of men? Who was it—the Gnostics?—who had said that the God of the Old Testament was the Devil of the New? He shivered as he sat in his acceleration chair.
She was dropping steadily, was Piety, following the first of her flares. But there was drift down there—perhaps a gale in the upper atmosphere, or a jet stream. The Inertial Drive generators grumbled suddenly as Smith applied lateral thrust. Down she dropped, and down, almost falling free, but under the full control of her captain. On the target screen, right in the center, highly magnified, the cluster of ruins that had been a spaceport was clearly visible, tilting like tombstones in a deserted graveyard, ghastly in the blue light of the rising sun.
Down she dropped, plunging through the wisps of cirrus, and there was a slight but appreciable rise of temperature as skin friction heated the metal of her hull. Smith slowed the rate of descent. The Presbyter started muttering irrita-blv to himself.
There was no longe" need for magnification on the screen. The great rectangle of the landing field was clearly visible, the vegetation that covered it lighter in color—eau de Nile against the surrounding indigo—than the brush outside the area. The last of the flares to have been fired was still burning there, its column of smoke rising almost vertically. The growth among which it had fallen was slowly smoldering.
Grimes looked at Smith. The man was concentrating hard. Beads of perspiration were forming on his upper cheeks, running down into his beard. But this was more important than an ordinary landing. So much hinged upon it. And, perhaps, malign (or benign) forces might be gathering their strength to overset the ship before her massive tripedal landing gear reached the safety of the planetary surface.
But she was down.
There was the gentlest of shocks, the faintest of creak-ings, the softest siehing of shock-absorbers. She was down, and the Inertial Drive generators muttered to themselves and then were quiet. She was down, and the soughing of the fans seemed to make the silence all the more silent.
Presbyter Cannan broke it. He turned in his chair to address Grimes. "Commodore," he asked as he pointed toward a distant peak, a black, truncated cone against the blue sky, "Commodore Grimes, what is the name of that mountain?"
"I… I don't know, sir."
"I know." The old man's voice was triumphant. "It is Sinai."
Had this been any other ship there would have been a period of relaxation. There were wild pigs and rabbits to hunt, descendants of the livestock abandoned by the original colonists. There were the famous caves, with their rock paintings, to visit. But the animals, their fear of Man long forgotten, came out of the undergrowth to stare curiously at the vessel and at the humans who busied themselves a-round her, opening side ports to allow the egress of the three pinnaces, already stocked with what would be required for the final stages of the expedition. And nobody was remotely interested in the caves.
Grimes managed to see Clarisse Lane. The ship was almost deserted now, so he was able to make his way down into the women's quarters without being challenged and stopped. He found her little cabin, hardly more than a cell. She was not locked in, not restrained in any way. She was sitting in her chair, a somber figure in her black dress, staring into nothingness. Her full lips moved almost imperceptibly as she vocalized her thoughts.
With a sudden start she realized that Grimes was standing before her. She whispered, "I—I was talking to Ken."
"To Mayhew?"
"Yes."
Saying goodbye, he thought. He said, "Clarisse, you don't have to go through with this."
"I am going through with it, Commodore."
"You don't have to," he insisted. "You're in touch with Mayhew. And hell be in touch with Rim Sword. The Admiral told me that she'd be standing by in this sector. She's probably on her way here now. We can stall off these fanatics until she comes in."
She said, "I'm going through with it."
"But why? Why?"
"Because I want to."
"But you're not really one of them."
"I'm not."
"Sister Lane!" It was the Deaconess. "You asked for a few moments of privacy—and now I find you with this— this lecher! I3ut come. The boat is waiting."
"I'll come with you," said Grimes.
"You will not," snapped the woman. "A place has been reserved for you in the pinnace carrying the Presbyter and the Rector. They have decided that it is meet that an infidel shall witness the handing down of the Law."
Clarisse Lane followed the Deaconess from the cabin. Grimes trailed along behind them. They went down to the main air lock, down the ramp to the overgrown apron, stumbling over the tough, straggling vines on their way to the boats. The sun was dropping fast to the western horizon. There was a hint of chill, a smell of dusk in the still air. There was the scent of growing things, and a faint hint of corruption.
Smith beckoned to Grimes from the open door of the leading pinnace. He made his way slowly toward it, walking carefully. He clambered up the retractable steps into the crowded cabin that stank of perspiration and damp, heavy clothing. He found a seat, wedged between two junior officers.
The door hissed shut. The Inertial Drive generator throbbed and snarled. Grimes could not see out of the ports, but he knew that the boat was airborne, was moving. There was no conversation in the cabin, but a metallic male voice reported from the speaker on the pilot's console, "Number Two following." After a pause a harsh female voice said, "Number Three following."
How long the flight lasted Grimes did not know; he was unable to raise his arm to look at his watch. But it seemed a long time, and it seemed a long time that they sat there, after they had landed, waiting for the other boats to come down. But at last the door opened and a thin, icy wind whined through the aperture. The Presbyter was out first, then Smith, and eventually Grimes, in the middle of a huddle of officers and civilians.
The plateau was smooth, windswept, an expanse of bare rock. To one side of it were the three pinnaces, and in front of them the men were drawn up in orderly ranks, with only the Presbyter standing apart. In the middle of the circular area were the women, a ragged huddle of somber black.
Grimes's attention was caught by a blue spark far below, not far from the still gleaming, serpentine river. Had Rim Sword landed? No. It was only the control room windows of Piety reflecting the last rays of the setting sun.
There was a subdued munnuring as the women walked to stand to one side of the men. No, not all the women. Two remained in the center of the plateau. One was the Deaconess, tall and forbidding. The other was Clarisse Lane. They had stripped her. She was wearing only a kilt cut roughly from the hide of some animal, clothing like that which had been worn by her ancestresses on this very planet. She was shivering and was hugging her full breasts to try to keep out the cold.
Stark, incongruous, an easel stood there, supporting a framed square of black canvas, and there was a battery-powered floodlight to illuminate it. At its foot were pots of pigment, and brushes. Raul, the forefather of this girl, had called animals with his paintings. What would • she call? What could she call?
"Drink!" said the Deaconess, her voice loud and clear over the thin whine of the bitter wind. "Drink!" She was holding out a glass of something. Clarisse took it, drained it.
Suddenly the sun was gone, and there was only the glare of the floodlight. Overhead was the almost empty black sky, and low to the east was an arc of misty luminescence that was the slowly rising Galactic Lens. The wind seemed to be coming straight from intergalactic space.
The Deaconess stalked over the rocky surface to take her stand beside the Presbyter, leaving the girl alone. Hesitantly Clarisse stooped to the pots and brushes, selected one of the latter, dipped it into paint, straightened, stood before the easel. She stiffened into immobility, seemed to be waiting for something.
They were singing, then, the black-clad men and women drawn up in their stiff ranks before the pinnaces. They were singing, "Cwn Rhonda," it was, and even Grimes, who had always loved that old Welsh hymn tune, found it hard to refrain from joining in. They were singing, the rumbling basses, the baritones, the high tenors and the shrill sopranos.
Guide, me, oh Thou great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this barren land! _
I am weak, but Thou art mighty, Hold me with Thy powerful hand!
They were singing, and the girl was painting. With deft, sure strokes she was depicting on the black canvas the figure of a god, white-bearded, white-robed, wrathful. She was painting, and the men and women were singing, and the air was full of unbearable tension and the wind was now howling, tugging at their clothing, buffeting them. But the easel in its circle of harsh light stood steady and the girl worked on…
There was the dreadful crack of lightning close at hand, too close at hand, the crack and the dazzle, and the pungency of ozone, and the long, long streamer of blue fire licking out from above their heads and culminating on the plain far below, at the spaceport.
There was the burgeoning fireball where the ship had been.
There was the dreadful laughter, booming above the frenzy of the wind, and the metallic crash and clatter as the pinnaces, lifted and rolled over the rim of the plateau, plunged to destruction down the steep, rocky mountain slope.
And They were there—the robust, white-bearded deity, a lightning bolt clutched and ready in his right hand, and the naked, seductively smiling goddess, and the other naked one with her bow and her leashed hounds, and she in the white robes, carrying a book, with the owl perched on her shoulder. The lame smith was there, with his hammer, and the sea-god, with his trident, and he with the red beard and the helmet and the body armor and the sword.
Somebody screamed, and at least a score of the men and women had fallen to their knees. But the Presbyter stood his ground.
"Who are you?" he shouted. "Who are you?"
"Little man," the great voice replied, "we were, we are and we always shall be."
Grimes realized that he was laughing uncontrollably and saying, over and over to himself, "Not Sinai, but Olympus! Not Sinai, but Olympus!"
There was another supernal clap of thunder and the dark came sweeping back.
They sat around in miserable little groups on the bare mountaintop.
The Presbyter was gone, nobody knew where or how, and the Deaconess, and Smith, and perhaps a dozen of the others. It had been a long night, and a cold one, but the sun had risen at last, bringing some warmth with it.
Grimes, in shirt and trousers, stood with Clarisse Lane, who was wrapped in his jacket.
"But what happened?" he was asking. "What happened? What did you do?"
She said, "I… I don't know. I suppose that I do have some sort of power. And I suppose that I am, at heart, one of the Blossom People. Our religious beliefs are a sort" of vague pantheism… And, after all, the Father of the Gods is very similar in His attributes to the patriarchal gods of later religions…" She looked at the sky. "It's lucky that I'm a telepath as well as being… whatever it is that I am. Rim Sword will be here very shortly. I hope it's soon. I have a feeling that when some of our fanatical friends recover they'll be blaming me for everything."
"When they recover," said Grimes. "It will take me a long time." He added, "But I don't think you'd better return to Francisco with them."
"Ken," she told him, "has already got the formalities under way that will make me a Rim Worlds citizen."
"The obvious one?"
"Yes."
"And are you going to get married in church?" he asked. "It should be interesting."
"Not if I can help it," she told him.
And so, in due course, Grimes kissed the bride and, at the reception, toasted the newlyweds in imported champagne. He did not stay long after that. He was too much the odd man out—almost all the other guests were married couples, and such few women as were unattached made little or no appeal to him. He was missing Sonya, still away on her galactic cruise. Somehow he missed her less at home, lonely though it was without her. There was still so much of her in the comfortable apartment: her books, the pictures that she had chosen, the furniture that had been specially designed to her taste.
Having left the party early, he was at his office, at the spaceport, bright and early the following morning. He received, personally, the urgent Carlottigram from Rim Griffon, on Tharn. He smiled as he read it. He had been deskbound for too long, and his recent voyage in the oddly named Piety had aggravated rather than assuaged the itching of his feet. Captain Timms, one of the Rim Runners' senior masters, was due back from annual leave within a few days and, at the moment, there was no appointment open for him. So Timms could keep the chair warm while Grimes took passage to Tharn; the scheduled departure date of Rim Dragon for that planet fitted in very nicely with his plans.
"Miss Walton," he said happily to the rather vapid little blonde secretary, "this is going to be a busy morning. Telephoning first, and then correspondence every which way… To begin with, get me the General Manager…"
Her Inerttal Drive throbbing softly, all hands at landing stations, all passengers save one strapped in their acceleration couches (a sudden emergency requiring the use of the auxiliary reaction drive was unlikely, but possible), the starship Rim Dragon dropped slowly down to Port Grimes on Tharn. The privileged passenger—although in his case it was a right rather than a privilege—was riding in the control room instead of being incarcerated in his cabin. Commodore John Grimes, Astronautical Superintendent of Rim Runners, said nothing, did nothing that could be construed as interference on his part. Legally speaking, of course, he was no more than a guest in the liner's nerve center; but at the same time he could and did exercise considerable authority over the space-going employees of Rim Runners, made the ultimate decisions in such matters as promotions and appointments. However, Captain Wenderby, Rim Dragon's master, was a more than competent ship-handler and at no time did Grimes feel impelled to make any suggestions, at no time did his own hands start to reach out hungrily for the controls.
So Grimes sat there, stolid and solid in his acceleration chair, not even now keeping a watchful eye on the briskly efficient Wenderby and his briskly efficient officers. They needed no advice from him, would need none. But it was easier for them than it had been for him, when he made his own first landing on Tharn—how many years ago? Tod many. There had been no spaceport then, with spaceport control keeping the master fully informed of meteorological conditions during his entire descent. There had been no body of assorted officials—port captain, customs, port health and all the rest of it—standing by awaiting the ship's arrival. Grimes, in fact, had not known what or whom to expect, although his robot probes had told him that the culture of the planet was roughly analogous to that of Earth's Middle Ages. Even so, he had been lucky in that he had set Faraway Quest down near a city controlled by the priesthood rather than in an area under the sway of one of the robber barons.
He looked out of one of the big viewports. From this altitude he could see no signs of change—but change there must have been, change there had been. On that long ago exploration voyage in the old Quest he had opened up the worlds of the Eastern Circuit to commerce—and the trader does more to destroy the old ways than either the gunboat or the missionary. In this case the trader would have been the only outside influence: the Rim Worlds had always, fortunately for them, been governed by cynical, tolerant agnostics to whom gunboat diplomacy was distasteful. The Rim Worlders had always valued their own freedom too highly to wish to interfere with that of any other race.
But even commerce, thought Grimes, is an interference. It makes people want the things that they cannot yet produce for themselves; the mass-produced entertainment, the labor-saving machines, the weapons. Grimes sighed. I suppose that we were right to arm the priesthood rather than the robber barons. In any case, they've been good customers.
Captain Wenderby, still intent on his controls, spoke. "It must seem strange, coming back after all these years, sir."
"It does, Captain."
"And to see the spaceport that they named after you, for the first time."
"A man could have worse monuments."
Grimes transferred his attention from the viewport to the screen that showed, highly magnified, what was directly astern of and below the ship. Yes, there it was. Port Grimes. A great circle of gray-gleaming concrete, ringed by warehouses and administration buildings, with cranes and gantries and conveyor belts casting long shadows in the ruddy light of the westering sun. (He had made the first landing on rough heathland, and for a long, heart-stopping moment had doubted that the tripedal landing gear would be able to adjust to the irregularities of the surface.) And there was Rim Griffon, the reason for his voyage to Tham. There was the ship whose officers refused to sail with each other and with the master. There was the mess that had to be sorted out with as few firings as possible—Rim Runners, as usual, was short of spacefaring personnel. There was the mess.
It was some little time before John Grimes could get around to doing anything about it. As he should have foreseen, he was a personality, a historical personality at that. He was the first outsider to have visited Tharn. He was responsible for the breaking of the power of the barons, for the rise to power of the priesthood and the merchants. Too, the Rim Confederacy's ambassador on Tharn had made it plain that he, and the government that he represented, would appreciate it if the Commodore played along. The delay in the departure of a very unimportant merchant vessel was far less important than the preservation of interstellar good relations.
So Grimes was wined and dined, which was no hardship, and obliged to listen to long speeches, which was. He was taken on sight-seeing tours, and was pleased to note that progress, although inevitable, had been a controlled progress, not progress for its own sake. The picturesque had been sacrificed only when essential for motives of hygiene or real efficiency. Electricity had supplanted the flaring natural gas jets for house- and street-lighting—but the importation and evolution of new building techniques and materials had not produced a mushroom growth of steel and concrete matchboxes or plastic domes. Architecture still retained its essentially Tharnian character, even though the streets of the city were no longer rutted, even though the traffic on those same streets was now battery-powered cars and no longer animal-drawn vehicles. (Internal combustion engines were manufactured on the planet, but their use was prohibited within urban limits.) And at sea change had come. At the time of Grimes's first landing the only oceangoing vessels had been the big schooners; now sail was on its way out, was being ousted by the steam turbine. Yet the ships, with their fiddle bows and their figureheads, with their raked masts and funnels, still displayed an archaic charm that was altogether lacking on Earth's seas and on the waters of most Man-colonized worlds. The Commodore, who was something of an authority on the history of marine transport, would dearly have loved to have made a voyage in one of the steamers, but he knew that time would not permit this. Once he had sorted out Rim Griffon's troubles he would have to return to Port Forlorn, probably in that very ship.
At last he was able to get around to the real reason for his visit to Tharn. On the morning of his fifth day on the planet he strode purposefully across the clean, well-cared-for concrete of the apron, walked decisively up the ramp to Rim Griffon's after air lock door. There was a junior officer waiting there to receive him; Captain Dingwall had been warned that he would be coming on board. Grimes knew the young man, as he should have: after all, he had interviewed him for a berth in the Rim Runners' service.
"Good morning, Mr. Taylor."
"Good morning, sir." The Third Officer was painfully nervous, and his prominent Adam's apple bobbled as he spoke. His ears, almost as outstanding as Grimes's own, flushed a dull red. "The Old-" The flush spread to all of Taylor's features. '^Captain Dingwall is waiting for you, sir. This way, sir."
Grimes did not need a guide. This Rim Griffon, like most of the older units in Rim Runners' fleet, had started her career as an Epsilon Class tramp in the employ of the Interstellar Transport Commission. The general layout of those tried and trusted Galactic workhorses was familiar to all spacemen. However, young Mr. Taylor had been instructed by his captain to receive the Commodore and to escort him to his, Dingwall's, quarters, and Grimes had no desire to interfere with the running of the ship.
Yet.
The two men rode up in the elevator in silence, each immersed in his own thoughts. Taylor, obviously, was ap-prehensive. A delay of a vessel is always a serious matter, especially when her own officers are involved. And Grimes was sorting out his own impressions to date. This Rim Griffon was obviously not a happy ship. He could feel it-fust as he could see and hear the faint yet unmistakable sign of neglect, the hints of rust and dust, the not yet anguished pleading of a machine somewhere, a fan or a pump, for lubrication. And as the elevator cage passed through the "farm" level there was a whiff of decaying vegetation; either algae vats or hydroponic tanks, or both, were overdue for cleaning out.
The elevator stopped at the captain's deck. Young Mr. Taylor led the way out of the cage, knocked diffidently at the door facing the axial shaft. It slid open. A deep voice said, "That will be all, Mr. Taylor. I'll send for you and the other officers when I want you. And come in, please, Commodore Grimes."
Grimes entered the day cabin. Dingwall rose to meet him—a short, stocky man, his features too large, too ruddy, his eyes too brilliantly blue under a cockatoo-crest of white hair. He extended a hand, saying, "Welcome aboard, Commodore." He did not manage to make the greeting sound convincing. "Sit down, sir. The sun's not yet over the yard-arm, but I can offer you coffee."
"No thank you, Captain. Later, perhaps. Mind if I smoke?" Grimes produced his battered pipe, filled and lit it. He said through the initial acrid cloud, "And now, sir, what is the trouble? Your ship has been held up for far too long."
"You should have asked me that five days ago, Commodore."
"Should I?" Grimes stared at Dingwall, his gray eyes bleak. "Perhaps I should. Unfortunately I was obliged to act almost in an ambassadorial capacity after I arrived here. But now I am free to attend to the real business."
"It's my officers," blurted Dingwall. "Yes?"
"The second mate to begin with. A bird-brained navigator if ever there was one. Can you imagine anybody, with all the aids we have today, getting lost between Stree and Mellise? He did."
"Legally speaking," said Grimes, "the master is responsible for everything. Including the navigation of his ship."
"I navigate myself. Now."
And 1 can imagine it, thought Grimes. "Do 1 have to do everybody's bloody job in this bloody ship? Of course, I'm only the Captain…" He said, "You reprimanded him, of course?"
"Darn right I did." Dingwall's voice registered pleasant reminiscence. "I told him that he was incapable of navigating a plastic duck across a bathtub."
"Hmm. And your other officers?"
"There're the engineers, Commodore. The Interstellar Drive chief hates the Inertial Drive chief. Not that I've much time for either of 'em. In fact I told Willis—he's supposed to run the Inertial Drive—that he couldn't pull a soldier off his sister. That was after I almost had to use the auxiliary rockets to get clear of Grollor—n
"And the others?"
"Vacchini, Mate. He couldn't run a pie cart. And Sally Bowen, Catering Officer, can't boil water without burning it. And Pilchin, the so-called purser, can't add two and two and get the same answer twice running. And as for Sparks… I'd stand a better chance of getting an important message through if I just opened a control viewport and stood there and shouted."
The officer who is to blame for all this, thought Grimes, is the doctor. He should have seen this coming on. But perhaps I'm to blame as well. Dingwall's home port is Tort Forlorn, on horn—and his ship's been running between the worlds of the Eastern Circuit and Port Farewell, on Faraway, for the past nine standard months. And Mrs. Dingwall (Grimes had met her) is too fond of her social life to travel with him. …
"Don't you like the ship, Captain?" he asked.
"The ship's all right," he was told.
"But the run, as far as you're concerned, could be better."
"And the officers."
"Couldn't we all, Captain Dingwall? Couldn't we all? And now, just between ourselves, who is it that refuses to sail with you?"
"My bird-brained navigator. I hurt his feelings when I called him that. A very sensitive young man is our Mr. Missenden. And the Inertial Drive chief. He's a member of some fancy religion called the Neo-Calvinists…"
"I've met them," said Grimes.
"What I said about his sister and the soldier really shocked him."
"And which of them refuse to sail with each other?"
"Almost everybody has it in for the second mate. He's a Latter Day Fascist and is always trying to make converts. And the two chiefs are at each other's throats. Kerholm, the Interstellar Drive specialist, is a militant atheist—"
And I was on my annual leave, thought Grimes, when this prize bunch of square pegs was appointed to this round hole. Even so, I should have checked up. I would have checked up if I hadn't gotten involved in the fun and games on Kinsolving's Planet.
"Captain," he said, "I appreciate your problems. But there are two sides to every story. Mr. Vacchini, for example, is a very efficient officer. As far as he is concerned, there could well be a clash of personalities…"
"Perhaps," admitted Dingwall grudgingly.
"As for the others, I don't know them personally. If you could tell them all to meet in the wardroom in—say—five minutes, we can go down to try to iron things out."
"You can try," said the Captain. "I've had them all in a big way. And, to save you the bother of saying it, Commodore Grimes, they've had me likewise."
Grimes ironed things out. On his way from Lorn to Tharn he had studied the files of reports on the captain and his officers. Nonetheless, in other circumstances he would have been quite ruthless—but good spacemen do not grow on trees, especially out toward the Galactic Rim. And these were good spacemen, all of them, with the exception of Missenden, the second officer. He had been born on New Saxony, one of the worlds that been part of the short-lived Duchy of Waldegren, and one of the worlds upon which the political perversions practiced upon Waldegren itself had lived on for years after the downfall of the Duchy.
He had been an officer in the navy of New Saxony and had taken part in the action off Pelisande, the battle in which the heavy cruisers of the Survey Service had destroyed the last of the self-styled commerce raiders who were, in fact, no better than pirates.
There had been survivors, and Missenden had been one of them. (He owed his survival mainly to the circumstance that the ship of which he had been Navigator had been late in arriving at her rendezvous with the other New Saxony war vessels and had, in fact, surrendered after no more than a token resistance.) He had stood trial with other war criminals, but had escaped with a very light sentence. (Most of the witnesses who could have testified against him were dead.) As he had held a lieutenant commander's commission in the navy of New Saxony he had been able to obtain a Master Astronaut's Certificate after no more than the merest apology for an examination. Then he had drifted out to the Rim, where his New Saxony qualifications were valid; where, in fact, qualifications issued by any human authority anywhere in the galaxy were valid.
Grimes looked at Missenden. He did not like what he saw. He had not liked it when he first met the man, a few years ago, when he had engaged him as a probationary third officer—but then, as now, he had not. been able to afford to turn spacemen away from his office door. The Second Officer was tall, with a jutting, arrogant beak of a nose over a wide, thin-lipped mouth, with blue eyes that looked even madder than Captain Dingwall's, his pale, freckled face topped by close-cropped red hair. He was a fanatic, that was obvious from his physical appearance, and in a ship where he, like everybody else, was unhappy his fanaticism would be enhanced. A lean and hungry look, thought Grimes. He thinks too much; such men are dangerous. He added mentally, But only when they think about the wrong things. The late Duke Otto's Galactic Superman, for example, rather than Pilgrens Principles of Interstellar Navigation.
He said, "Mr. Missenden…"
"Sir?" The curtly snapped word was almost an insult.
The way in which it was said implied, "I'm according respect to your rank, not to you."
"The other officers have agreed to continue the voyage. On arrival at Port Forlorn you will all be transferred to more suitable ships, and those of you who are due will be sent on leave or time off as soon as possible. Are you agreeable?"
"No."
"And why not, Mr. Missenden?"
"I'm not prepared to make an intercontinental hop under a captain who insulted me."
"Insulted you?"
"Yes." He turned on Dingwall. "Did you, or did you not, call me a bird-brained navigator?"
"I did, Mr. Missenden," snarled Captain Dingwall. "And I meant it."
"Captain," asked Grimes patiently, "are you prepared to withdraw that remark?"
"I am not, Commodore. Furthermore, as master of this ship I have the legal right to discharge any member of my crew that I see fit."
"Very well," said Grimes. "As Captain Dingwall has pointed out I can only advise and mediate. But I do possess some authority; appointments and transfers are my responsibility. Will you arrange, Captain, for Mr. Missenden to be paid, on your books, up to and including midnight, local time? Then get him off your Articles of Agreement as soon as possible, so that the second officer of Rim Dragon can be signed on here. And you, Mr. Missenden, will join Rim Dragon."
"If you say so," said Missenden. "Sir."
"I do say so. And I say, too, Mr. Missenden, that I shall see you again in my office back in Port Forlorn."
"I can hardly wait. Sir."
Captain Dingwall looked at his watch. He said, "The purser already has Mr. Missenden's pay-off almost finalized. Have you made any arrangements with Captain Wenderby regarding his second officer?"
"I told him that there might be a transfer, Captain. Shall we meet at the Consul's office at 1500 hours? You probably know that he is empowered to act as shipping master insofar as our ships on Tharn are concerned."
"Yes, sir," stated Dingwall. "I know."
"You would," muttered Missenden.
The transfer of officers was nice and easy in theory—but it did not work out in practice. The purser, Grimes afterward learned, was the only person aboard Rim Griffon with whom the second officer was not on terms of acute enmity. Missenden persuaded him to arrange his pay-off for 1400 hours, not 1500. At the appointed time the purser of the Griffon was waiting in the Consul's office, and shortly afterward the purser and the second officer of Rim Dragon put in their appearance. The Dragons second mate was paid off his old ship and signed on the Articles of his new one. But Missenden had vanished. All that Griffon's purser knew was that he had taken the money due him and said that he had to make a business call and that he would be back.
He did not come back.
Commodore Grimes was not in a happy mood. He had hoped to be a passenger aboard Rim Griffon when she lifted off from Port Grimes, but now it seemed that his departure from Tharn for the Rim Worlds would have to be indefinitely postponed. It was, of course, all Missenden's fault. Now that he had gone into smoke all sorts of unsavory facts were coming to light regarding that officer. During his ship's visits to Tharn he had made contact with various subversive elements. The Consul had not known of this—but Rim Runners' local agent, a native to the planet, had. It was the police who had told him, and he had passed the information on to Captain Dingwall. Dingwall had shrugged and growled, "What the hell else do you expect from such a drongo?" adding, "As long as I get rid of the bastard he can consort with Aldebaranian necrophiles for all I care!"
Quite suddenly, with Grimes's baggage already loaded aboard Rim Griffon, the mess had blown up to the proportions of an interstellar incident. Port Grimes's Customs refused outward clearance to the ship. The Rim Confederacy's Ambassador sent an urgent message to Grimes requiring him to disembark at once—after which the ship would be per-mitted to leave—and to report forthwith to the Embassy. With all this happening, Grimes was in no fit state to listen to Captain Wenderbv's complaints that he had lost a first class second officer and now would have to sail shorthanded on completion of discharge.
The Ambassador's own car took Grimes from the spaceport to the Embassy. It was a large building, ornately tur-reted, with metal-bound doors that could have withstood the charge of a medium tank. These opened as the Commodore dismounted from the vehicle, and within them stood saluting Marines. At least, thought Grimes, they aren't going to shoot me. Yet. An aide in civilian clothes escorted him to the Ambassador's office.
The Honorable Clifton Weeks was a short, fat man with all of a short, fat man's personality. "Sit down, Commodore," he huffed. Then, glowering over his wide, highly polished desk at the spaceman, "Now, sir. This Missenden character. What about him? Hey?"
"He seems to have flown the coop," said Grimes.
"You amaze me, sir." Weeks's glower became even more pronounced. "You amaze me, sir. Not by what you said, but by the way in which you said it. Surely you, even you, have some appreciation of the seriousness of the situation?"
"Spacemen have deserted before, in foreign ports. Just as seamen used to do—still do, probably. The local police have his description. They'll pick him up, and deport him when they get him. Arid we'll deport him, too, when he's delivered back to the Confederacy."
"And you still don't think it's, serious? Hey?"
"Frankly, no, sir."
"Commodore, you made the first landing on this planet. But what do you know about it? Nothing, sir. Nothing. You haven't lived here. I have. I know that the Confederacy will have to fight to maintain the currently favorable trade relations that we still enjoy with Tharn. Already other astro-nautical powers are sniffing around the worlds of the Eastern Circuit."
"During the last six months, local time," said Grimes, "three of the Empire of Waverley's ships have called here. And two from the Shakespearean Sector. And one of Trans-
Galactic Clippers' cargo liners. But, as far as the rulers of Tharn are concerned, the Confederacy is still the most favored nation."
"Who are the rulers of Tharn?" barked the Ambassador.
"Why, the priesthood."
The Ambassador mumbled something about the political illiteracy of spacemen, then got to his feet. He waddled to the far wall of his office, on which was hung a huge map of the planet in Mercator projection, beckoned to Grimes to follow him. From a rack he took a long pointer. "The island continent of Ausiphal…" he said. "And here, on the eastern seaboard, Port Grimes, and University City. Where we are now."
"Yes___"
The tip of the pointer described a rhumb line, almost due east. "The other island continent of the northern hemisphere, almost the twin to this one. Climatically, politically— you name it."
"Yes?"
The pointer backtracked, then stabbed viciously. "And here, well to the west of Braziperu, the island of Tangaroa. Not a continent, but still a sizable hunk of real estate."
"So?"
"So Tangaroa's the last stronghold of the robber barons, the ruffians who were struggling for power with the priests and merchants when you made your famous first landing. How many years ago was it? Hey?"
"But what's that to do with Mr. Missenden?" Grimes asked. "And me?" he added.
"Your Mr. Missenden," the Ambassador said, "served in the navy of New Saxony. The people with whom he's been mixing in University City are Tangaroan agents and sympathizers. The priesthood has allowed Tangaroa to continue to exist—in fact, there's even trade between it and Ausiphal—but has been reluctant to allow the Tangaroans access to any new knowledge, especially knowledge that could be perverted to the manufacture of weaponry. Your Mr. Missenden would be a veritable treasure house of such knowledge."
"He's not my Mr. Missenden!" snapped Grimes.
"But he is, sir. He is. You engaged him when he came out to the Rim. You appointed him to ships running the Eastern Circuit. You engineered his discharge on this world, even."
"So what am I supposed to do about him?"
"Find him, before he does any real damage. And if you, the man after whom the spaceport was named, are successful it will show the High Priest fust how much we of the Confederacy have the welfare of Tharn at heart."
"But why me? These people have a very efficient police force. And a man with a pale, freckled face and red hair will stand out like a sore thumb among the natives."
The Honorable Mr. Weeks laughed scornfully. "Green skin dye! Dark blue hair dye! Contact lenses! And, on top of all that, a physical appearance that's common on this planet!"
"Yes," admitted Grimes. "I might recognize him, in spite of a disguise…**
"Good. My car is waiting to take you to the High Priest."
The University stood on a rise to the east of the city, overlooking the broad river and, a few miles to the north, the sea. It looked more like a fortress than a seat of learning, and in Tharn's turbulent past it had, more than once, been castle rather than academy.
Grimes respected the Tharnian priesthood, and the religion that they preached and practiced made more sense to him than most of the other faiths of Man. There was something of Buddhism about it, a recognition of the fact that nothing is, but that everything is flux, change, a continual process of becoming. There was the equation of God with Knowledge—but never that infuriating statement made by so many Terran religions, that smug, "There are things that we aren't meant to know." There was a very real wisdom— the wisdom that accepts and rejects, and that neither accepts nor rejects just because a concept is new. There was a reluctance to rush headlong into an industrial revolution with all its miseries; and, at the same time, no delay in the adoption of techniques that would make the life of the people longer, easier and happier.
Night had fallen when the Embassy car pulled up outside the great gates of the University. The guard turned out smartly—but in these days their function was merely ceremonial; no longer was there the need to keep either the students in or the townsfolk out. On all of Tharn—save for Tangaroa—the robber barons were only an evil memory of the past.
A black-uniformed officer led Grimes through long corridors, lit by bright electric bulbs, and up stairways to the office of the High Priest. He, an elderly, black-robed man, frail, his skin darkened by age to an opaque olive, had been a young student at the time of the first landing. He claimed to have met the Commodore on that occasion, but Grimes could not remember him. But he was almost the double of the old man who had held the high office then—a clear example of the job making the man.
"Commodore Grimes," he said. "Please be seated."
"Thank you, your Wisdom."
"I am sorry to have interfered with your plans, sir. But your Mr. Weeks insisted."
"He assured me that it was important."
"And he has… put you in the picture?"
"Yes."
The old man produced a decanter, two graceful glasses. He poured the wine. Grimes relaxed. He remembered that the Tharnian priesthood made a point of never drinking with anybody whom they considered an enemy, with nobody who was not a friend in the true sense of the word. There was no toast, only a ceremonial raising of goblets. The liquor was good, as it always had been.
"What can I do?" asked Grimes.
The priest shrugged. "Very little. I told Mr. Weeks that our own police were quite capable of handling the situation, but he said, 'It's his mess. He should have his nose rubbed in it.' " The old man's teeth were very white in his dark face as he smiled.
"Tales out of school, your Wisdom." Grimes grinned. "Now I'll tell one. Mr. Weeks doesn't like spacemen. A few years ago his wife made a cruise in one of the T-G clippers—and, when the divorce came through, married the chief officer of the liner she traveled in."
The High Priest laughed. "That accounts for it. But I shall enjoy your company for the few weeks that you will have to stay on Tharn. I shall tell my people to bring yo*ur baggage from the Embassy to the University."
"That is very good of you." Grimes took another sip of the strong wine. "But I think that since I'm here I shall help in the search for Mr. Missenden. After all, he is still officially one of our nationals."
"As you please, Commodore. Tell me, if you were in charge how would you set about it?"
Grimes lapsed into silence. He looked around the office. All of the walls were covered with books, save one, and on it hung another of those big maps. He said, "He'll have to get out by sea, of course."
"Of course. We have no commercial airship service to Tangaroa, and the Tangaroans have no commercial airship service at all."
"And you have no submarines yet, and your aerial coastguard patrol will keep you informed as to the movements of all surface vessels. So he will have to make his getaway in a merchant vessel… Would you know if there are any Tangaroan merchantmen in port?"
"I would know. There is one—the Kawaroa. She is loading textiles and agricultural machinery."
"Could she be held?"
"On what excuse, Commodore? The Tangaroans are very touchy people, and if the ship is detained their consul will at once send off a radio message to his government."
"A very touchy people, you say… and arrogant. And quarrelsome. Now, just suppose that there's a good, old-fashioned tavern brawl, as a result of which the master and his officers are all arrested…"
"It's the sort of thing that could easily happen. It has happened, more than once."
"Just prior to sailing, shall we say? And then, with the ship immobilized, with only rather dim-witted ratings to try to hinder us, we make a thorough search—accommodations, holds, machinery spaces, storerooms, the works."
"The suggestion has its merits."
"The only snag," admitted Grimes, "is that it's very unlikely that the master and all three of his mates will rush ashore for a quick one just before sailing."
"But they always do," said the High Priest.
As they always had done, they did.
Grimes watched proceedings from the innkeeper's cubbyhole, a little compartment just above the main barroom with cunning peepholes in its floor. He would have preferred to have been among the crowd of seamen, fishermen and watersiders, but his rugged face was too well known on Tharn, and no amount of hair and skin dye could have disguised him. He watched the four burly, blue- and brass-clad men breasting the bar, drinking by themselves, tossing down pot after pot of the strong ale. He saw the fat girl whose dyed yellow hair was in vivid contrast to her green skin nuzzle up to the man who was obviously the Tangaroan captain. He wanted none of her—and Grimes sympathized with him. Even from his elevated vantage point he could see that her exposed overblown breasts were sagging, that what little there was of her dress was stained and bedraggled. But the man need not have brushed her away so brutally. She squawked like an indignant parrot as she fell sprawling to the floor with a display of fat, unlovely legs.
One of the other drinkers—a fisherman by the looks of him—came to the aid of beauty in distress. Or perhaps it was only that he was annoyed because the woman, in her fall, had jostled him, spilling his drink. Or, even more likely, he was, like the woman, one of the High Priest's agents. If such was the case, he seemed to be enjoying his work. His huge left hand grasped the captain's shoulder, turning him and holding him, and then right fist and left knee worked in unison. It was dirty, but effective.
After that, as Grimes said later, telling about it, it was on for young and old. The three mates, swinging their heavy metal drinking pots, rallied to the defense of their master. The fisherman picked up a heavy stool to use as his weapon. The woman, who had scrambled to her feet with amazing agility for one of her bulk, sailed into the fray, fell to a crouching posture, straightened abruptly, and one of the Tangaroan officers went sailing over her head as though rocket-propelled, crashing down on to a table at which three watersiders had been enjoying a quiet, peaceful drink. They, roaring their displeasure, fell upon the hapless foreigner with fists and feet.
The police officer with Grimes—his English was not too good—said, "Pity break up good fight. But must arrest very soon."
"You'd better," the Commodore told him. "Some of your people down there are pulling knives."
Yes, knives were out, gleaming wickedly in the lamplight. Knives were out, but the Tangaroans—with the exception of the victim of the lady and her stevedoring friends—had managed to retreat to a corner and there were fighting off all comers, although the captain, propped against the wall, was playing no great part in the proceedings. Like the fisherman, the two officers had picked up stools, were using them as both shields and weapons, deflecting flung pots and bottles with them, smashing them down on the heads and arms of their assailants.
The captain was recovering slowly. His hand went up to fumble inside the front of his coat. It came out, holding something that gleamed evilly—a pistol. But he fired it only once, and harmlessly. The weapon went off as his finger tightened on the trigger quite involuntarily, as the knife thrown by the yellow-haired slattern pinned his wrist to the wall.
And then the place was full of University police, tough men in black tunics who used their clubs quite indiscriminately and herded all those present out into the waiting trucks.
Quietly, Grimes and the police officer left their observation post and went down the back stairs. Outside the inn they were joined by twelve men—six police and six customs officials, used to searching ships. Their heels ringing on the damp cobblestones, they made their way through the misty night to the riverside, to the quays.
Kawaroa was ready for sea, awaiting only the pilot and, of course, her master and officers. Her derricks were stowed, her moorings had been singled up, and a feather of smoke from her tall, raked funnel showed that steam had been raised. She was not a big ship, but she looked smart, well maintained, seaworthy.
As Grimes and his party approached the vessel they saw that somebody had got there ahead of them, a dark figure who clattered hastily up the gangway. But there was no cause for hurry. The ship, with all her navigating officers either in jail or in the hospital, would not be sailing, and the harbor master had already been told not to send a pilot down to take her out.
There was no cause for hurry…
But what was that jangling of bells, loud and disturbing in the still night? The engine room telegraph? The routine testing of gear one hour before the time set for departure?
And what were those men doing, scurrying along to foc'sle head and poop?
Grimes broke into a run, and as he did so he heard somebody shouting from Kawaroa's bridge. The language was unfamiliar, but the voice was not. It was Missenden's. From forward there was a thunk! and then a splash as the end of the severed headline fell into the still water. The last of the flood caught the ship's bows and she fell away from the wharf. With the police and customs officers, who had belatedly realized what was happening, well behind him, Grimes reached the edge of the quay. It was all of five feet to the end of the still-dangling gangway and the gap was rapidly widening. Without thinking, Grimes jumped. Had he known that nobody would follow him he would never have done so. But he jumped, and his desperate fingers closed around the outboard manropes of the accommodation ladder and somehow, paying a heavy toll of abrasions and lacerations, he was able to squirm upward until he was kneeling on the bottom platform. Dimly he was aware of shouts from the fast receding dock. Again he heard the engine room telegraph bells, and felt the vibration as the screw began to turn. So the after lines had been cut, too, and the ship was under way. And it was—he remembered the charts that he had looked at—a straight run down river with absolutely no need for local knowledge. From above sounded a single, derisory blast from Kawaroa's steam whistle.
Grimes was tempted to drop from his perch, to swim back ashore. But he knew too much; he had always been a student of maritime history in all its aspects. He knew that a man going overboard from a ship making way through the water stands a very good chance of being pulled under and then cut to pieces by the screw. In any case, he had said that he would find Missenden, and he had done just that.
Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself erect, then walked up the clattering treads to deck level.
There was nobody on deck to receive him. This was not surprising; Missenden and the crew must have been too engrossed in getting away from the wharf to notice his pierhead jump. So… He was standing in an alleyway, open on the port side. Looking out, he saw the harbor lights sliding past, and ahead and to port there was the white-flashing fairway buoy, already dim, but from mist rather than distance. Inboard there was a varnished wooden door set in the white-painted plating of the 'midships house, obviously the entrance to the accommodation. Grimes opened it without difficulty—door handles will be invented and used by any being approximating to human structure. Inside there was a cross alleyway, brightly illuminated by electric light bulbs in well fittings. On the after bulkhead of this there was a steel door, and the mechanical hum and whine that came from behind it told Grimes that it led to the en trine room. On the forward bulkhead there was another wooden door.
Grimes went through it. Another alleyway, cabins, and a companionway leading upward. At the top of this there were more cabins, and another companionway. And at the top of this… the captain's accommodation, obviously, even though the word on the tally over the door was no more than a meaningless squiggle to Grimes.
One more companionway—this one with a functional handrail instead of a relatively ornate balustrade. At the head of it was a curtained doorway. Grimes pushed through the heavy drape, found himself in what could only be the chart room, looked briefly at the wide chart table upon which was a plan of the harbor, together with a pair of dividers and a set of parallel rulers. The Confederacy, he remembered, had at one time exported quite large consignments of these instruments to Tham.
On the forward bulkhead of the chart room, and to port, was the doorway leading out to the wheelhouse and bridge. Softly, Grimes stepped through it, out into the near-darkness. The only light was that showing from the compass periscope, the device that enabled the helmsman to steer by the standard magnetic compass, the binnacle of which was sited up yet one more deck, on what had been called on Earth's surface ships the "monkey island." There was the man at the wheel, intent upon his job. And there, at the fore end of the wheelhouse, were two dark figures, looking out through the wide windows. One of them, the taller one, turned suddenly, said something in Tangaroan. As before, the voice was familiar but the language was not.
The question—intonation made that plain—was repeated, and then Missenden said in English, "It's you! How the hell did you get aboard? Hold it, Commodore, hold it!"j There was just enough light for Grimes to see the pistol] that was pointing at his midriff.
"Turn this ship around," ordered Grimes, "and take her back into port."
"Not a chance." Missenden laughed. "Especially when I've gone to all the trouble of taking her out of port. Pity old Dingwall wasn't here to see it. Not bad, was it, for a bird-brained navigator? And keep your hands up where 't't can see them."
"I'm unarmed," said Grimes.
"I've only your word for it," Missenden told him. Then) he said something to his companion, who replied in what, in happier circumstances, would have been a very pleasant contralto. The girl produced a mouth whistle, blew a pierc ing blast. In seconds two burly seamen appeared on tha bridge. They grabbed Grimes and held him tightly whilfj she ran practiced hands over his clothing. It was not first time that she had searched a man for weapons. Then they dragged him below, unlocked a steel door and threw him into the tiny compartment beyond it. The heavily barred port made it obvious that it was the ship's brig.
They locked him in and left him there.
Grimes examined his surroundings bv the light of the single dim bulb. Deck, deckhead and bulkheads were all of steel—but had they been of plvboard it would have made no difference: that blasted girl had taken from him the only possession that could possibly have been used as a weapon, his pocketknife. There was a steel-framed bunk, with a thin mattress and one sleazy blanket. There was a stained washbasin, and a single faucet which, when persuaded, emitted a trickle of rusty water. There was a bucket —plastic, not metal. Still, it could have been worse. He could sleep, perhaps, and he would not die of thirst. Fully clothed, he lay down on the bunk. He realized that he was physically tired; his desperate leap for the gangway had taken something out of him. And the ship was moving gently now, a slight, soporific roll, and the steady hum and vibration of the turbines helped further to induce slumber. There was nothing he could do, absolutely nothing, and to lose valuable sleep by useless worry would have been foolish.
He slept.
It was the girl who awakened him.
She stood there, bending over him, shaking his shoulder. When he stirred she stepped sharply back. She was holding a pistol, a revolver of Terran design if not manufacture, and she looked as though she knew how to use it; and she was one of those women whose beauty is somehow accentuated by juxtaposition to lethal ironmongery. Yes, she was an attractive wench, with her greenish, translucent skin that did not look at all odd, with her fine, strong features, with her sleek, short-cut blue hair, and her slim yet rounded figure that even the rough uniform could not hide. She was an officer of some sort, although what the silver braid on the sleeves of her tunic signified Grimes could not guess. Not that he felt in the mood for guessing games; he was too conscious of his own unshaven scruffiness, of the aches and pains resulting from his athletics of the previous night and from the hardness of the mattress.
She said, in fair enough English, "Your Mr. Missenden would see you."
"He's not my Mr. Missenden," replied Grimes testily. Why did everybody ascribe to him the ownership of the late second officer of Rim Dragon?
"Come," she said, making an upward jerking motion of the pistol barrel.
"All right," grumbled Grimes. "All right."
He rolled off the narrow bunk, staggered slightly as he made his way to the washbasin. He splashed water over his face, drank some from his cupped hands. There was no towel. He made do with his handkerchief. As he was drying himself he saw that the door was open and that a seaman was standing beyond it. Any thoughts that he had entertained of jumping the girl and seizing her gun —if he could—evaporated.
"Follow that man," she ordered. "I will follow you."
Grimes followed the man, through alleyways and up com-panionways. They came at last to the bridge. Missenden was there, striding briskly back and forth as though he had been at sea all his life. In the wheelhouse the helmsman was intent on his own task. Grimes noted that the standard compass periscope had been withdrawn and that the man was concentrating upon the binnacle housing the ocean passage compass. So they still used that system. But why shouldn't they? It was a good one. He looked out to the sea, up to the sky. The morning was calm, but the sun was hidden by a thick, anti-cyclonic overcast. The surface of the sea was only slightly ruffled and there was a low, confused swell.
"Missenden," called the girl.
Missenden stopped his pacing, walked slowly to the wheelhouse. With his dyed hair and skin he looked like a Tharnian, a Tangaroan, and in his borrowed uniform he looked like a seaman. He also looked very pleased with himself.
"Ah, Commodore," he said, "welcome aboard. You've met Miss Ellevie, I think. Our radio officer."
"You'd better tell Miss Ellevie to send a message to the Hiph Priest for me, Mr. Missenden."
Missenden laughed harshly. "I'll say this for you, Commodore, you do keep on trying. Why not accept the inevitable? You're in Tangaroan hands; in fact you put yourself in their—our—hands. The Council of Barons has already been informed, and they have told me that they want you alive. If possible."
"Why?" asked Grimes bluntly.
"Use your loaf, Commodore. First, it's possible that we may be able to persuade you to press for the establishment of trade relations between the Confederacy and Tan-garoa. You do pile on quite a few G's in this sector of the galaxy, you know. Or should I say that you do draw a lot of water? And if you play, it could be well worth your while."
"And if I don't play?"
"Then we shall be willing to sell you back to your lords and masters. At a fair price, of course. A squadron of armed atmosphere fliers? Laser weapons? Missiles with nuclear warheads?"
"That's for your lords and masters to decide." Missenden flushed and the effect, with his green-dyed skin, was an odd one. He said to the girl, "That will do, Ellevie. I'll let you know when I want you again." He walked out to the wing of the bridge, beckoning Grimes to follow. When he turned to face the Commodore he was holding a pistol in his right hand.
He said, "Don't try anything. When I was in the navy of New Saxony I was expert in the use of hand guns of all descriptions. But I'd like a private talk. Ellevie knows English, so I sent her below. The man at the wheel may have a smattering, but he won't overhear from where we are now."
"Well?" asked Grimes coldly. * "We're both Earthmen."
"/ am, Mr. Missenden."
"And I am, by ancestry. These Tharnians are an inferior breed, but if they see that you can be humiliated—"
-
"—they'll realize that you aren't the Galactic Superman you set yourself up to be."
Missenden ignored this, but with an effort. He said, "My position in this ship is rather… precarious. The crew doesn't trust me. I'm captain, yes—but only because I'm the only man on board who can navigate."
"But can you?"
"Yes, damn you! I've read the textbooks—it was all the bastards gave me to read when I was holed up down in the secret compartment. And anybody who can navigate a starship can navigate one of these hookers! Anyhow… anyhow, Commodore, it will be better for both of us if we maintain the pretense that you are a guest rather than a prisoner. But I must have your parole."
"My parole? What can I do?"
"I've heard stories about you."
"Have you? Very well, then, what about this? I give you my word not to attempt to seize the ship."
"Good. But not good enough. Will you also give your word not to signal, by any means, to aircraft or surface vessels?"
"Yes," agreed Grimes after a short hesitation.
"And your word not to interfere, in any way, with the ship's signaling equipment?"
"Yes."
"Then, Commodore, I feel that we may enjoy quite a pleasant cruise. I can't take you down yet; I relieved the lookout for his breakfast. You'll appreciate that we're rather shorthanded—as well as the Old Man and the three mates half the deck crew was left ashore, and two of the engineers. I can't be up here all the time, but I do have to be here a lot. And the lookouts have orders to call me at once if they sight another ship or an aircraft."
"And, as you say, you're the only navigator." The only human navi'gator, Grimes amended mentally.
The lookout came back to the bridge then, and Missenden took Grimes down to what was to be his cabin. It was a spare room, with its own attached toilet facilities, on the same deck as the captain's suite, which, of course, was now occupied by Missenden. It was comfortable, and the shower worked, and there was even a tube of imported depilatory cream for Grimes to use. After he had cleaned up he accompanied Missenden down to the saloon, a rather gloomy place paneled in dark, unpolished timber. Ellevie was • already seated at one end of the long table, and half Way along it was an officer who had to be an engineer. Missenden took his seat at the head of the board, motioned to Grimes to sit at his right. A steward brought in cups and a pot of some steaming, aromatic brew, returning with what looked like two deep plates of fish stew.
But it wasn't bad and, in any case, it was all that there was.
After the meal Missenden returned to the bridge. Grimes accompanied him, followed him into the chart room, where he started to potter with the things on the chart table. Grimes looked at the chart—a small-scale oceanic one. He noted that the Great Circle track was penciled on it, that neat crosses marked the plotting of dead reckoning positions at four hourly intervals. He looked from it to the ticking log clock on the forward bulkhead. He asked, "This submerged log of yours—does it run fast or slow?"
"I… I don't know, Commodore. But if the sky clears and I get some sights I'll soon find out."
"You think you'll be able to?"
"Yes. I've always been good with languages, and I've picked up enough Tangaroan to be able to find my way through the ephemeris and reduction tables."
."Hmm." Grimes looked at the aneroid barometer—another import. It was still high. With any luck at all the anti-cyclonic gloom would persist for the entire passage. In any case, he doubted if Missenden's first attempt to obtain a fix with sextant and chronometer would be successful.
He asked, "Do you mind if I have a look around the ship? As you know, I'm something of an authority on the history of marine transport."
"I do mind!" snapped Missenden. Then he laughed abruptly. "But what could you do? Even if you hadn't given your parole, what could you do? All the same, I'll send Ellevie with you. And I warn you, that girl is liable to be trigger happy."
"Have you known her long?"
Missenden scowled. "Too long. She's the main reason why I'm here."
Yes, thought Grimes, the radio officer of a merchant vessel is well qualified for secret service work, and when the radio officer is also an attractive woman … He felt sorry for Missenden, but only briefly. He'd had his fun; now he was paying for it.
Missenden went down with Grimes to the officers' quarters, found Ellevie in her room. She got up from her chair without any great enthusiasm, took a revolver from a drawer in her desk, thrust it into the side pocket of her tunic.
"I'll go now," said Missenden.
"All right," she answered in a flat voice. Then, to Grimes, "What you want to see?"
"I was on this world years ago," he told her.
"I know."
"And I was particularly impressed by the… the ocean passage compasses you had, even then, in your ships. Of course, it was all sail in those days."
"Were you?"
Grimes started pouring on the charm. "No other race in the galaxy has invented such ingenious instruments."
"No?" She was beginning to show a flicker of interest. "And did you know, Commodore Grimes, that it was not a wonderful priest who made the first one? No. It was not. It was a Baron Lennardi, one of my ancestors. He was—how do you put it? A man who hunts with birds?"
"A falconer."
"A falconer?" she repeated dubiously. "No matter. He had never been to the University, but he had clever artisans in his castle. His brother, whom he loved, was a—how do you say sea raider?"
"A pirate."
She took a key from a hook by the side of her desk. "Second Mate looks after compass," she said. "But Second Mate not here. So I do everything."
She led the way out into the alleyway, then to a locked door at the forward end of the. officers' accommodation, to a room exactly on the center line of the ship, directly below the wheelhouse. She unlocked and opened the door, hooked it back. From inside came an ammonia-like odpr. In the center of the deck was a cage, and in the cage was a bird—a big, ugly creature, dull gray in color, with ruffled plumage. It was obvious that its wings had been brutally amputated rather than merely clipped. Its almost globular body was imprisoned in a metallic harness, and from this cage within a cage a thin yet rigid shaft ran directly upward, through the deckhead and, Grimes knew, through a casing in the master's day cabin and, finally, to the card of the ocean passage compass. As Grimes watched, Ellevie took a bottle of water from a rack, poured some into the little trough that formed part of the harness. Then from a box she took a spoonful of some stinking brown powder, added it to the water. The bird ignored her. It seemed to be looking at something, for something, something beyond the steel bulkhead that was its only horizon, something beyond the real horizon that lay forward and outside of the metal wall. Its scaly feet scrabbled on the deck as it made a minor adjustment of course.
And it—or its forebears—had been the only compasses when Grimes had first come to this planet. Even though the Earthmen had introduced the magnetic compass and the gyro compass, this was still the most efficient for an ocean passage.
Cruelty to animals is penalized only when commercial interests are not involved.
"And your spares?" asked Grimes.
"Homeward spare—right forward," she told him. "Ausi-phal compass and one spare—right aft."
"So you don't get them mixed?" he suggested.
She smiled contemptuously. "No danger of that."
"Can I see them?" . "Why not? May as well feed them now."
She almost pushed Grimes out of the master compass room, followed him and locked the door. She led the way to the poop, but Grimes noticed that a couple of unpleasant looking seamen tailed after him. Even though the word had been passed that he had given his parole he was not trusted.
The Ausiphal birds were in a cage in the poop house. As was the case with the Tangaroa birds, their wings had been amputated. Both of them were staring dejectedly directly astern. And both of them (even though dull and ruffled their plumage glowed with gold and scarlet) were females.
Grimes followed Ellevie into the cage, the door to which was at the forward end of the structure. He made a pretense of watching interestedly as she doled out the water and the odoriferous powder—and picked up two golden tail feathers from the filthy deck. She straightened and turned abruptly. "What you want those for?"
"Flies," he lied inspiredly. "Dry flies."
"Flies?"
"They're artificial lures, actually. Bait. Used for fishing."
"Nets," she stated. "Or explosives."
"Not for sport. We use a rod, and a line on the end of it, and the hook and the bait on the end of that. Fishermen are always experimenting with different baits…"
The suspicion faded from her face. "Yes, I remember. Missenden gave me a book—a magazine? It was all about outdoor sports. But this fishing… Crazy!"
"Other people have said it, too. But I'd just like to see what sort of flies I can tie with these feathers when I get home."
"If you get home," she said nastily.
Back in his cabin, Grimes went over mentally what he had learned about the homers, which was as good a translation as any of their native name, during his visit to Tharn. They were land birds, but fared far out to sea in search of their food, which was fish. They always found their way back to their nests, even when blown thousands of miles away by severe storms, their powers of endurance being phenomenal. Also, whenever hurt or frightened, they headed unerringly for home—by the shortest possible route, which was a Great Circle course.
Used as master compasses, they kept the arrowhead on the card of the steering compass pointed directly toward wherever it was that they had been born—even when that was a breeding pen in one of the seaport towns. On a Mer-cator chart the track would be a curve, and according to a magnetic or a gyrocompass the ship would be continually changing course; but on a globe a Great Circle is the shortest distance between two points.
Only one instinct did they possess that was more powerful, more overriding than the homing instinct.
The sex instinct.
Grimes had given his word. Grimes had promised not to do certain things—and those things, he knew, were beyond his present capabilities in any case. But Grimes, as one disgruntled Rim Runners' captain had once remarked, was a stubborn old bastard. And Grimes, as the Admiral commanding the navy of the Rim Worlds Confederacy had once remarked, was a cunning old bastard. Sonya, his wife, had laughed when told of these two descriptions of her husband, and had laughed still louder when he had said plaintively that he didn't like to be called old.
Nonetheless, he was getting past the age for cloak and dagger work, mutiny on the high seas and all the rest of it. But he could still use his brains.
Kaivaroa's shorthandedness was a help. If the ship had been normally manned he would have found it hard, if not impossible, to carry out his plan. But, insofar as the officers were concerned, the two engineers were on alternate watches, and off-duty hours would be spent catching up on lost sleep. That left Ellevie—but she had watches to keep, and one of these two hour stretches of duty coincided with and overlapped evening twilight. Missenden was not a watch-keeper, but he was, as he was always saying, the only navigator, and on this evening there seemed to be the possibility of breaks appearing in the overcast. There had been one or two during the day, but never where the sun happened to be. And insofar as evening stars were concerned out here on the Rim, there were very, very few. On a clear evening there would have been three, and three only, suitably placed for obtaining a fix. On this night the odds were against even one of the three appearing in a rift in the clouds before the horizon was gone.
Anyhow, there was Missenden, on the bridge, sextant in hand, the lid of the chronometer box in the chart room open, making an occasional gallop from one wing to the other when it seemed that a star might make a fleeting appearance. Grimes asked if he might help, if he could take the navigator's times for him. Missenden said no, adding that the wrong times would be no help at all. Grimes looked hurt, went down to the boat deck, strolled aft. The radio shack was abaft the funnel. He looked in, just to make sure that Ellevie was there. She was, and she was tapping out a message to somebody. Grimes tried to read it—then realized that even if the code was Morse the text would be in Tangaroan.
He went down to the officers' deck. All lights, with the exception of the dim police bulbs in the alleyways, were out. From one of the cabins came the sound of snoring. He found Ellevie's room without any trouble; he had been careful to memorize the squiggle over her door that meant Radio Officer. He walked to the desk, put his hand along the side of it. Yes, the key was there. Or a key. But it was the only one. He lifted it from its hook, stepped back into the alleyway, made his way forward.
Yes, it was the right key. He opened the door, shut it behind him, then groped for the light switch. The maimed, ugly bird ignored him; it was still straining at its harness, still scrabbling how and again at the deck as it made some infinitesimal adjustment of course. It ignored him—until he pulled one of the female's tail feathers from his pocket. It squawked loudly then, its head turning on its neck to point at the potent new attraction, its clumsy body straining to follow. But Grimes was quick. His arm, his hand holding the feather shot out, steadied over the brass strip let into the deck that marked the ship's center line. But it had been close, and he had been stupid. The man at the wheel would have noticed if the compass card had suddenly swung a full ninety degrees to starboard—and even Missenden would have noticed if the ship had followed suit. (And would he notice the discrepancies between magnetic compass and ocean passage compass? Did he ever compare compasses?
Probably not. According to Captain Dingwall he was the sort of navigator who takes far too much for granted.)
Grimes, before Missenden had ordered him off the bridge, had been able to study the chart. He assumed—he had to assume—that the last dead reckoning position was reasonably accurate. In that case, if the, ship flew off at a tangent, as it were, from her Great Circle, if she followed a rhumb line, she would miss the north coast of Tangaroa by all of a hundred miles. And if she missed that coast, another day's steaming would bring her into the territorial waters of Braziperu. There was probably some sort of coastal patrol, and even though surface and airships would not be looking for Kawaroa her description would have been sent out.
The rack containing water and food containers was on the forward bulkhead of the master compass room. It was secured to the plating with screws, and between wood and metal there was a gap. Grimes pushed the quill of the feather into this crack, being careful to keep it exactly over the brass lubber's line. He remembered that the male homer had paid no attention to the not-so-artificial lure until he pulled it out of his pocket. Had his own body odor masked the smell of it? Was there a smell, or was it some more subtle emanation? He had learned once that the male birds must be kept beyond a certain distance from the females, no matter what intervened in the way of decks or bulkheads. So… ? His own masculine aura… ? The fact that he had put the feathers in the pocket that he usually kept his pipe in… ?
H° decided to leave the merest tip of the feather showing, nonetheless. He had noted that Ellevie went through her master compass tending routine with a certain lack of enthusiasm; probably she would think that the tiny touch of wld was iust another rust speck on the paintwork.
He waited in the foul-smelling compartment for what se-m°d like far too long a time. But he had to be sure. He decided, at last, that his scheme was working. Before the planting of the feather the maimed bird had been shifting to starboard, the merest fraction of a degree at a time, continually. Now it was motionless, just straining at its harness.
Grimes put out the light, let himself out, locked up, then returned the key to Ellevie's cabin. He went back up to the bridge, looked into the chart room. It seemed that Mis-senden had been able to take one star, but that his sums were refusing to come out right.
The voyage wore on. It was not a happy one, especially for Grimes. There was nothing to read, and nobody to talk to except Missenden and Ellevie—and the former was all too prone to propagandize on behalf of the Galactic Superman, while the latter treated Grimes with contempt. He was pleased to note, however, that they seemed to be getting on each other's nerves. The honeymoon, such as it had been, was almost over.
The voyage wore on. No other ships were sighted, and the heavily clouded weather persisted. Once or twice the sun showed through, and once Missenden was able to obtain a sight, to work out a position line. It was very useful as a check of distance run, being almost at right angles to the course line.
"We shall," announced Missenden proudly, "make our landfall tomorrow forenoon."
"Are you sure?" asked Grimes mildly.
"Of course I'm sure." He prodded with the points of his dividers at the chart. "Look! Within five miles of the D.R."
"Mphm," grunted Grimes.
"Cheer up, Commodore! As long as you play ball with the barons they won't boil you in oil. All you have to do is be reasonable."
"I'm always reasonable," said Grimes. "The trouble is that too many other people aren't."
The other man laughed. "We'll see what the Council of Barons has to say about that. I don't bear you any malice-well, not much—but I hope I'm allowed to watch when they bring you around to their way of thinking."
"I hope you never have the pleasure," snapped Grimes, going below to his cabin.
The trouble was that he was not sure. Tomorrow might be arrival day at Port Paraparam on Tongaroa. It might be. It might not. If he started taking too much interest in the navigation of the ship—if, for example, he took it upon himself to compare compasses—his captors would at once smell a rat. He recalled twentieth century sea stories he had read, yarns in which people, either goodies or baddies, had thrown ships off course by hiding an extra magnet in the vicinity of the steering compass binnacle. Those old bastards had it easy, he thought. Magnetism is straightforward; it's not like playing around with the tail feathers of a stupid bird.
He did not sleep well that night, and was up on bridge before breakfast, with Missenden. Through a pair of binoculars he scanned the horizon, but there was nothing there, no distant peaks in silhouette against the pale morning sky.
The two men were up on the bridge again after breakfast. Still there was nothing ahead but sea and sky. Missenden was beginning to look worried—and Grimes's spirits had started to rise. Neither of them went down for the midday meal, and it was significant that the steward did not come up to ask if they wanted anything. There was something in the atmosphere of the ship that was ugly, threatening. The watches—helmsmen and lookouts—were becoming increasingly surly.
"I shall stand on," announced Missenden that evening. "I shall stand on. The coast is well lit, and this ship has a good echometer."
"But no radar," said Grimes.
"And whose fault is that?" flared the other. "Your blasted pet priests'. They say that they won't introduce radar until it can be manufactured locally!"
"There are such things as balance of trade to consider," Grimes told him.
"Balance of trade!" He made it sound like an obscenity. Then: "But I can't understand what went wrong… the dead reckoning… my observed position…"
"The log could be running fast. And what about set? Come to that, did you allow for accumulated chronometer error?"
"Of course. In any case, we've been getting radio time signals."
"Are you sure that you used the right date in the ephe-meris?"
"Commodore Grimes, as I told you before, I'm a good linguist. I can read Tangaroan almost as well as I can read English."
"What about index error on that sextant you were using?"
"We stand on," said Missenden stubbornly.
Grimes went down to his cabin. He shut the door and shot the securing bolt. He didn't like the way the crew was looking at the two Earthmen.
Morning came, and still no land.
The next morning came, and the next. The crew was becoming mutinous. To Missenden's troubles—and he was, by now, ragged from lack of sleep—were added a shortage of fresh water, the impending exhaustion of oil fuel. But he stood on, stubbornly. He wore two holstered revolvers all the time, and the ship's other firearms were locked in the strong room. And what about the one that Ellevie had been waving around? wondered Grimes.
He stood on—and then, late in the afternoon, the first dark peak was faintly visible against the dark, clouded sky. Missenden rushed into the chart room, came back out. "Mount Rangararo!" he declared.
"Doesn't look like it," said Ellevie, who had come on to the bridge.
"It must be." A great weight seemed to have fallen from his shoulders. "What do you make of it, Commodore?"
"It's land," admitted Grimes.
"Of course it's land! And look! There on the starboard bow! A ship. A cruiser. Come to escort us in."
He snapped orders, and Kawaroa's ensign was run up to the gaff, the black mailed fist on the scarlet ground. The warship, passing on their starboard beam, was too far distant for them to see her colors. She turned, reduced speed, steered a converging course.
The dull boom of her cannon came a long while after the flash of orange flame from her forward turret. Ahead of Kawaroa the exploding shell threw up a great fountain of spray. It was Grimes who ran to the engine room telegraph and rang Stop. It was Ellevie who, dropping her binoculars to the deck, cried, "A Braziperuan ship!" Then she pulled her revolver from her pocket and aimed it at Missenden, yelling, "Terry traitor!" Unluckily for her she was standing just in front of Grimes, who felled her with a rabbit punch to the back of the neck. He crouched, scooped up the weapon and straightened. He said, "You'd better get ready to fight your faithful crew away from the bridge, Missenden. We should be able to hold them off until the boarding party arrives." He snapped a shot at the helmsman, who, relinquishing his now useless wheel, was advancing on them threateningly. The man turned tail and ran.
"You're behind this!" raved Missenden. "What did you do? You gave your word…"
"I didn't do anything that I promised not to."
"But… what went wrong?"
Grimes answered with insufferable smugness. "It was fust a case of one bird-brained navigator trusting another."
The tidying up did not take long. Missenden's crew did not put up even a token resistance to the boarding party sent from the warship. Kawaroa was taken into the nearest Braziperuan port, where her crew was interned pending decisions as to its eventual fate. Grimes and Missenden—the latter under close arrest—made the voyage back to University City by air. The Commodore did not enjoy the trip; the big blimp seemed to him to be a fantastically flimsy contraption and, as it was one of the hydrogen-filled craft, smoking was strictly forbidden.
He began to enjoy himself again when he was back in University City, although the task of having to arrange for the deportation of the sullen Missenden back to New Saxony was a distasteful one. When this had been attended to Grimes was finally able to relax and enjoy the hospitality and company of the High Priest and his acolytes, none of whom subscribed to the fallacy that scholarship goes hand in hand with asceticism. He would always remember the banquet at which he was made an Honorary Admiral of the Ausiphalian Navy.
Meanwhile, his passage had been arranged on the Lorn-bound Rim Cayman, aboard which Missenden would also be traveling on the first leg of his long and miserable voyage home. It came as a surprise, therefore, when he re-ceived a personal telephone call from the Honorable Clifton Weeks, the Rim Worlds' ambassador to Tharn. "I hope that you're in no hurry to be getting home, Commodore," said the fat man. Grimes could tell from the Ambassador's expression that he hoped the reverse.
"Not exactly," admitted Grimes, enjoying the poorly concealed play of expressions over the other's pudgy features.
"Hrrmph! Well, sir, it seems that our masters want you on Mellise."
"What for, sir?" asked Grimes.
"Don't ask me. I'm not a spaceman. I didn't open the bloody world up to commerce. All that I've been told is that you're to arrange for passage to that planet on the first available ship. You're the expert."
On what? wondered Grimes. He said sweetly, "I'm looking forward to the trip, Mr. Ambassador."
Commodore John Grimes was proceeding homeward from Tharn the long way around—by way of Groller, Stree and Mellise, by the route that he, in the old Faraway Quest, had opened and charted so many years ago.
On all the worlds he was still remembered. On Tharn the spaceport was named after him. In Breardon, the planetary capital of Groller, a huge statue of him stood in Council Square. Grimes had stared up at the heroic monument with some distaste. Surely his ears didn't stand out that much, and surely his habitual expression was not quite so frog-like. He made allowances for the fact that the Grol-lens, although humanoid, are a batrachian people, but he still inspected himself for a long time in a full-length mirror on his return to the ship in which he was a passenger.
And then Rim Kestrel, in which Grimes had taken passage from Tharn, came to Mellise.
Mellise was a watery world, fully four-fifths of its surface being covered by the warm, mainly shallow seas. The nearest approach to a continent was a long, straggling chain of islands almost coincident with the equator. On one of the larger ones was the spaceport. There was no city, only a village in which the human spaceport personnel and the Rim Confederacy's ambassador and his staff lived. The Mellisans themselves were an amphibious race; like the Earthly cetacea they returned to the sea after having reached quite a high stage of evolution ashore. They could, if they had to, live and work on dry land, but they preferred the water. They dwelt in submarine villages where they were safe from the violent revolving storms that at times ravaged the surface. They tended their underwater farms, raising giant mollusks, great bivalves that yield lustrous pearls, the main item of export. Their imports were the manufactured goods needed by an aquatic culture: nets, cordage, harpoon guns and the like. They could make these for themselves but, with the establishment of regular trade between themselves and the Confederacy, they preferred not to. Why should an essentially water-dwelling being work with fire and metals when pearl farming was so much more comfortable and pleasant?
Grimes rode down to the surface in Rim Kestrels control room. Captain Paulus, the ship's master, was nervous, obviously did not like having his superior there to watch his ship-handling. But he was competent enough, although painfully cautious. Not for him the almost meteoric descent favored by other masters. His Inertial Drive delivered a thrust that nearly countered the planet's gravitational pull. The Kestrel drifted surfaceward like a huge balloon with barely negative buoyancy. But Paulus reacted fast enough when a jet stream took hold of the ship, canceling its effect by just the right application of lateral drive; reacted fast again when the vessel was shaken by clear air turbulence, pulling her out of the danger area with no delay. Nonetheless, Grimes was making mental notes. The efficiency of the spaceport's meteorological observatory left much to be desired; Paulus should have been warned by radio of the disturbances through which he had passed. (But he, Grimes, had made his first landing here before there was a spaceport, let alone spaceport facilities. He had brought the Quest down through the beginnings of a hurricane.)
The Commodore looked at the vision screen that showed, highly magnified, what lay aft and below. There were the islands, each one raggedly circular, each one ringed by a golden beach that was ringed, in its turn, by white surf. There was the cloudy green of shallow water, the clear blue of the deeper seas. Inland was the predominant purple of the vegetation.
Yes, it was a pleasant world, Mellise. Even here, out on the Rim, it could have been developed to a holiday planet, rivaling if not surpassing Caribbea. If the Mellisans had been obliged to deal with the Interstellar Federation rather than with the Rim Worlds Confederacy, this probably would have been the case. Grimes, whose first years in space had been as an officer in the Federation's Survey Service, knew all too well that the major Terran galactic power was far more concerned with the rights of other intelligent races in theory than in practice—unless there was some political advantage to be gained by posing as liberator, conservator or whatever.
He could see the white spaceport buildings now, gleaming in the light of the afternoon sun, startlingly distinct against their backdrop of purple foliage. He could see the pearly gray of the apron, and on it the black geometrical shadows cast by cranes and conveyor belts and gantries. He could even see the tiny, blinking stars that were the three beacons, the markers of the triangle in the center of which Rim Kestrel was to land. He wished that Paulus would get on with it. At this rate it would be after sunset by the time the ship was down.
After sunset it was, and the night had fallen with the dramatic suddenness to be expected in the low latitudes of any planet. Overhead the sky was clear and almost empty, save for the opalescent arc that was the upper limb of the Galactic Lens, low on the western horizon. Paulus had ordered all ports throughout the ship opened, and through them flowed the warm breeze, the scents of growing and flowering things that would have been cloyingly sweet had it not been for the harsh tang of salt water. There was the distant murmur of surf and, even more distant, a grumble of thunder.
"Thank you, Captain Paulus," said Grimes formally. "A very nice set-down."
And so it had been. Merchant captains, after all, are not paid to put their ships in hazard.
Port formalities were few. The Mellisans cared little about such matters as health, customs and immigration regulations. The port captain, a Rim Worlder, took care of all such details for them; and insofar as vessels owned by the Confederacy were concerned there was not even the imposi-tion of port dues. After all, the levying of such charges would have been merely robbing Peter to pay Paul. The rare outside ships—the occasional Interstellar Transport Commission Epsilon Class tramp, the infrequent Empire of Wa-verley freighter, the once-in-a-blue-moon Shakespearian Sector trader—were, presumably, another matter. They would at least pay port dues.
Grimes sat with Captain Paulus and Stacey, the port captain, in Paulus' day cabin. Cold drinks were on the table before them. The Commodore was smoking his foul pipe, Paulus was nervously lighting one cigarette after another, and Captain Stacey had between his fleshy lips a peculiarly gnarled cigar of local manufacture. It looked as though it had been rolled from dry seaweed, and smelt like it. ("An acquired taste," Stacey had told them. "Like to try one?" They had refused.)
"Only a small shipment of pearls this time," Stacey said. "The pearl fishers—or farmers—are having their troubles."
"Disease again?" asked Paulus.
"No. Not this time. Seems to be a sort of predatory starfish. Could be a mutation. Whether it is or not, it's a vicious bastard."
"I thought, Captain Stacey," said Grimes, "that the people here were quite capable of dealing with any of the dangerous life forms in their seas."
"Not this, new starfish," Stacey told him. "It's a killer." He sipped his drink. "The natives knew that you were coming here almost as soon as I did, Commodore. Telepathy? Could be. But, sir, you are almost a local deity. Old Wun-naara—he's the boss in these parts—said to me only this morning, 'Grimes Wannarbo'—and a Wannarbo is roughly halfway between a high chief and the Almighty—'will us help…' Really touched by his faith, I was."
"I'm not a marine biologist," said Grimes. "But couldn't you, with your local knowledge, do something, Captain Stacey?"
"I'm not a marine biologist either, Commodore. It takes all my time to run the port."
And 1 recommended you for this appointment, thought Grimes, looking at the fat man. I thought that this would
be an ideal job for anybody as notoriously lazy as yourself. I thought that you couldn't do any harm here, and that you'd get on well with the Mellisans. But you can't do any good either.
"They must produce pearls," stated Paulus, "if they'll to pay for their imports. They've nothing else we want."
Nothing eke that we want . . . thought Grimes. But the Rim Confederacy is not alone in the galaxy. He said, "Surely, Captain Stacey, you've found out what sort of weapons would be most effective against these things. They could be manufactured back on Lorn or Faraway, and shipped out here. And what about protective netting for the oyster beds?"
"Useless, Commodore," Stacey told him. "The starfish just tear to shreds even the heaviest nets, made from wire rope. As for weapons—poison has always been effective in the past, but not any longer."
"We have to do something to help these people," Grimes said definitely. "And, frankly, not altogether from altruistic motives. As you should know, both Waverley and the Shakespearian Sector are anxious to expand their spheres of influence. If they can help Mellise and we can't…" The unspoken words "you'll be out of a soft job" hung in the air between them.
"They seem to rely upon you to help them, sir," Stacey grumbled.
"And perhaps I can," Grimes told him. "Perhaps I can."
Perhaps he could—but, as he had said, he was not a marine biologist. Even so, he knew of the parallel evolution of life forms on all Earth-type planets. And in the course of his career he had tangled with unfriendly and hungry beasts on more than a century of worlds; he was still around and the hostile animals were not. Variations on familiar patterns or utterly alien, all had fallen victim to human cunning and human weaponry—and human savagery. Man, after all, was still the most dangerous animal.
He said good night to Stacey and Paulus, told them that he was going outside the ship to stretch his legs. He made his way down to the after air lock, then down the ramp to the smooth, clean concrete of the apron. He walked away from the direction of the administration buildings and the human village, found a path that must lead down to the sea. On either side of it the feathery fronds of the trees rustled in the warm breeze. Overhead, Mellise's single moon, a ruddy globe with an almost unmarked surface, rode high in the sky.
Grimes came to the beach, to the pale, gently shelving stretch of coarse sand beyond which the surf was greenly luminescent. He kicked off his sandals and, carrying them, walked slowly down to the edge of the water. He missed Sonya.
He saw that a black, humanoid shape, outlined by the phosphorescence, was waddling ashore, splashing through the shallows. From its dark head two eyes that reflected the light of the moon stared at Grimes. The teeth glinted whitely in the long muzzle as it spoke. "Meelongee, Grimes Wannarbo," Its voice was like that of a Siamese cat.
"Meelongee," replied Grimes. He remembered that this was the word of greeting.
"You have come back." The English was oddly accented but perfectly understandable.
"Yes. I have come back."
"You… help?"
"I shall try."
The native was close to Grimes now, and the Commodore could smell the not unpleasant fishy odor of him. He could see, too, that he was old; in the'moonlight the white hairs about the muzzle and the white patches of fur on the chest were plainly visible.
"You me remember?" There was a short, barking laugh. "No? I was cub when first you come to Mellise, Grimes Wannarbo. Now I am chief. My name—Wunnaara. And you, too, are chief—not of one skyship, but of many. I am chief—but know little. You are chief—but know much."
"The Rim Kestrel lifts tomorrow," said Grimes.
"But you will stay, Wannarbo? You will stay?"
Grimes made his decision. If there was anything that he could do he would be furthering the interests of the Confederacy as well as helping the natives of Mellise. Stacey, it was obvious, would not lift one fat finger. The ambassador, like the port captain, was a no-hoper who had been sent to a planet upon which no emergencies were ever likely to arise. Grimes had not yet met him, but he knew him by repute.
"I will stay," he told the Chief.
"Then I tell my people. There is much to make ready." Wunnaara slipped back into the water, far more silently than he had emerged from it, and was gone.
The Commodore resumed his walk along the beach.
He came to a shallow bay, a crescent-like indentation in the shoreline. There was somebody out there in the water swimming—and by the flash of long, pale arms Grimes knew that it was not a native. Too, there was a pile of clothing on the sand. Grimes quickly stripped. It was a long time since he had enjoyed a swim in the sea. He divested himself of his clothing without embarrassment. Even though he was no longer a young man his body was still compact, well-muscled, had not begun to run to belly. He waded out into the warm salt water.
Suddenly he was confronted by the other swimmer. Only her head and smooth, bare shoulders were visible above the surface. Her eyes and her wide mouth were very dark against the creamy pallor of her face.
"Can't you read?" she was asking indignantly. "Didn't you see the notices? This beach is reserved for ladies only."
Her accent was not a Rim Worlds' one; it was more Pan-Terran than anything. That would account for her indignation; only on parts of the home planet did the absurd nudity taboo still persist. But this was not the home planet.
Grimes said mildly, "I'm sorry. I didn't know." He turned to leave the water.
She said, "Don't run away. We can talk, at this depth, modestly enough."
"I suppose we can."
"You're from the ship, aren't you? But of course, you must be… let me see, now… I've a good ear for accents, and you haven't quite lost the good old Terran twang-Commodore Grimes, would it be?"
"Guilty," admitted Grimes. He was amused to note either that the tide was going out fast or that his companion had moved closer inshore. Her full breasts were fully exposed now, and there was more than a hint of the pale glimmer of the rest of her below the surface.
She said, "It's rather a pity that you're leaving tomorrow."
"I'm not leaving."
"You're not?" she asked sharply.
"No. I promised Chief Wunnaara that I'd stay to look into this plague of starfish."
"You promised Wunnaara…" Her voice was scornful. "But he's only a native, and has to be kept in his place. That's why I insisted on having this beach made private. I hated to think that those… things were spying on me, leering at me while I was swimming."
"And what about me, leering and spying?" Grimes asked sarcastically.
"But you're a Terran—"
"Ex-Terran, young lady. Very ex."
"—and we Terrans should stick together," she completed with a dazzling smile.
"I'm a Rim Worlder," Grimes told her severely. "And so must you be, if you're employed at the spaceport, no matter where you were born." He asked abruptly, "And what do you do, by the way?"
"I'm in the met. office," she said.
"Then I shall see you tomorrow," stated Grimes.
"Good!" Her smile flashed on again.
"I shall be calling in to register a strong complaint," the Commodore went on.
He attempted to step past the girl, intending to swim out to the first line of breakers. Somehow she got in his way, and somehow both of them lost their balance and went down, floundering and splashing. Grimes got to his feet first, pulled the young woman to hers. He was suddenly conscious, as she fell against him, of the firmness and the softness of the body against his own. It was all very nice—and all a little too obvious. But he was tempted, and tempted strongly. Then, but with seemingly reluctance, she broke away from him and splashed shoreward, her slim, rounded figure luminous in the moonlight.
Her voice floated back to him, "I still hope that it's a pleasant meeting tomorrow, Commmodore!"
It was not as unpleasant as it could have been. The girl, Lynn Davis, was second in charge of the spaceport's meteorological office. By daylight, and clothed, she was still attractive. Her hair was a dark, dull-gleaming blonde and her eyes were so deep a blue as to be almost black. Her face was thin and intelligent, with both mouth and nose a little too pronounced for conventional prettiness. There was a resemblance to Sonya, his wife, that strongly attracted Grimes; more than a physical likeness, it was a matter of essential quality. This, at once, put Grimes on his guard. Sonya had held the rank of commander in the Federation's Survey Service, and in the Intelligence branch at that. But now Federation and Rim World Confederacy worked together, shared all information, kept no secrets from each other.
Even so…
Lynn Davis had all the answers ready. Rim Kestrel had been given no information on jet streams and clear air turbulence because there had been a breakdown of radar and other instruments. This, Grimes was made to feel, was his fault; the Rim Runners' Stores Department should have been more prompt in dealing with requisitions for spare parts. "And after all, Commodore," she told him sweetly, "you made the first landing here without any aid at all from the surface, didn't you?"
Grimes asked to see the instrument room. He thought that this request disconcerted her—but this was understandable enough. Any officer, in any service, likes to do things his own way and is apt to resent a superior's intrusion into his own little kingdom, especially when the superior is in a fault-finding mood. But she got up from behind her very tidy desk, led the Commodore out of the office and up a short flight of stairs.
At first glance the compartment looked normal enough; its counterpart could have been found at almost any human-operated spaceport throughout the galaxy. The deviations from the norm were also normal. On many worlds with a lack of recreational facilities the instrument room, with its laboratory and workshop equipment to one side of it, is an ideal place for hobbyists to work. The practice is officially frowned upon, but persists.
There was a tank there, a small aquarium, brilliantly lit. Grimes walked over to it. The only animal denizens were a dozen or so small starfish, brightly colored, spiny little beasts, unusually active. These, unlike their kind on the majority of worlds, seemed to prefer swimming to crawling as a means of locomotion, although they possessed, on the undersides of their limbs, the standard equipment of myriads of suckers.
"And who belongs to these?" asked Grimes.
"Me," she replied.
"Is marine biology your hobby?"
"I'm afraid not, Commodore. I fust 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. Petersen?"
"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. Petersen 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 Ambassa3or."
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'Il 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 Mel-lisans a world of good if they did take over." He raised a slim, graceful wrist and looked at his watch. "Old Wun-naara'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 Wan-narbo, 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 Mel-lisan'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 depofrfor 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 Wannar-bo?"
"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 blood. Just clear of the fight the submarine reared 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 directed 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 governmental 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 dor
"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 particular 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 World-ers—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.
Feeling like a Peeping Tom, another permanent fixture, he leafed through Lynn Davis' service record. She was
Terran-born, of course. Her real education had been at M.I.T., where she had graduated as a Bachelor of General Physics. After that she seemed to have specialized in meteorology. There had been a spell with Weather Control, North American Continent, and another spell with Weather Prediciton, satellite-based. After that she had entered the service of Trans-Galactic Clippers as Spaceport Meteorological Officer. She had seen duty on Austral, Waverley, and Caribbea, all of them planets upon which T-G maintained its own spaceports. From Waverley she had gone to Caribbea—and on Caribbea she had blotted her copybook.
So, thought Grimes, she's a ~ compulsive gambler. She doesn't look like one. But they never do. It was on Caribbea that she had become a regular habitue of the New Port of Spain Casino. She had, of course, worked out a system to beat the wheel—but the system hadn't worked out for her. There had been the unhappy business of the cracking of the T-G cashier's safe, allegedly thiefproof, but (luckily) very few thieves held a degree in Physics. There had been the new banknotes, the serial numbers of which were on record, that had turned up in the safe of the casino's cashier.
After that-the Rim Worlds.
A pity, said Grimes to himself. A pity. But it could have been worse. If she'd gone to Elsinore, in the Shakespearian Sector, where they're notorious for their gambling, she'd really be in a mess by now.
He turned up the file on Petersen. The absentee meteorologist was another ex-Terran, and also had been employed with Trans-Galactic Clippers. Grimes noted with interest that Petersen had spent a few weeks on El Dorado, popularly known as "the planet of the filthy rich." (Grimes had been there himself as a young man, as a junior officer in the Federation's Survey Service.) It seemed that a T-G ship had called there on a millionaires' cruise, and T-G had insisted on sending its own spaceport personnel there in advance.
Women, not money, had been Petersen's trouble. Twice he had been named as corespondent in an unsavory divorce case. If the ladies had not been the wives of prominent
T-G executives it wouldn't have mattered so much—but they had been.
There could be a connection, thought Grimes. There could be. Both of them from Earth, both of them T-G. … He shrugged away the idea. After all, it had been said that if you threw a brick at random aboard any Rim Runners' ship, the odds are that you will hit an ex-officer of the Interstellar Transport Federation's vessels.
So it went on—case histories, one after the other, that made depressing reading and, insofar as the quite serious crisis on Mellise was concerned, a shortage of both motive and opportunity. But money could be a motive. Suppose, tomorrow, a foreign ship dropped in, and suppose that somebody aboard her said to old Wunnaara, "We'll fix your starfish for you—in return for full trading rights…"
And whatever else I am, thought Grimes tiredly, I'm not a starfish fixer.
He poured himself a stiff drink and went to bed.
She said, "I hear that you've been looking through the personnel files, John. That wasn't very gentlemanly of you."
"How did you hear?" asked Grimes. "My doing so was supposed to be as secret as the files themselves."
"There aren't any secrets on this bloody planet, in this tiny community." Her face, as she stared at him over her candlelit dining table, was hard and hostile, canceling out the effects of an excellent meal. "And did you find what you were looking for?"
"No."
"What were you looking for?"
"Somebody who's capable of doing a spot of biological engineering."
"Did you find anybody?"
"No, Lynn."
"What about the spaceport quack?"
"Frankly," said Grimes, "I wouldn't go to him with a slight head cold."
"Frankly, my dear, neither would I." She laughed, and her manner softened. "So you're still no closer to solving the Mystery of the Mutated Starfish."
"No."
"Then I'll solve it for you. There was a bad solar flare about a year ago, and our atmospheric radiation count went up no end in consequence. There's the answer. But I'm glad that you stayed on Mellise, John. You've no idea how hungry a girl gets for intelligent company."
"I'm glad that I stayed, Lynn. For personal reasons. But I really wish that I could help old Wunnaara…"
She said, "I don't like His Too Precious Excellency any more than you do, John, but I often feel that he's on the right tack as far as the natives are concerned. Let them help themselves."
He said, "I discovered this world. I feel, somehow, that it's my direct responsibility."
She replied a little bitterly, "I wish that you'd start shedding some of your feelings of responsibility, Commodore. Don't worry so much. Start having a good time, while you can."
And I could, too, he thought. With a quite beautiful, available woman. But…
She said, "It's a wild night. Hurricane Lynn—I named it after me. You aren't walking back to old Stacey's place in this, surely?"
He said, "It's time I was going."
"You'll be drenched," she told him. "It won't be for the first time." He grinned. "All right. Then go. You can let yourself out." For a tall girl she flounced well on her way from the little dining room to her bedroom.
Grimes sighed, cursing his retentive memory, his detailed recollection of the reports from all the planets with which Rim Runners traded. But he had to be sure, and he did not wish to make any inquiries regarding this matter on Mellise. He let himself out of the little dome-shaped cottage, was at once furiously assailed by the wind. Hurricane Lynn had not yet built up to its full intensity, but it was bad enough. There were great sheets of driving rain, and with them an explosion of spray whipped from the surface of the sea.
Luckily the spaceport was downwind from the village.
Grimes ran most of the way. He didn't want to, but it was easier to scud before the gale than to attempt to maintain a sedate pace. He let himself into the port captain's large house. The Staceys were abed—he had told them that he would be late—but Captain Stacey called out from his bedroom, "Is that you, Commodore?"
"Who else, Captain? I shall be going out again shortly."
"What the hell for?" testily.
"I have to send a message. An important one."
"Telephone it through to the Carlotti Communications Office from here."
"I want to make sure it goes."
Grimes faintly overheard something about distrustful old bastards as he went to his own room, but ignored it.
There was a very cunning secret compartment built into his suitcase. The Commodore opened it, took from it a slim book. Then, with scratch pad and stylus, he worked rapidly and efficiently, finishing up with eleven gibberish groups. He put the book back in its hiding place, pocketed the pad. Then he had to face the stormy night again.
The duty operator in the Carlotti Office was awake, but only just. Had it not been for the growing uproar of the hurricane, penetrating even the insulated walls, he would not have been. He reluctantly put down his luridly covered book and, recognizing Grimes, said, "Sir?"
"I want this to go at once. To my office at Port Forlorn. Urgent." He managed a grin. "That's the worst of space travel. It's so hard to keep track of dates. But my secretary will be able to lay on flowers for the occasion."
The operator grinned back. Judging by the way that he was making a play for that snooty Lynn Davis the Commodore must be a gay old dog, he figured. He said, a little enviously, "Your message will be winging its way over the light-years in a jiffy, sir." He handed the Commodore a signals pad.
Grimes put down the address, transcribed the groups from his own pad, filled in his name and the other details in the space provided. He said, "Let me know how much it is. It's private."
The young man winked. "Rim Runners'U never know, sir."
"Still, I prefer to pay," said Grimes.
He watched the miniature Carlotti Beacon—it was like a Mobius Strip distorted to a long oval—turn on its mounting in the big star tank until it was pointing directly at the spark that represented the Lorn sun. He hoped that the big beacon on the roof of the building was turning, too. But it had to be. If it stopped, jammed, the little indicator would seize up in sympathy. In any case, it was shielded from the weather by its own dome.
The operator's key rattled rapidly in staccato Morse, still the best method of transmitting messages over vast distances. From the wall speaker blurted the dots and dashes of acknowledgment. Then the message itself was sent, and acknowledged.
"Thank you," said Grimes. "If there's a reply phone it through to me, please. I shall be at Captain Stacey's house."
"Very good, sir."
Grimes was relaxing under a hot shower when he heard the telephone buzz. Wrapping a towel around himself, he hurried out of the bathroom, colliding with Captain Stacey.
"It's probably for me," he said.
"It would be," growled Stacey.
It was. It was in reply to Grimes's signal which, when decoded, had read, Urgently require information on solar flares Mellise sun last year heal. It said, after Grimes had used his little book, No repeat no sdlar flares Mellise sun past ten years.
Somebody's lying, thought Grimes, and I don't think it's my secretary.
Hurricane Lynn, while it lasted, put a stop to any further investigations by Grimes. Apart from anything else, the sea people were keeping to their underwater houses, each of which was well stocked with air bladders and the carbon dioxide absorbing plants. He managed, however, to get back on friendly terms with Lynn Davis—or she with him; he was never quite sure which was the case. He found her increasingly attractive; she possessed a maturity that was lacking in all the other young women in the tiny human community. He liked her, but he suspected her—but of what? It was rather more than a hunch: there had been, for example, that deliberate lie about the solar flares. Grimes, who was an omnivorous reader, was well aware that fictional detectives frequently solved their cases by sleeping with the suspects. He wasn't quite ready to go that far; he had always considered such a modus operandi distinctly ungentlemanly.
Then Hurricane Lynn blew itself out and normally fine weather returned to the equatorial belt. Flying was once again possible, and Petersen came back to the spaceport from Mount Llayilla. Grimes didn't like him. He was a tall, athletic young man, deeply tanned, with sun-bleached hair and startlingly pale blue eyes. His features were too regular, and his mouth too sensual. The filed stories of his past amatory indiscretions made sense. And he was jealously possessive insofar as Lynn Davis was concerned. She's nice, Commodore, was the unspoken message that Grimes received, loud and clear. She's mine. Keep your dirty paws off her.
Grimes didn't like it, and neither did the girl. But the Commodore, now that the storm was over, was busy again. At least once daily he argued with the Ambassador, trying to persuade that gentleman to request the services of a team of marine biologists and professional fishermen. He composed and sent his own report to Rim Runners' head office. And, whenever conditions were suitable, he was out to the pearl beds with Wunnaara, at first in the little submarine and then in a skin diving outfit that the spaceport's repair staff had improvised for him. It was a bastard sort of rig, to quote the chief mechanic, but it worked. There was a spacesuit helmet with compressed air tanks, suitably modified. There was a pair of flippers cut from a sheet of thick, tough plastic. There was a spear gun and a supply of especially made harpoons, each of which had an explosive warhead, fused for impact. As long as these were not used at close range the person firing them should be reasonably safe.
Lynn Davis came into the maintenance workshop while Grimes was examining one of the projectiles.
"What's that, John?" she asked.
"Just a new kind of spear," he replied shortly.
"New—an' nasty," volunteered the chief mechanic, .ignoring Grimes's glare. "Pack too much of a wallop for my taste. If you're too close to the target when one o' these goes off, you've had it."
"Explosive?" she asked.
"That's right."
She turned back to Grimes. "Are these safe, John?"
"Safe enough, as long as they're used carefully."
"But against starfish! Like using an elephant gun against a gnat!"
"There are starfish and starfish," he told her. "As everybody on this planet should know by this time."
"You think this will kill them?"
"It's worth giving it a go."
"Yes," she admitted. "I suppose so…" Then, more briskly, "And when are you giving your secret weapon a trial?"
"There are a few modifications to be made," Grimes told her.
"They'll all be ready for you tomorrow morning," said the mechanic. "As promised."
She turned on her dazzling smile. "Then you'd better dine with me tonight, John. If you insist on playing with these dangerous toys there mightn't be another time." She laughed, but that odd, underlying note of seriousness persisted. She went on. "And Jeff will be out of our hair, I promise you that. There's a party on in the Carlotti Operators' Mess, and he never misses those."
"I've a pile of paper work, Lynn," Grimes told her.
"That can wait."
He made his decision. "All right, then. What time?"
"Whatever time suits you; 1800 hours, shall we say? For a few drinks first… P"
"Good. I'll be there."
He dressed carefully for the dinner party, paying even more attention to the contents of his pockets than to the clothes themselves. He had one of his hunches, arid he knew he'd need the things that he was taking from the secret compartment of his suitcase. There was the Minetti automatic, with a spare clip, neither of which made more than a slight bulge in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. There was the pack of cigarillos. (Two of the slim, brown cylinders possessed very special properties, and were marked in such a way that only Grimes would be able to identify them.) Marriage to an Intelligence officer, he thought, has its points. Something is bound to rub off. There was the button on his suit that was a camera, and the other button that was a miniaturized recorder.
On the way from his room to the front door he passed through the lounge where Captain and Mrs. Stacey were watching a rather witless variety program on the screen of their playmaster. The Captain looked up and around, his fat, heavy face serious. He said, "I know that it's none of my business, Commodore, and that you're technically my superior, but we—Lucy and myself—think that you should be warned. Miss Davis is a dangerous woman…"
"Indeed, Captain?"
"Yes, indeed. She leads men on, and then that Jeff Peter-sen is apt to turn nasty."
"Oh?"
An ugly flush suffused Stacey's face. "Frankly, sir, I don't give a damn if you are beaten up for playing around with a girl young enough to be your granddaughter. But because you're Astronautical Superintendent of Rim Runners there'd be a scandal, a very nasty scandal. And I don't want one in my spaceport."
"Very concisely put, Captain. But I can look after myself."
"I hope that you can, Commodore. Good night to you."
"Good night, Captain Stacey."
Grimes let himself out. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fall into place; his suspicions were about to be confirmed. He smiled grimly as he walked along the narrow street toward the row of neat little bungalows where Lynn Davis lived. Night was falling fast, and already lights were coming on in the houses. From open windows drifted the sound of music. The scene was being set for a romantic —romantic?—assignation.
Lynn Davis met him at her door. She was dressed in something loose and, Grimes noted as she stood with the lamp behind her, almost transparent. She took his hand, led him into her living room, gently pushed him down into a deep chair. Close by it was a tray of drinks, and a dish upon which exotic delicacies were displayed. Real Terran olives—and a score of those would make a nasty hole in the weekly pay of an assistant met. officer. Sea dragon caviar from Atlantia… pickled rock frogs from Dunartil…
The playmaster was on, its volume turned well down. A woman was singing. It was an old song, dating back to the twentieth century, its lyrics modernized, its melody still sweet with lost archaic lilt.
Spaceman, the stars are calling, Spaceman, you have to roam… Spaceman, through light-years falling, Turn back at last to home….
"Sherry, John?" asked Lynn Davis. She was sitting on the arm of his chair. He could see the gleam of her smooth flesh through her sheer robe. "Amontillado?"
He said, "You're doing me proud."
"It's not often I entertain such an important guest as you."
He sipped the wine from the fragile glass she had filled for him. She had measured her own drink from the same decanter. He did not think that there was anything wrong with it—any connoisseur would have told him, indignantly, that there was nothing wrong with it—but at the first hint of muzziness he would smoke a cigarillo…
She was leaning closer to him, almost against him. Her robe was falling open in front. She was wearing nothing underneath it. She said, "Aren't you hot? Why not take your jacket off?"
"Later, perhaps." He managed a quite creditable leer. "After all, we've all night."
"Why waste time?" Her mouth was slightly parted in frank invitation. What the hell? thought Grimes, and accepted. Her body was pliant in his arms, her lips on his warm and moist. But his mind, his cold, calculating mind, was still in full command of the situation. He heard the door open softly, heard feet sliding over the thick carpet. He pushed the girl away from him, from the corner of his eye saw her fall to the floor, a delectable sprawl of exposed, gleaming body and limbs.
"So," snarled Jeff Petersen. "So this is what you get up to, Mr. Commodore Dirty Old Man Grimes! What did you promise her, you swine? Promotion and a transfer to a better station?"
Petersen, Grimes noted, was not a slave to his instincts any more than he, Grimes, had been. Superficially his voice was that of the wronged, jealous lover, but there was an artificial quality in his rage.
Grimes said equably, "I can explain…"
"Yes." Petersen was advancing slowly. "You can explain after I've torn off your right arm and beaten your brains out with it."
Suddenly the tiny pistol was in Grimes's right hand. It cracked once, and once only, a sound disproportionate to its dimensions. Petersen halted, staggered, staring stupidly. He swayed on his feet for long seconds and then crashed to the floor, overturning the low table, spilling wine over the sprawling body of the girl. She exploded up from the carpet like a tigress, all teeth and claws. Grimes was hampered by the chair in which he was confined but fought her off somehow. He did not want to use the gun again.
"You bastardl" She was sobbing. "You ruthless bastard! You killed him. And we were careful not to kill—not even the natives!"
"I didn't kill him," Grimes managed to say at last, after he had imprisoned her hands behind her back, after he had clasped her legs between his own. "I didn't kill him. This pistol is loaded with anesthetic needles. He'll be out for twelve hours—no more, no less."
"He's not… dead?"
"Do dead men snore?" asked Grimes practically.
"I… I suppose not." Her manner changed abruptly. "Well, he asked for it, John, and this time he got it. Poor Jeff." There was little sympathy in her voice. "So…"
"So what?"
"So we might as well be hung for sheep as lambs. We might as well have the game as well as the name."
He said admiringly, "You're a cold-blooded bitch, aren't you?"
"Just realistic." She bent her head forward, but it was not to bite. After the kiss Grimes released her. She pulled slowly away from him, walked undulatingly to the door of the bedroom, shedding the torn remnants of her robe as she went.
Grimes sighed, then got up and followed.
She said, "That was good…"
"It was."
"Stay there, darling, and I'll make us some coffee. We don't want to waste time sleeping."
A sleep, thought Grimes, is just what I would like. The sleep of the just—the just after.
He sprawled at ease on the wide couch, watched her appreciatively as she left him, as she walked gracefully to the door. In the subdued light she was all rosy bronze. In any sort of light she was, as he knew, beautiful. He heard a slight clattering from the kitchenette, imposed upon the still stertorous snores of the hapless Jeff. After a while she came back with a tray on which were a pot and two cups. She poured. "Sugar, darling? Cream?" The steam from the coffee was deliciously fragrant. He reached out for his cup, accidentally? put his fingers on the handle of hers. She gently pushed his hand away. "Mine hasn't sugar," she told him.
"You're sweet enough as you are," he said, asking himself, How corny can you get?
So he took three sips of the coffee that was intended for him, and at once felt the onset of heavy drowsiness, even though there was no warning flavor. He mumbled, "Like a smoke… Would you mind, Lynn? In my pocket… on chair…"
She reached out to his clothing, produced the packet of cigarillos and his lighter. She, he already knew, did not smoke herself, which was just as well. She handed him the packet. In his condition, in the dim lighting, he could hardly make out the distinguishing mark. He hoped that he had the right one. Here and now, the special effects of the other one would be more spectacular than useful.
She lit the cigarillo for him, smiling condescendingly down at him. He inhaled the smoke, retained it for long seconds before blowing it out. He took one more sip of coffee, then let a dribble of the hot fluid fall on to his naked chest. He was careful not to wince. He mumbled indistinctly, then fell back against the pillows. His right hand, with the little smoldering cylinder between his fingers, fell limply on to his belly. He could smell the acridity of burning body hair, felt the sharp beginnings of pain. With a great effort of will he remained in his relaxed posture.
He heard her mutter, "I should let the old bastard burn, but…" Her cool, slim fingers removed the minature cigar from his hand. He felt very grateful to her.
He heard her dressing, heard her walk rapidly from the bedroom. He heard, eventually, the front door open and shut. He gave her time to get clear of the house.
When he got down from the bed he expected to feel sick and dizzy, with drug and antidote still at war within his system. But he did not, although he was conscious of the minor burns. He dressed rapidly, checked his possessions. He was pleased to find that the Minetti was still in his pocket; probably whatever it was in the coffee was supposed to put him under for a longer period than the anesthetic needle-bullet that he had used on Jeff Petersen.
The street outside the house was deserted. Everybody was indoors, and everybody seemed to be having a party. He grinned. He had had one too. He walked briskly away from the spaceport, in the direction of the beach where he had first met Lynn Davis. The signs that had been affixed to the trunks of trees were a help. By what moonlight there was he could read, private, ladies only. And how would she have managed, he wondered, if the other human ladies on Mellise had shared her views on outdoor nudity?
The beach was deserted. Backing the narrow strip of sand were the trees, and between their boles was undergrowth, affording effective cover. Grimes settled down to wait. He slipped the magazine from his automatic, exchanged it for the other one; the needle-bullets in this one were "no more lethal than the first had been, but they differed from them in one or two respects. He took the remaining marked cigarillo from its packet, put it carefully into his breast pocket. This one had a friction fuse.
At last she came, walking barefooted over the sand, her shoes in her left hand, a heavy case in the other. She dropped the shoes, put the case down carefully. She opened it, then pulled out a silvery telescopic antenna to its full extent. She squatted down, making even this normally ungainly posture graceful, appeared to be adjusting controls of some sort. There was a high, barely audible whine.
Something was coming in from the sea. It was not a native. It came scuttling ashore like a huge crab—like a huge, five-legged crab. Then there was another, and another, and another, until two dozen of the beasts stood there waiting. For orders—or programming?
Grimes walked slowly and deliberately out from the shadows, his Minetti in his right hand. He said quietly, "I'm sorry, Lynn, but the game's up."
She whirled grotesquely, like a Russian dancer. "You!" she snarled, making it seem like a curse. "Yes. Me. If you come quietly and make a full confession I'll see to it that things go easy for you."
"Like hell I will!"
She turned swiftly back to the transmitter, kicking up a flurry of sand. The whining note abruptly changed to an irregular beat. And then the starfish were coming for him, slowly at first, but faster and faster. He swatted out instinctively at the leading one, felt the skin of his hand tear on metal spines. In his other hand was the gun. He fired—almost a full burst. The minute projectiles tore though the transmitter. Some of them, a few of them, were bound to sever connections, to shatter transistors. They did. There was a sputtering shower of blue sparks. The metal monsters froze into immobility.
But Lynn did not. She had her own gun out, a heavier weapon than Grimes's own. He felt the wind of her first bullet. And then, with one of the few remaining rounds in his magazine, he shot her.
He stood there, looking down at her. She was paralyzed, but her eyes could still move, and her lips, and her tongue. She was paralyzed—and when the drug took hold properly she would feel the compulsion to talk.
She asked bitterly, "How long will this last?"
"Days, unless I let you have the antidote."
She demanded, "How did you knowF'
"I didn't know. I guessed, and I added two and two to make a quite convincing and logical four. Suppose I tell you—then you can fill in the details."
"That'll be the sunny Friday!"
"Will it?" Grimes squatted down beside her. "You had things easy here, didn't you? You and Jeff Petersen. Such a prize bunch of nongs and no-hopers, from the Ambassador and the port captain on down. I shouldn't have said that; I forgot that this is being recorded…
"Well, one thing that started to make me suspicious of you, especially, was that lie you told me about the solar flares. I checked up; there are very complete records of all phenomena in this sector of space in my office at Port Forlorn. Then there was the shortage of spares for your equipment—I remembered that the requisitions for electronic bits and pieces have been abnormally heavy ever since you and Mr. Petersen were appointed here. There was that ornamental tank of little starfish—and that so-called mobile almost alongside it Petersen's hobby. The construction that, I realized later, looked very much like the tin starfish I saw raiding the pearl beds. There was the behavior of these same tin starfish: the way in which they attacked the bivalves with absolute viciousness, but seemed very careful not to hurt the Mellisans.
"That tied in with the few weeks that Petersen spent on El Dorado.
"They have watchbirds there, Lynn, and similar semi-robots that function either on the ground or in the water. Animal brains in metal bodies. Absolute faithfulness and obedience to their human masters. As a skilled technician,
Petersen would have been able to mingle, to a certain extent, with the gifted amateurs who play around with that sort on El Dorado. He must have picked up some of their techniques, and passed them on to you. You two modified them, probably improved upon them. A starfish hasn't any brain to speak of, so probably you have the entire animal incorporated into your destructive servants. Probably, too, there's an electronic brain built in somewhere, that gets its orders by radio and that can be programmed.
"You were going to recall the local… flock, pack, school? What does it matter?… tonight, weren't you? For reprogramming. Some preset course of action that would enable them to deal with the threat of spears with explosive warheads. It wouldn't do to have tin tentacles littering the ocean floor, would it? When the Mellisans brought in the evidence even the Ambassador would have to do something about it.
"And, tonight being the night, I had to be got out of the way. Plan A failed, so you switched to Plan B. Correct?"
"Correct," she muttered.
"And for whom were you working?" he asked sharply and suddenly.
"T-G." The answer had slipped out before she could stop it.
"Trans-Galactic Clippers… Why do T-G want Mellise?"
"A tourist resort." She was speaking rapidly now, in obvious catharsis. "We were to destroy the economy, the trade with the Confederacy. And then T-G would step in, and pay handsomely for rights and leases."
"And you and Mr. Petersen would be suitably rewarded…" He paused. "Tell me, Lynn… did you enjoy tonight? Between the disposal of Jeff and the disposal of myself, I mean."
"Yes," she told him.
"I'm glad you said that. It makes what I'm going to do a lot easier. I was going to do it in any case; I always like to pay my bills." As he spoke, he pulled the cigarillo from his breast pocket, scratched the friction fuse with his thumbnail. The thing ignited at once, fizzed, ejected a bright blue pyrotechnic star. "I'm letting you go free," Grimes went on, "both of you. You will have to resign, of course, from the Rim Runners' service, but as T-G is your real employer that shouldn't mean any hardship. The records I have made" —he tapped the two buttons of his jacket—"stay with me. To be used, if required. Meanwhile my friends"—he turned to wave to Wunnaara and a dozen other natives who were wading up from the sea—"will dispose of the evidence. The story will be that they, without any outside aid, have succeeded in coping with the starfish plague. You will furnish them, of course, with transmitters like the one you used tonight so that your pets in other parts of the sea can be rounded up."
"Haven't much option, have I?" she asked.
"No."
"There's just one thing I'd like to say. That question you asked me, about my enjoying myself… I'm damned sorry this truth drug of yours made me give the right answer."
"I'm not," said Grimes.
It was nice while it lasted, thought the Commodore, but I'm really not cut out for these James Bond capers, any more than I would be for the odd antics of any of the other peculiar heroes of twentieth century fiction. He filled and lit his pipe—he preferred it to the little cigars, even to those without the built-in devices—and looked out over the blue sea. The sun was warm on his naked body. He wished that Sonya were with him. But it wouldn't be long now.
John Grimes was really homeward bound at last.
On both Tharn and Mellise he had been obliged to leave the ships in which he had taken passage when requested by the rulers of those planets to assist them in the solution of rather complicated problems. He had not minded at all; he had welcomed the prospect of action after too long a time as a desk-borne commodore. But now he was beginning to become a little impatient. Sonya, his wife, would be back soon from her galactic cruise and then the major city of Lorn would be—as far as Grimes was concerned—forlorn in name only. He was pleased that Rim Jaguar would be making a direct run from Mellise to Port Forlorn with no time-expanding calls en route. All being well, he would have a few days in which to put things in order prior to Sonya's homecoming.
It promised to be an uneventful voyage—and in deep space uneventful voyages are the rule rather than the exception. Rim Jaguar was one of the more modern units of Rim Runners' fleet, built for them to modified Epsilon Class design. She was well found, well manned and reasonably happy. Grimes was the only passenger, and as Rim Runners' Astronautical Superintendent he was given the run of the vessel. He did not abuse the privilege. He would never have dreamed of interfering, and he made suggestions only when asked to do so. Nonetheless he enjoyed the long hours that he spent in the control room, yarning with the officer of the watch, looking out through the wide viewports at the great, distant Galactic Lens, unperturbed by its weird, apparent distortion, the result of the warped space-time through which the ship was falling. He was Earth-born but, like so many spacemen who had made their various ways to this frontier of the dark, he belonged on the Rim, had come to accept that almost empty sky—the sparsely scattered, unreachable island universes, the galaxy itself no more than a dim-glowing ellipsoid—as being altogether right and proper and, somehow, far more natural than worlds in toward the center.
He was sitting in Rim Jaguars control room now, at ease in his acceleration chair, his seamed, pitted face and his still youthful gray eyes almost obscured by the cloud of acrid smoke from his vile, battered pipe. He was listening tolerantly to the third officer's long list of grievances; shortly after departure from Mellise he had made it quite plain that he wouldn't bite and also that anything told to him by the ship's people would not be taken down and used as evidence against them.
"And annual leave, sir," the young man was saying. "I realize that it isn't always possible to release an officer on the exact date due, but when there's a delay of two, or even three months…"
"We just haven't enough personnel, Mr. Sanderson," Grimes told him, "to ensure a prompt relief. Also, when it comes to appointments I try to avoid putting square pegs into round holes. You know what that can lead to."
"The Rim Griffon business, sir?"
"Yes. Everybody hating everybody, and the ship suffering in consequence. A very sorry affair."
"I see your point, sir, but—" An alarm pinged sharply. "Excuse me."
It was the Mass Proximity Indicator that had sounded off, the only piece of navigational equipment, apart from the Carlotti Direction Finder, that was functional while the Interstellar Drive was in operation. Grimes swiveled his chair so that he could look at the globular tank that was the screen of the device. Yes, there was something there all right, something that had no business to be there, something that, in the screen, was only a little to one side of the glowing filament that was the extrapolation of the ship's trajectory.
Sanderson was speaking briskly into the telephone. "Control Room here, sir. Unidentified object 000 01.5, range 3,000, closing. Bearing opening."
Grimes heard Captain Drakenberg's reply. "I'll be right up, Mr. Sanderson."
Drakenberg, an untidy bear of a man, looked into the screen and grunted. He turned to Grimes. "And what do you make of it, sir?"
"It's something. …"
"I could have told you that, Commodore." Grimes felt his prominent ears redden. Drakenberg was a highly competent shipmaster, popular rather than otherwise with his officers, but at times lacking in the social graces.
The third officer said, "According to Traffic Control there are no ships in this sector…"
"Would it be a Rim Ghost?" asked the Captain. "You're something of an expert on them, Commodore. Would one show up on the M.P.I.?"
"Conditions would have to be exactly right," said Grimes. "We would have had to slip into its continuum, or it into ours. The same applies, of course, to any attempt to establish radio communication."
"We'll try that, sir," said Drackenberg bluntly. Then, to Sanderson, "Line up the Carlotti."
The watch officer switched on the control room Carlotti communicator, a miniature version of the main set in the ship's radio office, which was a miniature version of the huge, planet-based beacons. The elliptical Mobius Strip that was the antenna began to rotate about its long axis, fading into apparent insubstantiality as it did so. Sanderson threw the switch that hooked it up with the Mass Proximity Indicator. At once the antenna began to swing on its universal mounting, turning unsteadily, hesitantly in a wide arc. After its major oscillations had ceased it hunted for a few seconds, finally locked on.
"Pass me the microphone," Drackenberg ordered. Then he said, speaking slowly and very distinctly, "Rim Jaguar
calling unidentified vessel. Rim Jaguar calling unidentified vessel. Come in, please. Come in, please."
There was a silence, broken by Grimes. "Perhaps she hasn't got M.P.I.," he suggested. "Perhaps she hasn't seen us."
"It's a compulsory fitting, isn't it?" growled the master.
"For the Federation's ships. And for ours. But the Empire of Waverley hasn't made it compulsory yet. Or the Shakespearian Sector." He got out of his chair, moved to the screen. "Besides, I don't think that this target is a ship. Not with a blip that size, and at this range…"
"What the hell else can it be?" demanded Drakenberg.
"I don't know," admitted Grimes. "I don't know…"
It hung there against the unrelieved blackness of Rim Space, a planet where no planet should have been, illuminated by a sun that wasn't there at all. There was an atmosphere, with cloud masses. There were seas and continents. There were polar icecaps. And it was real, solid, with enough mass to hold the ship—her Inertial Drive and her Mannschenn Drive shut down—in a stable orbit about it. An Earth-type world it was, according to Rim Jagua/s instruments—an inhabited world, with the scintillant lights of cities clearly visible scattered over its night hemisphere.
All attempts at communication had failed. The inhabitants did not seem to have radio, either for entertainment or for the transmission of messages. Grimes, still in the control room, looked with some distaste at the useless Car-lotti transceiver. Until the invention of this device, whereby ships could talk with each other and with shore stations regardless of range and with no time lag, psionic radio officers had always been carried. In circumstances such as these a trained telepath would have been invaluable, would have been able to achieve contact with at least a few minds on the planet below. Psionic radio officers were still carried by fighting ships and by survey vessels, but Rim Jaguar was neither. She was a merchantman, and the employment of personnel required for duty only upon very special occasions would have been uneconomical.
She did not carry sounding rockets, even. Grimes, as
Astronautical Superintendent of Rim Runners, had been responsible for that piece of economy, had succeeded in having the regulations amended. He had argued that ships trading only in a well charted sector of space had no need for such expensive toys. It had not been anticipated that an unknown planet—matter or anti-matter?—would appear suddenly upon the track between Mellise and Lorn.
But the construction of a small liquid fuel rocket is little more than a matter of plumbing, and the Jaguar's engineers were able to oblige. Her second officer—as well as being the ship's navigator he specialized in gunnery in the Confederacy's Naval Reserve—produced a crude but effective homing device for the thing. It was hardly necessary. The range was short and the target a big one.
The rocket was fired on such a trajectory that it would hit the night side while the ship was directly over that hemisphere. Radar tracked it down to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, where it disintegrated. But it was a normal, meteoric destruction by impact and friction, not the flare of released energy that would have told of the meeting of matter and anti-matter. That was that. The initial reports of the sighting, together with all the relevant coordinates, had already been sent to Lorn; all that remained now was to report the results of the sounding rocket experiment. Grimes was scribbling the message down on a signal pad, and Drakenberg was busy with the preliminaries of putting the ship back on to trajectory, when the radio officer came into the control room. He was carrying three envelopes, one of which he handed to the Captain, giving the two to the Commodore. Grimes knew what their contents would be, and sighed audibly. Over the years he had become too much of an expert on the dimensional oddities encountered out on the rim of the galaxy. And he was the man on the spot—just when he was in a hurry to be getting home.
The first message was from Rim Runners' Board of Management and read, Act as instructed by Admiral Commanding Confederate Navy. The second one was from Admiral Kravinsky. Carry out full investigation of strange planet. Drakenberg, scowling, handed Grimes the flimsy that had been inside his own envelope. Its content was clear enough. Place self and vessel under orders of Commodore Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve.
"Keep the ship in orbit, Captain," ordered Grimes resigned-ly.
A dust mote in the emptiness, Rim Jaguar's number two lifeboat fell toward the mysterious planet. In it were two men only—Grimes and Sanderson, the freighter's third officer. There had been no shortage of volunteers, from the Master on down, but Grimes, although a high ranking officer of the Naval Reserve, was still an employee of a commercial shipping line. To make a landing on an unknown world with horse, foot and artillery is all very well when you have the large crew of a warship to draw upon; should the initial expedition come to grief there is sufficient personnel left aboard the vessel to handle her and, if necessary, to man her weaponry. But, insofar as manning is concerned, a merchant ship is run on a shoestring. There are no expendable ratings, and the loss of even one officer from any department means, at least, considerable inconvenience.
Grimes's decision to take only Sanderson with him had not been a popular one, but the young man had been the obvious choice. He was unmarried and—so Grimes had learned from the control room conversations—was an orphan. He did not have a steady girlfriend, even. Furthermore, he had just completed a period of Naval Reserve training and rather fancied himself a small arms expert.
Rim Jaguar, however, did not carry much of an armory. Grimes had with him his own Minetti and one of the ship's laser handguns. Sanderson had one of the other lasers-there were only three on board—and a vicious ten millimeter projectile pistol. There were spare power packs and a good supply of ammunition for all weapons.
The third officer, who was handling the boat, was talkative on the way down. Grimes did not mind—as long as the young man kept his trap shut and concentrated on his piloting as soon as the little craft hit the atmosphere.
"This is a rum go," he was saying. "How do you ex-plain it, sir? All that obvious sunlight, and no sun at all in the sky…"
"I've seen worse," Grimes told him. Like, he thought, the series of alternative universes he had explored—although not thoroughly—in that voyage of the Faraway Quest that somebody had referred to as a Wild Ghost Chase. And that other universe, into which he had quite literally blown his ship, the one in which those evil non-human mutants had ruled the Rim. On both of those occasions Sony a had been with him. She should have been with him now—not this lanky, blond, blue-eyed puppy. But that wasn't Sanderson's fault, and in any case Grimes did not think that he would find the young man lacking in any respect.
"I suppose," the third officer rattled on, "that it's all something to do with different dimensions. Here we're at the very edge of the expanding galaxy, and the barriers between continua must be stretched thin, very thin. That planet's popped through into our continuum, but only half through, if you see what I mean. Its primary has stayed put on the other side of the boundary…" v
"A fairish hypothesis," admitted Grimes. "It will have to do until we can think of a better one."
And, he told himself, there must be a better one. As far as he knew the difference between the universes were cultural rather than cosmological. There fust shouldn't be a planet here—or a sun with a family of planets.
"And I wonder what the people are like, sir. Would they be humanoid, do you think, or even human? They must be civilized. They have cities."
Grimes muttered something about plastic jungles.
"Not plastic, sir. They haven't radio, so the chances are that they don't run to chemical engineering. Concrete jungles… would that be better?"
Grimes allowed himself to suppose that it might be.
"You couldn't have timed it better, sir. That large town you decided on will be just clear of the terminator when we get down."
In the Federation's Survey Service, thought Grimes, we were drilled so that such timing became second nature. How had that instructor put it? "Make your first landing just west of the terminator, and unless some bastard chases you off you've the whole day to play silly buggers in."
"Better fasten seat belts, sir."
Grimes pulled the webbing taut across his body, snapped shut the buckle. In a boat fitted with Inertial Drive the ride down to the planetary surface should be a smooth one, provided that there was no atmosphere turbulence. But here there was no spaceport control to give information on meteorological conditions. He spoke into the microphone of the transceiver. "Commodore to Rim Jaguar. We are now entering exosphere. So far all is going as planned." He heard Drakenberg acknowledge.
The air below the boat was clear, abnormally so. The lights of the cities were like star clusters. For a brief second Grimes entertained the crazy idea that they were star clusters, that he and Sanderson had broken through into some other time and space, were somehow adrift in regions toward the heart of a galaxy. He looked upward for reassurance. But he did not, through the transparency of the overhead viewport, see the familiar, almost empty Rim sky. The firmament was ablaze with unfamiliar constellations. It was frightening. Had Sanderson, somehow, turned the boat over fust as Grimes had shifted his regard? He had not, as a glance at the instrument panel made obvious. He had not—and below were still the city lights, and from zenith to horizon there were the stars, and low to the west was a great golden moon. Astern, the first rosy flush of dawn was in the sky.
His voice unemotional, deliberately flat, Grimes reported his observations to the ship.
Swiftly the boat fell through the atmosphere, so fast that interior temperature rose appreciably. But Sanderson was a first class pilot and at no time did he allow the speed of descent to approach dangerous limits. Swiftly the boat fell, her Inertial Drive purring gently, resisting but not overcoming the gravitational field that had her in its grip. Through the morning twilight she dropped, and above her only the brighter stars were visible in the pale sky, and below her the land masses were gray-green rather than black, and the city lights had lost their sharp scintillance and were going out, street by street.
It was toward what looked like a park that Sanderson, on Grimes's instructions, was steering, an irregular rectangle of comparative darkness outlined by such lights as were still burning. There were trees there, the men could see as the boat lost altitude; there were trees, and there were dull-gleaming ribbons and amoeboid shapes that looked like water, and featureless patches that must be clear level ground. Bordering the park were the towers of the city-tall, fantastically turreted and, when struck by the first bright rays of the rising sun, shining like jewels in the reflected radiance.
The boat grounded gently on a soft, resilient surface. Grimes looked at Sanderson and Sanderson looked at Grimes, and then they both stared out of the viewports. They had landed in the middle of the park, on what looked like a lawn of emerald green grass, not far from the banks of a stream. There were trees in the foreground, low, static explosions of dark foliage among which gleamed, scarlet and crimson and gold, what were either fruit or flowers. In the background were the distant towers, upthrusting like the suddenly frozen spray of some great fountain, an opalescent tracery against the clear blue sky.
"Open up, sir?" asked the young officer at last.
"Yes," said Grimes. An itemized list of all,the precautions that should be taken before setting foot on a strange planet briefly flashed before his mind's eye, but he ignored it. And to wear a spacesuit in this huge, gorgeous garden would be heresy. But not all of his training could be dismissed so easily. Reluctantly he picked up the microphone, made his report to the ship. He concluded with the words, "We're going out, now, to make contact with the natives. You have your instructions, Captain."
"Yes, Commodore Grimes." Grimes wondered why Drak-enberg should sound so anxious. "If I don't hear from you again twenty-four standard hours from now, at the latest, I'm to make a report directly to the Admiralty and await their orders." He hesitated, then brought out the final words with some difficulty. "And on no account am I to attempt another landing."
"That is correct, Captain Drakenberg. Over."
"Good luck, Commodore Grimes. Over and out."
Sanderson already had both air lock doors open and the cool breeze had eddied gently through the little cabin, flushing out the acridity of hot oil and machinery, bringing with it the scent of flowers, of dew-wet grass. There were birds singing outside and then, faint yet clear, the sound of a great clock somewhere in the city striking the hour. Automatically Grimes looked at his watch, made to reset it and then smiled at his foolishness. He did not know yet what sort of time it was that these people kept.
He was first out of the boat, jumping down on to the velvety turf, joined almost at once by Sanderson. "This is beautiful!" exclaimed the young man. "I hope that the natives come up to what we've seen so far." He added, "The girls especially."
Grimes should have reproved him, but he didn't. He was too busy wondering what it was that made everything, so far, so familiar. He had never seen this world before, or any planet like it, and yet… How did he know, for example, that this city's name was Ayonoree? How could he know?
"Which way do we go, sir?" Sanderson was asking.
Which way? The memory, if it was memory, wasn't quite good enough. "We'll follow the stream," he decided.
It was a short walk to the near bank of the little river, along which ran a path of flagstones. The water was crystal clear, gently flowing. On it floated great lily pads, and on one of these sat a huge frog, all gold and emerald, staring at them with bright, protuberant eyes. It croaked loudly.
"It's saying something!" cried Sanderson.
"Rubbish!" snapped Grimes, who was trying to break the odd spell that had been cast over them. But were those words that they could hear?
Follow stream stay in the dream. Follow stream, stay in the dream.
"You!" shouted Sanderson. "What do you mean?"
In reply the batrachian croaked derisively, splashed into the water and struck out slowly for the further shore.
So we follow the stream, thought Grimes. He set off along the path, the young man tailing behind. Suddenly he stopped. There was a tree, gracefully trailing its tendril-like branches almost to the water, to one side of the flagstones, another tree a few yards inshore from it. Between the trunks was a huge, glittering web. There was a spider, too, disgustingly hairy, as big in body as a large man's clenched fist, scuttling toward the center of its fragile-seeming net. And there was an insect of some kind, a confused fluttering of gauzy wings, snared by the viscous strands.
Grimes made to detour around the landward tree. After all, spiders were entitled to a meal, just as he was. Insofar as the uglier sides of Nature were concerned he tried to maintain his neutrality. He did not especially like spiders— but, in all probability, that oversized insect in the web was something even more unpleasant.
Behind him he heard Sanderson cry out, heard the hiss of his laser pistol and felt the heat of the beam that narrowly missed his right ear. The fleshy body of the spider exploded and hung there, tattered and steaming. There was a sickening stench of burned flesh.
Grimes turned angrily on the young man. "What the hell do you think you're doing? For all we know, spiders are sacred on this world!"
"More likely these are!"
Sanderson had pushed past Grimes and, with gentle hands, was freeing the trapped creature. "Look!" he was saying. "Look!"
The Commodore looked. This was not," as he assumed, an insect. It was humanoid, a winged woman, but tiny, tiny. Her lustrous golden hair hung to her waist, and beneath her filmy green robe was the hint of perfectly formed breasts. Her mouth was scarlet and her eyes blue, and her features were perfectly formed. She sat there in the third officer's cupped hands, looking up at him. Her voice, when she spoke, was like the tinkling of a little silver bell.
"Follow stream, and follow river,
When danger threatens do not quiver;
Follow stream to Ogre's Keep,
Wake the Princess from her sleep!"
"What princess?" demanded Grimes.
She turned to glare at him.
"Prince's servitors like you,
Should only speak when spoken to."
Sanderson was shocked. "This is the Commodore," he said severely to the winged being.
"Commodore, Schmommodore!" she replied sweetly—and then, with hardly a quiver of those impractical looking pinions, was gone.
"So you're promoted," said Grimes dryly. "And I'm demoted."
"All the same, sir, it was absolute sauce on her part." Then he went on a little smugly. "The odd part is that I am a prince. My father was King of Tavistock, until they threw him out."
"And your great-grandfather," said Grimes, "who founded the dynasty, was a semi-piratical tramp skipper. I know the history."
"Do we follow the stream, sir?"
"Yes. It's as good a way to explore this world as any."
They followed the stream. Through the great park it led them, past enormous beds of fantastic, glowing flowers, through a grove of gaunt, contorted trees. The transition from parkland to city street was abrupt; suddenly there were cobbles underfoot instead of the worn flagstones, and on every hand towered multi-colored buildings, convoluted structures that made nonsense of all the laws of architecture and engineering.
People were abroad now, men and women, a great number of children. They were human enough in outward appearance at least, but there was an oddness about them, an oversimplification of all features, a peculiar blend of stylization and caricature. There was no vehicular traffic, but there were riders—some upon horses, some upon camels, some upon the lizard-like roadrunners indigenous to Tari-zeel, some upon beasts that were utterly strange even to the widely traveled Grimes.
The two explorers marched on, ignored by the brightly dressed natives, ignoring them. They should, Grimes knew, have tried to make contact, which would not have been hard. From the scraps of conversation they overheard it was obvious that Anglo-Terran was the language of this planet. They should have demanded to be taken to the king, president or whatever authority it was that ruled this world. But it was not important. What was important was to find the Ogre's Keep, to awaken the sleeping princess. It was as though some outside power had taken control of them. The feeling should have been nightmarish, but it was not. Grimes was oddly grateful that somebody—or something—else was making the decisions that he should have been making.
The stream joined a river, and the path continued along the bank of the larger body of water, taking the two men clear of the city. They walked on steadily, feeling no fatigue, maintaining a brisk pace. They were away from the crowds of the city, met only an occasional pedestrian, and now and again a peasant man or woman pushing a barrow high-laden with produce in to market. One of these latter, a wizened, black-clad crone dragging a little cart filled with pumpkins, accosted them. Raising high a skinny claw she declaimed in a cracked voice,
"Dare the dragon! Storm the Keep! Save us all from endless sleep!"
"The dragon, madam?" inquired Grimes politely.
But she was given no time to answer him. From the cloudless sky crackled a bolt of lightning, dazzling, terrifying, striking the path between her and the two men. She wailed, "I didn't say anything! I didn't say anything!" and was gone, scuttling toward the city, the cart bouncing along behind her, a trail of bruised and burst pumpkins in her wake.
"Somebody Up There doesn't like her," remarked Sanderson. Then, brightly, "Do you feel in the mood for dragon-slaying, sir?"
"Why not?" countered Grimes. After all, it would be no more outrageous than any of their other encounters to date. Outrageous? He repeated the word mentally. Where had he got it from? Nothing, so far, justified its use: the frog, the fairy in the spider's web, all the talk of ogres' keeps and sleeping princesses and dragons, it had all been perfectly natural. In any well-regulated world sleeping princesses were there to be awakened, and ogres' keeps to be stormed, and dragons to be slain. Of course, the way he and the young prince were dressed was all wrong—more like peasants than like knights errant. But that could not be helped. Disguise was allowable.
"Shall we press on, Your Highness?" he suggested.
"Yes, Sir John. No doubt the dragon awaits us eagerly." Sanderson pulled the projectile pistol from its holster, spun it carelessly with his right forefinger through the trigger guard. "Methinks that our magic weapons will prove more efficacious than swords."
"M ehopes that you're right, Your Highness."
"Then come, Sir John. Time's a-wasting."
They walked on—and then, just ahead of them, Grimes saw a pontoon landing dock on the river. There was a ship alongside it, an archaic side-wheel paddle steamer, smoke issuing from its tall funnel. At the shoreward side of the stage was a notice board and on it, in big black letters on a white ground, the sign:
RIVER TRIPS TO OGRE*S KEEP. HALF A FLORIN. VERY CHEAP.
"Your Highness," said Grimes, "let's take the boat and rest awhile, then face the dragon with a smile."
"Have you the wherewithal, Sir John, to pay the fare agreed upon?"
"I have a pass, Prince Sanderson. And so have you—your trusty gun."
Something at the back of the Commodore's mind winced at the doggerel and cried voicelessly, You're a spaceman, not a character out of a children's book! Grimes almost ignored it, tried to ignore it, but the nagging doubt that had been engendered persisted.
They marched on to the pontoon, their sturdily shod feet ringing on the planking, their weapons drawn and ready. Side by side, but with Sanderson slightly in the lead, they tramped up the gangway. At the head of it stood a man in uniform—and, incongruously, his trappings were those of a purser in the Waverley Royal Mail Line. He held out his hand. "Good knights, if you would board this ship,, pay passage money for your trip."
"Varlet, stand back! The ride is free for this, the bold Sir John, and me!"
"And here, as you can plainly see," added Grimes, making a meaningful gesture with his Minetti, "is our loud-voiced authority."
"Sir, it speaks loud enough for me," admitted the purser, standing to one side. As they passed him Grimes heard him mutter, "The Royal Mail could not be worse. They never made me speak in verse."
Grimes, who was always at home aboard ships of any kind, led the way down to the saloon, a large compartment, darkly paneled, with black leather upholstery on chairs and settees. At one end of it there was a bar, but it was shut. Along both sides were big windows, barely clear of the surface of the water. There were no other passengers.
Overhead there was the thudding of feet on planking. Then there was a jangling of bells, followed at once by the noise of machinery below decks. From above came the long mournful note of a steam whistle, and then came the steady chunk, chunk, chunk of the paddles. The ship was underway, heading down river. On either side the banks were sliding past, a shifting panorama of forest and village, with only rarely what looked like a cultivated field, but very often a huge, frowning, battlemented castle.
The rhythm of paddles and engines was a soothing one and Grimes, at least, found that it made him drowsy. He lolled back in his deep chair, halfway between consciousness and sleep. When he was in this state his real memories, his very real doubts and worries came suddenly to the surface of his mind. He heard his companion murmur, "Speed, bonny boat, like a bird through the sky. Carry us where the dragon must die."
"Come off it, Sanderson," ordered the Commodore sharp-
"Sir John, please take yourself in hand. Such insolence I will not stand."
"Come off it!" ordered Grimes again—and then the spell, which had been so briefly broken, took charge again. "Your Highness, I spoke out of turn. But courtesy I'll try to learn."
"My good Sir John, you better had. Bad manners always make me mad. But look through yonder port, my friend. Methinks we neareth journey's end."
Journey's end or not, there was a landing stage there toward which the paddle steamer was standing in. Inshore from it the land was thickly wooded and rose steeply. On the crest of the hill glowered the castle, a grim pile of gray stone, square-built, ugly, with a turret at each corner. There was a tall staff from which floated a flag. Even from this distance the two men could make out the emblem: a white skull-and-crossbones in a black ground. And then, as the ship neared the shore, the view was shut out and, finally, only the slime-covered side of the pontoon could be seen through the window.
The paddle steamer came alongside with a gentle crunch and, briefly, the engines were reversed to take the way off her. From forward and aft there was a brief rattle of steam winches as she was moored, and then there were no more mechanical noises.
The purser appeared in the saloon entrance. "Good knights, you now must leave this wagon. So fare you forth to face the dragon."
"And you will wait till we are done?" asked Grimes.
"We can't, Sir Knight, not on this run.
Come rain, come shine, come wind, come snow,
Back and forth our ferries go.
Like clockwork yet, sir, you should try 'em,
And even set your wristwatch by 'em."
"Enough, Sir John," said Sanderson, "this wordy wight will keep us gabbing here all night. In truth, he tells a pretty tale—this lackey from the Royal Maill"
The spell was broken again. "You noticed too!" exclaimed Grimes.
"Yes. I noticed. That cap badge with a crown over the silver rocket." Sanderson laughed. "It was when I tried to find a rhyme for tale that things sort of clicked into place."
Grimes turned on the purser. "What the hell's going on here?" he demanded.
"Alas, Sir Knight, I cannot say. / cannot say?" The young man's pudgy face stiffened with resolution. "No! Come what may…"
Whatever it was that came, it was sudden. He was standing there, struggling to speak, and then he was… gone, vanished in a gentle thunderclap as the air rushed in to fill the vacuum where he had stood. Then another man stamped into the saloon, in captain's uniform with the same familiar trappings.
"Begone, good knights," he shouted, "to meet your fate! Get off my ship, I'm running late."
"Sir," began Grimes—and then that influence gripped his mind again. He said, "Thank you for passage, sir. Goodbye. We fare forth now, to do or die!"
"Well said, Sir John," declaimed Sanderson. "Well said, my friend. We go—to shape the story's end."
"I hope, good knights, you gallant two," growled the captain, "that story's end does not shape you." He led the way from the saloon up to the gangway.
They stood on the pontoon, watching the little steamer round the first bend on her voyage up river, then walked to the bridge that spanned the gap between landing stage and bank. Overhead the sky was darkening and the air was chill. The westering sun had vanished behind a bank of low clouds. Grimes, his shirt and slacks suddenly inadequate, shivered. What am I doing here? he asked himself. And then, quite suddenly, Who am I? It was a silly question, and he at once knew how foolish it was. The answer shaped itself in his mind. / am the one they call Sir John, true comrade to Prince Sanderson.
"We forward march," announced the Prince, "my cobber bold, to meet the perils long foretold. Up yonder hill, let us then, to beard the dragon in his den."
"The dragon wastes no time on fuss," remarked Grimes. "He's coming down, and bearding us."
Yes, the beast was coming down, either from the castle or from somewhere else atop the hill. It was airborne—and even in his bemused state Grimes realized that it should never have gotten off the ground. Its head and body were too large, its wings too small, too skimpy. But it was a terrifying sight, a monstrous, batwinged crocodile, its mouth, crowded with jagged teeth, agape, the long, sharp claws of its forefeet extended. It dived down on them, roaring, ignoring the laser beams that the two men directed at it, even though its metallic scales glowed cherry red where they scored hits. It dived down on them—and there was more than mere sound issuing from that horrid maw. The great gout of smoky flame was real enough, and Grimes and Sanderson escaped it only by diving into the undergrowth on either side of the steep path.
The beast pulled out of its dive and flapped away slowly, regaining altitude. The men watched it until it was only a darker speck in the dark sky, then realized that the speck was rapidly increasing in size. It was coming for them again.
Something was wrong, very wrong. In the fairy stories the dragons never kill the heroes… but this dragon looked like being the exception to prove the rule. Grimes holstered his laser pistol, pulled out his Minetti. He doubted that the little weapon would be of any avail against the armored monstrosity, but it might be worth trying. From the corner of his eye he saw that Sanderson had out and ready his heavy projectile pistol. "Courage, Sir John," called the young man. "Aim for his head. We've no cold steel; we'll try hot lead!"
"Cold steel, forsooth!" swore Grimes. "Hot lead, indeed! A silver bullet's what we need!"
"Stand firm, Sir John, and don't talk rot! Don't whine for what we haven't got!"
Grimes loosed off a, clip at the diving dragon on full automatic. Sanderson, the magazine of whose pistol held only ten rounds, fired in a more leisurely manner. Both men tried to put their shots into the open mouth, the most obviously vulnerable target. Whether or not they succeeded they never knew. Again they had to tumble hastily off the path just as the jet of flame roared out at them. This time it narrowly missed Grimes's face. It was like being shaved with a blowtorch.
He got groggily to his feet, fumbled another clip of cartridges out of the pouch at his belt, reloaded the little automatic. He saw that Sanderson was pushing a fresh magazine into the butt of his heavy pistol. The young man smiled grimly and said, "Sir John, the ammo's running low. When all is spent, what shall we do?"
"The beast will get us if we run. Would that we'd friends to call upon!"
"Many did give us good advice. If they gave us more it would be nice."
"What of the fairy Lynnimame?"
"And how, Sir John, do you know her name?" The dragon was coming in again, barely visible in the fast gathering dusk. The men held their fire until the last possible moment—and it was almost the last moment for both of them. Barely did they scramble clear of the roaring, stinking flame, and as they rolled in the brush both of them were frantically beating out their smoldering clothing. The winged monster, as before, seemed to be uninjured.
Suddenly Sanderson cried out, swung to turn his just reloaded pistol on a new menace. It was Grimes who stopped him, who knocked his arm down before he could fire. In the glowing ovoid of light was a tiny human figure, female, with gauzy wings. She hung there over the rough, stony path. She was smiling sweetly, and her voice, when she spoke, was a silvery tintinmabulation. "Prince, your companion called my name. I am the fairy Lynnimame. I am she who, this very morn, from the j'aws of the spider foul was torn. I pay my debts; you rescued me. I'll rescue you, if that's your fee."
"Too right it is, you lovesome sprite."
"Then take this, Prince. And now, good night." She put something into Sanderson's hand and vanished. Before she flickered into invisibility Grimes, by the pale luminosity of her, saw what it was. It was a cartridge case, ordinary enough in appearance except that the tip of the bullet looked too bright to be lead. "A silver bullet!" mar-veled Sanderson. "A silver bullet. We are saved. He'll play Goliath to my David!"
"Unless you load, you pious prig, he'll play the chef to your long pig!"
Hastily Sanderson pulled the magazine from the butt of his pistol, ejected the first cartridge, replaced it with the silver bullet. He shoved the clip back home with a loud click. He was just in time; the dragon was upon them again, dropping almost vertically. The first lurid flames were gushing from its gaping mouth when the third officer fired. The result was spectacular. The thing exploded in mid-air, and the force of the blast sent Grimes tumbling head over heels into the bushes, with only a confused impression of a great, scarlet flower burgeoning against the night.
He recovered consciousness slowly. As before, when he had dozed briefly aboard the river steamer, he was aware of his identity, knew what he was supposed to be doing. And then Sanderson's words severed the link with reality, recast the spell.
"Arise, Sir John! No time for sleep! We march against the Ogre's Keep!"
They marched against the Ogre's Keep—but it was more an undignified scramble up the steep path than a march. Luckily the moon was up now, somewhere above the overcast, and its diffused light was helpful, showed them the dark mass of briars that barred their way before they blundered into the thorny growth. Luckily they had not lost their weapons, and with their laser pistols they slashed, and slashed again, and slashed until their wrists ached with fatigue and their thumbs were numb from the continual pressure on the firing studs. For a long while they made no headway at all; it seemed that the severed, spiny tendrils were growing back faster than they were being destroyed. When the power packs in the pistols were exhausted they were actually forced back a few feet while they were reloading. It was Grimes who thought of renewing the attack with a wide setting instead of the needle beams that they had been using at first. The prickly bushes went up with a great whoosh of smoky flame, and the two men scrambled rather than ran through the gap thus cleared, and even then the barbed thorns were clutching at skin and clothing.
Then, with the fire behind them, they climbed on, bruised, torn and weary. They climbed, because it was the only thing to do. At last they were high enough up the hillside to see the castle again, black and forbidding against the gray sky. The few squares of yellow light that were windows accentuated rather than relieved the darkness.
They gained the rock-strewn plateau in the center of which towered the Keep. They stumbled across the uneven surface, making their way between the huge boulders, avoiding somehow the fissures that made the ground a crazy pattern of cracks. From some of these sounded ominous hissings and croakings and gruntings, from some there was a baleful gleaming of red eyes, but nothing actively molested them. And there was a rising wind now, damp and cold, that made a mockery of their rent, inadequate clothing, that whined and muttered in their ears like unquiet ghosts.
But they kept on at a staggering, faltering pace and came at last to the great iron-studded doorway. Barely within Sanderson's reach—and he was a tall man—was a huge knocker, forged in the semblance of a snarling lion's head. The young officer had to stretch to reach it; and as he put his hand to it, it moved of its own accord, emitting a thunderous clangor like an artillery barrage. Boom, boom! Boom, boom! Boom!
Almost as loud were the heavy footsteps that sounded thunderously behind the door. Almost as loud was the deep voice that asked, "Who on this night, so bleak and frore, disturbs the Giant Blunderbore?"
The double doors crashed outwafd. Standing there, silhouetted against the light, was a human figure. It was all of ten feet tall, and broad in proportion. It looked down at them, its eyes gleaming yellow in the black face, and bellowed, "Enter, Princeling! Enter, Knight! Ye shall be my guests tonight." Then, as the two men drew back, it went on, "Come in, come in! This is Liberty Hall—you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
The lapse from rhymed couplets and the use of an expression that had never failed to annoy him snapped Grimes back to reality. He was Commodore John Grimes, of the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, not Sir John, and he was supposed to be investigating this crazy planet. But the castle was real enough, as was the giant who loomed there in the open doorway, as were the bruises on his body that still ached, the scratches and burns that still smarted.
"What's the matter?" he asked nastily. "Can't you find a rhyme for *bastard'? And who are you, anyhow?"
"And who are you? All I know is that you are outsiders, and I'm supposed to stop you. Not that I want to. This damn foolishness has gone on too long. Much too long."
From the sky thundered a great voice, "Blunderbore, your duty's plain! These prying strangers must be slain!"
The giant stared upward, growled, "—you. I've had you, chum, in a big way."
The answer was a sizzling bolt of lightning, a crackling streak of dazzling energy that should have incinerated Blunderbore where he stood. But he caught it with a huge hand, laughed and hurled it back like a flaming javelin, shouting, "Try that on for size, damn you!"
"What's going on?" Sanderson whimpered. "What's going on here?"
"It's a long story," Blunderbore told him.
"It's a story, all right," agreed Grimes. "The city of Ayonoree… the Frog Prince… the Fairy Lynnimame… and you, Blunderbore." Yes, it was all coming back to him, and it was all making a fantastic kind of sense.
"Can you be killed?" Blunderbore was asking.
"I suppose so," said Grimes, conscious of the smart of his wounds. "Yes, I fear so. We're the outsiders. We don't belong in the series, do we? And you and the others go on from installment to installment…"
"Only because we're trapped. But come in. You have to wake the Princess. It's the only way out, for all of us."
The huge man stood to one side as Grimes and Sanderson hurried into the castle. They were barely in time, were almost knocked from their feet by the wind from the crashing volley of great rocks that fell from the black sky. Splinters stung the backs of their legs painfully. Grunting, Blunder-bore pushed past them, seized the two sides of the door in his big hands, pulled them shut just as another shower of boulders crashed against the stout, iron-bound timbers. "Hurry!" he shouted. "He's turning nasty!"
The giant led the way across the flagstoned floor, to the far end of the enormous, gloomy hall. He staggered as he ran—and with cause. The very earth was growling beneath their feet, and each successive tremor was more violent than the last. From above came a crash of toppling masonry.
The air was thickening. Tendrils of yellow fog clutched at the running, stumbling men, and the writhing mist had substance. Half-seen, evil faces leered at them, distorted visages that were all teeth and dull-gleaming eyes. Vaporous claws reached out for them, solidifying as they did so. Behind Grimes Sanderson screamed, and the Commodore stopped and turned, slashing with his laser at the gelatinous obscenity that had the young officer in its grip. It piped shrilly as it disintegrated, stinking sulfurously.
"Hurry!" Blunderbore was still shouting. "Hurry!"
The stone floor was crackling underfoot, heaving and buckling, and from the high, vaulted ceiling ominous groans resounded. The castle could not withstand this punishment for long. The' flaring torches were going out and there was a strong smell of escaping gas. Then, as a chance spark reignited the explosive mixture, there was a fiery blast that almost finished the destructive work initiated by the earthquake.
Almost finished.
But Blunderbore and the two spacemen were still on their feet, somehow, and there were still walls around them, although crumbling and tottering, and over their heads the last stone arch still held, despite the torrential rain of rubble that was clattering upon and around it. Ahead of them was the great fireplace, into which the giant jumped without stooping. Then he bent slowly and fumbled among the dead ashes, and straightened even more slowly, the muscles of his naked back and arms bulging and glistening. He grunted as he came erect, holding before him an enormous slab of stone. He cast it from him—and the noise of its fall and its shattering was lost amid the general uproar.
Under the slab was a spiral stairway, a helix of rusty iron running down, and down, down to murky depths where an eerie blue glimmer flickered. The prospect was not an inviting one; how long would the walls of the shaft withstand the incessant tremors? Even so, the fire was yet to come, whereas the frying pan was becoming hotter and hotter. Great sheets of flame from the ruptured gas mains were shrieking across the ruined hall, and through them crashed increasingly heavy falls of debris. And the writhing phantasms were back, multiplying in spite of the geysers of burning, exploding gas, coalescing, solidifying, piping and tittering. They were insubstantial no longer; their claws and their teeth were sharp.
"Down with you!" bellowed Blunderbore. "Down with you! It's the only way!"
"You lead!" gasped Grimes, using his laser like a sword, slashing at the half-materialized things that were closing in upon them.
"No… I'll hold… them off…" The giant had wrenched the great iron spit from its sockets on either side of the fireplace, was flailing away with it, grunting with every stroke. Tattered rags of ectoplasm clung to its ends, eddied through the smoke- and dust-filled air.
Grimes paused briefly at the head of the spiral staircase, then barked to Sanderson, "Come on!" He clattered down the shaking treads, his left hand on the outer guard rail, his pistol clenched in his right fist. The central column seemed to be trying to tie itself into a knot, but it held, although the steps were canting at odd angles. The walls of the shaft were starting to bulge inward.
Grimes ran—down, down, round, round—keeping his footing in spite of the earthquake shocks, in spite of his increasing dizziness. He ran, and after him ran the third officer. Up there above Blunderbore was still fighting; his joyous bellowing came rolling down on them like thunder, loud even above the clangorous destruction of the Ogre's Keep.
Down, down…
Grimes staggered on, forcing his legs to move, to go on moving, taking great gasps of the damp, fetid air. Something barred his way, something long and serpent-like, with absurdly small forelegs, with curved poison-fangs and a flickering black tongue. The Commodore tried to stop, tried to bring his pistol up to a firing position, but could not. His impetus carried him on. Then he was through the monster; its body offered no more resistance than wet tissue paper.
Down, down…
It was more of a fall than a run.
It was a fall.
Grimes thudded gently into something thick and soft, lay sprawled on the soft bed of moss, breathing in great, painful gulps. Slowly he became aware of his surroundings: the cave, lit by a soft, rosy radiance with no apparent source, the opalescent colonnades of stalactite and stalagmite, the tinkling, glittering waterfall. He focused his attention upon his immediate vicinity. The Prince was still with him, was himself slowly stirring into wakefulness. Sir John knew where he was. This was the Witch's Cave, the home of the wicked Melinee.
She was standing over them, a tall woman, white of skin, black of hair, vividly red of mouth, clad in a robe of misty gray. In either hand she held a crystal goblet, bedewed with condensation. She murmured, "Rest you awhile, good knights and true, and pray accept this cooling brew."
Sanderson reached greedily for the vessel she held out to him—and Grimes, firing from his supine position, exploded it into a spray of splinters and acrid steam.
"It's not the mess," protested Sanderson, "but it's the waste! I never even got a taste!"
"Prince, had we quaffed the witch's wine," Grimes told him, "it would have turned us into swine."
Melinee laughed, a low, throaty gurgle. "You know too much, too much by far. But you'll be more fun the way you are." She looked at Sanderson as she said this. The invitation in her black eyes, her parted scarlet lips, was unmistakable.
The young officer reacted. He got gracefully to his feet, took a step toward the witch. He said gallantly. "Who needs wine when you're around, beautiful?"
"Careful!" warned Grimes.
"Have we been careful so far, sir? We've been collecting all the kicks—it's time that we got our paws on some of the ha'pence." Then, to the woman, "Isn't there somewhere around here a little more private?"
She smiled. "My bower, behind the waterfall…"
"Sanderson! I order you to keep away from this female!"
"I give the orders around here, old man," said Melinee sweetly. "This is my cave, and whatever your rank may be it means nothing as long as you're on my property." She turned again to Sanderson. The filmy robe was already slipping down from one smooth shoulder and it was obvious that she was wearing nothing underneath it. "Come," she murmured.
The admonitory voice boomed from the roof of the cavern. "Melinee, you forget yourself!"
"I don't!" she shouted. "I'm remembering myself. I'm a real person, not a character in some stupid children's fairy story! If you can't write adult fiction, buster, I'm taking charge of the plot. I'm supposed to be stopping these men from going any further, aren't I? Then shut up and let me do it my way!"
"Melinee!"
"That's not my name, and you know it." She turned again to Sanderson. "Don't be shy, spaceman. I'll show you just how wicked a wicked witch can be!"
"Mr. Sanderson!" Grimes's voice crackled with authority. "Leave that woman alone!"
The young man stood there, obviously thinking mutinous thoughts but not daring to express them. The woman stood there, looking at him, a contemptuous little smile curving her full lips. And then she turned, began to walk slowly and gracefully toward the waterfall. Her robe was almost transparent.
"Melinee!" The voice from the roof expressed entreaty as well as anger.
And why, Grimes asked himself suddenly, should 1 be on his side? He said aloud, but quietly, "All right, Mr. Sanderson. Go with her."
Sanderson shook his head bewilderedly. "First you tell me not to, and now you say that I can… After all, we are on duty."
"Go with her," repeated Grimes. It was more of an order than a suggestion.
"But, sir…"
"Damn it all, when I was your age I didn't have to be told twice."
The Wicked Witch called over her shoulder, "Do as the nice man says, darling."
The third officer made a sort of growling noise deep in his throat, glared defiantly at the Commodore, then started after the woman. She had reached the shimmering curtain of the waterfall, was passing through it. As she turned to look back through the rippling transparency Sanderson quickened his pace. Grimes chuckled, pulled from his pocket the battered pipe that somehow had survived unbroken, filled it, then ostentatiously used his laser pistol as a lighter. It was a dangerous trick, but an impressive one.
From beyond the cascade came the sound of a crooning female voice. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of allF' Then there was a crash of splintering glass and a scream. "No! No! You can't do that to me! I'll fix you! I'll fix you, you… you fairy story-teller!"
Melinee burst back into the main cavern. She was shaking with murderous fury. "Look!" she yelled. "Look what that bastard did to me!"
Grimes looked. Sanderson looked. "But—" the latter started to say. Grimes interjected hastily, "It's shocking!" He was lying—as the mirror must have done.
"Come on!" she snarled. "This joke's gone on quite long enough!"
She led the way into her bower, through the curtain of falling water. As Grimes passed through it he heard behind him the clatter of falling stalactites, felt the brief wave of scalding heat as the waterfall flashed into steam. But it was too late to harm him, and the others were well clear.
On the far wall of the bower was the mirror—or what had been the mirror. Now it was only an elaborately molded golden frame set into the rock face. Melinee scrambled through it, ignoring the sharp edges that ripped her robe from hip to ankle. Sanderson followed her, then Grimes. The tunnel beyond it was unpleasantly organic in appearance, a convoluted tube, with smooth and pinkly glistening walls, winding, pulsing underfoot, writhing.
Melinee ran on, sure-footed. Somewhere she had lost her sandals, had probably used one of them to smash the lying, libelous looking-glass. The men, in their shoes, slipped and slithered, but they kept up with her. Down they went, and down, losing all sense of direction, losing their footing, putting hands out to steady themselves against smooth, warm walls that shrank away from the touch. Down they went, and down, gasping in the hot air, suddenly conscious that the red-glowing walls were steadily contracting. Soon there would be no going any further ahead, and no turning back. They were crouching, and then they were slithering on their bellies. Grimes, who had passed Sanderson while it was still possible, while there was still freedom of movement, suddenly found his way blocked, realized that the crown of his head was pressing against the soles of Melinee's bare feet. Faintly her voice came back to him. "We're there… at the air lock. But… I don't know how to open it…"
"I… I have to crawl past you…" gasped Grimes. Then, urgently, "Make yourself small, woman I Breathe out!" 1T1… try."
Like an earthworm in its tunnel—but with far less agility, far less speed—the Commodore edged forward. Somehow he managed to get both arms ahead of his body, clutched filmy fabric and the firm flesh beneath. He heard her give a little scream, but he ignored it. Cloth tore, and then he had a firm grip on her waist, just above her hips. His face was over her heels, and then pressing down on her ankles. Somehow he was still able to draw an occasional breath. His nose was sliding—but slowly, slowly—up the valley between her calves. He hunched his back, and the resilient wall above him gave a little.
He grunted as he wriggled forward. Somehow he negotiated her buttocks; then his fingers were on her shoulders. He pulled himself ahead, more rapidly now. He spat out a mouthful of hair, then slid his hands along her upreaching bare arms. And then there was metal, blessedly hard and solid to the touch—and touch was the only sense that he had to guide him.
Was this an air lock door? He did not know; he had only her word for it. And if it were, indeed, an air lock door, was it of the standard pattern? It had to be; otherwise the situation was utterly hopeless. Cramped as he was, Grimes could never get his laser pistol out of its holster—and even if he could its employment in this confined space might well prove fatal to himself and the others.
His fingers groped, scrabbled, feeling nothing at first but smooth, seamless metal. He had almost given up hope when he found what he was looking for: the neat little hole, large enough to admit a space-gloved digit. He had to squirm and contort himself to get his hand to the right angle. Under him Melinee whimpered a little, but did not complain.
The tip of his index finger crept over the faired rim of the hole, pushed into it, at first encountering nothing at all and then, after what seemed an eternity, smooth plastic. Grimes pushed, felt the surface give. He maintained the pressure, relaxed it, pushed again, and again, making "O" in Morse Code—"O" for "Open."
He heard the faint whir of machinery, a noise that suddenly became louder. The inward opening door almost took his finger with it. And then he was in the air lock, closely followed by Sanderson.
Melinee had vanished.
Slowly Grimes and Sanderson walked through the silent, the too silent alleyways of the ship, fighting the lassitude that threatened to close down upon them, forcing their way through air that seemed to possess the viscosity of cold treacle. But they were not alone. In their ears—or in their minds?—sounded the croaking voice of the Frog Prince, the tinkling soprano of the Fairy Lynnimame, the husky whisper of Melinee. "You must not give in. You have come so far; you must not give in. Waken the Princess. Waken the Princess." And there was Blunderbore's urgent muttering, and the faint voices of the River Queen's captain and purser. "Wake the Princess. Wake the Princess."
They stumbled on, weakening, through the gelid air, the internal atmosphere that didn't even smell right, that didn't smell at all, that lacked the familiar taints of hot oil and machinery, of tobacco smoke and women's perfume, the clean, garden scents of the hydroponics deck. They staggered on, through alleyways and up companionways, fighting every inch of the way, sustained somehow by the fairytale characters whom they had encountered.
And Grimes knew what was wrong, knew the nature of the stasis that must, soon, make them part of itself; unless they reached the Mannschenn Drive room in time. He had read of, but had never until now experienced, the almost impossible balance of forces, the canceling out of opposing temporal precession fields that would freeze a ship and all her people in an eternal Now, forever adrift down and between the dimensions. That had been one of the theories advanced to account for the vanishing, without trace, of that Waverley Royal Mail liner ten standard years ago—the ship aboard which the writer Clay Wilton had been a passenger.
Grimes could remember, vividly, the blurb on the dust jacket of the book that he had bought as a present for the small daughter of a friend. "The last of the dreamers," the author had been called. He had skimmed through it, had laughed at the excellent illustrations and then, to his amazement, had been gripped by the story. It was about a world that never was and never could be, a planet where sorcery was everyday practice, where talking animals and good fairies and wicked witches interfered in the affairs of men and women.
"You are beginning to understand," whispered Lynni-mame.
There was the door ahead of them, with mannschenn drive in shining metal letters above it. The door was closed, stubborn; it would not yield. Human muscles were powerless against the stasis; human muscles with strength flowing into them from outside, somehow, were still powerless. The handle snapped off cleanly in Grimes's hand.
"Let me, sir," Sanderson was saying. "Let me try."
The Commodore stepped slowly to one side, his motions those of a deep-sea diver. He saw that the young man had his laser weapon out of its holster, was struggling to raise it against the dreadful inertia.
He pressed the firing stud.
Slowly, fantastically, the beam of intense light extruded itself from the muzzle, creeping toward that immovable door. After an eternity it made contact, and after another eternity the paint began to bubble. Aeons passed, and there was a crater. More aeons dragged by—and the crater was a hole. Still Sanderson, his face rigid with strain, held the weapon steady. Grimes could imagine that luminous, purple worm crawling across the space from the door to the switchboard. Then Sanderson gasped, "I can't keep it up!" and the muzzle of the pistol wavered, sagged until it was pointing at the deck.
We, tried, thought Grimes. Then he wondered, Will Wilton add us to his permanent cast of characters?
Suddenly there was sound again—the dying, deepening whine of a stopped Mannschenn Drive unit, of spinning, precessing gyroscopes slowing to final immobility. Like a bullet fired from a gun deflected after the pulling of the trigger, the laser beam had reached its target. There was sound again: fans, and pumps, the irregular throbbing of the Inertial Drive, and all the babble and clamor of a suddenly awakened ship. From bulkhead speakers boomed a voice, that of the captain of the river steamer. "Whoever you are, come up to the main saloon, please. And whoever you are—thank you."
Grimes sprawled comfortably in an easy chair, a cold drink ready to hand. He had decided to stay aboard this ship, the Princess of Troon, having persuaded her captain to set trajectory for Lorn. After all, he was already ten years late—a few more weeks would make very little difference. During the voyage the Commodore would be able to question the Princess' personnel still further, to work on his report. He was keeping young Sanderson with him. Drakenberg had not been at all pleased when deprived of the services of a watch officer, but the Commodore piled on far more G's than he did.
Already Grimes was beginning to wonder if his report would be believed, in spite of all the corroborative evidence from the personnel of both ships, Rim Jaguar and Princess of Troon. He recalled vividly the scene in the passenger liner's main saloon when he and Sanderson had made their way into that compartment. The stasis must have been closed down while everybody was at dinner; dishes on the tables were still steaming.
They had all been there: the frog-like Grollan, the old lady who had been the peasant woman encountered on the towpath, the pretty fragile blonde whose name should have been Lynnimame, but was not; all of them looking like the characters in the illustrations to the Clay Wilton books. And there was the big—but not all that big—Negro, who was a physicist, not an ogre, and the captain, and the purser. There was the beautiful woman who could have been the model for the Melinee in the pictures and who was, in fact, Mrs. Wilton. There were other officers, other passengers, and among them was Clay Wilton himself. He had the beginnings of a black eye, and a trickle of blood still dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Ship's staff had formed a protective cordon about him, but made it quite obvious that this was only because they had been ordered to do so.
After the first excitement there had been the conference, during which all concerned tried to work out what had happened, and why. Blundell, the big physicist—it had been hard not to think of him as Blunderbore—had said, "I've my own ideas, Commodore Grimes. But you, sir, are the recognized authority on Rim phenomena…"
Grimes was flattered, and tried not to show it. He made a major production of filling and lighting his pipe. After he had it going he said, "I can try to explain. The way I see it is this. The ship went into stasis, and somehow drifted out from the Waverley sector toward the Rim. And out here, at the very edge of the expanding galaxy, there's always an… oddness. Time and space are not inclined to follow the laws that obtain elsewhere. Too, thought seems to have more power—physical power, I mean—than in the regions more toward the center. It's all part and parcel of the vagueness—that's not quite the right word—of… of everything. We get along with it. We're used to it.
"Look at it this way. You were all frozen in your everlasting Now, but you could still think, and you could still dream. And who was the most expert dreamer among you? It had to be Clay Wilton; after all, his publishers refer to him as 'the last of the dreamers.' Mr. Wilton dreamed out the story that he was working on at the time when your Mannschenn Drive went on the blink. Then he dreamed of the next story in the series, and the next, and the next… Somehow a world shaped itself about his dreams. Out here, on the Rim, there must be the raw material for the creation of new galaxies. Somehow that world shaped itself, a solid world, with atmosphere, and vegetation, and people. It was real enough to register on all Rim Jaguar's instruments, even though it vanished when this ship came out of stasis. It was real enough, but, with a few exceptions, the people weren't real. They were little more than mobile scenery. The exceptions, of course, were those characters drawn from real life. And they led a sort of double existence. One body here, aboard the ship, and another body on the surface of that impossible planet, dancing like a puppet as Mr. Wilton manipulated the strings. Toward the end, the puppets were getting restive…"
"You can say that again, Commodore," grinned Blundell.
"Yes, the puppets were getting restive, and realized that they, too, could become puppet-masters, could use Mr. Sanderson and myself to break the stasis. And, at the same time, Mr. Wilton was trying to work us into his current plot." Grimes turned to the writer. "And tell me, sir, did you intend to kill us?"
"Nobody dies in my stories," muttered the man. "Not even the baddies."
"But there has to be a first time for everything. That dragon of yours was far too enthusiastic. And so was your destruction of Blunderbore's castle."
"I'd gotten kind of attached to the place, too," grumbled the physicist.
"I meant no harm." Wilton's voice was sullen.
"Don't you believe him!" flared Mrs. Wilton—Melinee, the Wicked Witch. "He has a nasty, cruel streak in him, and only writes the sweetness and light fairy-tale rubbish because it makes good money. But that trick of his with my mirror will be grounds for divorce. Any judge, anywhere, will admit that it was mental cruelty."
"But what did you do to me?" demanded the weedy little man, taking a pitiful offensive. "You destroyed my world."
But did we? Grimes was wondering. Did we?
Sanderson and the fragile little blonde had come into the small smoking room, had not noticed him sitting there; they were sharing a settee only a few feet from him.
"The really fantastic thing about it all, Lynnimame—I like to call you that; after all, it was your name when I first met you. You don't mind, do you?" Sanderson was saying.
"Of course not, Henry. If you like it, I like it."
"Good. But as I was saying, the really fantastic thing about it all, the way that I fitted into old Wilton's story, is that I am a prince…"
"But I think," said Grimes coldly as he got up from his chair, "that the Wicked Witch will be able to vouch that you're not a fairy prince."
And would they all live happily ever after? he wondered as he made his way to his cabin. At least he was finally on his way home.