To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (42 page)

Ahead of them loomed the city.

Just a huddle of domes it was, some large, some small, with the greatest of all of them roughly in the center. This one, Grimes saw as they approached it, had a flattened top, and there was machinery there—a winch, he decided.

The airship came in high, but losing altitude slowly, finally hovering over the palace, its propeller just turning over to keep it stemming the light breeze. Two workers flew up from the platform, caught the end of the dangling cable, snapped it on to the end of another cable brought up from the winch drum. The winch was started and, creaking in protest, the blimp was drawn rapidly down. A set of wheeled steps was pushed into position, its upper part hooked on to the gunwale of the swaying car. The princess and her escort ignored this facility, fluttering out and down in a flurry of gauzy wings. Grimes used the ladder, of course, feeling grateful that somebody had bothered to remember that he was a wingless biped.

“Follow me,” snapped the Princess.

The spaceman followed her, through a circular hatch in the platform. The ramp down which she led him was steep and he had difficulty in maintaining his balance, was unable to gain more than a confused impression of the interior of the huge building. There was plenty of light, luckily, a green-blue radiance emanating from clusters of luminescent insects hanging at intervals from the roof of the corridor. The air was warm, and bore an acrid but not unpleasant tang. It carried very few sounds, however, only a continuous, faintly sinister rustling noise. Grimes missed the murmur of machinery. Surely—apart from anything else—a vast structure such as this would need mechanical ventilation. In any case, there was an appreciable air flow. And then, at a junction of four corridors, he saw a group of workers, their feet hooked into rings set in the smooth floor, their wings beating slowly, maintaining the circulation of the atmosphere.

Down they went, and down, through corridors that were deserted save for themselves, through other corridors that were busy streets, with hordes of workers scurrying on mysterious errands. But they were never jostled; the lower caste Shaara always gave the Princess and her party a respectfully wide berth. Even so, there seemed to be little, if any curiosity; only the occasional drone would stop to stare at the Earthman with interest.

Down they went, and down . . .

They came, at last, to the end of a long passageway, closed off by a grilled door, the first that Grimes had seen in the hive. On the farther side of it were six workers, hung about with metal accoutrements. Workers? No, Grimes decided, soldiers, Amazons. Did they, he wondered, have stings, like their Terran counterparts? Perhaps they did—but the laser pistols that they held would be far more effective.

“Who comes?” asked one of them in the sort of voice that Grimes associated with sergeant-majors.

“The Princess Shrla, with Drones Brrynn and Drryhr, and Earth-Drone-Captain Grrimes.”

“Enter, Princess Shrla, Enter, Earth-Drone-Captain Grrimes.”

The grille slid silently aside, admitting Grimes and the Princess, shutting again, leaving the two drones on its further side. Two soldiers led the way along a tunnel that, by the Earthman’s standards, was very poorly illuminated, two more brought up the rear. Grimes was pleased to note that the Princess seemed to have lost most of her arrogance.

They came, then, into a vast chamber, a blue-lit dimness about which the shapes of the Queen-Mother’s attendants rustled, scurried and crept. Slowly they walked over the smooth, soft floor—under Grimes’s shoes it felt unpleasantly organic—to the raised platform on which lay a huge, pale shape. Ranged around the platform were screens upon which moved pictures of scenes all over the planet—one of them showed the spaceport, with
Adder
standing tall slim and gleaming on the apron—and banks of dials and meters. Throne-room this enormous vault was, and nursery, and the control room of a world.

Grimes’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the near-darkness. He looked with pity at the flabby, grossly distended body with its ineffectual limbs, its useless stubs of wings. He did not, oddly enough, consider obscene the slowly moving belt that ran under the platform, upon which, at regular intervals, a glistening, pearly egg was deposited, neither was he repelled by the spectacle of the worker whose swollen body visibly shrank as she regurgitated nutriment into the mouth of the Shaara Queen—but he was taken aback when that being spoke to him while feeding was still in progress. He should not have been, knowing as he did that the artificial voice boxes worn by the Shaara have no connection with their organs of ingestion.

“Welcome, Captain Grimes,” she said in deep, almost masculine tones.

“I am honored, Your Majesty,” he stammered.

“You do us a great service, Captain Grimes.”

“That is a pleasure as well as an honor, Your Majesty.”

“So . . . But, Captain Grimes, I must, as you Earthmen say, put you in the picture.” There was a short silence. “On Brooum there is crisis. Disease has taken its toll among the hives, a virus, a mutated virus. A cure was found—but too late. The Brooum Queen-Mother is dead. All Princesses not beyond fertilization age are dead. Even the royal eggs, larvae and pupae were destroyed by the disease.

“We, of course, are best able to afford help to our daughters and sisters on Brooum. We offered to send a fertilizable Princess to become Queen-Mother, but the Council of Princesses which now rules the colony insists that their new monarch be born, as it were, on the planet. So, then, we are dispatching, by your vessel, a royal pupa. She will tear the silken sheath and emerge, as an imago, into the world over which she will reign.”

“Mphm . . .” grunted Grimes absentmindedly. “Your Majesty,” he added hastily.

The Queen-Mother turned her attention to the television screens. “If we are not mistaken,” she said, “the loading of the refrigerated canister containing the pupa has been completed. Princess Shrla will take you back to your ship. You will lift and proceed as soon as is practicable.” Again she paused, then went on. “We need not tell you, Captain Grimes, that we Shaara have great respect for Terran spacemen. We are confident that you will carry out your mission successfully. We shall be pleased, on your return to our planet, to confer upon you the Order of the Golden Honeyflower.

“On your bicycle, spaceman!”

Grimes looked at the recumbent Queen dubiously. Where had she picked up
that
expression? But he had heard it said—and was inclined to agree—that the Shaara were more human than many of the humanoids throughout the Galaxy.

He bowed low—then, following the Princess, escorted by the soldiers, made his way out of the throne-room.

It is just three weeks, Terran Standard, from Droomoor to Brooum as the Serpent Class Courier flies. That, of course, is assuming that all systems are Go aboard the said Courier. All systems were not Go insofar as
Adder
was concerned. This was the result of an unfortunate combination of circumstances. The ship had been fitted with a new computer at Lindisfarne Base, a new Engineering Officer—all of whose previous experience had been as a junior in a Constellation Class cruiser—had been appointed to her, and she had not been allowed to stay in port long enough for any real maintenance to be carried out.

The trouble started one evening, ship’s time, when Grimes was discussing matters with Spooky Deane, the psionic communications officer. The telepath was, as usual, getting outside a large, undiluted gin. His captain was sipping a glass of the same fluid, but with ice cubes and bitters as additives.

“Well, Spooky,” said Grimes, “I don’t think that we shall have any trouble with
this
passenger. She stays in her cocoons—the home-grown one and the plastic outer casing—safe and snug and hard-frozen, and thawing her out will be up to her loyal subjects. By that time we shall be well on our way . . .”

“She’s alive, you know,” said Deane.

“Of course she’s alive.”

“She’s conscious, I mean. I’m getting more and more attuned to her thoughts, her feelings. It’s always been said that it’s practically impossible for there to be any real contact of minds between human and Shaara telepaths, but when you’re cooped up in the same ship as a Shaara, a little ship at that . . .”

“Tell me more,” ordered Grimes.

“It’s . . . fascinating. You know, of course, that race memory plays a big part in the Shaara culture. The princess, when she emerges as an imago, will
know
just what her duties are, and what the duties of those about her are. She
knows
that her two main functions will be to rule and to breed. Workers exist only to serve her, and every drone is a potential father to her people . . .”

“Mphm. And is she aware of us?”

“Dimly, Captain. She doesn’t know, of course, who or what we are. As far as she’s concerned we’re just some of her subjects, in close attendance upon her . . .”

“Drones or workers?”

Spooky Deane laughed. “If she were more fully conscious, she’d be rather confused on that point. Males are drones, and drones don’t work . . .”

Grimes was about to make some unkind remarks about his officers when the lights flickered. When they flickered a second time he was already on his feet. When they went out he was halfway through the door of his day cabin, hurrying towards the control room. The police lights came on, fed from the emergency batteries—but the sudden cessation of the noise of pumps and fans, the cutting off in mid-beat of the irregular throbbing of the inertial drive, was frightening. The thin, high whine of the Mannschenn Drive Unit deepened as the spinning, precessing gyroscopes slowed to a halt, and as they did so there came the nauseating dizziness of temporal disorientation.

Grimes kept going, although—as he put it, later—he didn’t know if it was Christmas Day or last Thursday. The ship was in Free Fall now, and he pulled himself rapidly along the guide rail, was practically swimming in air as he dived through the hatch into Control.

Von Tannenbaum had the watch. He was busy at the auxiliary machinery control panel. A fan restarted somewhere, but a warning buzzer began to sound. The navigator cursed. The fan motor slowed down and the buzzer ceased.

“What’s happened, Pilot?” demanded Grimes.

“The Phoenix Jennie I
think,
Captain. Vitelli hasn’t reported yet . . .”

Then the engineer’s shrill, excited voice sounded from the intercom speaker. “Auxiliary engine room to Control! I have to report a leakage of deuterium!”

“What pressure is there in the tank?” Grimes asked.

“The gauges still show 20,000 units. But . . .”

“But what?” Grimes snapped.

“Captain, the tank is empty.”

Grimes pulled himself to his chair, strapped himself in. He looked out through the viewports at the star-begemmed blackness, each point of light hard and sharp, no longer distorted by the temporal precession fields of the Drive, each distant sun lifetimes away with the ship in her present condition. Then he turned to face his officers—Beadle, looking no more (but no less) glum than usual, von Tannenbaum, whose normally ruddy face was now as pale as his hair, Slovotny, whose dark complexion now had a greenish cast, and Deane, ectoplasmic as always. They were joined by Vitelli, a very ordinary looking young man who was, at the moment, more than ordinarily frightened.

“Mr. Vitelli,” Grimes asked him. “This leakage—is it into our atmosphere or outside the hull?”

“Outside, sir.”

“Good. In that case . . .” Grimes made a major production of filling and lighting his battered pipe. “Now I can think. Mphm. Luckily I’ve not used any reaction mass this trip, so we have ample fuel for the emergency generator. Got your slipstick ready, Pilot? Assuming that the tanks are full, do we have enough to run the inertial and interstellar drives from here to Brooum?”

“I’ll have to use the computer, Captain.”

“Then use it. Meanwhile, Sparks and Spooky, can either of you gentlemen tell me what ships are in the vicinity?”

“The Dog Star Line’s
Basset,
” Slovotny told him. “The cruiser
Draconis”
added Deane.

“Mphm.” It would be humiliating for a Courier Service Captain to have to call for help, but
Draconis
would be the lesser of two evils. “Mphm. Get in touch with both vessels, Mr. Deane. I’m not sure that we can spare power for the Carlotti, Mr. Slovotny. Get in touch with both vessels, ask their positions and tell them ours. But don’t tell them anything else.”

“
Our
position, sir, is . . . ?”

Grimes swiveled his chair so that he could see the chart tank, rattled off the coordinates, adding, “Near enough, until we get an accurate fix . . .”

“I can take one now, Captain,” von Tannenbaum told him.

“Thank you, Pilot. Finished your sums?”

“Yes.” The navigator’s beefy face was expressionless. “To begin with, we have enough chemical fuel to maintain all essential services for a period of seventy-three Standard days.
But
we do not have enough fuel to carry us to Brooum, even using Mannschenn Drive only. We could, however, make for ZX1797—Sol-type, with one Earth-type planet, habitable but currently uninhabited by intelligent life forms . . .”

Grimes considered the situation. If he were going to call for help he would be better off staying where he was, in reasonable comfort.

“Mr. Vitelli,” he said, “you can start up the emergency generator. Mr. Deane, as soon as Mr. von Tannenbaum has a fix you can get a message out to
Basset
and
Draconis . . .
“

“But she’s properly awake,” Deane muttered. “She’s torn open the silk cocoon, and the outer canister is opening . . .”

“What the hell are you talking about?” barked Grimes.

“The Princess. When the power went off the refrigeration unit stopped. She . . .” The telepath’s face assumed an expression of rapt devotion. “We must go to her . . .”

“We must go to her . . .” echoed Vitelli.