To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (61 page)

Five kilometers, and closing still. . . .

Four. . . .

He restarted the inertial drive, in reverse. This was close enough until he had some idea of what he was running into.

Una was still talking softly into the microphone. “We mean you no harm. We need help.
Tarfelet.
”

The use of that final word brought an excited gabble in reply.

Three point five kilometers, holding. Three point five . . . Three point six.

Grimes stopped the inertial drive.

“Go on talking,” he said. “Get them used to your voice. Maybe they’ll send a boat out to us.”

“You’re not going in?”

“Not yet. Not until I’m sure of a friendly reception, as the wise fly said to the spider.”

“And what happened to him in the end? The fly, I mean.”

“I can’t remember,” said Grimes. There are so many ways in which flies die, and most of them unconnected with spiders.

Chapter 12

They hung there,
maintaining their distance off the two conical spaceships. Grimes was almost convinced that they were friendly.
Almost.
The boat was within easy range of any of the weapons with which he was familiar. It would be foolish to assume that a spacefaring race did not possess arms at least as good as those mounted by the warships of the Federation. Of course, the strange ships could be merchantmen. Their crews might have at their disposal nothing better (or worse) than hand weapons. They might just be waiting for Grimes and Una to board one of the vessels, when they would overpower them by force of numbers.

If only, thought Grimes, they could get some sort of a picture on the vision screen of the Carlotti transceiver, things would be very much easier. Or, better still, if Una or himself were a graduate of the Rhine Institute, a licensed telepath. . . . He had often, in the past, relied heavily on the services of Psionic Communications Officers. It was a great pity that he did not have one along now.

Una said, “I’m sure that it would be safe to go in.”

“Sure? How can you be sure?”

“Training,” she told him. “In my job we soon pick up the knack of being able to know if the other person is lying . . . I’ve been listening to their voices. There’ve been at least three of them talking to us. I bet you anything you like that they’re our sort of ‘people’.”

“And that makes them just wonderful, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t be so bloody cynical.”

“In any case, what experience have you had with dealing with aliens?”

“Very little. Why?”

“Because very often facial expressions, and verbal intonations, can be misleading. What we take for a friendly grin could very well be a snarl of hatred. And so on.”

“Even so, I think we should go in. We’ve nothing to lose.”

“All right, then.”

Grimes restarted the inertial drive. While he was watching the pilot lights on the control panel he heard Una cry out. He looked up, and out through the control cabin ports. They—the lifeboat and the two spaceships—were no longer alone. Shimmering into full visibility were at least a dozen of the weird, skeletal spheres, latticework globes containing odd, spinning bulks of machinery. They were big, far bigger than the one that had attacked them on the devastated world.

The conical ships were armed after all.

From the nearer of them shot a salvo of missiles, none of which reached their target. All of them exploded harmlessly well short of the sphere at which they had been aimed. Both ships were firing now—and both ineffectually. It wasn’t Grimes’ fight, but he deeply regretted not being able to take sides. He regarded the spherical ships as the enemy. He had to sit there, watching helplessly. But there was something odd about the battle. Apart from the way in which they were closing in, with mathematical precision, to completely surround the conical vessels, they were not attacking. They were using whatever armament they possessed—laser, or something similar?—only to detonate the warheads of the rockets before they hit.

“Isn’t it time we were getting out of here?” demanded Una.

Yes, it was time, and more than time. Once the mini-Mannschenn was restarted the boat would slip out of the normal dimensions of space, would be untouchable unless any enemy succeeded in synchronizing temporal precession rates. But Grimes could not bring himself to flee until he knew how it all came out. Like the majority of humankind he numbered Lot’s wife among his ancestors.

Still the battle continued. The flare of exploding missiles glowed fitfully through the clouds of smoke that were dissipating slowly in the nothingness. Slashing beams, heating gas molecules to brief incandescence, were visible now. Oddly, the englobed vessels made no move to escape. They could have actuated their own interstellar drives to do so, but they did not. Perhaps they could not. Perhaps, Grimes realized, the spheres, between them, had set up some sort of inhibiting field.

“Isn’t it time that we were getting out of here?” shouted Una.

“Too right it is,” agreed Grimes, but reluctantly. It had occurred to him that the inhibiting field might affect the boat’s mini-Mannschenn. He cursed himself for not having left it running, precessionless. Valuable seconds would be wasted while he restarted it. But, especially with the miniaturized drives with their overly delicate controls, the precessionless state could be maintained only by constant attention.

He switched on the boat’s interstellar drive. The pilot lights on the console came alive. There was nothing further that he could do until the requisite RPS had built up. He looked out of the viewports again. The battle was still going on, although with diminished fury. The rocket salvos were coming at longer and longer intervals, the smoke was thinning fast. From the skeleton spheres long, long tentacles of metallic rope were extending, reaching out for the trapped ships.

Then it happened.

One of the conical vessels suddenly burgeoned into a great flower of dreadful, blinding incandescence, expanding (it seemed) slowly (but the field of the mini-Mannschenn was building up, distorting the time perception of Grimes and Una), dissolving the other ship into her component atoms, engulfing the nearer of the surrounding spheres.

The scene faded, slowly at first, then faster.

It flickered out.

The boat fell through the warped continuum, alone again.

Chapter 13

“So now what do we do?”
asked Una.

They were sitting over one of the nutritious but unappetizing meals. After this last escape they had not broken out a bottle of brandy, had not celebrated in any other way. They were, both of them, far too frightened. They were alone, utterly alone. Each of them, in the past, had derived strength from the big organizations of which they were members. Each of them—and especially Grimes—had known racial pride, had felt, deep down, the superiority of humans over all other breeds. But now, so far as they knew, now and here, they were the sole representatives of humanity, just the two of them in a little, unarmed boat.

“You tell me,” he retorted glumly.

“We can, at least, try to sort things out, John,” she said. “If we know what we’re up against we might, just possibly, be able to deal with it. You’re the spaceman. You’re the Survey Service officer. You’ve been around much more than I have. What do you make of it all?”

“To begin with,” he said, “there has been a war. It certainly seems that there still is a war. As far as the planet we landed on is concerned, the war finished a long time ago. But it’s still going on, nonetheless. A war between two different geometrical forms. Between the cones and the geodesic spheres. The people who build conical ships against those who build spherical ones. Which side is in the right? We don’t know. Which side is in the wrong? We don’t know that, either.”

She remarked quietly, “In human history, quite a few wars have been fought with neither side in the right—and quite a few have been fought over causes as absurd as the distinction between geometrical shapes. Even so, I still stick to my assertion that the people in the conical ships are—
were,
rather—our kind of people . . .”

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out now,” he told her.

“Of course we shall. There are other worlds, other ships. We’re still picking up signals on the Carlotti, from all over.”

“Mphm. Yes. So we pick up something promising, again, and home on it.”

“That’s the general idea.”

He spooned a portion of the reconstituted mush into his mouth, swallowed it. At least it slipped down easily. He said, “It would be good to find somebody who could treat us to a square meal.”

“We aren’t starving.”

“Maybe not. Even so. . . .” The Carlotti speaker emitted a series of coded buzzes. “Mphm. Each time that we’ve homed on a plain language transmission we’ve landed up in the cactus. Each time telephony has let us down. What about giving telegraphy a go?”

“Why not?”

He got up from the table, walked to the Carlotti transceiver. He waited for the next burst of code, got a relative bearing. He went forward to the controls, shut down both the inertial and the interstellar drives, turned the boat on to the new heading. He restarted the motors. Looking aft, at Una, he experienced a brief flash of prevision as the temporal precession field built up again. He saw her naked, astride a graceful, glittering machine. A bicycle.

He thought,
There’s hope for us yet. It looks as though we shall be enjoying that nudist holiday on Arcadia after all.

Yes, there was hope.

There was hope that whoever was responsible for those frequent signals in what seemed to be some sort of alien Morse Code would be able to help them, might even be able to get them back to where they belonged. Surely the craziness that they had twice, so far, encountered was not spread all over this galaxy. In their own universe, no matter what irrational wars were fought, there was always that majority of people—too often dumb, too often conformist, but essentially decent—who, when the shooting was over, quietly picked up the pieces and set about rebuilding civilization.

So it must be here, said Grimes.

So it must be here, agreed Una.

Meanwhile the target star waxed daily, hourly, in brilliance. It must be another planet toward which they were heading, a world perhaps untouched by the war, undevastated. Those signals sounded sane enough. Grimes could visualize a city that was both spaceport and administrative center, with a continual influx of messages from all over the galaxy, a continual outflow of replies and instructions to ships throughout a vast volume of space.

The parent sun was close now, close enough for the mini-Mannschenn to be shut down. Grimes brought the boat in for the remainder of the journey under inertial drive only. As he had assumed, the signals were emanating from one of the planets of the star. But there was something wrong. Now that the boat was back in the normal continuum it was all too apparent that the primary was not a yellow, G type sun. It was a red dwarf. And the world on which they were homing was too far out, much too far out, to be within the eco-sphere. Still, he did not worry overmuch. In any Universe human life—or its equivalent—exercises control over its environment. One did not have to venture very far from Earth, he said to Una, to see examples of this. The underground Lunar Colony, the domed cities on the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, the terra-forming of Mars and Venus. . . .

“But those people,” she said, “on that world, mightn’t be anything like us. They might take their oxygen—if they need oxygen—as a fluid or, even, a solid. They might. . . .”

Grimes tried to laugh reassuringly. “As long as they’re intelligent—and they must be—their bodily form doesn’t matter a damn. Do you know how man has been defined, more than once? A fire-using, tool-making animal. Anybody who can build ships and set up a network of interstellar communications comes into that category.”

“The first tools,” she told him quietly, “were weapons.”

“All right, all right. So what? But we can’t wander forever through this cockeyed universe like a couple of latter day Flying Dutchmen. We have to trust somebody, some time.”

She laughed. “I admit that I was willing to trust the people in those spaceships. But I had their voices to reassure me. Now you want to trust these other people on the basis of utterly emotionless dots and dashes. Still, as you say, we have to land somewhere, sometime. It might as well be here.”

So, cautiously, they approached the planet from which the Deep Space radio transmissions were being made. It would have been a cold, dark world had it not been for the clusters of brilliant lights that covered its entire surface, blazing almost as brightly on the day hemisphere as on the night side. (But very little illumination was afforded by that dim, distant, ruddy sun.)

Closer the boat approached, closer.

Grimes was reluctant to leave his controls, even if only for a few seconds. He remained in the pilot’s chair, eating, now and again, the savorless meals that Una brought him—although had they been epicure’s delights he would not have noticed. He remained keyed up for instant flight. But no targets appeared in the radar screen, no obvious interrogatory demands blatted out from the Carlotti speaker. Surely somebody down there, he thought, must have noted the approach of the little spacecraft. Perhaps—and he didn’t much like the thought—the missiles were ready in their launchers, aimed and primed, tracking the lifeboat as it drifted slowly in. Perhaps the laser cannon already had the boat in their sights, were waiting until it came within effective range. He might be able to evade rockets, but laser artillery—especially as the lifeboat was not fitted with shielding—was another matter.

He swung the binoculars on their universal mounting into a position from which he could use them. He could make out a few details on the planetary surface now; high, latticework towers, what looked like either roads or railways with long strings of lights moving along them, huge, spidery wheels lazily revolving. It was like, he thought, a sort of cross between an amusement park and an oil refinery. It could have been either—or neither.