The Big Black Mark (4 page)

"Not to mention the jolly swagman," growled Grimes. "But that's all nonsense, Mr. Flannery. You can't tell me that
that's
the brain of a dingo who was around when the Kelly Gang was brought to book!"

Flannery chuckled. "What d'ye take me for, Captain? I don't believe that, an' I'm not expectin' you to. But he's a dog, an' all dogs have this race memory, goin' back to the Dream Time, an' farther back still. And now, Captain, witt ye, with all due respect, be gettin' out of here? Ye've got Ned all upset, ye have."

Grimes departed in a rather bad temper, leaving Flannery communing with the whiskey bottle and his weird pet.

Six hours before liftoff time Grimes received Brandt, the only scientific officer who was making the voyage, in his day cabin. From the very start they clashed. This Dr. Brandt—he soon made it clear that he did not wish to be addressed as "Commander" and that he considered his Survey Service rank and uniform childish absurdities—was, Grimes decided, a typical case of small-man-itis. He did not need to be a telepath to know what Brandt thought about him. He was no more than a bus driver whose job it was to take the learned gentleman to wherever he wished to go.

And then Brandt endeared himself to Grimes still further by putting his thoughts into words. "It's a high time, Captain," said the little, fat, bald black-bearded man, "that contacts with Lost Colonies were taken out of the clumsy hands of you military types. You do irreparable damage with your interferences.
I
should have been on hand to make a thorough and detailed study of the New Spartan culture before you ruined it by aiding and abetting revolution."

"Mphm," grunted Grimes.

"And you did the same sort of thing on Morrowvia."

"Did I? I was trying to save the Morrowvians from Drongo Kane—who, in case you don't know, is a slave trader—and from the Dog Star Line, who wanted to turn the whole damn planet into a millionaires' holiday camp."

"Which it is now well on the way to becoming, I hear."

"The Morrowvians will do very nicely out of it. In any case, on neither occasion was I without scientific advice."

"Dr. Lazenby, I suppose you mean. Or Commander Lazenby, as she no doubt prefers to be called. Pah!"

"Wipe the spit off your beard, Doctor," admonished Grimes, his prominent ears flushing angrily. "And, as far as Commander Lazenby is concerned, the advice she gave me was consistently, good."

"
You
would think so. An ignorant spaceman led up the garden path by a flashily attractive woman."

Luckily Brabham came in just then on some business or other, and Grimes was able to pass Brandt on to the first lieutenant. He sat down at his littered desk and thought,
That cocky little bastard is all I need.
He remembered a captain under whom he had served years ago, who used to exclaim when things went wrong, "I am surrounded by rogues and imbeciles!"

And how many rogues and imbeciles was he, Grimes, surrounded by? He began to make calculations on a scrap of paper.

Control room officers—six.

Electronic communications officers—two.

Psionic communications officer—one (and that was more than ample!).

Supply branch officers—two.

Engineer officers—six.

Medical officer—one.

Marine officer—one.

Scientific officer—one.

That made twenty, in the commissioned ranks alone.

Cooks—four.

Stewards—two.

Stewardesses—four.

That made thirty.

Marines, including the sergeant and corporal—twenty-two.

Fifty-two was now the score.

Petty officers—four.

General purpose ratings—twenty.

Total, seventy-six. Seventy-six people who must have ridden to their parents' weddings on bicycles.

Grimes had done his figuring as a joke, but suddenly it was no longer funny. Normally he enjoyed the essential loneliness of command, but that had been in ships where there was always company, congenial company, when he felt that he needed it. In this vessel there seemed to be nobody at all with whom he could indulge in a friendly drink and a yarn.

Perhaps things would improve.

Perhaps they wouldn't.

Growl you may, he told himself, but go you must.

It is always an anxious moment when a captain has to handle a strange ship, with strange officers and crew, for the first time. Grimes, stolidly ensconced in the pilot's chair, tried, not unsuccessfully, to convey the impression that he hadn't a worry in the whole universe. He made the usual major production of filling and lighting his pipe while listening to the countdown routine. "All hands," Brabham was saying into the intercom microphone, "secure ship for liftoff. Secure ship. Secure ship." Lieutenant Tangye, the navigator, was tense in the co-pilot's seat, his hands poised over the duplicate controls. No doubt the slim, blond, almost ladylike young man was thinking that he could make a far better job of getting the old bitch upstairs than this new skipper. Other officers were standing by radar and radar altimeter, NST transceiver, drift indicator, accelerometer, and all the rest of it. It was unnecessary; all the displays were visible to both pilot and co-pilot at a glance—but the bigger the ship the more people for whom jobs must be found.

From the many compartments the reports came in. "All secure."

"All secure for liftoff."

"All secure."

"All secure."

"Any word from Commander Brandt yet?" asked Grimes. "After all, he is a departmental head."

"Nothing yet, sir," replied Brabham.

"Shake him up, will you, Number One."

"Control to Commander Brandt. Have you secured yet? Acknowledge."

Brandt's voice came through the speaker. "
Doctor
Brandt here. Of course I'm secure. This isn't my first time in Space, you know."

Awkward bastard,
thought Grimes. He said, "Lifting off."

"Lifting off," repeated Brabham.

At Grimes's touch on the controls the inertial drive, deep in the bowels of the ship, muttered irritably. Another touch—and the muttering became a cacophonous protest, loud even through the layer after layer of sonic insulation.
Discovery
shook herself, her structure groaning. From the NST speaker came the bored voice of Aerospace Control. "You are lifting,
Discovery.
You are clear of the pad.
Bon voyage.
"

"Acknowledge," said Grimes to the radio officer. He didn't need to be informed that the ship was off the ground. His own instruments would tell him that if he bothered to look at them—but the
feel
of the ship made it quite obvious that she was up and clear, lifting faster and faster. In the periscope screen he could see the spaceport area—the clusters of white administration buildings, the foreshortened silvery towers that were ships, big and little, dropping away, diminishing. The red, flashing beacons marking the berth that he had just left were sliding from the center of the display, but it didn't matter. He had been expecting drift, the wind the way it was. If he had been coming in to a landing it would have been necessary to apply lateral thrust; during a liftoff all that was required was to get up through and clear of the atmosphere.

A hint of yaw—

Only three degrees, but Grimes corrected it, more to get the feel of the ship than for any other reason. With the same motivation he brought the red flashers back to the center of the periscope screen. Mphm. The old bitch didn't handle too badly at all. He increased acceleration from a half gee to one gee, to one and a half, to two.

The intercom speaker squawked. "Dr. Brandt, here. What the hell are you playing at up there?"

"Minding our own bloody business!" snapped Grimes into his microphone. "Might I suggest that you do the same?"

Brabham sniggered loudly.

"Emergency rocket drill," ordered Grimes quietly. That, as he had suspected it would, took the grin off the first lieutenant's face. But the reaction drive was here to be used, wasn't it? "Number One, pass the word."

"Attention, all hands," growled Brabham into the intercom. "Stand by for testing of reaction drive. Sudden variations in acceleration are to be expected. Stand by. Stand by."

Grimes pushed a button, looked down at his console. Under ROCKETS the READY light glowed vivid green. With all his faults, MacMorris kept every system in a state of go. Decisively Grimes cut the inertial drive. His stomach tried to push its way up into his throat as acceleration abruptly ceased. He brought a finger down to the FIRE button, pushed it down past the first, second, and third stops. He felt as well as heard the screaming roar as the incandescent gases rushed through the Venturis, and then the renewal of acceleration pushed him downward into the thick padding of his chair.

"Aerospace Control to
Discovery.
Are those pyrotechnics really necessary?"

"Tell him testing, testing," said Grimes to the radio officer. He succeeded in restarting the inertial drive and cutting the rockets at exactly the same instant. The ship continued to drive upward with no reduction of velocity.

Brabham loudly sighed his relief. "You're lucky," he commented. "Sir. Come to that, we're all lucky."

"What do you mean, Number One?" demanded Grimes.

The first lieutenant laughed sourly. "This is the first time that the reaction drive has been tested within the memory of the oldest man. Commander Tallis would
never
use it."

"How many times must I tell you that I am not Commander Tallis?"

The intercom speaker crackled, then, "Dr. Brandt here. I'm speaking from my laboratory. What the hell is going on? Do you know that you've smashed thousands of credits worth of valuable equipment?"

"You saw it stowed?" Grimes asked Brabham.

"Yes, sir. There was no chance of its shifting."

Grimes signaled to Tangye to take over the controls. "Keep her going as she is, pilot." Then he said into his microphone, "Captain here, Dr. Brandt. Did anything shift?"

"No. But I heard glass breaking in the cases. Delicate apparatus can't stand up to your needlessly violent maneuvers."

"Did you see the stuff packed, Doctor?"

"Of course."

"Then might I suggest that next time you see that your bits and pieces are packed properly? There are excellent padding materials available."

"I hold you entirely responsible for the breakages, Captain."

"You knew that you were embarking in a spaceship, Doctor."

"Yes. I did. But rockets went out generations ago."

"Reaction drive is still fitted to all Survey Service vessels, as you should have known,
Commander
Brandt."

"Pah!"

Grimes returned his attention to ship handling, taking over from Tangye. Overhead—or forward—the sky seen through the control room dome was a dark purple, almost black. In the periscope screen Lindisfarne was assuming a spherical aspect. Outside the ship there was still atmosphere—but atmosphere in the academic sense of the word only. On the dial of the radar altimeter the decades of kilometers were mounting up steadily and rapidly.

There was nothing to do now but to run out and clear of the Van Allens, while the globe that was Lindisfarne dwindled steadily in the periscope screen, a diminishing half-moon, the sunlit hemisphere opalescently aglow.

The stars were bright and unwinking in the black sky, and the polarizers were automatically dimming the harsh glare of the Lindisfarne sun on the beam. Grimes looked at the magnetometer. The bright red warning light was dimming. It gave one last flicker, then turned to green.

"Clear of the Van Allens, sir," announced Tangye belatedly.

Slow reaction time,
thought Grimes. He said, "So I see. Cut the inertial drive and line her up on the target star, will you?"

"Aye, aye, sir," replied the young man, smartly enough.

The engines grumbled to a stammering halt. Only then did Tangye busy himself with a star chart, looking through the ports frequently to check the relative positions of the constellations. Grimes refrained from pointing out the sun that he wanted to head for, a second magnitude luminary in the constellation of The Bunny, as this grouping of stars had been dubbed by the first settlers on Lindisfarne. There was, if one had a strong imagination, a suggestion of rabbit's ears and woman's breasts, thought Grimes while his navigator fumbled and bumbled.
If this were a
real
bunny,
he thought sardonically,
young Tangye'd be on target a damn sight sooner!
And how long would it be before Brandt, the obnoxious fool, started to whine about being kept too long in a condition of free fall? Meanwhile, other people besides the navigator were exhibiting shortcomings.

"Number One," Grimes said mildly, "you didn't make the usual announcement on the intercom. Stand by for free fall, setting trajectory and all the rest of it."

"You never told me to, sir."

"It's part of your job to look after these details," snapped Grimes.

"Commander Tallis didn't want announcements made every five minutes. Sir."

"Neither do I. But I want those announcements made that are required by Survey Service regulations."

Then Brandt came through on the intercom. "Doctor Brandt here. What
is
going on up there?"

"Stand by for setting trajectory," said Brabham sulkily into his microphone.

"On target, sir," announced Tangye. "I mean, I've
found
the target."

"Then get on to it."

The directional gyroscopes rumbled into motion. Slowly the ship turned about her axes, centrifugal forces giving an off-center surrogate of gravity. Grimes, looking up into the cartwheel sight set into the dome, saw The Bunny swim slowly into view.

The gyroscopes stopped.

"On target, sir."

"Mphm. Have you allowed for galactic drift, Mr. Tangye?"

"Eh. . . no, sir."

"Then please do so."

There was more delay while Tangye fumbled through the ephemeris, fed data into the control room computer.
All this should have been done before liftoff,
thought Grimes disgustedly.
Damn it all, this puppy couldn't navigate a plastic duck across a bathtub!
He watched the nervous young man, glowering.