To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (44 page)

“Then get Spooky on the intercom, and ask him if
he’s
been in touch with anybody—or anything.”

“Very good, Captain,” said Slovotny rather sulkily. There was always rivalry, sometimes far from friendly, between electronic and psionic communications officers.

Grimes looked over the Navigator’s shoulder into the velvety blackness of the screen, at the tiny, blue-green spark that lay a little to one side of the glowing filament that was the ship’s extrapolated trajectory. Von Tannenbaum had set up the range and bearing markers, was quietly reading aloud the figures. He said, “At our present velocity we shall be up to it in just over three hours.”

“Spooky says that there’s no psionic transmission at all from it, whatever it is,” reported Slovotny.

“So if it’s a ship, it’s probably a derelict,” murmured Grimes.

“Salvage . . .” muttered Beadle, looking almost happy.

“You’ve a low, commercial mind, Number One,” Grimes told him.
As I have myself,
he thought. The captain’s share of a fat salvage award would make a very nice addition to his far from generous pay. “Oh, well, since you’ve raised the point you can check towing gear, spacesuits and all the rest of it. And you, Sparks, can raise Lindisfarne Base on the Carlotti. I’ll have the preliminary report ready in a couple of seconds . . .” He added, speaking as much to himself as to the others, “I suppose I’d better ask permission to deviate, although the Galaxy won’t grind to a halt if a dozen bags of mail are delayed in transit . . .” He took the message pad that Slovotny handed him and wrote swiftly,
To Officer Commanding Couriers. Sighted unidentified object coordinates A1763.5 x ZU97.75 x J222.0 approx. Request authority investigate. Grimes.

By the time that the reply came Grimes was on the point of shutting down his Mannschenn Drive and initiating the maneuvers that would match trajectory and speed with the drifting object.

It read,
Authority granted, but please try to keep your nose clean for a change. Damien.

“Well, Captain, we can
try,
”
said Beadle, not too hopefully.

With the Mannschenn Drive shut down radar, which gave far more accurate readings than the mass proximity indicator, was operable. Von Tannenbaum was able to determine the elements of the object’s trajectory relative to that of the ship, and after this had been done the task of closing it was easy.

At first it was no more than a brightening blip in the screen and then, at last, it could be seen visually as
Adder’s
probing searchlight caught it and held it. To begin with it was no more than just another star among the stars, but as the ship gained on it an appreciable disc was visible through the binoculars, and then with the naked eye.

Grimes studied it carefully through his powerful glasses. It was spherical, and appeared to be metallic. There were no projections on it anywhere, although there were markings that looked like painted letters or numerals. It was rotating slowly.

“It could be a mine . . .” said Beadle, who was standing with Grimes at the viewport.

“It could be . . .” agreed Grimes. “And it could be fitted with some sort of proximity fuse . . .” He turned to address von Tannenbaum. “You’d better maintain our present distance off, Pilot, until we know better what it is.” He stared out through the port again. Space mines are a defensive rather than offensive weapon, and
Adder
carried six of the things in her own magazine. They are a dreadfully effective weapon when the conditions for their use are ideal—which they rarely are. Dropped from a vessel being pursued by an enemy they are an excellent deterrent—provided that the pursuer is not proceeding under interstellar drive. Unless there is temporal synchronization there can be no physical contact.

Out here, thought Grimes, in a region of space where some sort of interstellar drive
must
be used, a mine just didn’t make sense. On the other hand, it never hurt to be careful. He recalled the words of one of the Instructors at the Academy. “There are old spacemen, and there are bold spacemen, but there aren’t any old, bold spacemen.”

“A sounding rocket . . .” he said.

“All ready, Captain,” replied Beadle.

“Thank you, Number One. After you launch it, maintain full control throughout its flight. Bring it to the buoy or the mine or whatever it is
very
gently—I don’t want you punching holes in it. Circle the target a few times, if you can manage it, and then make careful contact.” He paused. “Meanwhile, restart the Mannschenn Drive, but run it in neutral gear. If there is a big bang we might be able to start precessing before the shrapnel hits us.” He paused again, then, “Have any of you gentlemen any bright ideas?”

“It might be an idea,” contributed Slovotny, “to clear away the laser cannon. Just in case.”

“Do so, Sparks. And you, Number One, don’t launch your rocket until I give the word.”

“Cannon trained on the target,” announced Slovotny after only a few seconds.

“Good. All right, Number One. Now you can practice rocketship handling.”

Beadle returned to the viewport, with binoculars strapped to his eyes and a portable control box in his hands. He pressed a button, and almost at once the sounding rocket swam into the field of view, a sleek, fishlike shape with a pale glimmer of fire at its tail, a ring of bright red lights mounted around its midsection to keep it visible at all times to the aimer. Slowly it drew away from the ship, heading towards the enigmatic ball that hung in the blaze of the searchlight. It veered to one side to pass the target at a respectable distance, circled it, went into orbit about it, a miniscule satellite about a tiny primary.

Grimes started to get impatient. He had learned that one of the hardest parts of a captain’s job is to refrain from interfering—even so . . . “Number One,” he said at last, “don’t you think you could edge the rocket in a little closer?”

“I’m trying, sir,” replied Beadle. “But the bloody thing won’t answer the controls.”

“Do you mind if I have a go?” asked Grimes.

“Of course not, Captain.” Implied but not spoken was, “And you’re bloody welcome!”

Grimes strapped a set of binoculars to his head, then took the control box. First of all he brought the sounding rocket back towards the ship, then put it in a tight turn to get the feel of it. Before long he was satisfied that he had it; it was as though a tiny extension of himself was sitting in a control room in the miniature spaceship. It wasn’t so very different from a rocket-handling simulator.

He straightened out the trajectory of the sounding rocket, sent it back towards the mysterious globe and then, as Beadle had done, put it in orbit. So far, so good. He cut the drive and the thing, of course, continued circling the metallic sphere. A brief blast from a braking jet—that should do the trick. With its velocity drastically reduced the missile should fall gently towards its target. But it did not—as von Tannenbaum, manning the radar, reported.

There was something wrong here, thought Grimes. The thing had considerable mass, otherwise it would never have shown so strongly in the screen of the MPI. The greater the mass, the greater the gravitational field. But, he told himself, there are more ways than one of skinning a cat. He actuated the steering jets, tried to nudge the rocket in towards its objective. “How am I doing, Pilot?” he asked.

“What are you trying to do, Captain?” countered von Tannenbaum. “The elements of the orbit are unchanged.”

“Mphm.” Perhaps more than a gentle nudge was required. Grimes gave more than a gentle nudge—and with no result whatsoever. He did not need to look at Beadle to know that the First Lieutenant was wearing his best I-told-you-so expression.

So . . .

So the situation called for brute strength and ignorance, a combination that usually gets results.

Grimes pulled the rocket away from the sphere, almost back to the ship. He turned it—and then, at full acceleration, sent it driving straight for the target. He hoped that he would be able to apply the braking jets before it came into damaging contact—but the main thing was to make contact, of any kind.

He need not have worried.

With its driving jet flaring ineffectually the rocket was streaking back towards
Adder,
tail first. The control box-was useless. “Slovotny!” barked Grimes. “Fire!”

There was a blinding flare, and then only a cloud of incandescent but harmless gases, still drifting towards the ship.

“And what do we do now, Captain?” asked Beadle. “Might I suggest that we make a full report to Base and resume our voyage?”

“You might, Number One. There’s no law against it. But we continue our investigations.”

Grimes was in a stubborn mood. He was glad that
Adder
was not engaged upon a mission of real urgency. These bags of Fleet Mail were not important. Revised Regulations, Promotion Lists, Appointments . . . If they never reached their destination it would not matter. But a drifting menace to navigation was important. Perhaps, he thought, it would be named after him. Grimes’s Folly . . . He grinned at the thought. There were better ways of achieving immortality.

But what to do?

Adder
hung there, and the
thing
hung there, rates and directions of drift nicely synchronized, and in one thousand seven hundred and fifty-three Standard years they would fall into or around Algol, assuming that Grimes was willing to wait that long—which, of course, he was not. He looked at the faces of his officers, who were strapped into their chairs around the wardroom table. They looked back at him. Von Tannenbaum—the Blond Beast—grinned cheerfully. He remarked, “It’s a tough nut to crack, Captain—but I’d just hate to shove off without cracking it.” Slovotny, darkly serious, said, “I concur. And I’d like to find out how that repulsor field works.” Vitelli, not yet quite a member of the family, said nothing. Deane complained, “If the thing had a mind that I could read it’d all be so much easier . . .”

“Perhaps it’s allergic to metal . . .” suggested von Tannenbaum. “We could try to bring the ship in towards it, to see what happens . . .”

“Not bloody likely, Pilot,” growled Grimes. “Not yet, anyhow. Mphm . . . you might have something. It shouldn’t be too hard to cook up, with our resources, a sounding rocket of all-plastic construction . . .”

“There has to be metal in the guidance system . . .” objected Slovotny.

“There won’t be any guidance systems, Sparks. It will be a solid fuel affair, and we just aim it and fire it, and see what happens . . .”

“
Solid
fuel?” demurred Beadle. “Even if we had the formula we’d never be able to cook up a batch of cordite or anything similar . . .”

“There’d be no need to, Number One. We should be able to get enough from the cartridges for our projectile small arms. But I don’t intend to do that.”

“Then what do you intend, Captain?”

“We have graphite—and that’s carbon. We’ve all sorts of fancy chemicals in our stores, especially those required for the maintenance of our hydroponics system. Charcoal, sulphur, saltpeter . . . Or we could use potassium chlorate instead of that . . .”

“It
could
work,” admitted the First Lieutenant dubiously.

“Of course it will work,” Grimes assured him.

It did work—although mixing gunpowder, especially in Free Fall conditions, wasn’t as easy as Grimes had assumed that it would be. To begin with, graphite proved to be quite unsuitable, and the first small sample batch of powder burned slowly, with a vile sulphurous stench that lingered in spite of all the efforts of the air conditioner. But there were carbon water filters, and one of these was broken up and then pulverized in the galley food mixer—and when Grimes realized that the bulkheads of this compartment were rapidly acquiring a fine coating of soot he ordered that the inertial drive be restarted. With acceleration playing the part of gravity things were a little better.

Charcoal 13 percent, saltpeter 75 percent, sulphur 12 percent . . . That, thought Grimes, trying hard to remember the History of Gunnery lectures, was about right. They mixed a small amount dry, stirring it carefully with a wooden ladle. It was better than the first attempt, using graphite, had been—but not much. And it smelled as bad. Grimes concluded that there was insufficient space between the grains to allow the rapid passage of the flame.

“Spooky,” he said in desperation. “Can you read my mind?”

“It’s against Regulations,” the telepath told him primly.

“Damn the Regulations. I sat through all those Gunnery Course lectures, and I’m sure that old Commander Dalquist went into the history of gunnery
very
thoroughly, but I never thought that the knowledge of how to make black powder would be of any use at all to a modern spaceman. But it’s all there in my memory—if I could only drag it out!”

“Relax, Captain.” Spooky Deane told him in a soothing voice. “Relax. Let your mind become a blank. You’re tired, Captain. You’re very tired. Don’t fight it. Yes, sit down. Let every muscle go loose . . .”

Grimes lay back in the chair. Yes, he
was
tired . . . but he did not like the sensation of cold, clammy fingers probing about inside his brain. But he trusted Deane. He told himself very firmly that he
trusted
Deane . . .

“Let yourself go back in Time, Captain, to when you were a midshipman at the Academy . . . You’re sitting there, on a hard bench, with the other midshipmen around you . . . And there, on his platform before the class, is old Commander Dalquist . . . I can see him, with his white hair and his white beard, and his faded blue eyes looking enormous behind the spectacles . . . And I can see all those lovely little models on the table before him . . . The culverin, the falcon, the carronade . . . He is droning on, and you are thinking,
How can he make anything so interesting so boring?
You are wondering,
What’s on for dinner tonight?
You are hoping that it won’t be boiled mutton
again . . .
Some of the other cadets are laughing. You half heard what the Commander was saying. It was that the early cannoneers, who mixed their own powder, maintained that the only possible fluid was a wine drinker’s urine, their employer to supply the wine . . . And if the battle went badly, because of misfires the gunners could always say that it was due to the poor quality of the booze . . . But you are wondering now if you stand any chance with that pretty little Nurse . . . You’ve heard that she’ll play. You don’t know what it’s like with a woman, but you want to find out . . .”