Upon a Sea of Stars (13 page)

Chapter 24

THERE, TO PORT,
was the lens of the Galaxy, and to starboard was the gleaming globe that was Lorn, the great, hourglass-shaped continent proof positive. From astern came the rumble of the gentle blasts fired by Swinton, intent on his instruments, that would put
Faraway Quest
into a stable orbit about the planet. From the speaker barked an oddly familiar voice, “What ship? What ship? Identify yourself at once.” And at the controls of the transceiver Renfrew made the adjustments that would bring in vision as well as sound.

“What ship?” demanded the voice. “What ship?”

From his chair Grimes could see the screens of both radar and Mass Proximity Indicator. He could see the bright and brightening blob of light that gave range and bearing of another vessel, a vessel that was closing fast. She was not yet within visual range, but that would be a matter of minutes only.

“What ship? What ship?”

Grimes accepted the microphone on its wandering lead, said, “
Faraway Quest
. Auxiliary Cruiser, Rim Worlds Confederation Navy.
What ship?”

The voice from the bulkhead speaker contrived to convey incredulity with an odd snorting sound. “
Faraway Quest?
Rim Worlds Confederation? Never heard of you. Are you mad—or drunk?”

“No,” Sonya Verrill was whispering. “No. It can’t be. . . .”

Grimes looked at her, saw that her face was white, strained.

The big screen over the transceiver was alive with swirling colors, with colors that eddied and coalesced as the picture hardened. It showed the interior of another control room, a compartment not unlike their own. It showed a uniformed man who was staring into the iconoscope. Grimes recognized him. In his, Grimes’, Universe this man had been Master of
Polar Queen
, had smashed her up in a bungled landing at Fort Farewell, on Faraway. Grimes had been president of the Court of Inquiry. And this man, too, had been an officer of the Intelligence Branch of the Survey Service, his position as a tramp master being an excellent cover for his activities. And he and Sonya . . .

The Commodore swiveled in his chair. He rather prided himself on the note of gentle regret that he contrived to inject into his voice. He said to the woman, “Well, your quest is over. It’s been nice knowing you.”

She replied, “My quest was over some time ago. It’s nice knowing
you
.”

“I’ve got their picture,” Renfrew was saying unnecessarily. “But I don’t think that they have ours yet.”

“
Starfarer
to unknown ship.
Starfarer
to unknown ship. Take up orbit and prepare to receive boarding party.”

“You’d better go and pretty yourself up,” said Grimes to Sonya. He thought,
It’s a pity it had to end like this, before it got properly started even. But I mustn’t be selfish.

“You’ll be meeting . . . him. Again. Your second chance.”

“
Starfarer
to unknown ship. Any hostile action will meet with instant retaliation. Prepare to receive boarders.”

“Commander Swinton!” There was the authentic Survey Service crackle on Sonya Verrill’s voice. “Stand by Mannschenn Drive. Random precession!”

“Ay, ay, sir.” The young man flushed. “Ma’am.” Then he swiveled to look at the Commodore. “
Your
orders, sir?”

“John!” Sonya’s voice and manner were urgent. “Get us out of here.”

“No. This was the chance you were wanting, the second chance, and now you’ve got it.”

She grinned. “A girl can change her mind. I want my own Universe, where there’s only you . . .” She laughed, pointing to the screen. A woman officer had come into
Starfarer’s
control room, was standing behind the Captain’s chair. He outranked her, but her attitude was obviously proprietorial. “Where there’s only you,” repeated Sonya, “and only one of me . . .”

“Mannschenn Drive,” ordered Grimes. “Random precession.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” acknowledged Swinton, and with the thin, high keening of the precessing gyroscopes the screen blanked, the speaker went dead and, on the port hand, the Galactic lens assumed its familiar distortion, a Klein flask blown by a drunken glass blower.

“Sir,” growled Renfrew, obviously in a mutinous mood, “they could have helped us to get back. And even if they couldn’t, I’m of the opinion that the Rim Worlds under Federation Rule would have been somewhat better than those same planets under your Confederacy.”

“That will do, Lieutenant,” snapped Sonya, making it plain that she was capable of dealing with her own subordinates. “Both the Commodore and myself agreed upon our course of action.”

“This was supposed to be a scientific expedition, Commander,” protested Renfrew. “But it’s been far from scientific. Séances, and dowsers . . .” He almost spat in his disgust.

“You can’t deny that we got results,” muttered Calhoun.

“Of a sort.”

Grimes, seated at the table on the platform in the still unreconverted wardroom, regarded the squabbling officers with a tired amusement. He could afford to relax now. He had driven the ship down the warped Continuum in an escape pattern that had been partly random and partly a matter of lightning calculation. He had interrogated Maudsley—the other Maudsley—after the Polar Queen disaster and had not formed a very high opinion of that gentleman’s capabilities as a navigator. And even if this Maudsley were brilliantly imaginative, a ship in Deep Space is a very small needle in a very big haystack. . . .

“Gentlemen,” he said, “the purpose of this meeting is to discuss ways and means of getting back to our own Space-Time. Has anybody any suggestions?”

Nobody had.

“The trouble seems to be,” Grimes went on, “that although the dowser technique works, Mayhew is far too liable to look at his home world through rose-colored spectacles. Unluckily he is the only one among us capable of influencing the dreams of the hapless Mr. Jenkins. No doubt the Rim Worlds are better off, in some respects, under Federation rule than under our Confederacy. Weather control (which is far from inexpensive) for example, and a much higher standard of living. But I’ve also no doubt that the loss of independence has been a somewhat high price to pay for these advantages. And, even you who are not Rim Worlders, would find it hard to get by in a Universe in which somebody else, even if it is
you
, has your job, your home, your wife.”

“So—what are we to do?”

“We still have Jenkins,” contributed Calhoun.

“Yes. We still have Jenkins. But how can we use him?”

“And you still have
your
talent,” said Sonya.

“My talent?”

“Your hunches. And what is a hunch but a form of precognition?”

“My hunches,” Grimes told her, “are more a case of extrapolation, from the past at that, than of precognition.” And sitting there, held in his chair by the strap, he let his mind wander into the past, was only dimly conscious of the discussion going on around him. He recalled what had happened when
Faraway Quest
had been drawn into the first of the Alternative Universes before falling into Limbo. He remembered that odd sensation, the intolerable stretching, the sudden
snap
. Perhaps . . . “Mr. Mayhew!” he said.

“Yes? Sorry. Yes, sir?”

“What sort of feeling do you have for this ship?”

“She’s just a ship.”

“You don’t, in your mind, overglamorize her?”

“Why the hell should I? Sir.”

“Good. Please come with me again to this man Jenkins, the dowser. I want you to take charge of his dreams, the same way that you did before. I want you to lose him in nothingness again, and then to let his talent guide him out of the emptiness back to light and life and warmth.”

“But you said that
my
vision of Lorn was too idealistic.”

“It is. It is. I want you to envisage
Faraway Quest
.”

“
Us,
sir?”

“Who else?”

“The cold . . .” Mayhew was whispering. “The cold, and the dark, and the absolute emptiness. There’s nothing, nothing. There’s not anything, anywhere, but that rod of twisted silver wire that you hold in your two hands. . . . You feel it twitch. You feel the gentle, insistent tug of it. . . . And there’s a glimmer of light ahead of you, faint, no more than a dim glow. . . . But you can make out what it is. It’s the pilot lights of instrument panels, red and green, white and amber, and the fluorescent tracings in chart tanks. . . . It’s the control room of a ship, and the faint illumination shows through the big, circular ports. By it you can just read the name, in golden lettering, on her sharp stem,
Faraway Quest
.”

And Mayhew went on to describe the ship in detail, in amazing detail, until Grimes realized that he was drawing upon the knowledge stored in the brains of all the technical officers. He described the ship, and he described the personnel, and he contrasted the warmth and the light and the life of her interior with the cold, empty dream-Universe in which the dowser was floating. He described the ship and her personnel—and, Grimes thought wryly, some of his descriptions were far from flattering. But she was Home. She was a little world of men in the all-pervading emptiness.

She was Home, and Grimes realized that he, too, was feeling the emotions that Mayhew was implanting in the sleeping dowser’s mind. She was Home, and she was close, and closer, an almost attained goal. She was Home, and Grimes knew that he could reach out to touch her, and he reached out, and felt the comforting touch of cool metal at his fingertips, the security of solidity in the vast, empty reaches of Deep Space. . . .

She was Home, and he was home at last, where he belonged, and he was looking dazedly at the odd, transparent tank that had appeared from nowhere in the Auxiliary Machinery Room, the glass coffin with a complexity of piping and wiring extruded from its sides, the casket in which floated the nude body of a portly man.

He turned to Sonya Verrill, and he heard her say, “Your hunch paid off, John.”

He remembered then. (But there were two sets of memories—separate and distinct. There were the memories of Limbo, and all that had happened there, and there were the memories of a boring, fruitless cruise after the first and only Rim Ghost sighting and the failure to establish even a fleeting contact.) He remembered then, and knew that some of the memories he must cling to, always. They were all that he would have, now. There were no longer any special circumstances. There was no longer the necessity for—how had she put it?—the political marriage of the heads of two potentially hostile tribes.

He muttered, unaware that he was vocalizing his thoughts, “Oh, well—it was nice knowing you. But now. . . .”

“But now . . .” she echoed.

“If you’ll excuse me, sir, and madam,” broke in Mayhew, “I’ll leave you alone. Now that we’re back in our own Universe I’m bound by the Institute’s rules again, and I’m not supposed to eavesdrop, let alone to tell either of you what the other one is thinking.” He turned to the Commodore. “But I’ll tell you this, sir. I’ll tell you that all the guff about political marriages
was
guff. It was just an excuse. I’ll tell you that the lady has found what she was looking for—or whom she was looking for—and that his name is neither Derek Calver nor Bill Maudsley.”

“In the Survey Service,” remarked Sonya Verrill softly, “he could be court martialed for that.”

“And so he could be,” Grimes told her, “in the Rim Confederacy Navy. But I don’t think that I shall press any charges.”

“I should be rather annoyed if you did. He told you what I should have gotten around to telling you eventually, and he has saved us a great deal of time.”

They did not kiss, and their only gesture was a brief contact of hands. But they were very close together, and both of them knew it. Together they left the compartment, making for the control room.

Grimes supposed that it would be necessary to carry on the cruise for a while longer, to continue going through the motions of what young Swinton had termed a wild ghost chase, but he was no longer very interested. A long life still lay ahead of him, and there were pleasanter worlds than these planets of the far outer reaches on which to spend it.

For him, as for Sonya Verrill, the faraway quest was over.