Upon a Sea of Stars (60 page)

“It is. And Clarisse is still on Lorn. She married Mayhew. I was thinking that we might have them round tomorrow evening. And they’ll be coming with us in the
Quest
, in any case.”

“But what’s our expedition supposed to be in aid of?” she demanded. “You’re leading it, and I shall be your second-in-command; and two more unlikely people to be involved in any sort of religious research, I can’t think of.”

The Commodore smiled a little crookedly. “I’ll tell you what Kravinsky said to me. ‘It boils down to this, Grimes. Both the Confederacy and our big brothers of the Federation think that something should be done about Kinsolving. Nobody is quite sure what. So I’m sending you, with your usual crew of offbeats and misfits, and if you bumble around in your inimitable manner
something
is bound to happen . . .’ ”

Sonya grinned back at him. “The man could be right,” she said.

Finally—the recommissioning of a long laid up vessel takes time,
Faraway Quest
, Commodore John Grimes commanding, lifted slowly from Port Forlorn. She was well-manned; Grimes had selected his crew, both spacefaring personnel and civilian scientists and technicians, with care. The officers of all departments were, like the Commodore himself, naval reservists, specialists in navigation and gunnery and engineering: in ship’s biochemistry. And there was the Major of Marines—also, as were his men, a specialist. Grimes hoped that the spaceborne soldiers’ services would not be needed, but it was good to have them along, just in case. There was Mayhew, one of the few psionic radio officers still on active service, youthful in appearance but old in years; and Clarisse, really beautiful since her marriage and her breakaway from the neo-Calvinists and their severe rules regarding dress and decorum, her hair styling revealing the pointed ears inherited from her nonhuman ancestor. There were the two fat, jolly men from the Dowser’s Guild who, even in this day and age, were shunned by the majority of the scientists. There were men and women whose specialty was the measururement of radiation, others whose field was chemistry, organic and inorganic. There were archeologists, and paleontologists, and . . .

“One more specialist, Grimes,” Admiral Kravinsky had growled, “and that old bitch of yours won’t be able to lift a millimeter . . .”

But a converted freighter, with all space properly utilized, has quite amazing capacity insofar as the carrying of passengers is concerned.

So she lifted, her inertial drive running sweetly and uncomplainingly, with Grimes himself at the controls, all the old skill flowing back into his fingers, the ship an extension of his fit, stocky body, obedient to his will, as were his officers grouped around him in the control room, each in his own chair with his own bank of instruments before him.

She lifted, accelerating smoothly, soaring up to the low cloud ceiling, and through it, breaking out into the steely sunlight of high altitudes, driving up to the purple sky that soon deepened to black, into the darkness where glimmered the few, faint stars of the Rim, where, rising above the gleaming arc that was the sunlit limb of the planet, glowed the misty ellipsoid that was the Galactic Lens.

Sonya, who had traveled vast distances as a passenger, said quietly, “It’s good to see this from a control room again.”

“It’s always good . . .” said Grimes.

Faraway Quest
was clear of the atmosphere now, still lifting, and below them the planet presented the appearance of a huge, mottled ball, an enormous flawed pearl lustrous against the black immensities. She was clear of the Van Allen, and Grimes snapped an order. The Senior Communications Officer spoke quietly into his intercom microphone. “Attention all! Attention all! There will be a short countdown, from ten to zero. The inertial drive will be shut off, after which there will be a period of free fall, with brief lateral accelerations as trajectory is adjusted.” He turned to the Commodore. “Ready, sir?”

Grimes studied the chart tank. “Now!” he said.

“Ten . . .” began the officer. “Nine . . .”

Grimes looked to Sonya, raised his heavy eyebrows and shrugged. She shrugged back, and made even this gesture graceful. She knew, as he knew, that all this formality was necessary only because there were so many civilians aboard.

“. . . Zero!”

The irregular, throbbing beat of the inertial drive suddenly ceased and there was brief weightlessness and a short silence. Then there was the hum of the maneuvering gyroscopes, rising to a whine, and centrifugal force gently pressed those in Control to the sides of their chairs. Slowly, slowly, the target star, the Kinsolving sun, drifted across the black sky until the glittering spark was centered in the cartwheel sight, wavered, then held steady. The inertial drive came on again, its broken rumble a bass background to the thin, high keening of the ever-precessing rotors of the Mannschenn Drive. Ahead, save for the tiny, iridescent spiral that was the target sun, there was only emptiness. Lorn was to starboard; a vast, writhing planetary amoeba that was dropping back to the quarter, that was dwindling rapidly. And out to port was the Galactic Lens, distorted by the temporal precession field of the Drive to the similitude of a Klein flask blown by a drunken glassblower.

Grimes rather wished, as he had often wished before, that somebody would come up with another way of describing it. He doubted if anybody ever would.

This was a far more pleasant voyage than the one that he had made to Kinsolving in the unhappy
Piety
. To begin with, he had Sonya with him. Second, he was in command, and the ship was being run his way.
Faraway Quest
was no luxury liner, but she was warm, comfortable. Her internal atmosphere carried the scents of women’s perfume, of tobacco smoke, of good cooking—not that omnipresent acridity of disinfectant. The snatches of music that drifted through her alleyways from the playmasters in the public rooms were anything and everything from grand opera to the latest pop, never the morbid hymns and psalms in which the neo-Calvinists had specialized. He spoke of this to Clarisse. She grinned and said, “You’re not with it, Dad. You’re just not with it. By
our
standards this wagon is bitter endsville, just a spaceborne morgue.”

He grinned back. “If the best that the Blossom People can do is to resurrect the hip talk of the middle twentieth century, I doubt if you’re with it either.”

“Every religion,” she told him seriously, “uses archaic language in its scriptures and in its rituals.” Then she laughed. “I’m not complaining, John. Believe me, I’m not complaining. When I look back to the
Piety
, and Rector Smith and Presbyter Cannan, and that she-dragon of a deaconess, I realize how lucky I am. Of course, I could have been luckier . . .”

“How so?”

“That tall, beautiful redhead of yours could have been left behind.”

“To say nothing of that highly capable telepath you’re married to.”

Her face softened. “I was joking, John. Before I met Ken—before I met him physically, that is—something might have been possible between us. But I’m well content now, and I feel that I owe it all to you. Ken was against our coming on this expedition, but I insisted. I’ll do anything I can to aid your . . . researches.”

“Even to a repeat performance?”

“Even to a repeat performance.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Frankly, John, so do I.”

The voyage was over.
Faraway Quest
, her Mannschenn Drive shut down, her inertial drive ticking over just sufficiently to induce a minimal gravitational field, was falling in orbit about the lonely world, the blue and green mottled sphere hanging there against the blackness. The old charts were out, and the new ones too, made by Grimes himself with the assistance of the officers of
Rim Sword
. “Here,” said the Commodore, stabbing a blunt forefinger down onto the paper, “is where the spaceport
was
. There’s only a crater there
now.
Whoever or whatever destroyed
Piety
made a thorough job of it. And here’s the city—Enderston it was called—on the east bank of the Weary River . . .”

“ ‘Where even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea . . .’ ” quoted Sonya. “They must have been a cheerful bunch, those first colonists.”

“I’ve already told you that the very atmosphere of the planet engenders morbidity. And there, on the shore of Darkling Tarn, is what was the Sports Stadium, where
Rim Sword
landed. In the absence of any spaceport facilities it’s as good a place as any.” He turned from the chart to the big screen upon which a magnification of the planet was presented. “You can see it all there—just to the east of the sunrise terminator. That river, with all the S bends, is the Weary, and that lake which looks like an octopus run over by a streamroller is Darkling Tarn. The city’s too overgrown for it to show up at this range.”

“You’re the boss,” said Sonya.

“Yes. So I suppose I’d better do something about something.” He turned to his executive officer. “Make it landing stations, Commander Williams.”

“Landing stations it is, sir.”

The officers went to their acceleration chairs, strapped themselves in. In seconds the intercom speakers were blatting, “Secure all for landing stations! Secure all for landing stations! All idlers to their quarters!” And then the maneuvering gyroscopes hummed and whined as the ship was tilted relative to the planet until the surface was directly beneath her. The sounding rockets were discharged as she began her descent, each of them releasing a parachute flare in the upper atmosphere, each of them emitting a long, long streamer of white smoke.

Faraway Quest
dropped steadily—not too fast and not too slow. Grimes made allowance for drift and, as the first of the flares was swept west by a jet stream, he applied lateral thrust. Down she dropped, and down, almost falling free, but always under the full control of her master. The picture of the surface on the target screen expanded. The city could be seen now, a huddle of ruins on the river bank, and beside the lake there was the oval of the Stadium,
Eau de Nil
in the midst of the indigo of the older growth. The last of the flares to have been fired was still burning down there, the column of smoke rising almost vertically. The brush among which it had fallen was slowly smoldering.

Grimes shivered. The feeling of
déjà vu
was chillingly uncanny. But he had seen this before. He had been here before—and, save for the different choice of landing site, circumstances had been almost exactly duplicated, even to that luckily unenthusiastic bush fire. And again there was the sensation that supernal forces—malign or beneficent?—were mustering to resist the landing of the ship.

But she was down at last.

There was the gentlest of shocks, the faintest of creakings, the softest sighing of the shock absorbers as the great mass of the vessel settled in her tripodal landing gear. She was down. “Finished with engines!” said Grimes softly. Telegraph bells jangled, and the inertial drive generators muttered to themselves and then were still. She was down, and the soughing of the fans intensified the silence.

Grimes turned in his swivel chair, looked toward the distant mountain peak, the black, truncated cone sharp against the blue sky. “Sinai,” Presbyter Cannan had named it. “Olympus,” Grimes had called it on his new charts. It was there that the neo-Calvinists had attempted to invoke Jehovah, and there that the old gods of the Greek pantheon had made their disastrous appearance. Grimes hoped that he would never have to set foot upon that mountain top again.

He was not first off the ship; after all, this was no newly discovered planet, this was not a historic first landing of Man. The honor fell to the Major of Marines, who marched smartly down the ramp at the head of his clattering column of space soldiers. He barked orders and the detachment broke up into its component parts, fanning out from the landing site, trampling through the bushes. From somewhere came a sharp rattle of machine-pistol fire. The Commodore was not concerned. He said, “There’ll be fresh pork or rabbit on the table in the Marines’ mess tonight. Or pigburger or rabbitburger if the man who fired was too enthusiastic.”

“Pigs? Rabbits?” inquired Sonya.

“Descendants of the livestock brought here by the original colonists. They—the pigs, probably—seem to have wiped out most of the indigenous fauna. And, come to that, the hens and the sheep and the cattle.” He lit his pipe. “They were, I suppose, the two species best fitted to survive. The pigs with their intelligence, the rabbits with their ability to go underground and to breed . . . like rabbits.”

She said, “I could do with some fresh air after weeks of the tinned variety. What’s good enough for pigs and rabbits and Marines is good enough for me.”

“Just as well that the gallant Major didn’t hear you say that. Commander Williams!”

“Sir!” replied the burly Executive Officer.

“Shore leave is in order, as long as a full working watch—and that includes the manning of weaponry—is left aboard the ship at all times. And every party of boffins is to be accompanied by at least one officer or one Marine other rank, armed. Nobody is to go down the ramp without checking out or without wearing his personal transceiver. Apart from that, we’ll make this a day of general relaxation. After all, there are no physical dangers on this world. As for the other kind—I doubt if the Federation’s Grand Fleet could cope with them.”

“Good-oh, Skipper,” replied Williams.

Grimes glared at him, then laughed. “I wondered how long it would be before the veneer of your last drill in the Reserve wore off. Anyhow, those are the orders—and just try to remember now and again that this is an auxiliary cruiser of the Rim Worlds Navy, not your beloved
Rim Mamelute
.” He closed on a formal note. “The ship is yours, sir, until my return.”

“The ship is mine, sir, until your return.”

Then Grimes and Sonya went down to their quarters, replaced their light uniform sandals with knee-high boots, strapped on their wrist transceivers, buckled on the belts from which depended their holstered hand weapons. The Commodore was sure that these would never be required but, as leader of the expedition, he could not break the orders that he had issued. It was, he already knew, warm outside; the slate grey shorts and shirts that he and his wife were wearing would be adequate.