Upon a Sea of Stars (65 page)

“Yes,” broke in Sonya. “Carinthian Sector. Third Expansion colonization.” She grinned a little unkindly. “It’s a planet where the minimum qualification for immigration is a doctorate in one of the sciences, preferably physics. But they have to let in occasional chemists, biologists and the like to keep the dump habitable.”

“And they have quite a few, now, with degrees in salesmanship,” went on the Havenmaster. “One of them was here a few years back.”

“And he sold you this female pup,” said Grimes.

“He did that. The Purcell Navigator. It’s named, I suppose, after its inventor. It’s a sealed box, with the gods know what sort of mess of memory fields and the like inside it. It’s hooked up to all the ship’s electronic navigational gear: gyro compass, radar, echometer, loran, shoran . . . Just name a pie and it’s got a finger in it. Or a tentacle. It knows just where the ship is at any given second. If you ask it nicely it might condescend to tell you.”

“You don’t like it,” said Grimes.

“I don’t like it. To begin with, some of the shipowners—and this is a private enterprise planet, remember—feel that now the bridge can be automated to the same extent as the engine room, with just one man, the Master, in charge, snoring his head off on the chartroom settee and being awakened by an alarm bell just in time to rub the sleep out of his eyes and take his ship into port. But that’s not the worst of it. Now the Institute of Marine Engineers is saying, ‘If navigation is only a matter of pushing buttons, we’re at least as well qualified as deck officers.’ ”

“I’ve heard that often enough,” said Grimes. “Even in space.”

“Does anybody know how these Purcell Navigators work?” asked Sonya.

“No. One of the terms of sale is that they must be installed by technicians from the world of manufacture, Elektra. Another is that they must not, repeat not, be tampered with in any way. As a matter of fact the Chief Electrician of the Carrington Yard did try to find out what made one tick. He was lucky to lose only a hand.”

“It seems,” said Grimes, “that I came here just in time.”

“What do you mean, John?”

“Well, I shall be able to enjoy the last of the old days, the good old days, on Aquarius, and I shall have the material for a few more chapters to my
Times Of Transition
.”

“He likes being morbid,” said Sonya. “Almost as much as he likes being reactionary.”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes. “Old-fashioned sounds better.”

He got up from his chair, walked soundlessly over the carpeted floor to the bookshelves that formed a space divider in the huge, circular room that was called the Havenmaster’s Lookout. He stared at the rows of books, most of them old (but in recent printings), only a few of them new. And they were
real
books, all of them, not spools of microfilm. There were the standard works on the old arts of the seaman, hopelessly out of date on most worlds, but not (yet) on this one. Brown, Nicholl, Norie, Riesenberg . . . Lecky . . . Thomas . . . And the chronicles of the ancient explorers and navigators: Hakluyt, Dampier, Cook, Flinders, Bligh . . . Then there were the novels: Conrad (of course), McFee, Monsarrat, Herman Wouk, Forester . . . Grimes’s hand went out to Melville’s
Moby Dick
, and he remembered that odd Hall of Fame to which he had been whisked from the mountaintop on Kinsolving, and felt regret that he had not been able to meet Lieutenant Commander Queeg, Admiral Hornblower and Captain Ahab. (Were there any white whales in the Aquarian seas?)

He turned, saw that his wife and Captain Thornton had risen from their own seats, were standing staring out through the huge window that formed the entire outer wall of the Lookout that, in its turn, was the top level of the two thousand foot high Havenmaster’s Control Tower. Above it was only the mast from which sprouted antennae, radar scanners, anemometers and the like, that was topped by the powerful, group-flashing Steep Island light.

Grimes walked slowly to join Sonya and his host, gazed out through the clear glass into the darkness. At regular intervals the beam of the light, a sword of misty radiance, swept overhead. Far to the south, a loom of luminescence on the distant sea horizon, was Port Stellar, and to east and west, fainter still, were other hazy luminosities, island cities, island states. Almost directly below was a great passenger liner, from this height no more than a gaudy, glittering insect crawling over the black carpet of the sea.

In spite of the insulation, the soundproofing, the thin, high whine of the wind was evident.

Sonya shivered. “The winds of change are blowing,” she whispered.

“A seaman should be able to cope with the wind,” said the Havenmaster. Then, to Grimes, “I wonder how you’ll cope, John? I’ve arranged for you to take over
Sonya Winneck
at Port Stellar tomorrow.”

“I’ll get by,” said Grimes.

“He always does,” said Sonya. “Somehow.”

Grimes fell in love with
Sonya Winneck
from the very start. She was, of course, his first sea command; nonetheless, she made an immediate appeal to the eye, even to the eye of one who, for all his admiral’s commission, had very little practical knowledge of oceangoing ships. The lady was a tramp, but the tramp was also a lady.

Five hundred feet long overall, she was, with a seventy-foot beam. Bridge and funnel—the latter scarlet, with a black top and two narrow black bands—were amidships. Her upperworks and deck cranes were white, her hull green with a yellow ribbon. The boot-topping was red.

There is more to a ship than outward appearance, however. And Grimes, himself a shipmaster of long standing, knew this as well as the most seasoned master mariner on the oceans of Aquarius. But she had, he discovered, a fair turn of speed, her diesel-electric drive pushing her through the water at a good twenty knots. She was single screw, with a right-handed propeller. Her wheelhouse and chartroom reminded him almost of the spaceships that he was accustomed to command, but the electronic gadgetry was not unfamiliar to him after the sessions he had put in on the various simulators in the Havenmaster’s Control Tower. The only thing that he did not like was the Purcell Navigator squatting like a sinister octopus in its own cage abaft the chartroom. Oh, well, he would make sure that his young gentlemen had no truck with the electronic monster. He hoped.

“I don’t like it either,” said the tall, skinny, morose Captain Harrell, whom Grimes was relieving. “But it works. Even I have to admit that. It works.”

Then Harrell led Grimes down to the big, comfortable day cabin where the two wives—Mrs. Harrell very dumpy and mousy alongside the slender Sonya—were waiting. The Harrells’ baggage, packed and ready to be carried ashore, was against one bulkhead. On a table stood bottles and glasses, a bowl of cracked ice. The officers came in then, neat in their slate grey shirt-and-shorts uniforms, their black, gold-braided shoulderboards, to say good-bye to their old captain, to greet their new one. There was Wilcox, Chief Officer, a burly, blond young (but not too young) giant. There was Andersen, the Second, another giant, but red-haired. There was Viccini, the Third, slight and dark. And Jones, the Engineer, a fat, bald man who could have been any age, came up to be introduced, and with him he brought Mary Hales, the Electrician, a fragile, silver-headed little girl who looked incapable of changing a fuse. Finally there came Sally Fielding, Stewardess-Purser, plump and motherly.

Glasses were charged. “Well, Captain,” began Harrell. “Or should I say Commodore, or Admiral?”

“Captain,” Grimes told him.

“Well, Captain, your name’s on the Register and the Articles. You’ve signed the Receipt for Items Handed Over. You’ve a good ship, and a good team of officers. Happy sailing!”

“Happy sailing,” everybody repeated.

“Thank you, Captain,” replied Grimes. “And I’m sure that we all wish you an enjoyable leave.”

“And how are you spending it, Mrs, Harrell?” asked Sonya.

“We’ve a yacht,” the other woman told her. “Most of the time we shall be cruising around the Coral Sea.”

“A busman’s holiday,” commented Grimes.

“Not at all,” Harrell told him, grinning for the first time. “There’ll just be the two of us, so there’ll be no crew problems. And no electronic gadgetry to get in my hair either.”

“Happy sailing,” said Grimes, raising his glass.

“Happy sailing,” they all said again.

And it was happy sailing at first.

It did not take Grimes long to find his feet, his sea legs. “After all,” he said to Sonya, “a ship is a ship is a ship . . .” He had been afraid at first that his officers and crew would resent him, an outsider appointed to command with no probationary period in the junior grades—but there hung about him the spurious glamour of that honorary admiral’s commission, and his reputation as a maritime historian earned him respect.
Sonya Winneck
’s people knew that he was on Aquarius to do a job, a useful job, and that his sailing as master of her was part of it.

Sonya enjoyed herself too. She made friends with the other women aboard: with Mary Hales, with Sally Fielding, with the darkly opulent Vanessa Wilcox, who had joined just before departure from Port Stellar, with Tessa and Teena, the Assistant Stewardesses, with the massive Jemima Brown who was queen of the beautifully mechanized galley. This shipboard life—
surface
shipboard life—was all so new to her, in spite of its inevitable resemblances to life aboard a spaceship. There was so much to see, so much to inquire into . . .

The weather was fine, mainly, with warm days and nights with just sufficient chill to provide a pleasant contrast. Grimes played with the sextant he had purchased in Port Stellar, became skilled in its use, taking altitude after altitude of the sun, of the planet’s two moons, of such stars, planets and artificial satellites as were visible at morning and evening twilight. His officers watched with a certain amusement as he plotted position after position on the working chart, congratulated him when these coincided with those for the same times shown on the chart that was displayed on the screen of the Purcell Navigator. And they, he was pleased to note, tended to ignore that contraption, consulting it only when there was a wide variance between positions taken by two observers.

A shipmaster, however, is more than a navigator. Pilotage was not compulsory for the majority of the ports visited by
Sonya Winneck
, although in each one of them pilots were available. Grimes had taken a pilot sailing from Port Stellar, but after the six-day run between that harbor and Tallisport decided to try to berth the ship himself. After all, he had spent hours in the simulator and, since joining his ship, had read Ardley’s
Harbor Pilotage
from cover to cover.

This book, a standard Terran twentieth-century work on the handling and mooring of ships, had been given him by the Havenmaster, who had said, “You should find this useful, John. Ardley was one of
the
authorities of his time. One thing I like about him—he says that anchors are there to be used. For maneuvering, I mean . . .” He laughed, then added, “But don’t go making too much of a habit of it. It annoys chief officers!”

And so, having made a careful study of the large-scale chart, the plan and the “sailing directions,” Grimes stood in to Tallisport shortly after sunrise. The wheel was manned, the engines on standby. According to the Tide Tables it was just two hours after first high water, which meant that
Sonya Winneck
would be stemming the ebb on her way in. (But, Wilcox had told him, complications were bound to crop up in this river harbor. All wharfage was on the western bank of the river, on the starboard hand entering—and to berth starboard side to is to risk damage in a vessel with a right-handed single screw, especially when the master is an inexperienced ship handler. Sometimes, however, an eddy, a countercurrent, set strongly along the line of wharfage, giving the effect of flood tide. If this eddy were running—and only visual observation when approaching the berth would confirm this or not—Grimes would be able to bring the ship’s head to starboard, letting go the starboard anchor to stub her around, and then ease her alongside, port side to, with the anchor still on the bottom.)

Grimes stood into Tallisport. With his naked eye he could now see the Main Leads, two white towers, nicely in line. He told the Harbor Quartermaster to steer for them, to keep them right ahead. Yes, and there was the breakwater to port, with its red beacon . . . The red beacon was abeam now, and
Sonya Winneck
was sweeping into the harbor in fine style.

“Hadn’t you better reduce speed, sir?” suggested the Third Officer.

“Mphm. Thank you, Mr. Viccini. Better make it slow—no, dead slow.” “Dead slow, sir.”

The rhythmic thudding of the diesel generators was unchanged, but there was a subtle diminution of vibration as the propeller revolutions decreased. The Main Leads were still ahead, but coming abeam to starboard were the two white obelisks that were the Leads into the Swinging Basin. “Port ten degrees,” ordered Grimes. Would it be enough? Then he saw the ship’s head swinging easily, heard the clicking of the gyro repeater. “Midships. Steady!”