To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (60 page)

He said, “If they were going to shoot they’d have blown us out of the sky as soon as we entered the atmosphere. . . .”

Dizzard waling torpet droo . . .
came deafeningly from the Carlotti speaker.
Contabing blee . . .
“I wish they’d change the record!” shouted Una.
Waling torpet. Waling droo. Tarfelet, tarfelet, tarfelet. . . .

“Is there anybody alive to change the record?” he asked.

“You mean . . . ?”

“Just that. But I’ll land, just the same. We should be able to find something out.”

He brought the boat down to the fine, red dust, about two hundred meters from the ship.

They snapped shut the visors of their helmets, tested the suit radios. The boat contained equipment for sampling an atmosphere, but this they did not use. It would have taken too much time, and it seemed unlikely that the air of this world would be breathable, although the level of radioactivity was not high. Una belted on one laser pistol and one projectile pistol, each of which had a firing stud rather than a trigger so it could be used while wearing a spacesuit. Grimes followed her example.

They stood briefly in the airlock chamber while pressures equalized—that outside the boat was much lower than that inside—and then, as soon as the outer door opened, jumped down to the ground. Their booted feet kicked up a flurry of fine, red dust, then sank to the ankle. They looked around them. The view from ground level was even more depressing than that from the air had been. The gaping windows in the tall, truncated buildings were like the empty eye sockets of skulls. The omnipresent red dust lay in drifts and the beginnings of dunes. From one such a tangle of bleached bones protruded, uncovered by the wind.

“The End of the World . . .” murmured Una, almost inaudibly.

“The end of
a
world,” corrected Grimes, but it wasn’t much of an improvement.

He began to walk slowly toward the huge, metal cone. It had been there a long time. Although its surface still held a polish it had been dulled by erosion, pitted by the abrasive contact, over many years, of wind-driven particles of dust. It sat there sullenly, its base buried by the red drifts. There were complexes of antennae projecting from it toward its apex, what could have been radar scanners, but they were motionless. At the very top it was ringed with big, circular ports, behind which no movement could be detected.

The wind was rising now, whining eerily through and around the ruined towers, audible even through the helmets of the spacesuits, smoothing over the footprints that they had left as they walked from the boat. The surface of the dust stirred and shifted like something alive, clutching at their ankles.

“Let’s get out of here!” said Una abruptly.

“No, not yet. There must be an airlock door somewhere toward the base of that ship.”

“If it is a ship.”

“And we should explore the buildings.”

“What’s that?” she demanded.

Grimes stared at the motionless antennae. Had she seen something?

“No. Not there. In the sky. Can’t you hear it?”

There was a pervasive humming noise beating down from above, faint at first, then louder and louder. Grimes looked up. There was nothing to be seen at first—nothing, that is, but the ragged, dun clouds that were driving steadily across the yellow sky. And then, in a break, he spotted something. It was distant still, but big—and seemingly insubstantial. It was a glittering latticework, roughly globular in form. It was dropping fast.

“Back to the boat!” Grimes ordered.

He ran; she ran. It was a nightmarish journey. Every step was hampered by the clinging dust and the weight of the wind, into which they were directly heading, slowed their progress to little better than a crawl. And all the time that steady humming sounded louder and ever louder in their ears. They dare not look up; to have done so would have wasted precious time.

At last they reached the airlock. While Una was clambering into the chamber Grimes managed a hasty look up and back. The thing was close now, a skeleton globe inside which the shapes of enigmatic machines spun and glittered. From its lower surface dangled writhing tentacles, long, metallic ropes. The tip of one was reaching out for Grimes’ shoulder. Hastily he drew his laser pistol, thumbed it to wasteful, continuous emission and slashed with the beam. Five meters of severed tentacle fell to the ground and threshed in the dust like an injured earthworm. He slashed again, this time into the body of the thing. There was a harsh crackle and a blue flare, a puff of gray smoke.

He jumped into the chamber. It seemed an eternity before the foul air of the planet was expelled, the clean atmosphere of the boat admitted. He stood there beside Una, unable to see what was happening outside, waiting for the bolt that would destroy them utterly.

But it did not come.

The inner door opened. He ran clumsily to the control cabin, hampered by his suit. He looked through the starboard ports, saw that the skeleton sphere had landed, was between the boat and the conical spaceship. It seemed to be having troubles, lifting a meter or so then falling back to the dust. But its tentacles were extending, a full dozen of them, and all of them writhing out in only one direction, toward the boat. The nearer of them were less than a meter away, the tips of them uplifted like the heads of snakes.

Grimes was thankful that he had left the inertial drive ticking over; there was no time lost in restarting it. The boat went up like a bullet from a gun, driving through the dun clouds in seconds, through the last of the yellow atmosphere, into the clean emptiness of Space.

At last he felt that he could relax. He missed his pipe, which he had left aboard
Skink.
He thought that he would be justified—as soon as he was satisfied that there was no pursuit—in breaking out the medicinal brandy.

“What was all that about?” asked Una in a subdued voice.

“I wish I knew,” he said at last. “I wish I knew. . . .”

Chapter 11

They had a drink,
helping themselves generously from one of the bottles of medicinal brandy. They felt that they needed it, even if they didn’t deserve it. They had another drink after they had helped each other off with their spacesuits. After the third one they decided that they might as well make a celebration of it and wriggled out of their longjohns.

Then Una had to spoil everything.

She said, “All right, lover boy. Let us eat, drink and make merry while we can. But this is one right royal mess that you’ve gotten us into!”

If anybody had told Grimes in the not-too-distant past that he would ever be able to look at an attractive, naked woman with acute dislike Grimes would have told him, in more or less these words, Don’t be funny. But now it was happening. It was the injustice of what she was saying that rankled.

He growled, at last, “You were there too!”

“Yes, Buster. But you’re the expert. You’re the commissioned officer in the Federation’s vastly over-ballyhooed Survey Service.”

“You’re an expert too, in your own way. You should have warned me about using the Carlotti transceiver.”

“Don’t let’s go over all that again, please. Well, apart from what’s on your mind . . .” She looked down at him and permitted herself a sneer. “Apart from what
was
on your mind, what do you intend doing next?”

“Business before pleasure, then,” said Grimes. “All that we can do is find some other likely transmission and home on that.”

“What about those skeleton spheres, like the one that attacked us on the devastated planet? Was it after us actually—or was it, too, homing on the signal from the alien spaceship?”

“
Alien
spaceship?” queried Grimes. “I don’t know when or where we are—but
we
could be the aliens.”

“Regular little space lawyer, aren’t you, with all this hair-splitting. . . . Alien, schmalien. . . . As it says in the Good Book, one man’s Mede is another man’s Persian. . . . Don’t be so lousy with the drinks, lover boy. Fill ‘er up.”

“This has to last,” Grimes told her. “For emergenshies . . .”

“This is so an emergency.”

“You can shay—
say—
that again,” he admitted.

She was beginning to look attractive once more.
In vino veritas,
he thought. He put out a hand to touch her. She did not draw back. He grabbed her and pulled her to him. Her skin, on his, was silkily smooth, and her mouth, as he kissed her, was warm and fragrant with brandy. And then, quite suddenly, it was like an implosion, with Grimes in the middle of it. After he, himself, had exploded they both drifted into a deep sleep.

When they awoke, strapped together in one of the narrow bunks, she was in a much better mood than she had been for quite a long time. And Grimes, in spite of his slight hangover, was happy. Their escape from—at the very least—danger had brought them together again. Whatever this strange universe threw at them from now on they, working in partnership, would be able to cope—he hoped, and believed.

She got up and made breakfast, such as it was—although the food seemed actually to taste better. After they had finished the meal Grimes went to play with the Carlotti transceiver. He picked up what seemed to be a conversation between two stations and not, as had been the other signal upon which they had hopes, a distress call automatically repeated at regular intervals. He said, “This seems to be distant, but not too distant. What about it?”

She replied, “We’ve no place else to go. Get her lined up, lover boy, and head that way.”

He shut down the mini-Mannschenn briefly, turned the boat until its stem was pointed toward the source of the transmissions, then opened both the inertial drive and the interstellar drive full out. It was good to be going somewhere, he thought.
Hope springs eternal . . .
he added mentally. But without hope the human race would have died out even before the Stone Age.

For day after day after day they sped through the black immensities, the warped continuum. Day after day after day the two-way conversation in the unknown language continued to sound from the speaker of the Carlotti transceiver. There were words that sounded the same as some of the words used in the first transmission.
Tarfelet . . . Over?
wondered Grimes.
Over and out?

On they ran, on—and the strength of the signals increased steadily. They were close now to the source, very close. Unfortunately the lifeboat did not run to a Mass Proximity Indicator, as it seemed that the transmissions did not emanate from a planetary surface but from something—or two somethings—adrift in space. The ship—or ships—would be invisible from the boat unless, freakishly, temporal precession rates were synchronized. That would be too much to hope for. But if neither the boat nor the targets were proceeding under interstellar drive they could, if close enough, be seen visually or picked up on the radar.

Grimes shut down the mini-Mannschenn.

He and Una looked out along the line of bearing. Yes, there appeared to be something there, not all that distant, two bright lights. He switched on the radar, stared into the screen.

“Any joy?” asked Una.

“Yes. Targets bearing zero relative. Range thirty kilometers.” He grinned. “We’d better get dressed again. We may be going visiting—or receiving visitors.”

They climbed into their longjohns and spacesuits. After a little hesitation they belted on their pistols. Back in the pilot’s chair Grimes reduced speed, shutting down the inertial drive until, instead of the usual clangor, it emitted little more than an irritable grumble. In the radar screen the twin blips of the target slid slowly toward the center.

It was possible now to make out details through the binoculars. There were two ships there, both of them of the same conical design as the one they had seen in the ruined city. But these were not dead ships; their hulls were ablaze with lights—white and red and green and blue. They looked almost as if they belonged in some amusement park on a man-colonized planet—but somehow the illumination gave the impression of being functional rather than merely of giving pleasure to the beholder.

The speaker of the transceiver came suddenly to life. “
Quarat tambeel?
”
There was an unmistakable note of interrogation. “
Quarat tambeel? Tarfelet.
”

“They’ve spotted us,” said Grimes. “Answer, will you?”

“But what shall I
say?
”
asked Una.

“Say that we come in peace and all the rest of it. Make it sound as though you mean it. If they can’t understand the words, the tune might mean something to them.”

“
Quarat tambeel? Tarfelet.
”

What ship? Over,
guessed Grimes.

Una spoke slowly and distinctly into the microphone. “We come in peace. We come in peace. Over.” She made it sound convincing. Grimes, as a friendly gesture, switched on the boat’s landing lights.

“
Tilzel bale, winzen bale, rindeen, rindeen. Tarfelet.
”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Una said. “It is a pity that our visiscreens don’t work. If they did, we could draw diagrams of Pythagoras’ Theorem at each other. . . .” But the way she sounded she could have been making love to the entity at the other end.

Grimes looked at the little radar repeater on the control panel. Ten kilometers, and closing. Nine . . . Eight . . . Seven . . . He cut the drive altogether. He could imagine, all too clearly, what a perfect target he would be to the gunnery officers aboard the strange ships. If they had gunnery officers,
if
they had guns, or their equivalent, that was. But it seemed unlikely that all life on that devastated planet had been wiped out by natural catastrophe. There had been a war, and a dreadful one.

But many years ago,
he told himself,
otherwise the level of radioactivity would have been much higher. And possibly confined to the worlds of only one planetary system . . .