To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (64 page)

He said, “Panzen. . . .”

“Grimes,” sounded harshly from his helmet phones.

So he was awakened.

“Panzen, unless you do as we say, we shall destroy you.”

“What are your orders?”

I
never knew that skyjacking was so easy,
Grimes thought.
I’m surprised that there’s not more of it.
He said, “Take us back to our own space, our own time.”

“But
where
is your space, Grimes.
When
is your time?”

“Give him another jolt, John!” whispered Una viciously. “A stronger one!”

“I do not fear your weapons, Freeman,” said Panzen.

“Then try this for size!” Grimes heard her say, and then heard an ejaculation that was half gasp and half scream. His own pistol was snatched from his hand by some invisible force, went whirling away into the blackness. He pulled the other gun, tried to aim, hung on to it grimly when the intense magnetic field, the swirling lines of force, tried to take it from him. Too late he released his grip on it, and when he let it go had lost his balance, was already falling. He dropped from the girder, drifting down with nightmarish slowness. He fell against a tight stay wire, and before he could clutch it had rebounded, out and away from the center of the spherical ship. Faintly he heard Una scream, and cried out himself when he realized in what direction his plunge was taking him. To fall into nothingness, to drift, perhaps, until the air supply of his suit was exhausted, would have been bad—but to fall into the field of an operating interstellar drive unit would be worse, much worse.

He had seen, once, the consequences of such an accident, an unfortunate engineer who had been everted, literally, by the time-and-space-twisting temporal precession fields, and who had gone on living, somehow, until somebody, mercifully or in sick revulsion, had shot him.

Below Grimes, closer and closer, were the great, gleaming gyroscopes, the complexity of huge rotors, spinning, precessing, tumbling down the dark dimensions, ever on the point of vanishment and yet ever remaining blurrily visible. He could not influence his trajectory, no matter how he jerked and twisted his body. He had nothing to throw. It would have made little difference if he had—after all, the ship was accelerating, not falling free. Only a suit propulsion unit could have helped—and this he did not have.

He was beginning to feel the effects of the temporal precession field now. Scenes from his past life flickered through his mind. He was not only seeing his past but feeling it, reliving it. There were the women he had known—and would never know again. Jane Pentecost, his first love, and the Princess Marlene, and the red-haired Maggie Lazenby. And, oddly, there was another red-haired woman whom he could not place but who, somehow, occupied a position of great importance in his life.

The women—and the ships. Some well-remembered, some utterly strange but yet familiar. The past—and the future?

There could be no future, he knew. Not for him. This was the end of the line as far as he was concerned. Yet the visions persisted, previews of a screenplay which could not possibly include him among its cast of characters. There was Una again, naked, her splendid body bronze-gleaming, laughing, riding a graceful, glittering bicycle over a green, sunlit lawn. . . .

He blacked out briefly as his descent was brought up with a jerk. He realized dimly that something had hold of him, that he was suspended over the interstellar drive unit, dangling on the end of a long, metallic tentacle that had wrapped itself about his body, that was slowly but surely drawing him upward, to relative safety.

And from his helmet phones sounded the voice of Panzen. “Forgive me, Zephalon. I have sinned against You. Did I not forget Your words? Did You not say, ‘They are cunning, they are vicious, but they must be saved from themselves so that the cycle is not broken. Relax not your vigilance one microsecond when they are in your charge.’ But I did relax; the voyage is long. I did relax, playing against myself the game of Parsalong, moving the pieces, the leaders, the troopers, the war vehicles, the great and the little guns, all up and down the board, storming the fortresses, now advancing, now retreating . . .”

“And who was winning?” Grimes could not help asking, but Panzen ignored the question.

He went on, “I relaxed. In my self indulgence, I sinned. How can I atone?”

“By taking us back to where we came from!” That was Una’s voice. So she was all right, thought Grimes with relief.

Then a deep, humming note drowned her out, louder and louder, the vibration of it affecting every molecule of Grimes’ body. He tried to shout against it, but no words came. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was the gleaming, spinning, precessing intricacy of the interstellar drive unit below him, steadily receding as he was drawn upward.

Chapter 17

When, eventually,
they awoke they found that they were back inside the boat. Their helmets had been removed, but not their suits. Panzen might be rather slow witted, thought Grimes, but he was capable of learning by experience; he must have remembered how they had almost been asphyxiated after their initial capture.

Grimes raised his body slowly to a sitting posture. Not far from him Una turned her head to look in his direction. She said, “Thank you for taking my helmet off, John.”

He said, “I didn’t take it off. Or mine either.”

“But who . . . ?”

“Or
what.
There must be more than one of those little robots. . . .”

“Those little robots?”

“Like the one I shot. That mechanical spider. The thing had limbs and tentacles. Panzen’s crew, I suppose. He has to have something to do the work while he takes life easily inside his brain case.”

She said, “So he has ingress to this boat. Or his slaves do.”

“Too right.” Grimes had an uneasy vision of metal arthropods swarming all through the lifecraft while he and the girl lay unconscious. He scrambled to his feet, extended a hand to help Una. “I think we’d better have a general check up.”

They took inventory. With one exception, the life support systems were untampered with. That exception was glaringly obvious. Whatever had taken off their helmets had also uncoupled and removed the air bottles, and there were no spare air bottles in their usual stowage in the storeroom. The pistols and ammunition were missing from the armory, and most of the tools from the workshop. The books were gone from their lockers in the control cabin.

Grimes broke out the medicinal brandy. At least Panzen’s minions hadn’t confiscated that. He poured two stiff slugs. He looked at Una glumly over the rim of his glass, muttered, “Cheers . . .”

“And what is there to be cheery about?” she demanded sourly.

“We’re not dead.”

“I suppose not.” She sipped her drink. “You know, I went on a religious jag a standard year or so back. Believe it or not, I was actually a convert to Neo-Calvinism. You know it?”

“I’ve heard of the Neo-Calvinists,” admitted Grimes.

“They’re Fundamentalists,” she told him. “Theirs is one of the real, old-time religions. They believe in an afterlife, with Heaven and Hell. They believe, too, that Hell is tailored to fit you. As a Neo-Calvinist you’re supposed to visualize the worst possible way for you to be obliged to spend eternity. It’s supposed to induce humility and all the rest of it.”

“This is a morbid conversation,” said Grimes.

She laughed mirthlessly. “Isn’t it? And do you know what my private idea of Hell was?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“You wouldn’t. Well, as a policewoman I’ve been responsible for putting quite a few people behind bars. My private idea of Hell was for me to be a prisoner forever and ever.” She took another gulp of brandy. “I’m beginning to wonder . . .
Did
we survive the blast that destroyed
Delta Geminorum?
It would make much more sense if we had been killed, wouldn’t it?”

“But we’re not dead.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Well,” he said slowly, “
my
idea of Hell is not quite comfortable accommodation shared with an attractive member of the opposite sex.” He finished his drink, got up and moved around the small table. He lifted her from her chair, turned her so that she was facing him. Both of them, having removed their spacesuits, were now clad only in the long underwear. He could feel the soft pressure of her body against his, knew that she must be feeling his burgeoning hardness. He knew that she was responding, knew that it was only a matter of seconds before the longjohns would be discarded, before her morbid thoughts would be dispelled. His mouth was on hers, on her warm, moist, parted lips. His right hand, trapped between them, was yet free enough to seek and to find the tag of the fastener of her single garment, just below her throat. Just one swift tug, and. . . .

Suddenly she broke free, using both her hands to shove him away violently. Her longjohns were open to the crotch and she hastily pulled up the fastener, having trouble with her breasts as she did so.

“No,” she said. “No!”

“But, Una. . . .”

“No.”

He muttered something about absurd Neo-Calvinist ideas of morality.

She laughed bitterly. She told him, “I said that I was, once, a Neo-Calvinist. And it didn’t last long. I am, still, a policewoman. . . .”

“A woman, just as I’m a man. The qualifications, policewoman and spaceman, don’t matter.”

“Let me finish, Buster. It has occurred to me, in my professional capacity, that this boat is probably well and truly bugged, that Panzen can not only hear everything we say, but see everything that we do. And after our unsuccessful attempt at escape henot be passing his time working out chess problems anymore.” She paused for breath. “And, neither as a policewoman nor as a woman, do I feel like taking part in an exhibition fuck.”

Grimes saw her point. He would not have used those words himself, still being prone to a certain prudery in speech if not in action. Nonetheless, he did not give up easily. He said, “But Panzen’s not human.”

“That makes it all the worse. To have intercourse while that artificial intelligence watches coldly, making notes probably, recording every muscular spasm, every gasp . . . No! I’d sooner do it in front of some impotent old man who would, at least, get an all too human kick out of watching us!”

He managed a laugh. “Now I’m almost a convert to Neo-Calvinism. Being in prison is your idea of Hell, being in a state of continual frustration may well be mine. . . .” And he thought,
What if there is some truth in that crazy idea of hers? What if we were killed when
Delta Geminorum
blew up? After all, we should have been. . . . What if this is some sort of afterlife?

He returned to the table, poured himself another generous portion of brandy.

She said, “That doesn’t help.”

He retorted, “Doesn’t it? But it does. It has just occurred to me that neither your private Hell nor mine would be provided with this quite excellent pain-deadener.”

She said, “Then I’d better have some, while it lasts.”

Grimes was the first to awaken. He did not feel at all well. After he had done all that he had to do in the boat’s toilet facilities he felt a little stronger and decided that a hair of the dog that had bitten him might be an aid to full recovery.

The bottle on the table was empty.

There should have been four unopened bottles remaining in the storeroom. They were gone.

Chapter 18

She said,
“I want a drink.”

He told her, “There’s water, or that ersatz coffee, or that synthetic limejuice.”

She practically snarled, “I want a
drink
.”

He said, “I’ve told you what there is.”

“Don’t be a bloody wowser. I want a drink. B-R-A-N-D-Y. Drink.”

“I can spell. But there isn’t any.”

She glared at him. “You don’t mean to say that
you,
while I was sleeping . . . ?”

“No. But
he,
while we were sleeping.”

“That’s absurd. Whoever heard of a robot hitting the bottle?”

He said, “Many a fanatical teetotaler has confiscated bottles and destroyed their contents.”

“So Panzen’s a fanatical teetotaler? Come off it, Buster!”

“Panzen’s fanatical enough to be acting for what he conceives as our good.”

She swore. “The sanctimonious, soulless, silver-plated bastard!”

“Careful. He might hear.”

“I’ll bet you anything you like that he
is
hearing. I sincerely hope that he
is
listening.” She went on, in an even louder voice, “We’re
human,
Panzen, which is more, much more, than any machine can ever be. You’ve no right to interfere with our pleasures. You are only a servant. You are not the master.”

Panzen’s voice filled the boat. “I am not the master.”

Una turned to Grimes, grinning savagely. “You’ve got to be firm with these bloody machines. I know that all you spacemen think that a machine has to be pampered, but
I
wasn’t brought up that way.” Then, “All right, Panzen. This is an order. Return our medical comforts at once.”

“No.”

“No? Do as you’re told, damn you. You admit that you’re only a servant, that you are not the master.”

“Zephalon is the Master.” There was a pause. “I am to look after you. I am to maintain you in a state of good health. I must not allow you to poison yourselves.”

“Taken in moderation,” said Grimes reasonably, “alcohol is a medicine, with both physiological and psychological curative effects.”

“So I have noticed, Grimes.” There was irony as well as iron in the mechanical voice.

“The brandy you . . . stole,” went on the man, “belongs in this boat’s medical stores.”

“I have checked the boat’s medical stores, also the life-support systems. You have everything you need to maintain yourselves in a state of perfect health. Alcohol is not required. I have destroyed the brandy.”