Upon a Sea of Stars (35 page)

Part 3
The Tin Fishes

COMMODORE JOHN GRIMES
was proceeding homeward from Tharn the long way around—by way of Groller, Stree and Mellise, by the route that he, in the old
Faraway Quest,
had opened and charted so many years ago.

On all the worlds he was still remembered. On Tharn the spaceport was named after him. In Breardon, the planetary capital of Groller, a huge statue of him stood in Council Square. Grimes had stared up at the heroic monument with some distaste. Surely his ears didn’t stand out that much, and surely his habitual expression was not quite so frog-like. He made allowances for the fact that the Grollens, although humanoid, are a batrachian people, but he still inspected himself for a long time in a full-length mirror on his return to the ship in which he was a passenger.

And then
Rim Kestrel
, in which Grimes had taken passage from Tharn, came to Mellise.

Mellise was a watery world, fully four-fifths of its surface being covered by the warm, mainly shallow seas. The nearest approach to a continent was a long, straggling chain of islands almost coincident with the equator. On one of the larger ones was the spaceport. There was no city, only a village in which the human spaceport personnel and the Rim Confederacy’s ambassador and his staff lived. The Mellisans themselves were an amphibious race; like the Earthly cetacea they returned to the sea after having reached quite a high stage of evolution ashore. They could, if they had to, live and work on dry land, but they preferred the water. They dwelt in submarine villages where they were safe from the violent revolving storms that at times ravaged the surface. They tended their underwater farms, raising giant mollusks, great bivalves that yielded lustrous pearls, the main item of export. Their imports were the manufactured goods needed by an aquatic culture: nets, cordage, harpoon guns and the like. They could make these for themselves but, with the establishment of regular trade between themselves and the Confederacy, they preferred not to. Why should an essentially water-dwelling being work with fire and metals when pearl farming was so much more comfortable and pleasant?

Grimes rode down to the surface in
Rim Kestrel’s
control room. Captain Paulus, the ship’s master, was nervous, obviously did not like having his superior there to watch his ship-handling. But he was competent enough, although painfully cautious. Not for him the almost meteoric descent favored by other masters. His Inertial Drive delivered a thrust that nearly countered the planet’s gravitational pull. The
Kestrel
drifted surfaceward like a huge balloon with barely negative buoyancy. But Paulus reacted fast enough when a jet stream took hold of the ship, canceling its effect by just the right application of lateral drive; reacted fast again when the vessel was shaken by clear air turbulence, pulling her out of the danger area with no delay. Nonetheless, Grimes was making mental notes. The efficiency of the spaceport’s meteorological observatory left much to be desired; Paulus should have been warned by radio of the disturbances through which he had passed. (But he, Grimes, had made his first landing here before there was a spaceport, let alone spaceport facilities. He had brought the
Quest
down through the beginnings of a hurricane.)

The Commodore looked at the vision screen that showed, highly magnified, what lay aft and below. There were the islands, each one raggedly circular, each one ringed by a golden beach that was ringed, in its turn, by white surf. There was the cloudy green of shallow water, the clear blue of the deeper seas. Inland was the predominant purple of the vegetation.

Yes, it was a pleasant world, Mellise. Even here, out on the Rim, it could have been developed to a holiday planet, rivaling if not surpassing Caribbea. If the Mellisans had been obliged to deal with the Interstellar Federation rather than with the Rim Worlds Confederacy, this probably would have been the case. Grimes, whose first years in space had been as an officer in the Federation’s Survey Service, knew all too well that the major Terran galactic power was far more concerned with the rights of other intelligent races in theory than in practice—unless there was some political advantage to be gained by posing as liberator, conservator or whatever.

He could see the white spaceport buildings now, gleaming in the light of the afternoon sun, startlingly distinct against their backdrop of purple foliage. He could see the pearly gray of the apron, and on it the black geometrical shadows cast by cranes and conveyor belts and gantries. He could even see the tiny, blinking stars that were the three beacons, the markers of the triangle in the center of which
Rim Kestrel
was to land. He wished that Paulus would get on with it. At this rate it would be after sunset by the time the ship was down.

After sunset it was, and the night had fallen with the dramatic suddenness to be expected in the low latitudes of any planet. Overhead the sky was clear and almost empty, save for the opalescent arc that was the upper limb of the Galactic Lens, low on the western horizon. Paulus had ordered all ports throughout the ship opened, and through them flowed the warm breeze, the scents of growing and flowering things that would have been cloyingly sweet had it not been for the harsh tang of salt water. There was the distant murmur of surf and, even more distant, a grumble of thunder.

“Thank you, Captain Paulus,” said Grimes formally. “A very nice set-down.”

And so it had been. Merchant captains, after all, are not paid to put their ships in hazard.

Port formalities were few. The Mellisans cared little about such matters as health, customs and immigration regulations. The port captain, a Rim Worlder, took care of all such details for them; and insofar as vessels owned by the Confederacy were concerned there was not even the imposition of port dues. After all, the levying of such charges would have been merely robbing Peter to pay Paul. The rare outside ships—the occasional Interstellar Transport Commission
Epsilion
Class tramp, the infrequent Empire of Waverley freighter, the once-in-a-blue-moon Shakespearian Sector trader—were, presumably, another matter. They would at least pay port dues.

Grimes sat with Captain Paulus and Stacey, the port captain, in Paulus’ day cabin. Cold drinks were on the table before them. The Commodore was smoking his foul pipe, Paulus was nervously lighting one cigarette after another, and Captain Stacey had between his fleshy lips a peculiarly gnarled cigar of local manufacture. It looked as though it had been rolled from dry seaweed, and smelt like it. (“An acquired taste,” Stacey had told them. “Like to try one?” They had refused.)

“Only a small shipment of pearls this time,” Stacey said. “The pearl fishers—or farmers—are having their troubles.”

“Disease again?” asked Paulus.

“No. Not this time. Seems to be a sort of predatory starfish. Could be a mutation. Whether it is or not, it’s a vicious bastard.”

“I thought, Captain Stacey,” said Grimes, “that the people here were quite capable of dealing with any of the dangerous life forms in their seas.”

“Not this new starfish,” Stacey told him. “It’s a killer.” He sipped his drink. “The natives knew that you were coming here almost as soon I did, Commodore. Telepathy? Could be. But, sir, you are almost a local deity. Old Wunnaara—he’s the boss in these parts—said to me only this morning, ‘Grimes
Wannarbo
’—and a
Wannarbo
is roughly halfway between a high chief and the Almighty—‘will us help. . . .’ Really touched by his faith, I was.”

“I’m not a marine biologist,” said Grimes. “But couldn’t you, with your local knowledge, do something, Captain Stacey?”

“I’m not a marine biologist either, Commodore. It takes all my time to run the port.”

And I recommended you for this appointment,
thought Grimes, looking at the fat man.
I thought that this would be an ideal job for anybody as notoriously lazy as yourself. I thought that you couldn’t do any harm here, and that you’d get on well with the Mellisans. But you can’t do any good either.

“They must produce pearls,” stated Paulus, “if they’re to pay for their imports. They’ve nothing else we want.”

Nothing else that we want. . .
thought Grimes.
But the Rim Confederacy is not alone in the galaxy.
He said, “Surely, Captain Stacey, you’ve found out what sort of weapons would be most effective against these things. They could be manufactured back on Lorn or Faraway, and shipped out here. And what about protective netting for the oyster beds?”

“Useless, Commodore,” Stacy told him. “The starfish just tear to shreds even the heaviest nets, made from wire rope. As for weapons—poison has always been effective in the past, but not any longer.”

“We have to do something to help these people,” Grimes said definitely. “And, frankly, not altogether from altrusitic motives. As you should know, both Waverly and the Shakespearian Sector are anxious to expand their spheres of influence. If they can help Mellise and we can’t . . .” The unspoken words “you’ll be out of a soft job” hung in the air between them.

“They seem to rely upon
you
to help them, sir,” Stacey grumbled.

“And perhaps I can,” Grimes told him. “Perhaps I can.”

Perhaps he could—but, as he had said, he was not a marine biologist. Even so, he knew of the parallel evolution of life forms on all Earth-type planets. And in the course of his career he had tangled with unfriendly and hungry beasts on more than a century of worlds; he was still around and the hostile animals were not. Variations on familiar patterns or utterly alien, all had fallen victim to human cunning and human weaponry—and human savagery. Man, after all, was still the most dangerous animal.

He said good night to Stacey and Paulus, told them that he was going outside the ship to stretch his legs. He made his way down to the after air lock, then down the ramp to the smooth, clean concrete of the apron. He walked away from the direction of the administration buildings and the human village, found a path that must lead down to the sea. On either side of it the feathery fronds of the trees rustled in the warm breeze. Overhead, Mellise’s single moon, a ruddy globe with an almost unmarked surface, rode high in the sky.

Grimes came to the beach, to the pale, gently shelving stretch of coarse sand beyond which the surf was greenly luminescent. He kicked off his sandals and, carrying them, walked slowly down to the edge of the water. He missed Sonya.

He saw that a black, humanoid shape, outlined by the phosphorescence, was waddling ashore, splashing through the shallows. From its dark head two eyes that reflected the light of the moon stared at Grimes. The teeth glinted whitely in the long muzzle as it spoke. “
Meelongee,
Grimes
Wannarbo
.” Its voice was like that of a Siamese cat.

“Meelongee,”
replied Grimes. He remembered that this was the word of greeting.

“You have come back.” The English was oddly accented but perfectly understandable. “Yes. I have come back.” “You . . . help?”

“I shall try.”

The native was close to Grimes now, and the Commodore could smell the not unpleasant fishy odor of him. He could see, too, that he was old; in the moonlight the white hairs about the muzzle and the white patches of fur on the chest were plainly visible.

“You me remember?” There was a short, barking laugh. “No? I was cub when first you come to Mellise, Grimes
Wannarbo
. Now I am chief. My name—Wunnaara. And you, too, are chief—not of one skyship, but of many. I am chief—but known little. You are chief—but know much.”

“The
Rim Kestrel
lifts tomorrow,” said Grimes.

“But you will stay,
Wannarbo?
You will stay?”

Grimes made his decision. If there was anything that he could do he would be furthering the interests of the Confederacy as well as helping the natives of Mellise. Stacey, it was obvious, would not lift one fat finger. The ambassador, like the port captain, was a no-hoper who had been sent to a planet upon which no emergencies were ever likely to arise. Grimes had not yet met him, but he knew him by repute.

“I will stay,” he told the Chief.

“Then I tell my people. There is much to make ready.” Wunnaara slipped back into the water, far more silently than he had emerged from it, and was gone.