Upon a Sea of Stars (44 page)

He was later hanged.

Well, as I’ve indicated, my Old Man was up to the eyebrows in his research into the Ned Kelly legend, and some of his enthusiasm rubbed off on to me. I thought that I’d like to have a look at this Glenrowan place. Father was quite amused. He told me that Glenrowan
now
was nothing at all like Glenrowan
then
, that instead of a tiny huddle of shacks by the railway line I should find a not-so-small city sitting snugly in the middle of all-the-year-round-producing orchards under the usual featureless plastic domes. There was, he conceded, a sort of reconstruction of the famous hotel standing beside a railway line—all right for tourists, he sneered, but definitely not for historians.

I suppose that he was a historian—he certainly always took his researches seriously enough—but I wasn’t. I was just a spaceman with time on my hands. And—which probably decided me—there was a quite fantastic shortage of unattached popsies in The Alice and my luck might be better elsewhere.

So I took one of the tourist airships from Alice Springs to Melbourne and then a really antique railway train—steam-driven yet, although the coal in the tender was only for show; it was a minireactor that boiled the water—from Melbourne to Glenrowan. This primitive means of locomotion, of course, was for the benefit of tourists.

When I dismounted from that horribly uncomfortable coach at Glenrowan Station I ran straight into an old shipmate. Oddly enough—although, as it turned out later, it wasn’t so odd—his name was Kelly. He’d been one of the junior interstellar drive engineer officers in the old
Aries
. I’d never liked him much—or him me—but when you’re surrounded by planetlubbers you greet a fellow spaceman as though he were a long-lost brother.

“Grimes!” he shouted. “Gutsy Grimes in person!”

[No, Kitty, I didn’t get that nickname because I’m exceptionally brave. It was just that some people thought I had an abnormally hearty appetite and would eat
anything
.]

“An’ what are
you
doin’ here?” he demanded. His Irish accent, as Irish accents usually do, sounded phoney as all hell.

I told him that I was on leave and asked him if he was too. He told me that he’d resigned his commission some time ago and that so had his cousin, Spooky Byrne. Byrne hadn’t been with us in
Aries
but I had met him. He was a PCO—Psionic Communications Officer. A Commissioned Teacup Reader, as we used to call them. A trained and qualified telepath. You don’t find many of ‘em these days in the various merchant services—the Carlotti Communications System is a far more reliable way of handling instantaneous communications over the light-years. But most navies still employ them—a telepath is good for much more than the mere transmission and reception of signals.

So, Kelly and Spooky Byrne, both in Glenrowan. And me, also in Glenrowan. There are some locations in some cities where, it is said, if you loaf around long enough you’re sure to meet everybody you know. An exaggeration, of course, but there
are
focal points. But I wouldn’t put the Glenrowan Hotel—that artificially tumbledown wooden shack with its bark roof—synthetic bark, of course—in that category. It looked very small and sordid among the tall, shining buildings of the modern city. Small and sordid? Yes, but—somehow—even though it was an obvious, trashy tourist trap it possessed a certain character. Something of the atmosphere of the original building seemed to have clung to the site.

Kelly said, using one of my own favourite expressions, “Come on in, Grimes. The sun’s over the yardarm.”

I must have looked a bit dubious. My onetime shipmate had been quite notorious for never paying for a drink when he could get somebody else to do it. He read my expression. He laughed. “Don’t worry, Gutsy. I’m a rich man now—which is more than I was when I was having to make do on my beggarly stipend in the Survey Service—may God rot their cotton socks! Come on in!”

Well, we went into the pub. The inside came up to—or down to—my worst expectations. There was a long bar of rough wood with thirsty tourists lined up along it. There was a sagging calico ceiling. There was a wide variety of antique ironmongery hanging on the walls—kitchen implements, firearms, rusty cutlasses. There were simulated flames flickering in the glass chimneys of battered but well-polished brass oil lamps. The wenches behind the bar were dressed in sort of Victorian costumes—long, black skirts, high-collared, frilly white blouses—although I don’t think that in good Queen Victoria’s day those blouses would have been as near as dammit transparent and worn over no underwear.

We had rum—not the light, dry spirit that most people are used to these days but sweet, treacly, almost-knife-and-fork stuff. Kelly paid, peeling off credits from a roll that could almost have been used as a bolster. We had more rum. Kelly tried to pay again but I wouldn’t let him—although I hoped this party wouldn’t last all day. Those prices, in that clipjoint, were making a nasty dent in my holiday money. Then Spooky Byrne drifted in, as colorless and weedy as ever, looking like a streak of ectoplasm frayed at the edges.

He stared at me as though he were seeing a ghost. “Grimes, of all people!” he whispered intensely. “Here, of all places!”

[I sensed, somehow, that his surprise was not genuine.]

“An’ why not?” demanded his burly, deceptively jovial cousin. “Spacemen are only tourists in uniform. An’ as Grimes is in civvies that makes him even more a tourist.”

“The . . . coincidence,” hissed Spooky. Whatever his act was he was persisting with it.

“Coincidences are always happenin’,” said Kelly, playing up to him.

“Yes, Eddie, but—”

“But what?” I demanded, since it seemed expected of me.

“Mr. Grimes,” Spooky told me, “would it surprise you if I told you that one of your ancestors was
here?
Was here
then?
”

“Too right it would,” I said. “Going back to the old style Twentieth Century, and the Nineteenth, and further back still, most of my male forebears were seamen.” The rum was making me boastfully talkative. “I have a pirate in my family tree. And an Admiral of the Royal Navy, on my mother’s side. Her family name is Hornblower. So, Spooky, what the hell would either a Grimes or a Hornblower have been doing here, miles inland, in this nest of highway robbers?” Both Kelly and Byrne gave me dirty looks. “All right, then. Not highway robbers. Bushrangers, if it makes you feel any happier.”

“And not bushrangers either!” growled Kelly. “Freedom fighters!”

“Hah!” I snorted.

“Freedom fighters!” stated Kelly belligerently. “All right, so they did rob a bank or two. An’ so what? In, that period rebel organizations often robbed the capitalists to get funds to buy arms and all the rest of it. It was no more than S.O.P.”

“Mphm,” I grunted.

“In any case,” said Kelly, “your ancestor was so here. We
know
. Come home with us an’ we’ll convince you.”

So I let those two bastards talk me into accompanying them to their apartment, which was a penthouse atop the Glenrowan Tower. This wasn’t by any means the tallest building in the city although it had been, I learned, when it was built. I remarked somewhat enviously that this was a palatial pad for a spaceman and Kelly told me that he wasn’t a spaceman but a businessman and that he’d succeeded, by either clever or lucky investments, in converting a winning ticket in the New Irish Sweep into a substantial fortune. Byrne told him that he should give some credit where credit was due. Kelly told Byrne that graduates of the Rhine Institute are bound, by oath, not to use their psionic gifts for personal enrichment. Byrne shut up.

The living quarters of the penthouse were furnished in period fashion—the Victorian period. Gilt and red plush—dark, carved, varnished wood heavily framed, sepia-tinted photographs—no, not holograms, but those old
flat
photographs—of heavily bearded worthies hanging on the crimson-and-gold papered walls. One of them I recognized from the research material my father had been using. It was Ned Kelly.

“Fascinating,” I said.

“This atmosphere is necessary to our researches,” said Byrne. Then, “But come through to the laboratory.”

I don’t know what I was expecting to see in the other room into which they led me. Certainly not what first caught my attention. That caught my attention? That
demanded
my attention. It was, at first glance, a Mannschenn Drive unit—not a full sized one such as would be found in even a small ship but certainly a bigger one than the mini-Mannschenns you find in lifeboats.

[You’ve never seen a Mannschenn Drive unit? I must show you ours before you go ashore. And you don’t understand how they work? Neither do I, frankly. But it boils down, essentially, to gyroscopes precessing in time, setting up a temporal precession field, so that our ships aren’t really breaking the light barrier but going astern in time while they’re going ahead in space.]

“A Mannschenn Drive unit,” I said unnecessarily.

“I built it,” said Kelly, not without pride.

“What for?” I asked. “Time Travel?” I sneered.

“Yes,” he said.

I laughed. “But it’s known to be impossible. A negative field would require the energy of the entire galaxy—”

“Not physical Time Travel,” said Spooky Byrne smugly. “Psionic Time Travel, back along the world line stemming from an ancestor. Eddie’s ancestor was at Glenrowan. So was mine. So was yours.”

“Ned Kelly wasn’t married,” I said triumphantly.

“And so you have to be married to father a child?” asked Byrnes sardonically. “Come off it, Grimes! You should know better than that.”

[I did, as a matter of fact. This was after that odd business I’d gotten involved in on El Dorado.]

“All right,” I said. “Your ancestors might have been present at the Siege of Glenrowan. Mine was not. At or about that time he was, according to my father—and he’s the family historian—second mate of a tramp windjammer. He got himself paid off in Melbourne and, not so long afterwards, was master of a little brig running between Australia and New Zealand. He did leave an autobiography, you know.”

“Autobiographies are often self-censored,” said Byrne. “That long-ago Captain Grimes, that smugly respectable shipmaster, a pillar, no doubt, of Church and State, had episodes in his past that he would prefer to forget. He did not pay off from his ship in Melbourne in the normal way. He—what was the expression?—jumped ship. He’d had words with his captain, who was a notorious bully. He’d exchanged blows. So he deserted and thought that he’d be safer miles inland. The only work that he could find was with the Irish laborers on the railway.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked. “
If
it’s true—”

“He told me,” said Byrne. “Or he told my ancestor—but I was inside his mind at the time. . . .”

“Let’s send him back,” said Kelly. “That’ll convince him.”

“Not . . . yet,” whispered Byrne. “Let’s show him first what will happen if the special train is, after all, derailed. Let’s convince him that it’s to his interests to play along with us. The . . . alternative, since Grimes showed up here, is much . . . firmer. But we shall need—did need?—that British seaman Grimes, just as George Washington needed his British seaman John Paul Jones. . . .”

“Are you trying to tell me, “ I asked, “that the squalid squabble at Glenrowan was a crucial point in history?”

“Yes,” said Kelly.

I realised that I’d been maneuvered to one of the three chairs facing the Mannschenn Drive unit, that I’d been eased quite gently on to the seat. The chair was made of tubular metal, with a high back, at the top of which was a helmet of metal mesh. This Kelly rapidly adjusted over my head. The only explanation that I can find for my submitting so tamely to all this is that Spooky Byrne must have possessed hypnotic powers.

Anyhow, I sat in that chair, which was comfortable enough. I watched Kelly fussing around with the Mannschenn Drive controls while Byrne did things to his own console—which looked more like an aquarium in which luminous, insubstantial, formless fish were swimming than anything else. The drive rotors started to turn, to spin, to precess. I wanted to close my eyes; after all, it is dinned into us from boyhood up never to look directly at the Mannshchenn Drive in operation. I wanted to close my eyes, but couldn’t. I watched those blasted, shimmering wheels spinning, tumbling, fading, always on the verge of invisibility but ever pulsatingly a-glimmer. . . .

I listened to the familiar thin, high whine of the machine. . . .

That sound persisted; otherwise the experience was like watching one of those ancient silent films in an entertainments museum. There was no other noise, although that of the Drive unit could almost have come from an archaic projector. There were no smells, no sensations. There were just pictures, mostly out of focus and with the colors not quite right. But I saw Kelly—the here-and-now Kelly, not his villainous ancestor—recognizable in spite of the full beard that he was wearing, in some sort of sumptuous regalia, a golden crown in which emeralds gleamed set on his head. And there was Byrne, more soberly but still richly attired, reminding me somehow of the legendary wizard Merlin who was the power behind King Arthur’s throne. And there were glimpses of a flag, a glowing green banner with a golden harp in the upper canton, the stars of the Southern Cross, also in gold, on the fly. And I saw myself. It was me, all right. I was wearing a green uniform with gold braid up to the elbows. The badge on my cap, with its bullion-encrusted peak, was a golden crown over a winged, golden harp. . . .

The lights went out, came on again. I was sitting in the chair looking at the motionless machine, at Kelly and Byrne, who were looking at me.

Kelly said, “There are crucial points in history. The ‘ifs’ of history.
If
Napoleon had accepted Fulton’s offer of steamships . . . just imagine a squadron of steam frigates at Trafalgar!
If
Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg had been successful . . .
If
Admiral Torrance had met the Waverley Navy head on off New Dunedine instead of despatching his forces in a fruitless chase of Commodore McWhirter and his raiding squadron.