Read Upon a Sea of Stars Online
Authors: A. Bertram Chandler
Upon a Sea of Stars (10 page)
Grimes read aloud the heading of the first page:
“TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN . . .
“IF AND WHEN . . .
“WHEN AND IF . . .
“IF EVER.”
It was gallows humor, and it was not very funny.
Chapter 18
“JUST POSSIBLY
(Grimes read) somebody, somewhere, may stumble upon us. When we pushed off from Earth there was talk of an interstellar drive that would enable ships to take short cuts through sub-Space. I suppose that it’s sub-Space that we’re in now. But I don’t know how we got here, and I don’t know how we can get out. If I did know I would not have sanctioned the use of the Euthanol—and how was I to know that all but one of the containers had leaked?—and, in the case of the Gallaghers, the Nakamuras and ourselves, the rather messy substitutes. We could have finished our watch, of course, and then awakened Captain Mitchell and
his
staff so that they could have returned us to the state of suspended animation—but we talked it over and we decided against it. Our dreams, during our long sleep, our long watch below, would not have been happy ones. All the others are dreaming happily of the lives that they will lead on the new world to which we are bound, the lives of which their rationed vacations in Earth’s fast dwindling Nature Reserves were brief forecasts. But our dreams, now, would be full of anxiety, of cold and loneliness, of the black emptiness into which we have fallen.
“But how?
“How?
“It’s the odd flotsam that we’ve sighted, from time to time, that has made up our minds. What laws of motion are valid in this Limbo we do not know. Perhaps there are no laws. But, appearing from nowhere, there was that corpse that orbited for some hours about the control sphere. It was that of a man. He was wearing archaic clothing: a gray top hat, a stock and cravat, a frock coat. Mary Gallagher, whose hobby is—
was
, I should say—history, said that his dress was that of the early Nineteenth Century. And then there was an aircraft, a flimsy affair of fabric and stays and struts. Centuries ago they must have fallen here—they and the other briefly glimpsed men and women, and a surface ship from the days of steam on Earth’s seas, and a clumsy looking rocket (not that we can talk!) bearing on its side characters that bore no resemblance to any Earthly alphabet.
“But I feel that my time is running out. All the others are dead. Sarah asked me to dispose of her, giving as her reason her nervousness with firearms. But the others are dead. The Browns were lucky—when I dealt the cards she got the ace of spades, and with it the only intact bulb of Euthanol. The rest of us could have shared the pistol, but Nakamura preferred something more traditional (although, at the end, he didn’t use the knife in a traditional way) and Gallagher was an engineer to the end. But my time is running out. When I have finished this I shall shut down the machinery and then come back here to use the pistol on myself.
“So here is the story—such as it is. If whoever finds it—and I feel that it will be some castaway like ourselves—can read it, it might be of value.
“Fully manned, provisioned and equipped, with a full load of passengers, we broke away from orbit on January 3, 2005. (Full details will be found in the Log Books.) Once we were on the trajectory for Sirius XIV, watches were set. First Captain Mitchell, as senior officer, did the first year, so that he and his staff could make any necessary minor adjustments. The rest of us, after the period of preparation, went into the Deep Freeze. First Captain Mitchell was succeeded by Second Captain von Spiedel, and he was succeeded by Third Captain Geary. So it went on. It was a routine voyage, as much as any interstellar voyage is routine.
“We relieved Captain Cleary and his people.
“There was a period of three weeks, as measured by the chronometer, during which we were able to mingle socially with our predecessors, whilst Pamela Brown, in her capacity as Medical Officer, worked with Brian Kent, Cleary’s M.O., to restore us to full wakefulness and to prepare the others for their long sleep. And then, after Cleary and his team had been tucked away, we were able to get ourselves organized. The control room watches, of course, were no more than a sinecure. Routine observations were taken and told us that we were exactly on course and that our speed of advance was as predicted. The last observation, made at 1200 hours on the day that it happened, gave our position as 1.43754 Light Years out from Earth, and our velocity as 300 m.p.s. Full details are in the Log Book.
“That night—we divided our time, of course, into twenty-four hour periods—all off-duty personnel were gathered in the wardroom. There was the usual rubber of bridge in progress, and the playmaster was providing light background music. Nakamura and Mary Gallagher were engaged in their habitual game of chess. Brown had the watch and his wife was keeping him company. It was typical, we all thought, of a quiet evening in Deep Space. Those of us who were on duty were keeping the machines running, those of us off duty were relaxing in our various ways.
“So the sudden ringing of the alarm bells was especially shocking.
“I was first in the control room, but only by a very short head. There was no need for Brown to tell us what was wrong; it was glaringly obvious. No, not
glaringly
obvious. It was the absence of glare, of light of any kind, that hit us like a blow. Outside the viewports there was only a featureless blackness.
“We thought at first that we had run into a cloud of opaque dust or gas, but we soon realized that this hypothesis was untenable. Until the very moment of black-out, Brown told us, the stars ahead had been shining with their usual brilliance, as had been the stars all around the ship. Furthermore, one cannot proceed through a cloud of dust or gas, however tenuous, at a speed of 300 m.p.s. without an appreciable rise in skin temperature. An appreciable rise? By this time the shell plating would have been incandescent and all of us incincerated.
“I’ll not bore you, whoever you are (if there ever is anybody) with a full account of all that we did, of all that we tried, of all the theories that we discussed. Brown stuck to his story. At one microsecond the viewports had framed the blazing hosts of Heaven, at the next there had been nothing there but the unrelieved blackness. We thought that we might be able to learn something from the radio, but it was dead, utterly dead. We disassembled every receiver and transmitter in the control sphere, checked every component, reassembled. And still the radio was dead. There were no longer the faint signals coming in from Earth and from other interstellar ships. There were no longer the signals emanating from those vast broadcasting stations that are the stars.
“But there were no stars.
“There are no stars any more.
“And then, over the weeks, there were the—apparitions?
“No. Not apparitions. They were real enough. Solid. Brown and Nakamura took one of the tenders out, and ran right alongside an ocean-going ship out of Earth’s past. Her name was
Anglo-Australian
, and on her funnel was a black swan on a yellow field. They were wearing their spacesuits, so they were able to board her. They found—but could it have been otherwise?—that all of her crew was dead. There were no entries in the Log Book to account for what had happened to her. As in our case, it must have been sudden.
“There was the flotsam—the bodies, some clothed in the fashions of bygone centuries, some not clothed at all. The sea-going ships and the aircraft—and some of them could have come from Earth. There was the huge affair that consisted of a long fuselage slung under what must have been an elongated balloon—but the balloon had burst—with a crew of insects not unlike giant bees. There was that other construction—a relatively small hull suspended amid a complexity of huge sails. We never found out who or what had manned her; as soon as we turned our searchlights on her she vanished into the distance. A sailing ship of Deep Space she must have been—and we, unwittingly, provided the photon gale that drove her out of our ken.
“And we worked.
“But there was no starting point. We had fallen somehow into sub-Space—as had all those others—but how?
How?
“We worked, and then there were weeks of alcoholic, sexual debauch, a reaction from our days of wearisome, meaningless calculation and discussion. And when, sated, we returned to sobriety we were able to face the facts squarely. We were lost, and we did not possess the knowledge to find our way out of this desert of utter nothingness. We considered calling the other watches—and then, in the end, decided against it. They were happy in their sleep, with their dreams—but we, we knew, could never be happy. We knew too much—and too little—and our dreams would be long, long experiences of tortured anxiety. We could see no faintest gleam of hope.
“And so we have taken the only way out.
“But you, whoever you are (if there ever is anybody) will be able to help.
“The other watches are sleeping in their own compartments in the northern hemisphere of the main globe. The waking process is entirely automatic. Give First Captain Mitchell my best wishes and my apologies, and tell him that I hope he understands.
“John Carradine,
Fourth Captain.”
Chapter 19
THEY LEFT THE CONTROL SPHERE
then, and made their way through an airlock to the tube that connected it with the large globe that was the main body of the ship. They found themselves in a cylindrical space with a domed deck head, in the center of which was the hatch through which they had entered. In the center of the deck there was a similar hatch.
There were doors equally spaced around the inside surface of the cylinder. All of them were labeled, having stenciled upon them names as well as rank “First Captain Mitchell . . .” read Sonya Verrill. “Chief Officer Alvarez . . . Second Officer Mainbridge . . . Third Officer Hannahan . . . Bio-Technician Mitchell . . .” She paused, then said, “I suppose that a husband-wife set-up is the best way of manning a ship like this . . .”
Grimes slid the door aside.
The helmet lanterns threw their beams onto eight tanks—a tier of four, and another tier of four. They looked, thought the Commodore, like glass coffins, and the people inside them like corpses.
(But corpses don’t dream.)
Four of the tanks held men, four held women. All of them were naked. All of them seemed to be in first-class physical condition. Mitchell—his name was on a metal tag screwed to the frame of his tank—was a rugged man, not young but heavily muscled, robust. He did not need a uniform as a professional identification. Even in repose, even in the repose that was almost death, he looked like a master of men and machines, a man of action with the training and intelligence to handle efficiently both great masses of complex apparatus and the mere humans that operated it.
Grimes looked at him, ignoring the other sleepers. He wondered if Mitchell were the fisherman whose pleasant dreams were being spoiled by the sense of anxiety, of urgency. It could be so. It probably was so. Mitchell had been overdue to be called for his watch for a matter of centuries, and his was the overall responsibility for the huge ship and her cargo of human lives.
Todhunter was speaking. There was a certain disappointment in his voice. “I don’t have to do anything. I’ve been reading the instructions, such as they are. Everything is fully automated.”
“All right, Doctor. You can press the button. I only want First Captain Mitchell awakened.” He added softly, “After all, this is his ship. . . .”
“I’ve pressed the button,” grumbled Todhunter. “And nothing has happened.”
McHenry laughed. “Of course not. The dead Captain in the control sphere, in the wardroom, said that he’d shut down all the machinery.”
“As I recall it,” said Grimes, “these things were powered by a small reactor. It will be right aft, in the machinery sphere. Carradine was able to shut down by remote control, but we won’t be able to restart the same way. The batteries must be dead.”
“As long as the Pile is not,” contributed McHenry.
“If it is, we shall send for power packs from the
Quest
. But I hope it’s not.”
So they left Mitchell and his staff in their deep, frozen sleep and made their way aft, through deck after deck of the glass coffins, the tanks of the motionless dreamers. Jones paused to look at a beautiful girl who seemed to be suspended in a web of her own golden hair, and murmured something about the Sleeping Beauty. Before Grimes could issue a mild reprimand to the officer, McHenry pushed him from behind, growling “Get a move on! You’re no Prince Charming!”
And Grimes, hearing the words, asked himself,
Have we the right to play at being Prince Charming? But the decision is not ours to make. It must rest with Mitchell . . .
Then there was the airlocked tube leading to the machinery sphere, and there were the pumps and the generators that, said McHenry, must have come out of Noah’s Ark. “But this
is
an Ark,” said Jones. “That last deck was the storage for the deep-frozen, fertilized ova of all sorts of domestic animals. . . .”
There were the pumps, and the generators and then, in its own heavily shielded compartment, the Reactor Pile. McHenry consulted the counter he had brought with him. He grunted, “She’ll do.”
Unarmored, the people from
Faraway Quest
could not have survived in the Pile Room—or would not have survived for long after leaving it. But their spacesuits gave protection against radiation as well as against heat and cold and vacuum, and working with bad-tempered efficiency (some of the dampers resisted withdrawal and were subjected to the engineer’s picturesque cursing) McHenry got the Pile functioning.
Suddenly the compartment was filled with an opaque mist, a fog that slowly cleared. With the return of heat the frozen air had thawed, had vaporized, although the carbon dioxide and water were still reluctant to abandon their solid state.
McHenry gave the orders—he was the Reaction Drive specialist, and as such was in charge, aboard his own ship, of all auxiliary machinery. McHenry gave the orders and Calhoun, assisted by the second Mate, carried them out. There were gauges and meters to watch and, finally, valves to open. Cooling fluid flashed into steam, and was bled carefully, carefully into piping that had been far too cold for far too long a time. And then hesitantly, complainingly, the first turbine was starting to turn, slowly, then faster and faster, and the throbbing whine of it was audible through their helmet diaphragms. Leaping from position to position like an armored monkey, McHenry tended his valves and then pounced on the switchboard.
Flickering at first, then shining with a steady brilliance, the lights came on.
They hurried back through the dormitory sphere to the compartment in which First Captain Mitchell and his staff were sleeping. There Todhunter took charge. He slid shut the door through which they had entered and then pulled another door into place, a heavier one with a thick gasket and dogs all around its frame. He borrowed a hammer from McHenry to drive these into place.
Grimes watched with interest. Obviously the Surgeon knew what he was doing, had studied at some time the history of the “deep freeze” colonization ships, probably one written from a medical viewpoint. He remarked, “I can see the necessity for isolating this compartment, but what was that button you pressed when we first came in here? I thought that it was supposed to initiate the awakening process.”
Todhunter laughed. “That was just the light switch, sir. But once we’ve got over these few preliminaries everything will be automatic. But, to begin with, I have to isolate the other bodies. Each tank, as you see, is equipped with its own refrigeration unit, although this transparent material is a highly efficient insulation. Even so, it will be as well to follow the instructions to the letter.” He paused to consult the big, framed notice on the bulkhead, then went to a control console and pressed seven of a set of eight buttons. On seven of the eight coffins a green light glowed. “Now . . . heat.” Another button was pressed, and the frost and ice in the wedge-shaped compartment began to boil.
When the fog had cleared, the Surgeon muttered, “So far, so good.” He studied the tank in which lay the body of First Captain Mitchell, put out a tentative hand to touch lightly the complexity of wiring and fine piping that ran from its sides and base. He said, “You will have noticed, of course, that the arrangements here are far more elaborate than those in the main dormitory decks. When the passengers are awakened, they will be awakened
en masse
. . .”
“Get on with it, Doctor!” snapped Sonya Verrill.
“These things cannot be hurried, Commander. There is a thermostatic control, and until the correct temperature is reached the revivification process cannot proceed.” He gestured towards a bulkhead thermometer. “But it should not be long now.”
Suddenly—there was the whine of some concealed machinery starting, and the stout body of the First Captain was hidden from view as the interior of his tank filled with an opaque, swirling gas, almost a liquid, that quite suddenly dissipated. It was replaced by a clear amber fluid that completely covered the body, that slowly lost its transparency as the pneumatic padding upon which Mitchell lay expanded and contracted rhythmically, imparting a gentle agitation to the frame of the big man. The massage continued while the fluid was flushed away and renewed, this process repeated several times.
At last it was over.
The lid of the coffin lifted and the man in the tank stretched slowly and luxuriously, yawned hugely.
He murmured in a pleasant baritone, “You know, I’ve been having the
oddest
dreams . . . I thought that I hadn’t been called, and that I’d overslept a couple or three centuries. . . .” His eyes opened, and he stared at the spacesuited figures in the compartment.
“Who are you?”