Rendezvous on A Lost World Page 2

  Alan looked at me, raised his eyebrows. "Sound the general alarm, George," he ordered. He put down the telephone, picked up the public address system microphone. He waited until I had released my pressure on the alarm button, until the bells had ceased, then said quietly, "Your attention, please. This is the Chief Officer speaking. All hands are to evacuate ships immediately. All hands to evacuate ship. That is all." He turned to me, said, "That means us as well, George."

  "What do you think it is, Alan?"

  "Probably purple pirates from the next galaxy but three. They'll be after my hundred grand. I told you that I just can't win."

  We scrambled down the short ladder from Control to the officers' flat, waited a few seconds for the cage of "the little elevator to climb to us up the axial shaft, then dropped swiftly down to the after airlock, joining those few of our shipmates who, spending a quiet evening aboard, had been aroused by the alarm and by Alan's order to get out of the ship.

  One of them, old Jim Larsen, asked, "What is it, Alan?"

  "I wish I knew," Kemp told him. "There seems to be some kind of unidentified spacecraft coming in like a bat out of hell, and the Port Captain's scared that she'll come a right royal gutser, so he wants us out of the ship and well clear of the apron when she hits."

  "Talking of bats out of hell," remarked old Jim quietly.

  The ground car that had roared through the spaceport gates braked to a skidding, screaming halt. The Old Man jumped out of the vehicle, that he had been driving himself, walked quickly to where we were standing.

  "Mr. Kemp! What's going on here?"

  "Unidentified, unscheduled ship coming in for a landing. Orders from the Port Captain to get all hands away from the apron in case of a crash."

  "Then what are you still hanging around here for?"

  "We owe a certain responsibility to Rimhound, sir."

  The Old Man smiled briefly. "So we do, Mr. Kemp. I feel that we should not stray too far from the ship until we know just what is happening."

  "We should have seen and heard rocket drive by now," said somebody.

  We heard the noise then, a low humming, a vibration rather than a sound, that seemed to be coming from above and from the north. We stared in that direction and saw, just before the field floodlights came on and dazzled us, something that was bathed in an eerie blue glow, something that expanded rapidly, with every passing second.

  "Aliens?" whispered the Captain.

  "No." Old Jim's voice held assurance. "No, Captain, but that's a sight that I thought I'd never see again in my lifetime, a sound that I thought I'd never hear again."

  "But what is it, man?"

  "A gaussjammer. The last of the gaussjammers, it must be. A starship with the Ehrenhaft Drive."

  She came in fast, almost out of control, in what was, in effect, a shallow dive. She barely cleared the upthrusting spire that was Rimhound's prow. The wind of her passage set the old ship rocking on her vanes and almost swept us off our feet. She struck the concrete in midfield, the shape of her obscured by a fountain of ruddy sparks. To the shrieking of tortured metal she rushed on, until it seemed that she must crash into and wreck the Control Tower. Miraculously she slowed and stopped, but not before she had plowed up the ornamental lawn and shrubbery at the base of the administration buildings.

  The arrival of the scurrying crashwagons, with their flashing red lights and wailing sirens, was something of an anticlimax.

  We walked slowly towards the near-wreck, looking curiously at the deep, ragged furrow gouged out of the concrete. For some obscure reason I, at least, was more interested in the damage than in the machine that had caused it. I didn't look at the strange ship until we were almost up to her.

  She was an odd-looking brute, her hull form conical, with the twisted remains of tripod 4anding gear around the sharp end of the cone. The other end, the base, although, obviously, it was the stem of the ship, was a shallow dome rather than a flat surface and was broken by large, circular observation ports. There was dim lighting inside the control room and we could see movement. And then, briefly, there was a pale face pressed against the transparency from within.

  So the strangers were human.

  "Keep back!" somebody was saying in an authoritative voice. I saw that it was Baines, the Port Captain. "Keep back, you people. My rescue squad will be able to handle this."

  "Perhaps I can help," suggested Jim Larsen.

  "If I require any assistance I'll let you know," snapped Baines.

  "Do you know what sort of ship this is?" persisted old Jim.

  "Obviously something new and experimental," said Baines impatiently. "Please don't waste any more of my time."

  "She's not new, Captain Baines. She's old. She's a gaussjammer, and I've served in the things. She's on her side now, and the airlock door is jammed. You'll have to roll her to get it clear."

  "Are you sure?" demanded Baines.

  "I'm sure."

  In spite of his impatience Baines was willing to listen to reason, ready to make fresh decisions. It was for only a second or so that he stared at old Tim, then he called the chief of the rescue squad to his side. "Mr. Larsen knows this class of ship. Take orders from him, Harris."

  Harris did, setting up jacks and then, after they had done their work, parbuckling gear to Jim's instructions. Although the ship was small, little more than a yacht, she was amazingly heavy. Robust she must have been, we knew, to have survived her rough landing in such apparently good shape.

  I remarked upon the excessive weight of her to Jim as the creaking tackles of the parbuckle were slowly turning her about her longitudinal axis.

  "It's the soft iron." he told me: "Those ships used soft iron for almost everything. Thev had to." He broke off to shout instructions to the winch drivers. "Easy, there! Easy! There are people inside this thing, and some of them may be injured!"

  Gradually the hair-thin circle of the airlock came into view, lifting clear of the heaped earth of the ruined garden. Larsen stepped forward, rapped smartly on the hull with a spanner. Answering raps sounded from inside.

  Slowly, on creaking hinges, the door opened.

  The man who emerged from the airlock was bleeding from a gash on his pale forehead, but, otherwise, seemed uninjured. He was in uniform, an elaborate rig of blue and gold with wide bands of gleaming braid on the sleeves, with massive, ornate epaulets. He looked at us as curiously as we were looking at him, seemed to find our simple shorts and shirts lacking in dignity. His attention wavered between our Old Man, Captain Williams, and Captain Baines, each of whom wore on his shoulder boards the four gold bars of astronautical authority. He asked at last, with an unidentifiable accent, "Who is in charge here?"

  "I am the Port Captain," said Baines.

  "I, sir, am Admiral O'Hara of the Space Navy of Londonderry. Some of my people were injured in the landing. I request that you afford medical and hospital facilities."

  "My rescue squad and ambulance men are standing by, Admiral. May thev enter your ship?"

  "They may." O'Hara turned to a less elaborately uniformed officer standing inside the airlock. "Commander Moore, will you see to the casualties? These men wish to bring their stretcher parties into the vessel." He pivoted to face Baines again, a petulant frown on his heavy face. "Port Captain, I wish to make a serious complaint."

  "Yes, Admiral?"

  "I homed on your beacon, sir, only to find that your spaceport is situated nearer to your magnetic equator than to your magnetic pole. Surely, sir, it is obvious that any vessel obliged to make a landing in a locality where horizontal force is well in excess of vertical force will be, at least, seri-ouslv discommoded."

  "Too right," agreed Larsen.

  The admiral and the two captains glared at him, then Baines, breaking the short silence, addressed O'Hara. "Are all your ships like this one, Admiral?"

  "Of course, Port Captain. How else would one design and build an interstellar ship?"

  "I am told," Baines continued cautiously, "that this vessel of yours is a gaussjammer."

  "That is, I believe, the slang name for starships."

  "Furthermore, this is the first gaussjammer that I have seen, although I have read about them in astronautical histories." He was warming up now. "Furthermore, I have never heard of, until this moment, the Republic or Kingdom or whatever it is of Londonderry, although I hope, most sincerely, that it will be able to foot the bill for the damage to my spaceport. Furthermore—"

  He was interrupted by O'Hara's officer who, approaching the admiral, saluted smartly and reported, "All casualties out of the ship, sir."

  "Thank you, Commander." O'Hara, turning again to Baines, seemed to have lost a little of his aggressiveness. "You were saying, Port Captain?"

  "I suggest, sir," said Baines coldly, "that any further discussions take place in private. Will you accompany me to my office? And you, Captain Williams, if you will be so good. And your Chief Officer." He paused. "Yes, and Mr. Larsen. It will be as well to have somebody who knows something about this Ehrenhaft Drive along."

  It was late when the Old Man, Kemp and Larsen returned to the Rimhound. 't

  Captain Williams went straight to his quarters, Kemp and Larsen found me in my cabin where, with Dudley Hill, I was discussing the night's events.

  "I'd like to be able to have a look round that thing," Dudley was saying. "It's bloody absurd the way that they're keeping an armed guard posted at the airlock."

  "The bold Third Mate might get his wish yet," said Alan.

  We looked up, saw the two of them standing in the doorway.

  "You're back," I said, not very brightly.

  "A blinding glimpse of the obvious, George. If you ask us and pour us a drink—I didn't go much on the Port Captain's whisky—we'll tell you all about
it."

  "All right. Come in. Sit down. Here's the bottle. Here are glasses. Now talk."

  Kemp relaxed as far as relaxation was possible in the inadequate folding chair, but I could see that under his assumed ease of manner he was tense, excited.

  He said, "It was quite a session in Baines' office. Once we got that so called Admiral primed on rotgut all we had to do was to sit back and listen. Fascinating it was. Straight from the pages of a historical novel.

  "As you must already have guessed^ this Londonderry of his is one of the Lost Colonies. You know the story of them, of course. Way back in the good old days of the First Expansion a gaussjammer runs into a magnetic storm and is flung away to hell and gone off trajectory with, as like as not, a dead pile and no power for the flywheel and the Ehrenhaft jennies. Nobody has a clue as to where she is, but they start up the emergency diesels, get the Ehrenhalf Drive working after a fashion and carry on until they stumble upon a habitable planet, if they're lucky. If they aren't…"

  "I wish," I said, "that I had a dollar for every Lost Colony novel I've read, for every Lost Colony movie I've seen." Alan glared at me and growled, "Oh, all right. Anyhow, there was this hods Deny, a big migrant ship, commanded by one Captain O'Hara. She was bound from Earth to At-lantia, and the magnetic storm threw her off the tramlines when she was in the vicinity of Procyon. When her crew got things more or less under control again she was hopelessly lost.

  So they started up their diesels, hoped that supplies would hold out (the internal combustion engines, of course, burn hydrocarbons that, otherwise, would be used for food) and went planet hunting. You know that sector between Bellamy's Cluster and the Empire of Weaverley that's supposed to be antimatter? Well, it's not, not all of it. Lode Derry's people were lucky enough to find a small family of half a dozen suns, each with attendant planets, of normal matter.

  "They made a landing on one of the planets. They sweated and slaved, and bred enthusiastically, and in only a couple or three generations had achieved quite a fair technological civilization. There was a bit of luck about it; apart from anything else, the ship carried, as part of her cargo, a Thor-waldsen Incubator complete, so it was possible easily to build up population to the minimal figure, and beyond. Too, as a migrant ship she had carried a large number of skilled craftsmen and technicians.

  "They worked hard, and they multiplied, and they expanded. They built ships—and the Ehrenhaft Drive, of course, was the only interstellar drive of which they knew— ships that were modeled upon, although they were much smaller, Lode Deny. (They don't seem to have been a very inventive people.) They colonized the other planets, the worlds revolving around the other suns of their tiny cluster. "They learned by bitter and expensive experience, that they were marooned on a little island in the middle of a vast sea of antimatter. How far this sea extended they did not know. They might even, they thought, have been flung clear out of this galaxy into another one. So they settled down, made the best of things. And then a magnetic storm threw O'Hara and his Lode Lady out and clear."

  "This Admiral business…" the Third Mate started to say.

  "Oh, that. It's a hereditary rank, apparently. The first O'Hara—Captain O'Hara—sort of promoted himself when he became boss cocky of the colony. His descendants hold the title, and the honor and glory, without much power to go with it. The general idea is to give them a little ship and to let them play happily by themselves in some quiet corner. O'Hara isn't much of a spaceman and his crew are playboys like himself. O'Hara doesn't mind if he never sees Londonderry again and has already appointed himself Ambassador at Large to the rest of the galaxy. O'Hara will be happy to do any further space traveling as a passenger."

  "Where will he get the money to pay his fares?" I asked, the Purser in me coming to the surface.

  "Once he gets to the Center," said Alan, "he'll be sitting pretty. It's a long time since a Lost Colony was found, so he'll get the full prodigal son treatment."

  "He has to get to the Center first," I said. "And it's an expensive business. And he has to live while he's on Elsinore.

  And the Elsinorians aren't notorious for either hospitality or generosity."

  "He can sell his ship," said Alan.

  "To whom? She might be of some value as a museum piece, but Elsinore doesn't run to an astronautical museum."

  "To me," said Alan quietly.

  "To you? But you don't know the first thing about her."

  "I'll remind you that I hold a Master Astronaut Certificate."

  "But that covers Mannschenn Drive and rockets, not some crazy, obsolete system of induced magnetism and flywheels."

  "I already have a Chief Engineer to handle that side of it," he stated, nodding toward old Jim, who grinned in acknowledgment. "As for the navigation, if an unspaceman-like clod like O'Hara can cope, I can."

  "But O'Hara didn't cope. That's how he finished up here."

  "Magnetic storms are almost unknown on the Rim."

  "Almost. And, in any case, the Old Man will never release you."

  "He will, George, as long as I can supply substitutes. That shouldn't be hard. On every planet there are ex-spacemen who're crazy enough to feel the urge to make just one more trip."

  "Substitutes? With an s? Plural?"

  "You heard me. There'll be an engineer to replace old Jim, of course, and a new Second-Mate—Petersen will be moving up one to take my place. And a new Third Mate."

  "But I shall be the new Second Mate," Dudley pointed out in a pained voice. "There'll be a row if I'm not."

  "I was hoping," Alan told him, "that you'd be coming with me as Mate. No salary, of course, but shares…"

  "I rather think," said the Third, a slow smile spreading over his boyish features, "that you've talked me into it. You know, I was getting just a little bored with Rim Runners."

  "And I'd rather like a Purser," Alan went on. "Preferably one who knows all the Agents and shippers along the Rim and the Eastern Circuit."

  "All right," I said resignedlv. "One of the clerks in the Agent's office here wants to shin out as Purser. But, before we burn too many boats and count too many chickens before they're hatched—will O'Hara sell?"

  "He'll sell all right. The only thing that worries me is that he wants too damn much for that antique of his. There'll have to be something left over for repairs and modifications."

  "And," I added, "palm greasing."

  Chapter 4

  Palm greasing there was.

  As a Purser of long standing I thought that I knew all that there was to be known about that ancient and not-so-honorable art. As a shipowner—like the others, I was being paid in shares of the enterprise—I soon discovered that I didn't know the half of it. It was the certificates of clearance and spaceworthiness that were the most expensive, especially since, insofar-as the astronautical regulations of Elsinore were concerned, there was no legal recognition of the Ehrenhaft Drive.

  Lloyd's, by the way, never did get around to affording us coverage. They knew all about the Ehrenhaft Drive, it having been high on their black list for years. Furthermore, only starships with Mannschenn Drive can be fitted with the Carlotti communication and position-finding equipment; time-twisting radio devices are useless unless the vessel carrying them can be maintained in phase. So, not unreasonably, the underwriters considered that we, out of touch with the galaxy whilst en route and unable to avail ourselves of the latest navigational aids, would be altogether too heavy a risk.

  But before there were all these troublesome details to worry us there were the formalities of the sale to conclude. We had cause to bless the currency regulations of Elsinore; had O'Hara been able to take his money with him when he left the planet he would, it is certain, have stuck out for a far higher price. As it was, he was able to buy a small hotel on the outskirts of Port Fortinbras with what was left over after the passages of himself and his entourage to Earth had been booked.

  His aide, Commander Moore, who had had Space in a big way, even as a passenger, was installed there as manager, the idea being that the place would be a home for the so-called Admiral in the unlikely event of his returning to this sector of the galaxy.

  Frankly, I rather envied the Commander and told Alan that if he had any sense at all he would have done the same, bringing Veronica to Elsinore to help run the establishment. I told him I would willingly have served as barman. But he refused to listen to reason. His dream was coming true, and his dream belonged to the black emptiness between the stars, not to the warmth and light and comfort of any planetary surface.