Contraband From Otherspace Page 3

  "S.O.P., Skipper. It's more convenient if the people in the towed ship can see where they're going."

  "But it doesn't look as though there are any people. Not live ones, that is."

  "But we could be putting a prize crew aboard her, Skipper."

  Grimes thought about saying something about the radio-activity, then decided not to bother.

  "You just can't win, John," Sonya told him.

  VI

  In theory one can perform heavy work while clad in radiation armor. One can do so in practice—provided that one has been through a rigorous course of training. Pendeen, Second Engineer of Rim Mamelute, had been so trained. So, of course, had been Mr. Williams—but Grimes had insisted that the Mate stay aboard the tug while he, with Sonya and the engineer, effected an entry into the hull of the derelict. Soon, while the boarding party was making its exploratory walk over the stranger ship's shell plating, he had been obliged to order Williams to cut the drive; sufficient velocity had been built up so that both vessels were now in Free Fall away from the sun.

  Even in Free Fall it was bad enough. Every joint of the heavy suit was stiff, every limb had so much mass that great physical effort was required to conquer inertia. Weary and sweating heavily, Grimes forced himself to keep up with his two companions, by a great effort of will contrived to maintain his side of the conversation in a voice that did not betray his poor physical condition—

  He was greatly relieved when they discovered, towards the stern, what was obviously an airlock door. Just a hair-thin crack in the plating it was, outlining a circular port roughly seven feet in diameter. There were no signs of external controls, and the crack was too thin to allow the insertion of any tool.

  "Send for the bell, sir?" asked Pendeen, his normally deep voice an odd treble in Grimes' helmet phones.

  "The bell? Yes, yes. Of course. Carry on, Mr. Pendeen."

  "Al to Bill," Grimes heard. "Do you read me? Over."

  "Bill to Al. Loud an' clear. What can I do for you?"

  "We've found the airlock. But we want the bell."

  "You would. Just stick around. It'll be over."

  "And send the cutting gear while you're about it."

  "Will do. Stand by."

  "Had any experience with the Laverton Bell, sir?" asked Pendeen, his voice not as respectful as it might have been.

  "No. No actual working experience, that is."

  "I have," said Sonya.

  "Good. Then you'll know what to do when we get it."

  Grimes, looking towards Rim Mamelute, could see that something bulky was coming slowly towards them along one of the tow wires, the rocket that had given the packet its initial thrust long since burned out. He followed the others towards the stem of the derelict, but stood to one side, held to the plating by the magnetic soles of his boots, as they unclipped the bundle from the line. He would have helped them to carry it back aft, but they ignored him.

  Back at the airlock valve, Sonya and Pendeen worked swiftly and competently, releasing the fastenings, unfolding what looked like a tent of tough white plastic. This had formed the wrapper for other things—including a gas bottle, a laser torch and a thick tube of adhesive. Without waiting for instructions Sonya took this latter, removed the screw cap and, working on her hands and knees, used it to describe a glistening line just outside the crack that marked the door. Then all three of them, standing in the middle of the circle, lifted the fabric above their heads, unfolding it as they did so. Finally, with Grimes and Pendeen acting as tent poles, Sonya neatly fitted the edge of the shaped canopy to the ring of adhesive, now and again adding a further gob of the substance from the tube.

  "Stay as you are, sir," the engineer said to Grimes, then fell to a squatting position. His gloved hands went to the gas cylinder, to the valve wheel. A white cloud jetted out like a rocket exhaust, then faded to invisibility. Around the boarding party the walls of the tent bellied outwards, slowly tautened, distended to their true shape by the expanding helium. Only towards the end was the hiss of the escaping gas very faintly audible.

  Pendeen shut the valve decisively, saying, "That's that. Is she all tight, Sonya?"

  "All tight, Al," she replied.

  "Good." With a greasy crayon he drew a circle roughly in the center of the airlock door, one large enough to admit a spacesuited body. He picked up the laser torch, directed its beam downwards, thumbed the firing button. The flare of vaporizing metal was painfully bright, outshining the helmet lights, reflected harshly from the white inner surface of the plastic igloo. There was the illusion of suffocating heat—or was it more than only an illusion? Pendeen switched off the torch and straightened, looking down at the annulus of still-glowing metal. With an effort he lifted his right foot, breaking the contact of the magnetized sole with the plating. He brought the heel down sharply. The clang, transmitted through the fabric of their armor, was felt rather than heard by the others.

  And then the circular plate was falling slowly, into the darkness of the airlock chamber, and the rough manhole was open so that they could enter.

  * * *

  Grimes was first into the alien ship, followed by Sonya and then Pendeen. It was light enough in the little compartment once they were into it, the beams of their helmet lights reflected from the white-painted walls. On the inner door there was a set of manual controls that worked—once Grimes realized that the spindle of the wheel had a left handed thread. Beyond the inner door there was an alleyway, and standing there was a man.

  The Commodore whipped the pistol from his holster, his reflexes more than compensating for the stiffness of the joints of his suit. Then, slowly, he returned the weapon to his belt. This man was dead. Radiation may have killed him, but it had not killed all the bacteria of decay present in his body. Some freak of inertial and centrifugal forces, coming into play when the derelict had been taken in tow, had flung him to a standing posture, and the magnetic soles of his rough sandals—Grimes could see the gleam of metal—had held him to the deck.

  So he was dead, and he was decomposing, his skin taut and darkly purple, bulging over the waistband of the loincloth—it looked like sacking—that was his only clothing. He was dead—and Grimes was suddenly grateful for the sealed suit that he was wearing, the suit that earlier he had been cursing, that kept out the stench of him.

  Gently, with pity and pointless tenderness, he put his gloved hands to the waist of the corpse, lifted it free of the deck, shifted it to one side.

  "We must be just above engineroom level," said Sonya, her voice deliberately casual.

  "Yes," agreed Grimes. "I wonder if this ship has an axial shaft. If she has, it will be the quickest way of getting to the control room."

  "That will be the best place to start investigations," she said.

  They moved on through the alleyway, using the Free Fall shuffle that was second nature to all of them, letting the homing instinct that is part of the nature of all spacemen guide them. They found more bodies, women as well as men, sprawled in untidy attitudes, hanging like monstrous mermen and merwomen in a submarine cave. They tried to ignore them, as they tried to ignore the smaller bodies, those of children, and came at last, at the end of a short, radial alleyway, to the stout pillar of the axial shaft.

  There was a door in the pillar, and it was open, and one by one they passed through it and then began pulling themselves forward along the central guide rod, ignoring the spiral ramp that lined the tunnel. Finally they came to a conventional enough hatchway, but the valve sealing the end of the shaft was jammed. Grimes and Sonya fell back to let Pendeen use the laser torch. Then they followed him into the control room.

  VII

  There were more bodies in the control room. There were three dead men and three dead women, all of them strapped into acceleration chairs. Like all the others scattered throughout the ship they were clad only in rough, scanty rags, were swollen with decomposition.

  Grimes forced himself to ignore them. He could do nothing for them. Perhaps, he
thought, he might someday avenge them (somehow he did not feel that they had been criminals, pirates)—but that would not bring them back to life. He looked past the unsightly corpses to the instruments on the consoles before their chairs. These, at first glance, seemed to be familiar enough—white dials with the black calibrations marked with Arabic numerals; red, green, white and amber pilot lights, dead now, but ready to blossom with glowing life at the restoration of a power supply. Familiar enough they were, at first glance. But there were the odd differences, the placement of various controls in positions that did not tally with the construction and the articulation of the normal human frame. And there was the lettering: MINNSCHINN DRIVI, RIMITI CINTRIL. Who, he asked himself, were the builders of this ship, this vessel that was almost a standard Federation Survey Service cruiser? What human race had jettisoned every vowel in the alphabet but this absurdly fat "I?"

  "John," Sonya was saying, "give me a hand, will you?"

  He turned to see what she was doing. She was trying to unbuckle a seat belt that was deeply embedded in the distended flesh at the waist of one of the dead men.

  He conquered his revulsion, swallowed the nausea that was rising in his throat. He pulled the sharp sheath knife from his belt, said, "This is quicker," and slashed through the tough fabric of the strap. He was careful not to touch the gleaming, purple skin. He knew that if he did so the dead man would . . . burst.

  Carefully, Sonya lifted the body from its seat, set it down on the deck so that the magnetized sandal soles were in contact with the steel plating. Then she pointed to the back of the chair. "What do you make of that?" she asked.

  That was a vertical slot, just over an inch in width, that was continued into the seat itself, half bisecting it.

  It was Pendeen who broke the silence. He said simply, "They had tails."

  "But they haven't," objected Grimes. It was obvious that the minimal breech-clouts of the dead people could not conceal even a tiny caudal appendage.

  "My dear John," Sonya told him in an annoyingly superior voice, "these hapless folk are neither the builders nor the original crew of this ship. Refugees? Could be. Escapees? A slave revolt? Once again—could be. Or must be. This is a big ship, and a fighting ship. You can't run a vessel of this class without uniforms, without marks of rank so you can see at a glance who is supposed to be doing what. Furthermore, you don't clutter up a man-o-war with children."

  "She's not necessarily a man-o'-war," demurred Grimes. "She could be a defensively armed merchantman. . ."

  "With officers and first class passengers dressed in foul rags? With a name like DESTROYER?"

  "We don't know that that grouping of letters on the stern does spell DESTROYER."

  "We don't know that this other grouping of letters"—she pointed to the control panel that Grimes had been studying-"spells MANNSCHENN DRIVE, REMOTE CONTROL. But I'm willing to bet my gratuity that if you trace the leads you'll wind up in a compartment full of dimension-twisting gyroscopes."

  "All right," said Grimes. "I'll go along with you. I'll admit that we're aboard a ship built by some humanoid—but possibly non-human race that, even so, uses a peculiar distortion of English as its written language. . . ."

  "A humanoid race with tails," contributed Pendeen.

  "A humanoid race with tails," agreed Sonya. "But what race? Look at this slot in the chair back. It's designed for somebody—or something—with a thin tail, thin at the root as well as at the extremity. And the only tailed beings we know with any technology comparable to our own have thick tails—and, furthermore, have their own written languages. Just imagine one of our saurian friends trying to get out of that chair in a hurry, assuming that he'd ever been able to get into it in the first place. He'd be trapped."

  "You're the Intelligence Officer," said Grimes rather nastily.

  "All right. I am. Also, I hold a Doctorate in Xenology. And I tell you, John, that what we've found in this ship, so far, doesn't add up to any kind of sense at all."

  "She hasn't made any sense ever since she was first picked up by Station 3," admitted Grimes.

  "That she hasn't," said Pendeen. "And I don't like her. Not one little bit."

  "Why not, Mr. Pendeen?" asked Grimes, realizing that it was a foolish question to ask about a radioactive hull full of corpses.

  "Because . . . because she's wrong, sir. The proportions of all her controls and fittings—just wrong enough to be scary. And left-handed threads, and gauges calibrated from right to left."

  "So they are," said Grimes. "So they are. But that's odder still. Why don't they write the same way? From Right to Left?"

  "Perhaps they do," murmured Sonya. "But I don't think so. I think that the only difference between their written language and ours is that they have an all-purpose 'I', or an all-purpose symbol that's used for every vowel sound." She was prowling around the control room. Damn it all, there must be a Log Book. . . .

  "There should be a Log Book," amended Grimes.

  "All right There should be a Log Book. Here's an obvious Log Desk, complete with stylus, but empty. I begin to see how it must have been. The ship safe in port, all her papers landed for checking, and then her seizure by these people, by these unfortunate humans, whoever they were . . . H'm. The Chart Tank might tell us something. . ." She glared at the empty globe. "It would have told us something if it hadn't been in close proximity to a nuclear blast. But there will be traces. Unfortunately we haven't the facilities here to bring them out." She resumed her purposeful shuffle. "And what have we here? SIGNIL LIG? SIGNAL LOG? A black box that might well contain quite a few answers when we hook it up to a power supply. And that, I think, will lie within the capabilities of our Radio Officer back aboard Rim Mamelute."

  The thing was secured by simple enough clips to the side of what was obviously a transceiver. Deftly, Sonya disengaged it, tucked it under her arm.

  "Back to the Mamelute," said Grimes. It was more an order than a suggestion.

  "Back to the Mamelute," she agreed.

  The Commodore was last from the control room, watched first Pendeen and then Sonya vanish through the hatch into the axial shaft. He half-wished that enough air remained in their suit tanks for them to make a leisurely examination of the accommodation that must be situated abaft Control—and was more than half-relieved that circumstances did not permit such a course of action. He had seen his fill of corpses. In any case, the Signal Log might tell them far more than the inspection of decomposing corpses ever could.

  He felt far easier in his mind when the three of them were standing, once more, in the plastic igloo that covered the breached airlock, and almost happy when, one by one, they had squeezed through the built-in sphincter valve back to the clean emptiness of Space. The harsh working lights of Rim Mamelute seemed soft somehow, mellow almost, suggested the lights of Home. And the cramped interior of the tug, when they were back on board, was comforting. If one has to be jostled, it is better to be jostled by the living than by dead men and women, part-cremated in a steel coffin tumbling aimlessly between the stars.

  VIII

  It was very quiet in the radio office of Rim Mamelute. Grimes and Sonya stood there, watching chubby little Bennett make the last connections to the black box that they had brought from the control room of the derelict. "Yes," the Electronic Radio Officer had told them, "it is a Signal Log, and it's well shielded, so whatever records it may contain probably haven't been wiped by radiation. Once I get it hooked up we'll have the play-back."

  And now it was hooked up. "Are you sure you won't burn it out?" asked the Commodore, suddenly anxious.

  "Almost sure, sir," answered Bennett cheerfully. "The thing is practically an exact copy of the Signal Logs that were in use in some ships of the Federation Survey Service all of fifty years ago. Before my time. Anyhow, my last employment before I came out to the Rim was in the Lyran Navy, and their wagons were all Survey Service cast-offs. In many of them the original communications gear was still in place, and still in working order
. No, sir, this isn't the first time that I've made one of these babies sing. Reminds me of when we picked up the wreck of the old Minstrel Boy; I was Chief Sparks of the Tara's Hall at the time, and got the gen from her Signal Log that put us on the trail of Black Bart"—he added unnecessarily—"the pirate."

  "I have heard of him," said Grimes coldly.

  Sonya remarked, pointing towards the box, "But it doesn't look old."

  "No, Mrs. Grimes. It's not old. Straight from the maker, I'd say. But there's no maker's name, which is odd. . . ."

  "Switch on, Mr. Bennett," ordered the Commodore.

  Bennett switched on. The thing hummed quietly to itself, crackled briefly and thinly as the spool was rewound. It crackled again, more loudly, and the play-back began.