- Chapter 11






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Chapter 11
They had a drink, helping themselves generously from one of the bottles of medicinal brandy. They felt that they needed it, even if they didn't deserve it. They had another drink after they had helped each other off with their spacesuits. After the third one they decided that they might as well make a celebration of it and wriggled out of their longjohns.
Then Una had to spoil everything.
She said, "All right, lover boy. Let us eat, drink and make merry while we can. But this is one right royal mess that you've gotten us into!"
If anybody had told Grimes in the not-too-distant past that he would ever be able to look at an attractive, naked woman with acute dislike Grimes would have told him, in more or less these words, Don't be funny. But now it was happening. It was the injustice of what she was saying that rankled.
He growled, at last, "You were there too!"
"Yes, Buster. But you're the expert. You're the commissioned officer in the Federation's vastly over-ballyhooed Survey Service."
"You're an expert too, in your own way. You should have warned me about using the Carlotti transceiver."
"Don't let's go over all that again, please. Well, apart from what's on your mind . . ." She looked down at him and permitted herself a sneer. "Apart from what was on your mind, what do you intend doing next?"
"Business before pleasure, then," said Grimes. "All that we can do is find some other likely transmission and home on that."
"What about those skeleton spheres, like the one that attacked us on the devastated planet? Was it after us actually—or was it, too, homing on the signal from the alien spaceship?"
"Alien spaceship?" queried Grimes. "I don't know when or where we are—but we could be the aliens."
"Regular little space lawyer, aren't you, with all this hair-splitting . . . . Alien, schmalien . . . . As it says in the Good Book, one man's Mede is another man's Persian . . . . Don't be so lousy with the drinks, lover boy. Fill 'er up."
"This has to last," Grimes told her. "For emergenshies . . ."
"This is so an emergency."
"You can shay—say—that again," he admitted.
She was beginning to look attractive once more. In vino veritas, he thought. He put out a hand to touch her. She did not draw back. He grabbed her and pulled her to him. Her skin, on his, was silkily smooth, and her mouth, as he kissed her, was warm and fragrant with brandy. And then, quite suddenly, it was like an implosion, with Grimes in the middle of it. After he, himself, had exploded they both drifted into a deep sleep.
* * *
When they awoke, strapped together in one of the narrow bunks, she was in a much better mood than she had been for quite a long time. And Grimes, in spite of his slight hangover, was happy. Their escape from—at the very least—danger had brought them together again. Whatever this strange universe threw at them from now on they, working in partnership, would be able to cope—he hoped, and believed.
She got up and made breakfast, such as it was—although the food seemed actually to taste better. After they had finished the meal Grimes went to play with the Carlotti transceiver. He picked up what seemed to be a conversation between two stations and not, as had been the other signal upon which they had homes, a distress call automatically repeated at regular intervals. He said, "This seems to be distant, but not too distant. What about it?"
She replied, "We've no place else to go. Get her lined up, lover boy, and head that way."
He shut down the mini-Mannschenn briefly, turned the boat until its stem was pointed toward the source of the transmissions, then opened both the inertial drive and the interstellar drive full out. It was good to be going somewhere, he thought. Hope springs eternal . . . he added mentally. But without hope the human race would have died out even before the Stone Age.
For day after day after day they sped through the black immensities, the warped continuum. Day after day after day the two-way conversation in the unknown language continued to sound from the speaker of the Carlotti transceiver. There were words that sounded the same as some of the words used in the first transmission. Tarfelet . . . Over? wondered Grimes. Over and out?
On they ran, on—and the strength of the signals increased steadily. They were close now to the source, very close. Unfortunately the lifeboat did not run to a Mass Proximity Indicator, as it seemed that the transmissions did not emanate from a planetary surface but from something—or two somethings—adrift in space. The ship—or ships—would be invisible from the boat unless, freakishly, temporal precession rates were synchronized. That would be too much to hope for. But if neither the boat nor the targets were proceeding under interstellar drive they could, if close enough, be seen visually or picked up on the radar.
Grimes shut down the mini-Mannschenn.
He and Una looked out along the line of bearing. Yes, there appeared to be something there, not all that distant, two bright lights. He switched on the radar, stared into the screen.
"Any joy?" asked Una.
"Yes. Targets bearing zero relative. Range thirty kilometers." He grinned. "We'd better get dressed again. We may be going visiting—or receiving visitors."
They climbed into their longjohns and spacesuits. After a little hesitation they belted on their pistols. Back in the pilot's chair Grimes reduced speed, shutting down the inertial drive until, instead of the usual clangor, it emitted little more than an irritable grumble. In the radar screen the twin blips of the target slid slowly toward the center.
It was possible now to make out details through the binoculars. There were two ships there, both of them of the same conical design as the one they had seen in the ruined city. But these were not dead ships; their hulls were ablaze with lights—white and red and green and blue. They looked almost as if they belonged in some amusement park on a man-colonized planet—but somehow the illumination gave the impression of being functional rather than merely of giving pleasure to the beholder.
The speaker of the transceiver came suddenly to life. "Quarat tambeel?" There was an unmistakable note of interrogation. "Quarat tambeel? Tarfelet."
"They've spotted us," said Grimes. "Answer, will you?"
"But what shall I say?" asked Una.
"Say that we come in peace and all the rest of it. Make it sound as though you mean it. If they can't understand the words, the tune might mean something to them."
"Quarat tambeel? Tarfelet."
What ship? Over, guessed Grimes.
Una spoke slowly and distinctly into the microphone. "We come in peace. We come in peace. Over." She made it sound convincing. Grimes, as a friendly gesture, switched on the boat's landing lights.
"Tilzel bale, winzen bale, rindeen, rindeen. Tarfelet."
"I couldn't agree more," Una said. "It is a pity that our visiscreens don't work. If they did, we could draw diagrams of Pythagoras' Theorem at each other . . . ." But the way she sounded she could have been making love to the entity at the other end.
Grimes looked at the little radar repeater on the control panel. Ten kilometers, and closing. Nine . . . Eight . . . Seven . . . He cut the drive altogether. He could imagine, all too clearly, what a perfect target he would be to the gunnery officers aboard the strange ships. If they had gunnery officers, if they had guns, or their equivalent, that was. But it seemed unlikely that all life on that devastated planet had been wiped out by natural catastrophe. There had been a war, and a dreadful one.
But many years ago, he told himself, otherwise the level of radioactivity would have been much higher. And possibly confined to the worlds of only one planetary system . . .
Five kilometers, and closing still . . . .
Four . . . .
He restarted the inertial drive, in reverse. This was close enough until he had some idea of what he was running into.
Una was still talking softly into the microphone. "We mean you no harm. We need help. Tarfelet."
The use of that final word brought an excited gabble in reply.
Three point five kilometers, holding. Three point five . . . Three point six.
Grimes stopped the inertial drive.
"Go on talking," he said. "Get them used to your voice. Maybe they'll send a boat out to us."
"You're not going in?"
"Not yet. Not until I'm sure of a friendly reception, as the wise fly said to the spider."
"And what happened to him in the end? The fly, I mean."
"I can't remember," said Grimes. There are so many ways in which flies die, and most of them unconnected with spiders.
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