Ship of Strangers

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Surgenor came out through the main entrance of the Service hostel, filled his lungs with dew-cleansed morning air, and looked around for the shuttle which would carry him out to the Bay City terminal.

The silver-and-blue vehicle was waiting in the reserved section at the front of the parking area, its driver giving preliminary glances at his wristwatch. Surgenor walked across to it, slung the cases which contained all his personal possessions into the luggage bay, and climbed on board. The shuttle was three-quarters filled with departing surveyers and base personnel going out to begin a day’s work at the field, and he nodded to familiar faces here and there as he made his way to an empty place. His own ship was not due to lift off until early in the afternoon, and he was mildly surprised therefore to see Christine Holmes watching him from the bench seat at the rear.

“On the road early,” he commented, sitting down beside her.

“I’m new to the job—this is only my second trip,” she said. “What’s your excuse?”

“I’ve been on Delos before.”

“So you’re bored with it.” Christine examined him with undisguised curiosity. “I hear you’ve been on survey work for twenty years.”

“Almost.”

“How many worlds have you covered?”

“A fair amount, I suppose—I’m not sure how many.” Surgenor wondered briefly why he was lying on this point—he knew precisely the number of planets he had traversed. “Does it matter?”

“Not to me, it doesn’t. But if you’re bored after a couple of weeks’ stopover on Delos, what’s it going to be like when they put you out to grass?”

“Let me worry about that,” Surgenor said stiffly, annoyed at the forthrightness of the question. There was no rank structure on survey ships—an indication of the essentially casual nature of the work—but he felt that a raw novice could have chosen to show respect for his experience. Or was it that the question had touched a nerve, reminding him of his growing ambivalence towards the Service? How was he going to reconcile the life of a star gypsy with his need for stable and permanent relationships? What was to be his ultimate fate if it turned out that, literally, he was unable to stop travelling?

“Anyway,” he said, diverting his thoughts, “what decided you to sign on?”

“Why? Don’t tell me you’re one of those dinosaurs who thinks a competent woman is some kind of freak.”

“Did I say that?”

“You didn’t have to.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s not your sex—it’s your age,” Surgenor replied, losing his temper. “You’re about twice as old as most new starts.”

“I see.” Christine nodded, seemingly unoffended by his rudeness. “Well, that’s a fair question. I guess you could say I’m looking for a new career—something to take me out of myself, as they say. I had a husband once, and a son. And they both died. I wanted to get away from Earth, and I’ve got mechanical aptitudes, so I took a surveyor’s course…and here I am.”

“I’m sorry if I…’

“It’s all right, she said brightly. “It was a long time ago—and they say everybody has to die sometime.”

Surgenor nodded a glum assent, wishing he had confined himself to remarks about the weather or, better still, had chosen a different seat. “All the same, I’m sorry about…about what I…’

“That bitchy crack about my age? Forget it. Anyway, you’re no spring chicken yourself, are you?”

“Too right,” Surgenor said, relieved at the return to undemanding banter. A few seconds later the shuttle’s doors closed and the vehicle began its journey to the space terminal. The slanting rays of the sun, changing direction at each corner, threw a spotlight on Christine’s strong-jawed face, emphasizing the pallor of her complexion. She smoked cigarettes almost continuously throughout the trip, occasionally getting ash on her own uniform and brushing it off on to Surgenor’s. He considered drawing her attention to the multitude of NO SMOKING signs in the shuttle, but a moment’s reflection about the possible consequences persuaded him to remain silent. It was with a disproportionate sense of relief that he saw the terminal’s perimeter fence begin to blur past the windows, followed by clusters of peripheral buildings and glimpses of the metal pyramids of the spacecraft themselves.

He unshipped his case and walked with Christine to the Service operations block where they went through signing-in procedures and the pre-flight medical checks. There were still three hours to go before the Sarafand crew’s final muster. Surgenor hoped that Christine would stay in the crew lounge, but she opted to walk out to their ship with him. It was basically an eighty-metres-tall cylinder tapering to a point at the top, and with four triangular fairings on the lower third which made it into a slim pyramid. When Surgenor got closer he saw that considerable refurbishing had been done on the Sarafand. Most noticeable were the new rows of sacrificial anodes, the blocks of pure metal which acted as centres for electrical and chemical interactions between the ship and alien atmospheres, thus minimizing erosion of the entire hull. Unfortunately, the freshness of the anodes drew attention to the scarred dinginess of the surrounding metal.

“Is this it?” Christine said, as soon as their destination became obvious. “Is it really and truly a Mark Six?”

“That’s the mark that put our flag on three-quarters of the planets in the Bubble.”

“But is it still safe to fly in?”

Surgenor reached the entrance ramp first and started up it. “If you’ve got any doubts,” he said, without looking back, “this is the time to pack in the job. They don’t really like crewmen funking out, but if anybody is going to funk out they prefer them to funk out at base, and not to funk out in the middle of a trip.”

Christine was close behind him when he reached the cavernous shade of the hangar deck, and she caught his arm. “What’s all this stuff about funking out, big man?”

“Did I cause offence?” Surgenor looked politely apologetic. “I’m sorry. It was just that you seemed a little nervous down there.”

Christine stared at him with narrowed eyes which were almost on a level with his own. “I get it. You identify with this beat-up old scow—you actually identify with it. Boy, you really are in a mess!” She brushed past him before he could reply and marched towards the metal stair which led to the upper decks.

Surgenor gaped at her departing figure, outraged, then looked all around as though seeking a witness to the wrong which had been done him. The six survey modules crouched in their stalls gazed back at him with cyclopean headlights, noncommittal, uninvolved.

The take-off from Delos, in contrast to what was to follow, was a routine affair.

The Sarafand floated clear of the ground and rose steadily to a height of fifty metres, at which point—in compliance with interstellar quarantine regulations—she paused and electrostatically cleansed herself of the dust, pebbles and spacefield litter which were swirling within her counter-gravity field. There followed a one-gravity ascent to one hundred kilometres, and a second electrostatic purge which dispersed the last traces of captured atmosphere into the void. The ship was now set to make the first tentative beta-space jump, a short one which would take her clear of the gravitational complexities of the local sun and planetary system.

Surgenor knew that Aesop, using a part of his “mind’ which was inaccessible to the understanding of the crew members, was testing his environment, surveying the invisible slopes of space, making ready to perform geometric miracles. From his seat in the observation room, Surgenor stared down at the curving blue-white expanses of Delos and waited for the planet to vanish. As ever, in spite of all the years, he felt a slow build-up of excitement and his heart began a measured pounding.

He glanced along the row of swivel seats, taking stock of the company in which he was once again to leap into the unknown. Of the eleven other people present, only four—Victor Voysey, Sig Carlen, Mike Targett and Al Gillespie—were long-term veterans with the Sarafand. Some of the remainder had picked up limited experience on other ships before transferring to the Sarafand, and the rest, as was the case with Christine Holmes, were still in the novice stage.

Officially speaking, lack of service time or an abundance of it was of little importance—a newcomer to the job received virtually the same pay as an old hand—but Surgenor persisted in believing that experience was valuable, and he would have preferred a higher proportion of veterans in the crew. It occurred to him as he waited that he was becoming morbidly conscious of risk factors—something which had not bothered him unduly in the old days. Was that why he had, so uncharacteristically, lost his temper with Christine Holmes?

A frisson of excitement rippled through the room as the curving bright solidity of the planet Delos flicked out of existence, causing a sudden drop in the light intensity. In its place a fiercely concentrated point of brilliance stood out against the background of stars. Surgenor knew he had travelled upwards of half a light-year in the instant of change, and that Aesop—immune to fear, untouched by wonder—was calmly preparing for the next leap, a huge one this time which would carry the Sarafand deep into unknown space. It was heading outwards from the plane of the Milky Way, its destination a loose grouping of five suns which burned like look-out fires on the edge of intergalactic space.

Even on Delos, Surgenor had been accutely aware of the sparseness of stars in that quarter of the night sky which lay to the galactic north—now the realization loomed large in his mind that, on the completion of the next beta-space jump, there would be nothing between him and the great void. The observation room had two hemispherical viewing screens, and while one of them overflowed with the profuse suns of the galaxy which had almost been left behind, the other would be empty except for the dim, blurry specks of distant island universes.

The Bubble is getting too big, Surgenor mused uneasily. It was true that the sphere of man’s activity only extended through the thickness of the galactic wheel—and that most of its diameter, with all the multitudinous star systems of the hub—lay beyond his domain, but a boundary had been reached just the same. It was a reminder that the galaxy was finite. And that jaunty, querulous, presumptuous homo sapiens had a taste for the infinite…

“Hey, Dave!” Victor Voysey leaned across from the next chair and spoke in a whisper. “I’ve just had a dust-up with Marc’s replacement. I thought somebody said she was a woman.”

“She’s had a rough time,” Surgenor said, glancing along the row. In profile Christine’s shadow-eyed face looked almost haggard.

“That’s as may be, but…Christ…I only told her nobody’s allowed to smoke in the clean air rooms.”

Surgenor repressed a smile. “Look out, infinity—some of us are coming to flick ash on you.”

“You feeling all right Dave?”

“Some day, Victor, maybe you’ll learn not to rush in where…’ Surgenor gripped the arms of his chair as, within two seconds, the brilliant nucleus of the far-off sun of Delos snapped out of being, was replaced by an all-enveloping blackness in which a few misty blurs of light hovered like fireflies, then was replaced yet again by a different pattern of misty specks. Finally a wild extravagance of star fields—glittering and crowded, filling both hemispheres of vision—came blazing into existence.

Surgenor’s heart seemed to stop beating altogether as it became obvious that something had gone wrong with the beta-space jump. It was totally unknown for a ship to make three transitions in rapid succession; and it was apparent that their present location, where ever it might be was not on the brink of starless deeps.

“Dave?” Voysey kept his voice low. “Have we been on a joyride?”

“Joyride?” The inappropriateness of the word dragged at Surgenor’s lips. “I hope I’m wrong, but I got the impression that…just for a second or so…we were outside.”

“But Aesop wouldn’t go out. It says in all the books that the graviton flux is too strong out there for a ship to have any kind of control. I mean, if we went out we wouldn’t be able to…”

“Let’s discuss it later,” Surgenor said, inclining his head towards the other crew members. “If something has gone wrong in Aesop’s astrogation cabinets it can’t be too serious, and there’s no point in starting a panic.”

“Why doesn’t Aesop make an announcement?”

“He mightn’t think it’s worth while.” Surgenor looked along the row again and saw that both Carlen and Gillespie had half-risen from their seats and were frozen in that position, staring at him. “Let’s go to my room and quiz Aesop in private.” He walked to the door of the gallery-like observation chamber followed by Voysey and, at a greater distance, Carlen and Gillespie.

“Where are you guys going?” The voice, laden with discords of nervous stress, belonged to Billy Narvik, a wispy-bearded twenty-year-old, who had joined the Sarafand two trips back.

“To have a quiet drink,” Surgenor told him. “We’ve seen all this star-jumping stuff before.”

“Don’t try to gas me, Dave—you never saw anything like that before.” A general murmur of unease followed Narvik’s words, and Surgenor wished the youngster would sit down and keep his mouth shut.

“What do you think you saw?”

“I saw three or four jumps, all on top of each other. There were galaxies, nothing but galaxies, and now this.” Narvik gestured at the surrounding star fields. “This isn’t the Five Suns group.”

“For your information, Billy,” Surgenor said evenly, “you didn’t see any galaxies, and you can’t see any stars now. All this is just a projection that Aesop lays on for our benefit. None of the views that we get in this room have to correspond with what’s actually outside the ship.”

“They usually do, don’t they?”

“Usually.” Surgenor paused, seeking inspiration. “But if the new equipment we just got in has some bugs in it we might be seeing part of Aesop’s astrogation memory.”

Narvik gave a derisive snort. “A blind man could see you being tactful, Dave—Aesop has no memory of intergalactic space.”

“How do we know that? All ship computers take their normal-space bearings from the twenty or so galaxies of the Local Group, and Aesop could simulate their…’

“You’re gassing us again! What do you take me for?” Narvik left his seat and came running, wide-eyed, towards Surgenor. “What sort of a bloody moron do you think I am?” He began struggling with Sig Carlen and Al Gillespie as they sandwiched him and gripped his arms. A visible wave of unrest swept through the watching company.

“Calm down, everybody,” Surgenor ordered, raising his voice. “The point is that if there was any kind of a snarl-up in our normal-space or beta-space astrogation systems Aesop would let us know about it, and…’

“This is Sarafand control making an announcement for the attention of all crew members,” came the omnidirectional voice of Aesop. “Due to a major malfunction in the ship’s astrogation and location control complex, Survey Mission 837/LM/4002a has been aborted.”

“We’re lost!” somebody shouted. “Billy was right—we’re lost!”

“Don’t be so damn childish,” Surgenor bellowed, making himself heard above the uproar. “Spaceships don’t get lost. Listen, everybody—I want you all to calm down and keep quiet while we sort this thing out with Aesop. Now, I’m going to talk to him, and I’m going to do it right here so that everybody will know exactly what’s going on. Okay?”

There was a gradual return to silence. Surgenor, now beginning to feel selfconscious, looked up at the ceiling, in the direction of the ship’s control levels, then became uncomfortably aware that he had adopted the stance of a man addressing his deity. He lowered his gaze and, resolutely staring straight ahead, began his dialogue with the artificial intelligence upon whose proper functioning all their lives depended.

“Hear these words,” he said slowly. “Aesop, we saw that the beta-space transition was not completed in a…normal manner, and there is some confusion in our minds as to exactly what has happened. For a start—for the benefit of the newer members of the crew—I would like you to reassure us about any possibility of the Sarafand being lost.”

“If you are applying the word ‘lost’ to a condition of not knowing our position in relation to the standard galactic co-ordinate system, then I can assure you that the Sarafand is not lost,” Aesop replied immediately.

Surgenor felt both vindicated and relieved for only an instant before noticing the unusually pedantic nature of Aesop’s reply. Struggling to ignore a premonition of disaster, he said, “Aesop, is there another sense in which the word ‘lost’ would apply to our situation?”

There was a brief, but noticeable, hesitation before Aesop said, “If you define it as meaning ‘in a condition of irretrievableness’ or ‘not to be recovered’…then I regret to say that, for all practical purposes, the Sarafand is lost.”

“I don’t understand that,” Surgenor blurted, breaking a throbbing silence. “What are you saying to us?”

“The malfunction I have already referred to in the ship’s astrogation and location control complex has resulted in a normal-space emergence at a point which is extremely remote from our intended destination.” Aesop spoke in measured, neutral tones, as though announcing a change in the week’s breakfast menu.

“We are positioned close to the centre of the galaxy designated as N.5893-278(S) in the Revised Standard Catalogue. Our mean distance from the Local Group—which, of course, includes the Milky Way system and Earth—is approximately thirty million light-years. “This fact means that we are unable to return to Earth.”