First Command (38 page)

“Lifting off,” repeated Brabham.

At Grimes’s touch on the controls the inertial drive, deep in the bowels of the ship, muttered irritably. Another touch—and the muttering became a cacophonous protest, loud even through the layer after layer of sonic insulation.
Discovery
shook herself, her structure groaning. From the NST speaker came the bored voice of Aerospace Control. “You are lifting,
Discovery.
You are clear of the pad.
Bon voyage.
”

“Acknowledge,” said Grimes to the radio officer. He didn’t need to be informed that the ship was off the ground. His own instruments would tell him that if he bothered to look at them—but the
feel
of the ship made it quite obvious that she was up and clear, lifting faster and faster. In the periscope screen he could see the spaceport area—the clusters of white administration buildings, the foreshortened silvery towers that were ships, big and little, dropping away, diminishing. The red, flashing beacons marking the berth that he had just left were sliding from the center of the display, but it didn’t matter. He had been expecting drift, the wind the way it was. If he had been coming in to a landing it would have been necessary to apply lateral thrust; during a liftoff all that was required was to get up through and clear of the atmosphere.

A hint of yaw—

Only three degrees, but Grimes corrected it, more to get the feel of the ship than for any other reason. With the same motivation he brought the red flashers back to the center of the periscope screen. Mphm. The old bitch didn’t handle too badly at all. He increased acceleration from a half gee to one gee, to one and a half, to two.

The intercom speaker squawked. “Dr. Brandt, here. What the hell are you playing at up there?”

“Minding our own bloody business!” snapped Grimes into his microphone. “Might I suggest that you do the same?”

Brabham sniggered loudly.

“Emergency rocket drill,” ordered Grimes quietly. That, as he had suspected it would, took the grin off the first lieutenant’s face. But the reaction drive was here to be used, wasn’t it? “Number One, pass the word.”

“Attention, all hands,” growled Brabham into the intercom. “Stand by for testing of reaction drive. Sudden variations in acceleration are to be expected. Stand by. Stand by.”

Grimes pushed a button, looked down at his console. Under ROCKETS the READY light glowed vivid green. With all his faults, MacMorris kept every system in a state of go. Decisively Grimes cut the inertial drive. His stomach tried to push its way up into his throat as acceleration abruptly ceased. He brought a finger down to the FIRE button, pushed it down past the first, second, and third stops. He felt as well as heard the screaming roar as the incandescent gases rushed through the Venturis, and then the renewal of acceleration pushed him downward into the thick padding of his chair.

“Aerospace Control to
Discovery.
Are those pyrotechnics really necessary?”

“Tell him testing, testing,” said Grimes to the radio officer. He succeeded in restarting the inertial drive and cutting the rockets at exactly the same instant. The ship continued to drive upward with no reduction of velocity.

Brabham loudly sighed his relief. “You’re lucky,” he commented. “Sir. Come to that, we’re all lucky.”

“What do you mean, Number One?” demanded Grimes.

The first lieutenant laughed sourly. “This is the first time that the reaction drive has been tested within the memory of the oldest man. Commander Tallis would
never
use it.”

“How many times must I tell you that I am not Commander Tallis?”

The intercom speaker crackled, then, “Dr. Brandt here. I’m speaking from my laboratory. What the hell is going on? Do you know that you’ve smashed thousands of credits worth of valuable equipment?”

“You saw it stowed?” Grimes asked Brabham.

“Yes, sir. There was no chance of its shifting.”

Grimes signaled to Tangye to take over the controls. “Keep her going as she is, pilot.” Then he said into his microphone, “Captain here, Dr. Brandt. Did anything shift?”

“No. But I heard glass breaking in the cases. Delicate apparatus can’t stand up to your needlessly violent maneuvers.”

“Did you see the stuff packed, Doctor?”

“Of course.”

“Then might I suggest that next time you see that your bits and pieces are packed properly? There are excellent padding materials available.”

“I hold you entirely responsible for the breakages, Captain.”

“You knew that you were embarking in a spaceship, Doctor.”

“Yes. I did. But rockets went out generations ago.”

“Reaction drive is still fitted to all Survey Service vessels, as you should have known,
Commander
Brandt.”

“Pah!”

Grimes returned his attention to ship handling, taking over from Tangye. Overhead—or forward—the sky seen through the control room dome was a dark purple, almost black. In the periscope screen Lindisfarne was assuming a spherical aspect. Outside the ship there was still atmosphere—but atmosphere in the academic sense of the word only. On the dial of the radar altimeter the decades of kilometers were mounting up steadily and rapidly.

There was nothing to do now but to run out and clear of the Van Allens, while the globe that was Lindisfarne dwindled steadily in the periscope screen, a diminishing half-moon, the sunlit hemisphere opalescently aglow.

The stars were bright and unwinking in the black sky, and the polarizers were automatically dimming the harsh glare of the Lindisfarne sun on the beam. Grimes looked at the magnetometer. The bright red warning light was dimming. It gave one last flicker, then turned to green.

“Clear of the Van Allens, sir,” announced Tangye belatedly.

Slow reaction time,
thought Grimes. He said, “So I see. Cut the inertial drive and line her up on the target star, will you?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” replied the young man, smartly enough.

The engines grumbled to a stammering halt. Only then did Tangye busy himself with a star chart, looking through the ports frequently to check the relative positions of the constellations. Grimes refrained from pointing out the sun that he wanted to head for, a second magnitude luminary in the constellation of The Bunny, as this grouping of stars had been dubbed by the first settlers on Lindisfarne. There was, if one had a strong imagination, a suggestion of rabbit’s ears and woman’s breasts, thought Grimes while his navigator fumbled and bumbled.
If this were a
real
bunny,
he thought sardonically,
young Tangye’d be on target a damn sight sooner!
And how long would it be before Brandt, the obnoxious fool, started to whine about being kept too long in a condition of free fall? Meanwhile, other people besides the navigator were exhibiting shortcomings.

“Number One,” Grimes said mildly, “you didn’t make the usual announcement on the intercom. Stand by for free fall, setting trajectory and all the rest of it.”

“You never told me to, sir.”

“It’s part of your job to look after these details,” snapped Grimes.

“Commander Tallis didn’t want announcements made every five minutes. Sir.”

“Neither do I. But I want those announcements made that are required by Survey Service regulations.”

Then Brandt came through on the intercom. “Doctor Brandt here. What
is
going on up there?”

“Stand by for setting trajectory,” said Brabham sulkily into his microphone.

“On target, sir,” announced Tangye. “I mean, I’ve
found
the target.”

“Then get on to it.”

The directional gyroscopes rumbled into motion. Slowly the ship turned about her axes, centrifugal forces giving an off-center surrogate of gravity. Grimes, looking up into the cartwheel sight set into the dome, saw The Bunny swim slowly into view.

The gyroscopes stopped.

“On target, sir.”

“Mphm. Have you allowed for galactic drift, Mr. Tangye?”

“Eh. . . no, sir.”

“Then please do so.”

There was more delay while Tangye fumbled through the ephemeris, fed data into the control room computer.
All this should have been done before liftoff,
thought Grimes disgustedly.
Damn it all, this puppy couldn’t navigate a plastic duck across a bathtub!
He watched the nervous young man, glowering.

“Allowance applied, sir.” The gyroscopes restarted as the navigator spoke.

“Being applied, you mean. And are you sure that you’re putting it on the right way? All right, all right. Leave it.
I
worked it out roughly before we pushed off.”

“On trajectory, sir.”

“Thank you.” Grimes himself announced over the PA system that the Mannschenn Drive was about to be restarted and that acceleration would be resumed immediately thereafter.

He pushed the button to start the interstellar drive. He could imagine those shining rotors starting to turn, spinning faster and faster, spinning, processing at right angles to all the dimensions of normal space, tumbling through the dark infinities, dragging the ship and all aboard her with them as the temporal precession field built up.

There was the disorientation in space and time to which no spaceman ever becomes inured. There was the uncanny sensation of
déjà vu.
There was, as far as Grimes was concerned, an unusually strong premonition of impending doom. It persisted after everything had returned to normal—to normal, that is, as long as one didn’t look out through the viewports at the contorted nebulosities that glimmered eerily where the familiar stars had been. The ship, her restarted inertial drive noisily clattering, the thin, high whine of the Mannschenn Drive pervading every cubic millimeter of her, was speeding through the warped continuum toward her destination.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” said Grimes heavily.
(Thank you for what?)
“Normal Deep Space watches and routine, Number One.”

“Normal Deep Space watches and routine, sir,” replied Brabham.

Grimes unbuckled himself from his chair, got up and went down to his quarters. He poured himself a stiff brandy. Even if he hadn’t earned it, he felt that he needed it.

Chapter 7

Nonetheless,
Grimes was much happier now that the voyage had started.

The ship was back in her natural element, and so were her people. As long as she was in port—at a major naval base especially—the captain was not the supreme authority. On Lindisfarne, for example, Grimes had come directly under the orders of the officer-in-charge-of-surveys, and of any of that rear admiral’s officers who were senior to himself. Too, any rating, petty officer or officer of his own who considered that he had a grievance, could run, screaming, to one or another of the various Survey Service personnel protection societies, organizations analogous to the several guilds, unions, and whatever representing merchant spacemen. Of course, any complaint had to be justifiable—but it was amazing how many complaints, in these decadent days, were held to be warranted. Had MacMorris not been in such bad odor with the officials of the Engineer Officers’ Association his tales about Grimes’s alleged bullying would have been listened to; had they been,
Discovery
would never have got away from Lindisfarne.

In Deep Space, everybody knew, a captain could do almost anything to anybody provided that he were willing to face a Board of Inquiry at some later date. He could even order people pushed out of the airlock without spacesuits as long as they were guilty of armed mutiny.

All in all, Grimes was not too displeased with his new command. True, she was an old ship—but as an old ship should be (and sometimes is) she was as comfortable as a well-worn shoe. She was not a taut ship; she never would be or could be that. All of her people were too disheartened by slow, even nonexistent promotion, by the knowledge that they had been passed over, would always be passed over. She was not a happy ship—but once she settled down to the old, familiar routine, once her crew realized that it was less trouble to do things Grimes’s way than his predecessor’s way, she was not actively unhappy.

Grimes did not mix much with his officers. He would pass the time of day with the watchkeeper when he went up to the control room, he would, naturally, meet people when he made rounds, he took his seat at the head of the senior officers’ table at meals, occasions at which scintillating conversation was conspicuous by its absence.

Brabham was too morose, too full of his own woes. MacMorris was as he had been described more than once, an uncouth mechanic, incapable of conversation about anything but machinery. Vinegar Nell could have been good company—she was a highly intelligent, witty woman—but she could not forget that the last time she and Grimes had been shipmates she had been a lieutenant while Grimes was only a lowly ensign. The fact that he was now a commander and captain of a big ship she ascribed to sex and luck rather than ability.

The medical officer, Surgeon Lieutenant Commander Rath, was universally unpopular. He was barely competent, and in civil life his lack of a bedside manner would have militated against financial success. He was a tall, dark, thin (almost skeletal) man and his nickname, to all ranks, was The Undertaker. Nobody liked him, and he liked nobody.

And the Mad Major kept himself very much to himself. He was a Marine, and Marines were, in his opinion, the highest form of interstellar life.

All in all, Grimes began to think as the voyage wore on, the only interesting member of his crew was Flannery. But was it Flannery himself who was interesting—or was it that unfortunate dingo’s brain in its tank of nutrient solution? The thing was fascinating—that alleged racial memory, for example. Was it genuine, or was it merely the product of Flannery’s fertile, liquor-stimulated imagination? After all, Grimes only had Flannery’s word for what Ned was thinking . . . and, according to Flannery, Ned’s thoughts were fantastic ones.

“He thinks he remembers you, Captain,” said the PCO one day when Grimes dropped in to see him after rounds.

“Mphm. Don’t tell me that I’m a reincarnation of the original jolly swagman.”

“Indeed ye’re not, sorr! He’s thinkin’ o’ you as Bligh!”