First Command (84 page)

One of them, obviously, was looking down at what could only be an airlock door, a wide circle of uncluttered, dull-gleaming metal, its rim set down very slightly from the surrounding skin. At a word from Grimes this robot turned the lamp in its forehead up to full intensity but there was no sign of any external controls for opening the valve.

Another robot had made its way forward and was looking in through the control room viewports. The compartment was untenanted, looked, somehow, as though it had been untenanted for a very long time. There were banks of instrumentation of alien design that could have been anything. There were chairs—and whoever (whatever) had sat in them must have approximated very very closely to the human form, although the back of each was bisected by a vertical slit. For tails? Why not? Grimes had heard the opinion expressed more than once that evolution had taken a wrong turn when Man’s ancestors lost their prehensile caudal appendages. But he knew of no spacefaring race that possessed these useful adjuncts to hands.

He said, “We shall have to cut our way in. Big Sister, will you send a couple of robots across with the necessary equipment? And have my stewardess get my spacesuit ready.”

“And mine,” said the Baroness.

“Your Excellency,” said Grimes, “somebody must remain in charge of the ship.”

“And why should it be me, Captain? In any case, this isn’t one of your Survey Service tubs with a computer capable of handling only automatic functions. Big Sister’s brain is as good as yours. At least.”

Grimes felt his prominent ears burning as he flushed angrily. But he said, “Very well, Your Excellency.” He turned to the transceiver—he still found it necessary to think of Big Sister’s intelligence as inhabiting some or other piece of apparatus—and said, “You’ll mind the store during our absence. If we get into trouble take whatever action you think fit.”

The electronic entity replied ironically, “Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

The Baroness sighed audibly. Grimes knew that she was blaming him for the sense of humor that Big Sister seemed to have acquired over recent weeks, was equating him with the sort of person who deliberately teaches coarse language to a parrot or a
lliri
or any of the other essentially unintelligent life-forms prized, by some, for their mimicry of human speech. Not that Big Sister was unintelligent . . . He was tempted to throw in his own two bits’ worth with a crack about a jesting pilot but thought better of it.

The robot stewardess had Grimes’ spacesuit ready for him when he went down to his quarters, assisted him into the armor. He decided to belt on a laser pistol—such a weapon could also be used as a tool. He also took along a powerful flashlight; a laser handgun could be used as such but there was always the risk of damaging whatever it was aimed at.

The Baroness—elegantly feminine even to her space armor—was waiting for him by the airlock. She had a camera buckled to her belt. With her were two of the general purpose robots, each hung around with so much equipment that they looked like animated Christmas trees.

Grimes and his employer passed through the airlock together. She did not, so far as he could tell, panic at her exposure to the unmeasurable emptiness of interstellar space. He gave her full marks for that. She seemed to have read his thoughts and said, “It’s all right, Captain. I’ve been outside before. I know the drill.”

Her suit propulsion unit flared briefly; it was as though she had suddenly sprouted a fiery tail. She sped across the gap between the two ships, executed a graceful turnover in mid-passage so that she could decelerate. She landed between two gun turrets. Grimes heard her voice from his helmet radio, “What are you waiting for?”

He did not reply; he was delaying his own jump until the two GP robots had emerged from the airlock, wanted to be sure that they did so without damaging any of the equipment with which they were burdened. As soon as they were safely out he jetted across to join the Baroness. He landed about a meter away from her.

He was pleased to discover that the shell plating was of some ferrous alloy; the magnetic soles of his boots, once contact had been made, adhered. He said, “Let us walk around to the airlock, Your Excellency.”

She replied, “And what else did we come here for?”

Grimes lapsed into sulky silence, led the way over the curvature of the hull, avoiding as far as possible the many projections. The side on which they had landed was brilliantly illuminated by
The Far Traveler’s
searchlights but the other side was dark save for the working lamps of the robots—and their sensors did not require the same intensity of light as does the human eye.

At an order from Grimes the robots turned up their lights. It was fairly easy then to make a tortuous way through and around the protrusions—the turrets, the whip antennae, the barrels of guns and missile launchers. This ship, although little bigger than a Survey Service Star Class destroyer, packed the wallop of a Constellation Class battle cruiser. Either she was a not so minor miracle of automation or her crew—and who had
they
been—must have lived in conditions of Spartan discomfort.

Grimes and the Baroness came to the airlock door. The robots stood around it, directing the beams of their lights down to the circular valve. Grimes walked carefully on to the dull-gleaming surface, fell to his knees for a closer look, grateful that the designer of his suit had incorporated magnetic pads into every joint of the armor. The plate was utterly featureless. There were no studs to push, no holes into which fingers or a key might be inserted. Yet he was reluctant to order the working robots to go to it with their cutting lasers. He had been too long a spaceman, had too great a respect for ships. But, he decided, there was no other way to gain ingress.

One of the robots handed him a greasy crayon. He described with it a circle on the smooth plate then rose to his feet and walked back, making way for the golden giant holding the heavy duty laser cutter. The beam of coherent light was invisible but metal glowed—dull red to orange, to yellow, to white, to blue—where it impinged. Metal glowed but did not flow and there was no cloud of released molecules to flare into incandescence.

“Their steel,” remarked the Baroness interestedly, “must be as tough as my gold . . .”

“So it seems, Your Excellency,” agreed Grimes. The metal of which
The Far Traveler
was constructed was an artificial isotope of gold—and if gold could be modified, why not iron?

And then he saw that the circular plate was moving, was sliding slowly to one side. The working robot did not notice, still stolidly went on playing the laser beam on to the glowing spot until Grimes ordered it to desist and to get off the opening door.

The motion continued until there was a big circular hole in the hull. It was not a dark hole. There were bright, although not dazzling, lights inside, a warmly yellow illumination.

“Will you come into my parlor?” murmured Grimes, “said the spider to the fly . . .”

“Are you afraid, Captain?” demanded the Baroness.

“Just cautious, Your Excellency. Just cautious.” Then, “Big Sister, you saw what happened. What do you make of it?”

Big Sister said, her voice faint but clear from the helmet phones, “I have reason to suspect that this alien vessel is manned—for want of a better word—by an electronic intelligence such as myself. He was, to all intents and purposes, dead for centuries, for millennia. By attempting to burn your way through the outer airlock door you fed energy into his hull—power that reactivated him, as he would have been reactivated had he approached a sun during his wanderings. My sensors inform me that a hydrogen fusion generator is now in operation. It is now a living vessel that you are standing upon.”

“I’d already guessed that,” said Grimes. “Do you think that we should accept the . . . invitation?”

He had asked the question but was determined that Big Sister would have to come up with fantastically convincing arguments to dissuade him from continuing his investigations. He may have resigned from the Survey Service but he was still, at heart, an officer of that organization. Nonetheless he did want to know what he might be letting himself in for. But the Baroness gave him no chance to find out.

“Who’s in charge here?” she asked coldly. “You, or that misprogrammed tangle of fields and circuits, or me? I would remind you, both of you, that I am the Owner.” She went down to a prone position at the edge of the circular hole, extended an arm, found a handhold, pulled herself down. Grimes followed her. The chamber, he realized, was large enough to accommodate two of the robots as well as the Baroness and himself. He issued the necessary orders before she could interfere.

“What now?” she demanded. “If there were not such a crowd in here we could look around, find the controls to admit us to the body of the ship.”

He said, “I don’t think that that will be necessary.”

Over their heads the door was closing, then there was a mistiness around them as atmosphere was admitted into the vacuum of the chamber.
What sort of atmosphere?
Grimes wondered, hoping that it would not be actively corrosive. After minor contortions he was able to look at the gauge on his left wrist. The pressure reading was already 900 and still rising. The tiny green light was glowing—and had any dangerous gases been present a flashing red light would have given warning. The temperature was a cold 20° Celsius.

They staggered as the deck below them began to slide to one side. But it was not the deck, of course; it was the inner door of the airlock. Somehow they managed to turn their bodies through ninety degrees to orient themselves to the layout of the ship. When the door was fully opened they stepped out into an alleyway, illuminated by glowing strips set in the deckhead. Or, perhaps, set in the deck—but Grimes did not think that this was the case. He now had
up
and
down, forward
and
aft.
So far the alien vessel did not seem to be all that different from the spacecraft with which he was familiar, with airlock aft and control room forward. And an axial shaft, with elevator? Possibly, but he did not wish to entrust himself and his companion to a cage that, in some inaccessible position between decks, might prove to be just that.

Meanwhile there were ramps and there were ladders, these vertical and with rungs spaced a little too widely for human convenience. From behind doors that would not open came the soft hum of reactivated—after how long?—machinery. And to carry the sound there had to be an atmosphere. Grimes looked again at the indicator on his wrist. Pressure had stabilized at 910 millibars. Temperature was now a chilly but non-lethal 10° Celsius. The little green light still glowed steadily.

He said, “I’m going to sample the air, Your Excellency. Don’t open your faceplate until I give the word.”

She said, “My faceplate is already open and I’m not dead yet.”

Grimes thought,
All right. If you want to be the guinea pig you can be.
He put up his hand to the stud on his neckband that would open his helmet. The plate slid upward into the dome. He inhaled cautiously. The air was pure, too pure, perhaps, dead, sterile. But already the barely detectable mechanical taints were making themselves known to his nostrils, created in part by the very fans that were distributing them throughout the hull.

Up they went, up, up . . . If the ship had been accelerating it would have been hard work; even in free fall conditions there was considerable expenditure of energy. Grimes’ longjohns, worn under his spacesuit, were becoming clammy with perspiration. Ramp after ramp . . . Ladder after ladder . . . Open bays in which the breeches of alien weaponry gleamed sullenly . . . A “farm” deck, with only desiccated sludge in the long-dry tanks . . . A messroom (presumably) with long tables and rows of those chairs with the odd, slotted backs . . . Grimes tried to sit in one of them. Even though there was neither gravity nor acceleration to hold his buttocks to the seat, even though he was wearing a spacesuit, it felt . . . wrong. He wondered what the vanished crew had looked like. (And where were they, anyhow? Where were their remains?) He imagined some huge, surly ursinoid suddenly appearing and demanding, “Who’s been sitting in
my
chair?” He got up hastily.

“Now that you have quite finished your rest, Captain Grimes,” said the Baroness tartly, “we will proceed.”

He said, “I was trying to get the
feel
of the ship, Your Excellency.”

“Through the seat of your pants?” she asked.

To this there was no reply. Grimes led the way, up and up, with the Baroness just behind him, with the two automata behind her. At last they came to Control. The compartment was not too unlike the nerve center of any human-built warship. There were the chairs for the captain and his officers. There were navigational and fire-control consoles—although which was which Grimes could not tell. There were radar (presumably), mass-proximity indicator (possibly) and Deep Space and Normal Space Time radio transceivers (probably). Probability became certainty when one of these latter devices spoke, startlingly, in Big Sister’s voice. “I am establishing communication with him, Your Excellency, Captain Grimes. There are linguistic problems but not insuperable ones.”

Him!
wondered Grimes.
Him!
But ships were always referred to as
her.
(But were they? An odd snippet of hitherto useless information drifted to the surface from the depths of his capriciously retentive memory. He had read somewhere sometime, that the personnel of those great German dirigibles,
Graf Zeppelin
and
Hindenburg,
had regarded their airships as being as masculine as their names.) He looked out from a viewport at
The Far Traveler
floating serenely in the blackness. She had switched off the searchlights, turned on the floods that illumined her slim, golden hull.
She
looked feminine enough.

He asked, “Big Sister, have you any idea how old this ship is?” She replied, “At this very moment, no. There are no time scales for comparison. But his builders were not unlike human beings, with very similar virtues and vices.”