NOVELETTE

  ON

  THE

  ACCOUNT

  If you want to catch lightspeed, try just standing still before it!

  A. BERTRAM CHANDLER

  I

  COMMODORE GRIMES sat at his desk, looking down at the transcript of a Carlottigram from Port Listowel. Lord Of The Isles, one of the lightjammers on the run between the Rim Worlds and the Llanithi Consortium, was overdue. She, using her own Carlotti equipment, had beamed a final message to Port Forlorn before breaking the light barrier. Once the speed of light had been exceeded she was in a weird, private universe of her own—stranger even than the private universes of ships running under the space-time twisting Mannschenn Drive—and unable to communicate with any planetary base or any other ship. Toward the end of her voyage she had made her routine reduction of speed to a sublight velocity and had started to send her ETA to the Carlotti Station on Llanith. She had gotten as far as giving her name and then, according to the Llanithi Carlotti operator on watch, had experienced what seemed to be interference , on the band in use. Nothing more had been heard from her. And now she was all of ten days overdue.

  The communicator buzzed sharply.

  Grimes pressed the button that would admit the incoming call. The screen lit up and on it appeared the fleshy, ruddy face of Admiral Kravitz. "Ah, Grimes."

  The commodore repressed the temptation to counter with, And whom the hell else did you expect? Legally speaking the admiral was not his superior officer except when Grimes was called back to active duty with the Rim Worlds Navy, but there would be no sense in antagonizing the man.

  "Sir?" Grimes replied curtly. "This Lord Of The Isles business, Grimes?"

  "You have a transcript of the signal from Port Listowel, sir?

  "Of course. We do have an intelligence branch, you know. What do you make of it?"

  "I don't like it. Especially coming right after the vanishing of Sea Witch under very similar circumstances."

  "What are you doing about it, Grimes?"

  "I could ask you the same question, sir."

  "We cleaned up the energy-eaters for you, Grimes, and we made a clean sweep. Rim Culverin has been maintaining a patrol ever since the conclusion of Operation Rimhunt and has reported no further invasion of our territorial space by those entities." The admiral paused, then went on: "I'm not altogether happy about those light-jammers of yours, Grimes. As you know, we're having some built for the Navy, but I'm beginning to feel like trying to get the program canceled. They aren't safe. Sailing ships, indeed, in this day and age?"

  "They're the only ships we have capable of trading with the Llanithi Consortium."

  "At the moment, Grimes, at the moment. But our boffins are working on some other, simpler way of achieving a reversal of atomic charges."

  "With what success, sir?" asked Grimes innocently.

  Kravitz flushed. "None so far. But give them time, give them time. Meanwhile—"

  "Sir?"

  "Meanwhile, Grimes; I am recalling you to active duty. As long as the so-called ships of the line are still on our drawing boards we have to maintain an interest in sailing vessels. Furthermore, I have learned from your employers—from Rim Runners—that all further railings of the lightjammers have been suspended until such time as the mystery of the disappearance of Lord Of The Isles and Sea Witch has been cleared up. They are agreeable to the requisitioning and commissioning of Pamir as an auxiliary cruiser. You will sail in her."

  Grimes grinned. "Thank you, sir. But I have to tell you that I'm not qualified in sail."

  "Pamir's people are—and they all, like yourself, hold reserve commissions. Listowel's a full commander, isn't he? You'll be in overall charge of the ship and the expedition, but he can he your sailing master. We'll be putting aboard regular Navy personnel—gunnery specialists and the like. Satisfied?"

  "Gunnery specialists?"

  "You never know when weapons are going to come in handy, Grimes. It's better to have them than to be without them."

  Grimes had to agree. He knew as well as anybody that the universe was not peaceful and that Man was not its only breaker of peace.

  NOT at all reluctantly Grimes handed over his astronautical superintendent's duties to Captain Barsac, one of Rim Runners' senior masters. But it was with a certain degree of reluctance that he left his comfortable home in Port Forlorn for Port Erikson, the lightjammers' terminal. Sonya refused to accompany her husband. She detested cold weather. Port Forlorn's climate was barely tolerable. Only Esquimaux, polar bears or penguins—assuming that the immigration or importation of these from Earth could be arranged—would feel at home at Coldharbor Bay in Lorn's Antarctica.

  Pamir was alongside at Port Erikson. The cargo she had brought from Llanith had been discharged but she had not commenced to load for the return voyage. As yet the advance party from the Admiralty Yards was still to arrive, although accommodations—looking like black, partially inflated balloons grounded in the snow—had been set up for them.

  Grimes, accompanied by Captain Rowse, the Port Erikson harbormaster, went aboard Pamir. He was received by Ralph Listowel, the lightjammer's master.

  "Glad to have you aboard, sir," said Listowel.

  "Glad to be aboard, Commander."

  Listowel scowled. "That's right, sir. Rub it in. I suppose you'll be taking over my quarters."

  Grimes grinned. "No. You're to be my sailing master—and, as far as I'm concerned, this is still your ship and you're still the master of her. You've quite palatial passenger accommodations. That'll do me."

  Listowel's scowl faded from his lean, dark face. "Thank you, sir. But what is going on?"

  "Your ship has been requisitioned—and you and your officers have been called up for active duty in the Rim Worlds Navy."

  "I know that. But what is going on?"

  "I was hoping that you'd be able to tell me."

  Listowel waved his visitors to seats, took a chair himself. He said, "Let's face it, Commodore. To date the lightjammers have been lucky, fantastically lucky. Even in Flying Cloud, where we had to make up the rules as we went along, we all came through in one piece. But sooner or later luck runs out."

  "You think that's what happened to Sea Witch and Lord Of The Isles?"

  "There are so many things that could happen. When we're running under sail, building up to a velocity just short of that light, we could hit something—"

  "And the flare of the explosion would be seen from Llanith."

  "All right, all right. Something could go wrong with the magnetic suspension of the sphere of antiiron—"

  "And with matter and anti-matter canceling each other out the burst of released energy would be even more spectacular."

  "Yes, Commodore. But what if it happened at trans-light speed? We know very little of conditions outside the ship at that velocity. Would the explosion be witnessed in this universe— or in the next universe but three?"

  "Mphm. You have something there, Listowel. Even so, we've two ships missing, one after the other. There's an old saying: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

  "There hasn't been a third time," said Listowel.

  "Yet," pointed out Grimes. "But there's still the apparent jamming of Lord Of The Isles' last call to be considered."

  BACK in Rowse's office Grimes asked for the manifests of the cargoes carried by the two missing ships. It was possible that there had been some item of freight which, at trans-light speeds and with the reversal of atomic charges, had become chemically or physically unstable with fatal consequences. This was an idea worth considering. But no radioactives had been listed. No industrial chemicals, dangerous or otherwise, had been listed. Mainly the freight carried in each ship had consisted of luxury goods—preserved foodstuffs, liquor, fine textiles and the like. A few shipments of machine tools and some drugs had also been part of the cargoes.

  One drug in particular—Antigeriatridine—caught Grimes' attention. The substance was not manufactured on any of the Rim Worlds. It came from Marina, a planet in the Pleiades Sector. It was an extract from the glands of an indigenous sea slug and could not be synthesized. It was fantastically expensive and, on most worlds, was controlled by the state, rationed out only to deserving citizens. It was Marina's main source of income, exported to any planet that could afford to pay for it. In recent years the Llanithi Consortium had been placed on Marina's list of customers. Transhipment for Llanith was made from Lorn.

  Grimes' memory carried him back to the long ago days when he had been a newly commissioned ensign in the Federation Survey Service. He had played a part in bringing the pirates who had captured the merchant vessel Epsilon Sextans to book. Epsilon Sextans had been carrying Antigeriatridine, which had made her a worthwhile prey.

  Perhaps Admiral Kravitz' insistence that Pamir be armed made sense.

  But piracy?

  It was not the continued existence of the crime itself that Grimes found hard to comprehend, but rather the actual mechanics of it. Piracy was not unknown along the spaceways, but both predators and victims had always been conventional starships, with inertial drive and Mannschenn Drive and auxiliary rocket power for use in emergencies. Under inertial drive only, maintaining a comfortable 1G acceleration, a ship could build up almost to the speed of light if she took long enough about it. But, as soon as possible, she usually ran under Mannschenn Drive which, in effect, gave her FTL velocity. In these conditions she was untouchable unless the vessel attacking her succeeded in synchronizing her own rate

of temporal precession. The captains of warships—and of such vessels as have from time to time sailed on the plundering account—were reasonably competent in the practice of this art.

  But it would be impossible for a ship proceeding under inertial drive only to match velocities with a lightjammer under sail. And a ship running under Mannschenn Drive would have to return to the normal space-time continuum before her weapons could be brought to bear on a lightjammer—and, once again, the matching of velocities would be impossible.

  Hijacking was a form of piracy, of course.

  Grimes turned from the missing ships' cargo manifests to their passenger lists. The names meant nothing to him, neither those of Rim Worlds citizens nor of Llanithans. No doubt the police could help him in this respect. Perhaps one or more of those passengers had a criminal record. But the hypothesis made little appeal to him. He just could not imagine the officers of either of the vessels submitting meekly—and he could not imagine any passenger being able to handle a lightjammer. Sail spacemanship was an art rather than a science and the only practioners of the art—Grimes told himself—consisted of the handful of Rim Runners' personnel trained and qualified for lightjammers.

  He filled and lit his pipe, looked down at the manifests and passenger lists on the desk. He had a hunch that the manifests meant more than the passenger lists—no more than a hunch, hut his hunches were often right. Any ship --even a pirate ship—anywhere in space between Lorn and Llanith and in position to receive the beamed Carlotti transmissions from one planet to the other, would be able to read the routine signals sent immediately after the lift-off of one of the lightjammers. Date and time of departure—passengers carried—a listing of freight aboard. Nothing was encoded. There had never been any need for secrecy until now.

  Only the actual mechanics of attack, seizure and boarding puzzled him.

  HE CALLED Sonya, told her that she had better come to Port Erikson. "You're the intelligence officer in this family," he said. "This job calls for intelligence." Reluctantly she agreed to join him.

  The following morning he stood in the Port Erikson control tower, looking out through the wide windows at the bleak landscape. Pamir was alongside at her wharf, a great, dull-gleaming torpedo shape on the dark water. The sleekness of her lines was broken only by the pods that housed her airscrews and their engines. Out on Coldharbor Bay a small tug, Bustler, was chuffing busily back and forth, functioning as an icebreaker, keeping the harbor clear of any accumulation of ice heavy enough to impede surface maneuvers. Grimes had decided that Pamir must keep to her original schedule, which meant that her conversion to an auxiliary cruiser would be a skimpy one.

  There would be time for the installation of an extra generator and the fitting of two batteries of laser cannon, but no more.

  A familiar voice issued from the traffic controller's transceiver. "Pinnace Firefly to Port Erikson. Do you read me? Over."

  "Loud and clear, Firefly. Pass your message. Over."

  Grimes went to stand by the traffic control officer. He heard Sonya say, "My ETA Port Erikson oh-nine-four-five hours, your time. Over."

  So neither she—nor Admiral Kravitz—had wasted any time. And Sonya was doing her own piloting, which was typical of her.

  "I have her on the screen, sir," announced the radar operator.

  Grimes went to the window overlooking the Nullarbor Plain, almost featureless under the blanket of snow. It was one of the rare clear days, and on the horizon stood the distant, jagged battlements of the Great Barrens. And was that a tiny, glittering speck in the pale sky? Yes. It expanded rapidly and even in the control tower, through the thick glass of the windows, the irritated snarl of an inertial drive unit operating at maximum capacity was distinctly audible.

  "That's her," said Captain Rowse.

  "That's her," agreed Grimes. He shrugged into his heavy cloak, put on his cap and went down to the airstrip to meet Sonya.

  “THE trouble with you, John," she said, "is that you've read too much of the wrong kind of history. Wooden ships and iron men and all that sort of thing. Pieces of eight. Broadsides of carronades. The Jolly Roger. Oh, there have been space pirates, I admit. But I still get my share of the bumf issued by the Federation Survey Service's intelligence branch—and I can tell you that today there just aren't any pirates. Not that sort of pirate, anyway. There's still the occasional hijacking."

  Grimes' prominent ears flushed. He indicated with his hand the passenger lists. He said, "I've asked the Port Forlorn chief of police if any of these people have criminal records. He assures me that none of them have and that everybody aboard Lord Of The Isles and Sea Witch was a little, innocent woolly lamb—"

  "He'd know, wouldn't he?" She herself was flushed, her fine features literally glowing under the glossy auburn hair. "And you have all these bright ideas and drag me out here, where all the brass monkeys are singing falsetto, to join you in this comfortless shack to help you think."

  "Not comfortless," said Grimes. The quarters that he had been given were commodious and comfortable enough, although lacking in character. ACCOMMODATION, MARRIED COUPLE, FOR THE USE OF ...

  "Well, what do you intend doing? Put me in the picture."

  "Pamir will sail on time, having loaded the cargo that's been booked for her. That will include a shipment of Antigeriatridine. The usual routine signals will be made once she has lifted off. And then we wait to see what happens next."

  "We?"

  "I suppose you'll be coming along."

  "I might as well get a free trip to Llanith out of it."

  "All right. You. Me. Ralph Listowel and his officers. The gunnery officer from the Navy who'll be looking after the laser batteries. The two dozen or so marines who'll be traveling as passengers."

  "Anybody would think that you were contemplating embarking on a career of piracy yourself."

  Grimes laughed. "Why not? After all, one of my ancestors sailed on the account."

  "And what happened to him?" "He was eventually hanged from his own yardarm."

  She joined him in his laughter. "Then you'd better be careful. After all, the lightjammers are the only ships that run to masts and yards!"

  II

  PAMIR was ready for space. The extra generator had been installed, as had been the batteries of laser cannon. Stores for the voyage and the cargo had been loaded. The passengers were embarked. Grimes and Sonya, together with Major Trent, the marine officer, and Lieutenant Fowler, the gunnery officer, sat with Listowel and his wife, Sandra, in the master's day cabin.

  Listowel sipped his coffee rather glumly. He asked Grimes stiffly, "Have I your permission to cast off, sir, at the arranged time?"

  "Of course, Listowel. You're the master still. The rest of us are just along for the ride."

  "It's a ride I'm looking forward to," put in Fowler enthusiastically. He was a young giant with short-cropped yellow hair, the perpetual schoolboy so common in all the armed services. "It'll give me some time in sail and I'll he all set for our own ships of the line when they come out."

  "It's not a free ride we're here for," commented the major sourly.

  "More coffee anybody?" asked Sandra cheerfully.

  "No thanks," replied Listowel, looking at his watch. "It's time we got the show on the road."

  "Can I come up to control, sir?" asked Fowler.

  "Of course, Lieutenant. You're welcome on the bridge. And so are you, major."

  Grimes and Sonya went along with the others. They had witnessed Pamir's departure from the control position before, but it was so unlike the liftoff of a conventional spaceship as to remain fascinating. This time there was no need to use the tug, no need for the transverse thrust of the airscrews. The wind, what little there was of it, was northerly, blowing the ship bodily off from the wharf, the brash ice piling up along her lee side but not impeding her. When she was well out into the bay water, ballast was dumped and—the sphere of anti matter giving her positive buoyancy—she went up like a balloon or a rocket—silently. Within seconds she was driving through the low cloud ceiling and then had broken through into the clear upper air. Fast she rose ----and faster—into blackness, while below her Lorn became an opalescent globe hanging in nothingness.

 

1 2 3