A. Bertram Chandler- Alternate Orbits

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Alternate Orbits
Commodore at Sea (stories)
A. Bertram Chandler
1971
For my favorite wife.
Hall Of Fame
SONYA GRIMES was unpacking. Grimes watched her contentedly. She was back at last from her
galactic cruise, and the apartment was no longer just a place in which to live after a fashion, in which to
eat lonely meals, in which to sleep in a lonely bed. It was, once more, home.
She asked lightly, “And have you been good while I’ve been away?”
“Yes,” he replied without hesitation, bending the truth only slightly. There tiad been that girl on
Mellise, of course, but it had all been in the line of duty. A reminiscent grin softened his craggy features.
“So good, in fact, that I was given the honorary rank of Admiral on Tharn ...”
She laughed. “Then I’d better give you something too, my dear. Something I know you’ll like ...” She
fell gracefully to her knees beside a suitcase that she had not yet opened, unsnapped and lifted up the lid,
plunged a slender hand into a froth of gossamer undergarments. “Ah, here it is. I didn’t want it to get
broken ...”
It was a leather case and, although it obviously had been well cared for, it was worn and cracked,
was ancient rather than merely old. The Commodore took it carefully from his wife, looked at it with
some puzzlement. Its shape was clue enough to what it contained, but Grimes had never guessed that
such homely and familiar masculine accessories could ever possess any value other than a strictly
utilitarian one.
“Open it!” she urged.
Grimes opened the case, stared in some bewilderment at the meerschaum pipe that was revealed,
archaic and fragile in its nest of faded plush.
“There was a little shop in Baker Street,” she said, speaking rapidly. “An antique shop. They had
this. I knew you’d like it ...”
“Baker Street ...” he repeated. “In London? On Earth?”
“Of course, John. And you know who lived there ...”
Yes, thought Grimes. 7 know who lived there. And he smoked a pipe, and he wore something
called a deerstalker hat. The only trouble is that he never lived at all in real life. Oh Sonya, Sonya,
they must have seen you coming. And how much did you pay for ... this?
“Think of it,” she went on. “Sherlock Holmes’s own pipe ...”
“Fantastic.”
“You don’t like it?” Neither of them was a true telepath, but each was quick to sense the mood of
the other. “You don’t like it?”
“I do,” he lied. But was it a lie? The thought behind the gift was more important, much more
important than the gift itself. “I do,” he said, and this time there was no smallest hint of insincerity in his
voice. He put the precious pipe down carefully on the coffee table. “But you’ve brought yourself back,
and you’re worth more to me than Sherlock Holmes’s pipe, or Julius Caesar’s bloodstained toga, or
King Solomon’s mines. Come here, woman!”
“That’s an odd-looking weapon you’ve got, Grimes,” remarked Admiral Kravinsky.
The Commodore laughed. “Yes, and there’s quite a story attached to it, sir. Sonya bought it for me
in London—and you’d think that a woman who holds a commission in the Intelligence Branch of the
Survey Service would have more intelligence than to be taken in by phony antiques! This, sir, is alleged to
be the actual pipe smoked by the great Sherlock Holmes himself.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. But I’l say this for Sonya, she’s got a sense of humor. After I’d explained to her in
words of one syllable that Sherlock Holmes was no more than a fictional character she saw the joke,
even though it was on her ...”
“And on you.”
“I suppose so. When I think of all the first class London briars that could have been purchased for
the same money ...”—
“I’m surprised that you’re smoking that. After all, a secondhand pipe ...”
“Sonya’s thorough. She took the thing to the nearest forensic laboratory to have it examined. They
assured her that it was untouched by human hand—or lip. It’s a perfectly good meerschaum, recently
manufactured and artificially aged. So she said that she liked to see her husband smoking the most
expensive pipe in the Rim Worlds. It’s not a bad smoke either ...”
“Don’t drop it,” warned the Admiral. “Whatever you do, don’t drop it.” Then the tolerant smile
vanished from his broad, ruddy features. “But I didn’t send for you to discuss your filthy smoking habits.”
He selected a gnarled, black cigar from the box on his desk, lit it. “I’ve a job for you, Grimes. I’ve
already spoken to Rim Runners’ management and arranged for your release for service with the
Reserve.”
Normally Grimes would have been pleased, but with Sonya just back ...
“The Federation has a finger in this particular pie as well, Grimes. And as their Commander Sonya
Verrill is back in Port Forlorn she may as well go along with you.”
Grimes’s face cleared.
“And this will please you, Commodore. I haven’t any warships to spare, and so your beloved
Faraway Quest will be recommissioned, with you in full command. The selection of personnel will be up
to you.”
“And what is the job, sir?” asked Grimes.
“A detailed, leisurely investigation of Kinsolving’s Planet. We all of us tend to shy away from that
ruddy world—but, after all, it is in our back garden. And after those outsiders from Francisco landed
there to carry out their odd experiments ...”
“I was there too,” said Grimes.
“Well I bloody well know it. And I had to organize the rescue party. Anyhow, you’re our expert on
Rim World oddities. Things seem to happen around you rather than to you. If anybody falls through a
crack in the continuum the odds are at least a hundred to one that Commodore Grimes, Rim Worlds
Naval Reserve, will be lurking somewhere in the background ...”
“I’ve been in the foreground too, sir.”
“I know, Grimes, I know. But you always survive, and the people with you usually survive. I had no
hesitation in recommending you for this ... survey. Yes, I suppose you could call it that, although what
you’ll be surveying God knows.”
“Which god?” asked Grimes, remembering vividly what had happened to the expedition from
Francisco.
“Fill me in,” ordered Sonya. “Put me in the picture.”
“I wrote to you,” said Grimes. “I told you all about it.”
“I never received the letter.”
“It must still be chasing you. Well, you know of Kinsolv-ing’s Planet, of course ...”
“Not as much as I should, my dear. So just make believe that I’ve just come out to the Rim, and that
I was never in the Intelligence Branch of the Survey Service. Start from there.”
“You have access to all the official reports, including mine.”
“I prefer to hear the story in less formal language. I never did care for officialese.”
“Very well, then. Now, KJnsolving’s Planet. It’s one of the Rim Worlds, and it was colonized at the
same time as the others, but the colonization didn’t stick. There’s something ... odd about the atmosphere
of the place. No, not chemically, or physically. Psychologically. There are all sorts of fancy theories to
account for it; one of the more recent is that Kin-solving lies at the intersection of stress lines; that there
the very fabric of space and time is stretched almost to bursting; that the boundaries between then and
now, between here and there, are so thin as to be almost nonexistent. Oh, I know that the same sort of
thing has been said often enough about the Rim Worlds in general—but nowhere is the effect so
pronounced as on Kinsolving. People just didn’t like living on a world where they could never feel sure of
anything, where there was always the dread at the back of their minds that the Change Winds would
reach gale force at any tick of the clock. So, when their suicide rate had risen to an unprecedented level
and their nut hatches were crammed to capacity, they got the hell out.
“That was that. And then, a century and a half ago, Galactic Standard, one of the Commission’s
tramps, Epsilon Eridani, made an emergency landing at the spaceport. She had to recalibrate the
controls of her Mannschenn Drive and, as you know, that’s best done on a planetary surface. It could be
that the temporal precession fields set up while this was being done triggered some sort of
continuum-warping chain reaction ... Anyhow, a few of the officers were allowed shore leave, and they
decided to explore the famous caves, which were not far distant. In these caves are remarkably
well-preserved rock paintings, made by the Stone Age aborigines who once lived on Kinsolving. (What
happened to them, nobody knows. They just vanished, millennia before the first humans landed.) They
returned to their ship in quite a dither, reporting that the paint of some of the pictures of various animals
was wet.
“The Federation’s Survey Service finally got to hear about this and sent a small team of investigators,
one of them a very well-qualified young lady from the Rhine Institute. They found the rock paintings
without any trouble—and found that a new one had been added, one depicting men in the standard
spaceman’s rig of that period. While they were standing around marveling they were pounced upon by a
horde of cavemen and made prisoner.
“But the Rhine Institute’s star graduate was equal to the occasion. Telepathy, teleportation,
psychokinesis—you name it, she had it. The party escaped with a prisoner of their own, the artist in
person. His name was Raul ...
“And, back on Earth, Raul became a pet of the Rhine Institute himself. He was a very specialized
kind of painter. When he drew an animal, that animal was drawn, in the other sense of the word, to within
range of the weapons of the hunters. He was also a telepath, and after the Institute had just about sucked
him dry he went to Francisco to become chief psionic radio officer of the Deep Space Communications
Station on that world. By this time he’d married the wench who’d captured him and, although he wasn’t
human, strictly speaking, the genetic engineers were able to make certain modifications to his body so
that the union was a fruitful one.
“You’ve been to Francisco, of course. You know how religion is almost a primary industry on that
planet. Raul got religion—and became, of all things, a neo-Calvinist, as did all his family. His
great-granddaughter fell from grace with a loud thud and became one of the so-called Blossom People
...” “So there’s a woman mixed up in it!” commented Sonya.
“Look around, my dear, and you’ll find a woman mixed up in almost everything. But where was I?
Yes, Clarisse. She rather overdid things—drink, sex, drugs—and was picked up out of the gutter and
brought back into the fold. But the neo-Calvinists weren’t being charitable. They knew that she had
inherited her ancestor’s talents, and they knew that certain of the psychedelic drugs amplified these same
talents, and so ...”
“And so?” she echoed.
“And so some perverted genius cooked up a scheme that even now makes me shudder. The idea
was that she should be taken to Kinsolving and there, on a suitable mountain top, invoke by her graphic
art and magic the God of the Old Testament, in the pious hope that He would provide for the
neo-Calvinists a new edition of the Ten Commandments. That bunch of unspeakable wowsers had to get
the permission of the Confederacy, of course, before they could land on Kinsolving—and so my lords
and masters decided that Commodore Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, should go along as an
observer ...”
“You never tell me anything.”
“I wrote to you about it. And it’s all in the reports that you, as the senior representative of the Survey
Service’s Intelligence Branch on the Rim Worlds, should have read by now. Besides, I’ve hardly had a
chance to get a word in edgewise since you came home.”
“Never mind that. What happened?”
“They set up shop on top of the mountain that they’d decided was the new Sinai. Clarisse, after the
proper preparations, painted a picture of a suitably irate-looking, white-bearded deity ... The trouble
was, of course, that so many of those patriarchal gods looked alike. And the Blossom People’s religion is
a pantheistic one. Cutting a long and sad story short—what we got wasn’t Sinai, but Olympus ...”
There was a long silence. And then, “If I didn’t know you, and if I didn’t know from personal
experience what odd things do happen out on the Rim, I’d say that you’d missed your vocation, that you
should be a writer of fairy stories ... But you assure me that all this is in the reports?”
“It is. And Clarisse is still on Lorn. She married Mayhew. I was thinking that we might have them
round tomorrow evening. And they’ll be coming with us in the Quest, in any case.” ‘
“But what’s our expedition supposed to be in aid of?” she demanded. “You’re leading it, and I shall
be your second-in-command; and two more unlikely people to be involved in any sort of religious
research, I can’t think of.”
The Commodore smiled a little crookedly. “Ill tell you what Kravinsky said to me. ‘It boils down to
this, Grimes. Both the Confederacy and our big brothers of the Federation think that something should be
done about Kinsolving. Nobody is quite sure what. So I’m sending you, with your usual crew of offbeats
and misfits, and if you bumble around in your inimitable manner something is bound to happen ...’”
Sonya grinned back at him. “The man could be right,” she said.
Finally—the recommissioning of a long laid up vessel takes time, Faraway Quest, Commodore John
Grimes commanding, lifted slowly from Port Forlorn. She was well-manned; Grimes had selected his
crew, both spacefaring personnel and civilian scientists and technicians, with care. The officers of all
departments were, like the Commodore-himself, naval reservists, specialists in navigation and gunnery
and engineering: in ship’s biochemistry. And there was the Major of Marines—also, as were,his men, a
specialist. Grimes hoped that the spaceborne soldiers’ services would not be needed, but it was good to
have them along, just in case. There was Mayhew, one of the few psionic radio officers still on active
service, youthful in appearance but old in years; and Clar-isse, really beautiful since her marriage and her
breakaway from the neo-Calvinists and their severe rules regarding dress and decorum, her hair styling
revealing the pointed ears inherited from her nonhuman ancestor. There were the two fat, jolly men from
the Dowser’s Guild who, even in this day and age, were shunned by the majority of the scientists. There
were men and women whose specialty was the measur-urement of radiation, others whose field was
chemistry, organic and inorganic. There were archeologists, and paleontologists, and ... “ •
“One more specialist, Grimes,” Admiral Kravinsky had growled, “and that old bitch of yours won’t
be able to lift a millimeter ...”
But a converted freighter, with all space properly utilized, has quite amazing capacity insofar as the
carrying of passengers is concerned. ~~
So she lifted, her inertial drive running sweetly and uncomplainingly, with Grimes himself at the
controls, all the old skill flowing back into his fingers, the ship an extension of his fit, stocky body,
obedient to his will, as were his officers grouped around him in the control room, each in his own chair
with his own bank of instruments before him.
She lifted, accelerating smoothly, soaring up to the low cloud ceiling, and through it, breaking out into
the steely sunlight of high altitudes, driving up to the purple sky that soon deepened to black, into the
darkness where glimmered the few, faint stars of the Rim, where, rising above the gleaming arc that was
the sunlit limb of the planet, glowed the misty ellipsoid that was the Galactic Lens.
Sonya, who had traveled vast distances as a passenger, said quietly, “It’s good to see this from a
control room again.”
“It’s always good ...” said Grimes.
Faraway Quest was clear of the atmosphere now, still lifting, and below them the planet presented
the appearance of a huge, mottled ball, an enormous flawed pearl lustrous against the black immensities.
She was clear of the Van Allen, and Grimes snapped an order. The Senior Communications Officer
spoke quietly into his intercom microphone. “Attention all! Attention all! There will be a short countdown,
from ten to zero. The inertial drive will be shut off, after which there will be a period of free fall, with brief
lateral accelerations as trajectory is adjusted.” He turned to the Commodore. “Ready, sir?”
Grimes studied the chart tank. “Now!” he said.
“Ten ...” began the officer. “Nine ...” ‘
Grimes looked to Sonya, raised his heavy eyebrows and shrugged. She shrugged back, and made
even this gesture graceful. She knew, as he knew, that all this formality was necessary only because there
were so many civilians aboard.
“... Zero!”
The irregular, throbbing beat of the inertial drive suddenly ceased and there was brief weightlessness
and a short silence. Then there was the hum of the maneuvering gyroscopes, rising to a whine, and
centrifugal force gently pressed those in Control to the sides of their chairs. Slowly, slowly, the target
star, the Kinsolving sun, drifted across the black sky until the glittering spark was centered in the
cartwheel sight, wavered, then held steady. The inertial drive came on again, its broken rumble a bass
background to the thin, high keening of the ever-precessing rotors of the Mann-schenn Drive. Ahead,
save for the tiny, iridescent spiral that was the target sun, there was only emptiness. Lorn was to
starboard; a vast, writhing planetary amoeba that was dropping back to the quarter, that was dwindling
rapidly. And out to port was the Galactic Lens, distorted by the temporal precession field of the Drive to
the similitude of a Klein flask blown by a drunken glassblower.
Grimes rather wished, as he had often wished before, that somebody would come up with another
way of describing it. He doubted if anybody ever would.
This was a far more pleasant voyage than the one that he had made to Kinsolving in the unhappy
Piety. To begin with, he had Sonya with him. Second, he was in command, and the ship was being run
his way. Faraway Quest was no luxury liner, but she was warm, comfortable. Her internal atmosphere
carried the scents of women’s perfume, of tobacco smoke, of good cooking—not that omnipresent
acridity of disinfectant. The snatches of music that drifted through her alleyways from the playmasters in
the public rooms were anything and everything from grand opera to the latest pop, never the morbid
hymns and psalms in which the neo-Calvinists had specialized. He spoke of this to Clarisse. She grinned
and said, “You’re not with it, Dad. You’re just not with it. By our standards this wagon is bitter endsville,
just a spaceborne morgue.”
He grinned back. “If the best that the. Blossom People can do is to resurrect the hip talk of the
middle twentieth century, I doubt if you’re with it either.”
“Every religion,” she told him seriously, “uses archaic language in its scriptures and in its rituals.” Then
she laughed. “I’m not complaining, John. Believe me, I’m not complaining. When I look back to the
Piety, and Rector Smith and Presbyter Cannan, and that she-dragon of a deaconess, I realize how lucky
I am. Of course, I could have been luckier ...”
“How so?”
“That tall, beautiful redhead of yours could have been left behind.”
“To say nothing of that highly capable telepath you’re married to.”
Her face softened. “I was joking, John. Before I met Ken-before I met him physically, that
is—something might have been possible between us. But I’m well content now, and I feel that I owe it all
to you. Ken was against our coming on this expedition, but I insisted. I’ll do anything I can to aid your ...
researches.”
“Even to a repeat performance?”
“Even to a repeat performance.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Frankly, John, so do I.”
The voyage was over. Faraway Quest, her Mannschenn Drive shut down, her inertial drive ticking
over just sufficiently to induce a minimal gravitational field, was falling in orbit about the lonely world, the
blue and green mottled sphere hanging there against the blackness. The old charts were out, and the new
ones too, made by Grimes himself with the assistance of the officers of Rim Sword. “Here,” said the
Commodore, stabbing a blunt forefinger down onto the paper, “is where the spaceport was. There’s
only a crater there now. Whoever or whatever destroyed Piety made a thorough job of it. And here’s
the city—Enderston it was called—on the east bank of the Weary River ...”
“‘Where even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea ...’” quoted Sonya. “They must have
been a cheerful bunch, those first colonists.”
“I’ve already told you that the very atmosphere of the planet engenders morbidity. And there, on the
shore of Darkling Tarn, is what was the Sports Stadium, where Rim Sword landed. In the absence of
any spaceport facilities it’s as good a place as any.” He turned from the chart to the big screen upon
which a magnification of the planet was presented. “You can see it all there—just to the east of the
sunrise terminator. That river, with all the S bends, is the Weary, and that lake which looks like an
octopus run over by a streamroller is Darkling Tarn. The city’s too overgrown for it to show up at this
range.”
“You’re the boss,” said Sonya.
“Yes. So I suppose I’d better do something about something.” He turned to his executive officer.
“Make it landing stations, Commander Williams.”
“Landing stations it is, sir.”
The officers went to their acceleration chairs, strapped themselves in. In seconds the intercom
speakers were blatting, “Secure all for landing stations! Secure all for landing stations! All idlers to their
quarters!” And then the maneuvering gyroscopes hummed and whined as the ship was tilted relative to
the planet until the surface was directly beneath her. The sounding rockets were discharged as she began
her descent, each of them releasing a parachute flare in the upper atmosphere, each of them emitting a
long, long streamer of white smoke.
Faraway Quest dropped steadily—not too fast and not too slow. Grimes made allowance for drift
and, as the first of the flares was swept west by a jet stream, he applied lateral thrust. Down she
dropped, and down, almost falling free, but always under the full control of her master. The picture of the
surface on the target screen expanded. The city could be seen now, a huddle of ruins on the river bank,
and beside the lake there was the oval of the Stadium, Eau de Nil in the midst of the indigo of the older
growth. The last of the flares to have been fired was still burning down there, the column of smoke rising
almost vertically. The brush among which it had fallen was slowly smoldering.
Grimes shivered. The feeling of dejd, vu was chillingly uncanny. But he had seen this before. He had
been here before—and, save for the different choice of landing site, circumstances had been almost
exactly duplicated, even to that luckily unenthusiastic bush fire. And again there was the sensation that
supernal forces—malign or beneficent?—were mustering to resist the landing of the ship.
But she was down at last.
There was the gentlest of shocks, the faintest of creakings, the softest sighing of the shock absorbers
as the great mass of the vessel settled in her tripodal landing gear. She was down. “Finished with
engines!” said Grimes softly. Telegraph bells jangled, and the inertia! drive generators muttered to
themselves and then were still. She was down, and the soughing of the fans intensified the silence.
Grimes turned in his swivel chair, looked toward the distant mountain peak, the black, truncated cone
sharp against the blue sky. “Sinai,” Presbyter Cannan had named it. “Olympus,” Grimes had called it on
his new charts. It was there that the neo-Calvinists had attempted to invoke Jehovah, and there that the
old gods of the Greek pantheon had made their disastrous appearance. Grimes hoped that he would
never have to set foot upon that mountain top again.
He was not first off the ship; after all, this was no newly discovered planet, this was not a historic first
landing of Man. The honor fell to the Major of Marines, who marched smartly down the ramp at the
head of his clattering column of space soldiers. He barked orders and the detachment broke up into its
component parts, fanning out from the landing site, trampling through the bushes. From somewhere came
a sharp rattle of machine-pistol fire. The Commodore was not concerned. He said, “There’ll be fresh
pork or rabbit on the table in the Marines’ mess tonight. Or pigburger or rabbitburger if the man who
fired was too enthusiastic.”
“Pigs? Rabbits?” inquired Sonya.
“Descendants of the livestock brought here by the original colonists. They—the pigs,
probably—seem to have wiped out most of the indigenous fauna. And, come to that, the hens and the
sheep and the cattle.” He lit his pipe. “They were, I suppose, the two species best fitted to survive. The
pigs with their intelligence, the rabbits with their ability to go underground and to breed ... like rabbits.”
She said, “I could do with some fresh air after weeks of the tinned variety. What’s good enough for
pigs and rabbits and Marines is good enough for me.”
“Just as well that the gallant Major didn’t hear you say that. Commander Williams!”
“Sir!” replied the burly Executive Officer.
“Shore leave is in order, as long as a full working watch—and that includes the manning of
weaponry—is left aboard the ship at all times. And every party of boffins is to be accompanied by at
least one officer or one Marine other rank, armed. Nobody is to go down the ramp without checking out
or without wearing his personal transceiver. Apart from that, we’ll make this a day of general relaxation.
After all, there are no physical dangers on this world. As for the other kind—I doubt if the Federation’s
Grand Fleet could cope with them.”
“Good-oh, Skipper,” replied Williams.
Grimes glared at him, then laughed. “I wondered how long it would be before the veneer of your last
drill in the Reserve wore off. Anyhow, those are the orders—and just try to remember now and again
that this is an auxiliary cruiser of the Rim Worlds Navy, not your beloved Rim Mamelute.” He closed on
a formal note. “The ship is yours, sir, until my return.”
“The ship is mine, sir, until your return.”
Then Grimes and Sonya went down to their quarters, replaced their light uniform sandals with
knee-high boots, strapped on their wrist transceivers, buckled on the belts from which depended their
bolstered hand weapons. The Commodore was sure that these would never be required but, as leader of
the expedition, he could not break the orders that he had issued. It was, he already knew, warm outside;
the slate gray shorts and shirts that he and his wife were wearing would be adequate.
They made their way down to the after airlock, checked out with the officer on gangway duty,
walked slowly down the ramp. The fresh air was good, and the last traces of smoke from the now dead
fire added a pleasant tang to it. The light of the sun, past its meridian and now dropping slowly to the
west, was warm on the exposed portions of their bodies. (7 made much better time down than Rector
Smith did in his Piety, thought Grimes smugly. It had been late afternoon when that ship had landed.)
And yet there was a chill in the air—psychological rather than physical. There was a chill in the air, and
with the scent of green growing things there was a hint of corruption.
Sonya shivered. “There’s something ... wrong,” she stated.
“That’s why we’re here,” Grimes told her.
They were met by the Major. He was returning to the ship, seven of his men behind him. Four of
them carried the bodies of two large boars, slung on branches; the others were loaded down with
rabbits. The young officer saluted cheerfully. “Enemy beaten off, sir, with heavy casualties.”
“So I see, Major. But this is more than a hunting party, you know.”
“I know, sir. I’ve set alarms all around the field so that we shall be alerted if anything large and
dangerous approaches.”
“Good.”
Grimes and Sonya walked on, picking their way with care over the tangle of tough vines, making their
slow way toward what had once been the Stadium’s grandstand, now a terraced, artificial hillock
overgrown with flowering creepers. They saw the two dowsers, stumbling about happily with their
gleaming divining rods in their hands, trailed by a bored-looking junior officer. They passed a party of the
more orthodox scientists setting up a piece of apparatus that looked like a miniature radio telescope.
They met Mayhew and Clarisse.
“Do you feel it?” demanded the Psionic Radio Officer. “Do you feel it, sir? None of these others
seem to.”
“Yes, I feel it. And so does Sonya.”
“Like something that has been waiting for us for a long time. Like something getting ready to pounce.
But it’s not sure that it has the strength anymore ...”
“Yes ... I thought myself that the ominous atmosphere wasn’t quite so pronounced as when I was
here last. What do you think, Clarisse? You were here too.”
“I’m not as scared as I was then, John. But there are reasons for that.”
“It’s pronounced enough for me,” said Sonya.
“It’s here still,” admitted Grimes. “But it could be fading. It could be that this planet has been at the
very focus of ... forces, and now the focus is shifting.” He laughed. “We shan’t be at all popular if, after
our masters have sent us here at enormous expense, nothing happens.”
“Frankly,” said Clarisse, “I hope nothing does.”
Nothing did.
Day followed day, and the parties of scientists spread out from around the landing site, on foot and in
Faraway Quest’s pinnaces. The archeologists grubbed happily in kitchen middens that they discovered
on the banks of the lake and the river, penetrated the caves and photographed the famous paintings in a
wide range of illuminations. Nothing new was found in the middens, no evidence that would throw any
light at all on the disappearance of the aboriginal race. The rock paintings were just rock paintings, the
pigments dry and ancient. The dowsers dowsed, and discovered deposits of metals that would be
valuable if the planet were ever recolonized, and found oil, and mapped the meanderings of underground
streams in desert areas. The other specialists plotted and measured and calculated—and found nothing
that could not have been found on any Earth-type planet.
“At least,” said Grimes, “we’ve proven that this world is suitable for resettlement.” He, with Sonya
and Clarisse and Mayhew, was sitting over after dinner coffee in his comfortable day cabin. “All hands
are really enjoying a marvelous outdoor holiday.”
“Except us,” said Sonya in a somber voice.
“There’s a reason for that, my dear. You’re sensitive to my moods, as I am to yours. And I had such
a scare thrown into me when I was here last that I could never feel at ease on this planet. And Clarisse
was more frightened than I was—and with good reason!—and all the time she was in telepathic touch
with Mayhew.”
“I still say that there’s something wrong,” insisted May-hew. “I still say that we should be absolutely
sure before we put in a report recommending another attempt at colonization.”
Grimes looked at Clarisse. “Would you be willing to repeat that experiment?” he asked.
She replied without hesitation. “Yes. I was going to suggest it. I’ve talked it over with Ken. And I
feel that if I try to call those old gods, rather than the deity of the neo-Calvinists, the results might be
better. It could be that it is in their interests that this world be peopled again—this time with potential
worshippers.”
“Like your Blossom People,” said Mayhew, unmaliciously.
“Yes. Like the Blossom People. After all, the slogan Make Love, Not War, would appeal to
Aphrodite if not to Ares ...”
Grimes laughed, but without real humor. “All right, Clarisse. Well arrange it for tomorrow night. And
we’ll have all hands out of the ship and well scattered just in case Zeus is too handy with his thunderbolts
again. Williams has been getting too fat and lazy; it’ll do him good to have a job of organization thrown
suddenly onto his lap ...”
Williams enjoyed himself; things had been altogether too quiet for his taste. And then, with the ship
quiet and deserted, Grimes, with Sonya and Clarisse and Mayhew, and with a full dozen of assorted
scientists, boarded one of the pinnaces, in which the necessary materials had already been stowed.
It was just before sunset when they landed on the smooth, windswept plateau that was the summit of
the mountain. A thin, icy wind swept into the little cabin as the door opened. One by one, Grimes in the
lead, the members of the party clambered down on to the bare, barren rock, the last ones to emerge
handing down the equipment before making their own exits. There was an easel, as before, a floodlight,
pots of paint, brushes. There were cameras, still and cinematographic, one of which would transmit a
television picture to receivers on the plain below the mountain. There were sound recorders.
Silently, slowly, Mayhew and his wife walked to the center of the plateau, accompanied by Grimes
and Sonya, carrying what she would be using. Grimes set up the easel, with its stretched black canvas,
and the powerful floodlight. Sonya placed the painting materials at its foot. Mayhew, his thin face pale
and anxious, lifted the heavy cloak from Clarissa’s shoulders. She stood there as she had stood before,
naked save for the brief, rough kilt of animal hide, her arms crossed over her full breasts for warmth
rather than from modesty. She looked, thought Grimes (again) as her remote ancestresses on this very
world must have looked, was about to practice the magic that they had practiced. Mayhew had
produced from a pocket a little bottle and a tiny glass—the psychedelic drug. He filled the glass, held it
out to her. “Drink this, my dear,” he ordered gently.
She took it from him, drained it, threw it down. It shattered with a crystalline crash, surprisingly loud
in spite of the wind. “Your bare feet ...” muttered Mayhew. He squatted down, carefully picking up the
glittering fragments. She did not appear to see what he was doing, stood like a’ statue when he, on his
feet again, laid his free hand on her bare shoulder in an attempted gesture of reassurance and ... farewell?
He whispered to Grimes, his voice taut with strain and worry, “I can’t get through to her. Somebody,
something’s got hold of her ...”
The three of them walked back. to where the scientists were standing by the pinnace, their recording
apparatus set up and ready. And suddenly the sun was gone, and there was only the glare of the
floodlight, in which Clarisse was standing. Overhead •was the almost empty black sky with its sparse
scatter of dim stars, and low to the east was the arc of misty luminescence that was the slowly rising
Galactic Lens. The wind could have been blowing straight from in-tergalactic space.
Conditions were almost the same as they had been on the previous occasion. Almost. It was the
human element that was different. This time those on the mountain top were skeptics and earnest
inquirers, not true believers. But the feeling of almost unendurable tension was the same.
Hesitantly, Clarisse stooped to the clutter of materials at her feet. She selected a brush. She dipped it
into one of the pots, then straightened. With swift, sure strokes she began to paint.
But it was wrong, Grimes realized. It was all wrong. It was white paint that she had used before; this
time she was applying a bright, fluorescent pigment to the canvas. A figure was taking shape—that of a
tall, slender man in red .tights, with a pointed beard, a mocking smile ... A man?
But men do not have neat little goatlike horns growing from their heads; neither do they have long,
lissome tails ending in a barbed point ...
A god?
Pan, perhaps.
No, not Pan. Pan never looked like that.
There was a dreadful crack of lightning close at hand, too close at hand, but the flash was not blue
white but a dull, unnatural crimson. There was a choking, sulphurous stench. And then he was standing
there, laughing; amid the roiling clouds of black smoke, laughing.
Grimes heard one of the scientists almost scream, “What the devil ... ?”
And the devil advanced, still laughing, his very white and very sharp teeth flashing. His surprisingly
elegant right hand stretched out to rest on the Commodore’s wrist. “You are under arrest,” he said. “And
I must warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used as evidence.”
“By what authority?” Grimes heard Sonya cry. “By what ...?”
And then there was darkness deeper than that between the universes, and absolute silence.
How long did the journey last? An eternity, or a fraction of a microsecond? It could have been either.
There was light again; not bright, but dim and misty. There was light, and there was solidity
underfoot—and there was still the pressure of that restraining hand on his wrist. Grimes looked
down—he was reluctant to look up—and saw what looked like a marble pavement. At last he allowed
his eyes slowly to elevate. There were the slim, pointed red shoes, inches from his own. There were the
slender yet muscular legs in their skintight scarlet hose. There were the elaborately puffed trunks. There
was the scarlet, gold-trimmed doublet ... Suddenly Grimes felt less frightened. This was the
Mephistopheles of fancy dress balls, and of opera, rather than a real and living embodiment of
unutterable evil. But when he came to the face his assurance began to ebb. There was a reckless
handsomeness, but there was power, too much power, power that would be used recklessly and
selfishly.
Behind Grimes a very English voice was saying, “We must congratulate our friend on his speedy
arrest, Watson.”
A deeper voice replied, “Yes, yes, my dear Holmes. But are we sure that we have the right man?
After all; to judge by his uniform, he’s an officer, and presumably a gentleman ...”
Mephistopheles laughed sneeringly. “Well I know the villainies of which so-called gentlemen are
capable. But I have carried out my part of the bargain and now I shall return to my own place; it’s too
infernally cgld here for comfort.”
There was a flash of dull crimson light, the stench of burning sulphur, and he was gone.
“Turn around, fellow, and let us look at you,” ordered the first English voice.
Slowly Grimes turned, and what he saw was no surprise to him. There was the tall man with aquiline
features, wearing peculiar garments that he knew were a Norfolk jacket, an Inverness cape and a
deerstalker cap. There was the short, stout man with the walrus moustache, formally clad, even to black
frock coat and gleaming top hat.
Grimes looked at them, and they looked at him.
Then, “Hand it over, sir,” ordered the tall man. “Hand it over, and I shall prefer no charges.”
“Hand what over?” asked Grimes, bewildered.
“My pipe, of course.”
Silently the Commodore drew the leather case from his pocket, placed it in the outstretched hand.
“A remarkable piece of deduction, my dear Holmes,” huffed the stout man. “It baffles me how you
did it.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson. It should be obvious, even to you, that a crime, any crime, cannot
take place in the three dimensions ,of space only. The additional factor, the fourth dimension, time, must
always be taken into account. I reasoned that the thief must be somebody living so far in our future that
our fictional origin will be forgotten. Then I enlisted the aid of the London branch of the Baker Street
Irregulars—those fellows are always absurdly flattered when I condescend to share their dreamsl
Through them I maintained a round the clock watch on the antique shop that stands where our lodgings
used to be. At last it was reported to me that my pipe had been purchased by a red-haired young lady of
striking appearance. I learned, too—once again through the invaluable Irregulars—that she was the wife
of one Commodore Grimes, of the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, and would shortly be returning to her
hus—
band, who was .resident in a city called Port Forlorn, on a planet called Lorn, one of the Rim
Worlds. These Rim Worlds are outside our ambit, but I was able to persuade that learned colleague of
yours who dabbles in magic to persuade his ... er ... colleague, Mephistopheles to place his services at
my disposal. Between us we were able to lay a very subtle psychological trap on yet another planet, one
with the unlikely name of Kinsolving ...” Holmes opened the case, took out the pipe, looked at it, sniffed
it. His face darkened. “Sir, have you been smoking this?”
“Yes,” admitted Grimes.
Watson intervened. “It will be a simple matter, Holmes, to sterilize it. Just a jet of steam from a
boiling kettle, back in our lodgings ...”
“Very well, Watson. Let us proceed with the purification rites forthwith.”
The two men walked rapidly away, their forms becoming indistinct in the mist. Grimes heard Watson
say, “And when I chronicle this case, I shall call it The Adventure of the Missing Meerschaum.
And what about “The Case of the Kidnapped Commodore’? wondered Grimes. But before he
could start in pursuit of the great detective and his friend another figure had appeared, blocking his way.
He, too, was English, most respectably dressed in the style of the early twentieth century, in black
jacket and trousers with a gray waistcoat, a stiff white collar and a black necktie. He was inclined to
stoutness, but the ladies of the servants’ hall must often have referred to him—but never in his dignified
hearing—as “a fine figure of a man.”
He raised his bowler hat, and Grimes had sufficient presence of mind to bring the edge of his right
摘要：

AlternateOrbitsCommodoreatSea(stories)A.BertramChandler1971 Formyfavoritewife. HallOfFameSONYAGRIMESwasunpacking.Grimeswatchedhercontentedly.Shewasbackatlastfromhergalacticcruise,andtheapartmentwasnolongerjustaplaceinwhichtoliveafterafashion,inwhichtoeatlonelymeals,inwhichtosleepinalonelybed.Itwas,o...

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