A. Bertram Chandler - Rim World - The Dark Dimensions

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THE DARK DIMENSIONS

By A Bertram Chandler

A Commodore Grimes Novel

Published by Ace Books

Cover art by Frank Kelly Freas

With the author's sincere thanks to Poul Anderson for his loan of Captain Sir

Dominic Flandry.

"I've another job for you, Grimes," said Admi-ral Kravitz.

"Mphm," grunted Commodore Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, "sir." He

regarded the portly flag officer with something less than en-thusiasm. There

had been a time, not so very long ago, when he had welcomed being dragged

away from his rather boring civilian duties as Rim Run-ners' astronautical

superintendent, but increas-ingly of late he had come to appreciate a relatively

quiet, uneventful life. Younger men than he could fare the starways, he was

happy to remain a desk-sitting space commodore.

"Rim Runners are granting you indefinite leave of absence," went on Kravitz.

"They would," grumbled Grimes.

"On full pay."

Grimes' manner brightened slightly. "And I'll be drawing my commodore's

pay and allowances from the Admiralty, of course?"

"Of course. You are back on the active list as and from 00:00 hours this very

day."

"We can always use the extra money . . ." murmured Grimes.

Kravitz looked shocked. "I never knew that you were so mercenary, Grimes."

"You do now, sir." The Commodore grinned briefly, then once again looked

rather apprehen-sive. "But it's not Kinsolving's Planet again, is it?" The

Admiral laughed. "I can understand your being more than somewhat allergic

to that peculiar world."

Grimes chuckled grimly. "I think it's allergic to me, sir. Three times I've

landed there, and each time was unlucky; the third time unluckiest of all." "I've

read your reports. But set your mind at rest. It's not Kinsolving."

"Then where?"

"The Outsider."

"The Outsider..." repeated Grimes slowly. How many times since the

discovery of that alien construction out beyond the Galactic Rim had he urged

that he be allowed to take Faraway Quest to make his own investigation? He

had lost count. Always his proposals had been turned down. Al-ways he could

not be spared or was required more urgently elsewhere. Too, it was obvious

that the Confederacy was scared of the thing, even though it swam in space

that came under Rim Worlds' jurisdiction. The Federation was scared of it, too.

"Let well enough alone," was the attitude of both governments.

"The Outsider..." said Grimes again. "I was beginning to think that it

occupied top place on the list of untouchables. Why the sudden revival of

interest?"

"We have learned," Kravitz told him, "from reliable sources, that the

Waldegren destroyer Adler is on her way out to the... thing. I needn't tell you

that the Duchy of Waldegren is making a comeback, or that Federation policy

is that Wal-degren will never be allowed to build its fleet up to the old level.

But sophisticated weaponry can give a small navy superiority over a large one."

"The Outsiders' Ship, as we all know, is a storehouse of science and

technology thousands—millions, perhaps—of years in ad-vance of our own.

Your Captain Calver got his paws on to some of it, but passed nothing of

inter-est on to us before he flew the coop. Since then we, and the Federation,

and the Shaara Empire, and probably quite a few more, have sent expeditions.

Every one has ended disastrously. It is possible, probable, even, that this

Waldegren effort will end disastrously. But we can't be sure."

"It should not take long to recommission your Faraway Quest. She's only

just back from the Fleet Maneuvers, at which she was present as an auxiliary

cruiser...."

"I know," said Grimes. "I should have been in command of her."

"But you weren't. For all your early life in the Federation's Survey Service,

for all your rank in our Naval Reserve, you don't make a good naval officer.

You're too damned independent. You like to be left alone to play in your own

little corner. But—I grant you this—whatever sort of mess you fall into you

always come up smelling of roses."

"Thank you, sir," said Grimes stiffly.

Kravitz chuckled. "It's true, isn't it? Anyhow, you should be on the spot,

showing the flag, before Adler blows in. You'll be minding the shop. Play it by

ear, as you always do. And while you're about it, you might try to find out

something useful about The Outsider."

"Is that all?" asked Grimes.

"For the time being, yes. Oh, personnel for Faraway Quest.... You've a free

hand. Make up the crew you think you'll need from whatever officers are

available, Regulars or Reservists. The Federation has intimated that it'd like an

observer along. I think I'm right in saying that Commodore Verrill still holds a

reserve commission in the Intel-ligence Branch of their Survey Service...."

"She does, sir. And she'd be very annoyed if she wasn't allowed to come

along for the ride."

"I cap well imagine. And now we'll browse through The Outsider files and try

to put you in the picture."

He pressed a button under his desk, and a smartly uniformed W.R.W.N.

officer came in, car-rying a half dozen bulky folders that she put on the

Admiral's desk. She was followed by two male petty officers who set up screen,

projector and tape recorders.

Kravitz opened the first folder. "It all started," he said, "with Commander

Maudsley of the Fed-eration Survey Service's Intelligence Branch...."

"It all started," said Grimes, "with Com-mander Maudsley of the Federation

Survey Service's Intelligence Branch...."

As soon as he had spoken the words he regretted them. Sonya, his wife, had

known Maudsley well. They had been more, much more, than merely fellow

officers in the same service. Grimes looked at her anxiously, the reddening of

his prominent ears betraying his embarrassment. But her strong, fine-featured

face under the high-piled, glossy, au-burn hair was expressionless. All that she

said, coldly, was, "Why bring that up, John?"

He told her, "You know the story. Mayhew knows the story. I know the story.

But Clarisse doesn't. And as she's to be one of my key officers on this

expedition it's essential that she be put in the picture."

"I can get it all from Ken," said Clarisse Mayhew.

"Not in such detail," stated Sonya. "We have to admit that my ever-loving

husband has always been up to the eyebrows in whatever's happened on the

Rim."

"You haven't done so badly yourself," Grimes told her, breaking the

tension, returning the smile that flickered briefly over her face.

"One thing that I like about the Rim Worlds," murmured Clarisse, "is that

the oddest things al-ways seem to be happening. Life was never like this on

Francisco. But go on, please, John."

"Mphm," grunted Grimes. "Talking is thirsty work."

He raised a hand, and on silent wheels a robot servitor rolled into the

comfortable lounge room. Most people who could afford such luxuries

pre-ferred humanoid automatons and called them by human names, but not

Grimes. He always said, and always would say, that it was essential that

machines be kept in their proper place. The thing that had answered his

summons was obviously just a machine, no more than a cylindrical tank on a

tricycle carriage with two cranelike arms. It stood there impassively waiting for

their orders, and then from a hatch in its body produced a tankard of cold beer

for Grimes, Waverley Scotch and soda for Mayhew, iced Rigellian dragon's milk

for the ladies.

"Here's to all of us," said Grimes, sipping ap-preciatively. He looked over the

rim of his glass at his guests—at Mayhew, tall, gangling, deceptively youthful

and fragile in appearance, at Clarisse, attractively plump in face and figure, her

rich brown hair hanging down to waist level. On Fran-cisco, the world of her

birth, she had been one of the so-called Blossom People, and still looked the

part.

"Get on with it, John," said Sonya after sam-pling her own drink.

"Very well. It all started, as I've already said, with Commander Maudsley. As

well as being a fully qualified astronaut, he was an Intelligence Officer...."

"It didn't start with Maudsley," said Sonya sharply. "No one knows when it

started."

"Oh, all right. I'll go back a few more years in time. It was suspected for quite

a long while that there was something out there. Many years ago, long before

the Rim Worlds seceded from the Fed-eration, Faraway was a penal colony of

sorts. The Survey Service actually manned a ship with the sweepings of the

jails and sent her out to find that ... something. What happened to her is not

known to this day. After we'd established our own Con-federacy, the

Federation's Survey Service was still snooping around the Rim—and Maudsley,

passing himself off as the master of a star tramp called Polar Queen, did quite a

lot of work out there. So far as we know he was the first human spaceman to

set eyes on the Outsiders' Ship. Shortly thereafter he crashed his own vessel

coming in to a landing at Port Farewell on Faraway. He was the only sur-vivor.

After that he stayed out there. He served in a few of our Rim Runners' ships,

but he was practically unemployable. We didn't know then that he was a

Survey Service Commander, Intelligence Branch at that, but it wouldn't have

made any difference. He finished up as mate of a ship called, funnily enough,

The Outsider. Her master, Cap-tain Calver, had been master in our employ, but

he and his officers made a pile of money out of the salvage of the T.G. Clipper

Thermopylae and invested it in an obsolescent Epsilon Class tramp, going into

business as shipowners. To comply with regulations, Calver had to ship a chief

officer with at least a Chief Pilot's Certificate—and Maudsley was the only one

that he could find on Nova Caledon."

"Maudsley was hitting the bottle, almost drink-ing himself to death. (Forgive

me, Sonya, but that's the way that it was.) He talked in his drunken delirium.

He talked about the Outsiders' Ship, the finding of which had somehow

wrecked his life. Then he committed suicide...."

Grimes paused, looking at his wife. Her face was expressionless. He went on,

"For quite a while after that Calver got by in his Outsider. Toward the finish,

Sonya was his chief officer—she holds her Master Astronaut's papers, as you

know. Trade on the Rim was expanding faster than Rim Runners' fleet and

there was plenty of cargo for an independent operator. But, eventually, times

got bad for Calver. Rim Runners had suffi-cient tonnage for all requirements,

and a small, one ship company just couldn't compete. It was then that he and

his co-owners remembered Maudsley's story, and decided to find the Ship

From Outside for themselves. They knew that there was something out beyond

the Rim that could make them impossibly rich. They had Maudsley's sailing

directions, such as they were. The Confederacy evinced some slight interest in

the matter, and I was able to help out with the loan of a Mass Proximity

Indicator—which, in those days, was a very expensive hunk of equipment. Even

the Federation chipped in. As you know, my dear.

"Calver found the Outsiders' Ship. He and his people boarded... her?... it? A

ship? A robot intelligence? A quarantine station? Who knows? But they found

the thing. They boarded it. But I'll let Calver speak for himself. This is a

recording of the report he made to me."

Grimes switched on the small recorder that was standing ready on the

coffee table. He hated him-self for raising so many ghosts from Sonya's

past—she and Calver had been lovers, he knew—but these ghosts were bound

to have been raised during the expedition. Her face was stony, expressionless,

as the once familiar voice issued from the little machine.

"Did you ever read a twentieth century Terran author called Wells? He's

recommended reading in the 'Fathers of the Future' course they have at most

schools. Anyhow, there's one of his stories, a fantasy, called A Vision Of

Judgment. Wells imag-ined a Judgment Day, with all living and all who have

ever lived called by the Last Trump to face their Maker, to be tried and

punished for their sins or, perhaps, to be rewarded for their good deeds.

Everyone has his session of Hell as his naked soul stands in full view of the

multitude while the Re-cording Angel recites the long, long catalog of petty

acts of meanness and spite.... All the trivial (but not so trivial) shabby things,

all the things in which even the most perverted nature could never take pride,

and even the spectacular wrongdoings made to look shabby and trivial....

"It was left there, the Outsiders' Ship, out be-yond the Rim, in the hope that

with the develop-ment of interstellar flight techniques it would be discovered. It

was left there, in the far outer reaches of this galaxy, to test the fitness of its

discoverers to use the treasures of science and technology that it contains, to

build ships capable of making the Big Crossing. We passed the test without

cracking.... quite. Had we cracked there is little doubt that we should have

been bundled off the premises as unceremoniously as Maudsley must have

been, bundled outside with memories of fear and of horror, and of loss, and

with some sort of posthypnotic inhibition to stop us from ever talking about it.

It's possible, of course, that some of Maudsley's crew did pass the test—but

they died with Polar Queen.

"The test.... yes, it's ingenious, and amazingly simple. It's... it's a mirror

that's held up to you in which you see... everything. Yes, everything. Things

that you've forgotten, and things that you've wished for years that you could

forget. After all, a man can meet any alien monster with-out fear, without hate,

after he has met and faced and accepted the most horrible monster of all....

"Himself."

Grimes switched off, then busied himself refuel-ing and lighting his pipe. He

said, through the acrid smoke cloud, "Calver came back, as you've gathered,

and then he and his engineers did a few odd things to his ship's Mannschenn

Drive, and then they all pushed off to...? Your guess is as good as mine. To the

next galaxy but three? The general impression was that they had some sort of

intergalactic drive. Calver was decent enough to leave me a pile of

things—notes and diagrams and calculations. Unfortunately I'm no

engineer...."

"You can say that again!" interjected Sonya.

Grimes ignored this. "Our own bright boys tried to make something of them.

They actually rebuilt a Mannschenn Drive unit as allegedly specified, but it

just won't work. Literally. Every moving part has absolute freedom to move on

bearings that are practically frictionless, but...." He grinned. "Mayhew reckons

that the thing won't work un-less its operator is approved by it. Frankly, I can't

approve of a machine that thinks it has the right to approve or disapprove of

me!"

"That's only my theory, John," put in Mayhew.

"But you believe it, don't you? Where was I? Oh, yes. After the Calver affair

there was quite a flurry of interest in the Outsiders' Ship. The Fed-eration,

with our permission, sent Starfinder to nose around. She located quite a few

derelicts in the vicinity—a Shaara ship, an odd vessel that must have belonged

to some incredibly ancient culture, a Dring cruiser. Then she became a

dere-lict herself. When her Carlotti transmissions suddenly stopped we sent

Rim Culverin to investigate. The Culverin's captain reported that he had

boarded Starfinder and found all hands very dead; a few had been shot and the

rest wiped out by a lethal gas in the air circulation system. Whether or not any

of Starfinder's people boarded the Outsid-ers' Ship we don't know. Probably

some, at least, did. Rim Culverin was ordered not to investigate The Outsider

but to tow Starfinder in to Lorn. She did just that. Then our big brothers of the

Federa-tion tried again, this time with a Constellation Class cruiser, Orion.

Orion blew up with no sur-vivors. Rim Carronade was with her and saw it

happen. Orion had put quite a large boarding party onto—or into—the

Outsiders' Ship, and it was after their return to their own vessel that the big

bang happened. Rim Carronade was damaged herself, with quite a few

casualties, and returned to Lorn."

"All of you here know me. I'm not one of those people who say, in a

revoltingly pious voice, that there are some things that we are not meant to

know. For years I've been wanting to take my own expedition out to investigate

that hunk of alien ironmongery. I've got my chance at last—and I'm just a little

scared."

"And I'm damn glad that I shall have all of you with me.

III

She was an old ship, was Faraway Quest, but in first class condition. She

had started life as an Epsilon Class tramp, one of those sturdy work-horses of

the Federation's Interstellar Transport Commission. Sold to Rim Runners

during the days when practically all of the tonnage out on the Rim was at best

secondhand, she had been converted into a survey ship. In her, Grimes had

discovered and explored the worlds of the Eastern Circuit: Tharn, Mellise,

Grollor and Stree. In her he had made the first contact with the antimatter

systems to the galactic west.

After secession, the setting up of the Rim Worlds Confederacy, she had

been subject to further conversion, this time being fitted out as an auxiliary

cruiser. Even though the Rim Worlds Navy now possessed a sizable fleet built

to its own specifications, this was still her official status. Nonetheless,

Commodore Grimes regarded her as his ship.

As Admiral Kravitz had told him, she was prac-tically ready to lift off at once

to where The Out-sider drifted in the intergalactic nothingness. She was

almost fully stored. Her "farm" was in a flourishing state; her tissue culture,

yeast and algae tanks were well stocked and healthy. Main and auxiliary

machinery were almost fresh from thorough overhaul. Sundry weaponry had

been mounted so that she could play her part in the fleet maneuvers, and this

Grimes decided to retain. He liked to think of himself as a man of peace these

days but was willing to admit that it is much easier to be peaceful behind laser

projections and rocket batteries than in an unarmed ship.

The selection of personnel for the expedition posed no great problems. Billy

Williams, normally skipper of the deep space tug Rim Mamelute, was available.

On more than one occasion he had served as Grimes' second-in-command.

James Carnaby, second officer with Rim Runners and an outstandingly

competent navigator, had just come off leave and was awaiting reappointment.

Like Williams, he held a commission in the Reserve, as did Hendrikson,

another Rim Runners' second officer, just paid off from Rim Griffon. There was

Davis, an engineer whom Grimes knew quite well and liked, and who was

qualified in all three Drives: Mannschenn, inertial and reaction. There was

Sparky Daniels, currently officer in charge of the Port Forlorn Carlotti Station

but who fre-quently pined for a deep space appointment. And there was Major

Dalzell of the Rim Worlds Marines. Grimes had heard good reports of this

young space soldier and, on being introduced to him, had liked him at once.

There was what Grimes described as a brain trust of buffoons from the

University of Lorn. There was a team of technicians.

There was an officer of the Intelligence Branch of the Federation's Survey

Service—just along, as she said, "to see how the poor live." This, of course, was

Commander Sonya Verrill, otherwise Mrs. Grimes, who, in spite of her

marriage to a Rim Worlder, had retained both her Federation citizenship and

her Survey Service commission. There were the psionicists—Ken Mayhew, one

of the last of the psionic communications officers, and Clarisse, his wife. He

was a highly trained and qualified telepath. She, born on Francisco, was a

descendant of that caveman artist from the remote past who, somehow, on

Kinsolving's Planet, had been dragged through time to what was, to him, the

far future. Like her ancestor, Clarisse was an artist. Like him, she was a

specialist. Inborn in her was the talent to lure victims to the hunter's snare.

Twice, on Kinsolving itself, she had exercised this talent—and on each occasion

the hunters had be-come the victims.

The work of preparing the ship for her voyage went well and swiftly. There

was little to be done, actually, save for the rearranging of her accommodations

for the personnel that she was to carry, the conversion of a few of her

compartments into laboratories for the scientists. Toward the end of the refit

Grimes was wishing that on that long ago day when the Rim Worlds had

decided that they should have their own survey ship somebody had put up a

convincing case for the purchase of an obsolescent Alpha Class liner! Not that

there was anything wrong with Faraway Quest—save for her relative

smallness. And it was not only the civilians who demanded space and yet

more space. Officer Hendrikson—who, as a Reserve officer had specialized in

gunnery—sulked hard when he was told that he could not have the

recre-ation rooms as magazines for his missiles. (Dr. Druthen, leader of the

scientists, was already sulk-ing because he had not been allowed to take

them over as workshops.)

Grimes knew that he could not hasten matters, but he chafed at every delay.

As long as the Quest was sitting on her pad in Port Forlorn far too many people

were getting into every act. Once she was up and outward bound he would be

king of his own little spaceborne castle, an absolute monarch. Admiral Kravitz

had made it clear to him that he would be on his own, that he was to act as he

saw fit. It was a game in which he was to make up the rules as he went along.

It was a game that Grimes had always enjoyed playing.

Faraway quest lifted from Port Forlorn with-out ceremony; it could have

been no more than the routine departure of a Rim Runners' freighter. Grimes

had the controls; he loved ship handling and knew, without false modesty, that

he was a better than average practitioner of this art. In the control room with

him were Sonya, Billy Wil-liams, Carnaby, Hendrikson and Sparky Daniels.

Also there, as a guest, was Dr. Druthen. Grimes already did not like Druthen.

The physicist was a fat slug of a man, always with an oily sheen of perspiration

over his hairless skin, always with an annoyingly supercilious manner. He sat

there, a silent sneer embodied. Had he been a crew member he would have

faced a charge of dumb insolence.

Daniels was at the NST transceiver, a little man who looked as though he

had been assembled from odds and ends of wire, highly charged wire at that.

Williams—bulky, blue-jowled, with shaggy black hair—lounged in the co-pilot's

seat. He slumped there at ease, but his big hands were ready to slam down on

his controls at a microsecond's notice. Slim, yellow-haired, a little too

conventionally handsome, Carnaby was stationed at the radar with

Hendrikson, also blond but bearded and burly, looking as though he should

have been wearing a horned helmet, ready to take over if necessary. He

managed to convey the impression that fire control was his real job, not

navigation.

And Sonya conveyed the impression that she was just along as an observer.

She was slim and beautiful in her Survey Service uniform, with the micro-skirt

that would have been frowned upon by the rather frumpish senior female

officers of the Confederacy's Navy. She was a distracting influ-ence, decided

Grimes. Luckily he knew her well; even so he would find it hard to keep his

attention on the controls.

"Mphm," he grunted. Then, "Commander Wil-liams?"

"All stations secured for lift-off, Skipper. All drives on Stand By."

"Mr. Daniels, request clearance, please."

"Faraway Quest to Tower. Faraway Quest to tower. Request clearance for

departure. Over."

The voice of the Aerospace Control officer came in reply. "Tower to Faraway

Quest. You have clearance." Then, in far less impersonal accents, "Good

questing!"

Grimes grunted, keeping his face expression-less. He said into his intercom

microphone, "Count down for lift-off. Over to you, Com-mander Williams."

"Ten..." intoned Williams. "Nine... Eight...

"A touching ritual," muttered Dr. Druthen. Grimes glared at him but said

nothing.

"Five... Four..."

The Commodore's glance swept the control room, missing nothing. His eyes

lingered longer than they should have done on Sonya's knees and exposed

thighs.

"Zero!"

At the touch of Grimes' finger on the button the inertial drive grumbled into

life. The ship qui-vered, but seemed reluctant to leave the pad. I should have

been expecting this, he thought. The last time I took this little bitch out I wasn't

inflicted with this excess tonnage of personnel... He applied more pressure,

feeling and hearing the faint clicks as the next two stages were brought into

operation. The irregular beat of the drive was suddenly louder.

"Negative contact, sir," stated Carnaby. "Lift-ing... lifting..."

Grimes did not need to look at the instruments. He was flying by the seat

of his pants. He could feel the additional weight on his buttocks as

accel-eration, gentle though it was, augmented gravity. He did not bother to

correct lateral drift when the wind caught Faraway Quest as soon as she was

out of the lee of the spaceport buildings. It did not really matter at which

point she emerged from the upper atmosphere of the planet.

Up she climbed, and up, and the drab, gray landscape with the drab, gray

city was spread be-neath her, and the drab, gray cloud ceiling was heavy over

the transparent dome of the control room. Up she climbed and up and

beyond the dome; outside the viewports there was only the formless, swirling

fog of the overcast.

Up she climbed—and suddenly, the steely Lorn sun broke through, and the

dome darkened in compensation to near opacity. Up she climbed....

"Commodore," asked Druthen in his unpleas-antly high-pitched voice, "isn't

it time that you set course or trajectory or whatever you call it?"

"No," snapped Grimes. Then, trying to make his voice pleasant or, at least,

less unpleasant, "I usually wait until I'm clear of the Van Allen."

"Oh. Surely in this day and age that would not be necessary."

"It's the way that I was brought up," grunted Grimes. He scowled at Sonya,

who had assumed her maddeningly superior expression. He snapped at

Carnaby, "Let me know as soon as we're clear of the radiation belt, will you?"

The sun, dimmed by polarization, was still di-rectly ahead, directly overhead

from the view-point of those in the control room, in the very nose of the ship.

To either side now there was almost unrelieved blackness, the ultimate night

in which swam the few, faint, far nebulosities of the Rim sky; the distant,

unreachable island universes. Be-low, huge in the after vision screen, was the

pearly gray sphere that was Lorn. Below, too, was the misty Galactic Lens.

"All clear, sir," said Carnaby quietly.

"Good. Commander Williams, make the usual announcements.''

"Attention, please," Williams said. "Atten-tion, please. Stand by for free fall.

Stand by for free fall. Stand by for centrifugal effects."

Grimes cut the drive. He was amused to note that, in spite of the ample

warning, Druthen had not secured his seat belt. He remarked mildly, "I

thought that you'd have been ready for free fall, Doctor."

The physicist snarled wordlessly, managed to clip the strap about his flabby

corpulence. Grimes returned his full attention to the controls. Di-rectional

gyroscopes rumbled, hummed and whined as the ship was turned about her

short axis. The Lorn sun drifted from its directly ahead posi-tion to a point

well abaft the Quest's beam. The cartwheel sight set in the ship's stem was

centered on ... nothingness. Broad on the bow was the Lens, with a very few

bright stars, the suns of the Rim Worlds, lonely in the blackness beyond its

edge.

Williams looked toward Grimes inquiringly. The Commodore nodded.

"Attention, please," Williams said. "Stand by for resumption of acceleration.

Stand by for initia-tion of Mannschenn Drive."

Grimes watched the accelerometer as he re-started the engines. He let

acceleration build up to a steady one G, no more, no less. He switched on the

Mannshenn Drive. Deep in the bowels of the ship the gleaming complexity of

gyroscopes began to move, to turn, to precess, building up speed. Faster spun

the rotors and faster and their song was a thin, high keening on the very

verge of audibility. And as they spun they precessed, tumbling out of the

frame of the continuum, falling down and through the dark dimensions,

pulling the vessel and all aboard her with them.

The Commodore visualized the working of the uncanny machines—as he

always did. It helped to take his mind off the initial effects: the sagging of all

colors down the spectrum, the wavering insubstantiality of the forms, the

outlines of everything and everybody, the distortion of all the senses, the

frightening feeling of deja vu. He said, making a rather feeble joke of it, "This

is where we came in."

The others might be paid to laugh at their com-manding officer's witticisms,

but Dr. Druthen made it plain that he was not. He looked at Grimes, all

irritated and irritating inquiry. "Came in where?" he demanded.

Sonya laughed without being paid for it.

Grimes glared at his wife, then said patiently to the scientist, "Just a figure

of speech, Doctor."

"Oh. I would have thought that 'this is where we are going out' would have

been more apt." Druthen stared out through the viewport, to the distorted

Galactic Lens. Grimes, seeing what he was looking at, thought of making his

usual remark about a Klein flask blown by a drunken glassblower, then

thought better of it. He found it hard to cope with people who had too literal

minds.

"And talking of going out," went on Druthen, "why aren't we going out?"

"What do you mean, Doctor?"

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Commodore, but I always understood that the

Outsiders' Ship lay some fifty light years out beyond the outermost Rim sun.

I'm not a spaceman, but even I can see that we are, at the moment, just

circumnavigating the fringe of the galaxy."

Grimes sighed. He said, "Finding The Outsider is like trying to find a tiny

needle in one helluva big haystack. At the moment we are, as you have said,

circumnavigating the Lens. When we have run the correct distance we shall

have the Lead Stars in line or almost in line. I shall bring the Leads astern,

and run out on them for fifty light years. Then I shall run a search pattern...."

Druthen snorted. What he said next revealed that he must have acquainted

himself very well with Grimes' history, his past record. He said sardonically,

"What a seamanlike like way of doing it, Commodore. But, of course, you're an

honorary admiral of the surface Navy on Tharn, and your Master Mariner's

Certificate is valid for the oceans of Aquarius. I would have thought, in my

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THEDARKDIMENSIONSByABertramChandlerACommodoreGrimesNovelCopyright1971–ABertramChandlerPublishedbyAceBooksCoverartbyFrankKellyFreasWiththeauthor'ssincerethankstoPoulAndersonforhisloanofCaptainSirDominicFlandry.I"I'veanotherjobforyou,Grimes,"saidAdmiralKravitz."Mphm,"gruntedCommodoreGrimes,RimWorldsN...

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A. Bertram Chandler - Rim World - The Dark Dimensions

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