Contraband From Otherspace

IX

The derelict hung in orbit about Lorn, and the team of scientists and technicials continued the investigations initiated by Rim Mamelute’s people during the long haul to the tug’s home planet. Grimes, Sonya and the others had been baffled by what they had found—and now, with reluctance, the experts were admitting their own bafflement.

This ship, named Destroyer by her builders, and renamed Freedom by those who had not lived long to enjoy it, seemed to have just completed a major refit and to have been in readiness for her formal recommissioning. Although her magazines and some of her storerooms were stocked, although her hydroponics tanks and tissue culture vats had been operational at the time of her final action, her accommodation and working spaces were clean of the accumulation of odds and ends that, over the years, adds appreciably to the mass of any vessel. There were no files of official correspondence, although there was not a shortage of empty filing cabinets. There were no revealing personal possessions such as letters, photographs and solidographs, books, recordings, magazines and pin-up girl calendars. (The hapless humans who had been killed by the blast seemed to have brought aboard only the rags that they were wearing.) There were no log books in either control or engine rooms.

The cabins were furnished, however, and in all of them were the strange chairs with the slotted backs and seats, the furniture that was evidence of the existence of a race—an unknown race, insisted the xenologists—of tailed beings, approximating the human norm in stature. Every door tally was in place, and each one made it clear that the creatures who had manned the ship, before her seizure, used the English language, but a version of it peculiarly their own: KIPTIN… CHIIF INGINIIR… RIICTIIN DRIVI RIIM… HIDRIPINICS RIM…

Even so she was, apart from the furniture and the distortion of printed English and—as the engineers pointed out—the prevalence of left-handed threads, a very ordinary ship, albeit somewhat old fashioned. There was, for example, no Carlotti navigational and communications equipment. And the signal log was a model the use of which had been discontinued by the Survey Service for all of half a standard century. And she lacked yet another device, a device of fairly recent origin, the Mass Proximity Indicator.

She was, from the engineering viewpoint, a very ordinary ship; it was the biologists who discovered the shocking abnormality.

They did not discover it at once. They concentrated, at first, upon the cadavers of the unfortunate humans. These were, it was soon announced, indubitably human. They had been born upon and had lived their lives upon an Earth-type planet, but their lives had not been pleasant ones. Their physiques exhibited all the signs of undernourishment, of privation, and they almost all bore scars that told an ugly story of habitual maltreatment. But they were men, and they were women, and had they lived and had they enjoyed for a year or so normal living conditions they would have been indistinguishable from the citizens of any man-colonized world.

And there was nothing abnormal in the hydroponics tanks. There were just the standard plants that are nurtured in ships' farms throughout the Galaxy—tomatoes and cucumbers, potatoes and carrots, the Centaurian umbrella vine, Vegan moss-fern.

It was the tissue culture vats that held the shocking secret.

The flesh that they contained, the meat that was the protein supply for the tailed beings who should have manned the ship, was human flesh.

"I was right," said Sonya to Grimes. "I was right. Those people—whoever, wherever (and whenever?) they are—are our enemies. But where are they? And when?"

"From… from Outside… ?" wondered the Commodore.

"Don’t be a bloody fool, John. Do you think that a race could wander in from the next galaxy but three, reduce a whole planet of humans to slavery, and worse than slavery, without our knowing about it? And why should such a race, if there were one, have to borrow or steal our shipbuilding techniques, our language even? Damn it all, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t even begin to make sense."

"That’s what we’ve all been saying ever since this blasted derelict first appeared."

"And it’s true." She got up from her chair and began to pace up and down Grimes' office. "Meanwhile, my dear, we’ve been left holding the baby. You’ve been asked to stay on in your various capacities until the mystery has been solved, and my resignation from the Intelligence Branch of the Survey Service has been rescinded. I’ve been empowered by the Federation Government to co-opt such Confederacy personnel to assist me in my investigations as I see fit. (That means you—for a start.) Forgive me for thinking out loud. It helps sometimes. Why don’t you try it?"

"All we know," said Grimes slowly, "is that we’ve been left holding the baby."

"All we know," she countered, "is that we’re supposed to carry the can back."

"But why shouldn’t we?" he demanded suddenly. "Not necessarily this can, but one of our own."

She stopped her restless motion, turned to stare at him. She said coldly, "I thought that you had made a study of archaic slang expressions. Apparently I was wrong."

"Not at all, Sonya. I know what to carry the can back means. I know, too, that the word can is still used to refer to more and bigger things than containers of beer or preserved foods. Such as…"

"Such as ships," she admitted.

"Such as ships. All right. How do we carry the can, or a can back? Back to where the can came from?"

"But where? Or when?"

"That’s what we have to find out."

She said, "I think it will have to be the can. That is if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking: that this Destroyer or Freedom or whatever you care to call her drifted in from one of the alternative universes. She’ll have that built-in urge, yes, urge. She’ll have that built-in urge to return to her own continuum."

"So you accept the alternative universe theory?"

"It seems to fit the facts. After all, out here on the Rim, the transition from one universe to another has been made more than once."

"As we should know."

"If only we knew how the derelict did drift in…"

"Did she drift in?" asked Grimes softly. And then, in spoken answer to his wife’s unspoken query, "I think that she was blown in."

"Yes… yes. Could be. A nuclear explosion in close, very close proximity to the ship. The very fabric of the continuum strained and warped…" She smiled, but it was a grim smile. "That could be it."

"And that could be the way to carry the can back."

"I don’t want to be burned, my dear. And, oddly enough, I shouldn’t like to see you burned."

"There’s no need for anybody to be burned. Have you ever heard of lead shielding?"

"Of course. But the weight! Even if we shielded only a small compartment, the reaction drive’d be working flat out to get us off the ground, and we’d have damn all reaction mass to spare for any maneuvers. And the rest of the ship, as we found when we boarded the derelict, would be so hot as to be uninhabitable for months."

He gestured towards the wide window to the squat tower that was Faraway Quest. "I seem to remember, Sonya, that you shipped with me on our Wild Ghost Chase. Even though you were aboard as an officer of the Federation’s Naval Intelligence you should remember how the Quest was fitted. That sphere of anti-matter—now back in safe orbit—that gave us anti-gravity… We can incorporate it into Freedom’s structure as it was incorporated into Quest’s. With it functioning, we can afford to shield the entire ship and still enjoy almost negative mass."

"So you think we should take Freedom, or Destroyer, and not Faraway Quest?"

"I do. Assuming that we’re able to blow her back into the continuum she came from, she’ll be a more convincing Trojan horse than one of our own ships."

"Cans," she said. "Trojan horses. Can you think of any more metaphors?" She smiled again, and her expression was not quite so grim. "But I see what you mean. Our friends with the squeaky voices and the long, thin tails will think that their own lost ship has somehow wandered back to them, still manned by the escaped slaves." Her face hardened. "I almost feel sorry for them."

"Almost," he agreed.