Contraband From Otherspace

XXIII

"We were waiting for you, Skipper," Williams told Grimes cheerfully as the Commodore re-entered his own control room.

"Very decent of you, Commander," Grimes said, remembering how the Mate of Sundowner had realized his long standing ambition and clobbered his Captain. "Very decent of you."

He looked out of the viewports. The grain carrier was still close, at least as close as she had been when he had boarded her. The use of missiles would be dangerous to the vessel employing them—and even later might touch off a mutually destructive explosion.

"You must still finish your task, man Grimes," Serressor reminded him.

"I know. I know." But there was no hurry. There was ample time to consider ways and means.

"All armament ready, sir."

"Thank you. To begin with, Commander Williams, we’ll open the range . . ."

Then suddenly, the outline of Sundowner shimmered, shimmered and faded. She flickered out like a candle in a puff of wind. Grimes cursed. He should have foreseen this. The mutants had access to the Mannschenn Drive machinery—and how much, by continuous eavesdropping, had they learned? How much did they know?

"Start M.D.," he ordered. "Standard precession."

It took time—but not too long a time. Bronson was already in the Mannschenn Drive room, and Bronson had been trained to the naval way of doing things rather than the relatively leisurely procedure of the merchant service. (Himself a merchant officer, a reservist, he had always made it his boast that he could beat the navy at its own game.) There was the brief period of temporal disorientation, the uncanny feeling that time was running backwards, the giddiness, the nausea. Outside the ports the Galactic Lens assumed the appearance of a distorted Klein flask, and the Lorn sun became a pulsing spiral of multicolored light.

But there was no sign of Sundowner.

Grimes was speaking into the telephone. "Commander Bronson! Can you synchronize?"

"With what?" Then—"I’ll try, sir. I’ll try…"

Grimes could visualize the engineer watching the flickering needles of his gauges, making adjustments measured in fractions of microseconds to his controls. Subtly the keening song of the spinning, precessing gyroscopes wavered—and, as it did so, the outlines of the people and instruments in the control room lost their sharpness, while the colors of everything momentarily dulled and then became more vivid.

"There’s the mucking bastard!" shouted Williams.

And there she was, close aboard them, a phantom ship adrift on a sea of impossible blackness, insubstantial, quivering on the very verge of invisibility.

"Fire at will!" ordered Grimes.

"But, sir," protested one of the officers. "If we interfere with the ship’s mass while the Drive is in operation…"

"Fire at will!" repeated the Commodore.

"Ay, ay, sir!" acknowledged Carter happily.

But it was like shooting at a shadow. Missiles erupted from their launchers, laser beams stabbed out at the target—and nothing happened. From the bulkhead speaker of the intercom Bronson snarled, "What the hell are you playing at up there? How the hell can I hold her in synchronization?"

"Sorry, Commander," said Grimes into his microphone. "Just lock on, and hold her. Just hold her, that’s all I ask."

"An' what now, Skipper?" demanded Williams. "What now?"

"We shall use the Bomb," said Grimes quietly.

"We shall use the Bomb," he said. He knew, as did all of his people, that the fusion device was their one hope of a return to their own Space and Time. But Sundowner must be destroyed, the Time Stream must, somehow, be diverted. Chemical explosives and destructive light beams were, in these circumstances, useless. There remained only the Sunday Punch.

The ships were close, so close that their temporal precession fields interacted. Even so, it was obvious why all the weapons so far employed had failed. Each and every discharge had meant an appreciable alteration of Corsair’s temporal precession rate, so that each and every missile and beam had missed in Time rather than in Space. Had Corsair been fitted with one of the latest model synchronizers her gunnery might have been more successful—but she was not. Only Branson’s skill was keeping her in visual contact with her prey.

Getting the Bomb into position was not the same as loosing off a missile. Slowly, gently, the black-painted cylinder was eased out of its bay. The merest puff from one of its compressed air jets nudged it away from Corsair towards the target. It fell gently through the space between the two ships, came finally to rest against Sundowner’s scarred hull.

At an order from Grimes the thick lead shutters slid up over the control room ports. (But the thing was close, so close, too close. Even with the radar on minimum range the glowing blob that was Sundowner almost filled the tank.) Carter looked at Grimes, waiting for the order. His face was pale—and it was not the only pale face in Control. But Serressor—that blasted lizard!—was filling the confined space with his irritating, high, toneless whistling.

Sonya came to sit beside him.

She said quietly, "You have to do it. We have to do it."

Even her presence could not dispel the loneliness of command. "No," he told her. "I have to do it."

"Locking…" came Branson’s voice from the bulkhead speaker. "Locking … Holding…"

"Fire," said Grimes.