Contraband From Otherspace

VII

There were more bodies in the control room. There were three dead men and three dead women, all of them strapped into acceleration chairs. Like all the others scattered throughout the ship they were clad only in rough, scanty rags, were swollen with decomposition.

Grimes forced himself to ignore them. He could do nothing for them. Perhaps, he thought, he might someday avenge them (somehow he did not feel that they had been criminals, pirates)—but that would not bring them back to life. He looked past the unsightly corpses to the instruments on the consoles before their chairs. These, at first glance, seemed to be familiar enough—white dials with the black calibrations marked with Arabic numerals; red, green, white and amber pilot lights, dead now, but ready to blossom with glowing life at the restoration of a power supply. Familiar enough they were, at first glance. But there were the odd differences, the placement of various controls in positions that did not tally with the construction and the articulation of the normal human frame. And there was the lettering: MINNSCHINN DRIVI, RIMITI CINTRIL. Who, he asked himself, were the builders of this ship, this vessel that was almost a standard Federation Survey Service cruiser? What human race had jettisoned every vowel in the alphabet but this absurdly fat "I?"

"John," Sonya was saying, "give me a hand, will you?"

He turned to see what she was doing. She was trying to unbuckle a seat belt that was deeply embedded in the distended flesh at the waist of one of the dead men.

He conquered his revulsion, swallowed the nausea that was rising in his throat. He pulled the sharp sheath knife from his belt, said, "This is quicker," and slashed through the tough fabric of the strap. He was careful not to touch the gleaming, purple skin. He knew that if he did so the dead man would… burst.

Carefully, Sonya lifted the body from its seat, set it down on the deck so that the magnetized sandal soles were in contact with the steel plating. Then she pointed to the back of the chair. "What do you make of that?" she asked.

That was a vertical slot, just over an inch in width, that was continued into the seat itself, half bisecting it.

It was Pendeen who broke the silence. He said simply, "They had tails."

"But they haven’t," objected Grimes. It was obvious that the minimal breech-clouts of the dead people could not conceal even a tiny caudal appendage.

"My dear John," Sonya told him in an annoyingly superior voice, "these hapless folk are neither the builders nor the original crew of this ship. Refugees? Could be. Escapees? A slave revolt? Once again—could be. Or must be. This is a big ship, and a fighting ship. You can’t run a vessel of this class without uniforms, without marks of rank so you can see at a glance who is supposed to be doing what. Furthermore, you don’t clutter up a man-o-war with children."

"She’s not necessarily a man-o'-war," demurred Grimes. "She could be a defensively armed merchantman…"

"With officers and first class passengers dressed in foul rags? With a name like DESTROYER?"

"We don’t know that that grouping of letters on the stern does spell DESTROYER."

"We don’t know that this other grouping of letters"—she pointed to the control panel that Grimes had been studying-"spells MANNSCHENN DRIVE, REMOTE CONTROL. But I’m willing to bet my gratuity that if you trace the leads you’ll wind up in a compartment full of dimension-twisting gyroscopes."

"All right," said Grimes. "I’ll go along with you. I’ll admit that we’re aboard a ship built by some humanoid—but possibly non-human race that, even so, uses a peculiar distortion of English as its written language. …"

"A humanoid race with tails," contributed Pendeen.

"A humanoid race with tails," agreed Sonya. "But what race? Look at this slot in the chair back. It’s designed for somebody—or something—with a thin tail, thin at the root as well as at the extremity. And the only tailed beings we know with any technology comparable to our own have thick tails—and, furthermore, have their own written languages. Just imagine one of our saurian friends trying to get out of that chair in a hurry, assuming that he’d ever been able to get into it in the first place. He’d be trapped."

"You’re the Intelligence Officer," said Grimes rather nastily.

"All right. I am. Also, I hold a Doctorate in Xenology. And I tell you, John, that what we’ve found in this ship, so far, doesn’t add up to any kind of sense at all."

"She hasn’t made any sense ever since she was first picked up by Station 3," admitted Grimes.

"That she hasn’t," said Pendeen. "And I don’t like her. Not one little bit."

"Why not, Mr. Pendeen?" asked Grimes, realizing that it was a foolish question to ask about a radioactive hull full of corpses.

"Because… because she’s wrong, sir. The proportions of all her controls and fittings—just wrong enough to be scary. And left-handed threads, and gauges calibrated from right to left."

"So they are," said Grimes. "So they are. But that’s odder still. Why don’t they write the same way? From Right to Left?"

"Perhaps they do," murmured Sonya. "But I don’t think so. I think that the only difference between their written language and ours is that they have an all-purpose I, or an all-purpose symbol that’s used for every vowel sound." She was prowling around the control room. Damn it all, there must be a Log Book…

"There should be a Log Book," amended Grimes.

"All right There should be a Log Book. Here’s an obvious Log Desk, complete with stylus, but empty. I begin to see how it must have been. The ship safe in port, all her papers landed for checking, and then her seizure by these people, by these unfortunate humans, whoever they were … H’m. The Chart Tank might tell us something…" She glared at the empty globe. "It would have told us something if it hadn’t been in close proximity to a nuclear blast. But there will be traces. Unfortunately we haven’t the facilities here to bring them out." She resumed her purposeful shuffle. "And what have we here? SIGNIL LIG? SIGNAL LOG? A black box that might well contain quite a few answers when we hook it up to a power supply. And that, I think, will lie within the capabilities of our Radio Officer back aboard Rim Mamelute."

The thing was secured by simple enough clips to the side of what was obviously a transceiver. Deftly, Sonya disengaged it, tucked it under her arm.

"Back to the Mamelute," said Grimes. It was more an order than a suggestion.

"Back to the Mamelute," she agreed.

The Commodore was last from the control room, watched first Pendeen and then Sonya vanish through the hatch into the axial shaft. He half-wished that enough air remained in their suit tanks for them to make a leisurely examination of the accommodation that must be situated abaft Control—and was more than half-relieved that circumstances did not permit such a course of action. He had seen his fill of corpses. In any case, the Signal Log might tell them far more than the inspection of decomposing corpses ever could.

He felt far easier in his mind when the three of them were standing, once more, in the plastic igloo that covered the breached airlock, and almost happy when, one by one, they had squeezed through the built-in sphincter valve back to the clean emptiness of Space. The harsh working lights of Rim Mamelute seemed soft somehow, mellow almost, suggested the lights of Home. And the cramped interior of the tug, when they were back on board, was comforting. If one has to be jostled, it is better to be jostled by the living than by dead men and women, part-cremated in a steel coffin tumbling aimlessly between the stars.