Out of This World

Chapter Sixteen

Raven listened with approval as Captain Cahn conversed with the local lordling, the so-called Governor. This Cahn had the makings of a good commander, and such was recognized even in so dismal a place as this. Put him in armor and a sword in his hand, and he’d be fit for the service of Stormcrack, fit even to lead a hundred men.

Ah, but to get him there…

Best to say nothing and leave it all to Cahn. These misbegotten fools doubtless thought Raven mad; were he to speak it would serve no good. Leave it, then, in terms of the Empire’s good, the Empire’s authority, and say nothing of the need to fight Shadow.

* * * *

Prossie watched in admiration as Captain Cahn told the Governor what to do. It was really quite educational; he didn’t shout, didn’t argue, didn’t ask anything. He used a sort of tight, determined anger to drive his thoughts and words, but Prossie doubted a non-telepath would sense any of that-the Captain was calm and efficient, simply taking his authority as a given.

And of course, it was quite real. The Empire had given its emissary pretty much a free hand, and the legal power to go with it.

The Governor couldn’t really know that, though. He had no telepath to verify anything-Prossie worked for Cahn, and the Governor didn’t know enough about telepaths to realize that that meant Cahn had the Empire’s full blessing. His orders had always come by ship, prior to this.

For all he could prove, Cahn could be a rebel, a mutineer, a lunatic-but when Cahn spoke the Governor never doubted for a moment that he was just what he claimed to be.

Prossie could see the theory of how to do it, of course, but she couldn’t possibly have done it herself; quite aside from the near-universal antipathy to telepaths, and aside from her sex, she just didn’t have the knack. Watching Cahn was like listening to a first-rate musician. Prossie might read the same notes, might pick them out, but she didn’t have the talent to make the same music.

Cahn was magnificent. Prossie had been relaying messages to the Governor, had been telling him much the same thing that Cahn was now saying, and had been virtually ignored, because she simply didn’t have Cahn’s presence and aura of authority; the Governor had made a few tentative gestures, but no more than that. Now that the Captain was here in person, though, he was getting instant compliance.

It took less than fifteen minutes to establish martial law, with Cahn himself in charge, and to commandeer much of what they needed.

* * * *

The stay in the waiting room hadn’t been long-twelve minutes, according to Godwin, whose analog watch seemed to have survived better than Pel’s digital one. Half a dozen of the purple-uniformed men had then appeared and escorted the party out.

The next stop was a crowded men’s room-at least, for everyone except Nancy and Rachel, who had a ladies’ room to themselves. Soap, towels, and various brushes were provided, and Pel emerged feeling much better than he had entered. Clothes were still torn and wrinkled, faces unshaven, but at least the worst of the dirt had been cleared away.

The facilities were indistinguishable from what Pel would have expected in a men’s room back on Earth, in, say, a bus station or a rest station on an interstate-white tile, bare bulbs in wire cages overhead, green-painted steel partitions, white porcelain fixtures.

It was only when he ran water in the sink, and found himself bothered by something about how it flowed, that Pel was reminded that this was not Earth.

The difference wasn’t really very great at all, he decided, watching the water, but any change in how water flowed was enough to make him uneasy.

It was slower, he realized. In the lighter gravity of Psi Cassiopeia Two, objects-including water-fell more slowly.

He had more or less adjusted to how the air and gravity felt, but he had had few opportunities to see anything fall. He stared.

Then he shrugged, and went on washing.

After clean-up came food-cafeteria food, served in a more or less standard-issue cafeteria, but that was quite good enough for the Browns at this point. Rachel gobbled two hot dogs-which were labeled “hot reds”-along with several dozen sugared french fries and large quantities of canned milk; Nancy tried the macaroni salad, frowned, and then settled on ham slices, green salad, and cold tea.

Pel took a “Homburg shrewsbury,” which looked like a cheeseburger, and discovered that there was cornmeal and chopped onion in the meat, which appeared to be a blend of pork and beef, rather than pure beef.

Another quirk in the local cuisine, obviously, like the confectioner’s sugar on Rachel’s fries, or for that matter, the word “shrewsbury” replacing “sandwich.”

It was edible, though, and he ate it, washing it down with watery root beer.

“Everything tastes funny,” Rachel said, staring at her empty plate.

“Well, we’re on another planet,” Nancy said, throwing an uneasy glance at the smear of potato salad on the edge of her plate.

Pel said nothing; he had sampled a french fry and decided against eating any more. Rachel was quite right; everything did taste funny.

Well, why shouldn’t it? This wasn’t their own land. Foreign food was always strange at first.

He hoped that the stuff would nourish them. This was not only another planet, as Nancy had pointed out, but another universe. The molecules in the food could well be arranged differently-he vaguely recalled reading something about right-handed and left-handed proteins.

Well, the crew of the Ruthless hadn’t had any visible problems with the pizza.

He wondered about the people from Shadow’s universe-was this food strange to them, too?

What about the little people? Were they all right?

The later arrivals had not seen anyone from the first carload since arriving in Town, nor had Cahn and Raven rejoined them. The purple uniforms had denied knowing anything at all except where the group was to go next.

Pel stared down at the table, which was topped with black glass.

The cafeteria wasn’t quite standard issue, really. The tables were steel and glass, the chair seats made of something like fibreglass on steel frames. It struck Pel suddenly that except for some trim in the aircar, he hadn’t seen any wood in this entire place-none of the rooms had any woodwork, the chairs and benches and tables were all stone or steel or glass. Plastics and paper products were present, but scarce-the men’s room had been equipped with fluffy white terrycloth towels, rather than paper towels. The cafeteria plates were ceramic, the napkins cloth, the flatware steel.

He hadn’t seen any trees, anywhere, on this planet. There was nothing to make paper or wood out of. And most plastics were made from petroleum, weren’t they? Petroleum came from dead dinosaurs-well, maybe not dinosaurs, but dead things from millions of years ago. A planet as lifeless as this probably had no oil deposits. For all Pel knew, there was no native life here at all.

“Okay, folks,” someone called, “let’s clean up and move on.”

“Hell,” Pel muttered. “Let them clean it up themselves.” He did not find himself exactly brimming over with gratitude for the treatment he and his family had received here; while it was true they had been cleaned up and fed, they had hardly been pampered. After waiting around without any explanation, or any contact except the silent guards, Pel was hardly in a mood to show his hosts much consideration. He stood up and headed for the door, leaving his tray where it was.

Nancy and Rachel followed.

In a moment, the full dozen-the Browns, Valadrakul, Stoddard, Donald, Ted, Godwin, Smith, Soorn, Mervyn, and Lampert-were marching down another bare concrete corridor, with purple-clad guards ahead and behind.

Double doors swung open, and while two guards held them, others indicated that the visitors were to turn right into another corridor-but this one was not entirely empty. Captain Cahn and Raven of Stormcrack Keep were waiting there.

Smiles broke out, but after a few quick words of greeting there was no conversation.

Fourteen strong, the party continued down this new corridor, and through another set of doors-glass doors, this time-into a large glassed-in vestibule.

Pel scarcely had time to look out through the glass at the vast expanse of flat gray before he was swept on through another set of doors, out onto the gravel pavement.

Gravel-the tar in asphalt is another petroleum by-product, Pel realized.

For the first time he saw the exterior of the building he and the others had been in-a blank white concrete facade, only two stories, few windows. (Well, who needed windows? What was worth seeing on this bleak little world?) It extended several hundred yards in a gentle concave arc; the glass vestibule was the rightmost one of three, spaced well apart along the curve.

Red letters were painted above each of the vestibules, reading, “Welcome to Psi Cassiopeia II.” The lettering had clearly been done by hand, and the letters were shaped a bit oddly.

That was to his left; to his right the gravel pavement ran for perhaps a hundred feet, and then gave way to white concrete.

The broad strip of gravel ran the full length of the building, however, and in fact continued on past each end of the arc; it appeared to Pel that it formed a full circle, around the circular concrete.

And on the concrete-

There were three of them.

The smallest and farthest away, almost directly across the circle from them, was about the size of a tractor-trailor combination, back on Pel’s Earth; it had once been painted white, with red trim, but the paint had worn away in several places, exposing dull grey metal. A small bubble cockpit protruded from the top; two huge, swept-back fins adorned the sides. It rested on three legs; a hatch in its belly was open, and a ladder descended from the hatch to the pavement. Its lines were graceful, but it had obviously seen better days.

Flash Gordon, twenty years after, Pel thought.

He had never seen the Ruthless; had it looked something like that?

The largest, its bullet-shaped nose near the middle of the circle, was gigantic-the size of an ocean liner, perhaps, its tail assembly projecting well out over the gravel ring on the far side. It was also squat and ugly, its gray paint obviously several layers thick, its surface dented here and there. Three glass-and-steel observation blisters, reminding Pel of the gun turrets of a B-17, protruded near the nose. There were no fins or foils or trim, simply the immense cylinder, rounded at one end, flaring slightly at the other. Two support struts kept the thing from rolling over on its side in one direction; Pel assumed there were similar struts on the opposite side. He could see the outlines of three hatches in the behemoth’s side, any one of them large enough for the smallest ship to fit through sideways, but all three were closed.

A freighter, probably, Pel guessed.

They were headed toward the third and closest spaceship-the three craft had to be spaceships. This one was midway between the others in size, and apparently newer, with green and gold paint that had not yet begun to flake or peel. The stern was adorned with a profusion of gracefully-swept-back fins. A door in the side was open, and a boarding stair in place.

“The others are already aboard,” someone said.

It suddenly struck Pel that they were being herded aboard a spaceship-they were going to leave Psi Cassiopeia Two.

“Hey,” he said, “we’re leaving?”

Captain Cahn heard him, and turned to reply, “Yes, Mr. Brown-they’re giving us a ride back to Base One, just as we wanted. Nine days, I’m told, and we should be back there, ready to send you and your family home to, uh… to Earth.”

“But I thought… didn’t your telepath Thorpe say there weren’t any ships available, when we were out on the desert?”

Cahn nodded. “They weren’t available-that freighter just got in this morning, they couldn’t find the owner of that little one back there, and the liner here was just down, hadn’t cleared quarantine yet. And none of these are Imperial property, you know; we’ve had to invoke martial law to get the use of the liner. Don’t worry, Mr. Brown, we’re doing the best we can to get you home just as fast as possible.”

“But we haven’t seen anything here yet!”

Someone snorted; someone else chuckled.

“Believe me, Mr. Brown,” Cahn answered, amused, “you’ve seen everything worth seeing on this planet!”

Pel didn’t argue; for one thing, Nancy was glaring at him. It was quite obvious that she wanted him to shut up and not do anything that might delay their return home, and he belatedly realized that he didn’t want himself to do anything that might delay their return home, either.

Still, it seemed wrong, somehow, to visit another planet, an outpost of the vast Galactic Empire, and see nothing but a few hundred miles of desert and the spaceport waiting rooms.

This was another planet, after all, thousands of miles across, big enough for whole oceans and continents, entire new civilizations-and all he’d seen was a little of one town.

Maybe rushing home as quickly as possible wasn’t all that necessary…

He cut his chain of thought right there.

Getting home as fast as possible was necessary. He had responsibilities there, Silly Cat not the least of them. He had a home and a business and friends and family, all of whom would be wondering what had become of him.

And while he might be in the Galactic Empire, he didn’t have so much as a toothbrush with him.

The possibility of coming back here later, properly prepared, occurred to him. It was an idea, certainly.

If Earth had anything the Galactic Empire wanted, then they could probably open a healthy tourist trade; who wouldn’t want to visit an entire new universe, with strange new worlds, different air and light and gravity-and where everybody spoke English?

The business prospects in that began to percolate through his mind. That was certainly full of marketing possibilities, and marketing was what he did, after all.

But on the other hand, the Empire didn’t seem to be a particularly friendly place, and seemed to be unhappy about the very existence of other universes. It might well be that they wouldn’t want tourists.

And Earth might not, in fact, have anything they wanted-would a culture with interstellar travel and the resources of a galaxy be interested in a single planet’s output?

Looking around, Pel thought that they just might, at that. Psi Cassiopeia Two was a backwater, admittedly, but it seemed to him that what he’d seen of the Empire and its works wasn’t all that impressive, in many ways. They did have anti-gravity, which was amazing and wonderful and useful and all that, and they had blasters, which were effective enough, but they seemed to be rather backward in their use of metals, and he hadn’t seen anything using any sort of electronics anywhere-no digital clocks, no LED read-outs anywhere, certainly no computers. No one had even mentioned television.

There were innumerable possibilities, not just in tourism, but in trade of all sorts.

Where Shadow’s universe fit into this he wasn’t sure. And of course, he had no idea what the difficulties of inter-universal travel might be; so far, it had seemed simple enough, stepping through portals, but those had been magical portals, opened from Shadow’s realm-the technologically-created space-warps the Empire used might not be so easy.

Scientifically-created space-warps, he corrected himself-the Empire didn’t seem to like the word “technology” much, and preferred to call it “science.”

Had the Empire considered the possibility of trade?

Oh, they must have, he told himself. How could they not? Just because nobody had mentioned it to him, because everything anyone had said so far was about diplomatic or military interactions, that didn’t mean that no one had thought about trade.

Somebody must have thought of it. Surely, once the preliminaries of opening relations and dealing with Shadow were done, the Empire didn’t intend to just shut itself off from Earth again!

He stumbled slightly, the toe of his shoe catching in an uneven patch of gravel, and brought himself back to the present reality. Right now, nobody was talking about doing business between universes, because right now they all needed to get back to Base One and pick up where they had left off, in coping with Shadow and its creatures.

Raven probably wasn’t concerned with trade possibilities at all-he just wanted Stormcrack Keep back. Captain Cahn was just doing what he was told to do by his superiors, and not worrying about long-term consequences.

And there wasn’t really much point in his worrying about them, either, he decided. He squeezed Rachel’s hand, and on a sudden whim, leaned over and kissed Nancy on the cheek.

They stepped up from the gravel to the concrete pad, and marched on toward the ship. Pel could see her name now, painted on the side near the nose, in gleaming gold letters-Emerald Princess.

Captain Cahn stepped to one side at the foot of the steps, and started counting noses; Raven’s boots clanged loudly on the metal steps as he led the way up, into the waiting vessel.

The narrow steps created a slight bottleneck, and the Browns had to wait their turns for a few seconds while Stoddard and Valadrakul and the rest sorted themselves out.

“Nine days,” Nancy whispered, leaning over close so Rachel wouldn’t hear. “The cat will be frantic!”

“Everyone will be frantic,” Pel whispered back. “And unless these guys prove they’re real, somehow, no one’s going to believe our explanations.”

“Well, we’ll just say we were kidnapped by a UFO,” Nancy said. “It’s almost the truth, isn’t it?”

Pel started to protest; this was real life, not the absurd fantasies of little men with big heads who went around mutilating cattle. Then he stopped, before a word had escaped him.

After all, if one other universe was trying to contact Earth and botching it, why couldn’t there have been dozens, over the years? What if all those flying saucer stories were true?

Now that was a terrifying thought. Pel had grown up with science fiction and fantasy, in books and in movies and on TV, and while he enjoyed the stuff immensely, he’d always been very clear on where the line was between fantasy and reality.

Flying saucers and UFO abductions and psychics and all the rest of the material found in tabloid headlines he had always put on the “fantasy” side-and he’d considered them bad fantasy, at that.

But here he was, boarding a spaceship, and that woman, Prossie Thorpe, was a telepath-a psychic, in other words. He’d been abducted from Earth, after a fashion, and had found himself in a world of little men-though Grummetty’s appearance in his basement had hardly been the stereotypical close encounter of the third kind. Grummetty had seemed thoroughly down to earth, despite his impossible size.

The stairway was clear, and Captain Cahn was waving them forward; Nancy went first, leading Rachel by the hand. Pel brought up the rear, with a steadying hand on Rachel’s back.

As they climbed toward the warmly-lit doorway into the ship, Pel considered UFOs and the Galactic Empire.

This ship made sense, though. The people had an explanation for what was happening-the whole thing about Shadow and space-warps and telepaths all fit together. The space creatures in the UFO stories never made sense, flying around conducting mysterious experiments with no rhyme or reason to them, kidnapping people at random.

But on the other hand, would the Emerald Princess and all the rest make any sense to, say, an Australian aborigine?

Pel didn’t know anything about Australian aborigines, but he suspected that it wouldn’t.

Then he was at the door, being helped in by Susan Nguyen, of all people; she was wearing an unfamiliar outfit, a white blouse and maroon wool skirt combination cut oddly.

The door, or hatch, or whatever it was opened into a small chamber, presumably an airlock, painted in a friendly mustard color; a wine-colored drapery on one side incompletely hid a bank of gadgetry of some sort, probably the pressure controls.

The inner door was open; he stepped through into a room, or cabin, or compartment, whatever the correct term was, about the size and shape of a one-car garage. Amy Jewell, in white and maroon like her attorney, was standing there, welcoming people aboard; behind her was Spaceman Peabody, his arm in a cast and sling, the rest of him in one of the purple uniforms the guards had worn, rather than his own ruined outfit. Grummetty and Alella were perched atop a cabinet bolted to one wall-their clothes were the same, but somewhat cleaner.

A loud clang interrupted Pel before he could say more than a quick general hello; the last arrival, Captain Cahn, was aboard, and had just slammed the outer airlock door shut.

Now he was in the lounge, closing and locking the inner door as well.

Pel had looked first at the people, but now he considered the chamber in which he found himself.

The walls were covered in rich yellow wallpaper, flocked in a stylized floral design; the floor was covered in lush plum-colored carpet. The several doors leading elsewhere were dark polished wood, set with round, brass-rimmed windows. Plum-upholstered seating was bolted to the floor- two round things, like circular sofas, that reminded Pel of an old-fashioned hotel lobby. Light came from lantern-like brass fixtures on every wall. The overall impression, he decided, was of a turn-of-the-century ocean liner.

The Titanic, for example.

As Pel greeted the others he wished he hadn’t thought of that particular comparison.