"It all started," said Grimes, "with Commander 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, auburn 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 always 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 preferred 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 appreciatively. 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 Francisco, 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 sampling 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 Federation, 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 Confederacy, 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 survivor. 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, Captain 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 drinking 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 sufficient 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 himself 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 imagined 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 Recording 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 beyond the Rim, in the hope that with the development 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 without fear, without hate, after he has met and faced and accepted the most horrible monster of all. . . .
"Himself."
Grimes switched off, then busied himself refueling 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 unless 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 Federation, 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 derelict 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 Outsiders' 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 Federation tried again, this time with a Constellation Class cruiser, Orion. Orion blew up with no survivors. 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."