3
They were all in Grimes’s day cabin—his departmental heads and his senior scientific officers. There was Saul, the first lieutenant, a huge, gentle, very black man. There was Connery, chief engineer. The two officers in charge of communications were there—Timmins, the electronicist, and Hayakawa, the psionicist. There were Doctors Tallis, Westover and Lazenby—biologist, geologist and ethologist respectively—all of whom held the rank of full commander. Forsby—physicist—had yet to gain his doctorate and was only a lieutenant. There were Lieutenant Pitcher, navigator, Lieutenant Stein, ship’s surgeon and bio-chemist, and Captain Philby, officer in charge of Seeker’s Marines.
Grimes, trying to look and to feel fatherly, surveyed his people. He was pleased to note that the real spacemen—with the exception of Hayakawa—looked the part. Ethnic origins and differentiation of skin pigmentation were canceled out, as it were, by the common uniform. With the exception of Maggie Lazenby the scientists looked their part. They were, of course, all in uniform—though it wasn’t what they were wearing but how they were wearing it that mattered. To them uniform was just something to cover their nakedness, the more comfortably the better. And to them beards were merely the means whereby the bother of depilation could be avoided. The growths sprouting from the faces of Tallis, Westover and Forsby contrasted shockingly with the neat hirsute adornments sported by Connery and Stein. The only one of the scientists at whom it was a pleasure to look was Doctor Lazenby—slim, auburn-haired and wearing a skirt considerably less than regulation length.
Grimes looked at her.
She snapped, “Get on with it, John.” (Everybody present knew that she was a privileged person.)
“Mphm,” he grunted as he carefully filled his pipe. “Help yourselves to coffee—or to something stronger from the bar, if you’d rather.” He waited until everybody was holding a glass or a cup, then said, “As you all know by this time, this is a Lost Colony expedition . . . .”
Forsby raised his hand for attention. “Captain, forgive my ignorance, but I’ve only just joined the Survey Service. And I’m a physicist, not a historian. Just what is a Lost Colony?”
“Mphm,” grunted Grimes again. He shot a dirty look at Maggie Lazenby as he heard her whispered “Keep it short!” He carefully lit his pipe. He said, “The majority of the so-called Lost Colonies date from the days of the Second Expansion, of the gaussjammers. The gaussjammers were interstellar ships that used the Ehrenhaft Drive. Cutting a long and involved story short, the Ehrenhaft generators produced a magnetic current—a current, not a field—and the ship in which they were mounted became, in effect, a huge magnetic particle, proceeding at a speed which could be regulated from a mere crawl to FTL along the ‘tramlines,’ the lines of magnetic force. This was all very well—but a severe magnetic storm could throw a gaussjammer light-years off course, very often into an unexplored and uncharted sector of the galaxy . . . .”
“FTL?” demanded Forsby in a pained voice. “FTL?”
“A matter of semantics,” Grimes told him airily. “You know, and I know, that faster-than-light speeds are impossible. With our Mannschenn Drive, for example, we cheat—by going astern in time as we’re going ahead in space. The gaussjammers cheated too—by coexisting with themselves all along the lines of magnetic force that they were on. The main thing was—it worked. Anyhow, visualize a gaussjammer after a magnetic storm has tangled the lines of force like so much spaghetti and drained the micro-pile of all energy. The captain doesn’t know where he is. But he has got power for his main engines.”
“You said that the micro-pile was dead.”
“Sure. But those ships ran to emergency generators—diesel generators. They churned out the electricity to drive the Ehrenhaft generators. The ship’s biochemist knew the techniques for producing diesel fuel from whatever was available—even though it meant that all hands would be on short rations. So, for as long as she could, the ship either tried to make her way back to some known sector or to find a planet capable of being settled . . . .”
“Analogous,” contributed Maggie Lazenby, “to the colonization of many Pacific islands by Polynesians in Earth’s remote past. But this colony that we’re supposed to be looking for, John . . .”
“Yes. I was getting around to that. It’s supposed to be in the Argo Sector. It was stumbled upon by a Dog Star Line ship that made a deviation to recalibrate her Mannschenn Drive controls. It won’t be a Lost Colony for much longer.”
“Why not?” asked Forsby.
“To begin with, the Dog Star Line people know about it. The Shaara know about it. We know about it. And Drongo Kane knows about it.”
“Drongo Kane?” This was Forsby again, of course. “Who’s he?”
Grimes sighed. He supposed that his physicist knew his own subject, but he seemed to know very little outside it. He turned his regard to his officers, said, “Tell him.”
“Drongo Kane . . .” murmured Saul in his deep, rich voice. “Smuggler, gunrunner . . .”
“Pirate . . .” contributed Timmins.
“That was never proven,” Grimes told him.
“Perhaps not, sir. But I was on watch—it was when I was a junior in Scorpio—when Bremerhaven’s distress call came through.”
“Mphm. As I recall it, Bremerhaven’s own activities at the time were somewhat dubious . . . .”
“Slaver . . .” said Saul.
“Somebody had to take the people off Ganda before the radiation from their sun fried them. Whatever ships were available had to be employed.”
“But Kane was paid by the Duke of Waldegren for the people he carried in Southerly Buster.”
“Just a fee,” said Grimes, “or commission, or whatever, for the delivery of indentured labor.”
“What about this bloody Lost Colony?” demanded Maggie Lazenby.
“We’re supposed to find it.” Grimes gestured toward the folder on his desk with the stem of his pipe. “I’ve had copies made of all the bumf that was given to me. It consists mainly of reports made by agents on quite a few worlds. Our man at Port Llangowan, on Siluria, recorded a conversation between officers of Corgi and Pomeranian in one of the local pubs. Corgi had found this world—which seems to be called Morrowvia—quite by chance. Our man at Port Brrooun, on Drroomoorr, recorded a conversation between the second mate of Corgi and a Shaara drone; once again Morrowvia was mentioned. The same young gentleman—the second mate, not the drone—got into trouble at Port Mackay on Rob Roy. Normally he’d have been emptied out there and then by Corgi’s master—but keeping him on board must have been the lesser of two evils.”
“Why?” asked Forsby.
“Because,” Grimes told him patiently, “the master of Corgi didn’t want word of a new world that could well be included in the Dog Star Line’s economic empire spread all over the galaxy. Where was I? Yes. Our woman at Port Fortinbras, on Elsinore, recorded a conversation between the owner of a repair yard and the owner of a ship chandlery. The repair yard was doing some work on Drongo Kane’s ship, Southerly Buster—the mounting of armament, among other things. Kane had told the owner of the yard something—not much, but something—about a Lost Colony found by a Dog Star tramp . . . .”
“And what are we supposed to do, Captain?” asked Forsby.”Plant the Federation’s flag, or something?”
“Or something,” said Maggie Lazenby. “You can rest assured of that.”
Or something, thought Grimes.