The Rim of Space

Book 0: John Grimes

by A. Bertram Chandler

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

Derek Calver touches down on Lorn and is determined to join the Rim Runners to explore desolate planets. He joins the crew of Lorn Lady and sets forth for Mellise, inhabited by intelligent amphibians; for Groller, where the natives have just qualified as humanoids; for Stree with its tea loving lizards; and for Tharn, home of a pre-industrial civilization.

Release date: November 26, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY—as befitted her years, which were many—the star tramp Caliban dropped down to Port Forlorn. Calver, her Second Mate, looked out and down from the control room viewports to the uninviting scene below, to the vista of barren hills and mountains scarred by mine workings, to the great slag heaps that were almost mountains themselves, to the ugly little towns, each one of which was dominated by the tall, smoke-belching chimneys of factories and refineries, to the rivers that, even from this altitude, looked like sluggish streams of sewage.

So this, he thought, is Lorn, industrial hub of the Rim Worlds. This is the end of the penny section. This is where I get off. There’s no further to go …

Captain Bowers, satisfied that the ship was riding down easily and safely under automatic control, turned to his Second Officer. “Are you sure that you want to pay off here, Mr. Calver?” he asked. “Are you quite sure? You’re a good officer and we’d like to keep you. The Shakespearian Line mightn’t be up to Commission standards, but it’s not a bad outfit …”

“Thank you, sir,” replied Calver, raising his voice slightly to make himself heard over the subdued thunder of the rockets, “but I’m sure. I signed on in Elsinore with the understanding that I was to be paid off on the Rim. The Third’s quite capable of taking over.”

“You want your head read,” grunted Harris, the Mate.

“Perhaps,” said Calver.

And perhaps I do, he thought. How much of this is sheer masochism, this flight from the warm worlds of the Center to these desolate Rim planets? Could it have been the names that appealed to me? Thule, Ultimo, Faraway and Lorn …

“The usual cross wind, blast it!” swore Bowers, hastily turning his attention to the controls. The old ship shuddered and complained as the corrective blasts were fired and, momentarily, the noise in the control room rose to an intolerable level.

When things had quieted down again Harris said, “It’s always windy on Lorn, and the wind is always cold and dusty and stinking with the fumes of burning sulphur …”

“I’ll not be staying on Lorn,” said Calver. “I’ve been too long in Space to go hunting for a shore job, especially when there’s no inducement.”

“Going to try Rim Runners?” asked Captain Bowers.

“Yes. I hear they’re short of officers.”

“They always are,” said Harris.

“Why not stay with us?” queried the Captain.

“Thanks again, sir, but …”

“Rim Runners!” snorted the Mate. “You’ll find an odd bunch there, Calver. Refugees from the Interstellar Transport Commission, from the Survey Service, the Waverley Royal Mail, Trans-Galactic Clippers …”

“I’m a refugee from the Commission myself,” said Calver wryly.

Port Forlorn was close now, too close for further conversation, the dirty, scarred, concrete apron rushing up to meet them. The Caliban dropped through a cloud of scintillating particles, the dust raised by her back-blast and fired to brief incandescence. She touched, sagged tiredly, her structure creaking like old bones. The sudden silence, as the rockets died, seemed unnatural.

Harris broke it. “And their ships,” he said. “Their ships … All ancient crocks, mostly worn-out Epsilon Class tubs thrown out by the Commission just before they were due to collapse from senile decay … I’m told that they even have one or two of the old Ehrenhaft Drive jobs …”

“Wasn’t Caliban once Epsilon Sextants?” asked Calver mildly.

“Yes. But she’s different,” said Harris affectionately.

Yes, thought Calver, remembering the conversation, standing at the foot of the ramp to the airlock, Caliban was different. A worn-out Epsilon Class wagon she may have been—but she still had pride, just as her Master and officers still had pride in her. This Lorn Lady was a ship of the same class, probably no older than Caliban, but she looked a wreck.

Calver looked down at his shoes, which had been highly polished when he left his hotel, and saw that they were already covered with a thick film of dust. A sidewise glance at his epaulettes—the new ones, with their Rim Runners Second Officer’s braid, on the old jacket—told him that they, also, were dusty. He disliked to board a ship, any ship, untidily dressed. He brushed his shoulders with his hand, used a handkerchief, which he then threw away, to restore the shine to his shoes. He climbed the shaky ramp.

There was no airlock watch—but Calver had learned that the outward standards of efficiency diminished, almost according to the Law of Inverse Squares, with increasing distance from the Galactic Center. He shrugged, found the telephone.

After studying the selector board he pressed the button labelled Chief Officer. There was no reply. He tried Control Room, Purser and then Captain, then replaced the useless instrument in its clip, and opened the inner airlock door. He was agreeably surprised to find that the manual controls worked easily and smoothly. He picked up his bags and went into the ship. He was familiar enough with the layout of this type of vessel and went straight to the axial shaft. The newer Epsilon Class vessels boasted a light elevator for use in port. Calver was not amazed to discover that Lorn Lady did not run to such a luxury.

There was somebody clattering down the spiral stairway in the axial shaft, the stairway that led up to the officers’ accommodation. Calver stood there and waited. The owner of the noisy feet dropped into view. He was a man of Calver’s age, no longer young. His uniform was tight on his stocky frame; he wore Rim Runners epaulettes—the three gold bars of a Chief Officer with, above them, the winged wheel—but his cap badge was an elaborate affair of stars and rockets surmounted by an ornate crown.

He looked up at Calver when he reached the deck, making the tall man suddenly conscious of his gangling height. He said, “You’ll be the new Second. I’m the Mate. Maclean’s the name. Welcome aboard the Forlorn Bitch.” He grinned. “Well, she looks it, doesn’t she?”

They shook hands.

“I’ll take my bags up to my cabin,” said Calver. “I’ve seen enough of Port Forlorn to last me a long time so, if you like, I’ll do the night aboard.”

“Night aboard? There’s no shipkeeping here,” laughed Maclean. “And there’s no cargo working tonight, either. The night watchman will be on duty in an hour or so, and he’s fairly reliable.”

Calver looked as shocked as he felt.

“I know how you feel,” said the Mate, “but you’ll get over it. I used to feel the same myself when I first came out to the Rim—after the Royal Mail it seemed very slovenly.”

“I’m afraid it does.”

“You’re out of the Commission’s ships, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought as much. You’re a typical Commission officer—middle-aged before your time, stiff and starchy and a stickler for regulations. It’ll wear off. Anyhow, up you go and park your bags. I’ll wait for you here. Then we’ll go and have a couple or three drinks to wash this damned dust out of our throats.”

Calver climbed the spiral staircase and found his cabin without any trouble. It was, to his relief, reasonably clean. He left his bags under the bunk, went down to the airlock to rejoin Maclean. The two men walked down the ramp together.

“You’ll not find Commission standards here,” said the Mate, taking up the conversation where he had dropped it. “Or, come to that, Royal Mail standards. We keep the ships safe and reasonably clean—and reasonably efficient—but there’s neither money nor labor to spare for spit and polish.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“So I noticed, too, when I first came out to the Rim. And if I hadn’t told Commodore Sir Archibald Sinclair to his face that he was a blithering old idiot I’d still be in the Royal Mail, still keeping my night aboard in port and making sure that a proper airlock watch was being maintained, and all the rest of it …” He paused. “There’s a not bad little pub just outside the spaceport gates. Feel like trying it?”

“As you please,” said Calver.

The two men walked slowly across the dusty apron, past cranes and under gantries, through the gates and into a street that seemed lined with factories and warehouses. The swinging sign, the big bottle with vanes and ports added to make it look like a rocketship, was, even though sadly tarnished and faded, a note of incongruous gaiety.

The pub was better inside than out, almost achieving cosiness. It was, at this early hour of the evening, practically deserted. Calver and Maclean sat down at one of the tables, waiting only a few seconds for attention. The slatternly girl who served them did not ask for their order but brought them a bottle of whisky with graduations up its side, two glasses and a jug of water.

“They know me here,” said Maclean unnecessarily. He filled and raised his glass. “Here’s to crime.”

Calver sipped his drink. The whisky was not bad. He read the label on the bottle, saw that the liquor had been distilled on Nova Caledon. It wasn’t Scotch—but here, out on the Rim, the price of the genuine article would have been prohibitive.

He said, “Would you mind putting me into the picture, Maclean? They were very vague in the office when I joined the Company.”

“They always are,” the Mate told him. “They’re never quite sure which way is up. Besides—you hadn’t yet signed the Articles; you had yet to bind yourself, body and soul, to Rim Runners. I suppose you noticed the Secrecy Clause, by the way?”

“I did.”

“I suppose you thought it a rather odd clause to find in a merchant ship’s Articles of Agreement. But it’s there for a reason. Your predecessor signed it—and ignored it. That’s why he’s doing his spell in the mines, under guard …”

“What! Surely they wouldn’t …”

“They would, Calver—and in his case they did. Bear in mind that Rim Runners is just about a government shipping line and that all of us are, automatically, officers of the Rim Naval Reserve …

“Anyhow …” He glanced around him, made sure that there was nobody within earshot. “Anyhow, this is the way of it. Until very recently Rim Runners owned only a handful of ships and served only four planetary systems—those of Thule, Ultimo, Faraway and Lorn. Just puddle-jumping by our standards, Calver—our old standards, that is. Even so, they had to keep on recruiting officers from the rest of the Galaxy. They don’t like Deep Space, these Rim Worlders; they’re scared of it. I suppose that it’s because for all their lives they’ve been hanging over the edge of the Ultimate Pit by their eyebrows.

“But the Rim Government wants to expand, wants to become sufficiently powerful to be able to thumb its nose at Earth and the Federation. As you know, the Survey Service has always neglected the Rim. So Rim Runners put their own survey ships into operation. They made a sweep to the Galactic West—and found the anti-matter suns and planets. There was no room for expansion there. They ran to the East and found normal matter and quite a few stars with inhabited worlds. There’s Mellise, which is practically all water and inhabited by a race of intelligent amphibians. There’s Tharn, which has yet to build an industrial civilization but whose people are as near human as makes no difference. There’s Grollor, where the natives can just be classed as humanoid and have the first beginnings of space travel. There’s Stree, with its philosophical lizards …”

“I can see,” said Calver, “that I’ll have to do some heavy boning up on the Pilot Books …”

Maclean laughed. “There aren’t any Pilot Books, Calver. Not yet. When there are, it’ll be the likes of us who’ve written them.” He splashed more whisky into. . .