The Ship From Outside

by A. Bertram Chandler

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

Synopsis

The reward for rescuing Thermopylae is finally paid, and Calver and his shipmates from Lorn Lady purchase a ship and rename her The Outsider. Two years are spent as a charter to Rim Runners, then six months tramping, before Sonya Verrill reappears and engineers a charter from the Federation Survey Service to look for an alien derelict. She accompanies The Outsider, but proves very disruptive to Jane Calver.

Release date: November 26, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 103

Sample

IT WAS ON Stree that Calver, Master of the star-tramp Rimfire, received the news. He was in his day cabin at the time and he and Jane Calver, who was both his wife and his Catering Officer, were trying to entertain the large, not unhandsome lizard who acted as Rim Runners’ local agent. It had been heavy going; the saurians of Stree are avid for new knowledge and delight in long-winded and woolly philosophical discussions. Both Jane and Calver tried hard not to show their relief when there was a sharp rapping at the cabin door.

“Excuse me, Treeth,” Calver said.

“Most certainly, Captain,” replied the agent. “Doubtless one of your officers bears tidings of great import.”

“I doubt it,” said Jane Calver, with a slight shrug of her shapely shoulders. “It’ll be no more than some minor problem of stowage, or something.”

“Or something,” agreed her husband. He raised his voice. “Come in.”

The agent, who had been sitting on the deck, rose gracefully to his feet, his long tail skimming the afternoon tea crockery on the low coffee table with a scant millimeter of clearance. Jane, when the expected crash failed to eventuate, heaved an audible sigh of relief. Treeth looked at Calver and grinned, showing all his needle teeth. Calver said nothing but wished that a childish sense of humor did not, as it so often and too often does, go hand in hand with super intelligence.

Levine, the little Psionic Radio Officer, bounced into the cabin. For a moment Calver thought that the man had been drinking, then rejected the idea; Levine was well known for his abstemious ways. But there are other euphoriacs than alcohol.

“Captain,” he babbled, “I’ve picked up a message. An important one. Really important. Donaldson, the P.R.O. at Port Farewell, must have hooked up every telepath and every dog’s brain amplifier on the whole damn planet to punch it through at this range.”

“And what is this news?” asked Calver.

“The Thermopylae salvage case,” cried Levine. “It’s been settled at last.”

“So Rim Runners get their new ship,” said Calver. “So what?”

“To hell with Rim Runners!” exploded Levine. We get our whack—all of us who were in the poor old Lorn Lady at the time.”

Treeth sat down again. He showed that he was interested by forgetting to repeat his infantile joke with his tail and the tea things. He said, in the well-modulated voice that held only the suggestion of a croak, the merest hint of a hiss, “I trust that you will forgive my curiosity, Captain. But we, as you know, were utterly ignorant of commercial matters until your Commodore Grimes made his first landing on our planet. What is salvage?”

“Putting it briefly,” Calver told him, “roughly and briefly, it’s this. If you come across another ship in distress you do all that you can to save life and property. The lifesaving is, after all, it’s own reward. It’s when property—the other vessel, or her cargo, or both—is saved that the legal complications creep in. There are so many interested parties—the owners of the ships involved, the owners of the cargo and, last but not least, Lloyds of London, who carry the insurance….”

“Last but not least,” corrected Jane, “the crew of the ship that carries out the act of salvage, the people who’ve done all the work.”

“Anyhow,” went on Calver, “the whole mess is dumped on the lap of an Admiralty court. The court decides who gets paid how much for doing what.”

“And this Thermopylae?” asked Treeth. “We heard something about her from Captain Vickery, of the Sundowner. It happened shortly after Lorn Lady’s last visit here, if I remember rightly. I shall be obliged if you will apprise me of the relevant facts.”

“All right,” said Calver. “Thermopylae was—and, so far as I know, still is—one of the Trans-Galactic Clippers, a large passenger liner. She was making a cruising voyage out along the Rim. She got into trouble off Eblis….”

“A most unpleasant world,” said Treeth. “I have seen pictures of it.”

“As you say, a most unpleasant world. Anyhow, Thermopylae was putting herself into orbit around Eblis so that her passengers could admire the scenery and—things always seem to happen at the worst possible times—she blew her tube linings. As a result of this she was doomed to make a series of grazing ellipses until such time as she crashed to the surface. We, in Lorn Lady, picked up her distress calls and just about busted a gut getting there in time. We tried to tow her into a stable orbit. We succeeded—but wrecked our own ship in the process. Then Thermopylae used our tube linings to make temporary repairs to her own reaction drive units. As you can see, it was the sort of case that brings joy to the hearts of the lawyers and large wads of folding money into their pockets; in addition to the straightforward salvage there was the sacrifice of one ship to save the other.”

“And you have, at last, been rewarded by the owners of Thermopylae?” asked Treeth.

“So it would appear,” answered Calver.

“And how!” cried Levine, who had been waiting for a chance to get a word in. “And by Lloyds! A cool three quarters of a million to Lorn Lady’s crew! I haven’t got the individual figures yet, but …”

“This,” said Jane, “calls for a celebration. Luckily we’re well stocked with liquor….”

The agent got to his feet again. “And now I must depart,” he said gently. “For me, a stranger, an outsider, to be present at your thanksgiving would not be fitting. But there is one thing about you beings that never ceases to mystify me—the need that you feel to deaden the effects of the exhilaration that comes with good news by the ingestion of alcohol….” He paused. “Good afternoon to you, Captain and Captain’s lady, and to you, Mr. Levine. I am sufficiently familiar with your vessel to be able to find my own way ashore.

“Good afternoon—and my sincere congratulations.”

There was Calver, tall and gangling, and there was Jane Calver who, as “Calamity Jane” Arlen, had been Catering Officer of the lost Lorn Lady. Calver sat at the head of the table in Rimfire’s saloon and Jane, tall and slim, and with the silver streak in her glossy dark hair gleaming like a slender coronet, sat at his right hand. Very much Captain and Captain’s lady they had been when the other officers had been with them, the officers who had not served in Lorn Lady. But now these others had retired to their several cabins and the party was for Lorn Lady’s people only.

There was the painfully thin Bendix, with the few remaining strands of black hair brushed carefully over his shining scalp, who had been Interstellar Drive Engineer in T.G. Clippers before coming out to the Rim for reasons known only to himself. There was Renault, the Rocket King, swarthy, always in need of depilation, Reaction Drive Engineer—he, like Jane and Calver, was out of the Interstellar Transport Commission’s ships. There was little Brentano, in charge of Electronic Radio Communications, highly competent and capable of standing a watch in the control room or in either of the two engine rooms should the need arise. There was Levine, another small man and also competent—extremely so—but only in his own field. There was old Doc Malone, looking like a jovial monk who had, somehow, put on a uniform in mistake for his habit.

The decanter was passed around the table.

“A toast,” said Bendix harshly. “A toast. We’ll drink to you, Calver. It’s thanks to you that this good fortune has come our way.”

“No,” demurred the Captain. “No. We’ll drink to us, to all of us. We were all in it together, and we all of us did our best.” He raised his glass. “To us,” he repeated quietly.

“And to hell with the Rim!” Brentano almost shouted. “To hell with Lorn and Faraway, Ultimo and Thule and the whole damned Eastern Circuit!”

“And are you going home, Brentano?” asked Doc Malone. “And are you going home? To the warm Cluster Worlds, to the swarming suns and their attendant planets? Won’t you feel confined, shut in? Won’t you miss the empty sky, the call of it, the mystery of it? Won’t you miss this freemasonry of ours?”

“And what about you, Doc?” countered Brentano. “Aren’t you going home?”

The old man was silent for what could have been only seconds, but it seemed longer. He said at last, very softly, “… and home there’s no returning.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” murmured Bendix, breaking the sudden silence.

“He is right,” Renault said.

And Calver remembered how he and Jane had stood in the Captain’s cabin aboard Thermopylae, and how her hand had found his, and how he had said, “But we belong on the Rim.”

He said it again.

“So we belong on the Rim,” said Jane briskly. “We seem to be in complete agreement on that point, with the exception of friend Brentano….”

“Why make an exception of me?” demanded the Radio Officer plaintively. “I’m as much a Rim Runner as any of you.”

“But you said—.” began Jane.

“What I say isn’t always what I think, or feel.” His face clouded. “Old Doc put it in a nutshell. And home there’s no returning—not unless we want to face what we ran away from, not unless we want to reopen old wounds. All the same, there must be more in life than running the Eastern Circuit.”

“What if we ran it on our own behalf?” asked Calver.

“You mean …?” queried Renault.

“What I said. With what we’ve got we shall be able to buy an obsolescent Epsilon Class tramp and have enough left over for the refit. We know the trade, and there’s quite a deal of goodwill on the Eastern Circuit planets that’s ours rather than the Company’s.”

“The Sundown Line didn’t last long,” quibbled Levine.

“Perhaps not,” said Bendix, “but they didn’t lose any money when Rim Runners bought them out. . .