Grimm Someone to Watch Over Me

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5312-6561-8
Verlag: Ozymandias Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 87 Seiten

In the awfulness of hyperspace, everything was the nightmare opposite of itself ... and here was where Len Mattern found his goal! Christopher Grimm excels in this thoroughly awesome science fiction classic, Someone to Watch Over Me!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Grimm, Christopher

Leseproben

III

DID THAT TRUTH GO back fifteen years, to the time he had met the kqyres, twenty years to the time he had first seen Lyddy? Or even further back than that? Did it go back, say, twenty-four years, to the time when he was sixteen and had killed his stepfather? He could still see Karl Brodek lying there with his head crushed, could still feel the terror rising in him at what he had done....

Then he had turned and fled the small community on Fairhurst—one of the Clytemnestra planets—and made for the capital, where he shipped out on one of the small tramp freighters that voyaged among the planets of that system. None of the four other planets was human-inhabitable, but two had mining stations, and one had a native civilization advanced enough to make trading practicable, though not very profitable.

For the next four years, he drifted from one tenth-rate ship to another, one ill-paid job to another. In all this time, he never left the Clytemnestra System. As soon as he was satisfied that his former neighbors were not going to set the law on his trail, he had no desire to go away. It wasn’t place-liking that kept him; it was dread of the Jump.

Most spacemen never do quite get over their dread of the hyperspace Jump, but with Len the dread amounted almost to a mania. He was ashamed of the feeling, especially since he suspected he’d picked up that extra dollop of terror from the creatures on the native planet.

Self-respecting colonials didn’t associate with non-humans, but during those first years of fear that his fellow men were hunting him, he’d felt safe only with the flluska. He learned a little of their language, and he spent such spare time as he had on Liman, their planet. He couldn’t breathe the atmosphere, but there were the trading domes; nobody minded if he used them when there was no trade going on.

The flluska were a religious people, with gods and demons similar to those of the terrestrial cosmogonies. Only, while their gods lived conventionally in the sky, their demons lived in hyperspace. Len was too unsophisticated himself to wonder how so primitive a people could have evolved such a concept as hyperspace in their theology. He merely grew to share their terror of it.

The year Len was twenty, the Perseus, one of the star freighters that made the long haul from Castor to Capella, found itself in Fairhurst Station short one deckhand. The man they’d shipped out with was in jail, waiting to see whether a manslaughter or assault charge was going to be lodged against him. The ship could not afford to wait. The station was scoured for a replacement and Len Mattern was the best man they could find.

Normally the starships did not take on untrained hands. Even the lowliest crewman was supposed to have spent a minimum number of years at the space schools, because in theory, all promotions came from the ranks, even in the merchant service. But in spite of his lack of training, they offered him the job. The bigline ships never liked to sail shorthanded; in case of trouble, that could be a basis for legal action.

Len knew the opportunity offered him was a dazzling one—not only far more money than he’d ever seen before, but the chance of breaking out of the system. He was afraid though, terribly afraid. “I’ve never made the Jump,” he told the second officer in a quavering voice.

“You’ll never be a real spaceman until you do.” The second officer was patient, because he knew Mattern was his only chance of making the crew up to its full complement.

“I’ve heard tell that—things change their shapes in Hyperspace.”

“Maybe they do; maybe it’s their real shapes you see out there. Who’s to tell what the truth is?”

Len licked dry lips and tried again. “They say there’re people—beings, anyway—living in hyperspace.” That tale he had heard from spacemen who had made the Jump. Even if he’d believed in the flluska’s demons, he would have had the good sense not to admit such a thing to a starship officer—a man of sophistication from the Near Planets, perhaps even Earth herself. Still, spacemen were notorious myth-spinners. Perhaps he had made a fool of himself, anyway.

But the second officer wasn’t laughing. “Federation law says we should have nothing to do with the creatures of hyperspace. If we leave them alone, they don’t bother us.”

It would have been better if the officer had laughed at him and said there was nothing in hyperspace but space. “Will we see them?”

“Does a ship going through ordinary space see any of us?” the officer returned. “The creatures of hyperspace live on their own planets, and we give those planets a wide berth. Simple as that.” He added, “What are you so afraid of, boy? Not a ship’s been lost in hyperspace for over two centuries, and there haven’t been any blowups for years.”

“Blowups?” Len repeated.

“Accidents. A technical term. You’ve taken worse risks shipping out in those tincan tramps.”

Finally, Len gave in—to his own common sense more than to the officer’s—and signed up for the voyage. He filled out the necessary forms—hundreds of them, it seemed like. When it came to each line for next of kin, he left a blank on every one.

“Haven’t you any relatives at all?” the second officer asked, surprised.

“Not a one.” Len didn’t bother to mention that half-brother back on Fairhurst; a five-year-old kid isn’t much kin to speak of. Besides, the boy probably didn’t even know he had a brother—he’d been less than a year old when Len left. One of the barren women must have adopted him and brought him up as her own.

So Len Mattern filled out all the papers and was inscribed on the ship’s rolls. And he made the terrible jump through hyperspace for the first time.

People who traveled on spaceships only as passengers never could understand why the Jump was invariably referred to as “terrible.” That was because before the ship made the Jump they’d be given drugs, in their cocktails, in their food at dinner, or in their drinking water—and the next day they’d wake up and find they had slept right through the whole thing, so it couldn’t be so awful. Of course those who traveled around the universe a lot were bound to catch on. Someday they’d miss a meal or not drink anything and they’d find themselves awake while the ship was Jumping. But the shipping lines didn’t take any chances and the aberrant passengers would also find themselves locked in their cabins with smooth metal shutters where the mirrors used to be.

But one thing that couldn’t be helped: They couldn’t be stopped from looking down at themselves and seeing extra arms and legs; or finding no arms and legs at all, but tentacles instead; or that their skin had turned into shining scales or that there was an extra eye in the back of their head. And when the time came for another Jump, they would ask to be drugged.

However, crewmen couldn’t be drugged. They had to be awake to tend the ship. The credo of the Space Service was that you couldn’t trust a machine to itself any more than you could trust an extraterrestrial, a non-human. If a man wasn’t in charge, ultimately everything would go to pot. That was part of the space tradition, like the primitive axes that hung on the bulkheads, so a man could smash his way to the modern fire-fighting equipment. Except, of course, that if fire really broke out, it would be quicker to press the button that sent the automatic fire-fighting machines into immediate action. But still the axes hung there, because they had always hung there—and, like all the metal on the ship, they had to be kept polished.

Each time a ship made the Jump, the crewmen stayed awake. They saw space and time change before their eyes. They saw their own fellows turn into monsters. It was an awful thing to see, even though they knew it wasn’t actually a change, but a shift to another aspect of themselves. Worse than the seeing was the feeling. It was like being turned inside out, organ by organ—your heart and your liver and your guts and all the rest, each carefully turned inside out, the way a woman takes off her gloves, smoothing each one with great precision. The hellish part was that it didn’t hurt. A man felt as if he were being twisted and wrenched apart, and it didn’t hurt, and it was the wrongness of that more than anything else that—well, that was why the pay was so high on the starships. So many of them went mad.

All this Len Mattern had heard of and had expected—though no amount of expectation could have braced him for that kind of reality. But there was more to it than he had heard, and it was the extra part that the second officer seemed curiously anxious to deny. “You saw nobody—nothing at the portholes,” he told Mattern after that first Jump. “You just imagined it.”

Mattern had been a spaceman long enough to be able to distinguish imagination from reality. Perhaps the creatures of hyperspace did live on planets, but it seemed they did not breathe the atmosphere of those planets as human beings breathe air, and so...