To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga Read Online Free PDF Page A

.”
    “We have our share in Survey Service,” said Grimes. “But tell me, how do you man your vessels? This Sundowner Line of yours . . .”
    “There are always the drifters, the no-hopers, the castoffs from the Interstellar Transport Commission, and Trans-Galactic Clippers, and Waverley Royal Mail and all the rest of them.”
    “And from the Survey Service?” The question lifted her out of her somber mood. “No,” she replied with a smile. “Not yet.”
    “Not ever,” said Grimes.

6

    ONCE HIS INITIAL SHYNESS HAD WORN OFF —and with it much of his Academy-induced snobbery—Grimes began to enjoy the voyage. After all, Survey Service or no Survey Service, this was a ship and he was a spaceman. He managed to accept the fact that most of the ship’s officers, even the most junior of them, were far more experienced spacemen than he was. Than he was now, he often reminded himself. At the back of his mind lurked the smug knowledge that, for all of them, a captaincy was the very limit of promotion, whereas he, one day, would be addressed in all seriousness as Jane Pentecost now addressed him in jest.
    He was a frequent visitor to the control room but, remembering the Master’s admonition, was careful not to get in the way. The watch officers accepted him almost as one of themselves and were willing to initiate him into the tricky procedure of obtaining a fix with the interstellar drive in operation—an art, he was told, rather than a science.
    Having obtained the permission of the Chief Engineers he prowled through the vessel’s machinery spaces, trying to supplement his theoretical knowledge of reaction, inertial and interstellar drives with something more practical. The first two, of course, were idle, and would be until the ship emerged from her warped Space-Time back into the normal continuum—but there was the Pile, the radio-active heart of the ship, and there was the auxiliary machinery that, in this tiny, man-made planet, did the work that on a natural world is performed by winds, rivers, sunlight and gravity.
    There was the Mannschenn Drive Room—and, inside this holy of holies, no man need fear to admit that he was scared by the uncanny complexity of ever-precessing gyroscopes. He stared at the tumbling rotors, the gleaming wheels that seemed always on the verge of vanishing into nothingness, that rolled down the dark dimensions, dragging the ship and all aboard her with them. He stared, hypnotized, lost in a vague, disturbing dream in which Past and Present and Future were inextricably mingled—and the Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer took him firmly by the arm and led him from the compartment. “Look at the time-twister too long,” he growled, “and you’ll be meeting yourself coming back!”
    There was the “farm”—the deck of yeast- and tissue-culture vats which was no more (and no less), than a highly efficient protein factory, and the deck where stood the great, transparent globes in which algae converted the ship’s organic waste and sewage back into usable form (processed as nutriment for the yeasts and the tissue-cultures and as fertilizer for the hydroponic tanks, the biochemist was careful to explain), and the deck where luxuriant vegetation spilled over from the trays and almost barricaded the inspection walks, the source of vitamins and of flowers for the saloon tables and, at the same time, the ship’s main air-conditioning unit. Grimes said to Jane Pentecost, who had accompanied him on this tour of inspection, “You know, I envy your Captain.”
    “From you, Admiral,” she scoffed, “that is something. But why?”
    “How can I put it? You people do the natural way what we do with chemicals and machinery. The Captain of a warship is Captain of a warship. Period. But your Captain Craven is absolute monarch of a little world.”
    “A warship,” she told him, “is supposed to be able to go on functioning as such even with every compartment holed. A warship cannot afford to