Бертрам Чандлер - Contraband From Otherspace

So he was dead, and he was decomposing, his skin taut and darkly purple, bulging over the waistband of the loincloth—it looked like sacking—that was his only clothing. He was dead—and Grimes was suddenly grateful for the sealed suit that he was wearing, the suit that earlier he had been cursing, that kept out the stench of him.

Gently, with pity and pointless tenderness, he put his gloved hands to the waist of the corpse, lifted it free of the deck, shifted it to one side.

"We must be just above engineroom level," said Sonya, her voice deliberately casual.

"Yes," agreed Grimes. "I wonder if this ship has an axial shaft. If she has, it will be the quickest way of getting to the control room."

"That will be the best place to start investigations," she said.

They moved on through the alleyway, using the Free Fall shuffle that was second nature to all of them, letting the homing instinct that is part of the nature of all spacemen guide them. They found more bodies, women as well as men, sprawled in untidy attitudes, hanging like monstrous mermen and merwomen in a submarine cave. They tried to ignore them, as they tried to ignore the smaller bodies, those of children, and came at last, at the end of a short, radial alleyway, to the stout pillar of the axial shaft.

There was a door in the pillar, and it was open, and one by one they passed through it and then began pulling themselves forward along the central guide rod, ignoring the spiral ramp that lined the tunnel. Finally they came to a conventional enough hatchway, but the valve sealing the end of the shaft was jammed. Grimes and Sonya fell back to let Pendeen use the laser torch. Then they followed him into the control room.

There were more bodies in the control room. There were three dead men and three dead women, all of them strapped into acceleration chairs. Like all the others scattered throughout the ship they were clad only in rough, scanty rags, were swollen with decomposition.

Grimes forced himself to ignore them. He could do nothing for them. Perhaps, he thought, he might someday avenge them (somehow he did not feel that they had been criminals, pirates)—but that would not bring them back to life. He looked past the unsightly corpses to the instruments on the consoles before their chairs. These, at first glance, seemed to be familiar enough—white dials with the black calibrations marked with Arabic numerals; red, green, white and amber pilot lights, dead now, but ready to blossom with glowing life at the restoration of a power supply. Familiar enough they were, at first glance. But there were the odd differences, the placement of various controls in positions that did not tally with the construction and the articulation of the normal human frame. And there was the lettering: MINNSCHINN DRIVI, RIMITI CINTRIL. Who, he asked himself, were the builders of this ship, this vessel that was almost a standard Federation Survey Service cruiser? What human race had jettisoned every vowel in the alphabet but this absurdly fat "I?"

"John," Sonya was saying, "give me a hand, will you?"

He turned to see what she was doing. She was trying to unbuckle a seat belt that was deeply embedded in the distended flesh at the waist of one of the dead men.

He conquered his revulsion, swallowed the nausea that was rising in his throat. He pulled the sharp sheath knife from his belt, said, "This is quicker," and slashed through the tough fabric of the strap. He was careful not to touch the gleaming, purple skin. He knew that if he did so the dead man would… burst.

Carefully, Sonya lifted the body from its seat, set it down on the deck so that the magnetized sandal soles were in contact with the steel plating. Then she pointed to the back of the chair. "What do you make of that?" she asked.

That was a vertical slot, just over an inch in width, that was continued into the seat itself, half bisecting it.

It was Pendeen who broke the silence. He said simply, "They had tails."

"But they haven’t," objected Grimes. It was obvious that the minimal breech-clouts of the dead people could not conceal even a tiny caudal appendage.

"My dear John," Sonya told him in an annoyingly superior voice, "these hapless folk are neither the builders nor the original crew of this ship. Refugees? Could be. Escapees? A slave revolt? Once again—could be. Or must be. This is a big ship, and a fighting ship. You can’t run a vessel of this class without uniforms, without marks of rank so you can see at a glance who is supposed to be doing what. Furthermore, you don’t clutter up a man-o-war with children."

"She’s not necessarily a man-o'-war," demurred Grimes. "She could be a defensively armed merchantman…"

"With officers and first class passengers dressed in foul rags? With a name like DESTROYER?"

"We don’t know that that grouping of letters on the stern does spell DESTROYER."

"We don’t know that this other grouping of letters"—she pointed to the control panel that Grimes had been studying-"spells MANNSCHENN DRIVE, REMOTE CONTROL. But I’m willing to bet my gratuity that if you trace the leads you’ll wind up in a compartment full of dimension-twisting gyroscopes."

"All right," said Grimes. "I’ll go along with you. I’ll admit that we’re aboard a ship built by some humanoid—but possibly non-human race that, even so, uses a peculiar distortion of English as its written language. …"

"A humanoid race with tails," contributed Pendeen.

"A humanoid race with tails," agreed Sonya. "But what race? Look at this slot in the chair back. It’s designed for somebody—or something—with a thin tail, thin at the root as well as at the extremity. And the only tailed beings we know with any technology comparable to our own have thick tails—and, furthermore, have their own written languages. Just imagine one of our saurian friends trying to get out of that chair in a hurry, assuming that he’d ever been able to get into it in the first place. He’d be trapped."

"You’re the Intelligence Officer," said Grimes rather nastily.

"All right. I am. Also, I hold a Doctorate in Xenology. And I tell you, John, that what we’ve found in this ship, so far, doesn’t add up to any kind of sense at all."

"She hasn’t made any sense ever since she was first picked up by Station 3," admitted Grimes.

"That she hasn’t," said Pendeen. "And I don’t like her. Not one little bit."

"Why not, Mr. Pendeen?" asked Grimes, realizing that it was a foolish question to ask about a radioactive hull full of corpses.

"Because… because she’s wrong , sir. The proportions of all her controls and fittings—just wrong enough to be scary. And left-handed threads, and gauges calibrated from right to left."

"So they are," said Grimes. "So they are. But that’s odder still. Why don’t they write the same way? From Right to Left?"

"Perhaps they do," murmured Sonya. "But I don’t think so. I think that the only difference between their written language and ours is that they have an all-purpose I , or an all-purpose symbol that’s used for every vowel sound." She was prowling around the control room. Damn it all, there must be a Log Book…

"There should be a Log Book," amended Grimes.

"All right There should be a Log Book. Here’s an obvious Log Desk, complete with stylus, but empty. I begin to see how it must have been. The ship safe in port, all her papers landed for checking, and then her seizure by these people, by these unfortunate humans, whoever they were … H’m. The Chart Tank might tell us something…" She glared at the empty globe. "It would have told us something if it hadn’t been in close proximity to a nuclear blast. But there will be traces. Unfortunately we haven’t the facilities here to bring them out." She resumed her purposeful shuffle. "And what have we here? SIGNIL LIG? SIGNAL LOG? A black box that might well contain quite a few answers when we hook it up to a power supply. And that, I think, will lie within the capabilities of our Radio Officer back aboard Rim Mamelute ."