Бертрам Чандлер - Contraband From Otherspace

The thing was secured by simple enough clips to the side of what was obviously a transceiver. Deftly, Sonya disengaged it, tucked it under her arm.

"Back to the Mamelute ," said Grimes. It was more an order than a suggestion.

"Back to the Mamelute ," she agreed.

The Commodore was last from the control room, watched first Pendeen and then Sonya vanish through the hatch into the axial shaft. He half-wished that enough air remained in their suit tanks for them to make a leisurely examination of the accommodation that must be situated abaft Control—and was more than half-relieved that circumstances did not permit such a course of action. He had seen his fill of corpses. In any case, the Signal Log might tell them far more than the inspection of decomposing corpses ever could.

He felt far easier in his mind when the three of them were standing, once more, in the plastic igloo that covered the breached airlock, and almost happy when, one by one, they had squeezed through the built-in sphincter valve back to the clean emptiness of Space. The harsh working lights of Rim Mamelute seemed soft somehow, mellow almost, suggested the lights of Home. And the cramped interior of the tug, when they were back on board, was comforting. If one has to be jostled, it is better to be jostled by the living than by dead men and women, part-cremated in a steel coffin tumbling aimlessly between the stars.

It was very quiet in the radio office of Rim Mamelute . Grimes and Sonya stood there, watching chubby little Bennett make the last connections to the black box that they had brought from the control room of the derelict. "Yes," the Electronic Radio Officer had told them, "it is a Signal Log, and it’s well shielded, so whatever records it may contain probably haven’t been wiped by radiation. Once I get it hooked up we’ll have the play-back."

And now it was hooked up. "Are you sure you won’t burn it out?" asked the Commodore, suddenly anxious.

"Almost sure, sir," answered Bennett cheerfully. "The thing is practically an exact copy of the Signal Logs that were in use in some ships of the Federation Survey Service all of fifty years ago. Before my time. Anyhow, my last employment before I came out to the Rim was in the Lyran Navy, and their wagons were all Survey Service cast-offs. In many of them the original communications gear was still in place, and still in working order. No, sir, this isn’t the first time that I’ve made one of these babies sing. Reminds me of when we picked up the wreck of the old Minstrel Boy ; I was Chief Sparks of the Tara’s Hall at the time, and got the gen from her Signal Log that put us on the trail of Black Bart"—he added unnecessarily—"the pirate."

"I have heard of him," said Grimes coldly.

Sonya remarked, pointing towards the box, "But it doesn’t look old."

"No, Mrs. Grimes. It’s not old. Straight from the maker, I’d say. But there’s no maker’s name, which is odd…"

"Switch on, Mr. Bennett," ordered the Commodore.

Bennett switched on. The thing hummed quietly to itself, crackled briefly and thinly as the spool was rewound. It crackled again, more loudly, and the play-back began.

The voice that issued from the speaker spoke English—of a sort. But it was not human. It was a thin, high, alien squeaking—and yet, somehow, not alien enough. The consonants were ill-defined, and there was only one vowel sound.

" Eeveengeer tee Deestreeyeer . Eeveengeer tee Deestreeyeer . Heeve tee. Heeve tee!"

The voice that answered was not a very convincing imitation of that strange accent. " Deestreeyer tee Eeveenger . Reepeet, pleese. Reepeet…"

"A woman," whispered Sonya. "Human…"

"Heeve tee, Deestreeyeer . Heeve tee, eer wee eepeen feer!"

A pause, then the woman’s voice again, the imitation even less convincing, a certain desperation all too evident: " Deestreeyer tee Avenger . Deestreeyeer tee Eeveengeer … Eer Dreeve ceentreels eer eet eef eerdeer!"

Playing for time, thought Grimes. Playing for time, while clumsy hands fumble with unfamiliar armament. But they tried. They did their best…

"Dee!" screamed the inhuman voice. "Heemeen sceem, dee!"

"And that must have been it," muttered Grimes.

"It was," said Sonya flatly, and the almost inaudible whirring of what remained on the spool bore her out.

"That mistake she made," said Grimes softly, "is the clue. For Eeveengeer , read Avenger . For every E sound substitute the vowel that makes sense. But insofar as the written language is concerned, that fat I is really an E …"

"That seems to be the way of it," agreed Sonya.

" Die, " repeated the Commodore slowly. " Human scum, die! " He said, "Whoever those people are, they wouldn’t be at all nice to know."

"That’s what I’m afraid of," Sonya told him. "That we might get to know them. Whoever they are—and wherever, and whenever…"

The derelict hung in orbit about Lorn, and the team of scientists and technicials continued the investigations initiated by Rim Mamelute’s people during the long haul to the tug’s home planet. Grimes, Sonya and the others had been baffled by what they had found—and now, with reluctance, the experts were admitting their own bafflement.

This ship, named Destroyer by her builders, and renamed Freedom by those who had not lived long to enjoy it, seemed to have just completed a major refit and to have been in readiness for her formal recommissioning. Although her magazines and some of her storerooms were stocked, although her hydroponics tanks and tissue culture vats had been operational at the time of her final action, her accommodation and working spaces were clean of the accumulation of odds and ends that, over the years, adds appreciably to the mass of any vessel. There were no files of official correspondence, although there was not a shortage of empty filing cabinets. There were no revealing personal possessions such as letters, photographs and solidographs, books, recordings, magazines and pin-up girl calendars. (The hapless humans who had been killed by the blast seemed to have brought aboard only the rags that they were wearing.) There were no log books in either control or engine rooms.

The cabins were furnished, however, and in all of them were the strange chairs with the slotted backs and seats, the furniture that was evidence of the existence of a race—an unknown race, insisted the xenologists—of tailed beings, approximating the human norm in stature. Every door tally was in place, and each one made it clear that the creatures who had manned the ship, before her seizure, used the English language, but a version of it peculiarly their own: KIPTIN… CHIIF INGINIIR… RIICTIIN DRIVI RIIM… HIDRIPINICS RIM…

Even so she was, apart from the furniture and the distortion of printed English and—as the engineers pointed out—the prevalence of left-handed threads, a very ordinary ship, albeit somewhat old fashioned. There was, for example, no Carlotti navigational and communications equipment. And the signal log was a model the use of which had been discontinued by the Survey Service for all of half a standard century. And she lacked yet another device, a device of fairly recent origin, the Mass Proximity Indicator.

She was, from the engineering viewpoint, a very ordinary ship; it was the biologists who discovered the shocking abnormality.

They did not discover it at once. They concentrated, at first, upon the cadavers of the unfortunate humans. These were, it was soon announced, indubitably human. They had been born upon and had lived their lives upon an Earth-type planet, but their lives had not been pleasant ones. Their physiques exhibited all the signs of undernourishment, of privation, and they almost all bore scars that told an ugly story of habitual maltreatment. But they were men, and they were women, and had they lived and had they enjoyed for a year or so normal living conditions they would have been indistinguishable from the citizens of any man-colonized world.