The Broken Cycle - A. Bertram Chandler [51]
Hastily he unsnapped the catches of the safety belt that held him down, automatically felt under the bunk for his magnetic-soled sandals. They were there, exactly in the position where he always left them. He slipped them on, scrambled off the couch. That glaring light, he saw with some relief, was coming from forward, through the control cabin viewports. The smell of burning was coming from aft, from the little engineroom. He made his way toward it with more speed than caution, coughing and sneezing.
There was no immediate danger, however. There was very little in the boat that would burn. But the mini-Mannschenn Drive unit was a complete write-off, its complexity of precessing rotors fused into a shapeless lump of metal that still emitted a dull, red glow, the heat of which was uncomfortable on his bare skin. There was absolutely nothing that Grimes could do about it.
But where was that glaring light coming from? He turned, and with half shut eyes went forward, to the control cabin, fumbled with the controls that adjusted the polarization of the viewports. As soon as he had reduced the illumination to a tolerable intensity he was able to look out. He liked what he saw.
Zephalon had been generous, it seemed. Not only had Grimes and Una been returned to their boat, but the small craft had been put in orbit about a planet, about a world circling a G type star, a sun that looked very much as the sun looks from a ship or space station orbiting Earth.
But this planet, obviously, was not Earth. There were few clouds in its atmosphere, and the outlines of its land masses were unfamiliar, and the oceans were far too small. And was it inhabited? From this altitude Grimes could not tell; certainly there were not cities, no artifacts big enough to be seen from space.
He became aware that Una had joined him at the viewports. She asked predictably, "Where are we?"
"That," he told her, "is the sixty-four-thousand-credit question."
"You don't know?"
"No."
"But what happened?"
"What happened, I most sincerely hope, is that friend Zephalon gave us the bum's rush, sent us back to where we belong. He must have buggered our mini-Mannschenn in the process, but that's only a minor detail. Anyhow, I'll soon be able to find out if we are back in our universe."
He remained in the control cabin long enough to make a series of observations, both visually and by radar. When he was satisfied that the boat's orbit was not decaying—or was not decaying so fast as to present immediate cause for alarm—he went aft, giving the still hot wreckage of the interstellar drive unit a wide berth. The Carlotti transceiver looked to be all right. He switched it on. From the speaker blasted a deafening beep, beep, beep! and the antenna commenced its wobbly rotation. He turned down the volume, right down. He listened carefully. The signal was in Morse Code, the letters UBZKPT, repeated over and over.
UB . . . Unwatched Beacon.
ZKPT . . . The remainder of the call sign.
"Una," he said, as he tried to get a bearing of the planet-based transmitter, "bring me the Catalogue . . ."
"The Catalogue?"
"The Catalogue of Carlotti Beacons. It's in the book locker."
"But Panzen took all the books . . ."
"He may have put them back."
"He didn't!" she called, after an interval.
So there was no Catalogue. Such a volume, thought Grimes with wry humor, with its page after page of letters and numerals, call signs, frequencies and coordinates would no doubt make highly entertaining light reading for a robot . . . And perhaps Panzen (or Zephalon) was sentimental, wanted something to remember them by.
"So what do we do?" Una asked.
"We land. We've no place else to go. The mini-Mannschenn's had it."
"Can't you fix it? You fixed it before."
"Have you looked at it? As an interstellar drive unit it's a worthless hunk of scrap metal. Oh, well, it could be worse. All these unmanned beacon stations have living quarters still, with functioning life-support systems, leftovers from the days when all the stations were manned. They're used by the repair and maintenance crews