The Road to the Rim - A. Bertram Chandler [32]
WOLVERTON was in the Mannschenn Drive room, staring moodily at the gleaming complexity of precessing rotors. Grimes hastily averted his eyes from the machine. It frightened him, and he didn't mind admitting it. And there was something about the engineer that frightened him, too. The tall, cadaverous man, with the thin strands of black hair drawn over his gleaming skull, looked more like a seer than a ship's officer, looked like a fortune-teller peering into the depths of an uncannily mobile crystal ball. He was mumbling, his voice a low, guttural muttering against the thin, high keening of his tumbling gyroscopes. The Ensign at last was able to make out the words.
"Divergent tracks . . . . To be, or not to be, that is the question—"
Grimes thought, This ship should be renamed the State of Denmark. There's something rotten here . . . . He said sharply, "Mr. Wolverton!"
Slowly the Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer turned his head, stared at Grimes unseeingly at first. His eyes came into focus. He whispered, "It's you."
"Who else, Chief? Captain's compliments, and he'd like to borrow your temporal precession field initiator."
"He would, would he? And why?"
"An—an experiment." said Grimes, with partial truth. The fewer people who knew the whole truth the better.
"An experiment?"
"Yes. If you wouldn't mind letting me have it now, Chief . . . ."
"But it's engine room stores. It's the Commission's stores. It's a very delicate instrument. It is against the Commission's regulations to issue it to unqualified personnel."
"But Mr. Baxter is helping with the . . . experiment."
"Mr. Baxter! That letter-off of cheap fireworks. That . . . Rim Runner! No. No. Mr. Baxter is not qualified personnel."
"Then perhaps you could lend us one of your juniors."
"No. No, I would not trust them. Why do you think that I am here, Mr. Grimes? Why do you think that I have been tied to my gyroscopes? Literally tied, almost. If I had not been here, keeping my own watch, when the pirates struck, this ship would have been utterly destroyed. I know the Drive, Mr. Grimes." He seized the Ensign's arm, turned him so that he was facing the gleaming, spinning rotors, endlessly precessing, endlessly tumbling down the dark dimensions, shimmering on the very verge of invisibility. Grimes wanted to close his eyes, but could not. "I know the Drive, Mr. Grimes. It talks to me. It shows me things. It warned me, that time, that Death was waiting for this ship and all in her. And now it warns me again. But there is a . . . a divergence . . . ."
"Mr. Wolverton, please! There is not much time."
"But what is Time, Mr. Grimes? What is Time? What do you know of the forking World Lines, the Worlds of If? I've lived with this machine, Mr. Grimes. It's part of me—or am I part of it? Let me show you . . . ." His grip on the Ensign's arm was painful. "Let me show you. Look. Look into the machine. What do you see?"
Grimes saw only shadowy, shimmering wheels and a formless darkness.
"I see you, Mr. Grimes," almost sang the engineer. "I see you—but not as you will be. But as you might be. I see you on the bridge of your flagship, your uniform gold-encrusted and medal-bedecked, with commodores and captains saluting you and calling you 'sir' . . . but I see you, too, in the control room of a shabby little ship, a single ship, in shabby clothes, and the badge on your cap is one that I have never seen, is one that does not yet exist . . . ."
"Mr. Wolverton! That initiator. Please!"
"But there is no hurry, Mr. Grimes. There is no hurry. There is time enough for everything—for everything that is, that has been, that will be and that might be. There is time to decide, Mr. Grimes. There is time to decide whether or not we make our second rendezvous with Death. The initiator is part of it all, Mr. Grimes, is it not? The initiator is the signpost that stands at the forking of the track. You weren't here, Mr. Grimes, when the pirates struck. You did not hear the screams, you did not smell the stench of burning flesh. You're young and foolhardy; all that you want is the chance