Best SF 1967 by Omnibus

Author:Omnibus [Onbekend]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-16T22:00:00+00:00

by A. Bertram Chandler

A. Bertram Chandler is a Master Mariner, a ship's captain and a very good writer indeed. If there is a nautical feel to his stories, and perhaps a tinge of salt spray in his spaceship's atmosphere, this is to be expected and enjoyed. Since his first story appeared in Astounding in 1944, readers have enjoyed the color and adventure of his sagas of the spaceways. But too little attention has been paid to Chandler, the man with a sense of humor. This lapse can be remedied right now…

When the gaussjammer Lode Trader was wrecked on the planet later much later irreverently named Nirvana by Commodore Person of the Survey Service, there was only one survivor. Only one human survivor, that is.

Lode Trader one of the Interstellar Transport Com-mission's tramps carried only a small crew, consisting of master, three mates, three engineers and a catering officer. She had accommodation for twelve passengers which, sometimes, was fully booked, but which, this voy-age, wasn't. The sole occupant of the compartment packed with cramped dogboxes was a priest, a missionary, bound from Terra to the newly established colony on Hamal V. When the magnetic storm hit Lode Trader, throwing her light-years off trajectory, the captain, a confirmed agnos- tic, sneeringly suggested that his passenger get down on his knees and start praying. The priest, somewhat acidly, retorted that in his religion the practice of pleading for di-vine intervention in times of stress was somewhat frowned upon and made a counter-suggestion, this being that the master and his officers should carry out their duties as ably as possible, as by so doing it was likely that they would acquire merit.

Spaceman do not need to be told to do their jobs as well as possible a spaceman who needed to be told would not last very long; neither, in many cases, would his ship and so relations became somewhat strained. The priest Lee Chang was his name retired to his cramped quarters to spend the remainder of the voyage in meditation; the crew started the emergency diesel generators the pile having been drained of power by the storm restarted the Ehrenhaft generators, and set the ship to falling along a line of magnetic force that would lead them to a likely looking sun which might, just possibly, run to one Earth-type planet. An alternative would have been to try to navigate back to the colonized sector of the Galaxy, but the ship was hopelessly lost, the supply of diesel fuel was limited and the catering officer (biochemist, acting, unpaid) doubted her own ability to distil fresh supplies of fuel from the available hydrocarbons.

Colonies had been founded, as all Lode Trader's people were aware, by castaway spacemen, spacewomen and passengers. But all such Lost Colonies so far discovered by the Survey Service had been established by the crews and passengers of relatively large vessels. Lode Trader had only one woman aboard the catering officer. She was not yet past childbearing age, but she had never shown any inclination toward either marriage or motherhood.

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