Into the Alternate Universe by A Bertram Chandler

Author:A Bertram Chandler [Chandler, A Bertram]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1972-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

In a matter of seconds the probing beam of the searchlight found the target.

It was a ship, but no ship such as any of those in the control room had ever seen. There was a long hull that looked as though the conventional torpedo shape had been sliced in two longitudinally. At one end of it there was what looked like an assemblage of control surfaces. Grimes, out of his chair and monopolizing the huge mounted binoculars, studied it carefully. There was a rudder, and there were two screw propellers. It could be, he thought, a lightjammer, similar to the ones that he himself had designed, capable of being handled in a planetary atmosphere like an airship. But the rudder was too small, and those propellers were too heavy and had too coarse a pitch to be airscrews.

But there were the lofty masts, one forward and one aft, protruding from the flat deck. . . . But that would be an unusual, and not very practicable arrangement of spars to carry a lightjammer's suit of sails. . . . And between the masts there was a structure, white-painted, that looked more like a block of apartments, complete with balconies, than part of a ship. Roughly in the middle of this there was another mast. . . . No, decided Grimes, it wasn't a mast, it was too thick, too short. It, too, was white-painted, but with a black top, and carried a design in blue. Grimes studied it carefully, decided that it was supposed to be some sort of grapnel or anchor.

He relinquished the binoculars to Sonya Verrill. When she had had time to study the weird derelict he asked, "Well, Commander, what do you make of it?"

She replied doubtfully, "It could be a lightjammer, sir. But all those ports . . . It'd be hard enough to make a thing like that watertight, let alone airtight. . . ."

"H'm. But those ports seem to be on one half of the hull only, the half with all the odd superstructures. . . . Like half a ship, and half—something else . .

"After all, sir," put in Swinton, who had been studying the thing with a smaller pair of binoculars, "there's no reason why a spaceship should be symmetrical. As long as it never has to proceed through an atmosphere it can be any shape at all that's convenient."

"True, Swinton. True. But if that thing's designed for Deep Space only, why those screw propellers? Aerodynamically speaking it's a hopeless mess, and yet it's equipped for atmospheric flight. . . ."

"But is it?" queried Sonya Verrill. "Those absurdly heavy screws with their fantastically coarse pitch . . ."

"But where's the planet?" asked Swinton.

"Come to that," countered Grimes, "where's our planet?" He added, "Who knows what odd combinations of circumstances threw us here, dropped us into this crack in Time? Who knows what similar combinations have occurred in the past?" And then, in a whisper, "But we're such a long way from Earth .

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