The E C Tubb Boxset by E C Tubb

Author:E C Tubb [Tubb, E C]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Venture Press
Published: 2016-12-29T07:00:00+00:00

THE SHRINE

The ship came from darkness, drifting down like a snowflake, all cones„ and planes and spires of polished metal, spotted and mottled with patches of golden light. It feathered soundlessly and gently toward the tiny world and settled on a rolling green lawn, seeming to sigh as it settled, as the big engines which defied gravity muted into silence, as the metal of the ship relaxed after the Journey.

The sigh was echoed in the control room.

“Journey’s end.” The captain wasn’t human and he spoke Universal with a liquid sibilance, but he was intelligent and had about him something of the mystic. The navigator respected his mysticism.

“Journey’s end,” he echoed. He wasn’t human either but his form was as different from the captain’s as a man’s is from a frog. He spoke with a harsh bark, and his native polysyllabic name, as translated into Universal, was Aarne. He glanced through one of the ports. “They improved the place,” he commented. “Some new trees, a wider lawn, and wasn’t that a swimming pool we saw on the way down?”

“Possibly.”

“Money’s been spent here,” said Aarne. “A lot of money. All this refashioning of a hunk of dead rock into a miniature world.” He stamped on the floor. “Gravity even, they didn’t have all this in the old days.”

“They didn’t have a lot of things.” The captain sighed again as he stared through the port. He was wondering at the power of faith. It was something, so he had once heard, which could move mountains. It had certainly, in this place, done more than that.

“Well?” said the navigator. He was of a young race and the weight of tradition rested lightly on his shoulders. “What now?”

“We wait.”

“Is that all?” It was the navigator’s first trip to this place; his knowledge was confined to an out-of-date solidograph. It was the captain’s eighth, and the magic of it grew with each visit.

“We wait until the Pilgrims have done what they came to do,” he explained. “Then we take them back to the place from which they came.”

“And find more Pilgrims?”

“If we are fortunate enough, yes.”

“I see.” Aarne was young and had the impatience of youth. He moved restlessly about the control room. “You like this,” he blurted out suddenly. “You like this traveling backward and forward with the Pilgrims, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But why? They pay, that I’ll admit, but you could earn more on any regular commercial run. What’s so special about this route?”

“I like to see miracles,” said the captain simply.

“Miracles?”

“You will see.”

*

Deep in the bowels of the ship the Pilgrims were gathered. Unlike the captain and crew of the ship they were human; in fact it was all they had in common. Caris Weston, old, dried like a withered prune, her eyes brimming with the sense of a wasted life. Jud Murdock, crippled, his hands trembling on his cane. Joe Melish, young but bitter. Cynthia Hildergard, face pale and shoulders drooping; they and fifty more, all gathered in the bowels of this strange vessel, all human, all having that and one other thing in common.

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