Less than a minute later I was pulling Marshall from the water and extricating him from his harness, aided by men from a milling cluster of small boats. I pulled in against the seawall and we carried Charles to the shore, laying him on the grass while someone ran to call the ambulopter.
Almost instantly, it seemed, the Foes of Bondage were standing over us in force, and I shuddered involuntarily because I’ll swear there was something akin to predatory satisfaction in their eyes as they looked at the broken figure of Charles, his soaked life jacket oozing crimson.
Two women were to the fore, the president of the Foes, and Carioca Jones. Carioca was the first to speak; she indicated Marshall, who was bending over Charles and lifting a bottle to his lips.
“That’s the man I told you about, Evadne,” the ex-3-V star said in a voice sufficiently loud for all of us to hear. “He’s the prankster who tried to get us all out of the way so that we couldn’t spoil his fun. Well, you big brave man,” she addressed Doug, “how do you feel now? Your man saved you—and we all know why. And now look at him, poor thing.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the Foes and I believe someone tried to start up a chant, but some remnants of decency prevailed. A Newspocket reporter closed in with his hand minivid. Not to be outdone by Carioca, the elderly Evadne Prendergast said her piece.
“It is a terrible comment on our society when a man will, quite deliberately, risk his life to save another.”
Fortunately there was a diversion at this juncture. A man stepped forward and touched Doug on the shoulder. He was carrying the harness which had been cut away from the glider; he indicated the snap release.
“Look. Like you said, Doug. Someone’s been fooling with this. The release pin’s been roughed up. You can see file marks.”
The crowd had gathered itself without conscious volition into two distinct factions around the bleeding man on the seawall. To the landward side were the Foes of Bondage, an unyielding bloc of womanhood, upright and militant. Along the edge of the embankment, backs to the sea, were the pilots, their crews, and supporters, who up to now had been quietly on the defensive.
The mechanic’s words changed this. Doug stood, flushing, and an angry muttering spread through the ranks of the pilots. The Foes backed off guiltily.
“I can assure you all—” began the president, hands fluttering, wristlet yellowing.
Carioca Jones took one glance at her fading leader and knew her opportunity had come. She stepped forward boldly.
“It’s quite obviously a frame-up. And clever, too. Done by one of your own pilots with the object of discrediting the Foes and, incidentally, getting a competitor out of the way. Your treasurer himself told me he heard someone prowling about the slipway on Thursday night.” Her black eyes blazed at the elderly man, forcing a nervous nodding agreement. “So there you are. There are no grounds whatsoever for even considering the Foes as suspect. Only club members are familiar with the slipway and the gear you use. And only a slave-owner would think this way, knowing that a bonded man would risk injury himself rather than allow harm to come to his master.”
She bent over Charles. “You poor man,” she said. “And you only had a year or so to go.” Her voice hardened. “Couldn’t you have taken the chance that the bastard would kill himself? You’d have been free, then. A freeman!”
She moved back a little, a theatrical gesture to direct attention to Charles and ensure that we all heard his reply—so confident was Carioca Jones. Faintly, but growing louder, we could hear the hissing whine of the ambulopter. The Foes of Bondage wore righteous expressions as they contemplated their prize specimen, their raison d’être, while he lay bleeding on the seawall.
Charles managed a smile.
“I’ve been a freeman since Thursday, Miss Jones.”
11
Early the following morning I met Doug Marshall and Charles at the Skipper’s Marina and we drank coffee in the cockpit of his boat. Doug needed to make a trip to the mainland to pick up a new whip and bracket, and since this coincided with the arrival of my consignment of breeding slithes at Sentry Down, he had suggested that we all go in his hydrofoil. Charles was coming along for the ride; he seemed cheerful enough although his ribs were heavily bandaged and he was unable to move with any degree of comfort.
“A couple of broken ribs, that’s all,” he explained. “But it seems they take longer to mend than a bone graft. They shot me full of Rediseel; I’ll be fine in a couple of days, so they said.”
“He was lucky,” commented Doug. “We thought at first he’d smashed up at least one kidney. The doctor was talking about a transplant.”
“Uh … what would you have done about that, Charles?” I asked cautiously.
The big man laughed, then winced at the sudden pain. “There you go again, Joe. It didn’t happen, did it? So the question doesn’t arise. Anyway, a man can live perfectly well with one kidney.”
“It was the principle of Compulsory Donation that I was getting at. After all, now that you’re a freeman you’re entitled to the use of the Organ Pool.”
Marshall poured himself another coffee. “I’ll never forget Carioca Jones’s face when Charles told her he was a freeman. She knew his sentence but she’d forgotten the remission for bondage.”
“In her eagerness for the witch hunt,” I added. “Uh, do you mind if we get moving now, Doug? My shipment’s due in around noon.”
“Don’t panic. We’ll leave as soon as Rennie gets here. He’s off duty today and I asked him if he’d like to join us.”
“Oh. Fine.” I hadn’t seen much of Rennie since the misunderstanding over Marigold, and I was a little wary of meeting him; but it had to be faced. On the Peninsula, it’s difficult to avoid meeting people for long.
In due course the police chief came striding across the wharf and climbed aboard. I cast off, Marshall gunned the turbines, and the boat rose onto its hydrofoils, skimming over the quiet water. Rennie poured himself a coffee and we relaxed in the cockpit in the early sunshine, watching the coastline slide past our portside.
We swept past Black Point and saw the Ancia Telji lying more easily now against the foot of the cliff; she was probably half-full of water. Hawsers were strung fore and aft, securing her to the shore and preventing her from rolling onto her side and sliding into deeper water. Watching the peaceful scene on the quiet bay with its bright mirror surface, it was difficult to picture the horror of a few days ago, when that steel hull had pounded men and women to pulp.
“In time she’ll become a local landmark,” said Rennie. “She’ll be almost as well known as the Princess Louise. I can’t imagine the owners moving her. She’s not worth the cost of salvage.”
“Have you located the owners yet?” asked Charles.
“Yes. We were able to get a whole lot of information out of the crew, before they were released. It seems the owners were all tied up with a tourist agency down south—at least, they called it a tourist agency, but that was just a front. In fact, it was an unofficial immigration office. Christ knows how many people they’ve smuggled into this country.”
The wreck receded astern as Doug veered east, into the open sea. “Well, it’s all over now.”
“It’s not so simple as that. Somebody had to handle the organization from this end.” Rennie stared at each of us in turn, piercingly.
“Well, for Christ’s sake, Warren,” expostulated Doug good-naturedly. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“An organization with its own premises and boats would be the ideal front for such an operation. Just for a moment, let’s consider the Peninsula Sling-gliding Club.”
“All of us?” asked Charles incredulously.
“A small group within us. A Committee member or two, a few members with boats, that’s all you need. They have access to the yard and premises at all times—and a certain amount of night work often goes on, under the guise of rush repairs. Just think about it.”
“Hell, Warren, you might as well suspect
the Foes of Bondage.”
“I do. I do indeed. The Foes frequently travel between here and the mainland. Only last week they chartered an antigrav to take them to Lake William. I understand there was a hoax involved, but how do I know? You can’t set up passport checks between the island and the mainland; the public would never stand for it.”
We thought about this as we raced through the small islands which dot the Strait, and it occurred to me then that if Rennie hadn’t been with us, we could have kept some rendezvous, taken a dozen illegal passengers on board, and dropped them off at Sentry Down or some other convenient spot. Lambert had said there were around sixty passengers on the Ancia Telji; they wouldn’t have been difficult to dispose of.
Soon we neared the mainland; the pleasure craft became more numerous as the low coastline came into view. Sentry Down was built on the site of an old city which had been destroyed at the time of the Western Seaboard Slide; the landing area which is now at sea level was once three hundred feet higher. The black dots of antigrav shuttles swarmed about the sky like silent flies.
I left the others at the boatyard, arranging to meet them there around midafternoon, and caught the monorail for the short run to Sentry Down Spaceport. As the car skirted the perimeter of the field I saw the remains of the latest accident—a shuttle lying like a crushed beetle outside the maintenance depot. The crash had occurred last week; the antigrav units had inexplicably failed shortly after liftoff with loss of some seventy lives and God knows how many serious injuries. I had watched developments on Newspocket and had felt no small fury when the District Medical Officer had spoken of the magnificent response of the Ambulatory Organ Pool, without whose donations many innocent people would have been maimed for life.
My mood was therefore somewhat gloomy as I sat in the observation lounge drinking and watching the shuttles while I waited for my consignment. The slithes had come via Hetherington Crusader and the shuttle from the orbiting starship was already sitting on the concrete outside; the delay, as ever, was due to the interminable quarantine department.
To my mind the antigrav shuttles rising and falling gently outside were soulless black boxes compared with the magnificence of the liquid fuel rockets of my youth. I lived most of my childhood near the huge spaceport at Pacific Northwest—now abandoned and desolate—where my father worked as Maintenance Supervisor. In those far-off days I spent most of my leisure hours watching the thunderous giants roaring into the sky on a crackling blaze of glory, or squatting toward me—seemingly descending right on top of me—with fingers of fire probing my very brain, leaving a touch of wonder that I have never forgotten.
Then some unromantic scientist fiddled with force-fields, and came up with antigravity. …
In due course I heard myself being paged, made my way to the quarantine desk, and collected the pair of small brown reptiles. I caught the monorail and within half an hour was back on Marshall’s boat again, eating smoked salmon and drinking scotch. The replacement bracket had already been installed and crutches had been mounted on the bow and stern to support the sixty-yard length of the new whip. Although the slender rod overhung the boat by around twenty-five yards fore and aft, there was hardly a trace of sag at the ends. This is the proof of a good whip.
We swept away from the quay and headed back toward the island, and the Peninsula which juts eastward from its southern end. It was a beautiful afternoon, we’d enjoyed a pleasant lunch and a good drink, so it was unfortunate that Doug Marshall had now to introduce his topic—thereby revealing the real reason for his inviting Warren Rennie on the boat.
“Of course, I’ve a pretty damned good idea who was responsible for the attempt on my life,” he said, steering carefully around a fishing boat and accelerating into the open sea.
“If it was an attempt,” said Rennie carefully.
“You know quite well it was, Warren. You saw the marks on the catch.”
“They could have been caused by your efforts to free yourself.”
“Crap. The catch was roughed up so it would stick instead of releasing. It was quite deliberate. Joe—tell him what you told me; you know, about the intruder on the quay that night.”
I sipped at my scotch thoughtfully; it seemed that my hazy recollections of that drunken night were forming an intrinsic part of Doug’s case, and I wasn’t happy about that. “I’m not too clear about it,” I admitted, “but it did seem to me, at the time, that there was someone prowling about the yard a couple of nights before the race.”
“By which time the Foes of Bondage had returned from Lake William,” added Doug.
“Hold it just a minute.” Rennie was looking worried. “You’re not just stating your opinion that I have a case for investigation. You’re pointing the finger. I reckon that’s a bit premature, Doug.”
Marshall flushed. “Look, Rennie. I don’t say that sort of thing lightly. If I tell you that the Foes of Bondage wrecked my gear and tried to kill me, then take it from me I’ve got good reason. I suggest that you investigate further, and bear in mind what I’ve told you.”
He drank deeply from his glass, scowling. He scanned the ocean, making a course correction, his hands white on the wheel. The experience yesterday had shaken him up more than we’d realized. Charles watched him anxiously from his prone position, then glanced at me with his eyebrows raised.
A couple of weeks passed during which we heard nothing more from Rennie, although rumor in the club had it that investigations were under way and one or two people had been discreetly questioned. I prevailed upon Lambert to allow me to see Joanne again and we had a pleasant though inconclusive ‘talk through the wire. She told me that Carioca Jones had been to see her several times—apparently the ex-3-V star had more pull than I—and that she was getting up a petition demanding her release. Behind the petition was an implied threat that the Foes could make things even hotter for the state pen by stepping up their demonstrations and publicity, if they so desired. It was now mid-June, and although Joanne was due for release in less than three months, September seemed a hell of a way off.
In fact the Foes had been quiet lately, following their public humiliation over the episode of Charles. Carioca explained this to’ me one morning when she arrived with the monstrous Wilberforce—who was wearing a muzzle, I was relieved to see.
“My dear, we’re torn by internal dissension,” she cried.
It seemed a tactless moment to ask when the Foes were going to pay me for the forty-eight slithe-skin wristlets, but I have never prided myself on diplomacy.
“I really can’t say when you’ll see your money, Joe,” she replied distantly. “The Foes are more than a little fragmented just now, and since that ridiculous trek to Lake William we are really on our beam ends, financially speaking. But all that will soon change. Evadne Prendergast has resigned over that appalling debacle concerning the man Charles Wentworth—and I should think so too. How any normal person could be guilty of such a gross error of judgment I really can’t think.”
Wilberforce lay pulsating on the grass, eyeing the nearest slithe pen with ill-concealed gluttony. The little reptiles cowered against the far side of their enclosure, yellow with terror; so I stood close to the shark’s head, trying to obscure the slithes’ view of him. “Who is to be the new president?” I asked.
“Of course that’s up to the members, by secret ballot—but I’ve made it quite clear that I am willing to be considered. I am even holding the Lake William Hotel’s exorbitant bill until the result is known; naturally, I have made it known that I am not averse to throwing my personal wealth behind our great cause. Unfortunately, that wretched policeman Rennie is poking about and making the most bizarre accusations, and it is becoming so the Foes are terrified to be seen in the company of one another. It’s only the common cause of dear Joanne that’s holding us together.”
I made sympathetic noises and Wilberforce slammed his head against my leg, forgetting he wore a muzzle. “What’s wrong with this fish?” I asked.
&n
bsp; “Joe, that’s what I came to see you about. I intend to confront Miranda Marjoribanks with him and I need moral support. Will you be a dear and come along?”
In due course we dragged Wilberforce from the hovercar at Pacific Kennels, Miss Marjoribanks strode up with an inquiring look, Carioca whipped the muzzle from the shark’s head and stood well back. “Do you call this a well-adjusted fish?” she shrilled.
Miranda Marjoribanks eyed Wilberforce cautiously. I noticed that her foot was heavily bandaged—the legacy of Wilberforce’s last visit. “Have you been giving him his pills?” she inquired.
“Well, really! It should be obvious to the meanest intelligence that I couldn’t get near him, let alone put a pill in his mouth. Why, it took three hypodarts to get the muzzle on him—and even then I barely escaped with my life!”
“Rosalie! Come over here for a minute, dear!”
“You surely don’t intend to let that poor girl near him?”
The bonded girl approached Wilberforce, who stared at her malevolently. Unafraid, she put her hand out, patted him on the head, then knelt beside him. She slipped a pill from the pocket of her coveralls and pushed it into the shark’s mouth, then held his jaws closed while he swallowed. She stood, smiled at us, and returned to her duties around the enclosure.
“You see?” said Miranda Marjoribanks in triumph. Noting that the shark’s head was drooping she stepped up to him, rolled him onto his back, and opened his jaws. “You haven’t been filing his teeth,” she accused. “Naturally you can’t get near him—I told you he was highly strung.”
“I can’t get near him to file his teeth. In any case,” Carioca admitted, somewhat abashed, “I’ve lost the denticure set. But that’s neither here nor there, Miranda, as you perfectly well know. I’ve paid you, and paid you well, for a therapy course which you assured me would cure Wilberforce’s tantrums. I demand satisfaction.”
The Girl With a Symphony in Her Fingers Page 11