by Paul Preuss
“We can’t afford this standard practice anymore,” Pavlakis said. “These days we face worse than just the old competition…”
Wycherly grinned. “Besides which, you’re no longer allowed to get rid of them by something as simple as, say, slitting a few throats.”
“Yes.” Pavlakis jerked his head forward, solemnly. “Because we are regulated. So many regulations. Set fees per kilo of mass…”
“…divided by time of transport, multiplied by minimax distance between ports,” Wycherly said wearily. “Right, Nick.”
“So to attract business one must abide by the strictest adherence to launch windows.”
“I have been with the firm awhile.” Again Wycherly made that lawnmower sound in the back of his throat, struggling for breath.
“These calculations—I keep making them in my head,” Pavlakis said. He was thinking that Wycherly did not look well; the whites of his eyes were rimmed in bright red and his gingery hair was standing up in tufts, like the feathers of a wet bird.
“Sorry for you, old man,” Wycherly said wryly.
“We are so close to doing well. I have negotiated a long-term contract with the Ishtar Mining Corporation. The first shipment is six mining robots, nearly forty tonnes. That will pay for the trip, even give us a profit. But if we miss the launch window…”
“You lose the contract,” Wycherly said, keeping it matter of fact.
Pavlakis shrugged. “Worse, we pay a penalty. Assuming we have not declared bankruptcy first.”
“What else have you got for cargo?”
“Silly things. A pornography chip. A box of cigars. Yesterday we got a provisory reservation for a damned book.”
“One book?” Pavlakis jerked his head again, yes, and Wycherly’s eyebrow shot up. “Why ‘damned’?”
“The entire package weighs four kilos, Larry.” Pavlakis laughed, snorting like a bull. “Its freight will not pay your wages to the moon. But it is to be accompanied by a certificate of insurance in the amount of two million pounds! I would rather have the insurance.”
“Maybe you could load it and then arrange a little accident.” Wycherly started to laugh, but was taken by a spasm of coughing. Pavlakis looked away, pretending to be interested in the horse prints on the cream walls of the sitting room, the bookcases of unread leatherbound classics.
At last Wycherly recovered. “Well, of course you must know what book that is.”
“Should I know?”
“Really, Nick, it was all the news yesterday. That book’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Must be. Lawrence of Arabia and all that.” Wycherly’s wasted face twisted in a grin. “Another of the old empire’s treasures carried off to the colonies. And this time the colony’s another planet.”
“Very sad.” Pavlakis’s commiseration was brief. “Larry, without the Ishtar contract…”
But Wycherly was musing, staring past Pavlakis into the shadows of the hall. “That’s a rather odd coincidence, isn’t it?”
“What’s odd?”
“Or maybe not, really. Port Hesperus, of course.”
“I’m sorry, I fail to…”
Wycherly focused on him. “Sorry, Nick. Mrs. Sylvester, she’s the chief exec at Ishtar Mining, isn’t that right?”
His head bobbed forward. “Oh, yes.”
“She was the other bidder for The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, you see. Went to over a million pounds and lost out.”
“Ah.” Pavlakis’s eyelids drooped at the thought of that much personal wealth. “How sad for her.”
“Port Hesperus is quite the center of wealth these days.”
“Well … you see why we must retain the Ishtar contract. No room for Dimitrios and his … ‘standard practices.’” Pavlakis struggled to get the conversation back on track. “Larry, I am not certain that my own father fully understands these matters—”
“But you’ve had no trouble making it all clear to Dimitrios.” Wycherly studied Pavlakis and saw what he expected. “And he is not at all happy with you.”
“I was foolish.” Pavlakis fished for his worry beads.
“Could be so. He’ll know this is his last chance to steal. And still plenty of opportunities for the old crook to buy cheap and charge dear on the specs.”
“I found no sign of cheating on the specifications when I inspected the work two days ago…”
“I won’t be wanting to captain any substandard ship, Nick,” Wycherly said sharply. “Whatever else has been going on between Dimitrios and your dad—and I suspect plenty—your dad never asked me to risk my neck in a craft that was unspaceworthy.”
“I would not ask you that either, my friend…” Pavlakis was startled by Mrs. Wycherly, silently materializing at his elbow with a saucer. On it was balanced a cup filled with something brown. He looked up at her and smiled uncertainly. “You are very gracious, dear lady.” He took it and sipped the liquid cautiously; normally he took Turkish coffee with double sugar, but this was coffee in the American style, plain and bitter. He smiled, hiding his chagrin. “Mmm.”
His polite charade was wasted on Mrs. Wycherly, who was looking at her husband. “Please don’t let yourself become exhausted, Larry.” Wycherly shook his head impatiently.
When Pavlakis looked up from his cup, he discovered that she had gone. He set the coffee carefully aside. “What I had hoped was that you could help insure that Star Queen would not fail recertification by the board, Larry.”
“How would I do that?” Wycherly muttered.
“I would be happy to put you on flight pay immediately, with bonuses, if you would consent to go up to Falaron and live there for the next month—as soon as you feel fit, of course—to act as my personal agent. To inspect the work daily, until the ship is ready.”
Wycherly’s dull eyes brightened. He hummed and sputtered a moment. “You’re a clever fellow, Nick. Hiring a man to see to his own safety…” His gravelly voice broke into grinding coughs, and Pavlakis was aware that Mrs. Wycherly was nervously regaining solidity in the shadows. Wycherly’s spasms subsided, and he glared at his wife with eyes full of pain. “An offer I can hardly refuse”—his eyes fell back to Pavlakis—“unless I’m unable.”
“You’ll do it?”
“I’ll do it if I can.”
Pavlakis stood up with unseemly haste, his dark bulk looming in the nebulous room. “Thank you, Larry. I’ll let you be by yourself, now. I hope your recovery is swift.”
As he hurried to the waiting autocab his amber beads were swirling and clicking. He muttered a prayer to Saint George for Wycherly’s health, while voices were raised in anger in the house behind him.
Fifteen minutes on the swift magneplane brought Pavlakis back to the Heathrow Shuttleport and the local freight office of Pavlakis Lines. It was a cramped shed tacked onto the end of a spaceplane hangar, an enormous steel barn full of discarded, egglike fuel tanks and scavenged sections of booster fuselages. A smell of odorized methane and Gunk had worked its way into the paneling. When neither of the Pavlakises, Senior or Junior, was in England, the place was deserted except for the underemployed mechanics who hung around trying to make time with the secretary-receptionist, one of Nikos’s cousins’ sisters-in-law. Her name was Sofia, she was a wiry-yellow blond from the Peloponnese, heavier than her years, and she brooded. When Pavlakis walked into the office she had an open carton of yogurt on her desk, which she appeared to be ignoring in favor of the noonday news on her desktop videoplate.
“For those of you who may have needed an excuse, here’s a good reason to plan a trip to Port Hesperus,” the announcer was simpering. “Early this morning it was revealed that the buyer of that first-edition Seven Pillars of Wisdom…”
Sofia lifted smoldering eyes to Pavlakis when he came in, but no other part of her body moved. “A woman has been calling you.”
“What woman?”
“I could not say what woman. She says you were to write her a letter. Or send her a wire. I forget.” The smoldering eyes strayed back to th
e flatscreen.
“Mrs. Sylvester?”
Sofia’s eyes stayed fixed on the screen, but her palms opened: maybe.
Cursing the very concept of cousins and in-laws, Pavlakis went past a paste-board divider into the inner sanctum. The desk that everybody used whenever they felt like it was piled high with greasy flimsies. A pink slip sat on top, scratched out in Sofia’s degraded demotic, conveying the gist of Sondra Sylvester’s last communication: “Imperative you reaffirm contract in writing this date. If Pavlakis Lines cannot guarantee launch window, Ishtar Mining Corporation must immediately terminate proposed contract.”
Proposed contract…?
The worry beads clicked. “Sofia,” Pavlakis shouted. “Reach Mrs. Sylvester immediately.”
“Where to reach the lady?” came the delayed reply.
“At the Battenberg.” Idiot. By what folly did her father name her Sofia, Wisdom? Pavlakis scuffled through the flimsies, searching for anything new and hopeful. His hand fell on yesterday’s query from Sotheby’s. “Can you guarantee shipment of one book, four kilograms gross mass in case, to arrive Port Hesperus…?”
“I’ve reached the woman,” Sofia announced.
“Mr. Pavlakis? Are you there?”
Pavlakis snatched at the phonelink. “Yes, dear lady, I hope you will accept my personal apologies. Many unexpected matters…”
Sylvester’s image coalesced on the little videoplate. “I don’t need an apology. I need a confirmation. My business in England was to have been finished yesterday. Before I can leave London I must be persuaded that my equipment will arrive at Venus on time.”
“Just at this very moment I have been sitting down to write a letter.” Pavlakis resisted the urge to twist his beads in view of the videoplate.
“I’m not talking about a recording or a piece of paper, Mr. Pavlakis,” said the cool, beautiful face on the screen. How was her face so alluring? Something disarranged about the hair, the heightened color around the cheeks, the lips—Pavlakis forced himself to concentrate on her words. “Frankly, your behavior has not been reassuring. I sense that I should look for another carrier.”
Her words galvanized him. “You may have faith, dear lady! Indeed, you must. Even the Hesperian Museum has honored us to carry its recent and most valuable acquisition…” He hesitated, confused. Why had he said such a thing? To be … to be friendly, of course, to reassure her. “In which you yourself have had much interest, if I am correct?”
Great Christ, the woman had turned to metal. Her eyes flashed like spinning drillpoints, her mouth was steel shutters, slammed shut. Pavlakis turned away, desperately swiped away the sweat that was pouring from his hairline. “Mrs. Sylvester, please, you must forgive me, I have been … under much strain lately.”
“Don’t trouble yourself so much, Mr. Pavlakis.” To his surprise, her tone was as smooth and warm as her words … warmer, even. He half turned, looked at the screen. She was smiling! “Write me that letter you promised. And I will talk to you again when I return to London.”
“You will trust in Pavlakis Lines? Oh, we will not fail you, dear lady!”
“Let us trust in one another.”
Sylvester cut the phonelink and leaned back in the bed. Nancybeth was sprawled face down on top of the sheets, eyeing her from the slit of a heavy-lidded eye. “Will you be awfully unhappy if we delay the island for a day or two, sweet?” Sylvester whispered.
“Oh, God, Syl.” Nancybeth rolled onto her back. “You mean I’m stuck in this soot pile for two more days?”
“I have unexpected work to do. If you want to go ahead without me…”
Nancybeth writhed in indecision, her round knees falling open. “I suppose I can find something…”
Suddenly Sylvester felt a touch of nausea. “Never mind. Once you’re settled I may have to come back for a day or two.”
Nancybeth smiled. “Just get me to the beach.”
Sylvester picked up the phonelink and tapped out a code. Hermione Scrutton’s ruddy face came on the screen with surprising quickness. “You, Syl?”
“Hermione, I find that my vacation plans have changed. I require your advice. And possibly your assistance.”
“Mm, ah,” the bookseller replied, her eyes sparkling. “And what will that be worth to you?”
“More than lunch, I assure you.”
8
Captain Lawrence Wycherly made a remarkably rapid recovery from his chest ailment and took up residence at the Falaron Shipyards, where he ably represented the Pavlakis Lines as clerk of the works. The gaunt, determined Englishman bore down hard on the frustrated Peloponnesian, inspecting the ship daily without warning and hectoring the workers, and despite Dimitrios’s surliness and frequent tantrums the job was finished on time. It was with a certain grim satisfaction that Nikos Pavlakis watched spacesuited workers electrobonding the name Star Queen across the equator of the crew module. He praised Wycherly lavishly and added a bonus to his already handsome pay before leaving to make the final arrangements at Pavlakis Lines headquarters in Athens.
Star Queen, though of a standard freighter design, was a spacecraft quite unlike anything that had been imagined at the dawn of modern rocketry—which is to say it looked nothing like an artillery shell with fins or the hood ornament of a gasoline-burning automobile. The basic configuration was two clusters of spheres and cylinders separated from each other by a cylindrical strut a hundred meters long. The whole thing somewhat resembled a Tinkertoy model of a simple molecule.
The forward cluster included the crew module, a sphere over five meters in diameter. A hemispherical cage of superconducting wires looped over the crew module, partially shielding the crew against cosmic rays and other charged particles in the interplanetary medium—which included the exhaust of other atomic ships. Snugged against the crew module’s base were the four cylindrical holds, each seven meters across and twenty meters long, grouped around the central strut. Like the sea-land cargo containers of the previous century, the holds were detachable and could be parked in orbit or picked up as needed; each was attached to Star Queen’s central shaft by its own airlock and was also accessible through outside pressure hatches. Each hold was divided into compartments which could be pressurized or left in vacuum, depending on the nature of the cargo.
At the other end of the ship’s central strut were bulbous tanks of liquid hydrogen, surrounding the bulky cylinder of the atomic motor’s reactor core. Despite massive radiation shielding, the aft of the ship was not a place for casual visits by living creatures—robot systems did what work needed to be done there.
For all its ad hoc practicality, Star Queen had an air of elegance, the elegance of form following function. Apart from the occasional horn of a maneuvering rocket or the spike or dish of a communications antenna, the shapes from which she had been assembled shared a geometric purity, and all alike shone dazzling white under their fresh coats of electrobonded paint.
For three days, Board of Space Control inspectors went over the refurbished ship, at last pronouncing it fully spaceworthy. Star Queen was duly recertified. Her launch date was confirmed. Heavy-lift shuttles brought up cargo from Earth; other, smaller parcels were delivered by bonded courier.
Captain Lawrence Wycherly, however, did not pass the Board’s inspection. With one week to go before launch, flight surgeons discovered what Wycherly had disguised until now with illegal neural-enhancement preparations he had obtained from sources in Chile: he was dying from an incurable degeneration of the cerebellum. The viral infections and other minor illnesses that had plagued him were symptoms of a general failure of homeostasis. Never mind that the drugs might have accelerated his disease; Wycherly figured he was a dead man, and he was desperate for the money this last assignment was to have brought, for without it—the tale of his feckless investments and frantic spiral into debt was a cautionary tale of the age—his soon-to-be widow would lose their home, would lose everything.
The Board of Space Control notified the Pavlaki
s Lines home office in Athens that Star Queen was short a captain and that her launch permit had been withdrawn pending a qualified replacement. At the same time the Board routinely notified the ship’s insurors and every firm and individual who had placed cargo on the ship.
Delayed by “technical difficulties” on his way from Athens to Heathrow (stewards were staging a slow-down in protest against the government-owned airline), Nikos Pavlakis did not learn the devastating news until he stepped off the supersonic ramjet jitney at Heathrow. Miss Wisdom was glowering at him from behind the passport control screens, her paint-blackened eyes the very eyes of Nemesis beneath her helmet of wiry yellow hair. “This from your father,” she spat at him, when he came within reach, thrusting into his hands the flimsy from Athens.
Temporarily, but only temporarily, it appeared that Saint George had let Nikos Pavlakis down. Pavlakis spent the next twenty-four hours on the radio and phonelinks, sustained by a kilo or so of sugar dissolved in several liters of boiled Turkish coffee, and at the end of that time a miracle occurred.
Neither God nor Saint George had provided a new pilot. No such luck, for Pavlakis could find no qualified pilots who would be free of their commitments or current assignments in time for Star Queen’s Venus window. And the miracle was not wholly unqualified, for no saint had prevented the prompt defection of a few of the shippers on the manifest—those for whom the arrival of their cargo at Port Hesperus was not time-critical, or whose cargo could easily be sold elsewhere. Bilbao Atmospherics was even now off-loading its tonne of liquid nitrogen from Hold B, and a valuable shipment of pine seedlings, the bulk of the cargo that was to have travelled in Hold A, had already been reclaimed by Silvawerke of Stuttgart.
Pavlakis’s miracle was the intervention of Sondra Sylvester.