Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Too right,” murmured Damien.

  “And I couldn’t get into any of the major shipping lines without a big drop in rank. I don’t fancy starting a-fresh as a junior officer at my age.”

  “Understandable,” murmured Damien. “And I hope that you understand that you need the Survey Service, even though you are, in the eyes of most people, a civilian, and a rich shipowner.”

  “Rich!” interjected Grimes. “Ha!”

  “Just try to remember how much of your income has been derived from lucrative business that we have put in your way. All the charters, time or voyage. Such as the one that you have now, the shipment of not very essential and certainly not urgently required stores to the sub-base on Pleth.”

  “And after Pleth? What then?”

  “Arrangements have been made. It will just so happen that there will be a cargo offering from Pleth to New Otago. Pleth exports the so-called paradise fruit, canned. Have you ever sampled that delicacy?”

  “Once,” said Grimes. “I wasn’t all that impressed. Too sweet. Not enough flavor.”

  “Apparently the New Otagoans like it. Now, listen carefully. Your trajectory will take you within spitting distance of New Salem. What do you know of Salem?”

  “I’ve never been there, sir, but I seem to remember that it’s famous for the animal furs, very expensive furs, that it exports. Quite a few of the very rich bitches on El Dorado like to tart themselves up in them. Oh, yes. And this fur export trade is the monopoly of Able Enterprises . . . .”

  “Which outfit,” said Damien, “is run by old cobber Commodore Baron Kane, of El Dorado.”

  “No cobber of mine,” growled Grimes.

  “But you know Kane. And you know that any enterprise in which he’s involved is liable to be, at the very least, unsavory. Well, APS have heard stories about this fur trade. APS have asked me to carry out an investigation. After all, I’m only a rear admiral. But I have clashed, in the past, with the El Dorado Corporation and gotten away with it . . . .”

  “With me as your cat’s paw,” said Grimes.

  “Precisely. And, admit it, it does give you some satisfaction to score off Kane. Doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It does, and we both know it.” He turned to Madame Duvalier. “Grimes and Kane are old enemies,” he explained. “Apart from anything else there was rivalry for the favors of the Baroness Michelle d’Estang, who is now Kane’s wife—hence his El Doradan citizenship.”

  Then, speaking again to Grimes, he went on, “I wanted to send a Survey Service ship to Salem on a flag-showing exercise but there just aren’t any ships available. So I have to fall back on you.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Then, “But I shan’t be bound for Salem.”

  “Officially, no. But look at it this way. You are bound from Point A to Point C, bypassing Point B. But then, in mid-voyage, something happens that obliges you to make for a port of refuge to carry out essential repairs or whatever . . . .”

  “What something?” demanded Grimes.

  “Use your imagination, young man.”

  “Mphm. . . . A leakage, into space, of my water reserves. . . . And, after all, water is required as reaction mass for my emergency rocket drive as well as for drinking, washing, etc. And so I get permission from the Salem aerospace authorities to make a landing, fill my tanks and lift off again. But I shall be on the planetary surface for a matter of hours only.”

  “Not if your inertial drive goes seriously on the blink just as you’re landing.”

  “I’m not an engineer, sir, as well you know.”

  “But you have engineers, don’t you? And among them is a Ms. Cassandra Perkins. Calamity Cassie.”

  “What do you know about her, sir?”

  “I know that Lieutenant Commander Cassandra Perkins is an extremely skillful saboteur—or should that be saboteuse?”

  “So she’s one of your mob. . . .”

  “And your mob, Captain Grimes. Federation Survey Service Reserve.”

  “All right. So I’m grounded on Salem for some indefinite period. And I suppose that I shall be required to do some sniffing around . . . .”

  “You suppose correctly.”

  “Then why can’t you do as you did before, give me one of your psionic communication officers, a trained telepath, to do the snooping? You will recall that I carried your Lieutenant Commander Mayhew, as an alleged passenger, when I was involved in the El Doradan privateering affair.”

  “At the moment, Grimes, PCOs are as scarce as hen’s teeth in the Service. The bastards have been resigning in droves, recruited by various industrial espionage outfits. You may have heard of the war—yes, you could call it that—being waged by quite a few companies throughout the Galaxy against the so-called Wizards of Electra. But you have Shirl and Darleen who, despite their official human status, possess great empathy with the lower animals.”

  “And so, with the skilled assistance of your Ms. Perkins. . . .”

  “Your Ms. Perkins, Grimes. She’s on your books.”

  “ . . . I’m to prolong my stay on Salem as long as possible, find out what I can, and then write a report for you.”

  “Yes. And, hopefully, act as a catalyst. You always do.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Grimes.

  Yvonne Duvalier broke the brief silence.

  She said, “I don’t think that you have put Captain Grimes sufficiently into the picture, Admiral. To begin with, Captain, there was what Admiral Damien refers to as a flag-showing exercise on New Salem. The destroyer Pollux. She carried, of course, a psionic communication officer. He was not a very experienced one but he suspected, strongly, that at least one of the species of fur-bearing animal on New Salem, the silkies, possessed intelligence up to human standards. They can think and feel, but their thought processes aren’t the same as ours. And they are slaughtered for their pelts. Somehow his not very detailed report fell into our hands, at APS. The admiral has long been a friend of ours and promised to do something about it. And then, as you know, there was the Tarabel fiasco and the consequent reluctance of the authorities to rush to the aid of unpleasant and vicious extra-Terrans.

  “Although the fur of the silkies is beautiful, as you probably know, they are ugly beasts. They have, in the past, attacked the coastwise villages of the human colonists of New Salem. They have mutilated rather than killed, biting the hands off men, women and children. There are some rather horrid photographs of such victims.

  “The New Salem colonists are the descendants of a religious sect that emigrated from Earth during the Second Expansion. Fundamentalists, maintaining that God gave Man dominion over all other life forms. They have their own version, their own translation of the Holy Bible, the Old Testament only. Their God is a jealous God, taking a dim view of any who do not believe as the True Believers, as they call themselves, do. But they do not mind taking the money of those who are not True Believers. They have a huge account in the Galactic Bank, more than enough to pay for the occasional shipments of manufactured goods that they receive from the industrial planets. Popular belief is that, eventually, their funds will be used for the building of a huge Ark in which they, and they alone, will escape the eventual collapse of the Universe.”

  “Where will they escape to?” asked Grimes interestedly.

  Damien laughed. “I don’t suppose they know themselves. Perhaps they just hope to drift around until the next Big Bang, and then get in on the ground floor and start the human race again the way it should be started, free of all perversions. . . .” Suddenly he looked at Grimes very keenly. “Talking of perversions, young man, I hear that you are perverting Survey Service Regulations.”

  “Me, sir?”

  “Yes. You. The regulations regarding wild robots. I hear that you have one such aboard your ship. You have neither deactivated it and returned it to its makers nor destroyed it.”

  “I suppose that Mr. Steerforth told you, sir.”

  “Never mind wh
o told me. I just know.”

  “I’d like to make it plain, sir, that my ship is my ship. I am the owner as well as the master. Until, if ever, she is officially commissioned as an auxiliary unit of the Survey Service she is a merchant ship. The regulations to which her personnel are subject are company’s regulations. In this case, my regulations.”

  “Always the spacelawyer, Grimes, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I have to be.”

  Damien grinned. “Very well, then. I’ll just hope that your Seiko, as I understand that you call the thing, will be just another catalyst thrown into the New Salem crucible. Two wild girls, one wild robot and, the wildest factor of all, yourself . . . .”

  “I almost wish that I were going along on the voyage,” said Madame Duvalier.

  “Knowing Grimes as I do,” said the admiral, “I prefer to wait for the reports that I shall be getting eventually. Reports which I shall not pass on to higher authorities until they have been most thoroughly edited.”

  Chapter 10

  Sister Sue lifted from Port Woomera, driving up into the cloudless, blue, late afternoon sky. As members of the crew, Shirl and Darleen were among those in the control room; as first trip cadets their only duty was to keep well out of the way of those doing the work. Up and out drove the old ship, up and out. Soon, far to the south, the glimmer of the Antarctic ice could be discerned and, much closer, there was a great berg with its small fleet of attendant tugs, being dragged and nudged to its last resting place, its dying place, in the artificial fresh water harbor at the mouth of the Torrens River.

  The sky darkened to indigo and the stars appeared, although the bright-blazing sun was still well clear of the rounded rim of the Earth. In the stern vision screen the radar altimeter display totted up the steadily increasing tally of kilometers. There were the last exchanges of messages between Aerospace Control and the ship on NST radio. It was a normal start to a normal voyage. (But, thought Grimes, sitting in his command chair, his unlit pipe clenched between his teeth, for him a normal voyage was one during which abnormality was all too often the norm. And, not for the first time, Damien was expecting him to stick his neck out and get it trodden on.)

  Earth was a sphere now, a great, glowing opal against the black velvet backdrop of space.

  “Escape velocity, sir,” announced Harald Steerforth.

  “Thank you, Mr. Steerforth,” said Grimes.

  “Clear of the Van Allens, sir,” reported the second officer.

  “Thank you, Mr. Kershaw. Ms. Suzuki, make to all hands ‘Stand by for free fall. Stand by for trajectory adjustment.’”

  He heard the girl speaking into her microphone, heard, from the intercom speakers the reports from various parts of the ship that all was secured. Using the controls set in the broad armrest of his chair he shut down the inertial drive. There was an abrupt cessation of vibration and a brief silence, broken almost at once by the humming of the great gyroscopes around which Sister Sue turned, hunting the target star. Grimes’s fingers played on the control buttons, his face upturned to the curiously old-fashioned cartwheel sight set at the apex of the transparent dome of the control room. The pilot computer could have done the job just as well and much faster—but Grimes always liked to feel that he was in command, not some uppity robot. At last the tiny, bright spark was in the exact center of the concentric rings, the convergence of radii. It did not stay there for long; there was allowance for Galactic Drift to be made.

  At last Grimes was satisfied.

  “Stand by for initiation of Mannschenn Drive,” he ordered.

  “Stand by for initiation of Mannschenn Drive,” repeated Tomoko Suzuki.

  In the Mannschenn Drive room the gleaming complexity of rotors came to life, spinning faster and faster, tumbling, processing, fading almost to invisibility, warping the very fabric of Space-Time about themselves and about the ship, falling down the dark dimensions . . . .

  The temporal precession field built up and there was the inevitable distortion of perspective, with colors sagging down the spectrum. Not for the first time Grimes experienced a flash of prevision—but, he knew, it was of something that might happen. After all, there is an infinitude of possible futures and a great many probable ones.

  But he saw—and this was by no means his first such experience—a woman. It was nobody he knew—and yet she seemed familiar. She was clad in a dark blue, gold-embroidered kimono, above which her heavily made-up face was very pale. Her glossy, black hair was piled high on her head. She could almost have been a Japanese geisha from olden times . . . .

  Tomoko? Grimes wondered.

  No, she was not Tomoko.

  He could see her more clearly now. She was bound to a stake, around which faggots were piled. He saw a hand, a human hand, apply a blazing torch to the sacrificial pyre. There were flames, mounting swiftly. There was smoke, swirling about and over the victim.

  There was . . . .

  There was the instantaneous reversion to normality as the temporal precession field was established. Grimes tried to shake the vision from his mind.

  “Stand by for resumption of inertial drive,” he ordered.

  “Stand by for resumption of inertial drive,” repeated Tomoko into her microphone.

  From below came the muted arrhythmic thumping. Somewhere a loose fitting rattled. Grimes unsnapped his seat belt, took his time lighting and filling his pipe.

  “Set normal Deep Space watches,” he said to the chief officer. “Mr. Kershaw can keep the first one. Please join me in my day cabin for a drink before dinner, Mr. Steerforth. We’ve a few things to discuss.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I take it,” said Grimes, speaking over the rim of his glass, “that Admiral Damien has put you into the picture.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “What do you know about Ms. Perkins? Or should I say Lieutenant Commander Perkins?”

  “I’ve worked with her before, sir. I knew that she’d been planted in your ship some time ago. She’s highly capable, masquerading as being highly incapable.” Then Steerforth actually laughed. “Mind you, sir, I’ve often wondered if her masquerade is a masquerade. . . . Perhaps, like you, she’s a sort of catalyst. Things just happen when she’s around.”

  “Can she make them happen on demand?” asked Grimes.

  “Usually,” said Steerforth.

  “Mphm. But tell me, Mr. Steerforth, just how many undercover agents has Admiral Damien planted aboard my ship?”

  “Well, sir, there’s you, for a start. And myself. And Ms. Perkins. And those two alleged officer cadets . . . .” After a couple of drinks he was becoming more human. “For all I know that clockwork toy of yours might even be one! Tell me, is she really intelligent? Or is she just an example of very clever programming on somebody’s part?”

  “We are all of us the end products of programming,” Grimes told him.

  “To a point, sir. To a point. But as well as the programming there’s intuition, imagination, initiative . . . .”

  “I think,” said Grimes, “that Seiko possesses at least two of those qualities.”

  The dinner gong sounded.

  The two men finished their drinks, went down to the wardroom to join the other off-duty officers.

  Grimes had been half-expecting soul food but what Ms. Clay provided was a fine example of Creole cookery. This was not to everybody’s taste but Grimes enjoyed it.

  Chapter 11

  It was not a long voyage to Pleth, but long enough for Grimes to get the feel of things. His new chief officer, Harald Steerforth, was not quite such a pain in the arse as Grimes had feared that he would be on first acquaintance. Cleo Jones, the black and beautiful radio officer, the Zulu Princess, was the civilizing influence. What the pair of them did when they were off watch was none of Grimes’s business. These days, in vessels with mixed crews, temporary sexual unions were not discouraged so long as they did not interfere with the smooth running of the ship and so long as certain unwritten regulation
s were observed.

  In fact, thought Grimes disgruntledly, about the only person who wasn’t getting any was himself. He was the victim of those unwritten regulations. Shirl and Darleen had made it plain to him that they were available, as they had been when they had traveled as passengers in Sister Sue from New Sparta to Earth. But then they had been passengers, fair game. Now they were junior officers, very junior officers. Between Grimes and themselves there was too great a disparity of rank. He did not wish to be thought of as a wicked captain who ordered poor, helpless (ha!) first-trip cadets to his bed.

  Oh, there were offers, opportunities, but the two New Alicians did their best (worst) to ensure that he did not take advantage of them. There was that handsome academic, Sarah Smith, the second Mannschenn Drive engineer. She made it plain that she would not find the attentions of her captain unwelcome. Perhaps it was accidental that when she walked into the wardroom one evening, ship’s time, she was struck on the left shoulder by a heavy glass ashtray. Shirl had been giving an exhibition of boomerang throwing— using anything and everything as boomerangs—to the off-duty officers.

  Perhaps, Grimes thought at the time, it was accidental—but the next morning, in his day cabin, the two girls, who were supposed to be receiving instruction in general spacemanship from the captain, told him otherwise.

  “John,” said Shirl, “Vinegar Puss is trying to get her claws into you. Warn her off . . . .”

  “Or next time,” said Darleen, “she’ll be getting something hard and heavy where it really hurts.”

  “And the same applies,” added Shirl, “to Aunt Jemima . . . .”

  “Ms. Clay,” objected Grimes, “is nothing like Aunt Jemima.”

  “She’s the cook, isn’t she?”

  “She’s the catering officer,” said Grimes. “It’s the autochef that does the cooking—with, I admit, her personal touches. But Aunt Jemima? I’ve never heard her called that.”