“Mphm,” grunted Grimes, embarrassed.
“Talking of their eyes . . . .” she went on. “Is there anything odd about them?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I was in charge of picking you people up and supplying the native guides for the junior officers. Your Ms. Kelly and Ms. Byrne arrived at the base officers’ quarters well before the rest of the crowd—and they had nobody to guide them. And the fog was as thick as the armor plating of a Nova class battlewagon.”
“Probably,” said Grimes, “they regarded it as a sort of navigation test, got themselves headed in the right direction and then set off hopefully.”
“Then they were lucky. It’s not a straight line walk. There are two bridges to negotiate, and that mess of alleys and cross alleys through the workshops and stores.”
“Mphm,” grunted Grimes.
He finished his drink, she finished hers. It would soon be time for him to get back to his ship so as to spend what remained of the night in his own bed. But before he got dressed there were things to do better done naked.
At last it was time for him to say good night—or, more exactly, good morning. She threw on a robe and took him out to where the ground car, with native driver, was awaiting him.
He said, “I’ll see you at about 1100 hours, then, Selena. Drinks before lunch. And I think I can promise you a rather better meal than tonight’s dinner was.”
She said, “It should be. Aboard your ship you’re the boss.”
They kissed a long moment and he boarded the waiting vehicle.
* * *
She arrived aboard Sister Sue shortly after 1100, supported, almost carried, by Ensigns Cavallo and Brown. She was dazed, bleeding profusely from a deep cut on the forehead. The efficient Melinda Clay was called upon to administer first aid and, after some delay, the sub-base’s medical officer was in attendance.
At last Grimes was able to find out what had happened.
Selena had decided to walk from the sub-base to the ship, escorted through the fog by one of the native guides. Suddenly, without warning, she had been struck by a heavy missile. The guide had run to the ship to fetch help.
“I suppose, sir, that it was our fault,” said Ensign Cavallo unhappily. “We should not have encouraged them. But, after all, sir, they’re your officers, aboard your ship. . . .”
“Encouraged them? How?”
“We came on board for morning coffee. In the wardroom Ms. Kelly and Ms. Byrne were giving a demonstration of throwing weapons, using ashtrays and such, making them sail around and come back to their hands. I asked if this technique would be effective over a distance. They said that it was. So we all went down to the after airlock, and Ms. Kelly threw a rather thick glass saucer of some kind into the fog. We expected that it would come back, but it didn’t. . . .”
“Ms. Kelly,” asked Grimes severely, “Ms. Byrne, is this true?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Shirl innocently. “But we had no idea that there would be anybody out in the fog. After all, if Ms. Shaw had been making her approach by ground car we should have seen the glare of the headlights . . . .”
“And so, quite by chance,” said Grimes, “your random missile inflicted grievous bodily harm on Lieutenant Commander Shaw—”
And with that he had to be content. He could prove nothing—and, even if he could, what could he do about it? Shirl and Darleen were essential—or so he had been told by Damien—to the success of his mission. Selena had been no more than a pleasant diversion.
Chapter 13
The work of discharge and then of loading went smoothly. Grimes was able during his time in port to return some of the hospitality which he and his people had received from the sub-base personnel. He kept a close watch on the Terrible Twins, a joint nickname which Shirl and Darleen had quite suddenly acquired, making no further attempt to entertain Selena Shaw aboard his ship. (But her own quarters were quite adequate for purposes of mutual entertainment and she did not, as she could quite well have done, put him off by complaining that she had a severe headache.) And then, with cargo well-stowed, with all necessary in-port maintenance completed, it was time to lift off. Nobody board the ship was sorry, even though there were a few (very temporarily) broken hearts both in the sub-base and aboard Sister Sue. Sleth was such a dismal planet. Even New Otago would be better. Even though there was a shortage of bright lights on that world the scenery was said to be quite spectacular and the atmosphere was usually clear enough for it to be appreciated.
So Sister Sue lifted, ungumming herself from the omnipresent mud that, despite the thrice daily deployment of high-pressure hoses, inevitably crept over the spaceport apron. She clattered aloft through the fog, through the overcast, finally broke free into the dazzling sunlight while the last tenuous shreds of the Sleth atmosphere whispered along her pitted sides.
There was the usual trajectory setting routine, after which the old ship, her Mannschenn Drive running as sweetly as that Space-Time-twisting contraption ever ran, was falling down and through the warped dimensions toward the New Otago primary. Deep space watches were set and Grimes went down to his day cabin, asking Mr. Steerforth to join him there. As soon as the chief officer was seated and had been given a drink to nurse, served by the glittering Seiko, Grimes used the intercom to talk to the chief reaction drive engineer. “Ms. Scott, I’ve noticed that my shower is giving trouble. I almost got scalded this morning. Could you send Ms. Perkins up to fix it? She’s off watch, isn’t she?”
“I’ll come myself, Captain. You know what Calamity Cassie’s like.”
“I do, Flo. But as fourth engineer she’s supposed to be the ship’s plumber. It’s time that she started to earn her pay.”
“Well, it’s your shower, Captain. It’s you that’s going to get boiled or flash-frozen . . . .”
And so, after a wait of only a few minutes, Ms. Perkins presented herself, attired for work in overalls that had once been white but which now displayed a multitude of ineradicable grease stains, carrying a tunefully clinking tool bag. Only her teeth, which her cheerful grin displayed generously in her black face, were clean and very white.
“Sit down, Cassie,” ordered Grimes.
Before she could do so Seiko produced, as though from nowhere, a towel which the robomaid spread over the upholstery of the chair. The fourth engineer looked admiringly at the beautiful automaton and murmured, “I’d love to have the job of taking you apart and putting you together again, honey.”
“That’d be the Sunny Friday!” snapped Seiko.
“My father,” said Grimes, “improved upon the original programming, making additions from his own vocabulary.”
“And so Seiko,” said Cassie, “is no more than a sort of mechanical parrot. That I will not believe. She’s as human as you or me.” She grinned. “There are even rumors that you and she have a beautiful relationship.”
“I am the captain’s personal servant,” said Seiko stiffly. “Just that and nothing more. Unfortunately a relationship of a carnal nature would not be possible.”
Grimes’s prominent ears flushed angrily.
He said, “That will do, Seiko. Just fetch Ms. Perkins a drink, will you?”
“Yassuh, Massa Grimes. One Foster’s lager a-comin’ up, Missie Perkins.”
“And now, Ms. Perkins,” said Grimes as soon as Seiko had left them, “have you decided upon how you will carry out your act of sabotage?”
“Yes, sir. It will be quite simple. A disastrous leakage from the main water tank into the reaction drive engineroom. The bulkhead will give way—an area of it will have been treated with Softoll—to give it its trade name—which, as you know loosens molecular bonds in any metal. According to my calculations the application will take twelve hours to produce the desired effect. When you let me know the day, sir, when you wish the accident to happen I shall apply the Softoll at 1000 hours, during my watch. The flood will happen at 2200 hours—again during my watch. I shall panic. My one motivation will be to get
rid of all that water. After all, there’s electrical machinery that could be damaged, and I might get drowned. I’ll open the dump valves.”
“Make sure, Cassie,” Steerforth told her, “that you get into your emergency suit before you start getting rid of everything of a fluid nature in the engine room. After all, you’ll be throwing out the atmosphere along with the bath water.”
She grinned. “I look after my reputation. Things always happen around me, never to me.”
Grimes asked, “But won’t the cause of the so-called accident be obvious? Flo and Juanita aren’t fools, you know.”
She told him, “It will be put down to metal fatigue—and it won’t be the first case of metal fatigue in this rustbucket.”
“Are you referring to my ship?” asked Grimes stiffly. “It’s bad enough to have you doing things to her without having to listen to you insulting her.”
“Sorry, Captain. But unless you can think of some other kind of trouble that will force us to deviate to Salem, I shall have to do things to your ship. But I’ll try to keep the damage down to a minimum.” She finished her beer. “And now,” she went on brightly, “shall I fix your shower for you?”
“No,” said Grimes. “No, repeat and underscore, NO.”
Chapter 14
Grimes, of course, knew what was going to happen, and when.
At 2145 hours he was in the control room, having a chat with the officer of the watch, Tomoko Suzuki. As he frequently did just this before retiring for the night, the third officer did not suspect that anything was amiss or about to go so. The topic of conversation was such that he almost forgot his real reason for being there, which was to ensure that the Mannschenn Drive was shut down at the first sign of trouble in the inertial drive engineroom. The dumping of tons of water would mean that the mass of the ship would be suddenly and drastically reduced—and any change of mass while running under Mannschenn Drive could be, probably would be, disastrous. There were stories of vessels so afflicted being unable to re-enter normal Space-Time or being thrown back into the remote past. Nobody knew, of course (except for the crews of those ships) but there had been experiments and there was a huge amount of theoretical data which Grimes could not begin to understand.
“Captain-san,” Tomoko was saying, “I regard your Seiko as a friend. She may be a robot but she is, somehow, a real woman, a real Japanese woman.” She giggled. “I have made up her face, like that of an olden time geisha, and put a wig upon her head, and dressed her in a kimono . . . .”
“I must see this some time,” said Grimes.
He looked out through the viewport to the stars that were not points of light but vague, pulsating nebulosities. He heard the thin, high whine of the Drive as it engendered the temporal precession field, the warping of the continuum through which the ship was falling. He switched his attention to the control room clock. 2155:30 . . . 31 . . . 32 . . . Would that bulkhead blow exactly on time? Probably not. And would Calamity Cassie hit her alarm button as soon as the first trickle of water appeared? It could be just too bad if she didn’t.
“Is something worrying you, Captain-san?” asked Tomoko.
“I shouldn’t have had a second helping of Aunt Jemima’s jambalaya at dinner this evening,” lied Grimes.
2159:01 . . . .
He filled in time by playing with his pipe, stuffing the bowl with tobacco, making a major production of lighting it.
2200:00 . . .
“It would be rather pleasant,” said Tomoko, “if some time we had a Japanese catering officer . . . .”
“I’m very fond of sashimi myself,” said Grimes, “but I doubt if some of the others would care for raw fish.”
2201:03 . . . 04 . . . 05 . . .
“Seiko has told me,” said Tomoko, “that the preparation of sushi, sashimi and the like was in her original programming. And we have the carp in some of the algae tanks. Perhaps one night, just for a change, we could enjoy a sashimi dinner . . .”
2203:15 . . . 16 . . . 17
A red light suddenly sprang into being on the console of the inertial drive controls. An alarm klaxon uttered the beginnings of a squawk. Grimes’s hand flashed up to the Mannschenn Drive console, knocked the main switch to the off position. The thin, high whine deepened to a rumbling hum, faded into silence. Colors sagged down the spectrum, perspective was impossibly distorted. Outside the viewports the stars changed, coalescing from furry blobs into hard points of light. But, below decks, the inertial drive was still hammering away although its clangor was almost drowned by the hooting alarms. And then it, too, fell silent. Throughout the ship all the lights went out but there was less than a second of darkness before the power cells cut in to the major domestic circuits.
Grimes had been expecting what happened and had secured himself in his chair. Tomoko was unprepared. With the inertial drive off, the ship was in free fall and some involuntary movement had pushed her up from her seat and she was drifting, making rather futile swimming motions, above Grimes’s head. With his right hand he was just able to reach her ankle, pulled her down and then into the chair beside his.
“What happened, sir?” she gasped.
He said, “I suppose that somebody will eventually condescend to tell us.”
“Why did you shut the Mannschenn Drive off, sir?”
He told her—but it was less than the whole truth—“There was, and is, trouble with the inertial drive. Which meant, as we’ve just found out, a sudden transition from a comfortable one G to free fall. There was the risk that the MD engineer on watch—Mr. Siegel, isn’t it?—might blunder into the Drive and get himself turned inside out or something equally messy.”
She said admiringly, “You thought very fast, Captain-san. I hope that I can think as fast when I am a captain.”
Grimes never minded flattery, especially when it came from a pretty girl, even though in this case it was unearned. He supposed that if he had not been on the alert he would have acted as he had done, but not as fast.
He said to Tomoko, “Buzz the ID room, will you? Ask them what the hell’s going on.”
After an interval she reported, “The intercom seems to be out of order, sir.” (This was not surprising. The waterproofing of electrical systems is not considered necessary in spaceships.)
Steerforth pulled himself into the control room. He reported, almost cheerfully, “There’s all hell let loose down there, sir. As far as I can gather the after bulkhead of the main fresh water tank suddenly ruptured, flooding the ID room.” He laughed. “Of course, it would have to happen on Calamity Cassie’s watch. Then, according to Flo, what Cassie should have done was to drain the water into the engineers’ store and workshop space. But she went into a panic and opened the dump valves . . . .”
“It is indeed fortunate,” said Tomoko, “that the captain shut down the Mannschenn Drive before the loss of mass.”
“It is indeed fortunate, Ms. Suzuki,” agreed Steerforth. “Perhaps it was just another example of his famous luck.”
“Mphm,” grunted Grimes, looking severely at his chief officer.
“Shall I go back down,” asked that gentleman, “to try to find out the extent of the damage?”
“No, Mr. Steerforth. Engineers don’t like control room ornaments getting into their hair when they’re trying to cope with some kind of emergency. Ms. Scott will keep us informed in her own good time.”
Kershaw, the second officer, made his entrance into the control room. About bloody well time, thought Grimes. Doesn’t the puppy know that there’s an emergency? After him came Shirl and Darleen. There was some excuse for them; they were not real spacepersons. Finally Cleo Jones, the Zulu Princess, put in her appearance.
She reported, “I have been checking the main Carlotti transceiver, sir. Should it be necessary I can get out a Mayday using the power available.”
“Thank you, Ms. Jones.” Grimes looked around at his assembled people. They looked back at him, obviously awaiting orders. Well, he’d better start giving som
e.
“Ms. Kelly, Ms. Byrne,” he said, “report to Ms. Clay. Probably there are matters in her department needing attention. When the ID cut out nothing was secured for free fall.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the girls smartly.
Grimes watched them go. They handled themselves in the absence of gravity better than many a seasoned spaceman.
“Mr. Kershaw, since the intercom seems to be out of action you can report to Ms. Scott, to act as runner to carry messages to me from her.”
And she’ll probably chew his ears off, he thought, with some satisfaction.
“Shall I find out what’s happened to Seiko, sir?” asked Tomoko. “She might have been hurt. Damaged, I mean . . . .”
Not her, thought Grimes. He said, “She is a member of Ms. Clay’s department. Probably she is helping her to get things cleaned up.”
“Do you wish to send any messages, sir?” asked Cleo.
“Eventually,” Grimes told her. “But I want to know what I’m talking about before I start talking.” Then, to the third officer, “Get me a fix, will you? The navigational equipment is on the emergency circuit.”
The girl busied herself at the chart tank, taking bearings from three conveniently located Carlotti Beacon Stations. Grimes unbuckled himself from his chair, pulled himself to a position beside her. He looked down into the simulation of the blackness of interstellar space, at the intersection of the three glowing filaments, at the other filament this was the extrapolation of Sister Sue’s trajectory. At right angles to this, close, was the brilliant spark that was a star.
Grimes pointed the stem of his pipe at it.
“That sun?” he asked. “I may need to find a planet, one where there is fresh water available.”
She punched computer keys, read out from the screen, “Salema, sir, so called by the people of its own habitable planet, which is variously known as Salem or New Salem. Catalogue number. . . .”
Ride the Star Winds Page 48