Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Never mind that. And the people? Of Terran origin, aren’t they?”

  She punched more keys. “Yes, sir. Second Expansion stock.”

  “Now get that tin brain to do some sums for me. Running at a steady one G, with standard temporal precession, how long from here to planetfall?”

  “As from now, sir, six days, fourteen hours and forty-five minutes.”

  “Mphm. We can survive that long on what water is left in the system, with rationing and recycling. There shouldn’t be any need to go thirsty or get really dirty.”

  “Couldn’t we carry on to New Otago, sir?”

  “I’d not like to risk it. And I was brought up in the Survey Service, as you know, Tomoko. We always liked to have plenty of reaction mass on hand so that we could use emergency rocket drive if we had to. So I think that a deviation to New Salem is justified. The insurance should cover it.”

  And if it doesn’t, he thought, some Survey Service secret fund will be used to compensate me.

  From below decks came the whine of a generator starting up. Lights flickered and then brightened as the emergency circuit cut out and the main circuit cut in. Steerforth said, “Flo seems to be getting things under control. I wonder why she hasn’t sent Mr. Kershaw up to keep us informed.”

  Kershaw pulled himself into the control room. “Sir, Ms. Scott isn’t very communicative. So I checked up in the Mannschenn Drive room. The MD engineers are standing by, waiting to start up as soon as they have the power. Mr. Grey asked me to tell you that there is no damage.”

  “Thank you.”

  Finally Florence Scott made her appearance. Her once-white overalls were sweat-soaked and grease-stained, and more grease marked her broad, ruddy face.

  “Captain,” she announced, “we’ll have the phones working again in a couple o’ minutes but I thought I’d report the situation in person, not through your messenger boy.” Kershaw flushed and scowled. “As ye already know, the engineroom got flooded. Anybody’d think that this was some tramp steamer on Earth’s seas way back in the twentieth century, old style. Cassie didn’t think; all she wanted to do was to get rid of all that water in a hurry. She could ha’ let it drain into the store and workshop flat—but no. Not her. She opened the dump valves.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the innies that a little minor rewiring won’t fix. I should be able to restart in half an hour. An’ then you can restart the time twister an’ we can be on our way. You may as well restart it now.”

  “What about fresh water?” asked Grimes.

  “Enough. We’ll not die o’ thirst or go unwashed as long as we’re careful.”

  “What about the emergency reaction drive?”

  “There’s no reaction mass. But emergency reaction drive was phased out years ago in the merchant service. It’s not required by law.”

  Grimes said, “I may be old-fashioned, but I like to know that I have rockets under my arse should I feel the need for them in a hurry. I’m deviating to the nearest port of refuge, which is on New Salem. There we’ll get the bulkhead patched and refill the tank.”

  “A needless expense and waste of time,” sneered the chief engineer. “Oh, well, you’re the captain.”

  “And the owner,” Grimes reminded her firmly.

  Chapter 15

  There was Aerospace Control on New Salem, although its name was somewhat misleading. There was no aerial traffic, either lighter than or heavier than air, in the planet’s atmosphere. (“If God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings.”) But at Port Salem there was a Carlotti radio station with rather limited range and also an NST transceiver. Grimes got in touch while he was still proceeding toward the planet under Mannschenn Drive, using his Carlotti radio. This was an unusually troublesome procedure. According to the data in Sister Sue’s library bank New Salem Aerospace Control maintained a listening watch for the first five minutes of every hour, daylight hours only and never on Sunday. The first time that Cleo Jones tried to get through it must have been Sunday on New Salem. During the next twenty-four-hour period, ship’s time, the trouble was trying to get the ship’s clocks synchronized with those at the spaceport. Finally Cleo arranged for a continuous automatic transmission with an alarm to sound as soon as there was a reply.

  Grimes happened to be in the control room when this happened.

  An irritable female voice came from the Carlotti speaker. “Port Salem Aerospace Control to unknown vessel. Identify yourself. Pass your message.”

  “Sister Sue to Port Salem,” said Grimes. “Request permission to land to effect essential repairs.”

  “Stand by, Sister Sue. I shall come back to you.”

  Grimes stood by for a long time, having his lunch, served by the faithful Seiko, in the control room. At last the speaker crackled into life.

  “Port Salem to Sister Sue. What is the nature of the repairs that you will require? I must warn you that our workshop facilities are limited.”

  “The patching of a ruptured bulkhead,” said Grimes. “My own engineers can carry out the work as long as suitable plating is available. The replenishment of my fresh water supply.”

  “Stand by, Sister Sue.”

  There was another long wait.

  Finally, “Materials will be made available to you. Fresh water will be obtainable from Lake Beulah. What is your ETA please?”

  Clocks and calendar were synchronized and Grimes was able to give day and time for his return to the normal continuum and, not too approximately, for his eventual setting down at Port Salem.

  Eventually Sister Sue was dropping through the twilight towards the huddle of yellowish lights that was New Salem. He would have preferred to have made a dawn approach but, after all, he was supposed to be in some sort of distress and, therefore, in some sort of hurry. The traffic control officer, whose sour featured face was visible in the screen of the NST radio transceiver, instructed him to set down in the center of the triangle formed by the berth markers. What berth markers? Grimes asked himself irritably. What did they use for berth marking beacons on this benighted planet? Candles? He stepped up magnification and definition in the stern vision screen. At last he saw them as he continued his cautious descent, three feeble, ruddy sparks.

  He hoped that Cassandra Perkins fully understood what was expected of her. If she acted too soon, clumsily (but on purpose) tripping over her own feet and clutching at a lubrication line for support, bending it but not breaking it, throttling the supply of oil to the governor bearings, Sister Sue would fall for far too many meters, damaging herself irreparably. The governor would have to seize up almost immediately after Grimes applied that final surge of thrust to cushion the landing.

  He watched the read-out of the radar altimeter.

  10 meters . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . .

  Now!

  The cacophony of the inertial drive rose from little more than an irritable mutter to an angry clangor—then abruptly ceased. Sister Sue dropped like a stone, a very large and heavy stone. Shock absorbers screamed rather than sighed. Loose fittings rattled and there was a tinkling crash as something tore adrift from its securing bolts. Grimes slowly filled and lit his pipe—but even though he had been expecting the accident it was hard to maintain the pose of imperturbability. Tomoko, he thought, to whom it had all come as a big surprise, was making a far better job of it than he was.

  Steerforth voiced what must have been the thought of all those in the control room.

  “That’s fucked it!” he said.

  “Mr. Steerforth, mind your language,” Grimes told him.

  The intercom speaker crackled and then Florence Scott’s voice came from it. “ID room to captain. Chief engineer here. The bearings of the governor seem to have seized up. I am making an immediate check of the extent of the damage.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Scott,” said Grimes into his microphone.

  “MD room to captain.” This was the chief Mannschenn Drive engineer, Daniel Grey. “You seem to have made a crash landing.�
� A blinding glimpse of the obvious, thought Grimes. “The jolt unseated numbers one, three and four rotors from their bearings . . . .”

  Worse and worse, thought Grimes. Or better and better?

  “Apart from anything else,” Grey went on, “the Drive will have to be recalibrated once it has been reassembled.”

  “Somebody’s coming out to us, sir,” announced Steerforth.

  Grimes got up from his chair, went to stand with the chief officer by the viewport. He saw the group of bobbing lights—hand-held lanterns?—and the dimly illumined human forms.

  He said, “Looks like a boarding party of some kind. You’d better go down to the after airlock to receive them. I shall be in my day cabin. Oh, on your way down give Ms. Clay my compliments and tell her to keep Seiko out of sight as long as there are any locals aboard.”

  Steerforth grinned. “Aunt Jemima’s read that article too, just as we all have. But Star Scandals’ not quite in the same class as the Encyclopaedia Galactica, is it, sir? And their star reporter, Fenella Pruin, never lets facts get in the way of a sensational story.”

  “Ms. Pruin,” said Grimes, “is a very able investigative reporter.”

  “Oh, yes. You know her, sir. I was forgetting.”

  “We know her, too,” said Shirl and Darleen as one, making it plain that they held Fenella in quite high regard.

  In his day cabin Grimes picked up the rather tattered copy of Star Scandals from the coffee table. It would be advisable, he thought, to get it out of sight before the visitors arrived. That lurid cover, with its colored photograph of a naked girl chained to a stake and with flames licking around her lower body . . . It had been the third ID engineer, Bill the Bull, who had found this particular issue of Star Scandals in his well-thumbed collection of that pornographic, as often as not, publication. As soon as it was known that Sister Sue was deviating to Salem, Fenella’s piece on that planet had become almost required reading by all hands.

  Fenella had visited Salem as a passenger aboard Wombat, owned by Able Enterprises. (This, of course, had been before she had gotten into the bad books of Baron Kane, whose company Able Enterprises was.) She had found it hard to sniff out anything really juicy on Salem; the people lived lives of utterly boring sexual probity. She had witnessed a slaughter of the silkies, the animals whose furs were Salem’s only export—but Fenella was not at her best (worst?) as a writer on humanitarian issues. She blew up the business of her dancing dolls to absurd proportions. These tiny, beautifully made automata, one male, one female, not only danced to tinkling music but stripped, and when naked went through the motions of coitus. All very amusing to those of a kinky bent. . . .

  Grimes read, “That party, in Wombat’s wardroom, was inexpressably dreary. Pastor Coffin and his wife would drink only tea and insisted that this be both weak and tepid. In deference to the sensibilities of their guests Captain Timson and his officers did not smoke. Daringly I lit a cigarillo and was told, by the she-Coffin that if God had meant me to smoke He would have put a chimney on top of my head. I said that She had more important things to occupy Her time. This did not go down at all well.

  “The conversation, such as it was, got on to the topic of machinery. Machinery, I gathered, was disapproved of on Salem. Of course I had already noticed this. Just one solar power plant to generate electricity for the spaceport facilities, communications and so forth. But oil-lighting in the houses, sailing vessels on the sea, bullock-drawn wagons on the roads. And bullocks, too, supplied the power to operate the presses which extracted the flammable oil from various seeds.

  “Anyhow, Captain Timson was letting Pastor Coffin’s diatribe against inventions of the devil go on without interruption. He knew on which side his bread was buttered. The silkie skin trade was a profitable one for his owners. But his officers, the engineers, especially, were inclined to argue. The fruit punch that they had been drinking had been well spiked with gin as soon as it became obvious that the Coffin couple was having none of it.

  “Terry Muldoon, the third engineer, said, ‘But machines have their uses, Pastor Coffin. Even as toys for children, educational toys . . .’ (Terry, I learned later, had already resigned from Able Enterprises and had a job waiting for him with the Dog Star Line.) Coffin said, ‘What can a child learn from a mechanical toy? He will learn all that he ever needs to know from the Bible.’ Terry said, ‘You’d be surprised, Pastor.’ He turned to me and said, Fenella, why not show our guests those educational toys of yours?’ (He was one of the few people aboard the ship who had seen them. Old Timson had not, neither had the two chief engineers.) So I went to my cabin and got the box and set it down on the wardroom table. I took out Max and Maxine. They stood stiffly, facing each other. I switched on the music, Ravel’s Bolero. Max and Mazine came . . . alive. They could have been flesh-and-blood beings, not automata. They danced, and as they danced they shed their clothing. I always liked the part when Max got rid of his trousers; it is easy for a woman to disrobe gracefully to music, not so easy for a man. I always hoped that Max would get his feet tangled in his nether garments and come down heavily on his rather too perfect little arse, but he never did.

  And then they were quite naked, the pair of them, anatomically correct. Maxine, legs open, was supine on the table top and Max was about to lower himself upon her when Coffin’s big fist smashed down on the box as he bellowed, ‘Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’ The music stopped in mid-stridency. There was a sputter of sparks. Max, no more than a lifeless, somehow pathetic doll collapsed on top of the other doll, among the litter of rags that had been their clothing.

  “Timson apologized. ‘I had no idea, Pastor . . .’”

  “Coffin—he was virtually foaming at the mouth—screamed, ‘That is no excuse, Captain. Does it not say in the Book that you shalt not suffer a witch to live? She . . .” he pointed a quivering finger at me, ‘is a witch. And those are her familiars!’

  “‘Go to your cabin,’ Timson ordered me. I tried to argue but it was no use. The mate and the second mate, that pair of great, hulking louts, hustled me out of the wardroom, locked me in my quarters. And there I was confined until breakfast the next morning.

  “After the meal Terry managed to have a few words with me. He told me that the pastor had gone on ranting and raving after I had been removed from his presence, accusing me of witchcraft and saying that Max and Maxine were my familiars. He demanded that I be turned over to the local authorities to stand trial—but this was too much even for Captain Timson. Then he insisted that Max and Maxine be given into his custody, saying that they would be publicly destroyed by burning. Timson agreed to this. ‘And you’d better stay aboard from now on, Fenella,’ Terry told me, ‘otherwise you’ll find yourself tied to a stake with the faggots piled about you . . .’”

  There was a knock at the door. Grimes hastily took the dog-eared copy of Star Scandals through to his bedroom, returned to the day cabin and called, “Come in!”

  Tomoko entered, followed by a tall man in rusty black clothing with touches of white, rather grimy white, at his throat and wrists.

  “Pastor Coffin to see you, sir,” she announced.

  Grimes almost said what he usually said on such occasions but decided against it. To judge from the deeply lined, craggy face, the fanatical black eyes under shaggy gray brows, this was a man utterly devoid of humor.

  Chapter 16

  The two men shook hands. The pastor’s grip was firm but cold.

  “Be seated, sir,” said Grimes. “May I offer you refreshment? Coffee? Tea? Or . . . ?”

  “Tea, Captain. Not strong. No milk. No sugar.”

  Grimes telephoned the pantry and made the order. He sat back in his chair, filled and lit his pipe.

  The pastor said, “Do not smoke.”

  Grimes said, “This is my ship, sir. I make the rules.”

  “This may be your ship, Captain, but you neither own nor command this planet. And, as I understand it, you will be unable to lift from this world unless you are vouchsafed coope
ration by myself and the elders of my church.”

  Grimes made a major production of sighing. Until he knew which way the wind was blowing or likely to blow he would have to do as bid. He put his pipe down in the ashtray.

  Shirl came in, carrying a tray which she set on the coffee table. (Melinda Clay, in her capacity as purser, would still be dealing with the port officials.) In her very short uniform shorts she looked all legs.

  Coffin looked at her disapprovingly then said, “Are all your female officers so indecently attired, Captain?”

  Grimes said, “My female officers wear what is standard uniform for both the Federation Survey Service and the Merchant Service.”

  “Aboard the ships of Able Enterprises,” said Coffin, “females are always decently covered.”

  And Drongo Kane, thought Grimes, would put his people in sackcloth and ashes as the rig of the day rather than lose a profitable trade. And so would I, he realized with some surprise.

  Shirl glared at Coffin and strode out of the day cabin. Grimes poured the tea, which was far too weak for his taste, added milk and sugar to his own.

  “I understand, Captain,” said the pastor, “that you have various mechanical troubles. We on Salem, freed from the tyranny of the machine, are not so afflicted.”

  “It was machines, starships, that brought your ancestors here, sir.”

  “At times the Lord uses the Devil’s tools. But His people should avoid doing so. Now, what are your requirements? What must you do to make your vessel spaceworthy?”

  “I have to repair a bulkhead—just a matter of patching. I hope that a suitable plate will be available here. The shaft of my inertial drive governor must be renewed. My Mannschenn Drive has to be recalibrated. I understand that there is a workshop here, and a stock of spares and materials.”

  “Your understanding is correct, Captain. The workshop and the stores are the property of Able Enterprises. I am empowered to act as their agent.”