“I didn’t think that you would. But I have plenty in my cabin.”
Should he? Falsen wondered. Then, Why not?
• • •
Nonetheless, a little later, he was feeling uneasy.
This was the first time that he had been really alone with one of the Doralans. He was neither xenophobe nor male chauvinist, but this alien female was inducing in him a strong feeling of disquiet. His skin prickled as his body hairs, confined by his clothing, tried to stand erect.
Carlin smiled smugly. Her broad face with its pug nose and wide, thick lips could have been that of some predatory animal toying, sharp-clawed, with a helpless, terrified prey. Her very big, very deep blue eyes regarded him.
She said throatily, “You Terries have a saying that I have heard and rather like. ‘This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.’ ”
Falsen managed a laugh. “If he were here I’d do just that.”
She laughed too. “You don’t like Pondor any more than he likes you. Both you and he have made it obvious.”
“I’ve rather gained the impression,” he said, “that he doesn’t like you much either.”
“He doesn’t like anybody except the Lady Mother. And himself, of course. But be seated, Mr. Falsen.”
“Thank you, Lady Carlin.”
There was only one chair in the cabin and she had taken the divan. He did not think that she wished him to sit by her. He lowered himself on to the too-soft cushion. His buttocks sank deeply into it. It seemed that the padded arms were about to fold inwards and imprison him in a firm embrace. Imagination, he told himself sharply; nonetheless, this piece of furniture, constructed to the requirements of Doralan rather than Terran anatomy, had readjusted its contours under his weight almost as though it were a living thing.
There was what seemed to be a very long silence.
She broke it.
“The cat got your tongue?” she asked, then laughed. “You have so many sayings about cats in your language.”
“ ‘A cat may look at a king,’ for example,” said Falsen.
And he, no king, was looking at a cat. No, not quite a cat … her legs, exposed by her short uniform tunic and folded under her, were too plump, although tapering to daintily slim ankles. Yet the feet were … pudgy. She had kicked off her sandals and he could see her short toes, each tipped by a pointed, scarlet enameled nail.
Paws.
And claws.
“Shall we take refreshment, Mr. Falsen?” she asked.
A nice saucer of milk? he wondered wildly.
She slid off the divan. Her legs, despite their plumpness, were very long in proportion to her torso. She looked down at him trapped in the chair.
She said, “I could offer you a choice of our own wines — but we both like gin, don’t we? Pink gin … ”
“Pink gin would be fine,” he said.
She padded to the large cabinet set against one of the bulkheads of her cabin, her feet silent on the thick carpet. The door opened as she uttered a short, musical word in her own language; a shelf, with a little recessed sink, slid out. She stooped to get bottles from the lower compartment. The hem of her tunic rode up. She was wearing nothing under it. Her rump was large, firm, poised enticingly above the smooth fullness of her bare thighs. More than just a hint of pink gleamed moistly at the conjunction of the twin dusky moons.
She straightened, busied herself mixing the drinks. She did so in the classical although rather wasteful manner, shaking bitters into the chilled glasses, swirling the aromatic fluid to coat the inner surfaces, throwing out the surplus into the sink. She poured gin with a generous hand, added tetrahedrons of ice.
She handed him one tumbler, then returned to her seat on the divan, raising her own glass in salutation as soon as she was settled.
“Here’s looking at you,” she said.
“I’ve been looking at you,” said Falsen. Somehow it seemed expected of him.
She laughed. “I suppose that you must have been. In our ships we are so used to an all-female environment that it never occurred to me that I might be offending male susceptibilities … .”
All-female environment? thought Falsen. What about the male stowaway in the storeroom?
He said, “My susceptibilities weren’t offended.”
“I am glad about that. After all, you are a guest.”
“Yes.”
“You do not look very comfortable in that chair. And your clothes look tight.”
“I’m all right,” said Falsen.
He gulped his drink. It was good, although there was a subtly alien quality to it. There should not have been; even though distracted by the display of female flesh, he had seen familiar labels on both bottles, the gin and the bitters. The ice, perhaps? Could it make any difference if it came in three-sided pyramids rather than cubes?
She stated definitely, “You are not comfortable.”
She tossed down the remains of her drink, dropped the tumbler carelessly to the deck. She slid sinuously off the divan, displaying her hairless pudenda as she did so. She approached him slowly, slinking almost, her plump, short-fingered hands extended. He put down his own glass, unfinished, as she came to him. He was acutely conscious of the scent of her, too acrid to be altogether pleasant, alien yet disturbingly familiar. He knew that she wanted him (she had been making that obvious enough) and knew that he wanted her. He tried to get up, but that damned chair was reluctant to let go of him. Then she had taken his hands in hers and was pulling, lifting. She was amazingly strong.
They stood pressed together, body to body. He could feel the taut nipples of her almost nonexistent breasts through her clothing and his. He walked her backward to the bed. Her foot came down on the glass that she had dropped; it did not break but rolled under her sole. She fell backward on to the divan, pulling him with her. They were kissing, her tongue busy in his open mouth. Somehow her tunic was off, a splash of gold-trimmed scarlet on the black carpet. He felt her hands busy with his own clothing, and his slate gray shorts and shirt joined her more colorful uniform on the deck.
At first he was awkward. But this, he soon realized, was not her first experience of interspecies sexual congress. (She must have done more at the Antarctic Academy than acquire a taste for Terran liquor.) She fondled him expertly, and her little capable hands guided him into the voracious depths of her, the hot moistness, the unfamiliar, soft-yet-firm internal protuberances that clutched and held.
He wondered what the sound was, the vibration that was transmitted from her body to his, then knew that she was purring with pleasure.
Abruptly, explosively, it was over. She erupted beneath him as her claws scored his back. She subsided as he collapsed upon her, yet, consciously or unconsciously, she was reluctant to let go of him. Her hands roved over his body and she whispered (as Linda had done that first time), “You hairy bastard!” Then, “Oh, the feel of you!”
Almost automatically his hands were caressing her. Her skin was not as smooth as he had expected that it would be; from groin almost to breasts he could feel stubble. So she was not as hairless as he had thought the Doralans to be. But so what? After all, he had been supplied with depilatory cream from the ship’s stores; if there had been no demand for it, it would not have been available for his use. (But hadn’t he been told that it had been made up especially for him?)
At last he rolled off her. There was barely room for both of them, side by side, on the divan.
She raised herself on her elbow, looked down at him. A satisfied smile curved her full mouth.
She murmured, “We must do this again some time, Falsen. Admit it, I’m better than that bitch of yours.”
But she was not. With her there could never be the very real togetherness that he shared — sometimes — with Linda. After all, he and the Terran girl were the same breed. This Carlin would always be an alien.
“We can do things together, Falsen,” she whispered.
“We’ve just pro
ved that,” he said.
But had he grasped her real meaning?
What was her real meaning?
“Don’t go yet,” she cajoled as he made a move to slide off the bed.
“I must, Carlin. The wake or the service or whatever you call it will be over soon and Linda will be looking for me. I must shower, and … ”
“You mean that I stink?” She was amused rather than furious. “You mean that your Dog Star Line bitch will smell the scent of me on you?”
“Frankly, yes.”
“You’re odorous yourself, Falsen. But I don’t mind.”
He broke away from her, not without reluctance, swung his feet to the deck. He picked up his shirt, shrugged into it. He put on his shorts. He stooped to kiss her.
He said, deliberately flippant, “Thanks for the party, Lady Carlin.”
She said, “I’ll see you again, Falsen,” Then, as he turned to go, “We’re compatible. I had to be sure of that. You need me — and I just might need you … .”
Aren’t the fancy boys that you’ve got stashed away in the storerooms good enough for you? he thought.
“When the balloon goes up … ” she murmured.
And what the hell do you mean by that? he asked himself as he let himself out into the alleyway.
• • •
Later he was asked by Linda, “How did you get those scratches on your back?”
Hadn’t they faded yet?
“That bloody Pondor,” he lied. “He attacked me.”
She picked up his shirt from the deck of his cabin.
“No blood,” she said. “No rips apart from the patch that the leech took out. Odd … ”
“I wasn’t wearing it at the time,” he told her. “I went down to the gymnasium to get some exercise while the rest of you were at the wake.”
“Oh. You should complain to the Lady Mother — you seem to be rather a pet of hers. She should keep that beast under proper control.”
Which beast? he wondered.
CHAPTER 23
It was good to be back in the control room of a spaceship under way, thought Falsen, even though he was only a guest and the flight a suborbital one. Before lift-off the Lady Mother had sent a junior officer to invite him up to Control for the short journey back to the original landing site. He had accepted gladly. He wanted to see how the vessel handled and if any modifications had been made to the instrumentation since her transfer from Terran to Doralan registry.
He sat in one of the spare seats, looking around. The Lady Mother was in her chair and the sour-faced Prenta was in hers, the copilot’s position, ready to take over should, for any reason, the captain suddenly become incapable of handling the ship. There was an officer at the radar-altimeter, but the radio-telephone transceiver was unmanned; on a world with no Aerospace Control there was nobody to talk to.
Green ready lights glowed on panels, indicating that the ship was sealed, all air-lock doors securely closed. Looking out through a convenient viewport, Falsen saw that nothing of the wrecked dirigible remained on the ground outside. All its components, including the control car, were now neatly stowed in the spaceship’s holds. Perhaps the thing could be repaired and reassembled, perhaps not, but all that material would be reused.
Carlin’s voice sounded from an intercom speaker. Somehow Falsen could not imagine her in gloves and overalls, queen of her engine room. But that was where she was. She was no pussycat but a skilled astronautical engineer.
A buzzer sounded and the ship trembled as the inertial drive shook itself into life. Inside the ship, thanks to the insulation, its operation was almost silent, but the arhythmic vibration transmitted through every structural member, through the shell plating. A loose fitting somewhere began to rattle. Falsen saw the Lady Mother frown, heard her say something in a sharp voice to her chief officer.
The spaceship lifted slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity. On the master altimeter display figures appeared, flickering into and out of existence at regular intervals. Falsen did not know, of course, what the actual readings were. In a Terran ship they would have been meters at first and then kilometers. There would probably be a table of equivalents within the literature in the vessel’s technical library.
Outside the viewports the ground was dropping away. This was a good place to be leaving, thought Falsen. It was a pity that the destination had little, if anything, more to offer. There would only be the swampy terrain with the outcroppings of rock, and that cave and the lake.
If I were the Lady Mother, he thought, I’d scrape up what fissionable material I could from the ship’s power reserves and make a bomb and drop it in that lake, and then get the hell off this dreary mudball. He wondered if such a course of action had occurred to her. In the Federation Survey Service there were handbooks giving instructions on how to make explosive devices from whatever was at hand. Quite possibly the Doralans carried such useful instructions in their exploring vessels.
The cloud ceiling was low.
Nothing could be seen now through the viewports but swirling, formless, masses of crimson vapor. The vibration of the drive became stronger as lateral thrust was applied, as the ship’s trajectory became a parabola.
Falsen realized that the Lady Mother was speaking to him.
“I said, Mr. Falsen, that I could have made this flight at a relatively low altitude, but I am indulging myself. I want to get out of the atmosphere of this planet, if only briefly. I want to see the sun, unobscured by mist and cloud. I want to see the stars.”
“It’s your ship, Gracious Lady.” And I don’t sound very gracious, he thought ruefully. He forced a smile. “I shall be pleased to see the stars again myself.”
“I thought that you would be, Mr. Falsen.” She smiled herself. “Even though the Lady Prenta thinks that I am wasting both time and fuel.”
Overhead the mist was thinning and, to one side, the glare from rising Antares was almost dazzling. Viewports polarized, cutting the light down to a tolerable level. Overhead the sky was black, studded with bright, multicolored jewels that were the stars, some great and some small. Recognizable even at this distance, one of the other planets, a gas giant of the Antares system, glowed as a tiny globe. The primary itself, the obscuring clouds now far below and astern, was a sphere, a ruddy furnace, one limb ragged with great prominences. Away from it the ship’s shadow, a long black spindle, was cast onto the writhing surface of the eternal cloud.
The Lady Mother sighed.
“I wish I could stay up here. But we must come in for our landing.”
“It seems a pity,” said Falsen.
This woman is a real spacer, he thought. Just as I am. The trouble is that it’s not all that I am … .
The officer by the radar altimeter turned to the controls of another panel close by that instrument. Something was beeping faintly.
The captain said, “I left visual and radio beacons at the original site. The radio beacon, at least, is functioning.”
All Survey Service SOP, thought Falsen. The space ship was dropping now, on the descending leg of the great arc. Ruddy, swirling tendrils of mist rose about the control-room viewports, shutting out the stars, dimming the great red sun. The cloud was thicker again, an oppressive crimson glare that seemed almost solid.
A tiny, pulsing spark appeared at the very edge of the stern view-screen, began to creep, almost imperceptibly at first, towards its center — the radio beacon, guiding them in. Guiding them in, Falsen thought, to whatever it was that awaited them. He grew increasingly uneasy. He knew that there were things that he, that he and Linda, would have to do if they were to survive, make a fresh start elsewhere in the universe. He hoped — but Linda, he knew, did not share his scruples — that he would be able to take the ship without further bloodshed. But it was not this act of piracy that was bothering him. There was some much more immediate danger, to everybody, to Linda and to himself and to the Doralans.
He shifted uneasily in his seat.
The Lady
Mother noticed and said, “I thought that you were enjoying the ride, Mr. Falsen.”
“I was.” He corrected himself. “I mean, I am.”
The inertial drive sounded healthy enough, and Carlin, he hoped, would keep it that way. The Lady Mother’s competence was not in doubt; apart from what he had seen of her shiphandling, he knew that, on any world, only outstanding officers are selected for the command of exploratory expeditions to strange worlds.
The beacon spark had not reached the center of the screen when the ship broke through the cloud ceiling into the relatively clear air below. Looking out through a viewport, Falsen could see the sullenly glimmering lake — it looked like blood — set in its ring of low black hills. He wondered briefly just what lurked in that body of water besides the giant leeches. But soon, he hoped, he and Linda would not have to worry about that, although it could be of some concern to those marooned. It was a pity that they would have to be left here — but their predicament would not be as desperate as that of the Terrans had been. Sooner or later a ship would be sent from Dorala to find out what had happened, to pick up the survivors.
The vibration of the drive diminished as the ship dropped faster and faster, almost vertically now. As a merchant spaceman, Falsen did not approve of the approach although, during his training cruises in the Survey Service, he had seen the technique used often enough. An almost free drop, with the captain watching the diminishing radar-altimeter figures intently; and then, at what seemed to be the last second, slamming on the vertical thrust, bringing the vessel to a shuddering halt.
He had been bold enough to express his disapproval once to Captain Bannerman. The Old Man laughed harshly and said, “You merchant spacemen are all the same, treating your ships as though they’re made of glass. Don’t forget, Lieutenant Falsen, Federation Survey Service Reserve, that although this is called the Survey Service, it’s really a fighting navy. Earth’s fighting navy. If you’re ever in command of a warship, you may find out that there are times when you have to get downstairs in a hurry — just as there are times when you have to get upstairs in a hurry. And when, for your sins, you’re captain of a mere transport or survey ship proper, you keep in practice just as I’m doing now. So keep your eyes glued to the radar-altimeter screen, and if I haven’t put the brakes on by the time it reads fifty meters, either give me a nudge or pray to all the Odd Gods of the Galaxy. Or do both.”
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