She said, “People have often told me that I’m attractive. I would have thought. . . . But I can read you. You’re a businessman as well as a spaceman. You own this little ship. You have to make a profit. You’re afraid that if it’s discovered that you helped me, you’ll lose your profitable charter. Perhaps you’re afraid that you’ll become one of the inmates of Sheol yourself, like Wallace. . . .”
“I never said that I wasn’t going to help you,” I told her. “But there are conditions. One condition. That if you are picked up again, you say nothing about my part in your escape.”
When she kissed me, with warm thoroughness, I weakened—but not enough, not enough. And before the sleep period I rigged the privacy screen in the main cabin, and she stayed on her side of it and I stayed on mine. The next “day”—and I maintained Port Helms standard time while in space—she dressed in her all-concealing coveralls, which were now dry, instead of in my too-revealing bathrobe. We had one or two practice sessions of repacking her in the bale. And before long it was time for me to repack her for good—as far as I was concerned.
And I made my descent to the apron at Port Helms.
There was, of course, something of a flap about the escape of a prisoner from Sheol. The authorities, of course, knew that if she had escaped, she must have done so in Little Sister—but I was in the clear. The ship was under guard all the time that she was berthed in the air lock. Too, there was a certain element of doubt. In the past convicts had hidden for quite a while in unexplored tunnels, and some had even died there. Convicts had been murdered by fellow inmates and their bodies fed into waste disposal machinery.
And then Evangeline—that was her name—was picked up, in Calvinville. She had been caught leaving pamphlets in various public places. She was tried and found guilty and given another heavy sentence, tacked on to the unexpired portion of her previous one. She kept her word insofar as I was concerned, saying nothing of my complicity. She even managed to protect the clothing wholesalers to whom her bale had been consigned. Her story was that this bale could be opened from the inside, and that after her escape from it, at night, she had tidied up after herself before leaving the warehouse.
Inevitably, I got the job of returning her to incarceration. (The repairs to the prison tender Jerry Falwell were dragging on, and on, and on.) She was accompanied by two sourpussed female prison officers returning to Sheol from planet leave. These tried to persuade me—persuade? Those arrogant bitches tried to order me—that during the short voyage there should be two menus, one for the master, me, and the warders, and the other, approximating prison fare, for the convict. I refused to play, of course. The poor girl would eat well while she still had the chance. But there were no drinks before, with, or after meals, and I even laid off smoking for the trip.
And so I disembarked my passengers and discharged my cargo at Sheol. I’d not been able to exchange so much as a couple of words with Evangeline during the trip, but the look she gave me before she was escorted from the ship said, Thanks for everything.
So it went on, trip after trip.
Then it happened. I was having an unusually long stopover on Sheol, and my friend, Don Smith, suggested that I might wish to see, as he put it, the animals feed. I wasn’t all that keen—I’ve never been one to enjoy the spectacle of other people’s misery—but there was nothing much else to do, and so I accompanied him through the maze of tunnels to one of the mess halls used by the male prisoners. Have you ever seen any of those antique films about prison life made on Earth in the latter half of the twentieth century? It was like that. The rows of long tables, covered with some shiny gray plastic, and the benches. The counter behind which stood the prisoners on mess duty, with aprons tied on over their zebra-striped coveralls, ladling out a most unsavory-looking—and -smelling—stew into the bowls held out by the shuffling queue of convicts. The guards stationed around the walls, all of them armed with stun guns and all of them looking bored rather than alert. . . . The only novel touch was that it was all being acted out in the slow motion imposed by conditions of low gravity.
Finally, all the convicts were seated at the long tables, their sluggishly steaming plastic bowls—those that were still steaming, that is; by this time, the meals of those first in the queue must have been almost cold—before them, waiting for the prison padre, standing at his lectern, to intone grace. It was on the lines of: For what we about to receive this day may the Lord make us truly thankful.
As soon as he was finished, there was a commotion near the head of one of the tables. A man jumped to his feet. It was, I saw, Wallace, the ex-spaceman.
“Thankful for this shit, you smarmy bastard?” he shouted. “This isn’t fit for pigs, and you know it!”
The guards suddenly became alert. They converged upon Wallace with their stun guns out and ready. They made the mistake of assuming that Wallace was the only troublemaker. The guards were tripped, some of them, and others blinded by the bowls of stew flung into their faces. Their pistols were snatched from their hands.
“Get out of here, John,” said Don Smith urgently. He pulled me back from the entrance to the mess hall. “Get out of here! There’s nothing you can do. Get back to your ship. Use your radio to tell Helmskirk what’s happening. . . .”
“But surely your people,” I said, “will have things under control. . . .”
“I . . . I hope so. But this has been brewing for quite some time.”
By this time we were well away from the mess hall, but the noise coming from it gave us some idea of what was happening—and what was happening wasn’t at all pleasant for the guards. And there were similar noises coming from other parts of the prison complex. And there was a clangor of alarm bells and a shrieking of sirens and an amplified voice, repeating over and over, “All prison officers report at once to the citadel! All prison officers report at once to the citadel!”
Don Smith said, “You’d better come with me.”
I said, “I have to get back to my ship.”
He said, “You’ll never find the way to the air lock.”
I said, “I’ve got a good sense of direction.”
So he went one way and I went another. My sense of direction might have served me better if I had not been obliged to make detours to avoid what sounded like small-scale battles ahead of me in that maze of tunnels. And the lights kept going out and coming on again, and when they were on kept flickering in an epilepsy-inducing rhythm. I’m not an epileptic, but I felt as though I were about to become one. During one period of darkness I tripped over something soft, and when the lights came on found that it was a body, that of one of the female prison officers. Her uniform had been stripped from the lower part of her body, and it was obvious what had been done to her before her throat had been cut. And there was nothing that I could do for her.
At last, at long, long last, more by good luck than otherwise, I stumbled into the big air lock chamber in which Little Sister was berthed. There were people standing by her. The guards, I thought at first, still at their posts. Then the lights temporarily flared into normal brightness, and I saw that the uniform coveralls were zebra-striped. But I kept on walking. After all, I was just an innocent bystander, wasn’t I?
Wallace—it had to be he—snarled, “You took your time getting here.”
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“What the hell do you think? But we wouldn’t be here now if we could get your air lock door open.”
“And suppose you could, what then?”
“That, Skipper, is a remarkably stupid question.”
I looked at Wallace and his two companions. I looked at the sacks at their feet. I could guess what was in them. The lights were bright again, and I saw that the other two convicts were women—and that one of them was Evangeline. She looked at me, her face expressionless.
“What are you waiting for, Skipper?” almost shouted Wallace.
I’m playing for time, I thought, although I hadn’t a clue as to what I cou
ld do with any time I gained.
Wallace shot me with his stun gun. It wasn’t on the Stun setting but one that which gave the victim a very painful shock, one that lasted for as long as the person using the gun wished. It seemed to be a very long time in this case, although it could have been no more than seconds. When it was over, I was trembling in every limb and soaked in cold perspiration.
“Want another dose, Skipper?” Wallace demanded.
“You’d better open up, Captain,” said Evangeline in an emotionless voice. She was holding a gun, too, pointed in my direction. So was the other woman.
So what could I do? Three, armed, against one, unarmed.
There was more than one way of getting into Little Sister. The one that I favored, if the ship was in an atmosphere, was by voice. It always amused guests. And it worked only for me, although I suppose that a really good actor, using the right words, could have gained ingress.
“Open Sesame,” I said.
The door slid open.
And while Wallace and the woman whom I didn’t know had their attention distracted by this minor miracle, Evangeline shot them both with her stun gun.
“Hurry,” she said to me, throwing the sacks of mood opals into the air lock chamber. “Lend a hand, can’t you?”
No, I didn’t lend a hand, but I accompanied her into the ship. I used the manual air lock controls to seal the lock. I went forward to the control cab, my intention being to try to raise somebody, anybody, on my radio telephone to tell them what had been happening—and to try to find out what was still happening.
She said, from just behind me, “Get us out of here, Captain.”
I asked, “Do you expect me to ram my way out of the air lock chamber?”
She said, “Wallace’s men have taken over the air lock control room. If they hear my voice and see my face in their telescreen, they’ll open up.”
“But there’s also a screen,” I said, “that gives a picture of the air lock chamber. They must have seen what happened outside the ship, when you buzzed Wallace and the girl.”
“Very luckily,” she said, “that screen got smashed during the fight when we took over the control center.”
She’d seen me operate the NST transceiver when I was making my approach to Port Helms the voyage that she’d stowed away. She got it switched on—the controls were simple—without having to ask for instruction except for the last important one.
“What channel do I call on?”
“Hold it,” I said. I had acquired quite a dislike for Wallace but had nothing against his girlfriend. “The air’s going to be exhausted from the chamber before the outer doors open.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. . . .”
I activated the screens that showed me what was going on outside the ship. (From the control cab our only view was forward.) I saw that Wallace was just getting groggily to his feet, assisted by the girl, who must have made a faster recovery that he had. I spoke into the microphone that allowed me to talk to anybody outside the hull.
“Wallace,” I said, “get out of the chamber, fast! It’s going to open up—and you know what that means!”
He did know. He raised his right hand and shook his fist. I saw his mouth forming words, and I could guess what sort of words they were. Then he turned from Little Sister and made for the door leading into the interior of Sheol at a shambling run, with the girl trailing after. No women and children first as far as he was concerned.
“Channel six,” I told Evangeline. “Evangeline here,” I heard her say. “We’re all aboard, and the stones. Open up.”
“We’re relying on you to spend the money you get for the stones where it will do the most good! I hope Wallace can find his way to the nearest Shaara world, where there’ll be a market and no questions asked!”
“We’ll persuade Grimes to do the navigating.”
“Are you taking him with you?” I was annoyed by the lack of interest and regretted, briefly, having allowed Wallace to escape from certain asphyxiation. “Stand by. Opening up. Bon voyage.”
But opening up took time. The air had to be exhausted from the chamber first. How long would it take Wallace to reach the control center? From my own controls I had a direct view overhead. At last I saw the two valves of the air lock door coming apart, could see the black sky and the occasional star in the widening gap. I had Little Sister’s inertial drive running in neutral and then applied gentle thrust. We lifted, until we were hovering just below the slowly opening doors.
Was there enough room?
Yes, barely.
I poured on the thrust and we scraped through, almost literally. And just in time. In the belly-view screen I saw that the doors were closing again, fast. Wallace had reached the control center just too late.
And I kept going.
“Back to Helmskirk,” said Kitty Kelly, “to hand that poor girl back to the authorities. They must really have put the boot in this time.”
“I said,” Grimes told her, “that I kept on going. Not to Port Helms. To a Shaara world called Varoom, where we could flog those stones with no awkward questions asked. I considered that I owed far more loyalty to Evangeline than to the Helmskirk wowsers.”
“But what about those prison guards under siege in their citadel? Didn’t you owe them some loyalty?”
“One or two of them, perhaps,” he admitted. “But what could I have done? And, as a shipmaster, my main loyalty was to my ship.”
“But you could have carried reinforcements, police, from Port Helms to Sheol.”
“In Little Sister? She was only a pinnace, you know. Aboard her, four was a crowd. Too, there was one of the Commission’s Epsilon-class tramps in port. She could be requisitioned as a troopship.”
“But that time charter, Commodore . . . weren’t you tied by that?”
“Oddly enough, no. The original six weeks had expired and it was being renewed week by week. At the time of the mutiny it was due for renewal.”
“And the girl. Evangeline. Did you dump her on that Shaara planet?”
“Of course not,” said Grimes virtuously. “I was rather too fond of her by that time. After we sold the jewels, I carried her to Freedonia, a colony founded by a bunch of idealists who’d take in anybody as long as he or she could claim to be a political refugee. I’d have liked to keep her with me, but there were too many legal complications. She had no papers of any kind, and the authorities on most planets demand documentation from visitors, crew as well as passengers. I got into enough trouble myself for having left Helmskirk without my Outward Clearance.”
“And during your wanderings, before you got to Freedonia, did you lose your priggish high-mindedness?”
He laughed reminiscently. “Yes. I did let her work her passage, as she put it. And I accepted, as a farewell gift, quite a substantial share of the mood opal money.”
She said, not admiringly, “You bastard. I’d just hate to owe you a favor.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” Grimes told her. “I took what she offered because I owed her one.”
DEDICATION
For my favorite wife.
Hall of Fame
SONYA GRIMES was unpacking. Grimes watched her contentedly. She was back at last from her galactic cruise, and the apartment was no longer just a place in which to live after a fashion, in which to eat lonely meals, in which to sleep in a lonely bed. It was, once more, home.
She asked lightly, “And have you been good while I’ve been away?”
“Yes,” he replied without hesitation, bending the truth only slightly. There had been that girl on Mellise, of course, but it had all been in the line of duty. A reminiscent grin softened his craggy features. “So good, in fact, that I was given the honorary rank of Admiral on Tharn . . .”
She laughed. “Then I’d better give you something too, my dear. Something I know you’ll like . . .” She fell gracefully to her knees beside a suitcase that she had not yet opened, unsnapped and lifted up the lid, plunged a slender h
and into a froth of gossamer undergarments. “Ah, here it is. I didn’t want it to get broken . . .”
It was a leather case and, although it obviously had been well cared for, it was worn and cracked, was ancient rather than merely old. The Commodore took it carefully from his wife, looked at it with some puzzlement. Its shape was clue enough to what it contained, but Grimes had never guessed that such homely and familiar masculine accessories could ever possess any value other than a strictly utilitarian one.
“Open it!” she urged.
Grimes opened the case, stared in some bewilderment at the meerschaum pipe that was revealed, archaic and fragile in its nest of faded plush.
“There was a little shop in Baker Street,” she said, speaking rapidly. “An antique shop. They had this. I knew you’d like it . . .”
“Baker Street . . .” he repeated. “In London? On Earth?”
“Of course, John. And you know who lived there . . .”
Yes, thought Grimes. I know who lived there. And he smoked a pipe, and he wore something called a deerstalker hat. The only trouble is that he never lived at all in real life. Oh Sonya, Sonya, they must have seen you coming. And how much did you pay for . . . this?
“Think of it,” she went on. “Sherlock Holmes’s own pipe . . .”
“Fantastic.”
“You don’t like it?” Neither of them was a true telepath, but each was quick to sense the mood of the other. “You don’t like it?”
“I do,” he lied. But was it a lie? The thought behind the gift was more important, much more important than the gift itself. “I do,” he said, and this time there was no smallest hint of insincerity in his voice. He put the precious pipe down carefully on the coffee table. “But you’ve brought yourself back, and you’re worth more to me than Sherlock Holmes’s pipe, or Julius Caesar’s bloodstained toga, or King Solomon’s mines. Come here, woman!”
“That’s an odd-looking weapon you’ve got, Grimes,” remarked Admiral Kravinsky.
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