First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  She set the tray on the table, lifted the pot and poured. “Sugar, sir?” she asked. “Cream?”

  The mechanical quality of her golden voice was barely discernible.

  “Quite a work of art,” remarked Grimes when she was gone.

  “I’d sooner have something less good-looking in soft plastic,” said Billinger coarsely. “But I’ve been making up for lost time on this world! Too bloody right—as the natives say—I have!”

  “Big Sister. . .” murmured Grimes, looking meaningfully toward the playmaster.

  “So what?” demanded Billinger belligerently. “I’m human, not a mess of printed circuits and fluctuating fields. It took humans to handle the raising of Vega, not the bastard offspring of an electronic calculator and a library bank!”

  “The first time, Captain Billinger,” said a cold, mechanical yet somehow feminine voice from the playmaster. “But should a set of similar circumstances arise in the future I shall be quite capable of handling operations myself.”

  “Big Sister?” asked Grimes.

  “In person,” growled Billinger. “Singing and dancing.”

  “For your information, gentlemen,” went on the voice, “the artificers from the destroyer have now commenced work on my stern. I would have preferred to carry out the work with my own GP robots but Her Excellency maintained that Commander Delamere must adhere to the terms of the contract. Be assured, however, that I am keeping the workmen under close observation and shall not tolerate any shoddy workmanship.”

  “Even so,” said Grimes, “we had better go down and see what’s happening.”

  “That will not be necessary, Acting Port Captain. I shall not lift from this planet until I am completely satisfied as to my spaceworthiness.”

  “I shall be signing the certificate, not you,” said Grimes harshly.

  He drained his cup—he would have liked more of that excellent coffee but this uppity robot was spoiling his enjoyment of it—put it back on the table with a decisive clatter, got to his feet.

  “Coming, Billinger?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said the yachtmaster.

  The two men made their way to the axial shaft, to the waiting elevator, and made a swift descent to the after airlock.

  Vega’s technicians were working under one of the destroyer’s engineer lieutenants. This officer turned his head as Grimes and Billinger came down the ramp, straightened up reluctantly and accorded them a surly salute. He knew Grimes, of course, and like all of Vega’s personnel blamed him for what had happened to that ship. He did not know Billinger, nor did he much want to.

  Grimes watched the artificers at work. Scaffolding had been erected under The Far Traveler’s stern, a light but strong framework of aluminum rods and plates. Power cables snaked over the trampled grass from the destroyer to the equipment in use. That seemed odd. Surely it would have been less trouble to use the output from the yacht’s generators for the drilling, cutting and welding. He said as much to Billinger.

  The engineer overheard. He said bitterly, “She wouldn’t allow it.”

  “The Baroness?” asked Grimes.

  “No. Not her. It’s not her voice that’s doing all the yapping. Some other . . . lady. He raised his own voice an octave in not very convincing mimicry. “ ‘Why should I supply the power to repair the damage that you have done to me? Why should I wear out my generators?’” He paused. “And that’s not the worst of it. She hasn’t actually showed herself but she must have spy eyes planted, and concealed speakers. Nag, nag, nag . . .”

  The voice came from nowhere, everywhere. Grimes had heard it before, in Billinger’s cabin. “Careful, you men. Careful. I’m not some duty great battleship that you’re patching up. I take pride in my appearance, even if you take none in yours. I shall expect that scratch filled and then buffed to a mirror finish.”

  “Who the hell is she?” demanded the lieutenant

  “Big Sister,” Billinger told him, his voice smug and almost happy.

  “Big Sister? She sounds more like some wives I’ve heard.”

  “Not mine,” said Billinger. “Not mine. Not that I’ve ever had one—but when I do she’ll not be like that.”

  “They never are,” said the other philosophically, “until after you’ve married them.”

  “Captain Billinger, may I suggest that you abandon this futile discussion and take some interest in the repairs? And Mr. Verity, please supervise the activities of those ham-handed apes of yours. I distinctly said that each plug must be machined to a tolerance of one micromillimeter or less. I will not accept ugly cracks filled in with clumsy welding.”

  “It’s all very well,” expostulated the engineer, “but we don’t carry a stock of that fancy gold your ship is built from. We could use ordinary gold—but you’ve already said that that won’t do.”

  “And what happened to the metal that your men drilled out?”

  “There were . . . losses. There are always losses.”

  And how many of Vega’s mechanics, wondered Grimes, will be giving pretty little trinkets to their popsies back on Lindisfarne?

  “Very well,” said the voice of the computer-pilot. “I shall supply you with gold. Please wait at the foot of the ramp.”

  The men waited. A female figure appeared in the after airlock and then walked gracefully down the gangway. It was Billinger’s robot stewardess. The spacemen whistled wolfishly until, suddenly, they realized that she was not human. One of them muttered, a bleeding shame to melt her down. . .”

  She was carrying a golden tray and on it a teapot of the same metal, a milk jug and a sugar bowl. Wordlessly she handed these to one of the artificers.

  “My tea service!” exclaimed Billinger.

  “Nothing aboard me is yours, Captain,” Big Sister told him. “As long as you are employed you are allowed the use of certain equipment.”

  “What is all this?” asked the engineer.

  “Just do as she says,” muttered Billinger. “Melt down my teapot and make it snappy. Otherwise she’ll be having the buttons and braid off my uniform . . .”

  Grimes wandered away. The atmosphere around the stern of the yacht was becoming heavily charged with acrimony and he was, essentially, a peace-loving man. He was careful not to walk too close to the towering Vega. He had no reason to like that ship and, most certainly, her captain did not like him. He sensed that he was being watched. He looked up but could see nothing but the reflection of the morning sun from the control room viewports—yet he could imagine Delamere there, observing his every move through high-powered binoculars.

  “Port Captain! Hey! Port Captain!”

  Grimes sighed. There was a small crowd of pestilential cricketers under the destroyer’s quarter. What were the police doing? They were supposed to be keeping the field clear of demonstrators. But these men, he saw with some relief, were carrying neither flags nor placards although they were attired in the white uniform of their sport. He walked slowly to where they were standing.

  “Wotcher doin’ about this, Port Captain?” asked their leader. It was the man whom Mavis had identified as a police sergeant.

  This was the too deep furrows that had been gouged in the turf by the stern vanes of the destroyer during the lifting operation.

  Grimes looked at the ugly wounds in the skin of the planet. They were minor ravines rather than mere trenches. The sportsmen looked at him.

  He said, “These will have to be filled . . .”

  “Who by, Port Captain, who by? Tell us that.”

  “The groundsmen, I suppose . . .”

  “Not bloody likely. You Terries did it. You can bloody well undo it. An’ the sooner the bloody better.”

  “The sooner they’re off our world the better,” growled one of the other men.

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes. He, too, was beginning to think that the sooner he was off this world the better. He was the outsider who, by his coming, had jolted Botany Bay out of its comfortable rut. He had friends, good friends, the Lady Ma
yor and those in her immediate entourage—and that was resented by many. This same resentment might easily cost Mavis the next election.

  “Wotcher doin’ about it?” demanded again the bearded policeman.

  “I’ll see Commander Delamere,” promised Grimes, “and ask him to put his crew to work filling these . . . holes.”

  “Ask him, Port Captain? You’ll bloody tell him.”

  “All right,” said Grimes. “I’ll tell him.”

  He walked away from the glowering men. He paused briefly at the foot of Vega’s ramp, looked up at the smartly uniformed Marine on gangway duty in the airlock. The man looked down at him. His expression was hostile. I’d better not go aboard, thought Grimes. I’ll call Vega from my office. He carried on to the grandstand, made his way up the steps to the shed that was grandiosely labelled SPACEPORT ADMINISTRATION.

  He accepted the cup of tea that Shirley poured for him, went to the telephone and punched the number that had been alloted to Vega. The screen lit up and the face of a bored looking junior officer appeared. “FSS Vega.”

  “Port Captain here. Could I speak to Commander Delamere?”

  “I’ll put you through to the control room, sir.”

  The screen flickered, went blank, lit up again. Delamere’s face looked out from it. “Yes, Grimes? What do you want? Make it snappy; I’m busy.”

  “The local cricket club is concerned about the damage to their field.”

  “And what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Send some men down with shovels to fill the gashes your stern vanes cut in the turf.”

  “My men are spacemen, not gardeners.”

  “Even so, the damage has to be made good, Delamere.”

  “Not by me it won’t be, Grimes. You’re supposed to be the Port Captain and this bloody Oval is supposed to be the spaceport. Its maintenance is your concern.”

  “The maintenance of friendly relations with the natives of any world is the concern of any Survey Service commanding officer. Sending your crew to fill in the holes comes under that heading.”

  “You did that damage, Grimes, by your mishandling of the raising operation. If it’s beneath your dignity to take a shovel in your own hands I suggest that you ask your new girlfriend for the loan of a few of her GP robots.”

  “My new girlfriend? I thought . . .”

  Delamere scowled. “Then think again! You’re welcome to the bitch, Grimes!”

  The screen went blank.

  Grimes couldn’t help laughing. So here at last was a woman impervious to Handsome Frankie’s charms. And Delamere, being Delamere, would automatically blame Grimes for his lack of success. Meanwhile—just what was the legal situation regarding the damage to the turf?

  Grimes stopped laughing. It looked very much as though he would be left holding the baby.

  Chapter 8

  So the day went, a long succession of annoyances and frustrations. He succeeded in obtaining another audience with the Baroness—his new girlfriend, indeed!—and requested her assistance to fill the trenches. She refused. “My dear Port Captain, my robots are programmed to be personal servants and, to a limited degree, spacemen, not common laborers. Would you use your toothbrush to scrub a deck?”

  If it were the only tool available, thought Grimes, he might have to do just that.

  He returned to his office, called Mavis. She was short with him. She said, “I know I’m the Mayor, John, but the damage to the cricket pitch is your responsibility. You’ll just have to do the best you can.”

  Finally he went back to The Far Traveler. The repair work had been completed but he thought that he had better go through the motions of being a Lloyd’s Surveyor, even though it was almost impossible to detect where the golden hull had been patched, even though Big Sister had expressed her grudging satisfaction. He told the engineer lieutenant not to dismantle the staging until he had made his inspection. He tapped all around the repairs with a borrowed hammer, not at all sure what he was looking or listening for. He told the engineer to send to the destroyer for a can of vactest and then to have the black, viscous paste smeared all over the skin where the plugs had been inserted. Big Sister complained (she would) that this was not necessary, adding that she was quite happy with the making good of the damage and that she objected to having this filthy muck spread over her shell plating. Grimes told her that he would be signing the certificate of spaceworthiness and that he would not do so until he was happy.

  Sulkily Big Sister pressurized the after compartment. Not the smallest air bubble marred the gleaming surface of the vactest. The artificers cleaned the gummy mess off the golden skin, began to take down the scaffolding. Grimes went aboard the ship to endorse the Lloyd’s Certificate of Spaceworthiness. The Baroness was almost affable, inviting him to have a drink. Billinger was conspicuous by his absence.

  The aristocrat said, looking at him over the rim of her goblet of Spumante, “This is a boring world, Captain Grimes. I know that Captain Billinger has not found it so, but there is nothing for me here.”

  Grimes could not resist the temptation. “Not even Commander Delamere?” he asked.

  Surprisingly she took no offense. She even laughed. “Commander Delamere may think that he is the gods’ own gift to womankind but I do not share that opinion. But you, Captain . . . You, with your background . . . Don’t you find Botany Bay just a little boring?”

  “No,” said Grimes loyally. (The Baroness must surely know about Mavis and himself.) “No. . .” he repeated, after a pause. (And whom was he trying to convince?)

  “Thank you, Port Captain,” said the Baroness. It was clearly a dismissal.

  “Thank you, Your Excellency,” said Grimes.

  He was escorted from the boudoir by the robot butler, taken down to the after airlock. It was already dusk, he noted. The sun was down and the sky was overcast but the breeze, what little there was of it, was pleasantly warm. He debated with himself whether or not to go up to his office to call a cab, then decided against it. It was a pleasant walk from the Oval to the Mayor’s Palace, most of it through the winding streets of Paddington City. These, especially by night, held a special glamour, a gaslit magic that was an evocation of that other Paddington, the deliberately archaic enclave in the heart of bustling, towering Sydney on distant Earth.

  Somehow Grimes wanted to see it all once more, to savor it. Perhaps it was a premonition. There was a conviction that sooner or later, sooner rather than later, he would be moving on.

  He walked across the short grass to the main gates of the Oval. He turned to look at the two ships, both of them now floodlit—the menacing metal tower that was the destroyer, a missile of dull steel aimed at the sky, the much smaller golden spire, slender, graceful, that was the yacht. They would be gone soon, both of them—Delamere’s engineers must, by now, have Vega’s main and auxiliary machinery back in full working order and the Baroness had intimated that she had found little to interest her on Botany Bay.

  They would be gone soon—and Grimes found himself wishing that he were going with them. But that was out of the question. Aboard Vega he would be hauled back to Lindisfarne Base to face a court martial—and he could not visualize himself aboard The Far Traveler with her rich bitch owner and that obnoxious electronic intelligence which Billinger had so aptly named Big Sister.

  He resumed his walk, pausing once to stare up at a big dirigible that sailed overhead on its stately way to the airport, its red and green navigation lights and its rows of illuminated cabin ports bright against the darkness.

  He strolled along Jersey Road, admiring the terrace houses with their beautiful cast aluminum lacework ornamenting pillars and balconies, the verdant explosions of native shrubs, darkly gleaming behind intricate white metal railings, in the front gardens. He ignored the ground car—even though this was the only traffic he had seen since leaving the spaceport—that came slowly up from behind him, its headlights throwing his long shadow before him on to the stone-flagged footpath.

 
He heard a voice say, “There’s the bastard! Get him!”

  He experienced excruciating but mercifully brief pain as the paralyzing beam of a stungun hit him and was unconscious before he had finished falling to the ground.

  Chapter 9

  He opened his eyes slowly, shut them again hastily. He was lying on his back, he realized, on some hard surface, staring directly into a bright, harsh light.

  He heard a vaguely familiar voice say, “He’s coming round now, sir.”

  He heard a too familiar voice reply, “Just as well, Doctor. They’ll want him alive back at Base so they can crucify him.”

  Delamere, and his ship’s surgeon . . .

  He moved his head so that he would not be looking directly at the light, opened his eyes again. Delamere’s classically handsome face swam into view. The man was gloating.

  “Welcome aboard, Grimes,” he said. “But this is not—for you—Liberty Hall. There’s no mat to spit on and if you call my ship’s cat a bastard I’ll have you on bread and water for the entire passage.”

  Grimes eased himself to a sitting posture, looked around. He was in a small compartment which, obviously, was not the ship’s brig as it was utterly devoid of furniture. A storeroom? What did it matter? Delamere and the doctor stood there looking down at him. Ranking them were two Marines, their sidearms drawn and ready.

  He demanded, “What the hell do you think you’re playing at? Kidnapping is a crime on any planet, and I’ll see that you pay the penalty!”

  “Kidnapping, Grimes? You’re still a Terran citizen and this ship is Terran territory. Furthermore, your . . . arrest was carried out with the assistance of certain local police officers.” He smirked. “Mind you, I don’t think that Her Ladyship the Mayor would approve—but she’ll be told that you were last seen going down to the beach for a refreshing swim after a hard, hot day at the spaceport.” He laughed. “You might kid yourself that you’re a little friend to all the universe—but there’s plenty of people who hate your guts.”