First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  So what! thought Grimes.

  “S’wot?” demanded the man. Then, to Grimes, “Leggo. Leggo o’ me, you bassar!”

  Grimes said, “We’ll not get much from these people.”

  She asked coldly, “Are you an expert in handling decadent savages? I find it hard to believe that you are expert in anything.”

  The man’s free hand flashed up, the fingers, with then-long, broken nails, clawing for Grimes’ eyes. Grimes let go of the other’s wrist, using both his own hands to protect his face. Released, the caveman abandoned his attack and crammed the handful of fungus into his mouth, swallowed it without chewing. He immediately lapsed into unconsciousness.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” snapped the Baroness.

  “I didn’t do anything,” said Grimes.

  “That was the trouble!” she said. She snarled wordlessly. Then, “All right We will leave this . . . pigsty and return when we are better prepared. You will collect samples of the fungus so that it may be analyzed aboard the ship and an effective antidote prepared. Be careful not to touch the stuff with your bare hands.”

  He prodded a protuberance of the nearest growth with the muzzle of his Minetti. He hated so to misuse a cherished firearm but it was the only tool he had. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, extracting from its folds the Baroness’s watch, putting the instrument down on the floor. He wrapped the cloth around the sample of fungus, making sure that there were at least three thicknesses of cloth between it and his skin. He removed his beret, put the untidy parcel into it.

  He followed his employer out to the open air.

  After they had returned to ground level Grimes ordered one of the robots to get specimens of the purple grubs from a bush, also samples of the leaves on which the revolting things were feeding. Then the party reboarded the pinnace. Grimes took the craft straight up with the automatic cameras in action. The pictures would be of interest and value—the deserted village, the faint, rectangular outlines on the surrounding terrain showing where fields had once been cultivated, the cliff face with the dark mouths of the caves. No humans would be seen on these films; the children who had been feeding from the bushes had gone back inside.

  The flight back to The Far Traveler was direct and fast. Grimes felt—and in fact was—filthy, wanting nothing so much as a long, hot shower and a change into clean clothing. And the Baroness? Whatever he was feeling she must be feeling too, doubled and redoubled, in spades. And the robots, who should have been doing the dirty work, were as gleamingly immaculate as when they had disembarked from the yacht.

  They landed by the ramp. The Baroness was first out of the pinnace and up the gangway almost before Grimes had finished unbuckling his seat belt. By the time that he got aboard she was nowhere to be seen.

  He saw her discarded clothing in a little heap on the deck of the airlock chamber. He heard Big Sister say, “I suggest. Captain, that you disrobe before coming inside the ship.”

  He growled, “I was house-broken at least thirty years before you were programmed.”

  He stripped, throwing his own soiled khaki on top of the Baroness’s gear. He thought wryly, And that’s the closest I’ll ever get to the bitch! Nonetheless he was not sorry to get his clothes off; they were distinctly odorous. He walked naked into the elevator cage, was carried up to his quarters. The robot stewardess, his literally golden girl, awaited him there. She already had the shower running in his bathroom; she removed her skimpy uniform to stand under the hot water with him, to soap and to scrub him. To an outside observer not knowing that the perfectly formed female was only a machine the spectacle would have seemed quite erotic. Grimes wondered who was washing the Baroness’s back—her butler or her lady’s maid? He hoped maliciously that whichever one it was was using a stiff brush . . .

  He asked his own servant, “Aren’t you afraid you’ll rust?”

  She replied humorlessly, “Gold does not corrode.” She turned the water off. “You are now sterile.”

  I am as far as you’re concerned, he thought. It occurred to him that it was a long time since he had had a woman. Too long.

  He stood for a few seconds in the blast of warm air and then, clean and dry, stepped into his sleeping cabin. He looked with distaste at the purple and gold livery laid out on the bed. Reluctantly he climbed into it. As he did up the last button the voice of Big Sister said, “You will now join Her Excellency in her salon, Captain Grimes.”

  Grimes filled and lit his pipe. He badly needed a smoke.

  Big Sister said, “Her Excellency is waiting for you.”

  Grimes decided to allow himself three more slow inhalations.

  Big Sister said, “Her Excellency is waiting for you.”

  Grimes continued smoking.

  Big Sister reiterated, “Her Excellency is waiting for you.”

  Grimes said, “What you tell me three times is true.”

  Big Sister said coldly, “What I tell you is true.”

  Reluctantly Grimes put down his pipe. The stewardess produced a little golden atomizer, sprayed him with a fragrant mist.

  He said, “Now I reek like a whore’s garret.” Big Sister said, “You do not, now, reek like an incinerator.”

  Grimes sighed and left his quarters.

  Chapter 17

  The Baroness said coldly, “You took your time getting here, Captain. I suppose that you were obliged to indulge yourself by sucking on that vile comforter of yours. Be seated.”

  Grimes lowered himself cautiously into one of the frail-seeming chairs.

  “I thought that we would view the record of the orgy again.”

  “The record of the orgy, Your Excellency? I have not seen it yet.”

  “I would have thought, Captain Grimes, that you would have acquainted yourself with every scrap of information regarding this planet before our set down.”

  Grimes simmered inwardly. Every time that he had wished to view the orgy record it had not been available. He ventured to say as much.

  The voice of Big Sister came from the Baroness’s playmaster, an instrument that contrived to look as a TriVi set would have looked had such devices been in existence during the reign of King Louis XIV of France.

  “This record, like the others concerning this planet, was obtained by Commander Delamere from the Archives of the Survey Service on Lindisfarne. It is classified—for viewing by officers with the rank of Survey Service captain and above. You, Captain Grimes, resigned from the Survey Service with the rank of commander only.”

  “Let us not split hairs,” said the Baroness generously. “Although he is now only a civilian shipmaster, Captain Grimes should be accorded his courtesy title. In any case, Commander Delamere, from whom we obtained this copy, has yet to attain captain’s rank. The film, please.”

  The screen of the playmaster came alive, glowing with light and color. There was the village that they had visited—but as a living settlement, not a crumbling ghost town. There were the people—reasonably clean, brightly clothed. There were spacemen and spacewomen from the survey ship in undress uniform. And there was music—the insistent throb and rattle of little drums, the squealing of fifes. There was something odd about it, a tune and a rhythm that did not seem in accord with these circumstances. Grimes suddenly recognized the Moody and Sankey lilt. He started to sing softly to the familiar yet subtly distorted melody.

  Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

  The beautiful, the beautiful river . . .

  “Must you, Captain?” asked the Baroness coldly.

  He shut up.

  It must have been quite a party, he thought as he watched the playmaster screen. There were animal carcasses roasting over big, open fires. Pigs? But what had happened to them? Why were not their feral descendents rooting among the ruins? There were great earthenware pots of some liquor being passed around. There were huge platters heaped with amorphous hunks of . . . something, something which, even in the ruddy firelight, gave off a faint blue glow. And the music . . . Another
familiar hymn tune. The words formed themselves in Grimes’ mind:

  Bread of heaven, bread of heaven, Feed me till I want no more . . .

  Now the party was beginning to get rough—not rough in the sense of developing brawls but rough inasmuch as inhibitions were being shed with clothing. It was fast becoming an orgy. Grimes was no prude—but he watched with nauseated disgust three children who could not have been older than eight or nine, two girls and a boy, erotically fondling a fat, naked crewman.

  Grimes thought that he heard above the music, the singing, the mechanical cacophony of inertial drive units. This ceased suddenly. Then Commander Belton strode on to the scene. Grimes knew him slightly, although this Belton was a much younger man than the one of his acquaintance. The Belton with whom Grimes had had dealings, not so long ago, was still only a commander, was officer in charge of the third class Survey Service sub-base on Pogg’s Landing, a dreary, unimportant planet in the Shaula sector. A sour, embittered man . . . Looking at the playmaster Grimes realized that, apart from aging, Belton had changed very little over the decades.

  Belton looked not only sour and embittered but righteously furious. Behind him were a couple of lieutenant commanders and a captain of Marines, all trying to look virtuous. Behind them were twelve Marines in full battle order.

  Belton recoiled violently from a plump, naked girl who, a jug of liquor in one hand, a platter of fungus in the other, was trying to tempt him. He barked an order. His officers and the Marines opened fire with stunguns. Those revelers who were still on their feet fell, twitching. Grimes saw a hapless woman topple into one of the fires. Belton’s men made no effort to pull her to safety. He watched the Marines dragging their unconscious shipmates toward the waiting pinnaces, caring little what injuries were inflicted in the process. Finally there was a scuffle around the camera itself. It was knocked over and kicked around as its operator was subdued—but still recorded a series of shots of heavily booted feet trampling on sprawling, naked bodies.

  And that was it. The screen faded to featureless gray.

  “Well?” asked the Baroness, arching her fine eyebrows.

  “These things happen,” said Grimes. “After all, Your Excellency, a spaceship isn’t a Sunday school.”

  “But the colony should have been,” she told him. “The founders of the settlement were all members of a relatively obscure religious sect, the True Followers. And the True Followers were—and still are—notorious for their puritanism.”

  “There were spacemen too, Your Excellency. And spacemen are usually agnostics.”

  “Not always. It is a matter of record that the Master of Lode Venturer was a True Follower. So were several of his officers.”

  “Beliefs change, or are lost, over the generations,” said Grimes.

  “But the singing of hymns indicated that they still believed . . .” she murmured.

  Then Big Sister’s voice came from the playmaster. “Analysis of the samples has been completed, Your Excellency. Insofar as the larval stage of the indigenous arthropod is concerned there is protein, of course. Amino acids. Salts. A high concentration of sugars. It is my opinion that the children of this world regard these larvae as their counterparts on more privileged planets regard candy.

  “And now, the fungoid organism. It supplies all the nutritional needs of the lost colonists. By itself it constitutes an almost perfect balanced diet. Analysis of the human excreta adhering to the boots of yourself and Captain Grimes indicates that its donors were in a good state of physical health . . .”

  “Physical health . . .” interjected the Baroness.

  “Yes, Your Excellency. Analysis of the fungus indicates that it is, but for one thing, a perfect food . . .

  Formulae appeared on the screen.

  C2H5OH . . . (C2H5)2O . . .

  “Alcohol,” said Grimes. “Some people might think that its presence would make the food really perfect.”

  “The ways of organic intelligences are, at times, mysterious to me,” admitted Big Sister. “But, to continue. There are other, very complex molecules present but, so far as I can determine, they are non-toxic . . .”

  “And there were no indications of disease in the feces?” asked the Baroness. “Nothing to indicate breakdown of liver, kidneys, other organs?”

  “No, Your Excellency.”

  “Blotting paper,” said Grimes.

  “Blotting paper!” asked the Baroness.

  “A spaceman’s expression, Your Excellency. It means that if you take plenty of solid food—preferably rich and creamy—with your liquor there’s no damage done. That fungus must be its own blotting paper.”

  “It could be so,” she murmured. “And there are some people who would regard this planet as a veritable paradise—eternal alcoholic euphoria without unpleasant consequences.”

  “Talking of consequences,” said Grimes, “there were babies in that cave.”

  “What of it, Captain?”

  “To have babies you must have childbirth.”

  “Yet another blinding glimpse of the obvious. But I see what you are driving at and I think that I have the answer. Before the colonists retreated from their village to the caves there must have been doctors and midwives. And those doctors and midwives are still functioning.”

  “In those conditions?” he demanded, horrified.

  “In those conditions,” she said. “Do not forget, Captain, that the human race contrived not only to survive but to multiply long before there were such amenities as spotlessly clean maternity wards in hospitals literally bulging with superscientific gadgetry, long before every passing year saw its fresh crop of wonder drugs. And perhaps those doctors and midwives will pass on their skills to the coming generations—in which case the colony stands a very good chance of survival. Perhaps they will not—but even then the colony could survive.

  “Nonetheless,” she went on, “I must discover the reason for this quite fantastic devolution. There must have been more to it than the quarrel with Commander Belton. There must be records of some kind in the village.”

  “There are no records,” stated Big Sister. “I sent the general purpose robots back to make a thorough search of the settlement, Your Excellency. It seems certain that the colony’s archives were housed in one of the buildings destroyed by fire. There are no records.”

  “There could be records,” said the Baroness softly, “in the memories of those living in the caves. I must try to devise some sort of bribe, reward . . . Some form of payment . . . What, I wonder, would induce those people to talk freely?” That pretty watch hadn’t been much good, thought Grimes. “My watch,” said the Baroness suddenly. “Have you cleaned it for me, Big Sister? Did it need repair?”

  “Your watch, Your Excellency?”

  “Yes. My watch. It was a gift from the Duke of . . . No matter. The captain brought it back in his pocket. It had been dropped into a pool of . . . ordure.”

  “There was no watch in any of Captain Grimes’ pockets, Your Excellency.”

  Grimes remembered then. The thing had been wrapped in his handkerchief. Then he had removed it, to use the handkerchief to parcel up the specimen of fungus. He must have left it in the cave.

  He said as much. He added, “When we go back tomorrow morning I’ll find it. I don’t think that any of the cave dwellers will be interested in it.”

  The Baroness had been almost friendly. Now she regarded him with contemptuous hostility. She snapped, “You will go back to the cave to find it now!”

  Chapter 18

  Grimes went up to his quarters to change back into khaki; he did not think that even the Baroness would expect him to scrabble around in that noisome cavern wearing his purple and gold finery. When he left the ship it was almost sunset. The pinnace was waiting at the foot of the ramp. There were no general purpose robots to afford him an escort. He had assumed that Big Sister would lay them on as a matter of course. She had not but he could not be bothered to make an issue of it.

  He boarded
the pinnace. It began to lift even before he was in the pilot’s chair. Big Sister knew the way now, he thought. He was content to be a passenger. He filled and lit his pipe. The more or less (rather less than more) fragrant fumes had a soothing effect. His seething needed soothing, he thought, pleased with the play on words. He might be only an employee but still he was a shipmaster, a captain. To be ordered around aboard his own vessel was much too much. And all over a mere toy, no matter how expensive, a gaudy trinket that the Baroness had been willing enough to hand over to that revolting female brat. She couldn’t have thought much of its donor, the Duke of wherever it was.

  The pinnace knew the way. This was the third time that it was making the trip from the yacht to the valley. It had no real brain of its own but, even when it was not functioning as an extension of Big Sister, possessed a memory and was at least as intelligent as the average insect.

  It flew directly to the village while Grimes sat and fumed, literally and figuratively. When it landed darkness was already thick in the shadow of the high cliffs.

  “Illuminate the path,” ordered Grimes.

  As he unsnapped his seat belt he saw through the viewports the rock face suddenly aglow in the beams of the pinnace’s searchlights, the brightest of which outlined one of the dark cave openings. So that was where he had to go. He passed through the little airlock, jumped down to the damp grass. He walked to the cliff face, came to the foot of the natural ramp. He hesitated briefly. It had been a dangerous climb— for a non-mountaineer such as himself—even in daylight, in company, with a guide. But, he was obliged to admit, he could not complain about lack of illumination.

  He made his slow and cautious way upward, hugging the rock face. He had one or two nasty moments as he negotiated the really awkward parts. Nonetheless he made steady progress although he was sweating profusely when he reached the cave mouth. This time he had brought a flashlight with him. He switched it on as he entered the natural tunnel.

  Did these people, he wondered disgustedly, spend all their time sleeping? It seemed like it. Sleeping, and eating, and copulating. But the paradises of some Terran religions were not so very different—although not, surely, the promised Heaven of a sect such as the True Followers.