Feeling like a Peeping Tom, another permanent fixture, he leafed through Lynn Davis' service record. She was Terran-born, of course. Her real education had been at M.I.T., where she had graduated as a Bachelor of General Physics. After that she seemed to have specialized in meteorology. There had been a spell with Weather Control, North American Continent, and another spell with Weather Prediction, satellite-based. After that she had entered the service of Trans-Galactic Clippers as Spaceport Meteorological Officer. She had seen duty on Austral, Waverly, and Caribbea, all of them planets upon which T-G maintained its own spaceports. From Waverly she had gone to Caribbea—and on Caribbea she had blotted her copybook.
So, thought Grimes, she's a compulsive gambler. She doesn't look like one. But they never do. It was on Caribbea that she had become a regular habitué of the New Port of Spain Casino. She had, of course, worked out a system to beat the wheel—but the system hadn't worked out for her. There had been the unhappy business of the cracking of the T-G cashier's safe, allegedly thiefproof, but (luckily) very few thieves held a degree in Physics. There had been the new banknotes, the serial numbers of which were on record, that had turned up in the safe of the casino's cashier.
After that—the Rim Worlds.
A pity, said Grimes to himself. A pity. But it could have been worse. If she'd gone to Elsinore, in the Shakespearian Sector, where they're notorious for their gambling, she'd really be in a mess by now.
He turned up the file on Peterson. The absentee meteorologist was another ex-Terran, and also had been employed with Trans-Galactic Clippers. Grimes noted with interest that Petersen had spent a few weeks on El Dorado, popularly known as "the planet of the filthy rich." (Grimes had been there himself as a young man, as a junior officer in the Federation's Survey Service.) It seemed that a T-G ship had called there on a millionaires' cruise, and T-G had insisted on sending its own spaceport personnel there in advance.
Women, not money, had been Petersen's trouble. Twice he had been named as correspondent in an unsavory divorce case. If the ladies had not been the wives of prominent T-G executives it wouldn't have mattered so much—but they had been.
There could be a connection, thought Grimes. There could be. Both of them from Earth, both of them T-G. . . . He shrugged away the idea. After all, it had been said that if you threw a brick at random aboard any Rim Runners' ship, the odds are that you will hit an ex-officer of the Interstellar Transport Federation's vessels.
So it went on—case histories, one after the other, that made depressing reading and, insofar as the quite serious crisis on Mellise was concerned, a shortage of both motive and opportunity. But money could be a motive. Suppose, tomorrow, a foreign ship dropped in, and suppose that somebody aboard her said to old Wunnaara, "We'll fix your starfish for you—in return for full trading rights. . . ."
And whatever else I am, thought Grimes tiredly, I'm not a starfish fixer.
He poured himself a stiff drink and went to bed.
* * *
She said, "I hear that you've been looking through the personnel files, John. That wasn't very gentlemanly of you."
"How did you hear?" asked Grimes. "My doing so was supposed to be as secret as the files themselves."
"There aren't any secrets on this bloody planet, in this tiny community." Her face, as she stared at him over her candlelit dining table, was hard and hostile, canceling out the effects of an excellent meal. "And did you find what you were looking for?"
"No."
"What were you looking for?"
"Somebody who's capable of doing a spot of biological engineering."
"Did you find anybody?"
"No, Lynn."
"What about the spaceport quack?"
"Frankly," said Grimes, "I wouldn't go to him with a slight head cold."
"Frankly, my dear, neither would I." She laughed, and her manner softened. "So you're still no closer to solving the Mystery of the Mutated Starfish."
"No."
"Then I'll solve it for you. There was a bad solar flare about a year ago, and our atmospheric radiation count went up no end in consequence. There's the answer. But I'm glad that you stayed on Mellise, John. You've no idea how hungry a girl gets for intelligent company."
"I'm glad that I stayed, Lynn. For personal reasons. But I really wish that I could help old Wunnaara. . . ."
She said, "I don't like His Too Precious Excellency any more than you do, John, but I often feel that he's on the right tack as far as the natives are concerned. Let them help themselves."
He said, "I discovered this world. I feel, somehow, that it's my direct responsibility."
She replied a little bitterly, "I wish that you'd start shedding some of your feelings of responsibility, Commodore. Don't worry so much. Start having a good time, while you can."
And I could, too, he thought. With a quite beautiful, available woman. But. . . .
She said, "It's a wild night. Hurricane Lynn—I named it after me. You aren't walking back to old Stacey's place in this, surely?"
He said, "It's time I was going."
"You'll be drenched," she told him.
"All right. Then go. You can let yourself out."
For a tall girl she flounced well on her way from the little dining room to her bedroom.
Grimes sighed, cursing his retentive memory, his detailed recollection of the reports from all the planets with which Rim Runners traded. But he had to be sure, and he did not wish to make any inquiries regarding this matter on Mellise. He let himself out of the little dome-shaped cottage, was at once furiously assailed by the wind. Hurricane Lynn had not yet built up to its full intensity, but it was bad enough. There were great sheets of driving rain, and with them an explosion of spray whipped from the surface of the sea.
Luckily the spaceport was downwind from the village. Grimes ran most of the way. He didn't want to, but it was easier to scud before the gale than to attempt to maintain a sedate pace. He let himself into the port captain's large house. The Staceys were abed—he had told them that he would be late—but Captain Stacey called out from his bedroom, "Is that you, Commodore?"
"Who else, Captain? I shall be going out again shortly."
"What the hell for?" testily.
"I have to send a message. An important one."
"Telephone it through to the Carlotti Communications Office from here."
"I want to make sure it goes."
Grimes faintly overheard something about distrustful old bastards as he went to his own room, but ignored it.
There was a very cunning secret compartment built into his suitcase. The Commodore opened it, took from it a slim book. Then, with scratch pad and stylus, he worked rapidly and efficiently, finishing up with eleven gibberish groups. He put the book back in its hiding place, pocketed the pad. Then he had to face the stormy night again.
The duty operator in the Carlotti Office was awake, but only just. Had it not been for the growing uproar of the hurricane, penetrating even the insulated walls, he would not have been. He reluctantly put down his luridly covered book and, recognizing Grimes, said, "Sir?"
"I want this to go at once. To my office at Port Forlorn. Urgent." He managed a grin. "That's the worst of space travel. It's so hard to keep track of dates. But my secretary will be able to lay on flowers for the occasion."
The operator grinned back. Judging by the way that he was making a play for that snooty Lynn Davis the Commodore must be a gay old dog, he figured. He said, a little enviously, "Your message will be winging its way over the light-years in a jiffy, sir." He handed the Commodore a signals pad.
Grimes put down the address, transcribed the groups from his own pad, filled in his name and the other details in the space provided. He said, "Let me know how much it is. It's private."
The young man winked. "Rim Runners'll never know, sir."
"Still, I prefer to pay," said Grimes.
He watched the miniature Carlotti Beacon—it was like a Mobius Strip distorted to a long o
val—turn on its mounting in the big star tank until it was pointing directly at the spark that represented the Lorn sun. He hoped that the big beacon on the roof of the building was turning, too. But it had to be. If it stopped, jammed, the little indicator would seize up in sympathy. In any case, it was shielded from the weather by its own dome.
The operator's key rattled rapidly in staccato Morse, still the best method of transmitting messages over vast distances. From the wall speaker blurted the dots and dashes of acknowledgment. Then the message itself was sent, and acknowledged.
"Thank you," said Grimes. "If there's a reply phone it through to me, please. I shall be at Captain Stacey's house."
"Very good, sir."
Grimes was relaxing under a hot shower when he heard the telephone buzz. Wrapping a towel around himself, he hurried out of the bathroom, colliding with Captain Stacey.
"It's probably for me," he said.
"It would be," growled Stacey.
It was. It was in reply to Grimes's signal which, when decoded, had read, Urgently require information on solar flares Mellise sun last year local. It said, after Grimes had used his little book, No repeat no solar flares Mellise sun past ten years.
Somebody's lying, thought Grimes, and I don't think it's my secretary.
* * *
Hurricane Lynn, while it lasted, put a stop to any further investigations by Grimes. Apart from anything else, the sea people were keeping to their underwater houses, each of which was well stocked with air bladders and the carbon dioxide absorbing plants. He managed, however, to get back on friendly terms with Lynn Davis—or she with him; he was never quite sure which was the case. He found her increasingly attractive; she possessed a maturity that was lacking in all the other young women in the tiny human community. He liked her, but he suspected her—but of what? It was rather more than a hunch: there had been, for example, that deliberate lie about the solar flares. Grimes, who was an omnivorous reader, was well aware that fictional detectives frequently solved their cases by sleeping with the suspects. He wasn't quite ready to go that far; he had always considered such a modus operandi distinctly ungentlemanly.
Then Hurricane Lynn blew itself out and normally fine weather returned to the equatorial belt. Flying was once again possible, and Petersen came back to the spaceport from Mount Llayilla. Grimes didn't like him. He was a tall, athletic young man, deeply tanned, with sun-bleached hair and startlingly pale blue eyes. His features were too regular, and his mouth too sensual. The filed stories of his past amatory indiscretions made sense. And he was jealously possessive insofar as Lynn Davis was concerned. She's nice, Commodore, was the unspoken message that Grimes received, loud and clear. She's mine. Keep your dirty paws off her.
Grimes didn't like it, and neither did the girl. But the Commodore, now that the storm was over, was busy again. At least once daily he argued with the Ambassador, trying to persuade that gentleman to request the services of a team of marine biologists and professional fishermen. He composed and sent his own report to Rim Runners' head office. And, whenever conditions were suitable, he was out to the pearl beds with Wunnaara, at first in the little submarine and then in a skin diving outfit that the spaceport's repair staff had improvised for him. It was a bastard sort of rig, to quote the chief mechanic, but it worked. There was a spacesuit helmet with compressed air tanks, suitably modified. There was a pair of flippers cut from a sheet of thick, tough plastic. There was a spear gun and a supply of especially made harpoons, each of which had an explosive warhead, fused for impact. As long as these were not used at close range the person firing them should be reasonably safe.
Lynn Davis came into the maintenance workshop while Grimes was examining one of the projectiles.
"What's that, John?" she asked.
"Just a new kind of spear," he replied shortly.
"New—an' nasty," volunteered the chief mechanic, ignoring Grimes's glare. "Pack too much of a wallop for my taste. If you're too close to the target when one o' these goes off, you've had it."
"Explosive?" she asked.
"That's right."
She turned back to Grimes. "Are these safe, John?"
"Safe enough, as long as they're used carefully."
"But against starfish! Like using an elephant gun against a gnat!"
"There are starfish and starfish," he told her. "As everybody on this planet should know by this time."
"You think this will kill them?"
"It's worth giving it a go."
"Yes," she admitted. "I suppose so. . . ." Then, more briskly, "And when are you giving your secret weapon a trial?"
"There are a few modifications to be made," Grimes told her.
"They'll all be ready for you tomorrow morning," said the mechanic. "As promised."
She turned on her dazzling smile. "Then you'd better dine with me tonight, John. If you insist on playing with these dangerous toys there mightn't be another time." She laughed, but that odd, underlying note of seriousness persisted. She went on. "And Jeff will be out of our hair, I promise you that. There's a party on in the Carlotti Operations' Mess, and he never misses those."
"I've a pile of paper work, Lynn," Grimes told her.
"That can wait."
He made his decision. "All right, then. What time?"
"Whatever time suits you; 1800 hours, shall we say? For a few drinks first . . . ?" "Good. I'll be there."
* * *
He dressed carefully for the dinner party, paying even more attention to the contents of his pockets than to the clothes themselves. He had one of his hunches, and he knew he'd need the things that he was taking from the secret compartment of his suitcase. There was the Minetti automatic, with a spare clip, neither of which made more than a slight bulge in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. There was the pack of cigarillos. (Two of the slim, brown cylinders possessed very special properties, and were marked in such a way that only Grimes would be able to identify them.) Marriage to an Intelligence officer, he thought, has its points. Something is bound to rub off. There was the button on his suit that was a camera, and the other button that was a miniaturized recorder.
On the way from his room to the front door he passed through the lounge where Captain and Mrs. Stacey were watching a rather witless variety program on the screen of their playmaster. The Captain looked up and around, his fat, heavy face serious. He said, "I know that it's none of my business, Commodore, and that you're technically my superior, but we—Lucy and myself—think that you should be warned. Miss Davis is a dangerous woman. . . ."
"Indeed, Captain?"
"Yes, indeed. She leads men on, and then that Jeff Petersen is apt to turn nasty."
"Oh?"
An ugly flush suffused Stacey's face. "Frankly, sir, I don't give a damn if you are beaten up for playing around with a girl young enough to be your granddaughter. But because you're Astronautical Superintendent of Rim Runners there'd be a scandal, a very nasty scandal. And I don't want one in my spaceport."
"Very concisely put, Captain. But I can look after myself."
"I hope that you can, Commodore. Good night to you."
"Good night, Captain Stacey."
Grimes let himself out. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fall into place; his suspicions were about to be confirmed. He smiled grimly as he walked along the narrow street toward the row of neat little bungalows where Lynn Davis lived. Night was falling fast, and already lights were coming on in the houses. From open windows drifted the sound of music. The scene was being set for a romantic—romantic?—assignation.
Lynn Davis met him at her door. She was dressed in something loose and, Grimes noted as she stood with the lamp behind her, almost transparent. She took his hand, led him into her living room, gently pushed him down into a deep chair. Close by it was a tray of drinks, and a dish upon which exotic delicacies were displayed. Real Terran olives—and a score of those would make a nasty hole in the weekly pay of an assistant met. officer. Sea dragon caviar from
Atlantia . . . pickled rock frogs from Dunartil . . .
The playmaster was on, its volume turned well down. A woman was singing. It was an old song, dating back to the twentieth century, its lyrics modernized, its melody still sweet with lost archaic lilt.
Spaceman, the stars are calling,
Spaceman, you have to roam . . .
Spaceman, through light-years falling,
Turn back at last to home. . . .
"Sherry, John?" asked Lynn Davis. She was sitting on the arm of his chair. He could see the gleam of her smooth flesh through her sheer robe. "Amontillado?"
He said. "You're doing me proud."
"It's not often I entertain such an important guest as you."
The Rim Gods Page 11