Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes. He made a major production of lighting and filling his pipe. “So there’s a chance that a small, private operator based on this planet might make a go of things.”

  “A chance,” conceded the Postmistress. “As far as I’m concerned, there are escape clauses in our contract with ITC. For example, if ITC cannot provide a ship to carry mails directly from Tiralbin to their planet of destination I can place such articles aboard any vessel making such a voyage. Mind you, it’s not very often that such a vessel is here when we want one.”

  “The last time,” said the Port Captain, “was five years ago.”

  “It was,” she agreed. She frowned slightly. “It so happens, it just so happens, Captain Grimes, that there’s an urgent consignment of parcel mail for Boggarty. Would you be interested?”

  “I would,” said Grimes, without hesitation.

  “How much would you charge?” she asked bluntly.

  “I’ll have to do my sums first,” he told her.

  “Do that,” she said, “and let me know by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Epsilon Corvus is due in the day after tomorrow, and by some minor miracle she’s actually proceeding from here direct to Panzania—and Panzania, as you know, has the mail exchange.”

  “Boggarty’s well off the trade routes,” said Grimes. “Even from Panzania the consignment would travel by a very roundabout way.”

  “Feed that factor into your computer with the others,” the Postmistress said.

  Chapter 3

  THE PORT CAPTAIN, who lived out at the spaceport, ran Grimes back to the pinnace in his shabby little tricar. It was still raining. It would go on raining, Grimes was told, for three more weeks. And then there would be the dry season. And then the winter, with its high winds and blizzards. Grimes allowed himself to wonder why Tiralbin didn’t go in for weather control to spread the meteorological goodies and baddies more evenly through the year. He was told sternly that Tiralbin was a poor world with no money to spare for useless luxuries. And, in any case, Tiralbin’s main export was an indigenous fruit, the so-called Venus strawberry, prized on quite a few planets both by gourmets and by those few to whom it was an aphrodisiac. Its low, tough bushes flourished in the local climatic conditions; it was a case of leave well enough alone.

  The ground car stopped by Little Sister’s airlock. The Port Captain declined Grimes’ invitation to come aboard for a nightcap—which was just as well; after that afternoon’s session stocks of liquor were running low. Replenishments would have to be laid in—and paid for.

  Grimes managed to cover the short distance between the car and the airlock without getting too wet. He was thankful that he had thought to lock the inner door only, leaving the outer one open. He let himself into the pinnace—his ship, his home. In the tiny galley he set coffee a-heating and helped himself to a couple of soberup capsules. Back in the main cabin, which was also bedroom, sitting room and chartroom, he sipped his coffee and watched the screen of the little playmaster, which instrument was, in effect, his library. (Big Sister, before setting the Baroness and Grimes adrift in the pinnace, had seen to it that the small spacecraft was fully equipped from the navigational as well as other viewpoints, and had contributed generously from her personal memory banks.)

  Boggarty, read Grimes on the little screen.

  Then followed the astronautical and geophysical data, the historical information. It was an Earth-type planet, fourth out from its primary. It had been colonized from a ship of the First Expansion, which meant that the First Landing post-dated First Landings on other worlds classed as Second Expansion planets. But the First Expansion vessels—the so-called Deep Freeze Ships—had proceeded to their destinations at sub-light speeds. Boggarty was even further removed from the main trade routes than Tiralbin. Its exports consisted of very occasional shipments of native artifacts, consigned mainly to museums, art galleries and private collectors. As a result of these infrequent but lucrative sales, Boggarty had built up a large credit balance in the Galactic Bank, which maintained its headquarters on Earth. There was ample money for the human colonists to pay for any of the goods they ordered, by the practically instantaneous Carlotti radio, from anywhere at all in the known universe. The main trouble, apparently, lay in persuading any of the major shipping lines or even a tramp operator to deviate from the well-established tram-lines to make a special call. The only company to make regular visits was the Dog Star Line which, every three standard years, sent a ship to pick up a worthwhile consignment of objets d’art.

  The planet, Grimes learned, was named after the indigenes, whom the first colonists had dubbed boggarts. Looking at the pictures that flickered across the little screen he could understand why. These creatures could have been gnomes or trolls from Terran children’s fairy stories. Humanoid but grossly misshapen, potbellied, hunchbacked, the males with grotesquely huge sex organs, the females with pendulous dugs . . . Curved, yellow tusks protruding from wide, lipless mouths . . . Ragged, spiny crests in lieu of hair . . .

  If the boggarts were horrendous, what they manufactured was beautiful. They worked with wire, with gleaming filaments of gold. Their gnarled, three-fingered, horny-nailed hands moved with lightning dexterity as they wove their metal sculptures, complex intricacies that seemed to be (that were?) at least four dimensional. And these, Grimes learned with some amazement, were no more than adaptions from the traps—in which they caught large, edible, flying insects—that the boggarts had been weaving at the time of the First Landing. (But some spiders’ webs are works of art, he thought.)

  He wondered what the boggarts got paid for their work. There was no explicit information, but in one shot of a cave workshop he saw, in a corner, bottles and plastic food containers, and some of the females were wearing necklaces of cheap and gaudy glass beads.

  He was wasting time, he knew, viewing what was, in actuality, no more than a travelogue—but he liked to have some idea of what any world to which he was bound was like. He looked at mountainous landscapes, at long, silver beaches with black, jagged reefs offshore, at mighty rivers rushing through spectacular canyons, flowing majestically across vast, forested plains. He saw the towns and the cities, pleasant enough but utterly lacking in architectural inspiration, too-regular cubes and domes of metal and plastic. He saw the cave villages of the boggarts.

  He had seen enough to be going on with and turned his attention to navigational details. The voyage from Tiralbin to Boggarty would, he (or the computer) calculated have a duration of thirty-seven subjective days, well within the pinnace’s capacity. Food would be no problem—although he would, in effect, be getting his own back. The algae tanks, as well as removing carbon dioxide from the spacecraft’s atmosphere and enriching it with oxygen, would convert other body wastes into food. The little autochef, he had learned from experience, could use the algae paste as the raw material for quite palatable meals. That same autochef, he had discovered, was capable of distilling a flavorless spirit that, with the addition of various flavorings, was a fair substitute for gin. Tobacco? Luckily Tiralbin was one of the worlds on which smoking was a widespread habit. He would have to make sure that he had an ample stock of fuel for his battered pipe before he lifted off. Fuel? No worries there. The small hydrogen fusion unit would supply ample power for the mini-Mannschenn, the inertial drive, the Carlotti radio, the Normal Spacetime radio, light, heat, cooking, the playmaster . . . And would it be possible for him to lay in a stock of spools for this instrument in Muldoon? He hoped so. Thirty-seven subjective days of utter solitude is quite a long time, but not too long if it is not compounded with utter boredom.

  And then he came to the calculations for which his past training and experience had not fitted him. How much would it cost? How much should he charge? On the one hand, he was not a philanthropic institution, but, on the other hand, he was entitled to a fair profit. What was a fair profit? He supposed that he could regard Little Sister as an investment. A deep space-going pinnace is a very expensive hunk of ir
onmongery . . . A return of 10%? But Little Sister was not a hunk of ironmongery. She was the outcome of miscegenation between a goldsmith and a shipbuilder . . . And how much had she cost? How much was she worth?

  Grimes didn’t know.

  All right, then. How much would the voyage cost him? His port dues here on Tiralbin, for a start. Hospitality to the port officials. Such stores—luxuries as well as necessities—as he would have to purchase before lift-off. Such stores as he would have to purchase after arrival at Boggarty. Depreciation of ship and fittings during the round trip. (But depreciation in a vessel such as Little Sister, built of almost everlasting materials, was negligible.) Insurance? That was something he would have to go into with the local Lloyd’s Agent. Salaries? There was only one salary, and that was his own, paid (presumably) by himself to himself. What was the Award Rate for the master of a vessel of this tonnage? Did the Astronauts’ Guild have a representative in Muldoon?

  It was all quite simple, he realized. He would charge on a cost plus basis. The only trouble was that he did not know what the costs were likely to be. There was no way of finding out until various business offices opened in the morning.

  He let down the folding bunk that he had been using—the other one, intended for the Baroness, had never been used—took a sleeping tablet to counteract the effects of the soberup, told the computer to wake him at 0600 hours local, and turned in.

  Chapter 4

  GRIMES HAD A BUSY MORNING. He was able to arrange a hook-up between the pinnace’s NST transceiver and the local telephone exchange, so was able to carry out most of his business by telephone. This was just as well, as it was still raining heavily and he had no local currency with which to pay for cab hire. As he accumulated data he fed it into Little Sister’s computer. The insurance premium demanded by Lloyd’s was amazingly high, but not so amazing, he realized, bearing in mind the fact that his spacecraft was built of a precious metal. He was rather surprised that the figure should be quoted with so little delay, but, of course, Lloyd’s records would contain all details of The Far Traveller, including her pinnace.

  Finally the estimated cost of the round voyage appeared on the screen. It was, inevitably, frightening. After he realized that his master’s salary was included in the total he decided to add only a modest 10%. He put through a call to the Superintending Postmistress. After a short delay her face appeared on the screen, as his would be appearing on the one at her end.

  “Yes, Captain?” she asked.

  “I’ve done my sums,” he replied. “I don’t think you’ll like the result.”

  “Tell me.”

  He told her.

  Her fine eyebrows arched, but the rest of her face remained impassive.

  She said, “I’m not buying your pinnace.”

  He said, “If you were it would cost quite a bit more.”

  She smiled. “I suppose so. And, after all, I’m not paying the bill. Neither is my government. The Boggartians want the shipment no later than yesterday, and if it’s sent through normal channels it could take a year to reach them. I’ll punch through a Carlottigram and find out if they’re willing to pay the charges. I’ll call you back.”

  Grimes brewed coffee, filled and lit his pipe, settled down to watch what passed for entertainment on Tiralbin on his playmaster, which, in port, could function as a tridi receiver. He watched without much enthusiasm a local version of football being played in pouring rain. One team was male, the other female, but the players were so thickly coated with mud that it was impossible to determine their sex.

  The transceiver chimed.

  It was the Superintending Postmistress.

  She said, “They must be in a hurry on Boggarty. They wasted no time in replying. They have agreed to pay your figure, half, before departure, to be placed to your credit in the Galactic Bank, the other half to be paid on delivery. There is only one slight snag . . .”

  “And what is that?” asked Grimes.

  “They demand that our Postal Service send one of its own officials to travel in charge of the parcels, to hand them over in person. You have passenger accommodation, don’t you?”

  “Of a sort,” he said. “Not too uncomfortable, but no privacy.”

  “As long as I don’t have to share a bunk . . .”

  He doubted that he had heard her correctly. “As long as you don’t have to share a bunk?”

  She laughed. “I’m overdue for a long leave. I want to travel, but travel is damned expensive—as you should know.”

  He said, “I’m finding out.”

  She told him, “I thought that I might temporarily demote myself to postwoman . . .”

  He said, “I thought that I, as a courier, would be a sort of a postman.”

  She said, “But you’re not an employee of our government. You’re a private individual, a hired carrier. You have still to build up a reputation for reliability.”

  Grimes felt his prominent ears burning. He exclaimed, “They have only to check my Survey Service record!”

  She laughed. “And what sort of marks will the FSS give you for reliability? Apart from the way in which you lost your last ship, you had quite a few enemies among the top brass, and not too many friends. You’re on the run from a court martial.”

  The angry flush spread all over his face, then slowly subsided. He had to admit that she was right. As an officer of the Federation Survey Service he was finished. As a merchant officer, a shipmaster—or even a shipowner of a sort—he had yet to prove himself.

  She demanded, “Well, Captain Grimes, do you want the job or not?” She grinned engagingly, “Would my company be so hard to put up with? Or would you rather have some hairy-arsed postman? I could arrange that, you know . . .”

  He looked at her face in the screen. He decided that she would be preferable to a postman, but remembered the last time that he had been cooped up in a small spacecraft—a lifeboat—with an attractive woman. It had been great fun at first, but they had finished up hating each other. However, Little Sister was more, much more, than a mere lifeboat. There would be, with the erection of a plastic partition in the main cabin (and who was going to pay for that?) far more privacy. The food would be much better, even though it had its origin in the algae vats. And there would be a foreseeable conclusion to the voyage, as there had not been on that past occasion.

  He smiled back at her. He said, “All right. It’s on. But you’d better come out to the spaceport to see what you’re letting yourself in for.”

  “It’s a date,” she said. “Expect me half an hour from now.”

  ***

  She was punctual.

  A scarlet, post office car, with a uniformed driver, drew up in a cloud of spray by the pinnace’s airlock exactly twenty-nine minutes after the conclusion of the call. He had occupied the time with housekeeping—a hasty tidying up, the programing of the autochef with a lunch for two, one of the few remaining bottles of El Doradan Spumante put to cool in the refrigerator, gin of the ship’s own manufacture decanted from its plastic container into a much more attractive glass flagon.

  Enveloped in hooded, transparent rainwear she walked from the car, which turned to return to the city, to the airlock. Grimes helped her off with the water-slick coverall, then ushered her into the little cabin. She seated herself at the small table. She looked at the flagon, the glasses, the little bottle of flav, the bowl of ice cubes.

  “So,” she remarked, “this is how the poor live.”

  He poured drinks, raised his glass, said, “Down the hatch.”

  “Down the hatch,” she repeated. She sipped. “H’m. You don’t do yourself badly. One thing we can’t do here is make decent gin.”

  The autochef chimed. Grimes got up to get disposable napkins and—a legacy from The Far Traveller—gold cutlery. Her eyes widened as he laid the table. He went through into the galley-workshop-engine room, returned with the meal on gold-rimmed china. It was ‘steak’, with ‘mashed potato’ and a puree of ‘peas.’ Appearancewise a
nd flavorwise it passed muster, although the texture of the ‘meat’ left much to be desired. (So, he realized, did his choice of a wine to accompany the meal; a still red would have been more suitable.)

  His guest patted her lips with her napkin. “Congratulate the chef for me, Captain. Tissue culture beef?”

  “Not in a ship this size,” he told her. “She’s too small to run to a farm. Just algae, from the vats, processed, colored and flavored.”

  She said, “I’ll not ask what nutrients your algae subsist upon. I’m not altogether ignorant of spaceship ecology. I’m not squeamish either. After all, the sewage of every town and city on this planet is processed and fed back into the land. Do you have coffee, by the way?”

  “Coming up,” said Grimes.

  “You’ve got yourself a passenger,” she told him.

  Chapter 5

  EPSILON CORVUS came in while Grimes, standing in Little Sister’s airlock to keep out of the persistent rain, was receiving the stores that he had ordered. The transfer of funds to his account with the Galactic Bank had been made with quite amazing promptitude and, for one of the few times in his life, he felt rich. He was having to restrain himself from spending money like a drunken spaceman.

  The Commission’s ship dropped down through the grey overcast, glimpsed fitfully through the slowly drifting veils of rain, the arrhythmic clangor of her inertial drive muffled by the downpour. Finally she sat down decisively in the center of the triangle formed by the marker beacons. The driver of the ship chandler’s truck which delivered the stores remarked sourly, “She’s here. At last. And much good will she be to us.”

  “Who’s us?” asked Grimes politely.

  The driver gestured to the name painted on the side of his vehicle. “Bannington and Willis, that’s who. I’m Willis. Those cows . . .” he jerked his thumb towards the freighter “. . . don’t buy a single item here apart from private orders. Bloody Venus strawberries. Tiralbin’s one claim to fame. Ha!” He brightened slightly. “You didn’t order any, Captain. I’ll be back at the spaceport before you push off, I’ll be delivering aboard the Old Crow, so what about putting you down for a couple of dozen cans?”