Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III

by A Bertram Chandler

  “No thank you,” said Grimes.

  “Don’t need ’em, hey? You’re lucky. Mind you, they don’t work on everybody. Not on me, for one. If they did I wouldn’t be selling them! Ha! Well, sign here Cap for what you’ve got.” Grimes signed. “Sure you won’t change your mind about the strawberries? From what I hear you may be needing them after all . . .”

  “No thank you,” said Grimes again. He was mildly annoyed by the assumption that a man and a woman alone together in a small spacecraft must inevitably fall into each other’s arms. Since his appointment to his first commercial command, The Far Traveller, he had studied the Space Shipping Act. He had learned that any master or officer forcing his attentions on a female passenger or crew member was liable to the suspension or cancellation of his certificate of competency. Grimes possessed a civilian master astronaut’s certificate, having been required to pass that examination before his promotion to Lieutenant Commander in the Survey Service. He had no desire to lose it.

  The truck drove off and Grimes went inside the pinnace to stow his stores. He was still finding it strange to have to do everything himself but was rather enjoying it. He sang untunefully:

  “Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold

  And the mate of the Nancy brig . . .”

  A strange voice called, “Ahoy, Little Sister! May I come aboard?”

  Grimes stowed a carton, then turned towards the airlock. He said, “This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”

  His visitor was a small, wiry man in grey working uniform with master’s epaulettes on the shoulders. He introduced himself. “I’m Halley, from the Old Crow, as they call her here. I couldn’t help noticing your little ship when I came in and thought I’d like a closer look at her. The port officials told me that she’s built of gold . . .”

  “She is, Captain,” said Grimes. He waved his visitor to a chair, took one himself. “Coffee?”

  “Thank you.”

  Grimes got up again, went through to the galley and returned with two steaming mugs.

  “Ex Survey Service, aren’t you, Captain?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “And now you’re one of us, more or less.”

  “I’m trying to be.”

  The other man grinned. “I’m afraid that you haven’t tried quite hard enough. As well as being Master of Epsilon Corvus I’m an official of the Guild. A Committee-man, as a matter of fact. You, sir, are about to embark on a commercial voyage in a ship not commanded by a Guild member. I have to tell you that members of the Guild and of the space-associated unions have no option but to declare you black.”

  “Which means?” asked Grimes.

  “Which means that you will receive no clearance to lift from Aerospace Control, for a start.”

  Grimes shrugged.

  “It means, too, that Aerospace Control on Boggarty will be informed that you are black if you do, illegally, lift from Port Muldoon . . .”

  “Call me Ishmael,” muttered Grimes.

  “What? Oh, yes. Ha, ha. I’m sorry, Captain, but that’s the way of it. As a Survey Service type you’ve led a sheltered life. You’ve no idea of the struggle we’ve had, and are still having, to maintain and to improve conditions.” He grinned. “I understand that you’re owner as well as master, so your own conditions are up to you. But if you were, as an employee, in command of this spacecraft you’d be entitled to hard-lying money and short-handed money. You’ve no cook or steward, no engineer . . .”

  I should have included hard-lying money and short-handed money in my estimated costs, thought Grimes. I will in future.

  His guest pulled a sheaf of papers from the inside breast pocket of his uniform coveralls. “I’m not holding a pistol at your head, Captain, but I do strongly advise you to join the Guild. Apart from anything else we guarantee you full legal protection—as master, that is, not owner. But it’s as a master that you’re always liable to come up against a court of enquiry. So, if you’ll just fill in the details and sign here . . .”

  Grimes sighed. “How much?” he asked.

  “Joining fee, five hundred. Annual dues another five hundred.”

  It wasn’t much compared to the profits that Grimes hoped soon to be making, compared to the salary that he was paying himself on paper. And, he reluctantly admitted, Guild membership was an essential to a merchant spaceman. He filled in the forms and signed them. He made out a check for one thousand credits to the Interstellar Astronauts’ Guild, signed that. He received a small plastic card, with his name already printed on it, in exchange.

  Business over, Halley was once again quite affable. He said, “Well, that was quite painless, wasn’t it? Welcome aboard and all that.” He relaxed in his chair, cast an appraising eye around the cabin. “You know, Captain, I rather envy you. No owners to get on your back. No crew to get in your hair, no passengers . . .”

  A female voice called from the airlock, “May I join the party?”

  “Meet my passenger, Captain Halley,” said Grimes.

  ***

  Halley and Tamara Haverstock were already acquainted. Neither much liked the other. The Superintending Postmistress was, to the shipmaster, yet another officious official to make his life a misery, with her unreasonable demands, each and every time that he was in Port Muldoon. Halley, to Tamara Haverstock, was the unobliging representative of the cordially disliked Interstellar Transport Commission.

  “Are you actually travelling in this, Miss Haverstock?” Halley asked.

  “Your ship, Captain Halley, seems never to be proceeding in a direction suitable to my requirements. And now, if you will excuse me, I have business to discuss with Captain Grimes.”

  Halley rose to leave. “Bon voyage,” he said. “And don’t do anything that you couldn’t do riding on a bicycle. Remember Paragraph 118 (c) of the Space Shipping Act. If you do fall foul of it, the Guild will back you up.”

  “What was he talking about?” asked the Postmistress after he was gone.

  “I don’t know,” said Grimes. Actually he didn’t, but strongly suspected that Paragraph 118(c) was the one setting out the penalties for rape, or alleged rape.

  Miss Haverstock looked at her watch. She said, “The consignment of parcel mail, together with my baggage, will be here very shortly. Are all your stores on board? Good. Have you paid your port dues and obtained Customs clearance? Good. If you have no objections we will lift as soon as the mails and baggage have been stowed.”

  Grimes said, “This was certainly a quick turn-around. I was hoping to see something of Tiralbin. Apart from one evening in the Gentlepersons’ Club in Muldoon I haven’t been off the ship.”

  She told him, “You haven’t missed anything. As far as we are concerned here in the south it’s monsoon weather over the entire damned hemisphere, and winter’s set in north of the equator. As you may have noticed, we have no land masses at all in the tropical and sub-tropical zones. So it’s a choice between getting soaked or frozen.”

  “Frankly,” said Grimes, “I’ve often wondered why people live on some of the worlds that they do . . .”

  “Are you getting in a nasty dig at this one? Well, Grimes, I was born here. I’m used to it. At times I even like it, but I don’t suppose I’d like much the planet that you were born on. Earth, wasn’t it? I thought as much. You Terries always contrive to convey the impression that you own the whole damn galaxy but don’t think much of it anyhow . . .”

  Grimes laughed. “Surely we aren’t as bad as that.”

  “Aren’t you?” She grinned at him. “Anyhow, much as I love Tiralbin I want a change of scenery. And my leave does not officially start until I have delivered the mail to its consignee on Boggarty, so, by the time we get there, I shall still have several standard months due . . .”

  A man in a drab blue uniform came into the cabin without first announcing himself. He accorded the Postmistress a grudging salute then turned to Grimes. “You the skipper?”

  “Yes.” />
  “Mail’s here, an’ some travellin’ bags. Where do you want ’em?”

  Grimes saw the single mail sack—it was heavy, and obviously held square boxes or cartons—stowed in the locker that he had cleared for the purpose. Tamara Haverstock’s baggage went into a storeroom off the galley-cum-engine room. He signed the receipt for his cargo. The man left.

  The high-ranking postwoman said, “What’s holding you, Captain? The mail must fly!”

  “I suppose I’d better think about getting upstairs,” admitted Grimes.

  Chapter 6

  GRIMES TOOK Little Sister upstairs. It was his first lift-off in her—his first lift-off, that is, prior to a deep space voyage. While the pinnace had been attached to The Far Traveller she had been used mainly as an atmosphere flier. This occasion seemed wrong, somehow. In a spaceship down and aft should be co-directional. Here—unless the interior of the pinnace were entirely rearranged—the little spacecraft’s progress in space would always be along her short axis.

  He would get used to it, he supposed. With the inertial drive hammering healthily he lifted through the pouring rain, losing sight of Port Muldoon when he was less than a kilometer up. He missed the auxiliary reaction drive that was a standard fitting in most spaceships. It was supposed to be for emergency use only, but the majority of Survey Service Captains employed it, blasting off, when they were a safe distance from the ground, like an archaic rocket. He was not sure that he liked having a woman, even an attractive woman, in the seat by his, watching his every move with intelligent interest. Still, he grudgingly admitted to himself, she wasn’t as bad as the Baroness had been. She did not object to his smoking. He noticed that she had a cigarillo between her full lips, its acrid fumes competing with the incinerator reek of his pipe. She should have asked permission before lighting up, he thought, but was not prepared to make an issue of it.

  Little Sister broke through into the clear air above the cloud cover. The light—from Tiralbin’s sun and reflected from the cloudscape—was briefly dazzling until the ports automatically polarized. She drove up through the thinning atmosphere, through near-vacuum, into the almost complete vacuum of outer space. Below her Tiralbin could have been a giant pearl displayed on black velvet, the surface featureless save for the occasional rift in the overcast, the spiral pattern, near the equator, of a revolving storm.

  Up she drove, up. Lights flared briefly on the console marking the pinnace’s passage through the Van Allens. Grimes adjusted his seat so that he was almost on his back, looking straight upwards through the transparency now uncovered in the roof of the control cab. He had no trouble finding the first target star; it was a blue luminary in the constellation called on Tiralbin Muldoon’s Cat. He was rather surprised that the Tiralbinians had ever gotten around to naming their constellations, but supposed that the skies would be clear during the Dry Season.

  He asked, “Who was Muldoon?”

  “Huh? Muldoon? Oh, I see what you mean . . .” She had adjusted her own chair so that her body was parallel to his. “That Muldoon. He was captain of the First Ship, the Lode Caravel. The story goes that he had a pet cat . . .”

  “Such is fame,” said Grimes.

  He concentrated on bringing The Cat’s Eye into the center of the cartwheel sight engraved in the overhead port. In a real ship he would have been employing gyroscopes to swing the hull about its various axes, here he was having to do it by adjusting the thrust of the inertial drive. It was a ticklish job. Finally he had the target star centered, then allowed it to fall a degree off to port.

  “You had it right,” she complained. “Now you’ll have to do it again.”

  “Galactic Drift,” he said, “has to be allowed for. Now, stand by for free fall. I’m cutting the drive.”

  “Why?”

  He ignored her. The drumming of the inertial drive fell silent, was replaced by the humming of the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the mini-Mannschenn, the humming that rapidly rose in pitch to a thin, high whine. Grimes was used—as much as anybody can get used—to the distortions of light and sound, to the crazy perspective, to the uncanny sensation of deja vu. Sometimes there was prevision, a glimpse of the future, or of a possible future, sometimes only a haunting unease. This time there was only, for him, the unease.

  Things snapped back to normal. He touched the control that brought the back of his chair upright and, with the other hand, restarted the inertial drive. There was acceleration again, substituting for gravity. Up was up and down was down.

  He looked to his passenger. She was still in the reclining position. Her face was very pale. He said, “Don’t look through the ports if it frightens you.” He touched the switch that opaqued the transparencies. He went on, “Space from a ship under interstellar drive is a scary sight, especially for the first time . . .”

  She said, “But I haven’t looked out of the ports. It was just a . . . It was . . . real. What happened . . .” She looked at him, then down at herself. “But it couldn’t have been, could it?”

  He said, “I should have warned you. Quite often when the interstellar drive is started, when the temporal precession field is building up, there are these . . . flashes of precognition.” He smiled reassuringly. “But don’t worry, it may never happen. From every now there’s an infinitude of futures.”

  She said, “I’m not worried. I was just . . . startled. Now, if you’ll unshield the ports, I’ll have a look at what space is like when it’s warped out of all recognition.”

  She stared out at the dim, coruscating nebulosities that should have been hard, bright stars and then, when Grimes rolled the pinnace slightly, down at Tiralbin, which had the appearance of a writhing, roughly spherical, luminescent amoeba.

  She shuddered. “Don’t you spacemen,” she asked, “usually celebrate the start of a voyage with a stiff drink?”

  “It has been done,” conceded Grimes, letting her precede him into the main cabin.

  Chapter 7

  HE BUSIED HIMSELF with the drinks and a tray of savories.

  He raised his glass, “Here’s looking at you.”

  She was worth looking at. Her severe blue and gold uniform suited her. It could almost have been painted on to her splendid body.

  She said, “Here’s looking at you, Grimes.” She sipped. “I hope you have enough of this excellent gin to last out the voyage.”

  He said, “I make it myself. Or, to be more exact, the autochef does.”

  She said, “A versatile ship. As versatile as her master.”

  “Versatile?” he asked.

  “Aren’t you? Survey Service officer, yacht skipper, ship-owner, courier . . .”

  He laughed. “I’ll try anything once.”

  “Will you?” There was something odd in the way she said it.

  Grimes finished his drink, said, “Now I’ll get on with the minor modifications that we shall require. I should have done it before lift-off, but the plaspartit sheets didn’t come down until this morning, with the rest of the stores.”

  “Plaspartit sheets?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows.

  “You know the stuff. Sticks to anything. Used for erecting temporary partitions.”

  “What for?’” she asked.

  “I just told you.”

  “But what for?”

  “To make a light, longitudinal bulkhead in this cabin. The folding bunk on the starboard side is mine. The one on the port side is yours . . .”

  She faced him over the table, looking into his eyes. Her own seemed preternaturally large, hypnotic in their intensity. She said, “I rather thought that it would have to happen, sooner or later. You’re a man, not unattractive. I’m a woman, with all the right things in the right places. When you turned on that Time-Space-twister of yours I had a sort of preview—a very vivid one. So now I know that it’s going to happen. Why put it off?”

  Why indeed? Grimes asked himself.

  He had not seen her touch any fastenings, but her shirt was open. Her breasts were large, f
irm, the pink nipples prominent and a stippling of color against the pearly pallor of her skin. She stood up and, moving with slow, deliberate grace, almost as though she were doing it to music, took off the shirt then pushed trousers and undergarments down her long, straight legs. She practiced all-over depilation, Grimes noted with almost clinical interest—or, perhaps, the lack of body hair was the result of some minor local mutation.

  He had always preferred his women with sun-darkened skins and with luxuriant rather than otherwise pubic growths, but . . . Why look a gift horse in the pussy? he asked himself.

  She moved lithely around the table and—it was the only possible word for her action—pounced, enveloping him in warm, naked femininity. As gently as possible he broke away. She stared at him incredulously. She almost snarled, “You’re not . . .”

  He said, “Don’t worry. I’m heterosexual. But there’s just something I have to do in the control cab first . . .”

  He made his way forward. He switched on the internal recorder. He had remembered Paragraph 118(c) of the Space Shipping Act. It was extremely unlikely that it would ever be evoked, that there would be need to prove that there had been no rape, but a videotape of this occasion would be a pleasant souvenir of the voyage, a felicitous parting gift when the time came for farewells.

  When he returned to the main cabin he saw that she had found out how to lower his folding bunk from the ship’s side and, stretched out on the pneumatic mattress, was waiting for him.

  He shed his clothing and joined her.