Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III

by A Bertram Chandler

  Chapter 8

  GRIMES WAS A COMPETENT spaceman but he was no engineer.

  During his Survey Service career he had subscribed to the belief commonly held by spacemen officers regarding routine overhauls of machinery in port by those of the engineering branch. “They’re so surprised that their toys are working properly that they have to take them apart to find out why!” All Little Sister’s machinery had been functioning well when Grimes and his late employer, the Baroness d’Estang, had been cast adrift from The Far Traveller. It had still been functioning well when the pinnace had been intercepted by Drongo Kane’s Southerly Buster. After the Baroness had decided to embark on Kane’s ship, leaving Little Sister to Grimes as a parting gift, all had functioned well on his lonely voyage to Tiralbin. Grimes had lifted from Port Muldoon without a worry in the universe—at least insofar as his ship and her equipment were concerned. He had set his initial trajectory for The Cat’s Eye. From that starfall he would adjust course to head towards the Boggarty sun, homing on the Carlotti Beacon on Boggarty, obtaining fixes as required from that beacon and those on Jones-world and the uninhabited Z314U.

  So—he thought in his innocence—there was nothing to do but enjoy the voyage. Tamara was a good shipmate. This was a holiday for her and she was making the most of it. She played a good game of chess. Her tastes and Grimes’ coincided regarding the entertainment spools for the playmaster. She could coax the autochef into producing dishes that Grimes had never dreamed could be concocted from such unpromising raw material as sewage-fed algae. She improved on Grimes’ homemade gin and persuaded the mechanized mini-galley to distill a brandy that Napoleon himself (after a hard battle and with nothing else to drink) would not have sneezed at, a liqueur that the Benedictine monks might have recognized as a distant cousin to their own famous after dinner drink, a Tia Maria that, topped with synthetic cream, was—in the absence of a potable yardstick—indistinguishable from the real thing.

  And, he told himself with a certain smugness, he was getting paid for all this. No doubt he and Tamara would say good bye without heartbreak when the time came, but meanwhile . . .

  Little Sister fell steadily down the dark dimensions, through the warped continuum. Her inertial drive hammered away steadily and healthily. There was light, and there was warmth. Meals were cooked and served. Entertainment of high quality was available from the play-master at the touch of a finger. And it would be a long time before Grimes and Tamara tired of each other’s company, before each fresh coupling of their bodies failed to engender some fresh refinement of sensation . . .

  And yet it came to pass.

  She moved under him sinuously, rotating her navel against him, contracting her vaginal muscles and, somehow, caused her erect nipples to titillate the skin of his chest while her eager tongue explored his mouth . . .

  The orgasm was explosive.

  She moved under him sinuously, rotating her navel against his, contracting her vaginal muscles and, somehow, caused her erect nipples to titillate the skin of his chest while her eager tongue explored his mouth . . .

  The orgasm was . . .

  Was . . .

  Implosive.

  She move under him . . .

  But although his body responded his mind was suddenly cold, frightened.

  The orgasm . . .

  Exgasm . . .

  Ingasm . . .

  She moved . . .

  He tried to roll off her, but it was as though some fantastic acceleration were holding him tight to the yielding cushions of her body.

  Her erect nipples . . . her eager tongue . . .

  The explosive/implosive orgasm . . .

  She moved under him sinuously . . .

  And, he realized, the thin, high whine of the mini-Mannschenn was no longer steady, was oscillating . . .

  He tried to break free from the strong cage of her arms and legs—and with startling suddenness, at the very moment of implosion, did so. He fell from the wide bunk to the deck, looked dazedly about him, at the crazy perspective, at the colors sagging down the spectrum. He heard her cry out but the words were gibberish. He ignored her, got unsteadily to his feet. The doorway, aft, of the engine room-cum-galley was incredibly distant, at the end of a long, convoluted tunnel, the walls of which throbbed and quivered as though this were a duct in the body of some living creature.

  He took a step—it was though he were wading against the current through some viscous fluid—and then another. Somehow the entrance to the engine room seemed more distant than it had at first. He took a third step, and a fourth—and he was looking down at the casing of the mini-Mannschenn and felt his brain being scrambled by the weird warbling of the machine, alternating from the ultrasonic to the subsonic. He dropped to his knees and began to loosen the butterfly nuts holding the casing in place. He put a hand on each of the grips, prepared to lift the cover.

  In the very nick of time he realized what he was doing. To look directly at a normally functioning Mannschenn Drive unit, a complexity of spuming, ever-precessing gyro-scopes, is bad enough. To be in the near vicinity of one that is malfunctioning can be suicidal—and eversion is a far from pleasant way of suicide.

  Luckily the master switch for the machine was within arm’s length. Grimes reached for it, threw it. The crazy warbling subsided, died, stopped.

  “Grimes! What’s happening?”

  He turned to look at her. She was a naked woman. He had seen naked women before. She was a beautiful naked woman. He had seen beautiful naked women before. And her skin was too pale and the hairless jointure of her thighs made her look absurdly childish. Somehow the magic was gone out of her.

  She said, “That—what we had just now—was what I foresaw at the start of the voyage. But what has happened?”

  He said, “The mini-Mannschenn’s on the blink.”

  She asked, “What’s wrong with it?”

  He said, “I’m not an engineer . . .”

  He remembered how one of the overhaul jobs done by a starship’s engine room staff is a complete check of the Mannschenn Drive, including examination of every hollow ball bearing. He had blandly assumed that the ball bearings in this mini-Mannschenn, presumably of the same super-gold as the rest of the pinnace and her fittings, would be immune to normal wear and tear.

  “I’m not an engineer,” he repeated. “No, that wasn’t meant to be an excuse. It was self-accusation.”

  He lifted the cover from the machine, looked down at it. Even though he was no engineer he could see at a glance what was wrong. The spindle of one of the little rotors had slipped, at one end, from its mounting, was free to oscillate. He poked it with a tentative forefinger and it wobbled. Somehow this motion was just not quite enough for it to foul the other rotors. Had it done so the mini-Mannschenn could have been, probably would have been, irreparably wrecked.

  There was a scattering of golden beads on the baseplate of the machine—the ball bearings. There was a scattering of gold beads and a little heap of curved, golden fragments. So he should have checked those bearings before lifting off from Port Muldoon, or hired one of the Port Captain’s technicians to do so.

  So he hadn’t.

  So what?

  He hoped that there were spares, and tools.

  There were.

  There was no instruction manual.

  There wouldn’t be, of course. Big Sister, the electronic brain of The Far Traveller, had needed no such literature. But, he remembered, she had transferred much of her knowledge to the pinnace’s computer.

  He went back to the main cabin, switched on the play-master.

  Tamara said, “This is no tune to watch some trashy operetta.”

  He ignored her, said to the instrument, “Information on mini-Mannschenn maintenance and repairs . . .”

  The diagrams and pictures succeeded each other on the screen. He said, “Hold it!” Then, “Play that sequence again.”

  While he watched he filled and lit his pipe.

  She said, “Did anybo
dy ever tell you that a naked man smoking a pipe looks ludicrous?”

  “No,” he said. “And if they did, I shouldn’t believe them.”

  She asked, “And how long shall we be stuck here? The consignee of the mail paid Special Delivery rate—which means that the Post Office, my Post Office, is liable to a penalty for every day’s delay over the specified time.”

  He said, “Be quiet, please, and let me watch this sequence.”

  She shut up.

  It should be quite simple, thought Grimes. Once the proper number of bearings was in the channel, the race, the end of the spindle would lock automatically into place. Until this was done Little Sister would, of course still be proceeding in the right direction—but she would be going a long way in a very long time. Once the mini-Mannschenn was fixed she would be going a very long way in a short time.

  There was one snag, as Grimes realized after the passage of about three frustrating hours. The instructional film had shown the maintenance of a full-sized Mannschenn Drive unit—a job for a team of engineers. The maintenance of a mini-Mannschenn is a job for a watchmaker.

  And Grimes was even less of a watchmaker than he was an engineer.

  Somehow he had contrived to unseat four other spindles and the deck of the engine room-cum-galley was littered with golden ball bearings.

  But he worked on with dogged determination, wishing, now and again, that Tamara would get off her big, fat arse and do something to help. He was vaguely conscious of her pale form at the forward end of the pinnace, in the control cab, and supposed that she was either sulking or admiring the scenery.

  Or both.

  Chapter 9

  SHE WAS TALKING TO HERSELF, he thought not very interestedly. He heard her voice but could not be bothered to try to make out the words; he was too engrossed in his ticklish, frustrating task. Then one of the little golden wheels, the spindle of which he had just pressed home into its mountings, sprang out again as soon as his hand was removed. It clattered to the deck and trundled forward through the main cabin. He ran after it, pounced on it just before it got as far as the control cab.

  She looked up and around at him.

  She said, “It’s all right, Grimes. We shall soon have some real engineers to put your time-twister together again.”

  “What?” he demanded.

  “You heard me.” She gestured with the golden microphone that she was holding. “I could see that we were liable to be stuck here, in the very middle of sweet damn all, for the next ten standard years, so I put out a call for assistance on the Carlotti . . .”

  “You did what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “By whose authority?”

  “My own. I may be only a passenger in this toy ship of yours—but I am also the Superintending Postmistress of Tiralbin. It is my duty to ensure that the mails arrive at Boggarty within the specified time.”

  He snatched the microphone from her hand, slammed it back into its clip on the control panel with unnecessary violence. He said, “Do you realize that this could lead to a salvage claim against me? Do you know that a salvage award is based on the value of a ship and her cargo? The cargo’s worth damn all, but a pinnace constructed of solid gold . . . I could never pay out that sort of money . . .”

  She said sullenly, “That’s a very valuable consignment of parcel mail that we’re carrying. And I have my responsibilities.”

  He told her what she could do with them. Then he asked, “Did anybody answer your call?”

  “A ship called Baroom.”

  Shaara, he thought, with a name like that. He said hopefully, “But you weren’t able to give her our coordinates—”

  “No. But they said that it wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “They’re homing on our Carlotti transmission I suppose.”

  “No. They said that they had us in the screen of their Mass Proximity Indicator.”

  And what the hell, he wondered, was a Shaara ship, a ship under any flag, doing in this particular sector of space, hundreds of light years away from any of the established trade routes? (The Shaara Queen-Captain might well be wondering the same about Little Sister.) Anyhow, it was pointless switching off the Carlotti radio which, to comply with regulations, had been in operation, maintaining a listening watch, ever since the lift off from Port Muldoon. Baroom had Little Sister in her MPI screen and, unless and until the mini-Mannschenn was repaired, could close her with ease.

  Grimes lifted the microphone from its clip.

  “Little Sister to Baroom . . .” he said.

  “Baroom to Little Sister.” The voice from the speaker could almost have been that of a robot; the arthropodal Shaara, telepathic among themselves, were obliged to use artificial voice-boxes when speaking with beings dependent upon sound waves for communication. “Do not concern yourself. We are approaching you with rapidity.”

  Grimes’ own MPI screen was still a sphere of unrelieved blackness, but, of course, his equipment did not have the range of that carried aboard the bigger ship.

  He said, “Please cancel my earlier call. I no longer require your assistance.”

  “But it is apparent,” came the voice from the speaker, “that you are not yet proceeding under interstellar drive.”

  “I no longer require your assistance,” repeated Grimes. He noticed that a tiny spark had just appeared in the MPI screen. “You may resume your voyage.”

  “We shall stand by you,” said Baroom, “until you have completed your repairs.”

  “I think,” said Tamara, “that that is very generous of them.”

  Grimes muttered something about salvage-hungry bastards, realizing too late that the button of the microphone was depressed. But no comment came from the other ship. He returned his attention to the screen, set up calibration rings, fed the data obtained into the pinnace’s computer. He did not like the way the sums came out.

  “Two and a half hours minus . . .” he muttered.

  “What does it matter?” Tamara asked. “They’ll just stand by until you admit that you’re licked, and they’ll send engineers aboard to do your job for you.”

  “But that’s a Shaara ship,” said Grimes.

  “And so what? I may not be a spacewoman, but even I know that the Federation is on friendly terms with the Hive. Hallicheki, or even some of our own people, like the Waldegrenans—we might have cause to worry. But the Shaara . . . They’re civilized.”

  “I haven’t time to explain now,” said Grimes. He picked up the rotor from where he had put it, hurried back to the mini-Mannschenn. He must, he knew, get the thing operative before Baroom came alongside. The only Shaara vessel likely to be traversing this sector of space would be one under the command of a rogue queen.

  Chapter 10

  HE HAD THE THING together again. It looked all right—a complexity of gleaming, fragile golden wheels, the spindles of which were set at odd angles one to the other, an instrument rather than a mere machine, a work of abstract sculpture rather than an instrument. A work of mobile, abstract sculpture . . . He put out a tentative ringer, gently pushed the rim of one of the rotors. It moved under his touch, as did, in sympathy, the other components of the device. He felt a momentary dizziness, a brief temporal disorientation, as precession was briefly initiated. So it worked. No one part was fouling any other part.

  So he had proved his capabilities.

  So who needed engineers?

  He called out cheerfully, “Stand by for temporal precession!”

  He reached out for the master switch—there should be no need to reset the Mannschenn Drive controls on the console forward—pressed it down. There was a sputtering, a brief, brilliant coruscation of blue sparks, a wisp of acrid smoke.

  Damn!

  He must have scraped a wire clean of insulation with a probing screwdriver.

  He switched off.

  Yes, that was the wire, or, to be more exact, that had been the wire. Luckily he would be able to replace it without disturbing the rotors. He heard
Tamara cry out, ignored her. She called out again.

  “Yes?” he replied irritably.

  “Grimes! They’re here! You’d better get some help before you do any more damage.”

  “All I have to do is replace a lead.”

  There was another voice. That woman must have switched on the Normal Space Time radio, Grimes realized. “Baroom to Little Sister. Stand by to receive us aboard.”

  He called out, “Tell them that I don’t need assistance.”

  “Grimes! That looks like a warship! There are guns, pointing at us!”

  He hurried forward. Through the control cab ports he stared at the Shaara ship. She was a huge, truncated cone surmounted by a transparent hemisphere. She looked like an enormous, metallic beehive. And, thought Grimes, staring at the extruding muzzles of laser and projectile cannon, these bees had stings . . .

  He spoke into the microphone, “Little Sister to Baroom. Thank you for standing by us. But, I repeat, we do not require assistance.”

  “But you do, Little Sister, you do. It is obvious that your interstellar drive is not operative. By the time that you arrive at your destination you will be dead of old age.”

  Grimes doubted that. With a steady acceleration of one gravity, which could be increased if necessary, it would not be all that long before a respectable fraction of the speed of light was attained. And then there would be the time dilation effects . . . Nonetheless, planetfall would be made at Boggarty a long time after, a very long time after the expiry date of the contract. But the problem was purely academic. Once that wiring was replaced Little Sister would be on her way with time to spare.

  “Baroom to Little Sister. Stand by to receive our boarding party.”

  “I do not require assistance,” repeated Grimes stubborn.

  He saw a flash of blue flame from one of the menacing guns and flinched. This was it. But the projectile exploded a good half kilometer from the pinnace in a dazzling pyrotechnic display. Nonetheless, Grimes could recognize a warning shot across the bows when he saw one.