Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III

by A Bertram Chandler

  Remembering his own experience Grimes felt sick.

  “Of course,” Wendover went on, “they—the consignors and the consignees—will claim that after the Cluster Queen affair, and one or two others, not as bad but bad enough, the odd behavior of the lerrigans under certain conditions must have been common knowledge among spacemen. Among merchant spacemen, yes. But your background, I understand, is Federation Survey Service and I don’t suppose that you have, in your ship’s library, a copy of Deitweller’s The Carriage Of Exotic Flora And Fauna . . .”

  “I haven’t,” admitted Grimes. “I relied upon the Encyclopedia Galactica. If I specialized in the carriage of obscure, dead politicians that book would be very useful.”

  “Ha, ha.” Captain Wendover permitted himself a dry chuckle. “And now, Captain Grimes, you must excuse me. There’s the problem of compensation for the Third Officer of Epsilon Draconis—he had to get himself involved in a rather nasty accident last night. So if you call in here tomorrow morning I’ll have our legal eagles—Pendlebury, Worrigan and Pendlebury—here to talk things over with you.”

  “And when should the case come up, Captain?” asked Grimes.

  “I’m a spaceman, not a lawyer, Captain. But as you should know the legal gentry are never in a hurry.”

  “But my ship’s under arrest and the airlock door’s been sealed. The only money I have is the Letter of Credit in my notecase and I have to eat and pay my hotel bill . . .”

  “H’m. I could get you away as Third Officer in the Epilectic Dragon—but that would mean that you would not be present in court when the case comes up. Legally that would be in order—I think. After all, your ship is a fine security . . .”

  “I’d sooner stick around,” said Grimes. “If my ship’s going to be sold to pay my bills and fines I want to be among those present.”

  “Would you be interested in a ship-keeping job, Captain? Bronson Star’s in parking orbit—it’s cheaper than paying port dues—and old Captain Pinner’s screaming for a relief. He recently retired out of Trans-Galactic Clippers and he’s used to the social life of big passenger ships. But Bronson Star would suit you. You’re used to being all by yourself in space.”

  “Not all the time,” said Grimes. “But I need the money.”

  “So does old Captain Pinner. But he decided that he needed company more.”

  Chapter 3

  BRONSON STAR was the flagship (the only ship) of the Interstellar Shipping Corporation of Bronsonia. She had started her working life as the Interstellar Transport Commission’s Epsilon Argo. When obsolescent she had been put up for sale—at a time when the Bronsonians were complaining that the standard of the services provided by the major shipping lines to and from their planet was extremely poor. A group of businessmen decided that Bronsonia should have an interstellar merchant fleet of its very own and the sale of shares in this enterprise provided initial working capital. But it had not been an economically viable enterprise. On voyages out of Bronsonia Bronson Star barely broke even. On voyages back to her home world, with almost empty holds, she operated at a dead loss.

  So the Interstellar Shipping Corporation of Bronsonia swallowed its pride and decommissioned its pet white elephant, having her placed in parking orbit about the planet. There she would remain until such time as a purchaser was found for her. Nonetheless she was too expensive a hunk of hardware to be left entirely unattended; apart from anything else, Lloyd’s of London refused to insure her unless she were in the charge of a qualified ship-keeping officer.

  The first of these had been the elderly but company-loving Captain Pinner—a typical big passenger shipmaster, Grimes had thought during the comprehensive handing over. The second of these was Grimes. He hoped, as he saw Captain Pinner into the airlock from which he would board the waiting shuttle, that this job would suit him very nicely until his complicated affairs were sorted out. He had quite comfortable living quarters and the life-support systems were working smoothly. The auxiliary hydrogen fusion power generator supplied more than enough current for the requirements of only one man. There was a late model autochef—not nearly so sophisticated as the one aboard Little Sister but adequate—and the farm deck had been well maintained; there would be no need to fall back on the algae from the air-purification and sewage-conversion system for nutriment.

  After only a week Grimes found that the job was getting him down. He was used to loneliness, especially during his voyages in Little Sister, but aboard his own ship there had always been a sense of purpose; he had been going somewhere. Here, in Bronson Star, he was going nowhere. As the ship was in an equatorial synchronous orbit this was obvious. She was hanging almost directly over a chain of islands that looked like a sea serpent swimming from east to west—a wedge-shaped head trailed by a string of diminishing wedges. At first he had rather liked the appearance of it but soon was pleased rather than otherwise whenever it was obscured by cloud. That stupid, mythological beast was going nowhere, just as Bronson Star was.

  Yet time passed. There were his twice-daily radio calls to Aerospace Control and, now and again, one to Captain Wendover, the Guild Secretary. Wendover could only tell him that it would be quite some time before the lerrigan case came up. He exercised regularly in the ship’s gymnasium, an essential routine to one living in Free Fall conditions. He was able to adjust the controls of the autochef so that it would produce meals exactly to his taste; fortunately there was a good supply of spices and other seasonings. He refrained from tinkering with other essential machinery; as long as it was working well he preferred to leave it severely alone. The playmaster in the captain’s dayroom was an old model and must have come with the ship when she was purchased from the Commission but it was satisfactorily operational. The trouble there was that few of the TriVi programs broadcast from the stations on Bronsonia appealed to Grimes and the same could be said of the majority of the spools in the ship’s library. Somebody must have had a passion for the Trust In God school of playwriting (as Grimes irreverently referred to it). He would have preferred pornography.

  The days—the weeks—went by.

  Grimes considered making further modifications to the autochef so that it could supply him with liquor; even an old model such as this could have produced a passable vodka. Yet he held back. In the final analysis alcohol is no substitute for human company but makes the addict unfit for such.

  Chapter 4

  BUT GRIMES got his human company.

  He was awakened in the small hours of the morning by the shrilling of the radar alarm. His first thought was that this must be a meteor on a collision course. By the time that he had sealed himself into his spacesuit—even though, to alleviate boredom, he had been carrying out daily emergency drills, the operation took many seconds—he was thinking that the hunk of cosmic debris should have struck by now. A merchant ship’s radar does not operate at the same extremely long ranges as the installations aboard fighting vessels. Too, the alarm kept on sounding, which indicated that whatever had set it off was still in close vicinity to Bronson Star.

  He left his quarters, made for the control room. He went at once to the radar screen. Yes, there was something out there all right, something big. Its range, a mere one kilometer, was neither opening nor closing; its azimuth was not changing. The shuttle from Port Bronson? wondered Grimes. Possibly—but surely Aerospace Control would have warned him that it was coming out to him. He was about to go to the transceiver to call the duty officer at the spaceport when his attention was diverted by a sharp tapping noise, audible even through his helmet. He opened the visor to hear better and to locate the source of the sound. It was coming from one of the viewports.

  There, was something—no, somebody—outside. He could see a helmeted head and, through the, transparent faceplate a pale face. He kicked himself away from the transceiver, fetched up against the viewport rather harder than he had intended. He stared into the eyes of the intruder. It was a woman staring back at him. Her wide mouth moved. She seemed annoyed th
at he made no reply to what she was saying. He nudged with his chin the on-off button that actuated his own suit radio.

  “Help!” she said. “Help! This is urgent. Orbital met. station Beta. Explosion. Atmosphere lost . . .”

  One of the orbital met. stations? What the hell was it doing here?

  “Don’t just stand there! Open your airlock door and let us in! Some fool forgot to maintain our suit air bottles . . .”

  “Opening up,” said Grimes, pushing himself away from the port and toward the auxiliary machinery control panel. He jabbed a gloved forefinger at the requisite buttons, saw the illuminated PUMP OPERATING sign come on, then PUMP STOPPED, then OUTER DOOR OPEN. The call to Aerospace Control, he decided, could wait until he had the survivors safely on board. He left the control room, hurrying as well as he could in the restrictive space armor, made his way to the head of the axial shaft. Fortunately the elevator cage was already at Captain’s Flat level so he did not have to wait for it. Within two minutes he was in the airlock vestibule, watching the illuminated signs over the inner door. At last the OUTER DOOR OPEN was replaced by OUTER DOOR CLOSED. The needle of the airlock pressure gauge began to creep upward from Zero, finally stopped. Before Grimes could thumb the local control button—which, of course, was duplicated inside the chamber—the door began to open. Before it had done so fully a spacesuited figure shuffled through, careful not to break the contact of magnetic soles with the deck.

  It was the woman, Grimes realized, with whom he had already talked. He realized, too, that she was holding a heavy pistol of unfamiliar make and that it was pointed at his belly.

  Her voice, through his helmet phones, was coldly vicious.

  “Don’t try anything or I’ll blow your guts through your backbone!”

  She was followed by three other spacesuited figures. They, too, were armed.

  “Take us up to the control room,” ordered the woman.

  Grimes had no option but to obey.

  ***

  Only two of the intruders accompanied Grimes into the elevator cage, riding forward (there would be no “up” or “down” until the ship was accelerating) to Control. They told Grimes, menacing him with their weapons, to sit down. He did so, in the chair by the NST transceiver, thinking that he might, given half an opportunity, try to get out a call to Aerospace Control. But the woman anticipated this, fastening his seat belt so that it confined his arms as well as his body.

  She asked, “Is this atmosphere breathable?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  “Then why the hell are you wearing a spacesuit?”

  “I was awakened by the radar alarm. I thought that it might be a meteor and that the ship might be holed.”

  “The alarm? It’s not sounding now.”

  It wasn’t. The craft that had set it off must now be drifting away from Bronson Star, Grimes thought.

  “And the air is good, you say? There’s just one way of finding out.”

  But her hands went not to her own helmet but to Grimes’, twisted, lifted. “Thank you,” said Grimes, not overly sarcastically. The ship’s atmosphere was better than that inside his suit.

  “He hasn’t died,” said the woman, “so it must be all right.”

  She took off her own headpiece. Her companion followed suit. Grimes looked at the skyjackers curiously. The woman’s face was thin, with fine bone structure, with eyes so deep a blue as to be almost black. Her glossy brown hair was swept back to a coil at the nape of her neck. Her mouth was wide, full lipped, palely pink in contrast to the deep tan of her skin. The man could have sat as a model for one of the more decadent Roman emperors. Greasy black ringlets framed a fleshy face, with jutting nose over a petulant mouth.

  She said, “We are taking your ship. If you cooperate you will live.”

  “For the time being,” said the man nastily.

  Grimes said nothing.

  “Has the cat got your tongue?” she asked.

  He decided that he had better say something. In any case he wanted to find out what this was all about.

  “Cooperate?” he queried. “How?”

  “You know this ship,” she said. “We don’t. Furthermore—I’ll be frank—our navigator got himself killed when we took over the met. satellite . . .” She laughed. “We’re all of us spacepersons, of a sort—but met. wallahs. Orbital flights only, apart from Hodge . . .”

  “Hodge?”

  “You’ll meet him. He’s served as engineer in deep space ships. He’s checking up now . . .”

  A voice came from the intercom speaker. “Hodge to Lania. Main hydrogen fusion power generator operating. Inertial and Mannschenn Drives on Stand-By. She’s all yours. You’d better get her the hell out of here before the Aerospace Control boys realize that Station Beta’s not where she’s supposed to be.”

  “Take her away,” ordered Lania, addressing Grimes, making a threatening gesture with her gun hand. Her companions also displayed their weapons menacingly.

  “If I’m dead,” said Grimes reasonably, “I shan’t be able to take this ship anywhere.”

  “If you’re dead,” she said, “you’re dead. Period. It’s quite permanent, you know. Are you going to play along or not?”

  “I’ll play,” muttered Grimes. “But you have to release me first.”

  “Cover him, Paul,” she said to her companion, handing him her own pistol. She unmapped the catch of Grimes’ seat belt, standing to one side so as to leave a clear field of fire for the guns. Then she stepped smartly back and retrieved her own weapon.

  “I have to sit in the command chair,” said Grimes.

  “Then sit in the command chair. We’ll be sitting behind you. We’re not such fools as to remain standing while you’re setting trajectory.”

  “Where do you want to go?” asked Grimes.

  “Just get us out of here, fast, the way she’s heading now. Mannschenn Drive as soon as you can so that we can’t be picked up by Aerospace Control’s radar. We’ll set trajectory properly later.”

  Grimes went through the familiar routine. He almost enjoyed it, this awakening of a slumbering ship, this breaking out and away from that deadly dull parking orbit. He would have enjoyed it had he not been acting under duress. There was the arrhythmic cacophony of the inertial drive and with the acceleration, blessed gravity again after the weeks of Free Fall. The ship was now headed, he saw, looking up through the transparency of the forward viewport, for the bright star that was the major luminary of the constellation called, by the Bronsonians, the Hobbit. He did not suppose that any world revolving about that primary would be the destination but it was as good a target star as any for the time being.

  He cut the inertial drive. Would the sudden return to weightless conditions give him the opportunity to do something, anything? From behind him he heard the tense whisper, “Watch it, Grimes! Watch it. We have you covered.” He sighed, audibly. He said, “Stand by Mannschenn Drive, for temporal disorientation.”

  There was the almost inaudible humming, a vibration rather than a sound, as the gyroscopes began to spin, a low hum that gradually heightened its pitch to a thin, high whine. As always, Grimes visualized that complexity of gleaming rotors, spinning, tumbling, precessing, warping the Continuum about the ship and all aboard her. Perspective was distorted and colors sagged down the spectrum. There was the usual dizziness, the faint nausea—and then inside the ship all was normal once more but outside, seen through the viewports the stars were no longer hard, diamond-sharp points of light but writhing, iridescent nebulosities. Still in view, just abaft the beam, was Bronsonia, no longer a sphere but a sluggishly pulsating ellipsoid.

  Grimes restarted the inertial drive and it dwindled to invisibility.

  Chapter 5

  HODGE AND HIS COMPANION came up to Control.

  They were spacesuited still but with the faceplates of their helmets open, their heavy gauntlets tucked into their belts. Hodge was a little man with coarse, dark hair growing low on his forehead, with muddy brown
eyes under thick brows, a bulbous nose and a mouth that was little more than a wrinkle in the deeply tanned skin of his face over a receding chin. The Last of the Neanderthalers, thought Grimes. He remembered them—his mind was a junk room littered with scraps of unrelated knowledge—reading somewhere that Neanderthal Man had been a technician superior to the more conventionally human Cro-Magnards.

  The person with Hodge was also of less than average height. The lustrous hair that framed her face was golden with a reddish tint. Unusual for a blonde, she was brown-eyed. Her face was not quite chubby, her nose was slightly uptilted, her scarlet-lipped mouth was generous. Grimes thought—even now he could regard an attractive woman with interest—A lovely dollop of trollop. And what was she doing in this galley?

  Hodge growled, “It’s all systems ‘Go.’”

  “All systems have gone,” commented Lania. “Or didn’t you notice? And what about the life-support systems, Susie? That’s your department.”

  “We’ll not starve,” replied the small blonde. Her voice, a rich contralto, was not the childish soprano that Grimes had expected. “We may not live like kings . . .” and why, Grimes wondered, should Hodge laugh, should the other male skyjacker scowl? “. . . but we’ll not go hungry or thirsty or asphyxiate.”

  “After all,” contributed Grimes, “I didn’t.”

  “Shut up, you!” snapped Lania. She addressed the others, “I suggest, Paul, that we continue on this trajectory until we’ve gotten ourselves organized. We have to arrange accommodation for ourselves to begin with. So, Hodge, I’d like you to fit a lock on the door of the Third Officer’s cabin that can be operated only from the outside. Captain Grimes . . .” so she knew his name . . . “will shift his things—such things as we allow him to keep, that is—to that accommodation. Paul and I will occupy the Master’s suite. You, Hodge, should be happy in the Chief Engineer’s quarters. And you, Susie, can take up residence in the Purser’s cabin. So, Grimes, get moving!”