Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III

by A Bertram Chandler

  Grimes didn’t like it; somehow he resented this demotion accommodation-wise even more than the seizure of the ship. It was many a long year since he had occupied a junior officer’s cabin. But there was no arguing with the pistols that were pointing at him.

  He unsnapped the buckle of his seat belt, rose from his chair and walked slowly to the hatch that gave access to the deck below Control. The others followed him but the engineer, Hodge, did not accompany them into the accommodation that Grimes had come to regard as a sort of home.

  Clothing he would need, thought Grimes, and toilet gear, and pipe and tobacco. And, if he were to be incarcerated, reading matter; from a very early age he had been addicted to the printed word.

  “Take off your spacesuit, Grimes,” ordered Lania. “Leave it here.”

  “But . . .”

  “Do as I say. Do you think that we want you escaping and clambering around the outside of the ship?”

  Grimes had donned the protective garment hastily when the alarm sounded, had not taken time to put on the longjohns that were the usual underwear with space armor. Although he had always regarded the fantastically persistent nudity taboo as absurd, he was reluctant to disrobe; nakedness on a sunny beach among fellow nudists is altogether different from being unclothed surrounded by hostile, fully dressed, armed strangers. But he had no option but to do as he was told. He stripped. Lania looked at him coldly, almost contemptuously, Susie regarded him with frank appraisal. He felt his prominent ears reddening with embarrassment. The flush spread to his face, down over his body.

  He asked, with what dignity he could muster, “Can I dress now?”

  “Your watch,” demanded Lania. “You’ll know nothing, not even the time, except when we require your services.”

  He loosened the wrist strap, dropped the instrument on top of the discarded spacesuit.

  Lania said, “Susie, get a shirt and shorts out of his wardrobe. Make sure that there’s nothing in the pockets.”

  The other woman obeyed, handing the garments to Grimes. He dressed hastily.

  “Toilet gear?” he asked.

  “Permitted,” said Lania. “Get it out of the bathroom for him, Susie.”

  “My pipe . . . Tobacco . . .”

  “Yes. You can get that rubbish out of here; neither of us smokes. But no lighter or matches or whatever you use for ignition.”

  “But . . .”

  “You heard me. Fire is a weapon.”

  Grimes decided not to argue. He said, “If I’m to be imprisoned for most of this voyage I’d like some books.”

  “We haven’t spared your life, Grimes, so that you can catch up on your back reading.”

  Susie intervened. “He won’t be navigating all the time. Let him have something to keep his mind occupied.”

  “Oh, all right. Give him his bedtime stories.”

  Grimes took two volumes from the bookcase, both of them novels left by his predecessor and which he had never gotten around to reading.

  “All right,” snapped Lania. “Enough. Get him out of here.”

  Clutching his pitifully few possessions he left what were no longer his own quarters, was hustled down a deck to the officers’ flat. The Third Officer’s cabin had been prepared for his occupancy. Hodge had found a combination padlock in the engine room stores, had welded a hasp and staple to the door and its frame. The main consideration, however, had been security rather than comfort. There was no bed linen on the bunk and the deckhead light tube was defective. The chair by the desk looked decidedly rickety. The settee cushion cover was torn. The only touch of color was a shipchandler’s calendar, useless for telling the date save on its planet of origin, depicting in startling, three-dimensional color a young lady proudly displaying her supernormal mammary development.

  “Stay here until we want you,” ordered Lania.

  When the door shut after her, when Grimes heard the sharp click of the padlock snapping shut, he knew that all he could do was just that.

  ***

  He made a thorough search of his new quarters. The toilet facilities, he was relieved to find, were operational although very cramped after the ones that he had become accustomed to. In one of the desk drawers were a few tattered magazines; evidently the Third Mate of Bronson Star—whoever he was and whatever he was doing now—had been a devotee of Hard Downbeat. Grimes permitted himself a sneer; he had never understood how that derivation from the ancient Portuguese fado had achieved such popularity. Then, in another drawer, he found a treasure—a rechargeable electric lighter. He pressed the stud and the ignition element at the end of the little cylinder glowed into incandescence. He made no attempt to fight temptation; after all he had become accustomed, over the years, to starting his day with a cup of coffee and a pipe of tobacco. This day had started some considerable time ago and it didn’t look as though there were going to be any coffee but his pipe would be better than nothing. It was an aid to thinking.

  He went through to the tiny bathroom, made sure that the exhaust fan was functioning, then lit up. He started to think about his predicament. He realized, with something of a shock, that there was something that he should have brought with him into what was to be his prison cell. This was a solidograph of Maggie Lazenby, a very special one, made on her home world, Arcadia. This planet being blessed with a subtropical climate almost from pole to pole, its inhabitants went about naked most of the time and would no more have dreamed of wearing a costume on the beach than under the shower in the bathroom . . . The solidograph was in one of the drawers of the wardrobe; Grimes had placed it there rather than have it drifting around, with the possibility of damage, while the ship was in free fall. Perhaps, he thought, it would stay there. Perhaps Lania and Paul would not find it. He hated the idea of that fat slob holding that three-dimensional portrait of the naked Maggie in his greasy hands . . .

  Perhaps if he asked . . .

  But if he did Lania and Paul would know of its existence.

  He decided that he might as well have a shower, freshen up. He stripped, stood in the little cubicle to be sprayed with hot water and detergent. He applied depilatory cream to his face, rinsed, then dried off under the warm air blast.

  Naked, he padded through into the cabin just as the outer door opened, admitting Susie. Hodge, carrying the inevitable pistol, was behind her. Once again Grimes was at a disadvantage but, somehow, did not feel the same embarrassment that he had felt before. Susie smiled sweetly. Hodge grinned, displaying strong, yellow teeth, aimed his pistol where it would do maximum if not immediately lethal damage.

  Susie said, “You’re wanted in Control. You can come as you are if you wish.”

  He said briefly, “I’ll dress.”

  As he pulled on his shorts and shirt he noticed that she and Hodge were no longer wearing spacesuits but were in a uniform that was strange to him. They must have brought a change of clothing with them from the meteorological satellite—but the devices on the shoulder boards of their shirts had no connection with Bronsonian meteorology or meteorology in general. Silver stars? Common enough, perhaps; people were wearing stars as marks of rank long, long before the first clumsy rocket soared out and away from old Earth. But golden crowns? There was no monarchy on Bronsonia. Surely, thought Grimes, these people could not be refugees from the Waverley Royal Mail . . .

  Then, with Susie and Hodge bringing up the rear, he made his way to the control room.

  Chapter 6

  LANIA AND PAUL were also wearing the strange uniform although theirs was black and not, as in the case of Susie and Hodge, slate grey, but they wore long trousers and not shorts and high-necked blouses rather than shirts. And Paul’s shoulder boards bore veritable clusters of silver stars under the golden crowns and although Lania’s were not so profusely star-spangled each one carried a not-so-minor constellation.

  “Be seated, Grimes,” ordered Lania.

  Sullenly Grimes complied.

  “Now,” she went on, “we’ll find out if you can navigate. I’ll
tell you where I want you to take this rust bucket . . .”

  Grimes said nothing but he must have looked as though he were thinking.

  “Be careful, Grimes. If the thought has flickered across your tiny mind that you can turn the ship around and head back for Bronsonia, forget it. We may not be navigators—but even we would be aware of such a large alteration of trajectory. And even if we should somehow fail to notice what you did we would know as soon as we got there. And then . . .”

  She jerked her pistol suggestively.

  You’re enjoying this, thought Grimes. You female-chauvinist bitch . . .

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “In future,” she told him, “please address me as Highness.”

  He stared at her. She was quite serious although he noticed Susie and Hodge exchange a sardonic glance. Her . . . husband? lover? did not seem to find what she had said at all out of the ordinary, however, merely maintained his pose of superior boredom.

  “Where to, Highness?” repeated Grimes.

  “Porlock.”

  “I shall have to take a fix, Highness, and then I have to set up the chart and identify the Porlock sun . . .”

  “We have you along, Grimes, just to handle such sordid details.”

  He got up from his chair, went to the Carlotti transceiver. He wondered briefly if he would be able to push out a message over the interstellar communications system but realized, almost at once, that this would be impossible. Somebody—Hodge, presumablyremoved vital components. The equipment was now a receiver only, although capable of direction finding. He returned to the chart tank, ran up a dead-reckoning trajectory from Bronsonia, noted which three Carlotti Beacon stations in relatively nearby space were most advantageously situated with reference to the ship. He took his bearings, saw that the three filaments of luminescence intersected very close indeed to his estimated position. (If they had not done so there would have been something somewhere seriously wrong.) He set up an extrapolated trajectory from the fix.

  Now, Porlock . . .

  A navigator he might be but he had no idea as to where in the universe it might be although he recalled the circumstances of its naming, the story being one of the legends of the Survey Service. One of the old-time Commodores, a man whose name was Coleridge and who claimed descent from that poet, had been interrupted while he was doing something important by a call from the control room of his ship to tell him that the sun which the vessel was approaching had at least one habitable planet in orbit. Accounts varied as to what the “something important” was. The one generally accepted was that he was on the point of beating down the stubborn resistance of one of the female scientists carried on the exploratory expedition. Another was that he, following in the footsteps of his illustrious ancestor, was in the throes of composing a piece of poetry that would ensure for him literary immortality. In either case—or in any of the other hypothetical cases—Porlock was the obvious name for the body responsible for the interruption.

  Porlock . . .

  The ship’s navigational data bank flashed the coordinates onto the screen almost immediately. Grimes had to reduce the scale of the chart tank so as to include the Porlock sun. He discovered then that there was no convenient target star. The first adjustment of trajectory, therefore, must be made on instruments only. This was no more than a minor inconvenience.

  Resuming his command seat, he shut down inertial and Mannschenn drives while the others watched him intently, their pistols ready. He turned the ship on her axes around the directional gyroscopes. He restarted the inertial drive and then the spacetime-twisting Mannschenn. Sometimes, on such occasions, there were flashes of déjà vu to accompany the spatial and temporal disorientation—but this time (as far as Grimes was concerned) there was only the discomfort of mild nausea. The chilling thought came to him that perhaps he had no future.

  But he knew that he must continue to cooperate until such time—if ever—as he had a chance, however faint, to escape.

  Lania got up from her chair to look into the chart tank, then stared out and up through the viewports at the stars, mere vague nebulosities as seen in the warped continuum engendered by the ever-precessing rotors of the Drive. She looked away hastily, back into the tank.

  She said accusingly, “That . . . that extrapolated trajectory or whatever you call it misses the Porlock sun by lightyears!”

  “Allowance for galactic drift,” he told her.

  “Haven’t you forgotten something?” she asked coldly.

  It took him some little time to realize what she was driving at. Then, “Allowance for galactic drift, Highness,” he said, hating himself for according her that title.

  “Hodge and Susie,” she ordered, “take him back to his kennel.” Then, “Oh, before you tear yourself away from us, Grimes, what is our estimated time of arrival?”

  “At our present precession rate and at an acceleration of one gravity just thirty standard days, Highness.”

  She made no acknowledgment, voiced neither approval nor disapproval, saying only, “Take him back to his kennel.”

  Chapter 7

  GRIMES MISSED HIS WATCH. And there was no bulkhead clock in the Third Officer’s cabin; her original owners, the Interstellar Transport Commission, were parsimonious in some respects, considering that only departmental heads were entitled to certain “luxuries.”

  But time would pass whether or not he possessed the mechanical means of recording its passage. One way of passing time is to sit and think. Grimes went through to the bathroom to do his sitting and thinking; he could smoke his pipe in there without its becoming obvious to anybody entering the cabin that he had found the means of lighting the thing.

  He sat and he thought.

  He thought about the skyjackers. The man called Paul was wearing the most gold and silver braid so, presumably, was the leader. But Lania, with fewer stars and smaller crowns on her shoulder boards, was the one giving all the orders—leader de facto if not de jure. The situation, perhaps, was analogous to that obtaining when a rather ineffectual Captain is overshadowed by a tough, dynamic First Lieutenant or Chief Mate or whatever.

  Hodge? Just another engineer, no matter where he came from or whose badges he was wearing.

  Susie? Her like could be found in many spaceships, both naval and mercantile. She was no more (and no less) than a spacefaring hotel manager.

  All four of the skyjackers, it seemed, had been in the employ of the Bronsonian Meteorological Service, crewpersons aboard Station Beta. How big a crew did those artificial satellites carry? Grimes didn’t know. But there must have been a mutiny, during which one of the skyjackers, the navigator of the party, had been killed. Somebody else—possibly the captain, with the muzzle of a pistol pressing into the back of his neck—had driven Beta out of her circumpolar orbit into one intersecting that of Bronson Star.

  And this “Highness” business . . .

  Grimes had known Highnesses and Excellencies and the like and was prepared to admit that Lania and Paul did have about them something of that aura which distinguishes members of hereditary aristocracy from the common herd. He knew what it was, of course. It was no more than plain arrogance; if you have it drummed into you from birth on that you are better than those in whose veins blue blood does not flow you will end up really believing it.

  But what had a Highness been doing as a crewwoman aboard an orbital spacecraft? A met. observatory owned by a planet state whose elected ruler bore the proud title of First People’s Minister, not First Peoples’ Minister . . . Grimes allowed himself a break to enjoy the semantic subtlety.

  He heard the cabin door open, voices.

  (Didn’t these people ever knock?)

  He got up, knocked his pipe out into the toilet bowl (the one operational only during acceleration), flushed. He put the pipe into his pocket, came through into the cabin.

  Susie said brightly, “Oh, there you are. Making room for breakfast?”

  Hodge, behind her, grinned.

 
; “Breakfast?” queried Grimes, looking at the tray that she set down on his desk. He was hungry, but a bowl of stew, however savory, did not seem right, somehow, for the first meal of the day.

  “Or lunch, or dinner. Take your pick. But it has to be something that you can eat out of a soft, plastic bowl with a soft, plastic spoon. Her Highness’s orders.”

  “Her Highness?”

  “That’s what we all have to call her now. And Paul, of course, is His Highness.”

  “But Bronsonia’s a sort of republic.”

  “And where we came from wasn’t. Or, to be more exact, where our parents came from.”

  “Porlock?” wondered Grimes. “But Porlock’s a republic too—unless it’s changed since I did my last Recent Galactic History course.”

  “May as well tell him, Susie,” said Hodge. “He can listen while he’s eating. I’ve more important things to do than play at being your armed escort.”

  “All right,” said the girl. “Get dug into your tucker and listen. Our parents were refugees from Dunlevin. You may recall from your history courses that Dunlevin was a monarchy. Paul’s father was the Crown Prince; he was one of the few members of the royal family who got away in the royal yacht. Lania’s parents were the Duke and Duchess of Barstow, who also escaped. Hodge’s father was an officer in the Royal Dunlevin Navy. My father was too, Paymaster Commander of the yacht.

  “Wallis, who should have been our navigator on this caper, was the son of Commodore Wallis, a loyalist officer. As a matter of fact he—young Wallis, that is—was Third Mate of this ship before he entered the met. service . . .”