Grimes pulled his vile pipe out of his pocket, filled and lit it, looked up and out of the familiar—comforting now rather than frightening—blackness with the writhing, iridescent nebulosities that, in normal spacetime, were the stars.
He said, “As soon as the mass proximity indicator shows that there’s nothing dangerously close we’ll set trajectory. And then . . . Bronsonia, here we come!”
“Not so fast,” said Susie, her voice oddly cold. “Not so fast. You have only a few fines to pay on Bronsonia. Hodge and I face life imprisonment or rehabilitation. And that—need I tell you?—is just another word for personality wiping.”
Chapter 17
BRONSON STAR broke away from Dunlevin without further incident. She was bound, at first, for nowhere in particular. Her inertial drive was running only to provide a comfortable half-standard gravity, her Mannschenn Drive was in operation only to make it virtually impossible for any Dunlevin warships—the Free People’s Navy did, Grimes knew, possess two obsolescent frigates—to intercept her.
Grimes, Hodge and Susie sat around the table in the wardroom. There was coffee—not very good. There was a bottle of some unnamed liqueur that had been distilled by the late General Mortdale’s senior mess sergeant. Grimes, sipping the smooth, potent and palatable fluid, rather hoped that the noncommissioned officer had survived the Bacon Bay debacle; as he had been one of the two men left with Major Briggs to keep guard on the ship this was possible. The drugged soldiers had been dumped from the airlock, onto the beach, shortly prior to lift-off.
Grimes raised his glass in a toast. “Here’s to Sergeant Whoever-He-Is. Here’s to his continuing good health.”
Susie said, a little sourly, “He was a good cook and even better at persuading the autochef to produce liquor. But I can’t help feeling a bit sorry that we didn’t kill the pongoes before we threw them out.”
“Too many people died,” said Grimes. “I rather hope that Briggs and the two sergeants didn’t.”
“And if they didn’t,” said Susie, “and if they were taken prisoner, they’ll sing. They’ll sing like a male voice trio—or, if the Free People’s Secret Police is as bad as the Royalist Underground makes out, like a soprano trio.”
“So,” asked Grimes, “what?” He lifted and lit his pipe then continued. “Nobody on Dunlevin thinks that Bronson Star lifted off all by her little self. They know that she must have had a crew.”
“And now,” said Susie, “they know who was in the crew. The Underground will know—and what the Underground knows the royalist refugee enclaves on Bronsonia, Porlock and a few other planets will soon know.”
“With your share of the salvage money you should be able to buy protection,” said Grimes. “That’s why I think we should return to Bronsonia as soon as possible. We—the three of us—won this ship back from Paul and Lania and their mob. Even though I was, at the time of the original seizure, employed by Bronson Star’s owners, I was, legally, neither master nor crew member. My name was on neither the Articles nor the Register. The salvage claim should stick.”
“And you want your share,” said Susie, “to pay your fines and port dues so that you can get your own little ship back.”
“Of course,” agreed Grimes.
“I see your point, John. But you’re not a known criminal. Hodge and I are. There was the first skyjacking, remember. The met. satellite. Captain Walvis will not have forgotten how I massaged the back of his neck with a pistol muzzle while he broke out of orbit to intercept Bronson Star.”
“You could claim,” said Grimes, “that you acted under duress.”
“Ha! And even if the court believed it, there’d still be the Dunlevin royalists out for revenge.”
“We could go out to the Rim,” contributed Hodge. “Change the ship’s name, our own names. Set up shop as a one-ship tramp company.”
“You’ve been reading too many space stories, Hodge,” said Grimes. “That’s the sort of thing that people do in fiction, never in fact. Known space is festooned with red tape. All—and I mean all—data concerning every merchant ship is fed into the memory banks of the Master Registry back on Earth—and those banks are instantly accessible to every port authority on every planet—on every planet that runs to a spaceport, that is. And those that donhaven’t been discovered or settled yet.”
“Surely we could buy false ship’s papers and personal papers,” said Hodge.
“Who from?” asked Grimes. “And, more importantly, what with?”
Susie laughed. “Mortdale brought the royalist war chest aboard at Porlock. Folding money, in good Federation credit bills. The accumulation of contributions from refugees such as my revered parents . . . I haven’t made a proper count yet—but there’s plenty. Even if we can’t—as you say—have the ship’s identity changed we can pay to have ourselves . . . transmogrified? Is that the right word? But you know what I mean.”
“But where?” said Grimes, more to himself than to the others. “But where? It can’t be too far away; I want to get Bronson Star back to where she came from before there’s too much of a hue and cry. Probably already the Survey Service has been ordered to keep its eyes skinned for us—and if they find us where we shouldn’t be they’ll be claiming the salvage money.”
“Looking after yourself, Grimes,” commented Hodge rather nastily.
Susie sprang to his defense. “And why shouldn’t he? Nobody else is.”
“I looked after him,” grumbled the engineer. “If it hadn’t been for me he’d never have gotten off Dunlevin.”
“If it hadn’t been for him,” said Susie, “we’d never have gotten off Dunlevin. We’d be undergoing interrogation by the Secret Police right now.”
“We’re all in this,” said Grimes. “But our ways have to part.” He looked at Susie regretfully, and she at him in the same way. “I must get you to some world where you can use your ill-gotten gains to buy yourselves new lives. Then I must get myself back to Bronsonia to look after my own affairs.”
“Without an engineer?” asked Hodge.
“I’ve covered quite a few light years in Little Sister without one. Of course, her engines are designed so as to require minimal maintenance. But the ones in this ship should hold out for the voyage from . . . From? From wherever it is to Bronsonia. And if they don’t . . . I’ll just have to yell for help on the Carlotti—if that hasn’t broken down, too.”
“You could just drop us off somewhere in one of the boats,” said Susie but looked relieved when Grimes refused to consider this expedient.
“We’ll sleep on it,” he said at last after several minutes more of fruitless discussion. He raised no objection when Susie accompanied him to the captain’s quarters which, with the feeling that he was once more putting himself in his rightful place, he had reclaimed.
Chapter 18
GRIMES GOT TO SLEEP at last. (Susie had been demanding.)
He slept, cradled against her warm, ample resilience—and he dreamed. The noise of Bronson Star’s engines—the subdued, arrhythmic beat of the inertial drive, the thin, high whine of the ever-precessing Mannschenn rotors—wove itself into his dream. (Most dreams are based on memories and he had spent so much of his life aboard ships.)
He was back on board his first command, the little Survey Service courier Adder. He was entertaining a guest in his cabin, the humanoid but nonhuman envoy from Joognaan. Joognaan was not an important world, either commercially or strategically; had it been, the envoy would have traveled in far greater style than he was doing now, aboard a ship that had been referred to slightingly, more than once, as an interstellar mail van.
Balaarsulimaam—that was the envoy’s name—had made his way to Earth in a variety of carriers. First there had been the star tramp that had dropped down to Joognaan for a small shipment of artifacts and a few casks of talaagra—a somewhat bitter wine that was prized, although not excessively so, by gourmets on one or two planets. His voyage—from world to world, in ship after ship—had been a sort of three-dime
nsional zigzag. On Earth he had seen the Minister for Galactic Trade but had been unable to interest that gentleman in his wares. The Federation government had not—by its own rights—been ungenerous, however. It had given Balaarsulimaam passage to Lindisfarne in the Survey Service transport Jules Verne and from Lindisfarne on in the courier Adder, Lieutenant John Grimes commanding.
He had been a lonely little being, this Balaarsulimaam. In spite of indoctrination Survey Service officers did not like having aliens aboard their ships. In Adder there was a further complication—with the exception of Grimes none of the courier’s people liked cats. The Joognaanards are cat-like—or kangaroo-like. Just as the mythical Centaur was half man and half horse, so the inhabitants of Joognaan are half cat and half kangaroo. They have only four limbs, however.
Grimes was less xenophobic than most and was something of a cat lover. He made Balaarsulimaan welcome in his quarters. He enjoyed talking with him over drinks and felt no repugnance when his guest lapped rather than sipped from his glass.
It was one such social occasion that he was reliving now in his dream.
He was saying, “I’m rather surprised, Balaarsulimaam, that you couldn’t interest any of the importers back on Earth in your wine. After all—the major restaurants pride themselves on being able to serve foods and drinks from every world known to man . . .”
The Joognaanard’s pink tongue dipped into the wide-rimmed drinking vessel that Grimes had provided for him, worked busily. He slurped, then sighed.
“Captain,” he said, “the business with our wine is like the business of Scottish whisky. What I am drinking now—and I thank you for your hospitality—does not come from Scotland. It comes from Rob Roy, a planet of the Empire of Waverley. I have enjoyed the real Scottish whisky on Earth. I am enjoying this. I am not a Scottishman and I cannot tell the difference. Can you?”
“I am not a Scotsman,” said Grimes. “I can’t.”
“And Rob Roy is much closer to your Lindisfarne than is Scotland. The freight, therefore, is much less. The whisky, therefore, is much less costly. So it is with our talaagra. There is a wine that they make on Austral, which is close to Earth. Even I can hardly detect the difference between it and our wine. And it must come only a short way and so is charged little freight.”
“I see,” said Grimes.
“But it was not only wine that I was trying to sell. It was a service—a service that people would have to come to Joognaan to avail themselves of. Our doctors—I have learned from captains of starships who have come in with injured crew members—are very clever. They have the—how do you say?—the technical—no, technique to regrow, in a short time, injured members that have had to be removed.”
“So do ours,” said Grimes. “But regrowing is a long process. Most people prefer to shop around for replacements in a body bank.”
“There was a young lady . . .” went on Balaarsulimaam. “She was, I think, a purser in one of the ships. Unwisely she had not gone to her cabin when the ship was landing. She was concerned about the safety of certain heavy cases in one of the storeplaces. A case fell on her, crushing her face and the upper part of her body. We remade her.”
“But that could have been done on Earth,” said Grimes. “On almost any of our worlds.”
“But we—our doctors—remodeled her. Aboard the ship was a representation of some female entertainer, a thin woman. The girl had been fat, like Susie . . .”
(With that last sentence Grimes, even in his sleep, realized that fantasy was mingling with actual memory.)
“We remade her so that she looked almost the twin of the entertainer.”
“Body sculpture is practiced on most worlds,” said Grimes.
“But it is a long process and very expensive. With our doctors it is not long, and it is not expensive. All that I asked your government was that a proper spaceport be constructed on Joognaan and that we be allowed to advertise on Earth and other planets. We have credits, from the sale of our pottery and our wine—enough for the advertising but not enough for a spaceport. I think that, at first, your Minister showed sympathy—but his advisers, the representatives of the Terran doctors, did persuade him that our way was not safe. It was all, somebody said to me in confidence, a matter of invested interests.”
Grimes refrained from correcting the alien. His meaning was clear enough. Members of any profession are jealous of their mystiques.
“But I will show to you, Captain, what can be done . . .”
Balaarsulimaam waved his three-fingered hand. The door to the day cabin opened. A woman stood there. She was quite naked. Her slender body was familiar, as it should have been, even to the mole over the small, firm left breast. But, incongruous above Maggie Lazenby’s slim, smooth shoulders was the plump face of Susie.
Grimes woke up with a start.
He slid out of the wide bunk without waking the girl and made his way to Control, ordered the computer to start doing its sums.
A call at Joognaan wouldn’t be too great a detour.
Chapter 19
“IT’S A GOOD SOLUTION to your problems,” said Grimes with as much conviction as he could muster. “Balaarsulimaam will help. He assured me, before he left Adder, that he would be at my service if ever I returned to his world.”
“Shipboard friendships,” said Susie, “are woven from even flimsier threads than shipboard love affairs.”
Grimes didn’t like the way that she was looking at him as she said this and didn’t like the way that Hodge chuckled.
He went on, “In any case, you can pay . . .”
“As long as it’s not too much,” said Hodge grudgingly. “But just what do you have in mind?”
“A complete change of physical characteristics for Susie and yourself—even, to be on the safe side, to fingerprints and retinal patterns. One beauty of the Joognaan technique is that it doesn’t take anything like as long as the body sculpture on human planets—so I’ll stay around until I’m sure that the two of you will be all right, hoping that no odd star tramp blows in to find Bronson Star sitting there. An All Ships broadcast must have gone out, asking everybody to keep their eyes skinned for us, as soon as we vanished from Bronsonia.
“When I’m happy—and when you’re happy, of course—I lift off, leaving you on Joognaan. You stay there—you’ll have no option—until the next tramp drops in. Then you buy passage in her to wherever she’s going next. Your story will be that you’re clones, that the Joognaanards, after they’d performed regenerative surgery on one or two spacepersons, retained cell cultures for their own experimental purposes. Balaarsulimaam will fix you up with the necessary papers.”
“Nobody likes clones,” stated Hodge dogmatically.
“Not when they know that they’re clones,” said Grimes. “Come to that, clones with money are no more unpopular than anybody else.”
“A complete making over . . .” said Susie thoughtfully. “Tell me, John, is the process painful?”
“I’ve been told that it’s not.”
She kneaded the flesh of her right thigh, below the hem of her shorts, with pudgy fingers. “Of course, it could be worth a little discomfort. I am just a bit overweight . . .”
“I like you the way that you are,” said Grimes gallantly—then wondered why he should remember that slim woman in his dream.
“And Hodge,” she went on, “is no Adonis . . .”
“I like me the way that I am,” growled the engineer. “But I’m willing to sacrifice my beauty in return for safety.”
“So it’s decided, agreed upon,” said Grimes.
“I don’t altogether like it,” muttered Susie. “And you haven’t told us about your end of it. What story will you have to account for the long time it took you between Dunlevin and Bronsonia? How will you account for your being alone in Bronson Star? Everybody in Dunlevin will know by now that you weren’t alone when you lifted off. Apart from anything else I handled the conversations with the Air Force and with the orbital fort.”
“My story will be,” said Grimes, “that the pair of you decided to take your chances in one of the ship’s boats—and one of the boats will, of course, be missing from its bay by the time that I make planetfall at Bronsonia. After your escape the Mannschenn Drive broke down. It took me—all by myself, with no engineer to do the work—a long time to fix it . . .”
“You couldn’t fix a Mannschenn Drive,” said Hodge.
“I have done so,” Grimes told him. “Once. In Little Sister. I admit that she has only a glorified mini-Mannschenn, but even so . . . Anyhow, I’d like you to fill me in on what sort of breakdown could be fixed by one man, not overly skilled.”
“All right,” said Hodge. “Your Mannschenn Drive breaks down. You bust a gut repairing it. Why, as a typical, bone-idle, spaceman branch officer don’t you yell for help on the Carlotti?”
“Because,” said Grimes, “I’m a money-hungry bastard. I don’t want to have to split—or even lose entirely—the salvage money.”
“And what about the auto-log?” asked Hodge. “That will carry a complete record of all use of main and auxiliary engines from Bronsonia on. It will show one set-down and lift-off too many.”
“It won’t,” said Grimes, “after you’ve wiped it for me. A short circuit or whatever. I leave the sordid, technical details to you.”
“You’re a cunning bugger, Grimes,” said Hodge with reluctant admiration.
“I try to be,” said Grimes smugly.
Chapter 20
AT THAT TIME there was no spaceport on Joognaan; nor was there Aerospace Control. Some ships—those that maintained the pretense of a service, albeit an extremely irregular one—announced their arrival with a display of pyrotechnics, even if such fireworks were only sounding rockets fired from superstratospheric levels to the surface to give some indication of wind directions and velocities. But there would be warning enough for the natives as soon as Bronson Star was well within the atmosphere; the clangor of her inertial drive would give ample notice of her coming.
Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III Page 21