“You can hear those shovels ring, ting-a-ling-a-ting-a-ling,
When you’re down in the sewer shoveling . . .”
“Mr. Tamworth! This is no occasion for buffoonery! Keep your men under proper control!”
“Sir.” Then, still in a sulky voice, “Airlock chamber sufficiently cleared. Access to inner door. Inner door opening . . .”
“Proceed straight to the boat bay, Mr. Tamworth, to release Commander Grimes. Use your weapons only in self-defense.”
“Sir.” A long pause, then, “No sign of opposition. We are proceeding to boat bay level by elevator, which is functioning quite normally.”
“You are what? Don’t you realize that you and your people could be trapped in the cage? Get out at once and use the spiral stairway!”
“Sir.”
“Commander Grimes, Commander Perkins here. Mr. Tamworth and his people should soon be with you.”
“So I have gathered, Commander Perkins.”
Finally Tamworth came back on the air. “Outside Number 1 Boat Bay. We have encountered no opposition. Am bleeding atmosphere back into the bay.” A pause. “Have found one pistol on the deck outside the compartment. A Franzetti-Colt, caliber 10 millimeter . . .” Another pause. “Pressures equalized. Am opening door.”
Grimes let himself out of the boat, stepped down to the deck just as his spacesuited rescuers came in through the doorway. In the lead was a tall man with the twin gold stripes of a lieutenant on the shoulders of his space suit. Immediately behind him was another figure, not quite so tall, wearing commander’s insignia.
This one lifted the faceplate of her helmet.
“Surprise, surprise!” she said.
“Maggie!” gasped Grimes.
Chapter 34
“MAGGIE!” Then, “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I’m one of the scientific officers aboard Explorer,” she told him.
“You might have told me that you were there,” he said.
She said, “I thought it better if we didn’t see each other again, John, if we didn’t speak to each other, even. If Bill hadn’t been so against it I’d probably not have come across to you . . .”
“Bill?”
“Commander Perkins.” Her wide mouth opened and curved, displaying very white teeth, but he sensed that she was smiling with rather than at him. “But at the last minute I insisted on accompanying the boarding party. I just couldn’t resist the temptation of finding out, at first hand, what sort of mess you’ve got yourself into now.”
“And talking of messes,” said Lieutenant Tamworth, who had opened his own faceplate, “may I suggest, Commander Lazenby, that we get this one sorted out?” He handed the weapon that he had picked up from the deck to Grimes. “Your pistol, Commander?” Grimes took it. “And now, will you lead the way? This is, after all, your ship.”
Lead the way? Grimes asked himself. Where to? Where would the pseudo-Susie be hiding? If she were hiding . . . Where would she be lurking to pounce out on them?
The farm deck, he thought.
He climbed the spiral staircase that ran around the axial shaft, Maggie immediately after him, then the lieutenant, then four ratings, alert for the first sign of attack, pistols cocked and ready.
The farm deck was as he had left it. The boarders looked curiously at the havoc wrought by Grimes himself—the hydroponic tanks stripped of all their vegetation, the emptied yeast vats.
Tamworth said, “So this is where all that garbage in your airlock came from . . . You said that she was mad. She must have been . . .”
“She probably still is,” said Maggie. “And, therefore, her actions will be unpredictable.”
Grimes wondered why she—it—had not yet attacked, said nothing.
They continued their ascent, searching every compartment as they climbed. Storerooms, galley, pantry, the wardroom. As they looked into the Third Officer’s cabin Grimes remembered his torrid sessions there with the real Susie, wondered what acid comment Maggie would make if she knew what he was thinking. But she was no more his keeper than he was hers.
They came at last to the Master’s quarters.
Grimes was first into his day cabin, brought up and aimed his pistol. But the pale, naked figure sitting hunched over the desk was motionless.
“Is that her?” demanded Tamworth.
“It is,” said Grimes. “If she attacks, shoot to kill.”
One of the men muttered something about a wicked waste.
Grimes approached the . . . thing cautiously. It did not stir. He stretched out his left hand to touch a bare shoulder. The skin was cold, clammy. He grasped the flaccid flesh, squeezed. There was no response.
He muttered, “She’s dead . . .”
“I’m the nearest thing here to a doctor,” said Maggie briskly. “Get back all of you—and you, John. Let the dog see the rabbit . . .”
She got her gloved hands under the armpits of the seated figure, lifted and pulled until it was sprawled back in the chair. It fell into an odd, boneless posture. Grimes was reminded of how the homunculus that was the start of all the trouble had looked among the shards of its broken bottle.
“Cardiac arrest, I’d say,” stated Maggie. “I can’t see any wounds. But I’d like to make a more thorough examination. Meanwhile, Mr. Tamworth, why don’t you and your men make a check of the control room to make sure that all is in order? And you, Commander Grimes, stay here with me, please. I may need a little help.”
Tamworth and his men left willingly enough; in that obscene posture the dead pseudo-Susie was not a pretty-sight.
“Shut the door, John,” ordered Maggie. “Better lock it.”
While he was doing so she picked up the solidograph of herself from the desk, looked at it. She said, “I’m pleased that you kept this . . . But I don’t think that Bill would be happy if he knew that you have it.”
“Damn Bill!” swore Grimes.
“He’s a nice bloke,” said Maggie. “And he’s in love with me. Which is just as well. It means that he’ll accept my story of what’s been happening here without question. You’ve been up to something, John, something very odd. That thing in your chair is not human. I imagine that you don’t want it taken aboard Explorer for a proper examination.”
“I don’t,” said Grimes.
“Then talk. It’s all right; I’ve accidentally on purpose switched off my helmet radio. You can spill all the beans you want without anybody but myself being privy to your guilty secrets.”
Grimes picked up his pipe from where he had left it on the desk, filled and lit it. He noticed that the lid of the box that he had used as a trap was open, that the mangled remains of the first mini-Susie to be killed were gone from it. He looked at the open, sharp-toothed mouth of the life-sized simulacrum, shuddered.
“You haven’t changed,” commented Maggie. “You can’t think, you can’t talk without that foul incinerator of yours. One thing about Bill—he’s a nonsmoker . . .”
“Must you keep dragging that bastard Perkins up?”
“Why not? At least he’s human. And it looks to me as though you’ve been passing your lonely days and night with some sort of obscene sex doll, something that you picked up on some foul world whose people cater to the tastes of woman-starved spacemen. What happened? Did she—no, it—get out of control? Did you hide in the lifeboat to escape a fate worse than death?”
“Damn it, no!” shouted Grimes.
“Then tell.”
Grimes told.
***
He had to keep it short. Back aboard Explorer Commander Perkins must be getting anxious when he heard no reports directly from Maggie, might even order Tamworth and his men to break into the Master’s quarters.
Maggie interrupted once.
“Yes, John, I’ve heard of Joognaan, but I’ve never been there. And so Susie had herself remodeled. I can’t say that I blame her if she looked like that. What was she like after the job was done?”
“Not bad,” s
aid Grimes noncommitally, then went on.
He finished, “Those surplus cells from the original Susie must have been changed, somehow, when the Joognaanards made me the girl in the bottle that was Susie’s parting gift. They can’t have died when the bottle was broken. They reassembled, somehow, in the algae tank, devoured those aquatic worms. And then, after I let them out, the horde of tiny copies of the original thrived on the yeast. And when I tried to starve them they reunited by absorption, or ingestion, and grew . . .”
“If she’d eaten you,” said Maggie, “she’d have been a giantess. But what killed her?”
Somebody was hammering on the door; either Lieutenant Tamworth was acting on his own initiative or had been ordered by his captain to ensure that Maggie Lazenby was safe.
Maggie nudged the on-off button of her helmet transceiver with her chin. “Commander Lazenby here,” she said. “I’m afraid that my radio switch is defective. Unless I keep it pressed all the time it goes off. Yes, I’ve almost finished the examination . . . Damn!” This latter was for the benefit of her listeners just before she switched off again.
The hammering ceased.
She said, “Poor Bill. He probably thinks that we’re enjoying ourselves. But I don’t think that I could with that thing staring at me with its dead eyes . . . Talking of dead eyes—why did she die?”
“I can guess,” said Grimes. “We know that she had a very odd metabolism. Perhaps dead meat was poison to her. The beef that I used as bait perhaps wasn’t quite dead enough to have a lethal effect—after all, whatever comes from the tissue-culture vats is alive, after a fashion, until it’s cooked. But the thing in the box—she must have eaten it—was very dead . . .”
She switched on the helmet transceiver again.
“Commander Lazenby here. Commander Grimes has fixed that switch for me. The woman, the mutineer, is dead. Cardiac arrest. She must have had a weak heart and the exertion and the excitement were too much for her . . . No, Bill, I don’t think that we should bring the body aboard Explorer. Commander Grimes has admitted that she was his mistress and still feels a sentimental regard for her. He wants to bury his own dead . . .” She addressed Grimes. “So it’s good bye once again, John. I’m pleased that we were able to help you. We can’t stay with you much longer; we have a schedule to keep . . .” She nudged the switch again with her chin, laughed. “You never were a very good electrician, John, were you?”
She put her spacesuited arms about him, hugged him. “Good luck, John. And good luck to your friends, to Hodge and the real Susie. You know, I’m just a little jealous of her. And good luck to you? Yes—although you still have more than your fair share of it. If I hadn’t been aboard Explorer, if I hadn’t carried out the examination of this corpse that so obviously isn’t a human body, all three of you would have been in the cactus . . .”
“Good bye, Maggie,” he said. “And good luck to you, too . . .”
He managed to kiss her through the open faceplate of her helmet. When at last he withdrew his mouth from hers, audibly, her chin inadvertently nudged the switch.
He heard, very faintly, Perkins’s voice from her helmet phones, “What was that? What was that noise?”
Maggie laughed softly, released him.
He let her out of the day cabin, said good bye again, and good bye and thanks to Lieutenant Tamworth. The boarding party declined his offer to see them down to the airlock. Before he went up to Control he looked at the solidograph on his desk and then at the bloated corpse sprawled in his chair. He would have to get rid of it as soon as possible; the sweet stench of decay, although faint, was already evident.
The control room NST transceiver was on. He listened to the voices of Tamworth and his men as they pushed all the garbage back into Bronson Star’s airlock. This was not essential; as the two ships were sharing a temporal precession field transfer of mass from one to the other would have no effect. This must be, he thought, spite on the part of Commander Perkins. Let Grimes clear up his own mess, he must be thinking.
He looked out through the viewports at the survey ship. He could see into her control room. Maggie was not there, although Perkins was.
Perkins spoke over the NST. “You can have your ship back now, Commander.”
“Thank you for your help, Commander.”
“I’m rather surprised that you needed it, Grimes. You should be an expert on handling mutinies by now.”
The last connection between the two ships was broken and Explorer faded, diminished and vanished.
Chapter 35
THE FIRST TASK that Grimes set himself was to rid the ship of all traces of the Joognaanard clones. After he had shut down the Mannschenn Drive he ejected the vegetable rubbish from the airlock, and then the body of the pseudo-Susie. The corpse, when he lugged it from his day cabin to the waiting elevator cage, seemed to be no more than a bag of skin filled with some soft jelly; it was indeed fortunate that it had not been taken aboard Explorer for an autopsy. Then he made a thorough search of the farm deck just in case any of the little pseudo-Susies remained, either alive or dead. He found nothing.
The distasteful but essential jobs completed he took a very long, very hot shower. He decided then to establish Carlotti contact with Bronsonia. Explorer must already have made her report to Lindisfarne Base and, even though intelligence flows very sluggishly through official channels, sooner or later the authorities on Bronsonia would learn that Bronson Star was on the way back to her home world.
He sent three Carlottigrams—one to Aerospace Control, one to Bronson Star’s owners, the third to Captain Wendover, Bronsonian Secretary of the Astronauts’ Guild. In all three messages he gave his ETA in Galactic Standard date and time, adding the promise, “Full report follows.” The signal to Wendover also contained a query as to the well-being or otherwise of Little Sister and a request that the Guild Secretary initiate proceedings regarding the Bronson Star salvage claim.
While he was awaiting the acknowledgments Grimes set about rewriting his report. In the original version Hodge and Susie had escaped from the ship in one of the lifeboats rather than face trial on Bronsonia. In the revised edition they had forced Grimes at gunpoint to deviate from trajectory on the passage from Dunlevin to Bronsonia. There had been a fight during which Hodge had been killed. Susie had promised to be a good girl but then, driven mad by the fear of what would happen to her when she was turned over to the Bronsonian police, had tried once again to seize the ship.
Luckily Grimes had switched on the lifeboat’s log-recorder when he told his story—fictitious insofar as the latter part of it was concerned—to Commander Perkins; all that he had to do was make a transcript of his side of the conversations with Explorer. Luckily, too, Hodge and Susie had left almost all their personal possessions on board when they disembarked on Joognaan. Should there be a really thorough investigation all the evidence would indicate that the man and the girl had been with Grimes aboard Bronson Star until their respective deaths. And the boarding party from the Survey Service ship had seen a female body; only Maggie knew that it was not a truly human one—and Grimes could trust her not to talk.
The acknowledgments finally came in.
Bronson Star’s owners were laconic, telling Grimes only to take up parking orbit as instructed by Aerospace Control. Aerospace Control started off by warmly congratulating Grimes on his escape and said that the full report was eagerly awaited. Wendover, too, started with congratulations.
The message went on: “Regret inform you lerrigan case decided in consignees’ favor. Your Bronson Star salary garnisheed to pay court costs. Heavy damages still outstanding, also accumulated port dues and charges incurred by Little Sister. Have succeeded delaying forced sale of your vessel to date. Preliminary enquiries indicate no certainty of success Bronson Star salvage claim despite San Demetrio precedent. Guild lawyers awaiting your full report.”
Things might be worse, thought Grimes. Little Sister was not yet sold—but would he, could he ever get her back? If he got
the salvage award before the financial situation became too desperate all would be well.
If . . .
Meanwhile, the only people who looked like they were coming well out of the mess were Susie and Hodge, with their changes of identity and with the money that should have gone to finance the counterrevolution on Dunlevin. If he’d had any sense, thought Grimes, he’d have insisted on taking his share of it.
It was too late now for that.
He would just have to play the cards the way that they fell.
Chapter 36
BRONSON STAR was once again in orbit about Bronsonia.
As before, she was hanging almost directly over that chain of islands that looked like a sea serpent swimming from east to west. But Grimes would not be aboard to admire the view for much longer. The shuttle was here with his relief and the hydroponics technician who would be making good the damage done in the farm deck allegedly by a demented Susie but actually by Grimes himself.
He handled the airlock controls from the control room, waited there for old Captain Pinner who had been the ship-keeper before Grimes got the job.
Pinner, still spacesuited but with his faceplate open and with his gauntlets tucked into his belt, pulled himself through the hatch.
“Welcome aboard, Captain,” said Grimes.
“Can’t say that I’m glad to be here, Captain,” grumbled Pinner. “But they want you down in New Syrtis as soon as possible if not before, and I was the only one they could find at short notice to take over.”
The two men shook hands.
Pinner went on, “I wish we had time for a proper talk, Captain. I’d like to hear your story about all that’s been happening . . .”
“I’ve left you a copy of my report,” Grimes told him.
A voice came from the NST transceiver, that of the shuttle’s captain. “Are you ready to transfer, Captain Grimes?”
“I’ll be with you in five minutes,” Grimes told him.
He went down to his quarters accompanied by Pinner. His bag was already packed but he had a quick look around to make sure that he had missed nothing. The old man helped him on with his spacesuit then said, with a chuckle, “You can find your own way to the airlock I think, Captain. I’ll get back up to Control. The best of luck to you—with the salvage claim and everything else.”
Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III Page 27