First Command (28 page)

“Take her south for a start, sir?” asked Pitcher. “And then, once we’re out of
Schnauzer’s
sight, we can bring her round on the course for Ballarat . . . .”

“No,” decided Grimes. The same idea had occurred to him—but Lilian knew his destination, and she was at least on speaking terms with Danzellan and his officers. In any case—as compared with Drongo Kane—the Dog Star people were goodies, and if anything went badly wrong they would be in a position to offer immediate help. “No,” he said again. “Head straight for Ballarat.”

Ballarat was different from the other towns that they had seen. It was dominated by a towering structure, a great hulk of metal, pitted and weathered yet still gleaming dully in the morning sunlight. It was like no ship that Grimes or his officers had ever seen—although they had seen pictures and models of such ships in the astronautical museum at the Academy. It was a typical gaussjammer of the days of the Second Expansion, a peg-top-shaped hull with its wide end uppermost, buttressed by flimsy looking fins. To land her here, not far from the magnetic equator, her captain must have been a spaceman of no mean order—or must have been actuated by desperation. It could well have been that his passengers and crew were so weakened by starvation that a safe landing, sliding down the vertical lines of force in the planet’s solar regions, would have been safe for the ship only, not for her personnel. Only the very hardy can survive the rigors of an arctic climate.

Hard by the ship was a long, low building. As seen from the air it seemed to be mainly of wooden construction, although it was roofed with sheets of gray metal. No doubt there had been cannibalization; no doubt many nonessential bulkheads and the like were missing from the gaussjammer’s internal structure.

Billard brought the pinnace in low over the town. There were people in the streets, mainly women and children. They looked upward and pointed. Some of them waved. And then, quite suddenly, a smoky fire was lit in a wide plaza to the east of the gaussjammer. It was a signal, obviously. The tall streamer of smoke rose vertically into the still air.

“That’s where we land,” said Grimes. “Take her down, please, Mr. Billard.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Quietly, without any fuss or bother, they landed. Even before the door was open, even before the last mutterings of the inertial drive had faded into silence, they heard the drums, a rhythmic thud and rattle, an oddly militaristic sound.

“Mphm?” grunted Grimes dubiously. He turned to Maya. “Are you sure the natives are friendly?”

She did not catch the allusion. “Of course,” she said stiffly.
“Everybody
on Morrowvia is friendly. A queen is received courteously by her sister queens wherever she may go.”

“I’m not a queen,” said Grimes. “I’m not a king, even . . . .”

“The way you carry on sometimes, aboard your ship, I’m inclined to doubt the validity of that last statement,” remarked Maggie Lazenby.

“Open up, sir?” asked Billard.

“Mphm. Yes. But nobody is to go outside—except myself—until I give the word. And you’d better have the twenty millimeters ready for use, Mr. Pitcher.”

He belted on his pistols—one projectile, one laser—then set his cap firmly on his head. Maya said, “I am coming with you.”

Grimes said, “I’m not in the habit of hiding behind a woman’s skirts.”

“What skirts?” asked Maggie Lazenby. Then, “Don’t be silly, John. Maya’s obviously one of
them.
When they see her with you they’ll know that you’re friendly.”

It made sense.

Grimes jumped down from the open door to the packed earth of the plaza, clapping each hand to a pistol butt as soon as he was on the ground. Maya followed him. They stood there, listening to the rhythmic
tap-tappity-tap
that was, with every second, louder and louder.

And then a women—a girl—appeared from around the end of the long, low building. She was naked save for polished high boots and a crimson sash, and was carrying a flag on a staff, a black flag with a stylized great cat, in gold, rampant over a compass rose. Behind her marched the drummers, also girls, and behind them a woman with a silver sash and with a silver crown set on her silvery hair. She was followed by six men, with spears, six female archers, and by six more men, each of whom carried what was obviously an automatic rifle of archaic design.

Abruptly the drums fell silent and the drummers divided their ranks to let the queen pass through. She advanced steadily, followed by her standard bearer. Her skin was black and gleaming, but there was no hint of negroid ancestry in her regular features. Apart from the absence of rudimentary nipples she was what Grimes was coming to consider a typical Morrowvian woman.

Grimes saluted.

The standard bearer dipped her flag.

The queen smiled sweetly and said, “I, Janine Morrow, welcome you to Ballarat—the landing place of
Lode Cougar
and of our forebears. I welcome you, spaceman, and I welcome you, sister.”

“Thank you,” said Grimes. (Should he call this definitely regal female “Your Majesty” or not?)

“Thank you, Janine,” said Maya. “I am Maya, of Cambridge.”

“Thank you, Janine,” said Grimes. “I am John Grimes, of the Federation Survey Service ship
Seeker.”

17

Grimes called the others
down from the pinnace and introductions were made. Then Janine led the way to her palace, which was the long, low building hard by the ancient spaceship. In a room like the other rooms in which they had been similarly entertained there was the ritual sharing of food and water, during which the Queen of Ballarat read the letter that Maya had brought. Grimes was about to get a glimpse of it during her perusal; the paper was coarse-textured and gray rather than white, and the words had been scrawled upon it with a blunt pencil.

Janine said, “Lilian is favored. Twice she has been visited by Captain Danzellan, and now Commander Grimes is calling on her.”

“Now Commander Grimes is calling on
you,”
Maya pointed out.

“And so he is.” Janine smiled sweetly, her teeth very white and her lips very red in her dark brown face. “And so he is. But what brings you to Ballarat, Commander Grimes? Do you have gifts for me?”

“I shall have gifts for you—but I have nothing at the moment. You will appreciate that we cannot carry much in a small craft such as my pinnace.”

“That is true,” agreed Janine. “But every time that Captain Danzellan has wished to look for information in the museum or the library he has brought me something.” She gestured toward one of the walls where a new-looking clock, with a brightly gleaming metal case, was hanging. “That is a
good
clock—far better than the old one with its dangling weights. This one does not have a spring even—just a power cell which Captain Danzellan tells me will be good for centuries.”

“From the way that you greeted us,” said Grimes, “I thought that you were pleased to see visitors from the home world of your ancestors.”

“But I am, I am! Too, it pleases me to try to—what is the word?—to reconstruct the old rituals. I have studied The History, as have we all. Also, I have access to records which my sisters elsewhere have not. I received you as important visitors must be received on Earth. . . .”

“Mphm.”

“I am sorry that I could not fire a salute, but we have no big guns. In any case, the supply of ammunition for our rifles is limited.”

“You did very nicely,” said Grimes.

“Bring on the marching girls . . .” muttered Maggie.

Grimes, surreptitiously, had eased his watch off his wrist. The instrument was almost new; he had purchased it from the commissary just prior to departure from Lindisfarne. He said, “Perhaps you will accept this, Janine. It is a personal timekeeper.”

“Just what I’ve always wanted,” she said, pleased.

“I take it, then,” said Grimes, “that you are the custodian of the books, the records, the . . .”

“Of everything,” she told him proudly. “Perhaps, while Maya and I have a gossip, you would care to be shown around?”

“We should,” said Grimes.

Their guide was the young woman who had carried the banner. Her name was Lisa Morrow. She vouchsafed the information that it was usually she who conducted visiting queens from other towns through the palace, but that it was the first time that she had been responsible for a party of outworlders. She did not seem to be greatly impressed by the honor, or even to regard it as such.

The palace was more than a palace. It was a library, and it was a museum. They were taken first of all into the Earth Room, a huge chamber devoted to Earth as it had been when
Lode Cougar
had lifted from Port Woomera on her last voyage. This had been the overcrowded planet dominated, in its northern and southern hemispheres respectively, by the short-lived Russian and Australian Empires.

Lode Cougar,
concluded Grimes, had carried a lot of junk—but even in the days of the Third Expansion a ticket out to the stars was very often a one-way ticket; it was even more so in the days of the First and Second Expansions. Those first colonists had been so reluctant to break every tie with their home world.

Here, in the Earth Room, were maps and photographs, reproductions of famous works of art, even files of newspapers and magazines. These latter had been chemically treated to make the paper impervious to normal wear and tear, but now were practically unreadable—and Lisa Morrow took good care her charges did not, as they would have loved to have done, leaf through them. Grimes could make out the headlines on the front page of one of the papers, The Australian. “
Lode Tiger
missing, feared lost.” No doubt the same paper had carried similar headlines regarding
Lode Cougar.
This had been long before the days of trained telepaths or the time-and-space-twisting Carlotti Communications System, but the established colonies had maintained a reasonably fast mail service with Earth. Grimes had read somewhere that it had taken less time for a letter to get from Port Southern, on Austral, to Sydney, in Australia, than it did to get through the post offices at either end. This state of affairs had persisted until the introduction of Carlotti radio transmission of all correspondence.

There were books, too—
real
books, properly bound, although with very thin, lightweight covers and paper. There were shelves of
How To
volumes. House building, boat building, aircraft building . . . mining, smelting, casting . . . navigation . . . surveying. . . . Useful, Grimes supposed, if you did not, as you were supposed to do, finish up at an established colony but, instead, made a forced landing on a hitherto undiscovered world.

There was fiction—but, in spite of their age, these books looked almost fresh from the printers. Grimes had suspected that the Morrowvians were oddly lacking in imagination. Anything factual—such as the famous History—they would read, or any book that would aid them to acquire necessary skills. But the products of the storyteller’s art left them cold. This attitude was not uncommon, of course, but it seemed more pronounced here than elsewhere. What books had Danzellan given to Lilian on the occasion of his first visit? Grimes asked Lisa the question.

She told him, “One by a man called Blenkinshop on first aid. And one about the fisheries on a world called Atlantia. We are having copies made for the library.”

“So you have a printing press?”

“Yes, Commander Grimes. It is used only when a book is almost worn out or when there is something new that has to be printed.”

“Is it hand operated?”

“No. We have an engine, driven by steam. Shall I show it to you now, or would you rather see the
Lode Cougar
room?”

“The
Lode Cougar
room,” Grimes told her.

This adjoined the Earth Room, but was not as large. It contained relics of the ship herself. There were cargo manifests, log books, crew and passenger lists. There was a large photograph of the
Cougar’s
officers taken at Port Woomera, presumably shortly prior to lift-off. It was typical of this sort of portraiture, whatever the day and age. The captain, his senior officers on either side of him, was seated in the front row, his arms folded across his chest (as were the arms of the others) to show the braid on his sleeves. Standing behind the row of seated seniors were the juniors. Grimes stopped to read the legend below the photograph.

The captain’s name was not, as he had expected that it would be, Morrow. (But in an emergency, such as a forced landing on an unexplored world, anybody at all is liable to come to the fore.) The name of Morrow was not among those of the officers. A passenger, then? Examination of the ship’s passenger list would supply the answer.

Lisa was pointing to a shelf of volumes. “And these,” she was saying, “were Morrow’s own books . . . .”

Grimes paused on his way to the display cases in which the ship’s documents were housed. Books told one so much about their owner’s makeup. His eye swept over the fiction titles. He realized, with pleased surprise, that he had read most of them, when he was a cadet at the Academy. Early Twentieth Century—and even late Nineteenth Century—science fiction aboard a starship! But it was no more absurd than to find the same science fiction required reading for future officers of a navy whose ships, even though they had yet to penetrate to The Hub, fared out to The Rim.
The Planet Buyer . . .
that had been good, as he remembered it.
The Island Of . . .

His wrist transceiver was buzzing. He raised the instrument to his mouth. “Captain!” Saul’s voice was urgent. “Captain, I would have called you before, but we’ve been having transmitter trouble. Drongo Kane left in his pinnace at first light this morning, heading north. He’s got Sabrina with him and three of his own people, all armed.”

“You heard that?” Grimes demanded of his officers.

They nodded.

“Thank you for your attention,” Grimes said to Lisa, “but we must get back to our pinnace.”

“Is Drongo Kane a friend of yours, that you are so eager to greet him?” she asked innocently, and looked bewildered when Grimes replied, “That’d be the sunny Friday!”