First Command (41 page)

“The Rim Worlds,” murmured Grimes. “I’ve heard quite a lot about them, off and on. Somehow the Survey Service never seems to show the flag in that sector of space. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see them.”

Davinas laughed. “Don’t be so sure. Rim Runners’ll take anybody, as long as he has some sort of certificate of com patency and rigor mortis hasn’t set in!”

“If they ever get me,” declared Grimes, “that’ll be the sunny Friday!”

“Or me,” agreed Davinas. “When the
Sundowner
Line finally folds I’m putting my savings into a farm.”

The two men sipped their good coffee. Davinas lit a long, slim cigar, Grimes his pipe. The cat purred noisily between them.

Then: “I hear that you’re on a Lost Colony hunt, John.”

“Yes, Bill. As a matter of fact, Commander Denny did mention that you might be able to give me a few leads.”

“I might be. But, as a Rim Worlds citizen, I’m supposed to make any reports on anything I find to the Rim Worlds government. And to my owners, of course.”

“But the Rim Worlds are members of the Federation.”

“Not for much longer, they’re not. Surely you’ve heard talk of secession lately.” Davinas laughed rather unpleasantly. “But I’m not exactly in love with our local lords and masters. I’ve been in the
Sundowner
Line practically all my working life, and I haven’t enjoyed seeing our fleet pushed off the trade routes by Rim Runners.
They
can afford to cut freights; they’ve the taxpayer’s money behind them. And who’s the taxpayer? Me.”

“But what about your owners? Don’t you report to them?”

“They just aren’t interested anymore. The last time that I made a deviation, sniffing around for a possible new run for
Sundowner,
there was all hell let loose.” He obviously quoted from a letter. “ ‘We would point out that you are a servant of a commercial shipping line, not a captain in the Federation Survey Service . . .’ Ha!”

“Mphm. So you might be able to help me?”

“I might. If you ask me nicely enough, I will.” He poured more coffee into the mugs. “You carry a PCO, of course?”

“Of course. And you?”

“No. Not officially. Our head office now and again—only now and again, mind you—realizes that there is such a force as progress. They found out that one of the early Carlotti sets was going cheap. So now I have Carlotti, and no PCO. But—”

“But what?”

“My NST operator didn’t like it. He was too lazy to do the Carlotti course to qualify in FTL radio. He reckoned, too, that he’d be doing twice the work that he was doing before, and for the same pay. So he resigned, and joined Rim Runners. They’re very old-fashioned, in some ways. They don’t have Carlotti equipment in many of their ships yet. They still carry psionic communication officers and Normal Space-Time radio officers.”

“Old-fashioned?” queried Grimes. “Perhaps they still carry PCOs for the same reason as we do. To sniff things out.”

“That’s what I tried to tell my owners when they took away Parley’s amplifier, saying that its upkeep was a needless expense. A few spoonfuls of nutrient chemicals each trip, and a couple of little pumps! But I’m getting ahead of myself. This Parley
was
my PCO. He’s getting on in years, and knows that he hasn’t a hope in hell of finding a job anywhere else. Unlike the big majority of telepaths he has quite a good brain and, furthermore, doesn’t shy away from machinery, up to and including electronic gadgetry. He actually took the Carlotti course and examination, and qualified, and also qualified as an NST operator. So now he’s my radio officer, NST, and Carlotti. It breaks his heart at times to have to push signals over the light-years by electronic means, but he does it. If they’d let him keep his beagle’s brain in aspic he’d still be doing it the good old way, and the Carlotti transceiver would be gathering dust. But with no psionic amplifier, he just hasn’t the range.”

“No. He wouldn’t have.”

“Even so, if one passes reasonably close to a planet, within a few light-years, a good telepath can pick up the psionic broadcast, provided that the world in question has a sizable population of sentient beings.”

“Human beings?”

“Not necessarily. But our sort of people, more or less. I’m told that there’s no mistaking the sort of broadcast you get from one of the Shaara worlds, for example. Arthropods, however intelligent, just don’t think like mammals.”

“And you have passed reasonably close to a planet with an intelligent, mammalian population? One that’s not on any of the lists?”

“Two of them, as a matter of fact. In neighboring planetary systems.”

“Where?”

“That’d be telling, John. Nothing for nothing, and precious little for a zack. That’s the way that we do business in the
Sundowner
Line!”

“Then what’s the
quid pro quo,
Bill?”

Davinas laughed. “I didn’t think that you trade school boys were taught dead languages! All right. This is it. Just let me know what you find. As I’ve already told you, the
Sundowner
Line’s on its last legs; I’d like to keep us running just a little longer. A new trade of our own could make all the difference.”

“There are regulations, you know,” said Grimes slowly. “I can’t go blabbing the Survey Service’s secrets to any Tom, Dick, or Harry. Or Bill.”

“Not even when they were Bill’s secrets to begin with? Come off it. And I do happen to know that those same regulations empower you, as captain of a Survey Service ship, to use your own discretion when buying information. Am I right?”

“Mphm.” Grimes was tempted. Davinas could save him months of fruitless searching. On the one hand, a quick conclusion to his quest would be to his credit. On the other hand, for him to let loose a possibly unscrupulous tramp skipper on a hitherto undiscovered Lost Colony would be to acquire yet another big black mark on his record. But this man was no Drongo Kane. He said, “You know, of course, that I carry a scientific officer. He has the same rank as myself, but if I do find a Lost Colony he’ll be wanting to take charge, and I may have to take a back seat.”

“If he wants to set up any sort of Base,” countered Davinas, “he’ll be requiring regular shipments of stores and equipment and all the rest of it. Such jobs, as we both know, are usually contracted out. And if I’m Johnny-on-the-spot, with a reasonable tender in my hot little hand—”

It made sense, Grimes thought. He asked, “And will you want any sort of signed agreement, Bill?”

“You insult me, and you insult yourself. Your word’s good enough, isn’t it?”

“All right.” Grimes had made up his mind. “Where are these possible Lost Colonies of yours?”

“Parley picked them up,” said Davinas, “when I was right off my usual tramlines—
anybody’s
usual tramlines, come to that—doing a run between Rob Roy and Caribbea.” He pushed the coffee mugs and the thermos bottle to one side, opened the folder that he had brought from his office on the low table. He brought out a chart. “Modified Zimmerman Projection.” His thin forefinger stabbed decisively. “The Rob Roy sun, here. And Sol, as the Caribbeans call their primary, here. Between them, two G type stars, 1716 and 1717 in Ballchin’s catalog, practically in line, and as near as damn it on the same plane as Rob Roy and Caribbea. Well clear of the track, actually—but not too well clear.”

“It rather surprises me,” said Grimes, “that nobody has found evidence of intelligent life there before.”

“Why should it? When those old lodejammers were blown away to hell and gone off course—assuming that these worlds
are
Lost Colonies, settled by lodejammer survivors—PCOs hadn’t been dreamed of. When your Commodore Slater made his sweep through that sector of space, PCOs still hadn’t been dreamed of. Don’t forget that we had FTL ships long before we had FTL radio, either electronic or psionic.”

“But what about the odd merchant ships in more recent years, each with her trained telepath?”

“What merchant ships? As far as I know,
Sundowner
was the only one to travel that route, and just once, at that. I happened to be on Rob Roy, discharging a load of kippered New Maine cod, and the word got through to my agents there that one of the transgalactic clippers, on a cruise, was due in at Caribbea. She’d been chartered by some Terry outfit calling themselves The Sons of Scotia. And it
seems that they were going to celebrate some Earth calendar religious festival—Burns Night—there.”

“Burns?” murmured Grimes. “Let me see. Wasn’t he a customs officer? An odd sort of chap to deify.”

“Ha, ha. Anyhow, the Punta del Sol Hotel at Port of Spain sent an urgent Carlottigram to Rob Roy to order a large consignment of haggis and Scotch whiskey. I was the only one handy to lift it. I got it there on time, too, although I just about burned out the main bearings of the Mannschenn Drive doing it.”

“And did they enjoy their haggis?” wondered Grimes.

“I can’t say.
I
didn’t. The shippers presented me with half a dozen of the obscene things as a token of their appreciation. Perhaps we didn’t cook them properly.”

“Or serve them properly. I don’t suppose that
Sundowner
could run to a bagpiper to pipe them in to the messroom table.”

“That could have been the trouble.” Davinas looked at his watch. “I hate to hurry you up, John—but I always like to get my shut-eye before I take the old girl upstairs. But, before you go, I’d like to work out some way that you can let me know if you find anything. A simple code for a message, something that can’t be cracked by the emperor of Waverley’s bright boys. As you see from the chart, those two suns are practically inside Waverley’s sphere of influence. I want to be first ship on the scene—after you, of course. I don’t want to be at the tail end of a long queue of Imperial survey ships and freighters escorted by heavy cruisers.”

“Fair enough,” agreed Grimes. “Fair enough. Just innocent Carlottigrams that could be sent by anybody, to anybody. Greetings messages? Yes. Happy Birthday, say, for the first world, that belonging to 1717. Happy Anniversary for the 1716 planet. Signed ‘John’ if it’s worth your while to persuade your owners to let you come sniffing around.

Signed ‘Peter’ if you’d be well advised not to come within a hundred light-years.

“But you’ll be hearing from me. I promise you that.”

“Thank you,” said Davinas. “Thank
you,
”
said Grimes.

Chapter 11

Davinas phoned down
to the night watchman to ask him to order a cab for Grimes. While they were waiting for the car he poured glasses of an excellent Scotch whiskey from Rob Roy. They were finishing their drinks when the night watchman reported that the car was at the ramp.

Grimes was feeling smugly satisfied when he left
Sundowner.
It certainly looked as though he had been handed his Lost Colony—correction,
two
Lost Colonies—on a silver tray. And this Davinas was a very decent bloke, and deserved any help that Grimes would be able to give him.

The ride back to the mayor’s palace was uneventful. The party was still in progress in the huge ballroom; the girl at the synthesizer controls was maintaining a steady flow of dance music, although only the young were still on the floor. The older people were gathered around the buffet tables, at which the supplies of food and drink were being replenished as fast as they dwindled.

Grimes joined Brabham and Vinegar Nell, who were tucking into a bowl of caviar as though neither of them had eaten for a week, washing it down with locally made vodka,

“Be with us, sir,” said Brabham expansively. “A pity they didn’t bring
this
stuff out earlier. If I’d known this was going to come up, I’d not have ruined my appetite on fishcakes and sausage rolls!”

Grimes spread a buttered biscuit with the tiny, black, glistening eggs, topped it up with a hint of chopped onion and a squeeze of lemon juice. “You aren’t doing too badly now. Mphm. Not bad, not bad.”

“Been seeing how the poor live, sir?” asked the first lieutenant.

“What do you mean?”

“You went off with
Sundowner’s
old man.”

“Oh, yes. He has quite a nice ship. Old, but very well looked after.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t have done better in the merchant service,” grumbled Brabham. “Even the Rim Worlds Merchant Service. I was having a yarn with
Sundowner’s
chief officer. He tells me that the new government-owned shipping line, Rim Runners, is recruiting personnel. I’ve a good mind to apply.”

“Nobody in the Survey Service would miss you,” said Vinegar Nell. Then, before Brabham could register angry protest, she continued, “Nobody in the Survey Service would miss any of us. We’re the square pegs, who find that every hole’s a round one.” She turned to Grimes, who realized that she must have been drinking quite heavily. “Come on, Captain! Out with it! What was in your sealed orders? Instructions to lose us all down some dark crack in the continuum, yourself included?”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes noncommittally, helping himself to more caviar. He noticed that the civilians in the vicinity had begun to flap their ears. He said firmly, “Things aren’t as bad as they seem.” He tried to make a joke of it. “In any case, I haven’t lost a ship yet.”

“There has to be a first time for everything,” she said darkly.

“
Some
people are lucky,” commented Brabham. “In the Survey Service, as everywhere else, luck counts for more than ability.”

“Some people have neither luck
nor
ability,” said Vinegar Nell spitefully. The target for this barbed remark was obvious—and Brabham, feared Grimes, would be quite capable of emptying the bowl of caviar over her head if she continued to needle him. And the captain of a ship, justly or unjustly, is held responsible for the conduct of his officers in public places. His best course of action would be to separate his first lieutenant and his paymaster before they came to blows.

“Shall we dance, Miss Russell?” he asked.

She produced a surprisingly sweet smile. “But of course, Captain.”

The synthesizer was playing a song that he had heard before, probably a request from those of
Sundowner’s
people who were still at the party. The tune was old, very old, but the words were new, and Rim Worlders had come to regard it as their very own.