First Command (78 page)

The outer airlock door of the pinnace was already open. The leading robots and the struggling man passed through just before a shell landed on the boat itself.

“Hell!” exclaimed Grimes.

“Don’t . . . worry . . .” panted the Baroness. “She . . can . . . take . . . it . . .”

The green smoke cleared and Grimes saw that the pinnace seemed to be undamaged, although bright gold gleamed where the protective plastic had been ripped away.

The next two rounds were wide and Grimes and the Baroness scrambled into the airlock during the brief lull. Another shell hit, however, as the last pair of robots were boarding. It was like, Grimes said later, being a bug inside a bass drum. But at the time he was not thinking up picturesque similes. He was getting upstairs, fast, before a chance projectile scored a hit on some vulnerable part of the pinnace. A similar craft in the Survey Service would have been fitted with armor shields for the viewpoints. This one was not. No doubt Big Sister would make good this omission but Grimes was more concerned with
now
than a possible future.

From his seat, as the boat lifted, he saw a squad of the reptilian humanoids jumping out of the leading, multi-wheeled land car. They carried weapons, firearms of some kind, took aim and delivered a ragged volley. It sounded like hail on a tin roof. The bullets were no more effective than the shells had been.

They went on firing after the pinnace was airborne and even when she was well aloft there was a sharp
ping
on her underside.

“Did you look at them?” demanded the Baroness. “Giants. At least twice as big as the ones we first saw!”

“We were lucky to get away,” said Grimes. “So was our friend here—although he didn’t seem to want to be rescued.”

“The robots frightened him,” she said. “To him they’re monsters. . .”

“Big Sister,” said Grimes. “Over to you. Get us back on board as soon as possible.”

“I have control, Captain,” came the reply from the transceiver.

Grimes released himself from his seat, went to the cabin at the rear of the pinnace. The Baroness accompanied him.

She whispered, “He’s . . . dead . . .”

“Only fainted,” said Grimes. Then, to the robots, “Get that net off him.”

They looked down at the spacesuited man sprawled on the deck. Grimes sneezed suddenly; there was an irritating acridity in the air despite the efforts of the ventilating fans. He knelt by the still figure. He was amazed to find that the suit was made only from thin, coarsely woven cloth. But, he reasoned, for many years
Lode Ranger’s
people and their descendants must have had to make do with whatever materials came to hand. He looked at the ovate, opaque helmet, tried to see through the narrow, glazed vision slit to the face beneath.

But the slit was not glazed.

It was not glazed and there were other openings, approximately where ears and mouth are located on a human head. A dreadful suspicion was growing in his mind.

He took hold of the helmet with his two hands, gave it a half turn to the left. It resisted the twisting motion. He tried to turn it to the right. It still would not come free. So he just lifted it.

He stared down in horror at the big-domed, saurian head, at the dull, sightless, faceted eyes, at the thin-lipped mouth, twisted in a silent snarl, from which ropy slime still dribbled.

He heard the Baroness’s gasp of horrified dismay.

He let the dead, ugly head drop to the deck, picked up the glittering, vicious looking pistol. The trigger guard was big enough for him to get his gloved forefinger into it.

“Don’t!” the Baroness cried sharply.

He ignored her, pulled the trigger. A stream of bright but harmless sparks flashed from the muzzle of the gun.

“A toy . . .” she whispered. “But what . . .?”

He asked, “Did you ever, as a child, play cowboys and Indians, Your Excellency? No, I don’t suppose you did. But you must have heard of the game. And that’s what these . . . kids were playing. But they’d call the game invaders and people or something like that, with the invaders as the baddies. Just a re-enactment of a small battle, but quite an important battle, many, many years ago. Goodies versus baddies. The goodies won. There were no
Lode Ranger
survivors.”

“But that wasn’t a make-believe battle that
we
ran away from,” she said.

“It wasn’t,” he agreed. “It could be that after
Lode Ranger’s
landing—and the massacre—some sort of defense force was set up in case any more hostile aliens came blundering in. Possibly drills every so often.” He laughed without humor. “It must have given the officer responsible quite a turn when our pinnace came clattering over, making straight for the old
Lode Ranger.
The real thing at last . . .”

He looked up at the Baroness. He was amazed to see that she was weeping; her helmet, unlike the native’s make-believe one, could not hide her expression or the bright tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Just a child . . .” she said. “Just a child, whose exciting, traditional game turned terrifyingly real . . .”

And so,
thought Grimes, rather hating himself for the ironic flippancy,
another redskin bit the dust.

At least he had the grace not to say it aloud.

Chapter 26

A report was made to
the Admiralty about the happenings on
Lode Ranger’s
planet. The Baroness had not wished to send one but, rather surprisingly, Big Sister supported Grimes on this issue. The Admiralty was not at all pleased and sent a terse message ordering
The Far Traveler
to leave any future explorations of the world to the personnel, far better equipped and qualified, of the destroyer
Acrux.

The Baroness finally decided to make the best of the situation. “After all,” she said to Grimes, “it is only Lost Colonies in which I am interested. Morrowvia, for example. What has happened on that world since you—and, I admit, others—tried to drag the happy colonists into the mainstream of galactic civilization? And now,” she went on sweetly, too sweetly, “we shall refresh your memory, Captain Grimes.”

Grimes regarded his employer apprehensively over the rim of his teacup. She always made a ritual of afternoon tea and almost invariably, even when he was in the doghouse, he was invited (commanded?) to her salon to share this minor feast. It was all done in considerable style, he was bound to admit—the fragrant infusion poured from the golden pot by the robot butler into gold-chased eggshell china, the paper-thin cucumber sandwiches, the delicious, insubstantial pastries . . . Sometimes on these daily occasions she was graciously charming; other times she seemed to delight in making her yachtmaster squirm. Always she was the aristocrat. She was the aristocrat and Grimes was the yokel in uniform.

He looked at her reclining gracefully on her
chaise longue
, wearing the usual filmy white gown that, tantalizingly, neither fully revealed nor fully concealed. Her wide, full mouth was curved in a smile—a malicious smile, Grimes decided; this was going to be what he had categorized as a squirm session. Her eyes—they were definitely green today—stared at him disdainfully.

She said, “As you already know, Captain, I was able to obtain recordings, of various occasions from the archives of the Federation Survey Service. Or, to be more exact, Commander Delamere had those records aboard his ship and allowed me, for a consideration, to have copies taken.”

He thought,
What can’t you buy, you rich bitch!

She went on, “This one is audio tape only. Recorded in the captain’s cabin aboard one of the Survey Service’s minor vessels some years ago. I wonder if you will recognize it . . .” She lifted a slim, languorous yet imperious arm. “Big Sister, the
Seeker
recordings, please.”

“Certainly, Your Excellency,” replied the computer-pilot. The screen of the big playmaster lit up but there was no picture, only glowing words and symbols:

SEEKER

1473/18.5

ETHOLOGY NTK=

RESTRICTED AO

For four ringers only,
thought Grimes.
Not to be heard outside the sacred precincts of the Archives . . . How the hell did Frankie get his dirty paws on this?

From the speaker of the ornate instrument came a voice, a woman’s voice, familiar.
Maggie . . .
Grimes thought. He wondered where she was now, what she was doing, whom she was doing it with. He regretted, not for the first time, his resignation from the Survey Service. He had his enemies in the Space Navy of the Federation but he’d had his friends, good ones, and Maggie Lazenby—Commander Margaret Lazenby of the Scientific Branch—had been the best of them.

She had been more than just a friend.

He recalled the occasion vividly as he listened to her talking. She was telling Grimes, the Dog Star Line’s Captain Danzellan and Captain Drongo Kane of the
Southerly Buster
what she had been able to learn of the origins of the Lost Colony on Morrowvia. It had been founded during the Second Expansion. A gaussjammer, the emigrant ship
Lode Cougar,
had been driven off trajectory by a magnetic storm, had been flung into a then unexplored sector of the galaxy. By the time that a habitable planet was blundered upon there had been starvation, mutiny, even cannibalism. There had been a crash landing with very few survivors—but, nonetheless, this handful of men and women possessed the wherewithal to start a colony from scratch. Aboard
Lode Cougar
had been stocks of
fertilized ova, animal as well as human. (Dogs had been required on Austral, the world to which the ship originally had been bound, and cats, both to keep the indigenous vermin under control.

“With those very few survivors,” Maggie had said, “a colony could still have been founded and might well have endured and flourished. There were ten men—nine of them, including Morrow, passengers, the other a junior engineer. There were six women, four of them young. Then Morrow persuaded his companions that they would have a far better chance of getting established if they had underpeople to work for them. It seems that the only ova suitable to his requirements were those of cats. The others did not query this; after all, he was an experienced and qualified genetic engineer. With the aid of the ship’s artificer he set up his incubators and then—everything that he needed he found in the ship’s cargo—a fully equipped laboratory. Before the diesel fuel ran out he was getting ample power from a solar energy converter and
from a wind driven generator . . .

“I quote from Dr. Morrow’s journal: The first batch is progressing nicely in spite of the accelerated maturation. I feel . . . paternal. I ask myself why should these, my children, be underpeople? I can make them more truly human than the hairless apes that infest so many worlds, that may, one day, infest this one . . .”

So it went on, Maggie still reading from Dr. Morrow’s diary, telling of the deaths of the
Lode Cougar
survivors. Although Morrow admitted nothing in writing it seemed probable that these were not accidental. Mary Little, Sarah Grant and Delia James succumbed to food poisoning. Douglas Carrick fell off a cliff. Susan Pettifer and William Hume were drowned in the river. The others, apparently, drank themselves to death after Morrow set up a still.

“There was something of the Pygmalion in Morrow,” went on that long ago Maggie. “He fell in love with one of his own creations, his Galatea. He even named her Galatea . . .”

“And he married her,” said a strange male voice that Grimes, with something of a shock, realized was his own. “He married her, and the union was fertile. According to Interstellar Law any people capable of fertile union with true people must themselves be considered true people. So, Captain Kane, that puts an end to your idea of setting up a nice, profitable slave trade.”

Drongo Kane’s voice—Grimes had no difficulty in recognizing it, even after all this time—broke in. “Don’t tell me that you believe those records! Morrow was just kidding himself when he wrote them. How many glorified tom cats were sneaking into his wifeor his popsies’ beds while his back was turned?”

There was an older, heavier male voice, the Dog Star Line’s Captain Danzellan. “I was the first to land on this planet, Captain Kane, quite by chance. I found that the natives were . . . friendly. My Second Officer—among others—did some tom catting around himself and, if I may be permitted the use of an archaic euphemism, got the daughter of the Queen of Melbourne into trouble. The young idiot should have taken his contraceptive shots before he started dipping his wick, but he didn’t think that it would be necessary. And then, just to make matters worse, he fell in love with the wench. He contrived, somehow, to get himself appointed to
Schnauzer
for my second voyage here. Now he wants to make an honest woman of the girl. Her mother, however, refuses to sanction the marriage until he becomes a Morrowvian citizen and changes his name to Morrow. As a matter of fact it all rather ties in with Company policy. The Dog Star Line will want a resident manager here—and a prince consort will be ideal for the job. Even though the queenships are not hereditary in theory they usually are in practice. And Tabitha—that’s her name—is next in line.”

Again Kane’s voice, “What are you driveling about?”

And Danzellan, stiffly, “Tabitha has presented young Delamere with a son.”

The Baroness raised her hand and the playmaster fell silent. “Delamere?” she asked. “But surely he’s captain of the destroyer
Vega.”

“The Odd Gods of the Galaxy did not create that name for Handsome Frankie alone, Your Excellency,” said Grimes. “But, as a matter of fact,
that
Delamere, the one on Morrowvia, is one of Frankie’s distant cousins. Like Frankie, he uses women to rise in the universe. Frankie has his plain, fat admiral’s daughter—which is why he’s gotten as high as he has. There’ll be other women, carefully selected, and Frankie’ll make admiral yet. Come to that, that Dog Star Line second mate hasn’t done badly either, using similar methods. Resident manager on Morrowvia
and
a prince consort . . .”

“And they say that women are jealous cats . . .” murmured the Baroness. Then, “Continue, Big Sister.”