First Command (79 page)

Kane’s voice issued from the playmaster. “And how many local boyfriends has
she
had?”

“She says,” stated Danzellan, “that she has had none. Furthermore, I have seen the baby. All the Morrowvians have short noses—except this one. He has a long nose, like his father. The resemblance is quite remarkable.”

“Did Mr. Delamere and his family come with you, Captain Danzellan?” asked Grimes. “Call them up, and we’ll wet the baby’s head!”

And Kane exclaimed, “You can break the bottle of champagne over it if you want to!”

The Baroness laughed as he raised her hand. She said, “Quite an interesting character, this Captain Kane. A rogue, obviously, but . . .”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes.

“According to the Survey Service records,” she went on, “your own conduct on Morrowvia was such that you were accused later, by Captain Kane, of partisanship. You had an affair with one of the local rulers . . .”

Grimes’ prominent ears felt as though they were about to burst into flame. “Yes,” he admitted.

“Tell me,” she pressed, “what was it like?”

“All cats are gray in the dark,” he said.

Chapter 27

The Far Traveler
came to Morrowvia.

This world, hopefully, would provide material for at least a couple of chapters of the Baroness’s doctorial thesis. Morrowvia, at the time of its rediscovery, had been an unspoiled world, almost Edenic. Then it had been developed by the Dog Star Line as a tourist resort. Grimes was apprehensive as well as curious. He had liked the planet the way it had been. What would it be like now?

Big Sister was supplying some answers. As the yacht approached her destination, the Mannschenn Drive was shut down at intervals, with a consequent return to the normal continuum, so that a sampling could be made of the commercial and entertainment programs emanating from the planet. These were interesting.

The major continent, North Australia, was now one huge tourist trap with luxury hotels, gambling casinos, emporia peddling native artifacts (most of them, Grimes suspected, manufactured on Llirith, a world whose saurian people made a good living by turning out trashy souvenirs to order), Bunny Clubs (here, of course, called Pussy Clubs) and the like. The screen of the Baroness’s playmaster glowed and flickered with gaudy pictures of beach resorts and of villages of holiday chalets in the mountain country, with performances of allegedly native dances obviously choreographed by Terrans for Terrans.

And then a once-familiar voice spoke from the instrument and looking out from the screen was a once-familiar face. Her hair was a lustrous, snowy white, her gleaming skin dark brown, the lips of her generous mouth a glistening scarlet. Her eyes were a peculiar greenish yellow and the tips of her small ears were oddly pointed. The cheekbones were prominent, more so than the firm chin. Grimes’ regard shifted downward. She was naked, he saw (and as he remembered her). Beneath each breast was a rudimentary nipple. He recalled how when he had first seen her that detail had intrigued him.

She said seductively, purring almost, “Are you tired of the bright lights, the ceaseless round of organized gaiety? Will you finish your vacation more tired than when you started it? Then why not come to Cambridge to relax, to live the natural way, as
we
lived before the coming of the Earthmen? Share with us our simple pleasures—the hunting of the deer in our forests, the fishing for the great salmon in the clear waters of our rivers . . .”

And neither deer nor salmon, Grimes remembered, bore much resemblance to the deer and salmon of Earth or, even, to those creatures as they had mutated on the other worlds into which they had been introduced. Old Morrow must have been a homesick man; his planet abounded with Terran place names, bestowed by himself, and indigenous animals had been called after their nearest (and not often very near) Earthly counterparts.

“Come to Cambridge,” went on the low, alluring voice. “You will not regret it. Come to Cambridge and live for awhile in the rosy dawn of human history. And it will cost you so very little. For two full weeks, with accommodation and food and hunting and fishing trips, the charge for a single adult is a mere one thousand credits. There are special terms for family parties . . .”

She smiled ravishingly. Her teeth were very white between the red lips, in the brown face.

“Please come. I am looking forward so very much to meeting you . . .”

She faded from the screen, was replaced by an advertisement for the Ballarat Casino where, at the time of this broadcast, the imported entertainer Estella di Scorpio had been the star attraction. The Baroness looked and listened briefly then made a sharp gesture. Big Sister cut the sound.

“A friend of yours, Captain Grimes?” asked his employer. “You were looking at her like a lovesick puppy.”

“Estella di Scorpio? No, Your Excellency. I don’t know the lady, nor do I much want to.”

“Not her, Captain. The . . . er . . . lady before her. That indubitably mammalian female.”

“That was Maya,” he told her. “The Queen of Cambridge.”

“A
queen,
advertising a holiday camp?”

“She’s no more than a mayor, really, Your Excellency. Cambridge is—or was when I was there—just a little town.”

She said, “I think that we shall land at this Cambridge rather than at the Melbourne spaceport. After all, you have landed there before in
Seeker
.”

“Things were different then, Your Excellency,” he told her. “There was no Aerospace Control. There were no rules and regulations. We just looked around for a reasonably clear and flat patch of ground, then sat down on it. But now we shall have to use the spaceport to get our Inward Clearance from the authorities.”

“Shall we?” she asked. “Shall we?

Chapter 28

Money talks.

Money talked over the Carlotti Communications System as
The Far Traveler
closed Morrowvia at a multiple of the speed of light. The planet was, to all intents and purposes, a Dog Star Line dependency, its officials, Dog Star Line appointees. The Baroness was a major shareholder in that company. Radio Pratique was granted. Customs and Immigration formalities were waived. Permission was accorded to Grimes to bring the ship down in the close vicinity of Cambridge.

Big Sister let him handle the landing, conceding that in these circumstances his local knowledge would be useful. He brought
The Far Traveler
down through the clear morning air toward an expanse of level ground, devoid of obstructions, that was almost an island, bounded to north, west and south by a winding river, to the east by a wooded hill. To the north and to the west of this eminence there were large villages, each with a sparse sprinkling of pale lights still visible in the brightening dawn. When he had come here before, Grimes recalled, the settlements had been smaller and the lights had been dim and yellow, from oil lamps. Now, obviously, there was electricity. And those latticework masts were new, too. Radio antennae? Possibly, although at least one of them looked heavy enough to afford mooring facilities to an airship.

Sunrise came at ground level and the horizontal rays cast long, dark shadows, showing up every slightest irregularity in the terrain, every hump and hollow, every outcropping of rock, every bush. Grimes applied lateral thrust, bringing the yacht directly above a patch of green that, from the air, looked perfectly smooth. It was. When he set
The Far Traveler
down gently in the middle of it she quivered ever so slightly as the shock absorbers took the strain, then was still.

“A nice landing, Captain,” remarked Big Sister, not at all condescendingly. Grimes remembered how the electronic entity had messed up his landing on Farhaven. But later, on that world, she had saved him and seemed, as a consequence, somehow to have adopted him.

But the Baroness had not. She said disparagingly, “But, of course, you have been here before.”

Grimes was sulkily silent. He rang Finished With Engines. Then he took an all around look through the viewports. He said, “It looks like the reception committee approaching, Your Excellency.”

“How boring,” commented the Baroness. She stifled a yawn. “They must be indecently early risers here.”

“The noise of our inertial drive will have awakened them,” said Grimes.

“Possibly.” She sounded very uninterested. “Go down to the airlock to receive them. You may invite them aboard—to
your
quarters. No doubt they are old friends of yours and will have much to talk about.”

Grimes left the control room. He was glad that the Baroness had not ordered him to change from his comfortable shirt and shorts into formal rig; only the purple, gold-braided shoulderboards were badges of his servitude. Both airlock doors were open when he got down to the stern. He stepped out and stood at the head of the ramp, savoring the fresh air with its scent of flowers, of dew on grass, and the warmth of the early sun. He looked to the west, to the direction from which he had seen the party approaching.

There was a woman in the lead—tall, dark-skinned, white-haired, moving with feline grace. He recognized her at once. She had hardly changed. (Old age when it came to the Morrowvians came suddenly and Maya was far from old.) A man strode beside her. Although he was naked, as were all the others, he was obviously not a native. He was far too heavily built and moved with relative clumsiness. A great mane of yellow hair fell to his broad, deeply tanned shoulders and a bushy yellow beard mingled with the almost as luxuriant growth on his chest. He was carrying a slender, ceremonial spear but looked as though he should have been hefting a heavy club.

The man, the woman (the queen, Maya) and the six archers, slender Dianas, and the half dozen of spearmen . . . Short-haired, all of them (with the exception of the Terran), with similitudes to fur skullcaps on their heads—black, brindle, tortoiseshell—and sharply defined pubic puffs. Grimes walked slowly down the golden ramp to meet them.

Maya stared up at him incredulously.

“John! After all these years! If I had known that you were coming back I would have waited . . .” The blond giant scowled. “But this is . . . fantastic! First Captain Kane, and now you . . .”

“Drongo Kane?” demanded Grimes.
“Here!”

“Never mind him, John.
You
are here, captain of a fine, golden ship . . .”

“Owned,” said Maya’s male companion drily, “by her self-styled Excellency, the Baroness Michelle d’Estang. And
you
are the John Grimes that my wife’s always talking about? I thought that you were in the Survey Service, not a yacht skipper.”

“I
was
in the Survey Service,” admitted Grimes. “But . . . I don’t think that I have the pleasure . . .”

The man laughed. “You can call me Your Highness if you feel like it; I’m Maya’s Prince Consort
and
Manager of Simple Life Holidays. I’m Bill to my friends, Bill Smith, just another Dog Star Line boy who’s found a fine kennel for himself. Mind you, I haven’t done as well as Swanky Frankie in Melbourne—but I’m not complaining.”

He extended a meaty hand. Grimes shook it.

“John . . .” mewed Maya plaintively.

He shook her hand. She conveyed the strong impression that she would have preferred him to have kissed her—but Bill Smith was watching and so would be, he knew, Big Sister and the Baroness.

He said, “Will you come aboard for some refreshment? I’m afraid I can’t ask all of you; my accommodation’s not all that commodious . . .”

“Have one of your hunks bring some dishes of ice cream out for the boys and girls,” Bill Smith told him. “Maya an’ I’ll inflict ourselves on you.” He looked down at himself. “I hope you an’ the Baroness don’t mind the way I’m dressed— but it’s the rig of the day for my job. Both my jobs.”

Grimes led the way up the gangway, then to his day cabin. He was glad that
The Far Traveler
did not have a human crew. From his past experience he had learned that some spacemen and women took naturist planets such as Arcadia—and now Morrowvia—in their stride, happily doing in Rome as the Romans did, while others were openly condemnatory or tried to hide their embarrassment by crudely obscene jokes. His robot stewardess, of course, was not at all perturbed by the nudity of his guests—although she, to them, was a source of wonderment. She brought coffee and pastries for the two men, a golden dish of ice cream for Maya. (It had been the first off-planet delicacy that she had enjoyed and she still loved it.) Grimes sent a general purpose robot to take care of Maya’s entourage, then settled down to talk.

“Drongo Kane?” he asked without preamble. “What’s he doing back here?”

Before either Maya or her husband could answer, the voice of Big Sister came from the playmaster. “I have been in communication with Melbourne Port Control. Captain Kane’s ship,
Southerly Buster,
has been berthed there for five weeks, local time. Captain Kane left Melbourne thirty days ago in one of his ship’s boats, taking with him ten of his passengers, seven men and three women. The ostensible purpose of the trip was a tour of England. No doubt your friends in Cambridge, whom you are now entertaining, will be able to give you further information.”

“Was that your boss?” asked Bill Smith interestedly.

“No,” replied Grimes, rather wondering with what degree of truth. “That was not Her Excellency. That was the ship’s pilot-computer. We call her Big Sister.”

“Haw! Big Sister is watching, eh? You’d better keep your paws off Maya!”

“I don’t think,” said Grimes stiffly, “that Big Sister is concerned about my morals. But what do you know about Drongo Kane?”

“You tangled with him when you were here last, didn’t you? Maya’s told me all about it. But he’s a reformed character now. He’s muscled in on the tourist racket—but one ship, and that not a very big one, won’t worry the Dog Star Line. As long as he pays his port charges and as long as his passengers blow their money in the tourist traps he’s as welcome as the day is long. He was here . . .”

“Only three days,” supplied Maya. “Then he flew off, up river, to Stratford.” She pouted. “I don’t know what he will find there to interest him. Anne—the Queen of Stratford is always called Anne; I wonder why—is more determined to keep to the old ways than any of the rest of us. She will not allow electricity or radio or
anything
in her city.” She smiled smugly.
“We,
of course, realize that tourists, even when enjoying a Simple Life Holiday, appreciate the little comforts, such as refrigeration and television, to which they are used.”