First Command (80 page)

“You appreciate them yourself,” said Bill Smith.

“I do,” she admitted. “But never mind Captain Kane, John. Tell us about
you.”
she smiled appealingly. “And while we are talking I will have some more of your delicious ice cream.”

“And would there be any gin?” asked the Prince Consort hopefully.

There was.

Chapter 29

“This Stratford,”
said the Baroness, “sounds as though it might be interesting.”

“In what way, Your Excellency?” asked Grimes.

“Unspoiled . . .”

“It won’t stay that way long if Drongo Kane is there,” Grimes said.

“You are prejudiced, Captain.”

She took a dainty sip from her teacup. Grimes took a gulp from his. He badly needed something refreshing but nonalcoholic. It would have been bad manners to let his guests drink alone and he had taken too much for the neutralizer capsules to have their usual immediate effect.

“Unspoiled,” she said again. “This world the way it was before you and those others blundered in. The Social Evolution of a Lost Colony taking its natural course. If we leave now we shall arrive at Stratford before dark.”

“There is the party tonight, Your Excellency,” Grimes reminded her. “After all, Maya is a reigning monarch.”

“The petty mayor of a petty city-state,” she sneered. “But do not worry. I have already sent my sincere apologies for not being able to attend. But I can just imagine what that party will be like! Drunken tourists going native and lolloping around in disgusting, self-conscious nudity. Imitation Hawaiian music played on ‘native’ guitars imported from Llirith. Imitation Israeli
horas.
Meat charred to ruination over open fires. Cheap gin tarted up with fruit juices—probably synthetic—and served as genuine Morrowvian toddy . . .” She smiled nastily. “Come to that—
you
have already had too much to drink. Big Sister will be able to handle the pinnace by remote control while you sleep it off in the cabin.”

“The pinnace?” asked Grimes stupidly.

“You, Captain, made a survey of this planet shortly after the first landings here. Surely you must remember that there is no site near to Stratford suitable for the landing of a ship, even one so relatively small as
The Far Traveler.”

Grimes did remember then and admitted as much. He said, too, that his local knowledge would be required to pilot the pinnace to Stratford. The Baroness said, grudgingly, that he might as well make some attempt to earn his salary.

Big Sister said nothing.

Grimes flew steadily south, maintaining a compass course and not following the meanderings of the river. Ahead the blue peaks of the Pennine Range lifted into an almost cloudless sky. An hour before sunset he knew that he could not be far from Stratford although, as he recalled, the little town was very hard to spot from the air. It was nestled in the river valley and the thatched roofs of its houses were overgrown with weeds. But there had been some quite remarkable rock formations that he had never gotten around to examining closely, rectangular slabs of dark gray but somehow scintillant stone, not far from the settlement.

Those slabs were still there.

So was a torpedo shape of silvery metal—the pinnace from
Southerly Buster.

He said, pointing, “Kane’s still here, Your Excellency.”

“Are you afraid to meet him again?” she asked.

Grimes flushed angrily. “No,” he said, “Your Excellency.”

He was not frightened of Kane but he would have been willing to admit that he was worried. Kane was up to no good. Kane was always up to no good. He was a leopard with indelible spots.

People emerged from the little houses, from the pinnace, alerted by the racket of the boat’s inertial drive. How many Terrans should there have been? Kane and ten of his passengers, seven men and three women . . . But standing there and looking up were thirty people. All of them were clothed, which seemed to indicate that there were no natives among them. Grimes studied the upturned faces through binoculars. Kane was not there—but suddenly that well remembered voice blasted from the transceiver.

“Ahoy, the pinnace! Who the hell are yer an’ wot yer doin’ here?”

Kane must be speaking from inside his own boat.

“The Far Traveler,”
replied Grimes stiffly into his microphone. “Her Owner, the Baroness d’Estang of El Dorado. And her Master.”

“An’ I’m
Southerly Buster,
Owner
and
Master, Welcome to Stratford. Come on down. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat an’ call the cat a bastard!”

“It should be the local mayor—Queen Anne, isn’t it?—to issue the invitation,” said the Baroness to Grimes.

“Perhaps Queen Anne is dead,” said Grimes. With sudden foreboding he remembered the old saying; Many a true word is spoken in jest.

“Take us down, Captain,” ordered the Baroness.

Grimes reduced vertical thrust and the pinnace settled slowly toward the ground, to the white sheet that somebody had spread to serve as a landing mark. She landed gently. Grimes cut the drive, actuated the controls of the airlock doors. He realized, too late, that he should have brought arms—but the six general purpose robots which had accompanied the humans from
The Far Traveler
would be capable of doing considerable damage to any enemy using nothing more than their own, enormously strong metal bodies.

He had landed about five meters from
Southerly Buster’s
pinnace. A man came out through the airlock door of this craft—tall, gangling, clad in slate-gray shirt-and-shorts uniform with black, gold-braided shoulderboards. His straw-colored hair was untidy, even though short, and his face looked as though at some time in the past it had been shattered and then reassembled by a barely competent, unaesthetic plastic surgeon.

“Captain Kane?” the Baroness asked Grimes.

“Drongo Kane,” he said.

She rose from her seat, was first out of the boat. Grimes followed her, then the robots. Kane advanced to stand in the forefront of his own people. He looked the Baroness up and down like a slave dealer assessing the points of a possible purchase. He bowed then—a surprisingly courtly gesture. He raised the Baroness’s outstretched hand to his lips, surrendered it reluctantly as he came erect. Grimes could not see his employer’s face but sensed that she was favorably impressed by her reception.

She said, “And now, Captain Kane, may I present my yachtmaster, Captain . . .”

“Grimes, Madam,” supplied Kane with a grin. “I thought that I recognized his voice but didn’t see how it could be him. But it is. Live on stage, in person. Singing and dancing.”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes.

“No hard feelin’s,” said Kane, extending his right hand. “You’ve come down in the universe, I see—but I don’t believe in kickin’ a man when he’s down.”

Not unless there’s some profit in it,
thought. Grimes, taking the proffered paw and getting the handshake over as quickly as possible.

“You know, ma’am, I’m pleased that you an’ me old cobber Grimes dropped in,” Kane went on. “A couple of independent witnesses is just what I’m needin’ right now. It’d be better if Grimes was still in the Survey Service—but at least he’s not a Dog Star Line puppy.”

“What are you talking about, Kane?” demanded Grimes.

“Just this. I —an’ my legal eagle, Dr. Kershaw . . .” A tall, gray-haired, gray-clad man among the small crowd inclined his head toward the newcomers . . . “have the honor of representin’ the rightful owners of this planet.”

“The
rightful
owners?” asked Grimes. “Too right.” Kane waved his right hand in a wide arc, indicating the twenty men and women who were standing a little apart from his own people. “The Little, Grant, James and Pettifer families!”

The names rang a faint bell in the recesses of Grimes’ memory.

“Descendants,” stated Kane, “of four of the human women who were among the
Lode Cougar
survivors!”

Chapter 30

Kane made no further
introductions until he had conducted the Baroness and Grimes into one of the houses. The room that they entered had small windows, unglazed, set into two of the walls, screened with matting against the westering sun. There was a huge, solid, wooden table, a half dozen sturdy chairs. On one of the walls a big map of the planet, drawn to Mercatorial projection, was hanging. It was all very like, thought Grimes, Maya’s council room
in
her “palace” had been on the occasion of his first landing on Morrowvia. So this was the palace, he thought.

Where was the queen?

He asked sharply, “Where is Queen Anne, Kane?”

Kane laughed. “Don’t get your knickers in a knot Grimes. She’s not dead. She’s . . . sleeping. So are her subjects. Meanwhile . . .” he gestured toward the four people who had followed them into the adobe building . . . “I’d like you to meet the leaders of the
true
Morrowvians. Mary Little . . .

The woman so named inclined her head and smiled shyly. She was wearing a shapeless blue coverall that hid her body to the neck but the way that she moved seemed human enough. Her teeth were very white and looked sharp. The hair of her head was obviously not the modified cat’s fur of the natives; it was much coarser and longer. It was brown, as were her eyes. Her face was, if anything, too normal, quite forgettable apart from the unusually thin-lipped mouth.

“Peter Pettifer,” continued Kane.

Pettifer was dressed as was Mary Little. He was yellow-haired, brown-eyed. He, too, had a peculiarly thin-lipped mouth.

“Dr. Kershaw you already know,” went on
Southerly Buster’s
master. “And this is Dr. Weldon . . .”

Weldon—short, tubby, black-haired, neatly black-bearded, dressed in gaudily patterned shirt and scarlet shorts—nodded curtly.

“Are you a lawyer too?” asked the Baroness.

“No, madam,” he told her. “My specialty is cryonics.”

Kane sat on the edge of the table, swinging his long legs. He said, “I’ll put you in picture, Ma’am. And you, Grimes. On the occasion of our first visit here—you in
Seeker,
that old woman Danzellan in
Schnauzer
an’ yours truly in the
Buster—
none of us dreamed that the true owners of the planet were stashed away here, in cold storage. There were other records left by Morrow, you know, besides the ones that you an’ Maggie what’s-her-name found in Ballarat. And I turned ‘em up. Oh, old Morrow played around with his cats—that I’ll not deny—but he also obtained fertilized human ova from Mary Little, Susan Pettifer, Delia James and Sarah Grant. These he brought to term,
in vitro,
in the laboratory that he set up here, in Stratford. But, as we all know too well, he was nuts on cats. Perhaps his infatuation with his pet creation, his Galatea, had something to do with it. He decided that Morrowvia would be a pussyocracy . . .” He grinned at his own play on words; nobody else was greatly amused. “He put the handful of true humans to sleep, stashed them away in the deep freeze so that they’d be available if ever he changed his mind. But they stayed there until I thawed ‘em out.”

“That’s your story, Kane,” said Grimes. “But I don’t believe it. To operate any refrigeration plant, even a cooler for your beer, you want power. If there were any wind or water-powered generators here we’d have seen ‘em when we came in. If there ever were any such jennies here they’d have worn out generations ago.”

“And
the refrigeration machinery itself,” said the Baroness, showing a flicker of interest.

“Morrow set up an absorption system,” said Kane smugly. “And as for the energy source—there were solar power screens in
Lode Cougar’s
cargo. The people of the village that Morrow established here had it drummed into them, from the very start, that their sacred duty was to keep the screens clear of weeds and not to allow any larger growths capable of blocking out the sunlight to take root around their edges.”

Grimes remembered those unnatural looking slabs of gray, scintillant rock. He should have investigated them when he made his first rough survey of the planet. The Dog Star Line people should have investigated them when they made their surveys—but they, of course, were concerned primarily with exploitation, not the pursuit of knowledge. (And Drongo Kane, too, was an exploiter, and shrewd enough to know that any scrap of information whatsoever might, some day, be used to his advantage.)

Kane’s story, Grimes admitted reluctantly to himself, was plausible. An absorption refrigeration system, with no moving parts, could well remain in operation for centuries provided that there was no leakage. And the resurrectees did not appear to be of feline ancestry. Nonetheless he wished that photographs of the
Lode Cougar
survivors were available. He looked at Mary Little dubiously.

“Tell us your story, Mary,” prompted Kane.

The woman spoke. Her voice held an unpleasant whining quality. She said, “We are all very grateful to Captain Kane. He restored us to life; he will restore us to our proper place in the world. In the Old Days we were happy—but then the Others were favored by Dr. Morrow. And they hated us, and turned the Doctor against us . . .”

“Cats,” said Kane, “are very jealous animals. And now, ma’am, and you, Grimes, would you care to accompany me on a tour of the . . . er . . . freezer?”

“Thank you, Captain Kane,” said the Baroness.

“I want you both to see for yourselves,” said Kane, “that the people of Stratford have not been harmed but merely filed for future reference. They may be required as witnesses when my, er, clients bring suit against the cat people for restoration of the legal ownership of this planet.”

“How much is in it for you, Kane?” asked Grimes bluntly.

“Nobody works for nothing!” the Baroness told him sharply.

There were steep cliffs on the other side of the river from the village and it was atop these that the solar power screens were mounted. There were inflatable dinghies to ferry the party across the swift-flowing stream. The darkness was falling fast but powerful searchlights on the Stratford bank made the crossing as light as day. Four of
The Far Traveler’s
general purpose robots waded over with the humans, their heads at the deepest part just above the surface, accompanying the boats. (“Don’t you trust me, Grimes?” asked Kane in a pained voice. “No,” said Grimes.) The remaining two automata stayed to guard the pinnace.