Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (2 page)

There were a few, a very few, exceptions to the feminine drabness. One of these was drinking at the bar, not far from Grimes’ table. She was a tall woman, made taller yet by the lustrous black hair elaborately coiled on top of her head. She was strong featured, her nose too large and chin too firm for mere prettiness. Her wide mouth was a scarlet slash across her pale face. Her eyes were a startling green. She was wearing a black, high-collared shirt, gold-trimmed, black, sharply creased trousers tucked into glossy, black, calf-high boots.

“And who is that?” asked Grimes in a low voice. “The general of your women’s army?”

The Chief Customs Officer laughed. “Not quite, although it is a uniform she’s wearing, and her rank is roughly equivalent to that of general.” He raised his voice. “Tamara! Why don’t you join us?”

The tall woman came across from the bar, set her glass down on the table, lowered her generously proportioned body into the chair that the Port Captain found for her. She looked at Grimes and smiled slightly.

“So you’re the famous John Grimes,” she said. “I’ve heard about you. My sister is engaged to an officer in the Federation Survey Service.”

“The famous cake baker,” said Grimes.

She laughed. “So you know about that silly business. I got blamed, of course.”

“But how?” asked Grimes.

“Tamara,” said the Customs Officer, “is our Superintending Postmistress.”

“In person,” said that lady. She continued to address Grimes. “And you, Captain, held the rank of Commander in the FSS. You were captain of
Discovery
at the time of the mutiny. You were left on the newly discovered—or rediscovered—Lost Colony of Botany Bay when the mutineers left for parts unknown in your ship, wrecking the destroyer
Vega
in the process. You resigned your FSS commission rather than face a court martial, but Commander Delamere, captain of
Vega,
had other ideas. He tried to arrest you, but you were rescued by the Baroness d’Estang, of El Dorado, who just happened to have blown in in her spaceyacht,
The Far Traveller.
And now—with no Baroness, no spaceyacht—you bob up on Tiralbin in command of a glorified lifeboat.” She laughed. “Very glorified. The thing’s built of solid gold, they tell me.” She looked hard at Grimes. “Quite a story, Captain. Would you mind filling in the gaps?”

“The Baroness and I split brass rags,” Grimes told her. “She gave me
Little Sister—
the pinnace—in lieu of back pay and separation pay.”

“A literally golden handshake,” she said. “And now what do you intend doing?”

Grimes said, “I was thinking of starting a courier service.”

“You were, were you? Or you are, are you? You’ve come to the right shop. In my official capacity I know just how lousy the mails are out of and into this world. Unfortunately we have no ships of our own and must rely upon the service, such as it is, provided by the Commission.”

“I’m surprised that you don’t have ships,” said Grimes.

“We did, once,” the Port Captain told him. “Three, very second hand Epsilon Class tramps.
Tiralbinian King, Tiralbinian Queen, Tiralbinian Prince.
The
King’s
inertial drive packed up when she was coming in to a landing at Port Chaka, on Panzania and the auxiliary reaction drive did more harm than good; blew the arse off her. Luckily there were no fatalities, although she was a structural total loss. The
Prince?
Nobody knows what happened to her—except, perhaps, her crew. It’s assumed that her Mannschenn Drive went on the blink when she was on passage from Tiralbin to Atlantia. As for the
Queen—
her
operating costs were astronomical. Repairs, maintenance and more repairs. We had a chance to sell her to Rim Runners and grabbed it with both hands. And that, Grimes, is the short, sad history of the Tiralbinian Interstellar Transport Commission.”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes. He made a major production of lighting and filling his pipe. “So there’s a chance that a small, private operator based on this planet might make a go of things.”

“A chance,” conceded the Postmistress. “As far as I’m concerned, there are escape clauses in our contract with ITC. For example, if ITC cannot provide a ship to carry mails directly from Tiralbin to their planet of destination I can place such articles aboard any vessel making such a voyage. Mind you, it’s not very often that such a vessel is here when we want one.”

“The last time,” said the Port Captain, “was five years ago.”

“It was,” she agreed. She frowned slightly. “It so happens, it just so happens, Captain Grimes, that there’s an urgent consignment of parcel mail for Boggarty. Would you be interested?”

“I would,” said Grimes, without hesitation.

“How much would you charge?” she asked bluntly.

“I’ll have to do my sums first,” he told her.

“Do that,” she said, “and let me know by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.
Epsilon Corvus
is due in the day after tomorrow, and by some minor miracle she’s actually proceeding from here direct to Panzania—and Panzania, as you know, has the mail exchange.”

“Boggarty’s well off the trade routes,” said Grimes. “Even from Panzania the consignment would travel by a very roundabout way.”

“Feed that factor into your computer with the others,” the Postmistress said.

Chapter 3

THE PORT CAPTAIN,
who lived out at the spaceport, ran Grimes back to the pinnace in his shabby little tricar. It was still raining. It would go on raining, Grimes was told, for three more weeks. And then there would be the dry season. And then the winter, with its high winds and blizzards. Grimes allowed himself to wonder why Tiralbin didn’t go in for weather control to spread the meteorological goodies and baddies more evenly through the year. He was told sternly that Tiralbin was a poor world with no money to spare for useless luxuries. And, in any case, Tiralbin’s main export was an indigenous fruit, the so-called Venus strawberry, prized on quite a few planets both by gourmets and by those few to whom it was an aphrodisiac. Its low, tough bushes flourished in the local climatic conditions; it was a case of leave well enough alone.

The ground car stopped by
Little Sister’s
airlock. The Port Captain declined Grimes’ invitation to come aboard for a nightcap—which was just as well; after that afternoon’s session stocks of liquor were running low. Replenishments would have to be laid in—and paid for.

Grimes managed to cover the short distance between the car and the airlock without getting too wet. He was thankful that he had thought to lock the inner door only, leaving the outer one open. He let himself into the pinnace—his ship, his home. In the tiny galley he set coffee a-heating and helped himself to a couple of soberup capsules. Back in the main cabin, which was also bedroom, sitting room and chartroom, he sipped his coffee and watched the screen of the little playmaster, which instrument was, in effect, his library. (Big Sister, before setting the Baroness and Grimes adrift in the pinnace, had seen to it that the small spacecraft was fully equipped from the navigational as well as other viewpoints, and had contributed generously from her personal memory banks.)

Boggarty,
read Grimes on the little screen.

Then followed the astronautical and geophysical data, the historical information. It was an Earth-type planet, fourth out from its primary. It had been colonized from a ship of the First Expansion, which meant that the First Landing post-dated First Landings on other worlds classed as Second Expansion planets. But the First Expansion vessels—the so-called Deep Freeze Ships—had proceeded to their destinations at sub-light speeds. Boggarty was even further removed from the main trade routes than Tiralbin. Its exports consisted of very occasional shipments of native artifacts, consigned mainly to museums, art galleries and private collectors. As a result of these infrequent but lucrative sales, Boggarty had built up a large credit balance in the Galactic Bank, which maintained its headquarters on Earth. There was ample money for the human colonists to pay for any of the goods they ordered, by the practically instantaneous Carlotti radio, from anywhere at all in the known universe. The main trouble, apparently, lay in persuading any of the major shipping lines or even a tramp operator to deviate from the well-established tram-lines to make a special call. The only company to make regular visits was the Dog Star Line which, every three standard years, sent a ship to pick up a worthwhile consignment of
objets d’art.

The planet, Grimes learned, was named after the indigenes, whom the first colonists had dubbed boggarts. Looking at the pictures that flickered across the little screen he could understand why. These creatures could have been gnomes or trolls from Terran children’s fairy stories. Humanoid but grossly misshapen, potbellied, hunchbacked, the males with grotesquely huge sex organs, the females with pendulous dugs . . . Curved, yellow tusks protruding from wide, lipless mouths . . . Ragged, spiny crests in lieu of hair . . .

If the boggarts were horrendous, what they manufactured was beautiful. They worked with wire, with gleaming filaments of gold. Their gnarled, three-fingered, horny-nailed hands moved with lightning dexterity as they wove their metal sculptures, complex intricacies that seemed to be (that were?) at least four dimensional. And these, Grimes learned with some amazement, were no more than adaptions from the traps—in which they caught large, edible, flying insects—that the boggarts had been weaving at the time of the First Landing.
(But some spiders’ webs are works of art,
he thought.)

He wondered what the boggarts got paid for their work. There was no explicit information, but in one shot of a cave workshop he saw, in a corner, bottles and plastic food containers, and some of the females were wearing necklaces of cheap and gaudy glass beads.

He was wasting time, he knew, viewing what was, in actuality, no more than a travelogue—but he liked to have some idea of what any world to which he was bound was like. He looked at mountainous landscapes, at long, silver beaches with black, jagged reefs offshore, at mighty rivers rushing through spectacular canyons, flowing majestically across vast, forested plains. He saw the towns and the cities, pleasant enough but utterly lacking in architectural inspiration, too-regular cubes and domes of metal and plastic. He saw the cave villages of the boggarts.

He had seen enough to be going on with and turned his attention to navigational details. The voyage from Tiralbin to Boggarty would, he (or the computer) calculated have a duration of thirty-seven subjective days, well within the pinnace’s capacity. Food would be no problem—although he would, in effect, be getting his own back. The algae tanks, as well as removing carbon dioxide from the spacecraft’s atmosphere and enriching it with oxygen, would convert other body wastes into food. The little autochef, he had learned from experience, could use the algae paste as the raw material for quite palatable meals. That same autochef, he had discovered, was capable of distilling a flavorless spirit that, with the addition of various flavorings, was a fair substitute for gin. Tobacco? Luckily Tiralbin was one of the worlds on which smoking was a widespread habit. He would have to make sure that he had an ample stock of fuel for his battered pipe before he lifted off. Fuel? No worries there. The small hydrogen fusion unit would supply ample power for the mini-Mannschenn, the inertial drive, the Carlotti radio, the Normal Spacetime radio, light, heat, cooking, the playmaster . . . And would it be possible for him to lay in a stock of spools for this instrument in Muldoon? He hoped so. Thirty-seven subjective days of utter solitude is quite a long time, but not too long if it is not compounded with utter boredom.

And then he came to the calculations for which his past training and experience had not fitted him. How much would it cost? How much should he charge? On the one hand, he was not a philanthropic institution, but, on the other hand, he was entitled to a fair profit. What was a fair profit? He supposed that he could regard
Little Sister
as an investment. A deep space-going pinnace is a very expensive hunk of ironmongery . . . A return of 10%? But
Little Sister
was not a hunk of ironmongery. She was the outcome of miscegenation between a goldsmith and a shipbuilder . . . And how much had she cost? How much was she worth?

Grimes didn’t know.

All right, then. How much would the voyage cost him? His port dues here on Tiralbin, for a start. Hospitality to the port officials. Such stores—luxuries as well as necessities—as he would have to purchase before lift-off. Such stores as he would have to purchase after arrival at Boggarty. Depreciation of ship and fittings during the round trip. (But depreciation in a vessel such as
Little Sister,
built of almost everlasting materials, was negligible.) Insurance? That was something he would have to go into with the local Lloyd’s Agent. Salaries? There was only one salary, and that was his own, paid (presumably) by himself to himself. What was the Award Rate for the master of a vessel of this tonnage? Did the Astronauts’ Guild have a representative in Muldoon?

It was all quite simple, he realized. He would charge on a cost plus basis. The only trouble was that he did not know what the costs were likely to be. There was no way of finding out until various business offices opened in the morning.

He let down the folding bunk that he had been using—the other one, intended for the Baroness, had never been used—took a sleeping tablet to counteract the effects of the soberup, told the computer to wake him at 0600 hours local, and turned in.

Chapter 4

GRIMES HAD A BUSY MORNING.
He was able to arrange a hook-up between the pinnace’s NST transceiver and the local telephone exchange, so was able to carry out most of his business by telephone. This was just as well, as it was still raining heavily and he had no local currency with which to pay for cab hire. As he accumulated data he fed it into
Little Sister’s
computer. The insurance premium demanded by Lloyd’s was amazingly high, but not so amazing, he realized, bearing in mind the fact that his spacecraft was built of a precious metal. He was rather surprised that the figure should be quoted with so little delay, but, of course, Lloyd’s records would contain all details of
The Far Traveller,
including her pinnace.