Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (29 page)

Trees and bushes grew in profusion between the domes and even on the domes themselves although the roads were kept well cleared of encroaching vegetation. There was little traffic abroad—the Joognaanards are not early risers—but such few pedestrians as were about, such few drivers and passengers of steam cars who were already going about their various businesses, looked curiously at the three Terrans in Balaarsulimaam’s vehicle—but not ill-manneredly so.

They came at last to a large dome almost in the center of the city, one of those standing around a wide, circular plaza. Glistening white letters, looking like the trail left by a drunken snail, shone above its arched doorway.

“The Institution of Medical Science,” said Balaarsulimaam proudly. “We go inside. They expect us.”

“I don’t like this,” whispered Hodge.

“It’s all right,” Susie told him. “If they don’t fix us the way we want they don’t get paid.”

Grimes helped Susie down out of the car. She was carrying a small bag, he noticed. Toilet gear? A nightdress? He did not think, remembering what he had been told of the Joognaan body-changing technique, that she would be needing either.

Balaarsulimaam hopped rather than walked through the archway. Susie and Grimes followed. Hodge brought up the rear. It was dark inside the building but would have been darker without the glowing mantles of the gas lamps. There was an odd, musty smell but the odor was neither dead nor unhealthy. There was the sound of water running somewhere in the inner recesses of the dome.

The native led them unhesitatingly through the maze of corridors, bringing them at last to a room that was surprisingly brightly lit, a large compartment in which was not the profusion of equipment that Grimes, in spite of what he had been told about the Joognaan process, had been expecting. There were two long, deep bathtubs that looked like something out of a Terran museum of bygone household furniture and fittings. There was a low table by each tub. Three white-furred Joognaanards were awaiting the . . . patients? customers? The larger of the trio said something in a mewling voice to Balaarsulimaam, who translated.

“Miss Susie, Mr. Hodge . . . You are to remove your clothing and get into the baths.”

“What’s in them?” demanded Hodge.

“It will not harm you, only change you. It is a . . . dissolvent fluid. A nutriment . . .”

Grimes looked into the tub nearest to himself. Its contents looked innocuous enough, could have been no more than cold consomme, exuded that musty odor which, somehow, signified life rather than decay.

He turned away. Hodge, he saw, had already stripped. He was an excessively hairy man and without his clothing looked more like an ape than ever. Susie was obviously reluctant to disrobe.

“Get a move on!” growled Hodge. “Let’s get this over with. What’re you so suddenly coy about? Nobody else is wearing a stitch but Grimes—an’ he’s seen you often enough.”

“But they’ve got fur!” she protested. Then—nastily— “And so have you!”

Nonetheless she stripped, handing her clothing to Grimes.

The head doctor spoke again and again Balaarsulimaam translated.

“Each of you will place the . . . image that you wish to resemble on the table by your bath. You will look at the image, think hard about it. The thought intensifiers—there is one for each of you—will intensify your thoughts, will help you to control the cells of your body.” He turned to Grimes. “In your little ship, the
Adder
, you had an officer who communicated with others like himself by thought. He used the brain of some animal as an intensifier. This is almost the same.”

Almost, Grimes thought. But the dog’s brain amplifiers of the psionic communication officers were not housed in living bodies but in glass tanks.

“The images, if you are pleased.”

Susie took her bag back from Grimes, took from it two solidographs, transparent cubes encasing human figures. Somehow he did not want to look at the one that was to be her model, felt that it would somehow be an invasion of privacy. (She was holding it, too, so that he could not get a good look at it.)

She said, “This is what Hodge will turn into. From frog into prince.” She turned the solidograph so that Grimes could see it properly. “It was lucky that I had this with me.”

Grimes recognized the handsome young man who was depicted in the cube. He was the hero of a popular TriVi series back on Bronsonia which he had watched on occasion.

Balaarsulimaam took the solidographs from Susie, looked at them curiously and then set them down carefully, one to each of the tables. The head doctor handed to him two flexible tubes. These he passed on to the man and the woman.

He said, “These you must hold in your mouths. All of your bodies, even your heads, must be under. These are . . . are . . . ?”

“Snorkels,” supplied Hodge impatiently. “All right, let’s get it over with. And I bloody well hope that it’s warmer in than out!”

He took one end of his tube in his mouth, clambered into his bath. He arranged the pipe so that it was dangling over the side. Carefully he lowered his hairy body into the fluid, lay there, completely submerged.

“Must I?” muttered Susie. She shrugged, sending a ripple down the well-filled skin of her entire body. She put the end of the snorkel between her full lips, stepped into the tub.
Like Aphrodite rising from the foam,
thought Grimes.
In reverse. And if she’d been painted by Rubens . . .

She went down like a full moon setting into a wine-dark sea. Her body displaced more liquid than that of Hodge. There was an overflow over the rim of the tub; it fell to the stone floor with an odd, somehow ominous slurping noise.

Grimes walked to the bath, looked down. Already there was a cloudiness, the beginnings of effervescence among the hairs of her head and those at the base of her round belly.

He felt sickened and more than a little afraid. What had he talked her into? He heard the doctor saying something in his mewing voice.

Balaarsulimaam took his arm, exerted gentle pressure to try to turn him away from the sight of what was happening to this woman with whom he had made love.

He said, “Better not to stay, Captain. You are too . . . involved. Your thoughts might interfere.”

“But . . .”

“Better that you return to your ship. Your friends are in good hands.”

Grimes allowed himself to be led out of the operating chamber. At the door he paused, looked back for the last time. There were the two baths, looking ominously like stone coffins, each with the table beside it, each with the squatting, black-and-white furred telepath (telesculptor?) staring fixedly at his faintly gleaming solidograph cube.

“It will not be long,” said Balaarsulimaam. “You are not to worry.”

Grimes allowed himself to be convinced.

Chapter 23

IT WAS VERY LONELY
aboard
Bronson Star
.

Balaarsulimaam had come aboard briefly after running Grimes back to the ship, had stayed only for one cup of coffee and then, pleading pressure of business, had returned to the city.

Grimes decided to pass the day with a general spring clean. He started in his own quarters. He decided to clear all the clothing left by Paul and Lania out of his wardrobe and to stow it in the Third Officer’s cabin. Not for the first time, while he was so engaged, he made a search for possessions that he had left behind on the occasion of his eviction—his watch, a gold everlasting pen that was a souvenir of
The Far Traveler
, a pocket computer from the same ship, the solidograph of Maggie Lazenby—but without happy result. Paul and Lania must have done something with these things—and Paul and Lania would not be answering any questions any more.

The control room was next to receive his attentions. He checked all the instruments, dusted and polished. He thought of sabotaging the auto-log himself but decided that it would be better to leave this to Hodge; the engineer would be able to make it look like an accident.

Conscious of a good morning’s work behind him he went down to the galley, programmed the autochef to cook him a chicken curry lunch. It was palatable enough but had a rather odd flavor. He wondered just what local bird—or reptile?—had made its contribution to the tissue-culture vats when these had been replenished on Porlock.

He smoked a quiet pipe and then went to the farm deck. He had to give Susie full marks for maintenance, he thought. (And what was happening to Susie now? Was that once firmly fleshed body no more than a skeleton submerged in that murky, soupy solution?) Everything was spotlessly clean. The hydroponic tanks were healthily flourishing indoor vegetable plots, the tissue culture and yeast vats, every polishable part and fitting gleaming, could have been scientific equipment in a well-endowed, well-run laboratory rather than an essential component of the ecology of a down-at-heels star tramp. The observation ports of the algae tanks were crystal clear, inside as well as outside. Obviously the aquatic worms that, Susie had told him, she had managed to obtain on Porlock were doing their job. He watched one of the sluglike things browsing on the surface of the glass. He wondered if the same creatures could be used to clean the inside of the Joognaanards’ body-sculpture baths. There must, he thought, be some . . .
sludge
left over . . .

He tried hard to switch his train of thought onto a more cheerful track.

He continued his downward progress, through the holds that had, briefly, been troop decks, that still held their tiers of wooden-framed bunks. Some of the fittings were broken—probably due to his violent maneuvers when coming in to land on Dunlevin. He wondered what value all this timber would have on Bronsonia. Would the cost of it be included in the salvage award? If any?

The engine compartments were next. Hodge, Grimes decided, was not as house-proud as Susie. The only things polished were things that had to be polished, the faces of gauges and the like. There was a thin film of oil over everything else. But there was no untidiness and everything seemed to be in perfect order.

Everything, Grimes hoped, would continue that way; the last leg of his voyage must be made without an engineer.

His inspection ended, he stood at the open airlock door, looking out at the somber forest, staring along the white road that led to the city. There were no vehicles on it.

He returned to his quarters and tried to pass the time watching the playmaster. He could not find a spool in the ship’s not very extensive library that was capable of holding his attention.

He had an early dinner and rather too much to drink and then retired.

His sleep was nightmare haunted; absurdly fat skeletons chased him through his dreams.

***

The next morning Balaarsulimaam came out to the ship.

Before Grimes could ask the question he answered it. “All goes well, Captain. The rebuilding process has begun.”

“And there are no problems?”

“There are no problems.” Balaarsulimaam made the high-pitched whinny that passed for a laugh among his people. “Perhaps when you see your friends you will consent to have your ears diminished. That will be without charge.”

“No thank you,” said Grimes.

Grimes escorted the native up to his quarters, got out bottle, ice and glasses.

“How soon,” he asked, “before Susie and Hodge are able to resume a normal life?” He was painfully aware from the burning of his prominent ears that he was blushing. “I would like a little time with her before I lift off . . .”

“I did guess how it is with you and the young lady.
We
, unlike you Terrans, do have only one sexual mate during our lifetime and so do not suffer from the problems that seem always to afflict your people. From what I learned during my voyage to Earth I am of the opinon that you flit from female to female like a
carnidal
from
bilaan
to
bilaan
. . .”

“I’m sorry that you don’t approve,” said Grimes stiffly.

“I neither approve nor not approve. But do not worry. You shall sip once more from the sugared cup.”

Chapter 24

GRIMES DID NOT ANTICIPATE
that Susie and Hodge would be returning to the ship at night. Had he known, he would have stayed up to welcome them—or he would have made sure, before retiring, that the radar alarm was switched on. As a matter of fact he did remember that he had failed to actuate this warning device but he was already in bed, and drowsy. On this planet, he told himself, there was no need to take precautions against nocturnal attack. Furthermore the airlock door was closed and only the three humans knew the code that would open it from the outside. The last that Balaarsulimaam had told him was that he would be allowed to see the girl and the engineer the following day. He fell asleep wondering what she would look like, which star of the Bronsonian entertainment screens she would have remodeled herself to resemble.

He fell asleep without having to work hard at it.

He did not dream—although at first he thought that it was a dream that he had awakened to.

The light in his bedroom came on.

He opened his eyes, blinked muzzily and then stared at the woman who stood just inside the doorway. She was quite naked, slim, fine featured, auburn haired. There was a beauty spot, a mole, over her small, firm left breast. This minor blemish seemed unusually distinct.

He was dreaming. He
knew
that he was dreaming. Maggie Lazenby could not possibly be here, on this world.

(But she might be, he thought. She just might be. Perhaps a Survey Service ship, with herself among the officers, had landed. Perhaps he had slept through the cacophony of its descent.)

Maggie (Maggie?) walked slowly into the cabin. She seemed to have lost the grace with which she usually moved and the smile that curved her wide mouth was not quite right.

(This
is
a dream, Grimes thought, oddly relieved.)

The scent of her, the muskiness of a sexually aroused human female, was
wrong,
wrong yet familiar. And her skin was too pale.

(But I don’t want to wake up just yet, he thought.)

She came to his bed, stooped to plant a kiss (it tasted wrong) on his mouth. Her erect nipples brushed his bare chest. She straightened, turned slowly around until she faced him again. (Maggie would have pirouetted.)