Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (30 page)

She asked, “What do you think of the new
me
, John?”

He gasped, “Susie!”

“On stage live, in person, singing and dancing.” She stared down at his face. “Aren’t you
pleased
?”

He said weakly, “It’s a surprise . . .”

“But aren’t you
pleased?
”

He was not. He realized then that, however much he might philander, his essential loyalties lay to one woman only—and Susie most certainly was not she.

“Aren’t you
pleased?
”

Suddenly anger supplanted all other emotions. He growled, “So that’s where my solidograph of Maggie went.
You
stole it . . .”

“I did not. Lania threw it out after she caught Paul leering at it.”

“You must have known that I valued it. You should have given it to me.”

“And had her looking at us from the top of your desk every time that we made love? With you making odious comparisons and me knowing that you were doing just that? If it’s any consolation to you, I used her as my model only because there was nothing else around—unless you count that tawdry calendar in the Third Mate’s cabin. In any case, whose bright idea was it that I should have a body change?”

“But you aren’t Maggie . . .”

“I know bloody well I’m not. And Hodge isn’t Trevor Carradine, but he looks like him and that’ll be good enough for me. This was to have been a sort of thank-you-for-everything, farewell session, John—but you’ve ruined it.” She snatched the sheet from off his body. “Look at you! When I came in you were making a tent but
now
. . . Like one of those slime-eating slugs in the algae tanks . . .”

“But . . .”

“You’ve said enough, John. I’ll go where I’m appreciated. Hodge has been trying hard to get some place with me ever since they dragged us out of their tubs and rinsed us off.”

“But . . .”

“But we have the same father? So bloody what? Some planets get all hot and bothered about incest, some don’t. And in any case we’re starting afresh with brand new identities.

“So this is good bye, John. Hodge is wiping the auto-log for you now and all that I have to do is to pick up the money from the safe in my office. We’ll leave you to your sweet dreams of Maggie—what a name!—and you can get off this world and back to your precious
Little Sister
as soon as you like.

“Good bye.”

As she turned to go Grimes jumped out of the bed, caught her by the slim shoulders, pulled her back to him. His erection grew again. No matter what or whom she looked like, no matter how much weight she had shed, she felt like Susie. She did not struggle as he forced her round to face him, as he pressed his mouth to hers. With the full frontal contact there was only the faintest hint of the girl that she had been—but it was enough.

As long as he kept his eyes closed.

He took her brutally on the disordered bed and she did not resist. She was there too and she made him fully aware of it.

When he was fully spent and she sated, she slithered from under him, tottered rather than walked to the door. She turned, supporting herself with one long, slim arm on the door frame.

She said, “All right. This
is
good bye. I’m glad that it was with a bang and not with a whimper—and I’m sorry that you aren’t staying here to take your chances with us . . . You still could . . .”

He said, “I’m sorry that you can’t come back to Bronsonia with me. I could use a purser aboard my own ship, when I get her back . . .”

She said, “You just used a purser. Oh, well. Good bye, good luck and all that. And give my love to
Little Sister
.”

He said, regretting the words as soon as he had uttered them, “And give mine to your half-brother.”

She called him a nasty, sarcastic bastard and then was gone.

Chapter 25

HE DID NOT EXPECT
to see her again but she came out to the ship, accompanied by Balaarsulimaam and three other Joognaanards, before he lifted off for the voyage back to Bronsonia. She was dressed in one of Lania’s black uniforms; her own clothing would not have fit her now. She was carrying a large parcel wrapped in a square of gaudily patterned cloth.

The natives, too, were bearing gifts—baskets of fruit, bottles of
talaagra
.

Balaarsulimaam said, “It has been good to see you again, Captain Grimes. And worry not, your friends will be in good hands. And if ever you should wish your ears remodeled . . .”

“Thank you,” said Grimes. “I’ll remember. And I hope that when I come here again I shall be able to enjoy a longer stay.”

After handshaking, the natives tactfully hopped out of the day cabin, leaving him alone with Susie.

She grinned rather lopsidedly. She said, handing him the parcel, “Here’s something to remember me by, John. No, don’t open it now.” She kissed him, rather clumsily; that package was between them. “Good bye. Or
au revoir?
I’ll see you out on the Rim Worlds, perhaps. Who knows?”

She turned and left him. He heard the whine of the elevator as it carried his visitors down to the airlock. He went up to Control, watched from a viewport Susie and the others walking to the waiting steam car and then standing alongside it. She waved. He waved back although it was doubtful that she would be able to see the salute.

He busied himself with last-minute preparations, sealing the ship and satisfying himself that all life-support systems were fully operational. No pilot lights, he noted, glowed on the otherwise featureless cube of the autolog. So Hodge (he hoped) had kept his promise, so there would be no record of the deviation. He took the command seat, strapped himself in. The inertial drive grumbled into life at his first touch on the controls. She drove up, slowly at first and then faster and faster. It was a lift-off without incident, with everything functioning smoothly.

So it went on and, after this smooth departure,
Bronson Star
was, before long, on trajectory for her home world. Grimes made sure that all alarms were functioning and then went down to his quarters. He uncorked one of the bottles of gift wine, poured himself a glass. After he had finished it he poured another, but let it stand untouched on the coffee table while he unwrapped Susie’s present. There were two solidographs in the parcel. One was that of Maggie Lazenby. The other . . .

No, it was not a solidograph.

It was a squat bottle of clear glass, filled with some transparent fluid. Suspended in it was a tiny, naked woman, full-bodied, with blonde hair and pale skin, a miniature Susie. And she was—somehow—alive. (Or were her movements due only to the way in which the container was being turned around in his hands?) A rather horrid thought came to him. Susie, while immersed in the body-sculpture bath, had lost surplus tissue. And what had happened to those unwanted cells?

But, he rationalized, this was, after all, a quite precious gift. Men have treasured locks of hair from the heads of their lovers. (And locks of hair from other parts of their bodies.) Men have gone into battle wearing their ladies’ favors, articles of intimate feminine apparel still carrying the body scents of their original owners. This present, after all, was the same in principle but to a far greater degree.

He put the bottle down on the table. It vibrated in harmony with the vibrations of the inertial drive. It looked as though the tiny Susie were performing a belly dance.

And was this altogether due to the vibrations?

It must be, he thought, although the only way to be sure would be to break the bottle and to remove its living or preserved contents for examination. And he had no intention of doing that. He did not wish to have a piece of decomposing female flesh on his hands and the thought of feeding what was, after all, a piece of Susie into the ship’s waste disposal and conversion system was somehow abhorrent.

He raised his glass in salute to the tiny Susie, drank. He raised it again to the solidograph of Maggie. He was sorry that neither of them was aboard to keep him company on this voyage. He had never been especially lonely in
Little Sister
but she was only a small vessel. In
Bronson Star
, a relatively big ship, there were far too many empty spaces.

***

The voyage wore on.

Grimes rehearsed, time and time again, the edited version of the story of
Bronson Star’s
voyagings that he would submit to the authorities, wrote the first, second and subsequent drafts of his report. He prepared the Number Two boat for ejection; he was sorry that he did not have the materials at hand to manufacture a time bomb, but the possibility of such a small craft being picked up and found empty was very slight. He admired Hodge’s thoroughness regarding a simulated breakdown of the Mannschenn Drive. Essential wiring had been ripped out, had been replaced with patched lengths of cable, installed with scant regard for appearance, obviously the work of a ham-handed amateur mechanic.

Meanwhile he enjoyed his meals, was inclined to drink rather too much (he had found the mess sergeant’s formula for the perversion of the autochef), exercised religiously to keep his weight down and set up war games in the chart tank to exercise his mind.

The solidograph and the pseudo-solidograph he did not stow away in a convenient drawer; the representations of the two women stood on his desk, facing each other. He often wondered what they would say to each other if ever they met in actuality.

Chapter 26

ALL WOULD HAVE BEEN WELL
had the Mannschenn Drive not broken down in actuality; that makeshift wiring installed by Hodge had been rather too makeshift. Grimes was not in his quarters when it happened; he was in the control room with the Battle of Wittenhaven set up in the chart tank, trying to make it come out differently from the way that it had in historical fact.

He suddenly realized that Commodore van der Bergen’s squadron, as represented by red sparks in the screen, was in full retreat instead of closing in for the kill. Testily he manipulated the controls but the knurled knobs seemed to have a will of their own, were turning the wrong way under his fingers.

The Mannschenn Drive,
he thought.
“The governor . . .”

Obviously it had ceased to function and equally obviously the temporal precession field was building up to a dangerous level. There should have been an automatic cut-off of power to the drive but the fail-safe device had just . . . failed. (It usually did; there were so many paradoxes involved that even a simple on-off switch would do the wrong thing.)

Grimes hoped that the remote controls were still operable. He fought his way to the command chair; it seemed to him that he was having to climb up a deck tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, that he was almost having to swim through an atmosphere congealed to the consistency of treacle. (Illusion it may have been but he was sweating profusely.) The command chair, with the essential ship-handling controls set in its wide arms, seemed to recede to a remote distance, to dwindle, as he straggled toward it. And then, with a bone-braising collision, he was falling over it.

He stabbed, almost blindly, with a stiffened index finger, hoping that he was hitting the right button. It was like spearing a fish at the bottom of a clear stream and trying to allow for refraction.

The thin, high Mannschenn whine deepened in pitch from the almost supersonic to the normally sonic, deepened further still to a low humming, ceased. With an almost audible snap, perspective and color resumed normality. Outside the viewports the stars were once again hard, multi-hued points of light in the interstellar blackness.

He wasted no time looking out at them. He hurried from the control room, took the elevator down to the engine compartments. (Now that he was alone in the ship the cage was always where he wanted it.) Blue smoke still lingered in the Mannschenn Drive room, in spite of the forced ventilation. There was a stink of burned insulation. The cause of the trouble was obvious enough. The protective coating of one of the wires installed by Hodge had chafed through and the wire itself had been melted by the arc between it and sharp-edged metal. The power supply to the governor had been cut. In theory this should have resulted in a loss of power to the complexity of ever-precessing gyroscopes but Hodge had done his best to convey the impression of a rewiring job having been done by somebody without much of a clue as to what he was doing.

Grimes found a length of wire in the spares locker. He removed the two ends of burned cable, substituted the replacement. He went to the local control switchboard and—wondering if he were doing the right thing—switched on. He heard the low hum as the rotors began to spin, heard the noise rise in pitch. The green indicator light at which he was staring took on the appearance of a luminous fire opal, seemed to expand to the likeness of some great, blazing planet toward which he was plunging.

Then, suddenly, it was no more than a little, innocuous emerald light.

He turned to look briefly (very briefly), to stare too long at those tumbling, ever-precessing, always-on-the-verge-of-vanishing rotors is to court disaster. All seemed to be well.

He returned to the control room to check the ship’s position by means of Carlotti bearings and then to make the necessary adjustment of trajectory.

***

He told himself,
I could do with a drink.

He went down to his day cabin.

He noticed the smell at once; it was the same mustiness that he had sniffed in the . . . operating theatre back on Joognaan. He looked at his desk top. The solidograph of Maggie still stood there but the bottle in which the likeness of Susie had been suspended was now no more than a scattering of jagged shards. Fluid had dripped from the deck on to the carpet, staining it badly. Among the broken glass was a formless pink blob.

He felt a stab of regret.

So this, he thought, was the last of Susie. It was a great pity that she had not given him a conventional solidograph; such a portrait would have survived the breakage of its container. He sighed audibly—and it seemed to him that the wide mouth of the miniature Maggie, standing proudly in her transparent cube, was curved in a derisive smile.