Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (4 page)

Miss Haverstock looked at her watch. She said, “The consignment of parcel mail, together with my baggage, will be here very shortly. Are all your stores on board? Good. Have you paid your port dues and obtained Customs clearance? Good. If you have no objections we will lift as soon as the mails and baggage have been stowed.”

Grimes said, “This was certainly a quick turn-around. I was hoping to see something of Tiralbin. Apart from one evening in the Gentlepersons’ Club in Muldoon I haven’t been off the ship.”

She told him, “You haven’t missed anything. As far as we are concerned here in the south it’s monsoon weather over the entire damned hemisphere, and winter’s set in north of the equator. As you may have noticed, we have no land masses at all in the tropical and sub-tropical zones. So it’s a choice between getting soaked or frozen.”

“Frankly,” said Grimes, “I’ve often wondered why people live on some of the worlds that they do . . .”

“Are you getting in a nasty dig at this one? Well, Grimes, I was born here. I’m used to it. At times I even like it, but I don’t suppose I’d like much the planet that
you
were born on. Earth, wasn’t it? I thought as much. You Terries always contrive to convey the impression that you own the whole damn galaxy but don’t think much of it anyhow . . .”

Grimes laughed. “Surely we aren’t as bad as that.”

“Aren’t you?” She grinned at him. “Anyhow, much as I love Tiralbin I want a change of scenery. And my leave does not officially start until I have delivered the mail to its consignee on Boggarty, so, by the time we get there, I shall still have several standard months due . . .”

A man in a drab blue uniform came into the cabin without first announcing himself. He accorded the Postmistress a grudging salute then turned to Grimes. “You the skipper?”

“Yes.”

“Mail’s here, an’ some travellin’ bags. Where do you want ’em?”

Grimes saw the single mail sack—it was heavy, and obviously held square boxes or cartons—stowed in the locker that he had cleared for the purpose. Tamara Haverstock’s baggage went into a storeroom off the galley-cum-engine room. He signed the receipt for his cargo. The man left.

The high-ranking postwoman said, “What’s holding you, Captain? The mail must fly!”

“I suppose I’d better think about getting upstairs,” admitted Grimes.

Chapter 6

GRIMES TOOK
Little Sister
upstairs. It was his first lift-off in her—his first lift-off, that is, prior to a deep space voyage. While the pinnace had been attached to
The Far Traveller
she had been used mainly as an atmosphere flier. This occasion seemed wrong, somehow. In a spaceship
down
and
aft
should be co-directional. Here—unless the interior of the pinnace were entirely rearranged—the little spacecraft’s progress in space would always be along her short axis.

He would get used to it, he supposed. With the inertial drive hammering healthily he lifted through the pouring rain, losing sight of Port Muldoon when he was less than a kilometer up. He missed the auxiliary reaction drive that was a standard fitting in most spaceships. It was supposed to be for emergency use only, but the majority of Survey Service Captains employed it, blasting off, when they were a safe distance from the ground, like an archaic rocket. He was not sure that he liked having a woman, even an attractive woman, in the seat by his, watching his every move with intelligent interest. Still, he grudgingly admitted to himself, she wasn’t as bad as the Baroness had been. She did not object to his smoking. He noticed that she had a cigarillo between her full lips, its acrid fumes competing with the incinerator reek of his pipe. She should have asked permission before lighting up, he thought, but was not prepared to make an issue of it.

Little Sister
broke through into the clear air above the cloud cover. The light—from Tiralbin’s sun and reflected from the cloudscape—was briefly dazzling until the ports automatically polarized. She drove up through the thinning atmosphere, through near-vacuum, into the almost complete vacuum of outer space. Below her Tiralbin could have been a giant pearl displayed on black velvet, the surface featureless save for the occasional rift in the overcast, the spiral pattern, near the equator, of a revolving storm.

Up she drove, up. Lights flared briefly on the console marking the pinnace’s passage through the Van Allens. Grimes adjusted his seat so that he was almost on his back, looking straight upwards through the transparency now uncovered in the roof of the control cab. He had no trouble finding the first target star; it was a blue luminary in the constellation called on Tiralbin Muldoon’s Cat. He was rather surprised that the Tiralbinians had ever gotten around to naming their constellations, but supposed that the skies would be clear during the Dry Season.

He asked, “Who was Muldoon?”

“Huh? Muldoon? Oh, I see what you mean . . .” She had adjusted her own chair so that her body was parallel to his.
“That
Muldoon. He was captain of the First Ship, the
Lode Caravel.
The story goes that he had a pet cat . . .”

“Such is fame,” said Grimes.

He concentrated on bringing The Cat’s Eye into the center of the cartwheel sight engraved in the overhead port. In a real ship he would have been employing gyroscopes to swing the hull about its various axes, here he was having to do it by adjusting the thrust of the inertial drive. It was a ticklish job. Finally he had the target star centered, then allowed it to fall a degree off to port.

“You had it right,” she complained. “Now you’ll have to do it again.”

“Galactic Drift,” he said, “has to be allowed for. Now, stand by for free fall. I’m cutting the drive.”

“Why?”

He ignored her. The drumming of the inertial drive fell silent, was replaced by the humming of the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the mini-Mannschenn, the humming that rapidly rose in pitch to a thin, high whine. Grimes was used—as much as anybody can get used—to the distortions of light and sound, to the crazy perspective, to the uncanny sensation of
deja vu.
Sometimes there was prevision, a glimpse of the future, or of a possible future, sometimes only a haunting unease. This time there was only, for him, the unease.

Things snapped back to normal. He touched the control that brought the back of his chair upright and, with the other hand, restarted the inertial drive. There was acceleration again, substituting for gravity.
Up
was
up
and
down
was
down.

He looked to his passenger. She was still in the reclining position. Her face was very pale. He said, “Don’t look through the ports if it frightens you.” He touched the switch that opaqued the transparencies. He went on, “Space from a ship under interstellar drive is a scary sight, especially for the first time . . .”

She said, “But I haven’t looked out of the ports. It was just a . . . It was . . . real. What happened . . .” She looked at him, then down at herself. “But it couldn’t have been, could it?”

He said, “I should have warned you. Quite often when the interstellar drive is started, when the temporal precession field is building up, there are these . . . flashes of precognition.” He smiled reassuringly. “But don’t worry, it may never happen. From every
now
there’s an infinitude of futures.”

She said, “I’m not worried. I was just . . . startled. Now, if you’ll unshield the ports, I’ll have a look at what space is like when it’s warped out of all recognition.”

She stared out at the dim, coruscating nebulosities that should have been hard, bright stars and then, when Grimes rolled the pinnace slightly, down at Tiralbin, which had the appearance of a writhing, roughly spherical, luminescent amoeba.

She shuddered. “Don’t you spacemen,” she asked, “usually celebrate the start of a voyage with a stiff drink?”

“It has been done,” conceded Grimes, letting her precede him into the main cabin.

Chapter 7

HE BUSIED HIMSELF
with the drinks and a tray of savories.

He raised his glass, “Here’s looking at you.”

She was worth looking at. Her severe blue and gold uniform suited her. It could almost have been painted on to her splendid body.

She said, “Here’s looking at you, Grimes.” She sipped. “I hope you have enough of this excellent gin to last out the voyage.”

He said, “I make it myself. Or, to be more exact, the autochef does.”

She said, “A versatile ship. As versatile as her master.”

“Versatile?” he asked.

“Aren’t you? Survey Service officer, yacht skipper, ship-owner, courier . . .”

He laughed. “I’ll try anything once.”

“Will you?” There was something odd in the way she said it.

Grimes finished his drink, said, “Now I’ll get on with the minor modifications that we shall require. I should have done it before lift-off, but the plaspartit sheets didn’t come down until this morning, with the rest of the stores.”

“Plaspartit sheets?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows.

“You know the stuff. Sticks to anything. Used for erecting temporary partitions.”

“What for?’” she asked.

“I just told you.”

“But what
for?”

“To make a light, longitudinal bulkhead in this cabin. The folding bunk on the starboard side is mine. The one on the port side is yours . . .”

She faced him over the table, looking into his eyes. Her own seemed preternaturally large, hypnotic in their intensity. She said, “I rather thought that it would have to happen, sooner or later. You’re a man, not unattractive. I’m a woman, with all the right things in the right places. When you turned on that Time-Space-twister of yours I had a sort of preview—a very vivid one. So now I
know
that it’s going to happen. Why put it off?”

Why indeed?
Grimes asked himself.

He had not seen her touch any fastenings, but her shirt was open. Her breasts were large, firm, the pink nipples prominent and a stippling of color against the pearly pallor of her skin. She stood up and, moving with slow, deliberate grace, almost as though she were doing it to music, took off the shirt then pushed trousers and undergarments down her long, straight legs. She practiced all-over depilation, Grimes noted with almost clinical interest—or, perhaps, the lack of body hair was the result of some minor local mutation.

He had always preferred his women with sun-darkened skins and with luxuriant rather than otherwise pubic growths, but . . .
Why look a gift horse in the pussy?
he asked himself.

She moved lithely around the table and—it was the only possible word for her action—pounced, enveloping him in warm, naked femininity. As gently as possible he broke away. She stared at him incredulously. She almost snarled, “You’re not . . .”

He said, “Don’t worry. I’m heterosexual. But there’s just something I have to do in the control cab first . . .”

He made his way forward. He switched on the internal recorder. He had remembered Paragraph 118(c) of the Space Shipping Act. It was extremely unlikely that it would ever be evoked, that there would be need to prove that there had been no rape, but a videotape of this occasion would be a pleasant souvenir of the voyage, a felicitous parting gift when the time came for farewells.

When he returned to the main cabin he saw that she had found out how to lower his folding bunk from the ship’s side and, stretched out on the pneumatic mattress, was waiting for him.

He shed his clothing and joined her.

Chapter 8

GRIMES WAS A COMPETENT
spaceman but he was no engineer.

During his Survey Service career he had subscribed to the belief commonly held by spacemen officers regarding routine overhauls of machinery in port by those of the engineering branch. “They’re so surprised that their toys are working properly that they have to take them apart to find out why!” All
Little Sister’s
machinery had been functioning well when Grimes and his late employer, the Baroness d’Estang, had been cast adrift from
The Far Traveller.
It had still been functioning well when the pinnace had been intercepted by Drongo Kane’s
Southerly Buster.
After the Baroness had decided to embark on Kane’s ship, leaving
Little Sister
to Grimes as a parting gift, all had functioned well on his lonely voyage to Tiralbin. Grimes had lifted from Port Muldoon without a worry in the universe—at least insofar as his ship and her equipment were concerned. He had set his initial trajectory for The Cat’s Eye. From that starfall he would adjust course to head towards the Boggarty sun, homing on the Carlotti Beacon on Boggarty, obtaining fixes as required from that beacon and those on Jones-world and the uninhabited Z314U.

So—he thought in his innocence—there was nothing to do but enjoy the voyage. Tamara was a good shipmate. This was a holiday for her and she was making the most of it. She played a
good game of chess. Her tastes and Grimes’ coincided regarding the entertainment spools for the playmaster. She could coax the autochef into producing dishes that Grimes had never dreamed could be concocted from such unpromising raw material as sewage-fed algae. She improved on Grimes’ homemade gin and persuaded the mechanized mini-galley to distill a brandy that Napoleon himself (after a hard battle and with nothing else to drink) would not have sneezed at, a liqueur that the Benedictine monks might have recognized as a distant cousin to their own famous after dinner drink, a Tia Maria that, topped with synthetic cream, was—in the absence of a potable yardstick—indistinguishable from the real thing.

And, he told himself with a certain smugness, he was getting paid for all this. No doubt he and Tamara would say good bye without heartbreak when the time came, but meanwhile . . .

Little Sister
fell steadily down the dark dimensions, through the warped continuum. Her inertial drive hammered away steadily and healthily. There was light, and there was warmth. Meals were cooked and served. Entertainment of high quality was available from the play-master at the touch of a finger. And it would be a long time before Grimes and Tamara tired of each other’s company, before each fresh coupling of their bodies failed to engender some fresh refinement of sensation . . .