Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  So Messrs. Muggeridge, Whitelaw, and Nile were supposed to be keeping their ears to the ground on my behalf, and I was getting more and more bored, and every day doing my sums—or having the ship’s computer do them for me—and trying to work out how long it would be before the profit made on my last voyage was completely eaten up by port charges and the like. For the lack of better entertainment I haunted the Port Helms municipal library—at least it was free—and embarked on a study course on the history of this dreary colony. Someday I shall write a book—The Galactic Guide to Places to Stay Away From. . . .

  The fiction in the library was not of the variety that is written to inflame the passions. It was all what, during the Victorian era on Earth, would have been called “improving.” The factual works were of far greater interest. From them I learned that the incidence of crime—real crime, not such petty offenses as trying to grow your own tobacco or brew your own beer—on Helmskirk was surprisingly high. Cork a bottle of some fermenting mixture—and any human society is such a mixture—too tightly and the pressures will build up. There was an alarmingly high incidence of violent crime—armed robbery, assault, rape, murder.

  I began to appreciate the necessity for Helmskirk’s penal satellite, a smallish natural moon in a just under twenty-four-hour orbit about its primary. Not only was it a place of correction and/or punishment for the really bad bastards, but it also housed a large population of people who’d been caught playing cards for money, reading banned books, and similar heinous offenses. If I’d been so unfortunate as to have been born on Helmskirk, I thought, almost certainly I should have been acquainted with the maze of caverns and tunnels, artificial and natural, that honeycombed the ball of rock.

  As the days wore on I’d settled into a regular routine. The morning I’d devote to minor maintenance jobs. Then I’d have lunch. Before leaving the ship after this meal, I’d make a telephone call to my agents to see if they’d anything for me. Then I’d stroll ashore to the library. It was a dreary walk through streets of drably functional buildings, but it was exercise. I’d try to keep myself amused until late afternoon, and then drop briefly into the agents’ office on the way back to Little Sister.

  Then the routine was disrupted.

  As I entered the premises, old Mr. Muggeridge looked up accusingly from his desk, saying, “We’ve been trying to get hold of you, Captain.”

  I said, “I wasn’t far away. I was in the municipal library.”

  “Hmph. I never took you for a studious type. Well, anyway, I’ve a time charter for you. A matter of six local weeks, minimum.”

  “Where to?” I asked hopefully.

  “It will not be taking you outside the Helmskirk System,” he told me rather spitefully. “The prison tender, the Jerry Falwell, has broken down. I am not acquainted with all the technical details, but I understand that the trouble is with its inertial drive unit. The authorities have offered you employment until such time as the tender is back in operation.”

  I went through the charter party carefully, looking for any clauses that might be turned to my disadvantage. But Muggeridge, Whitelaw, and Nile had been looking after my interests. After all, why shouldn’t they? The more I got, the more their rake-off would be.

  So I signed in the places indicated and learned that I was to load various items of stores for the prison the following morning, lifting off as soon as these were on board and stowed to my satisfaction. Oh, well, it was a job and would keep me solvent until something better turned up.

  It was a job, but it wasn’t one that I much cared for. I classed it as being on a regular run from nowhere to nowhere. The atmosphere of Helmskirk I had found oppressive; that of the penal satellite was even more so. The voyage out took a little over two days, during which time I should have been able to enjoy my favorite playmaster cassettes if the customs officers had seen fit to release them. But rules were rules, and I was not leaving the Helmskirk System. And the moon, which was called Sheol, was very much part of it.

  On my first visit I did not endear myself to the prison governor. I’d jockeyed Little Sister into a large air lock set into the satellite’s surface and then left my control room for the main cabin. I opened the air lock doors and then sat down to await whatever boarders there would be—somebody with the inevitable papers to sign, a working party to discharge my cargo, and so on and so forth. I was not expecting the ruler of this tiny world to pay a call in person.

  He strode into the ship, a tall man in dark gray civilian clothes, long-nosed, sour-featured, followed by an entourage of black-uniformed warders. “Come in, come in!” I called. “This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!”

  He said, “I do not see any cat. Where is the animal? The importation of any livestock into Sheol is strictly contrary to regulations.”

  I said, “It was only a figure of speech.”

  “And a remarkably foul-mouthed one.” He sat down uninvited. “I am the governor of this colony, Mr. Grimes. During each of your visits here you will observe the regulations, a copy of which will be provided you. You will be allowed, should time permit, to make the occasional conducted tour of Sheol so that you may become aware of the superiority of our penal system to that on other worlds. There will, however, be no fraternization between yourself and any of our inmates. There will be no attempt by you to smuggle in any small luxuries. One of the officers of the Jerry Falwell made such an attempt some months back. He is now among our . . . guests, serving a long sentence.”

  “What did he try to smuggle in?” I asked.

  “It is none of your business, Mr. Grimes. But I will tell you. It was cigarettes that he had illegally obtained from a visiting star tramp. And I will tell you what he hoped to receive in exchange. Mood opals. And the penalty for smuggling out mood opals is even greater than that for smuggling in cigarettes.”

  “What are mood opals?” asked Kitty.

  “Don’t you know? They were, for a while, very popular and very expensive precious stones on Earth and other planets, especially the Shaara worlds. The Shaara loved them. They weren’t opals, although they looked rather like them. But they were much fierier, and the colors shifted, according, it was said, to the mood of the wearer, although probably it was due to no more than changes in temperature and atmospheric humidity. They were found only on—or in, rather—Sheol. They were actually coprolites, fossilized excrement, all that remained of some weird, rock-eating creatures that inhabited Sheol and became extinct ages before the colonization of Helmskirk. The mood opals became one of Helmskirk’s major moneymaking exports. They were never worn by anybody on Helmskirk itself, such frivolity as personal jewelry being illegal.”

  “How come,” asked Kitty, “that we’ve never seen mood opals here? Most Terran fads drift out to this part of the Galaxy eventually.”

  “There aren’t any mood opals anymore,” Grimes told her. “It seems that the polishing process, which removed the outer crust, exposed the jewels to the atmosphere and to radiation of all kinds. After a few years of such exposure, the once-precious stones would crumble into worthless dust.”

  Well (he went on), that was my first visit to Sheol. Naturally it sparked my interest in the mood opal trade. I suggested to my agents that they try to organize for me the shipment of the next parcel of precious stones to wherever it was they were going. But the Interstellar Transport Commission had that trade tied up. Every six months one of their Epsilon-class freighters would make a very slight deviation during her voyage from Waverly to Earth, and it was on Earth—in Australia, in fact—where the opal polishers plied their trade. I pointed out that it was only a short hop, relatively speaking, from Helmskirk to Baroom, the nearest Shaara colony world, Surely, I said, the Shaara could polish their own mood opals. But it was no-go. They always had been polished in some place called Coober Peedy, and they always would be polished in Coober Peedy, and that was that.

  Meanwhile, I made friends among the warders on Sheol. Some of them were almost h
uman. Their close association with the quote, criminal, unquote classes had rubbed off much of the arrogant sanctimoniousness so prevalent on the primary. There was one—Don Smith was his name—whom I even trusted with one of my guilty secrets. He would share morning coffee, generously spiked with the rum that I had persuaded the autochef to produce, with me. When there was any delay between the discharge of the cargo I had brought and the loading of the mood opals that I should be taking back, he would take me on conducted tours of the prison.

  There were the hydroponic farms, where most of the workers were women, some of them, despite their hideous zebra-striped coveralls, quite attractive. Some of them, and not only the attractive ones, would waggle their hips suggestively and coo, “Hello; spaceman! I’ll do it for a cigarette!” And Don would grin and say, “They would, you know. I can arrange it for you.” But I refused the offer. I didn’t trust him all that much. Besides, my stock of cigarettes—which I kept aboard only for hospitality and not for my own use—had been impounded by the blasted customs.

  There were the workshops, where convict labor, all men, assembled machines at whose purpose I could do no more than guess; I haven’t a mechanical mind. There was the printery and there was the bookbindery. I was invited to help myself from the stacks of new books, but I did not take advantage of the offer. Collections of sermons of the hellfire-and-damnation kind are not my idea of light reading to while away a voyage. There was the tailor’s shop, where both warders’ uniforms and convicts’ uniforms were made. There were the kitchens and there were the messrooms. (The prison officers’ food was plain but wholesome; that for the convicts, just plain, definitely so.) There were the tunnels in which the mood-opal miners worked. It was in one of these that I was accosted by a man with a dirt-streaked face and sweat- and dust-stained coveralls.

  “Hey, Skipper!” he called. “How about my hitching a ride in your space buggy away from here? I can make it worth your while!”

  I stared at him. I didn’t like the cut of his jib. Under the dirt that partially obscured his features was a hard viciousness. He had the kind of very light and bright blue eyes that are often referred to as “mad.” He looked as though he’d be quite willing to use the small pickax he was holding on a human being rather than on a rock.

  I decided to ignore him.

  “Stuck-up bastard, aren’t you, Skipper. Like all your breed. You deep-spacers think yourselves too high and mighty to talk to orbital boys!”

  “That will do, Wallace!” said Don sharply.

  “Who’s talking? You’re not in charge of this work party.”

  “But I am.” Another warder had come up. He was holding one of the modified stun guns that were the main weaponry of the guards; on the right setting (or the wrong setting, if you were on the receiving end) they could deliver a most painful shock. “Get back to work, Wallace. You’re nowhere near your quota for the shift—and you know what that means!”

  Apparently Wallace did and he moved away. Don and I moved on.

  “A nasty piece of work,” I said.

  “He is that,” agreed Don, “even though he is a spaceman like yourself.”

  “Not too like me, I hope.”

  “All right. Not too like you. He got as high as mate of the Jerry Falwell, and then he was caught smuggling cigarettes and booze in and mood opals out. If only the bloody fool had done his dealing with the right people and not with the convicts! I suppose that it’s poetic justice that he’s serving his time here as an opal miner.”

  I supposed that it was.

  And then we wandered back to Little Sister, where, after half an hour or so, I loaded two small bags of mood opals—in their rough state they looked like mummified dog-droppings—and embarked a couple of prison officers who were returning to the primary for a spell of leave. Although they were (a) female and (b) not unattractive, they were not very good company for the voyage.

  My next trip back from Sheol to Helmskirk I had company again. Unexpected company. For some reason I decided to check the stowage in the cargo compartment; there was a nagging feeling that everything was not as it should be. This time there were no mood opals, but there were half a dozen bales of clothing, civilian work coveralls, that had been manufactured in the prison’s tailor’s shop. At first glance nothing seemed amiss. And then I saw a pool of moisture slowly spreading on the deck from the underside of one of the bales. Aboard a ship, any kind of ship, leaking pipes can be dangerous. But there were no pipes running through and under the deck of the compartment; such as there were were all in plain view on the bulkheads, and all of them were intact.

  Almost I dipped my finger into the seepage to bring it back to my mouth to taste it. Almost. I was glad that I hadn’t done so. I smelled the faint but unmistakable acridity of human urine.

  I went back to the main cabin, to my arms locker, and got out a stun gun and stuck it into my belt. And then, very cautiously, I unsnapped the fasteners of the metal straps holding the bale together. The outer layers of folded clothing fell to the deck. I stepped back and drew my stun gun and told whoever it was inside the bale, in as stern a voice as I could muster, to come out. More layers of clothing fell away, revealing a sort of cage of heavy wire in which crouched a young woman. She straightened up and stepped out of the cage, looking at me with an odd mixture of shame and defiance.

  She said, “I shouldn’t have had that last drink of water, but I thought that I should half die of thirst if I didn’t. . . .” She looked down at the sodden legs of her civilian coveralls and managed an embarrassed grin. “And now I suppose, Captain, that you’ll be putting back to Sheol and handing me over.”

  I said, “I can hand you over just as well at Port Helms.”

  She shrugged. “As you please. In that case, could I ask a favor? The use of your shower facilities and the loan of a robe to wear while my clothes are drying . . . I have to wash them, you know.”

  I thought, You’re a cool customer. And I thought, I rather like you.

  Despite her ugly and now sadly bedraggled attire, she was an attractive wench: blonde, blue-eyed, and with a wide mouth under a nose that was just retrousse enough, just enough, no more. She had found some way to tint her lips an enticing scarlet. (The women convicts, I had already learned, used all sorts of dyes for this purpose, although cosmetics were banned.) And I remembered, too, all the fuss there’d been about taking showers and such, all the simpering prudery, when I had carried those two women prison officers.

  So I let her use my shower and hang her clothes in my drying room, and lent her my best Corlabian spider silk bathrobe, and asked her what she would like for dinner. She said that she would like a drink first and that she would leave the ordering of the meal to me.

  It was good to be having dinner with a pretty girl, especially one who was enjoying her food as much as she was. The autochef did us proud, from soup—mulligatawny, as I remember—to pecan pie. The wines could have been better; an autochef properly programmed can make quite a good job of beer or almost any of the potable spirits, but as far as, say, claret is concerned, is capable of producing only a mildly alcoholic red ink. Not that it really mattered on this occasion. Everything that I gave my guest to eat and drink was immeasurably superior to the prison food—and, come to that, streets ahead of anything that could have been obtained in any restaurant on Helmskirk.

  After the meal we relaxed. I filled and lit my pipe. She watched me enviously. I let her have one of my spare pipes. She filled it with my shredded, dried, and treated lettuce leaf tobacco substitute. She lit it, took one puff, and decided that it was better than nothing, but only just.

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said. “This has been a real treat. The drinks, the meal, your company. . . .” She smiled. “And I think that you’ve been enjoying my company, too. . . .”

  “I have,” I admitted.

  “And won’t you feel just a little bit remorseful when you turn me in after we arrive at Port Helms? But I suppose that you’ve already been in touch with th
e authorities by radio, while I was having my shower, to tell them that you found me stowed away. . . .”

  I said, “I’ll get around to it later.”

  Her manner brightened. “Suppose you never do it, Captain? I could . . . work my passage. . . .” The dressing gown was falling open as she talked and gesticulated, and what I could see looked very tempting—and I had been celibate for quite a while. “Before we set down at Port Helms, you can put me back in the bale. The consignees of the clothing are members of a sort of . . . underground. They have helped escaped convicts before.”

  “So your crime was political?”

  “You could call it that. There are those of us, not a large number but growing, who are fighting for a liberalization of the laws—a relaxation of censorship, more freedom of thought and opinion. . . . You’re an off-worlder. You must have noticed how repressive the regime on Helmskirk is.”

  I said that the repression had not escaped my notice.

  “But,” she went on, “I do not expect you to help me for no reward. There is only one way that I can reward you. . . .”

  “No,” I said.

  “No?” she echoed in a hurt, a very hurt, voice.

  “No,” I repeated.

  Oh, I’m no plaster saint, never have been one. But I have my standards. If I were going to help this girl, I’d do it out of the kindness of my heart and not for reward. I realize now that I was doing her no kindness. In fact, she was to tell me just that on a later occasion. A roll in the hay was just what she was needing just then. But I had my moments of high-minded priggishness, and this was one of them. (Now, of course, I’m at an age when I feel remorse for all the sins that I did not commit when I had the chance.)