“Indeed?” Grimes felt flattered.
The other young man laughed—and Grimes did not feel quite so smug. “Yes, sir. Any piece of insubordination-justifiable insubordination, of course—is referred to as ‘doing a Grimes . . .’ ”
“Indeed?” The Commodore’s voice was cold.
The first young man hastened to make amends. “But I’ve heard very senior officers, admirals and commodores, say that you should never have been allowed to resign . . .”
Grimes was not mollified. “Allowed to resign? It was a matter of choice, my choice. Furthermore . . .” And then he became aware that Sonya, with Commander Farrell in tow, was making her way toward him through the crowd. She was smiling happily. Grimes groaned inwardly. He knew that smile.
“John,” she said, “I’ve good news.”
“Tell me.”
“Jimmy, here, says that I’m entitled to a free passage in his ship.”
“Oh.”
“I haven’t finished. The Survey Service Regulations have been modified since your time. The spouses of commissioned officers, even those on the Reserve List, are also entitled to a free passage if suitable accommodation is available. Star Pioneer has ample passenger accommodation, and she will be making a courtesy call at Port Forlorn after her tour of the Carlotti Beacon Stations in this sector of space . . .”
“We shall be delighted to have you aboard, sir,” said Farrell.
“Thank you,” replied Grimes. He had already decided that he did not much care for the young Commander who, with his close-cropped sandy hair, his pug nose and his disingenuous blue eyes, was altogether too much the idealized Space Scout of the recruiting posters. “Thank you. I’ll think about it.”
“We’ll think about it,” said Sonya.
“There’s no mad rush, sir,” Farrell told him, with a flash of white, even teeth. “But it should be an interesting trip. Glebe, Parramatta, Wyong and Esquel . . .”
Yes, admitted Grimes to himself, it could be interesting. Like Aquarius, Glebe, Parramatta and Wyong were rediscovered Lost Colonies, settled originally by the lodejammers of the New Australia Squadron. Esquel was peopled by a more or less humanoid race that, like the Grollons, had achieved the beginnings of a technological civilization. Grimes had read about these worlds, but had never visited them. And then, through the open windows of the hall, drifted the harsh, salty smell of the sea, the thunderous murmur of the breakers against the cliff far below.
I can think about it, he thought. But that’s as far as it need go.
“We’ll think about it,” Sonya had said—and now she was saying more. “Please yourself, John, but I’m going. You can follow me when Rim Eland comes in. If you want to.”
“You’ll not consider staying here on Aquarius?”
“I’ve already made myself quite clear on that point. And since you’re hankering after a seafaring life so badly it’ll be better if you make the break now, rather than hang about waiting for the Rim Runners’ ship. Another few weeks here and it’ll be even harder for you to tear yourself away.”
Grimes looked at his wife. “Not with you already on the way home.”
She smiled. “That’s what I thought. That’s why I took Jimmy’s offer. He is rather sweet, isn’t he?”
“All the more reason why I should accompany you aboard his blasted ship.”
She laughed. “The old, old tactics always work, don’t they?”
“Jealousy, you mean?” It was his turn to laugh. “Me, jealous of that puppy!”
“Jealous,” she insisted, “but not of him. Jealous of the Survey Service. You had your love affair with the Service many years ago, and you’ve gotten over it. You’ve other mistresses now—Rim Runners and the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve. But I was still in the middle of mine when I came under the fatal spell of your charm. And I’ve only to say the word and the Service’d have me back; a Reserve Officer can always transfer back to the Active List . . .” She silenced Grimes with an upraised hand. “Let me finish. If I’d taken passage by myself in Rim Eland there’d have been no chance at all of my flying the coop. There’s so much of you in all the Rim Runners’ ships. And the Master and his officers would never have let me forget that I was Mrs. Commodore Grimes. Aboard Star Pioneer, with you not there, I’d soon revert to being Commander Sonya Verrill. . .”
Slowly, Grimes filled and lit his pipe. Through the wreathing smoke he studied Sonya’s face, grave and intent under the gleaming corona of auburn hair. He knew that she was right. If he persisted in the pursuit of this new love for oceangoing steamships, she could return to her old love for the far-ranging vessels of the Interstellar Federation’s military and exploratory arm. They might meet again sometime in the distant future, they might not. And always there would be the knowledge that they were sailing under different flags.
“All right,” he said abruptly. “Better tell your boyfriend to get the V.I.P. suite ready.”
“I’ve already told him,” she said. She grinned. “Although as a mere Reserve Commander, traveling by myself, I shouldn’t have rated it.”
The last farewells had been said, not without real regrets on either side, and slowly, the irregular throbbing of her inertial drive drowning the brassy strains of the traditional Anchors Aweigh, Star Pioneer lifted from the Port Stellar apron. Guests in her control room were Grimes and Sonya. Usually on such occasions the Commodore would be watching the ship handling technique of his host, but today he was not. He was looking down to the watery world fast falling away below. Through borrowed binoculars he was staring down at the slender shape that had just cleared the breakwaters of the Port Stellar seaport, that was proceeding seawards on yet another voyage; and he knew that on her bridge Sonja Winneck’s officers would be staring upward at the receding, diminishing ship of space. He sighed, not loudly, but Sonya looked at him with sympathy. That was yet anotheChapter of his life over, he thought. Never again would he be called upon to exercise the age-old skills of the seaman. But there were worse things than being a spaceman.
He pulled his attention away from the viewport, took an interest in what was going on in the control room. It was all much as he remembered it from his own Survey Service days—dials and gauges and display units, telltale lights, the remote controls for inertial, auxiliary rocket and Mannschenn Drives, the keyboard of the Gunnery Officer’s “battle organ.” And, apart from the armament accessories, it was very little different from the control room of any modern merchantman.
The people manning it weren’t quite the same as merchant officers; and, come to that, weren’t quite the same as the officers of the Rim Worlds Navy. There was that little bit of extra smartness in the uniforms, even to the wearing of caps inside the ship. There were the splashes of fruit salad on the left breast of almost every uniform shirt. There was the crispness of the Captain’s orders, the almost exaggerated crispness of his officers’ responses, with never a departure from standard Naval terminology. This was a taut ship, not unpleasantly taut, but taut nonetheless. (One of Grimes’s shortcomings in the Survey Service had been his inability, when in command, to maintain the requisite degree of tension.) Even so, it was pleasant to experience it once again—especially as a passenger, an outsider. Grimes looked at Sonya. She was enjoying it too. Was she enjoying it too much?
Still accelerating, although not uncomfortably, the ship drove through the thin, high wisps of cirrus. Overhead the sky was indigo, below Aquarius was already visibly a sphere, an enormous mottled ball of white and gold and green and blue—mainly blue. Over to the west’ard was what looked like the beginnings of a tropical revolving storm. And who would be caught in it? Grimes wondered. Anybody he knew? In deep space there were no storms to worry about, not now, although in the days of the lodejammers magnetic storms had been an ever-present danger.
“Secure all!” snapped Commander Farrell.
“Hear this! Hear this!” the Executive Officer said sharply into his microphone. “All hands. Secure for free fall. Report.”
Another officer began to announce, “Sick Bay—secure, secure. Enlisted men—secure. Hydroponics—secure . . .” It was a long list. Grimes studied the sweep second hand of his wristwatch. By this time a Rim Runners’ tramp would be well on her way. Quite possibly, he admitted, with some shocking mess in the galley or on the farm deck. “. . . Mannschenn Drive Room—secure. Inertial drive room—secure. Auxiliary rocket room—secure. All secure, sir.”
“All stations secure, sir,” the Executive Officer repeated to the Captain.
“Free fall—execute!”
The throb of the inertial drive faltered and died in mid-beat.
“Centrifugal effect—stand by!”
“Centrifugal effect—stand by!”
“Hunting—execute!”
“Hunting—execute!”
The mighty gyroscopes hummed, then whined. Turning about them, the ship swung to find the target star, the distant sun of Glebe, lined it up in the exact center of the Captain’s cartwheel sights and then fell away the few degrees necessary to allow for galactic drift.
“Belay gyroscopes!”
“Belay gyroscopes!”
“One gravity acceleration—stand by!”
“One gravity acceleration—stand by!”
“One gravity acceleration—execute!”
“One gravity acceleration—execute!”
The inertial drive came to life again.
“Time distortion—stand by!”
“Time distortion—stand by!”
“Mannschenn Drive—stand by!”
“Mannschenn Drive—stand by!”
“Mannschenn Drive—3 lyps—On!”
“Mannschenn Drive—3 lyps—On!”
There was the familiar thin, high keening of the ever-precessing gyroscopes, the fleeting second (or century) of temporal disorientation, the brief spasm of nausea; and then, ahead, the sparse stars were no longer steely points of light but iridescent, pulsating spirals, and astern the fast diminishing globe of Aquarius could have been a mass of multi-hued, writhing gases. Star Pioneer was falling down the dark dimensions, through the warped continuum toward her destination.
And about time, thought Grimes, looking at his watch again. And about bloody time.
Glebe, Parramatta, Wyong . . . Pleasant enough planets, with something of the Rim Worlds about them, but with a flavor of their own. Lost Colonies they had been, settled by chance, discovered by the ships of the New Australia Squadron after those hapless lodejammers had been thrown light-years off course by a magnetic storm, named after those same ships. For generations they had developed in their own way, isolated from the rest of the man-colonized galaxy. Their development, Commander Farrell complained, had been more of a retrogression than anything else. Commodore Grimes put forward his opinion, which was that these worlds were what the Rim Worlds should have been, and would have been if too many highly efficient types from the Federation had not been allowed to immigrate.
Sonya took sides in the ensuing argument—the wrong side at that. “The trouble with you, John,” she told him, “is that you’re just naturally against all progress. That’s why you so enjoyed playing at being a twentieth century sailor on Aquarius. That’s why you don’t squirm, as we do, every time that you hear one of these blown away Aussies drawl, ‘She’ll be right . . .’ ”
“But it’s true, ninety-nine percent of the time.” He turned to Farrell. “I know that you and your smart young technicians were appalled at the untidiness of the Carlotti Stations on all three of these planets, at the slovenly bookkeeping and all the rest of it. But the beacons work and work well, even though the beacon keepers are wearing ragged khaki shorts instead of spotless white overalls. And what about the repairs to the one on Glebe? They knew that it’d be months before the spares for which they’d requisitioned trickled down through the Federation’s official channels, and so they made do with the materials at hand . . .”
“The strip patched with beaten out oil drums . . .” muttered Farrell. “Insulators contrived from beer bottles . . .”
“But that beacon works, Commander, with no loss of accuracy.”
“But it shouldn’t,” Farrell complained.
Sonya laughed. “This archaic setup appeals to John, Jimmy. I always used to think that the Rim Worlds were his spiritual home—but I was wrong. He’s much happier on these New Australian planets, which have all the shortcomings of the Rim but nary a one of the few, the very few good points.”
“What good points are you talking about?” demanded Grimes. “Overreliance on machinery is one of them, I suppose. That’s what I liked about Aquarius, and what I like about these worlds—the tacit determination that the machine shall be geared to man, not the other way round . . .”
“But,” said Sonya. “The contrast. Every time that we step ashore it hits us in the eye. Jimmy’s ship, with everything spick and span, every officer and every rating going about his duties at the very peak of efficiency—and this city (if you can call it that) with everybody shambling around at least half-asleep, where things get done after a fashion, if they get done at all. It must be obvious even to an old-fashioned . . . seaman like yourself.”
“Aboard a ship,” admitted Grimes, “any sort of ship, one has to have some efficiency. But not too much.”
The three of them were sitting at a table on the wide veranda of the Digger’s Arms, one of the principal hotels in the city of Paddington, the capital (such as it was) of Wyong. There were glasses before them, and a bottle, its outer surface clouded with condensation. Outside the high sun blazed down on the dusty street, but it was pleasant enough where they were, the rustling of the breeze in the leaves of the vines trailing around the veranda posts giving an illusion of coolness, the elaborate iron lace of pillars and railing contributing its own archaic charm.
A man came in from outside, removing his broad-brimmed hat as soon as he was in the shade. His heavy boots were noisy on the polished wooden floor. Farrell and Sonya looked with some disapproval at his sun-faded khaki shirt, the khaki shorts that could have been cleaner and better pressed.
“Mrs. Grimes,” he said. “How yer goin’?”
“Fine, thank you, Captain,” she replied coldly.
“How’s tricks, Commodore?”
“Could be worse,” admitted Grimes.
“An’ how’s the world treatin’ you, Commander?”
“I can’t complain,” answered Farrell, making it sound like a polite lie.
The newcomer—it was Captain Dalby, the Port Master—pulled up a chair to the table and sat down with an audible thump. A shirt-sleeved waiter appeared. “Beer, Garry,” ordered Dalby. “A schooner of old. An’ bring another coupla bottles for me friends.” Then, while the drinks were coming, he said, “Your Number One said I might find you here, Commander.”
“If it’s anything important you want me for,” Farrell told him, “you could have telephoned.”
“Yair. Suppose I could. But yer ship’ll not be ready ter lift off fer another coupla days, an’ I thought the walk’d do me good . . .” He raised the large glass that the waiter had brought to his lips. “Here’s lookin’ at yer.”
Farrell was already on his feet. “If it’s anything serious, Captain Dalby, I’d better get back at once.”
“Hold yer horses, Commander. There’s nothin’ you can do till you get there.”
“Get where?”
“Esquel, o’ course.”
“What’s wrong on Esquel?”
“Don’t rightly know.” He drank some more beer, taking his time over it. “But a signal just came in from the skipper of the Epileptic Virgin that the Esquel beacon’s on the blink.”
“Epsilon Virginis,” corrected Farrell automatically. Then—“But this could be serious . . .”
“Nothin’ ter work up a lather over, Commander. It’s an un-watched beacon, so there’s no need to worry about the safety of human personnel. An’ it’s not an important one. Any nog who can’t find his way through this sector o’
space without it ain’t fit ter navigate a plastic duck across a bathtub!”
“Even so . . .” began Farrell.
“Sit down and finish your beer,” said Grimes.
“Yer a man after me own heart, Commodore,” Dalby told him.
“Did the Master of Epsilon Virginis have any ideas as to what might have happened?” asked Sonya.
“If he had, Mrs. Grimes, he didn’t say so. Mechanical breakdown, earthquake, lightnin’—you name it.” He grinned happily at Farrell. “But it suits me down ter the ground that you’re here, Commander. If you weren’t, I’d have ter take me own maintenance crew to Esquel an’ fix the bloody thing meself. I don’t like the place, nor its people . . .” He noticed that Sonya was beginning to look at him in a rather hostile manner. “Mind yer, I’ve nothin’ against wogs, as long as they keep ter their own world an’ I keep ter mine.”
“So you’ve been on Esquel?” asked Sonya in a friendly enough voice.
“Too right. More’n once. When the beacon was first installed, an’ three times fer maintenance. It’s too bleedin’ hot, for a start. It just ain’t a white man’s planet. An’ the people . . . Little, gibberin’ purple monkeys—chatter, chatter, chatter, jabber, jabber, jabber. Fair gets on yer nerves. I s’pose their boss cockies ain’t all that bad when yer get ter know ‘em—but they know what side their bread’s buttered on an’ try ter keep in our good books. If they hate our guts they don’t show it. But the others—the lower classes I s’pose you’d call ‘em—do hate our guts, an’ they do show it.”
“It often is the way, Captain,” said Sonya. “Very often two absolutely dissimilar races are on far friendlier terms than two similar ones. I’ve never been to Esquel, but I’ve seen photographs of the natives and they’re very like Terran apes or monkeys; and the apes and monkeys are our not so distant cousins. You and your men probably thought of the Esquelians as caricatures in very bad taste of human beings, and they thought of you in the same way.”
Upon a Sea of Stars Page 59
