First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  Big Sister said, “I trust that you will make regular use of the gymnasium, Captain Grimes. You will, of course, have to arrange your exercise and sauna times so as not to coincide with those of Her Excellency.”

  He was tempted to sample a small, espaliered pear but, conscious that Big Sister was watching, refrained.

  Below and abaft the farm were more storerooms, in one of which the GP robots, looking like sleeping, golden-skinned men were stacked on shelves. He was told that these could be activated only on orders by the Baroness. He looked into the armory. There was a fine stock of weapons, handguns mainly, stunners, lasers and projectile pistols.

  Then came the deck upon which the gymnasium was situated with its bicycle, rowing machine, automasseur, sauna with, alongside this latter, a neck-deep pool of icy-cold water. There would be no excuse, Grimes decided, for not keeping disgustingly fit.

  Further aft there were the fully-automated workshops—in one of which, Grimes noted, a complex machine was just completing a purple, richly gold-braided tunic which he decided must be for himself. There was a laboratory, also fully automated, in which he watched the carcass of one of the Botany Bay kangaroos, an animal which had mutated slightly but significantly from the original Terran stock, being dissected.

  The voice of Big Sister told him, “You will be interested to learn that a tissue culture has already been started from cells from the tail of this beast. I understand that kangaroo tail soup is esteemed both on Earth and on Botany Bay. The fact that this caudal appendage is prehensile should not detract from its palatability.”

  Grimes did not linger to watch the flashing blades at their grisly work. He was one of those who would probably have been a vegetarian if obliged to do his own butchering. He left the laboratory and, using the spiral staircase around the axial shaft, carried on down and sternwards.

  He looked briefly into the Mannschenn Drive room where the gleaming, ever-precessing gyroscopes tumbled through the warped Continuum, drawing the ship and all aboard her with them. He spent as little time in the Inertial Drive compartment; within its soundproof bulkheads the cacophony was deafening. The hydrogen fusion power plant would have been fascinating to an engineer—which Grimes was not—and the fact that all the display panels were dead robbed the device of interest to a layman. Big Sister said condescendingly, “I can activate these if you wish, Captain Grimes, but such meaningless, to you, showing of pretty lights would only be a waste of electricity.”

  He did not argue. And when, a little later, he looked at the locked door of the compartment in which the electronic intelligence had its being he did not request admittance. He knew that this would be refused. He told himself that he would take a dim view of anybody’s poking around inside his own brain—but still it rankled.

  He had been too many years in command to enjoy being told what he could or could not see in a ship of which he was officially captain.

  Chapter 13

  The voyages, as voyages do, continued. Grimes was determined to learn as much as possible about his command—but when the command herself was rather less than cooperative this was no easy matter. His relationship with his employer was not unfriendly although he met her socially only on her terms. Sometimes he partook of luncheon with her, sometimes dinner, never breakfast. Frequently they talked over morning coffee, more often over afternoon tea. Now and again they watched a program of entertainment on the Baroness’s playmaster although her tastes were not his. Neither were Captain Billinger’s. Unfortunately it had not been possible to lay in a spool library that would have appealed to Grimes. He made frequent, pointless inspections. He insisted on keeping in practice with his navigation. He exercised dutifully in the gymnasium and kept himself reasonably trim.

  And now here he was, seated on a spindly-legged chair in the Baroness’s boudoir, sipping tea that was far too weak for his taste, attired in the uniform that he hated, all purple and gold, that would have been far more appropriate to a Strauss operetta than to a spaceship.

  He regarded his employer over the gold rim of his teacup. She was worth looking at, languidly at ease on her chaise lounge, attired as usual in a filmy gown that revealed more than it concealed. Her dark auburn hair was braided into a coronet in which clusters of diamonds sparkled. She could have been posing for a portrait of a decadent aristocrat from almost any period of man’s long history. Decadent she may have looked—but Grimes knew full well that the rulers of El Dorado were tough, ruthless and utterly selfish.

  She said, looking steadily at Grimes with her big, violet eyes, “We have decided to allow you to handle the landing.”

  Grimes, with a mouthful of tea, could not reply at once and, in any case, he was rather surprised by her announcement. He hastily swallowed the almost scalding fluid and was embarrassed by the distinctly audible gurgle. He put the fragile cup down in its saucer with far too much of a clatter.

  “Surely,” she went on, “you are getting the feel of the ship.”

  “Perhaps,” he admitted cautiously, “the ship is getting the feel of me.” He realized that she was regarding him even more coldly than usual and hastily added, “Your Excellency.”

  “But surely to a spaceman of your experience a ship is only a ship,” she said.

  You know bloody well that this one isn’t, he thought, A normal ship isn’t built of gold, for a start. A normal ship doesn’t have a mind of her own, no matter what generations of seamen and spacemen, myself among them, have half believed. A normal ship doesn’t run to an Owner’s suite looking like the salon of some titled rich bitch in Eighteenth Century France . . .

  “So you can handle the landing,” she stated.

  He replied, as nastily as he dared, “I am sure that Big Sister can manage by herself quite nicely.”

  She said, “But you are being paid—handsomely, I may add—to do a job, Captain Grimes. And this Farhaven is a world without radio, without Aerospace Control. During your years in command in the Survey Service your brain has been programmed to deal with such situations. Big Sister has not been adequately programmed in that respect, she informs me.” She frowned. “As you already know I have brought such deficiencies in programming to the notice of the builders on Electra. Fortunately the guarantee has not yet expired.”

  The golden robot butler refilled her cup from the golden teapot, added cream from a golden jug, sugar from a golden bowl. Grimes declined more tea.

  He said, “Please excuse me, Your Excellency. Since I am to make the landing I should like to view again the records made by Epsilon Pavonis and Investigator . . .”

  “You may leave, Captain,” said the Baroness.

  Grimes rose from his chair, bowed stiffly, went up to his far from uncomfortable quarters.

  He sat before the playmaster in his day cabin watching the pictures in the screen, the presentation of data, the charts and tables. As he had done before, as soon as he had learned of The Far Traveler’s destination, he tried to put himself in the shoes of Captain Lentigan of Epsilon Pavonis, one of the Interstellar Transport Commission’s tramps, who had first stumbled upon this planet. Epsilon Pavonis had been off trajectory, with a malfunctioning Mannschenn Drive. As far as Lentigan was concerned Farhaven had been merely a conveniently located world on which to set down to carry out repairs and recalibration. He was surprised to find human inhabitants, descendants of the crew and passengers from the long-ago missing and presumed lost Lode Venturer. He had reported his discovery by Carlotti Deep Space Radio. Then the Survey Service’s Investigator was dispatched to make a more thorough job of surveying than the merchant captain, all too conscious of the penalties for deviation, had been able to do. Her captain, a Commander Belton, had run into trouble. And as Farhaven, as it had been named by its colonists, was of neither commercial nor strategic importance to any of the spacefaring races its people were left to stew in their own juice.

  Grimes allowed himself to wonder what they would make of the Baroness, himself—and Big Sister.

  As yet he had
been unable to view Commander Belton’s records in their entirety. Every time that he asked for them they were unavailable. Presumably the Baroness was monopolizing them.

  Chapter 14

  Grimes sat in the captain’s chair in The Far Traveler’s control room. The Baroness occupied the chair that, in a normal ship, would have been the seat of the second in command. She was dressed in standard spacewoman’s working uniform—white shirt and shorts but without insignia. She needed no trappings of rank; in the functional attire she was no longer the decadent aristocrat but still, nonetheless, the aristocrat.

  The yacht was not equipped with robot probes—a glaring omission that, said the Baroness, would cost the shipyard on Electra dearly. There were, however, sounding rockets, a necessity when landing on a world with no spaceport facilities; a streamer of smoke is better than nothing when there are no Aerospace Control reports on wind direction and velocity—and at least as good as a primitive windsock.

  The Far Traveler dropped steadily down through Farhaven’s atmosphere. She was in bright sunlight although the terrain below her was still dark. Grimes had told Big Sister that he wanted to land very shortly after sunrise—S.O.P. for the Survey Service. The almost level rays of a rising luminary show up every smallest irregularity of a surface and, when a landing is being made on a strange world, there is a full day after the initial set-down to make preliminary explorations and to get settled in.

  Grimes, during his first orbitings of Farhaven, had selected his landing site—an unforested plain near the mouth of one of the great rivers, a stream that according to Belton’s charts was called the Jordan. Epsilon Pavonis had set down there. So had Investigator. A little way upriver was what Captain Lentigan had referred to as a large village and Commander Belton as a small town. Neither Lentigan nor Belton had reported that the natives were hostile; their troubles had been with their own crews. None of the material that Grimes had seen so far went into very great detail but he could fill in the gaps from his imagination. (He had experienced his own troubles with his own crew after the Botany Bay landing.)

  Big Sister broke into his thoughts. She said, her voice metallic yet feminine, issuing from the speaker of the NST transceiver, “I would suggest that we fire the first sounding rocket, Captain.”

  “Fire at will,” ordered Grimes.

  (In a normal ship some alleged humorist would have whispered, “Who’s Will?”)

  He watched in the stern view screen the arrow of fire and smoke streaking downward. Its trail wavered.

  “Ideal conditions, Captain,” commented the Baroness.

  “It would seem so, Your Excellency,” agreed Grimes.

  But from his own, highly personal viewpoint they were far from ideal. Over many years he had regarded his pipe as an essential adjunct to shiphandling—and for those many years he had been absolute monarch in his own control room. But the Baroness neither smoked nor approved of smoking in her presence.

  He allowed his attention to stray briefly from the controls to what he could see of the sunlit hemisphere through the viewports. Farhaven was a wildly beautiful world but, save for ribbons of fertility along the rivers and coasts, it was a barren beauty. To the east, beyond the narrow sea, reared great, jagged pinnacles, ice-tipped, and to the west similar peaks were already dazzlingly scintillant in the first rays of the rising sun. Unless there were considerable mineral wealth about all that this planet would be good for would be a holiday resort—and it was too far from anywhere for the idea to be attractive to those shipping companies involved in the tourist trade.

  Big Sister said, “I would suggest, Captain, that you pay more attention to your controls. It was, after all, with some reluctance that I consented to let you handle the landing.”

  Grimes felt his prominent ears burning as he blushed furiously. He thought, I’d like five minutes alone back on Electra with the bastard who programmed this brass bitch! He saw, in the screen, that the sounding rocket had hit and that its luminous smoke was rising directly upwards. But it was thinning, would not last for much longer.

  He ordered, “Fire two!”

  Big Sister said, “It is not necessary.”

  Fire two!” repeated Grimes sharply. He added, grudgingly, “Wind can rise suddenly, especially just after sunrise, especially in country like this.”

  “Fire two,” acknowledged Big Sister sullenly as the second rocket streaked downwards, striking just as the first one expired.

  And there was wind, Grimes noted with smug satisfaction, springing up with the dawn. The luminescent pillar of smoke wavered, then streamed seawards. Grimes applied lateral thrust, kept the flaring rocket head in the center of the screen.

  The sun came up relative to the land below the ship, topping the serrated ridge of the range to the eastward. The plain toward which The Far Traveler was dropping flared into color—blue-green with splotches of gold and scarlet, outcroppings of gleaming white from which extended long, sharply defined black shadows. Boulders . . . thought Grimes, stepping up the magnification of the screen. Yes, boulders . . . And the red and yellow patches must be clumps of ground hugging flowers since they cast no shadows. The sounding rocket, still smoking, was almost in the center of one of the scarlet patches; there was no unevenness of the ground there to worry about.

  The ship dropped steadily. Grimes was obliged to make frequent small lateral thrust adjustments; that wind was unsteady, gusting, veering, backing. He reduced the rate of descent until The Far Traveler was almost hovering.

  “I am not made of glass, you know,” remarked Big Sister conversationally.

  “I had hoped to make the landing some time before noon,” said the Baroness.

  Grimes tried to ignore them both. That bloody wind! he thought. Why can’t it make up its mind which way to blow!

  He was down at last—and the ship, suddenly and inexplicably, was tilted a full fifteen degrees from the vertical. She hung there—and then, with slow deliberation, righted herself, far more slowly than she should have done with the lateral thrust that Grimes was applying. There was no real danger, only discomfort—and, for Grimes, considerable embarrassment. He had always prided himself on his shiphandling and this was the first time that he had been guilty of such a bungled landing.

  When things had stopped rattling and creaking the Baroness asked, with cold sarcasm, “Was that really necessary, Captain?”

  Before he could think of a reply Big Sister said, “Captain Grimes was overly cautious. I would have come down fast instead of letting the wind play around with me like a toy balloon. I would have dropped and then applied vertical thrust at the last moment.”

  And you, you cast-iron, gold-plated bitch, thought Grimes, deliberately made a balls-up of my landing . . .

  “Perhaps, Captain,” said the Baroness, “it will be advisable to allow Big Sister to handle her own lift-offs and set-downs from now on.”

  The way she said it there wasn’t any “perhaps” about it.

  Chapter 15

  Big Sister carried out the routine tests for habitability. The captains of Epsilon Pavonis and Investigator had reported the atmosphere as better than merely breathable, the water suitable for drinking as well as for washing in and sailing ships on, a total absence of any micro-organisms capable of causing even mild discomfort to humans, let alone sickness or death. Nonetheless, caution is always advisable. Bacilli and viruses can mutate—and on Farhaven, after the landing of Lode Venturer, there had been established a new and sizeable niche in the ecology, the bodies of the original colonists and their descendants, just crying out to be occupied. The final tests, however, would have to wait until there was a colonist available for thorough examination.

  Finally Big Sister said, speaking through the control room transceiver, “You may now disembark. But I would recommend . . .”

  Grimes broke in. “You seem to forget that I was once a Survey Service captain. Landings on strange planets were part of my job.”

  The Baroness smiled maliciously. “I suppo
se that we may as well avail ourselves of Captain Grimes’ wide range of experience. Quite possibly he was far better at trampling roughshod over exotic terrain than bringing his ship to a gentle set-down prior to the extra-vehicular activities.” She looked away from Grimes, addressed the transceiver. “Big Sister, please have the small pinnace waiting for us. We shall board it from the ground. Oh, and an escort of six general purpose robots. Armed.”

  “Am I to assume, Your Excellency,” asked Grimes stiffly, “that you are placing yourself in command of the landing party?”

  “Of course, Captain. May I remind you that your authority, such as it is, does not extend as much as one millimeter beyond the shell of this ship?”

  Grimes did not reply. He watched her sullenly as she unbuckled herself from her seat and left the control room. Then he unsnapped his own safety belt, got up and went down to his quarters. He found that the robot stewardess had laid out a uniform of tough khaki twill with shoulderboards of gold braid on purple, a gold-trimmed purple beret, stout boots, a belt with attached holsters. He checked the weapons. These were a Minetti projectile pistol—as it happened, his favorite side-arm—and a hand laser. They would do; it was highly unlikely that heavy artillery would be required. He changed out of his shorts and shirt uniform—he had made it plain that he did not consider full dress suitable attire for shiphandling—slowly. Before he was finished the too familiar voice came from the speaker of the playmaster in his day cabin, “Captain Grimes, Her Excellency is waiting for you.”

  He buckled on the belt, went out to the axial shaft, rode the elevator down to the after airlock. He walked down the golden ramp to the blue-green not-quiet-grass. The pinnace was there, a few meters from the ship, a slim, torpedo shape of burnished gold. The Baroness was there, in khaki shirt and flared breeches and high, polished boots, looking like an intrepid White Huntress out of some archaic adventure movie. The general purpose robots were there, drawn up in a stiff line, staring at nothing. From belts about their splendidly proportioned bodies depended an assortment of hand weapons.