"Ask Mr. Timmins to show you up," he said.
* * *
He looked at her over the rim of his glass. He liked what he saw. The small screen of the intercom, showing only her face, had not done her full justice. She sat facing him in an easy chair, making a fine display of slender, well-formed thigh under the high-riding apology for a skirt. (Hemlines were down again, almost to ankle length, in the Rim Worlds and Grimes had not approved of the change in fashion.) The upper part of her green dress was not quite transparent but it was obvious that she neither wore nor needed a bust support.
She looked at him over the rim of her glass. She smiled. He said, "Here's to Yorick, the Jester . . ."
She said, "And the philosopher: We have our serious side." They sipped. The wine was cold, mellow fire.
He said, "Don't we all?"
"You especially," she told him. "You must be more of a philosopher than most men, Commodore. Your interdimensional experiences—"
"So you've heard of them . . . Kitty."
"Yes. Even here. Didn't somebody once say, 'If there's a crack in the Continuum, Grimes is sure to fall into it—and come up with the Shaara Crown Jewels clutched in his hot little hands.'?"
He laughed. "I've never laid my paws on the Shaara Crown Jewels yet—although I've had my troubles with the Shaara. There was the time that I was in business as an interstellar courier and got tangled with a Rogue Queen—"
But she was not interested in the Shaara. She pressed on, "It seems that it's only out on the Rim proper, on worlds like Kinsolving, that you find these . . . cracks in the Continuum. . . ."
Grimes refilled the glasses saying, "Thirsty work, talking. . . ."
"But we've talked hardly at all," she said. "And I want you to talk. I want you to talk. If all I wanted was stories of high adventure and low adventure in this universe I'd only have to interview any of our own space captains. What I want, what Station Yorick wants, what our public wants is a story such as only you can tell. One of your adventures on Kinsolving. . ."
He laughed. "It's not only on Kinsolving's Planet that you can fall through a crack in the Continuum." He was conscious of the desire to impress her. "In fact, the first time that it happened was on Earth . . . ."
She was suitably incredulous.
"On Earth?" she demanded.
"Too right," he said.
* * *
I'm a Rim Worlder now [he told her] but I wasn't born out on the Rim. As far as the accident of birth is concerned I'm Terran. I started my spacefaring career in the Interstellar Federation's Survey Service. My long leaves I always spent on Earth, where my parents lived.
Anyhow, just to visualise me as I was then: a Survey Service JG Lieutenant with money in his pocket, time on his hands and, if you must know, between girlfriends. I'd been expecting that—What was her name? Oh, yes. Vanessa. I'd been expecting that she'd be still waiting for me when I got back from my tour of duty. She wasn't. She'd married—of all people!—a sewage conversion engineer.
Anyhow, I spent the obligatory couple of weeks with my parents in The Alice. (The Alice? Oh, that's what Australians call Alice Springs, a city in the very middle of the island continent.) My father was an author. He specialised in historical romances. He was always saying that the baddies of history are much more interesting than the goodies—and that the good baddies and the bad goodies are the most fascinating of all. You've a fine example of that in this planetary system of yours. The names, I mean. The Hamlet sun and all that. Hamlet was rather a devious bastard, wasn't he? And although he wasn't an out and out baddie he could hardly be classed as a goodie.
Well, the Old Man was working on yet another historical novel, this one to be set in Australia. All about the life and hard times of Ned Kelly. You've probably never heard of him—very few people outside Australia have—but he was a notorious bushranger. Bushrangers were sort of highway robbers. Just as the English have Dick Turpin and the Americans have Jesse James, so we have the Kelly Gang. (Australia had rather a late start as a nation so has always made the most of its relatively short history.)
According to my respected father this Ned Kelly was more, much more, than a mere bushranger. He was a freedom fighter, striking valiant blows on behalf of the oppressed masses, a sort of Robin Hood. And, like that probably-mythical Robin Hood, he was something of a military genius. Until the end he outwitted the troopers—as the police were called in his day—with ease. He was a superb horseman. He was an innovator. His suit of homemade armour, breast and back-plates and an odd cylindrical helmet—was famous. It was proof against rifle and pistol fire. He was very big and strong and could carry the weight of it.
It was at a place called Glenrowan that he finally came unstuck. In his day it was only a village, a hamlet. (No pun intended.) It was on the railway line from Melbourne to points north. Anyhow, Ned had committed some crime or other at a place called Wangaratta and a party of police was on the way there from Melbourne by special train, not knowing that the Kelly gang had ridden back to Glenrowan. Like all guerrilla leaders throughout history Kelly had an excellent intelligence service. He knew that the train was on the way and would be passing through Glenrowan. He persuaded a gang of Irish workmen—platelayers, they were called—to tear up the railway tracks just north of the village. The idea was that the train would be derailed and the policemen massacred. While the bushrangers were waiting they enjoyed quite a party in the Glenrowan Hotel; Kelly and his gang were more popular than otherwise among the locals. But the schoolmaster—who was not a Kelly supporter—managed to creep away from the festivities and, with a lantern and his wife's red scarf, flagged the train down.
The hotel was besieged. It was set on fire. The only man who was not killed at once was Kelly himself. He came out of the smoke and the flames, wearing his armour, a revolver (a primitive multi-shot projectile pistol) in each hand, blazing away at his enemies. One of the troopers had the intelligence to fire at his legs, which were not protected by the armour, and brought him down.
He was later hanged.
* * *
Well, as I've indicated, my Old Man was up to the eyebrows in his research into the Ned Kelly legend, and some of his enthusiasm rubbed off on to me. I thought that I'd like to have a look at this Glenrowan place. Father was quite amused. He told me that Glenrowan now was nothing at all like Glenrowan then, that instead of a tiny huddle of shacks by the railway line I should find a not-so-small city sitting snugly in the middle of all-the-year-round-producing orchards under the usual featureless plastic domes. There was, he conceded, a sort of reconstruction of the famous hotel standing beside a railway line—all right for tourists, he sneered, but definitely not for historians.
I suppose that he was a historian—he certainly always took his researches seriously enough—but I wasn't. I was just a spaceman with time on my hands. And—which probably decided me—there was a quite fantastic shortage of unattached popsies in The Alice and my luck might be better elsewhere.
So I took one of the tourist airships from Alice Springs to Melbourne and then a really antique railway train—steam-driven yet, although the coal in the tender was only for show; it was a minireactor that boiled the water—from Melbourne to Glenrowan. This primitive means of locomotion, of course, was for the benefit of tourists.
When I dismounted from that horribly uncomfortable coach at Glenrowan Station I ran straight into an old shipmate. Oddly enough—although, as it turned out later, it wasn't so odd—his name was Kelly. He'd been one of the junior interstellar drive engineer officers in the old Aries. I'd never liked him much—or him me—but when you're surrounded by planetlubbers you greet a fellow spaceman as though he were a long-lost brother.
"Grimes!" he shouted. "Gutsy Grimes in person!"
[No, Kitty, I didn't get that nickname because I'm exceptionally brave. It was just that some people thought I had an abnormally hearty appetite and would eat anything.]
"An' what are you doin' here?" he demanded. His Irish accent, as Ir
ish accents usually do, sounded phoney as all hell.
I told him that I was on leave and asked him if he was too. He told me that he'd resigned his commission some time ago and that so had his cousin, Spooky Byrne. Byrne hadn't been with us in Aries but I had met him. He was a PCO—Psionic Communications Officer. A Commissioned Teacup Reader, as we used to call them. A trained and qualified telepath. You don't find many of 'em these days in the various merchant services—the Carlotti Communications System is a far more reliable way of handling instantaneous communications over the light-years. But most navies still employ them—a telepath is good for much more than the mere transmission and reception of signals.
So, Kelly and Spooky Byrne, both in Glenrowan. And me, also in Glenrowan. There are some locations in some cities where, it is said, if you loaf around long enough you're sure to meet everybody you know. An exaggeration, of course, but there are focal points. But I wouldn't put the Glenrowan Hotel—that artificially tumbledown wooden shack with its bark roof—synthetic bark, of course—in that category. It looked very small and sordid among the tall, shining buildings of the modern city. Small and sordid? Yes, but—somehow—even though it was an obvious, trashy tourist trap it possessed a certain character. Something of the atmosphere of the original building seemed to have clung to the site.
Kelly said, using one of my own favourite expressions, "Come on in, Grimes. The sun's over the yardarm."
I must have looked a bit dubious. My onetime shipmate had been quite notorious for never paying for a drink when he could get somebody else to do it. He read my expression. He laughed. "Don't worry, Gutsy. I'm a rich man now—which is more than I was when I was having to make do on my beggarly stipend in the Survey Service—may God rot their cotton socks! Come on in!"
Well, we went into the pub. The inside came up to—or down to—my worst expectations. There was a long bar of rough wood with thirsty tourists lined up along it. There was a sagging calico ceiling. There was a wide variety of antique ironmongery hanging on the walls—kitchen implements, firearms, rusty cutlasses. There were simulated flames flickering in the glass chimneys of battered but well-polished brass oil lamps. The wenches behind the bar were dressed in sort of Victorian costumes—long, black skirts, high-collared, frilly white blouses—although I don't think that in good Queen Victoria's day those blouses would have been as near as dammit transparent and worn over no underwear.
We had rum—not the light, dry spirit that most people are used to these days but sweet, treacly, almost-knife-and-fork stuff. Kelly paid, peeling off credits from a roll that could almost have been used as a bolster. We had more rum. Kelly tried to pay again but I wouldn't let him—although I hoped this party wouldn't last all day. Those prices, in that clipjoint, were making a nasty dent in my holiday money. Then Spooky Byrne drifted in, as colourless and weedy as ever, looking like a streak of ectoplasm frayed at the edges.
He stared at me as though he were seeing a ghost. "Grimes, of all people!" he whispered intensely. "Here, of all places!"
[I sensed, somehow, that his surprise was not genuine.]
"An' why not?" demanded his burly, deceptively jovial cousin. "Spacemen are only tourists in uniform. An' as Grimes is in civvies that makes him even more a tourist."
"The . . . coincidence," hissed Spooky. Whatever his act was he was persisting with it.
"Coincidences are always happenin'," said Kelly, playing up to him.
"Yes, Eddie, but—"
"But what?" I demanded, since it seemed expected of me.
"Mr. Grimes," Spooky told me, "would it surprise you if I told you that one of your ancestors was here? Was here then?"
"Too right it would," I said. "Going back to the old style Twentieth Century, and the Nineteenth, and further back still, most of my male forebears were seamen." The rum was making me boastfully talkative. "I have a pirate in my family tree. And an Admiral of the Royal Navy, on my mother's side. Her family name is Hornblower. So, Spooky, what the hell would either a Grimes or a Hornblower have been doing here, miles inland, in this nest of highway robbers?" Both Kelly and Byrne gave me dirty looks. "All right, then. Not highway robbers. Bushrangers, if it makes you feel any happier."
"And not bushrangers either!" growled Kelly. "Freedom fighters!"
"Hah!" I snorted.
"Freedom fighters!" stated Kelly belligerently. "All right, so they did rob a bank or two. An' so what? In, that period rebel organisations often robbed the capitalists to get funds to buy arms and all the rest of it. It was no more than S.O.P."
"Mphm," I grunted.
"In any case," said Kelly, "your ancestor was so here. We know. Come home with us an' we'll convince you."
So I let those two bastards talk me into accompanying them to their apartment, which was a penthouse atop the Glenrowan Tower. This wasn't by any means the tallest building in the city although it had been, I learned, when it was built. I remarked somewhat enviously that this was a palatial pad for a spaceman and Kelly told me that he wasn't a spaceman but a businessman and that he'd succeeded, by either clever or lucky investments, in converting a winning ticket in the New Irish Sweep into a substantial fortune. Byrne told him that he should give some credit where credit was due. Kelly told Byrne that graduates of the Rhine Institute are bound, by oath, not to use their psionic gifts for personal enrichment. Byrne shut up.
The living quarters of the penthouse were furnished in period fashion—the Victorian period. Gilt and red plush—dark, carved, varnished wood heavily framed, sepia-tinted photographs—no, not holograms, but those old flat photographs—of heavily bearded worthies hanging on the crimson-and-gold papered walls. One of them I recognised from the research material my father had been using. It was Ned Kelly.
"Fascinating," I said.
"This atmosphere is necessary to our researches," said Byrne. Then, "But come through to the laboratory."
I don't know what I was expecting to see in the other room into which they led me. Certainly not what first caught my attention. That caught my attention? That demanded my attention. It was, at first glance, a Mannschenn Drive unit—not a full sized one such as would be found in even a small ship but certainly a bigger one than the mini-Mannschenns you find in lifeboats.
[You've never seen a Mannschenn Drive unit? I must show you ours before you go ashore. And you don't understand how they work? Neither do I, frankly. But it boils down, essentially, to gyroscopes precessing in time, setting up a temporal precession field, so that our ships aren't really breaking the light barrier but going astern in time while they're going ahead in space.]
"A Mannschenn Drive unit," I said unnecessarily.
"I built it," said Kelly, not without pride.
"What for?" I asked. "Time Travel?" I sneered.
"Yes," he said.
I laughed. "But it's known to be impossible. A negative field would require the energy of the entire galaxy—"
"Not physical Time Travel," said Spooky Byrne smugly. "Psionic Time Travel, back along the world line stemming from an ancestor. Eddie's ancestor was at Glenrowan. So was mine. So was yours."
"Ned Kelly wasn't married," I said triumphantly.
"And so you have to be married to father a child?" asked Byrnes sardonically. "Come off it, Grimes! You should know better than that."
[I did, as a matter of fact. This was after that odd business I'd gotten involved in on El Dorado.]
"All right," I said. "Your ancestors might have been present at the Siege of Glenrowan. Mine was not. At or about that time he was, according to my father—and he's the family historian—second mate of a tramp windjammer. He got himself paid off in Melbourne and, not so long afterwards, was master of a little brig running between Australia and New Zealand. He did leave an autobiography, you know."
"Autobiographies are often self-censored," said Byrne. "That long-ago Captain Grimes, that smugly respectable shipmaster, a pillar, no doubt, of Church and State, had episodes in his past that he would prefer to forget. He did not pay o
ff from his ship in Melbourne in the normal way. He—what was the expression?—jumped ship. He'd had words with his captain, who was a notorious bully. He'd exchanged blows. So he deserted and thought that he'd be safer miles inland. The only work that he could find was with the Irish labourers on the railway."
"How do you know all this?" I asked. "If it's true—"
"He told me," said Byrne. "Or he told my ancestor—but I was inside his mind at the time. . . ."
"Let's send him back," said Kelly. "That'll convince him."
"Not . . . yet," whispered Byrne. "Let's show him first what will happen if the special train is, after all, derailed. Let's convince him that it's to his interests to play along with us. The . . . alternative, since Grimes showed up here, is much . . . firmer. But we shall need—did need?—that British seaman Grimes, just as George Washington needed his British seaman John Paul Jones . . . ."
The Rim Gods Page 17
