A circular doorway expanded in what had been a featureless bulkhead. Grimes and Tamara were pushed through it. The door closed. They were standing in a cubical cell, the deck of which was softly resilient underfoot. Dim red lighting came from a concealed source, barely bright enough for them to be able to make out the details of their prison. On one padded bulkhead two spigots protruded over a narrow drip tray. Against the bulkhead at right angles to it, just above deck level, was a trough through which ran a steady stream of water.
Grimes remembered one of the courses that he had taken while still an officer in the Survey Service, a series of lectures regarding the general lay-outs of the vessels owned and operated by the spacefaring races of the Galaxy, the Shaara among them. This cell was no more—and no less—than an officer’s cabin. One spigot was for water, the other for food. The trough was for general sanitary use. He realized that he felt thirsty. He went to the taps, pressed the button of one of them, looked at the blob of pink paste that was extruded on to the drip tray. He stuck his forefinger into it, raised a sample to his mouth. The stuff was bland, slightly sweet, almost flavorless. No doubt it was as nutritious as all hell but would be a dreadfully boring diet from the very start. Small wonder that the Shaara so easily became addicted to highly flavored Terran liquor! The other spigot yielded water—flat, lukewarm, unrefreshing.
Tamara joined him at the nutriment dispenser. She said, “At least, we shan’t starve . . .” She did not sound overly enthusiastic. “But where do we . . . ?”
“There,” said Grimes, pointing to the trough.
Even in the dim lighting he could see her angry flush. “This is insufferable! Surely they realize that we must have privacy!”
“Privacy,” he told her, “is a concept meaningless to a social insect.”
“But not to me,” she said. “You’re a spaceman, a captain. Tell these people that we demand to be housed in conditions such as we are accustomed to.”
He said, “I’ve no doubt that this cell is bugged. But bear in mind that our accommodation is, by Shaara standards, first class.”
“Not by mine,” she said stubbornly. “And now, would you mind standing in the corner with your face to the wall? I have to . . .”
After an interval, during which he tried not to listen, she said, “All right. You may turn round now.”
***
Their accommodation was first class by Shaara standards, but they were not Shaara. The food was nourishing, although very soon they were having to force it down, eating only to keep up their strength. They exercised as well as they were able in the cramped quarters when they realized that they were putting on weight. Before long they decided to go naked; the air was hot rather than merely warm, and humid, and their longjohns were becoming uncomfortably sweaty. After a struggle they managed to tear the upper portion of Grimes’ garment into strips for use as washcloths. An estimated twelve days after their capture Grimes sacrificed the lower legs of his longjohns so that Tamara could use the material for sanitary napkins.
Now and again, although not very often, there was a flare-up of sexuality, a brief and savage coming together that left them both exhausted but strangely unsatisfied. Always at the back of their minds was the suspicion, the knowledge almost, that alien eyes were watching. Also, Grimes missed, badly, his pipe as a sort of dessert after intercourse. (He missed his pipe. Period.) And Tamara complained every time about the roughness of his face; there were no facilities in the cell for depilation. (He noted, with a brief flicker of interest, that her body remained hairless.)
Fortunately for their sanity both of them could talk—and listen. The trouble there was that Tamara, when Grimes was telling stories about his past life, would interrupt and say, “But you handled that wrongly. You should have . . .”
And after the first few times he would snap, “I was there, and you weren’t!” and then there would be a sulky silence.
It was squalid, humiliating—but the ultimate humiliation was yet to come.
Without warning the door of their cell opened and a swarm of drones burst in and chivvied them out into the alleyway, along tunnels and up ramps until they came to a huge chamber that must have occupied almost an entire deck of the Shaara ship.
Chapter 13
IT WAS, GRIMES SUPPOSED, a recreation room—although it would have passed muster as an indoor jungle. There was the moss-covered deck, pillars so thickly covered with flowering vines that they could have been trees, real trees the uppermost branches of which brushed the deck-head and, in the center of the compartment, was a seemingly haphazard piling of smooth rocks down which glistening water tinklingly trickled. And there was Baroom’s crew—a scattering of bejewelled princesses, a rather larger number of gaudily caparisoned drones, a horde of comparatively drab workers.
The two humans were dragged to the pile of rocks, up it to a platform on the top of it. The drones returned to deck level leaving a princess there with them. Suddenly a bright spotlight came on, playing over their naked bodies. The princess extended one of her upper arms. The taloned “hand” at its extremity touched, first, Tamara’s left breast, then her right, then descended to her groin. It hovered there briefly, then moved to Grimes’ penis. Instinctively he tried to swat the claw away but, with lightning rapidity, another claw caught his arm, scratching it painfully.
“Do not struggle,” said the princess. “You will not be harmed. We are instructing our crew. And now you and the female will perform for us your generative functions.”
“Not a hope in hell!” snarled Grimes.
“I do not understand. Please to repeat.”
“No,” said Grimes definitely.
“You mean that you will not perform for us?”
“Yes.”
“It does not matter,” said the princess. “We have obtained certain records from your ship. Perhaps you will find it amusing to watch. We shall find them instructive.”
Records? wondered Grimes—and then he remembered.
Not only his prominent ears were burning with embarrassment—the angry flush spread over his entire body.
To one side of the circular chamber the wall was clear of vegetation. It glowed suddenly with light—not the red illumination that was the norm for this ship but bright, white, with splashes of color. The scene was the cabin of Little Sister. There was a cast of two, Grimes and Tamara Haverstock. There was hardly any dialogue but there were gasps and little screams. There was an intertwining of naked limbs, an undignified, vigorous pumping . . .
“You bastard!” whispered the woman—the actual woman, not the one on the screen—viciously. “You bastard!”
“I can explain . . .” muttered Grimes.
“There are questions,” said the princess. “Not many of our crew are familiar with humans and their ways. There are those who ask how many eggs the female will produce after the mating.”
“You bastard.’” repeated Tamara Haverstock.
Chapter 14
FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE Grimes tried to forget the details of the remainder of the voyage. Thinking of it as a preview of hell might have been an exaggeration, but it was most certainly not a foretaste of heaven, and in purgatory (we are told) there is hope. Hope was a quality altogether absent from this cramped cell with its boredom, its savorless food, the hateful company of the hating woman who spoke only to snarl at him, who had lost all interest in her appearance and who had become a compulsive eater, whose once trim body had become a mass of unsightly bulges, whose breasts were sagging, whose hair fell in an unsightly tangle about her sweaty, fattening, sullen face. Even so small a comfort (small comfort?) as his precious pipe with a supply of tobacco would have made conditions slightly less intolerable, but he was denied even this.
But every voyage must have its end.
And then, at long last, came the time when Grimes woke from an uneasy sleep. The light in the cabin was changing, shifting, deepening from pink to violet and its perspective was no longer that of a cube but a tesseract. T
amara’s sprawled, naked figure was as he had first known it, long-legged, firm-bodied, with the fine bone structure of her face prominent. She was snoring, but even that normally unlovely sound was musical . . .
Abruptly perspective, light and color were again as they always (for how long? for too long) had been. But sound was different. There was something lacking—and that something was the all-pervasive thin, high whine of the Mannschenn Drive. So, thought Grimes, Baroom was making planetfall. So in a matter of a few hours, or even less, it would be landing stations.
He touched the woman on a fleshy shoulder. Her eyes slowly opened. She looked up at him with an expression that at first was oddly eager but that almost immediately became one of extreme distaste.
She muttered, “It’s you. I was dreaming, but . . . Lemme sleep, damn you.”
He said, “Tamara, we’ve arrived. Or almost arrived. They’ve just shut down their Mannschenn Drive . . .”
“And so bloody what? Take your filthy paws off me!”
He snarled back at her, “For the love of the Odd Gods of the Galaxy pull yourself together, woman! We shall be landing shortly. I don’t know on what world but we’re liable to be meeting strangers. And you’re a mess.”
“And you’re no oil painting yourself, Grimes!”
He ignored this. “You’re a mess. The way you are a sex-starved second mate of a sixth rate star tramp wouldn’t look at you!”
She glared at him, heaved herself to her feet. She shuffled to the drip tray on the bulkhead, used a scrap of rag to stop the outlet and then, using another piece of the rag from Grimes’ longjohns, washed herself all over. Somehow after the ablutions she was beginning to look as she had looked before the imprisonment. She struggled into her longjohns and the elastic fabric moulded and constrained her figure. Then, using her long fingernails as a comb, she tried to arrange her hair. Without proper treatment it would not regain its lustre but the worst snarls were out of it
She snapped, “Am I fit for parade, Captain?”
He admitted, “It’s an improvement.”
“Then may I suggest that you do something about yourself?”
Grimes tried, but without depilatory cream it was an almost hopeless task. He pulled on the trunks that were all that remained of his space underwear.
He sat down in a corner of the cell to wait.
She sat down in the opposite corner to wait.
At last a variation of the beat of the inertial drive told them that they were coming in to a landing.
There was a very gentle jar. The inertial drive fell silent.
There was a mechanical hooting sound that began suddenly, that stopped as suddenly.
There was a brief thudding that could have been a burst from an automatic cannon. There was silence.
She raised her eyebrows, asked, “Well?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
She sneered, “You’re the expert.”
There was more silence.
Suddenly the door opened, admitting six drones. Careless of the minor wounds they inflicted with their sharp claws they stripped the humans, dragged them out into the alleyway, down ramps to an airlock, both doors of which were open, admitting bright sunlight, a cool breeze. Instead of a ramp extending from the outer door to the ground there was a platform. On this was a cage—a light yet strong affair with aluminum bars. Grimes and Tamara were thrust into this and the door was slammed shut after them with a loud clicking of the spring lock. The deck of interwoven metal swayed under their feet, throwing them off balance.
Grimes looked up, saw through streaming eyes (the sunlight was painfully bright after the dimness to which they had become accustomed) a blurred shape like a fat torpedo. It was a blimp, he realized, one of the non-rigid airships that the Shaara invariably used inside an atmosphere in preference to inertial drive powered craft. He looked down and back.
Baroom had landed in a wide meadow, a field under cultivation, crushing beneath her bulk row upon row of low bushes. Close by her was the gold-gleaming Little Sister, dwarfed by the huge Shaara ship. Over and around both vessels flew the bee people—princesses, drones, workers—rejoicing in the exercise of their wings. There was another blimp in the air, motionless.
He turned, barely conscious that his naked skin brushed Tamara’s bare breasts, looked ahead. There was a town or a village there, buildings of almost human architecture. Between this settlement and the spaceships was a charred patch on the ground, an untidy, cratered patch of dark grey in the yellow grass (or what passed for grass), a scattering of angular, twisted wreckage. A ground vehicle? The burst of a cannon fire that they had heard?
“Where are they taking us?” she demanded. “Where are they taking us?”
“To that town,” he replied.
“But why? But why?”
He made no answer. There was none that he could give. He looked up to the strong escort of armed drones that was accompanying the blimp. He looked ahead again. The air over the town was alive with swarming motes. He knew that these were more drones. And yet it was no Shaara city that they were approaching. Such a center of population would have consisted of domes great and little, not buildings that, in the main, were like upended rectangular blocks.
The blimp flew slowly over the town, finally stopped and hovered over a wide central square. There was a new looking structure in the middle of this, a metal platform around which were standing Shaara—two princesses, twenty drones, a half dozen workers. Above the cage a winch hummed and rattled. Grimes and Tamara were lowered swiftly to the platform where the workers caught the bars around them in their claws, positioning the portable prison. The winch cable was unhooked from its ring-bolt. The weight released, the blimp lifted rapidly, turned and flew off in the direction of the spaceships.
One of the princesses started to call, her voice box turned up to maximum amplification. It was in no language that Grimes had ever heard although she seemed fluent enough in it. By ones and twos and threes the people emerged timorously from the buildings and streets around the square. They were more human than merely humanoid although blue-skinned, bald-headed without exception and with horn-like protuberances above where their eyebrows would have been, had they been a hairy race. They were clad, men, women and children alike, in drab grey robes, neck-high and ankle-length, with sleeves falling half over their three fingered hands.
The princess continued her incomprehensible spiel, the people stared stolidly through dull crimson eyes. The princess waved a contemptuous claw at the captives. The people stared. Then a man broke out from the small crowd of which he had been a member. A metallic object gleamed in his hand, a cumbersome pistol. Two of the drones fired simultaneously, slicing him into smoking collops. The stench of burned meat was sickening. A sort of moan went up from the assembled natives. The princess delivered a last peroration, then fell silent. At last, obviously dreading that they would meet the same fate as the dead man, three women lifted the blood-oozing pieces into a small, two-wheeled hand-cart, trundled it away.
The sun blazed down.
There was no shade.
There were almost invisible, sharply biting, flying things.
Tamara sagged heavily against Grimes, slumped to the deck of the cage. She had fainted. Grimes clung to the bars, his head whirling, his vision dimming, fighting down his nausea. He knew that he could not long hold on to his own consciousness.
And then two of the workers produced from under the platform a light, folding framework that they set up about the cage, that was topped by a sheet of opaque plastic. The shade, briefly, was as welcome as a draught of ice-cold water. Another worker pushed a jug and a bowl of the sickly pink pabulum into the cage at Grimes’ feet. The surface of the latter was soon black with the tiny flying things.
He looked from it to the huddled, unconscious woman. Should he try to revive her? She seemed to be breathing normally enough. It would be kinder, he decided, to leave her in oblivion.
From the direction of the spaceship
s came two bursts of automatic gunfire. The crowd moaned. A blimp flew overhead, in no hurry, going nowhere in particular.
Without too many contortions Grimes managed to sit down, avoiding contact with the woman’s perspiring skin. He took a sip from the jug. The water was as flat and lukewarm as usual. He looked with distaste at the contents of the bowl.
He would have sold his soul for a smoke.
***
He was awakened by Tamara shaking him. When he had dropped off to sleep he had been too hot; now he was uncomfortably chilly. And yet it was still light. He blinked, realized that the glaring illumination came from three floodlights trained upon the cage.
She was babbling, “All these people, staring at us . . . But have something to eat. I saved you some. It tastes better than usual.”
Grimes could guess why but only said, “Not just now, thank you. Any water left?”
“Yes.”
He rinsed his mouth, swallowed. He got carefully to his feet, his joints creaking. In spite of the glaring floodlights he could see that the Shaara guards—or their reliefs—were still on duty, that the square was still crowded with citizens who must be prisoners as much as the two humans, although not as closely confined.
Then the lights went out.
Almost immediately a great oblong of bright illumination appeared on the wall of one of the tall buildings surrounding the square, down the facade of which a huge white sheet had been stretched. After a flickering second or so a picture appeared.
Grimes had seen it before.
Tamara had seen it before.
Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III Page 6
