Friday (51 page)

“Miss Friday, will you let me talk?”

“Sure, why not? But one peep out of you louder than a whisper and these toys come off.” I made sure he knew what I meant.

“Uh! Easy there—please! The purser put us on double watch tonight. I—”

“Double watch? How?”

“Ordinarily Tilly—Shizuko—is the only one on duty from the time you go to your cabin until you get up. When you do get up, she punches a button and that tells me to set the watch. But the purser—or maybe the Captain—is itchy about you. Worries that you might try to jump ship at Botany Bay—”

I made my eyes round. “Goodness gracious! How can anyone have such wicked thoughts about little ole me?”

“I can’t imagine,” he answered solemnly. “But why are we here in this landing boat?”

“I’m getting ready to go sight-seeing. How about you?”

“Me, too. I hope. Miss Friday, I realized that, if you were going to try to jump ship at Botany Bay, the most likely time would be tonight during the midwatch. I didn’t know how you expected to get into the landing boat but I had confidence in you—and I see that my confidence is justified.”

“Thank you. Some, anyhow. Who’s watching the portside boat? Or is there someone?”

“Graham. Little sandy bloke. Perhaps you’ve noticed him?”

“Too often.”

“I picked this side because you toured this boat with Mr. Udell yesterday. Day before yesterday, depending on how you figure it.”

“I don’t care how you figure it. Pete, what happens when you are missed?”

“I may not be missed. Joe Stupid—sorry, Joseph Steuben—the other is just my private name for him—I have instructed to relieve me after he eats breakfast. If I know Joe, he’ll make no fuss at not finding me at the door; he will just sit down on the deck with his back to the door and sleep until someone comes along and unlocks it. Then he’ll stay there until this boat drops away…whereupon he will go to his room and sack in until I look for him. Joe is steady but not bright. Which I figured on.”

“Pete, it sounds as if you had planned this.”

“I didn’t plan to get a sore neck and a headache out of it. If you had waited long enough to let me speak, you wouldn’t have had to carry me.”

“Pete, if you’re trying to sweet-talk me into untying you, you are barking down the wrong well.”

“Don’t you mean ‘up the wrong tree’?”

“The wrong one, in any case, and you aren’t improving your chances by criticizing my figures of speech. You’re in deep trouble, Pete. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you and leave you here. For the Captain is right; I’m jumping ship. I can’t be bothered with you.”

“Well…one reason is that they’ll find my body later this morning, while they are unloading. Then they’ll be looking for you.”

“I’ll be many kilometers the other side of the horizon. But why would they look for me? I’m not going to leave my fingerprints on you. Just some purple bruises around your neck.”

“Motive and opportunity. Botany Bay is a pretty law-abiding community, Miss Friday. You can probably talk your way out of trouble in jumping ship there—others have. But if you are wanted for a murder aboard ship, the local people will cooperate.”

“I’ll plead self-defense. A known rapist. Fer Gossake, Pete, what am I going to do with you? You’re an embarrassment. You know I won’t kill you; I can’t kill in cold blood. It has to be forced on me. But if I keep you tied up—Let me see—five and three is eight, then add at least two hours before they work back to here in unloading—that’s ten hours at least—and I’ll have to gag you—and it’s getting cold—”

“You bet it’s getting cold! Could you sort of drape my sweater around me?”

“All right, but I’ll have to use it later when I gag you.”

“And besides being cold, my hands and feet are going to sleep. Miss Friday, if you leave me tied up this way for ten hours, I’ll have gangrene in both hands and both feet—and lose them. No regeneration out here. By the time I’m back where they can do it, I’ll be a permanent basket case. Kinder to kill me.”

“Damn it, you’re trying to work on my sympathy!”

“I’m not sure you have any.”

“Look,” I told him, “if I untie you and let you put your clothes back on so that you won’t freeze, will you let me tie you up and gag you later without fussing about it? Or must I clip you a good deal harder than I did and knock you out cold? Run a risk of breaking your neck? I can, you know. You’ve seen me fight—”

“I didn’t see it; I just saw the results. Heard about it.”

“Same thing. Then you know. And you must know why I can do such things. ‘My mother was a test tube—’”

“‘—and my father was a knife,’” he interrupted. “Miss Friday, I didn’t have to let you clip me. You’re fast…but I’m just as fast and my arms are longer. I knew that you were enhanced but you did not know that I am. So I would have had the edge.”

I was sitting in lotus, facing him, when he made this astounding statement. I felt dizzy and wondered if I was going to throw up again. “Pete,” I said, almost pleadingly, “you wouldn’t lie to me?”

“I’ve had to lie all my life,” he answered, “and so have you. However—” He paused and twisted his wrists; his bonds broke. Do you know the breaking strength of a twisted sleeve of a good shirt? It is more than that of a manila line of equal thickness—try it.

“I don’t mind ruining the shirt,” he said conversationally. “The sweater will cover. But I would rather not ruin my trousers; I expect to have to appear in public in them before I can get more. You can reach the knots more easily than I can; will you untie them, Miss Friday?”

“Stop calling me Miss Friday, Pete; we’re APs together.” I started working on the knots. “Why didn’t you tell me a long time ago?”

“I should have. Other things got in the way.”

“There! Oh, your feet
are
cold! Let me rub them. Get the circulation back.”

We got some sleep, or I did. Pete was shaking my shoulder and saying quietly, “Better wake up. We must be about to ground. Some lights have come on.”

A dim twilight trickled in, under, around, and through the tarpaulin covering the dinosaur we had slept under. I yawned at it. “I’m cold.”

“Complaints. You had the inside of the snuggle. That’s warmer than the outside. I’m frozen.”

“Just what you deserve. Rapist. You’re too skinny; you don’t make much of a blanket. Pete, we’ve got to put some fat on you. Which reminds me that we didn’t have breakfast. And the thought of food—I think I’m about to throw up.”

“Uh—Slide past me and sort o’ heave it back into that corner. Not here where we would have to lie in it. And keep as quiet as you can; there may be someone in here by now.”

“Brute. Unfeeling brute. Just for that I won’t throw up.”

On the whole I felt fairly good. I had taken one of the little blue pills just before leaving cabin BB, and it seemed to be holding. I had a butterfly or two in my tummy but they weren’t very muscular butterflies—not the sort that shout “Lemme outa here!” I had with me the rest of the supply Dr. Jerry had given me. “Pete, what are the plans?”

“You’re asking me? You planned this jailbreak, not me.”

“Yes, but you are a big, strong, masculine man who snores. I assumed that you would take charge and have it all planned out while I napped. Am I mistaken?”

“Well—Friday, what are
your
plans? The plans you made when you didn’t expect to have me along.”

“It wasn’t much of a plan. After we ground they are going to have to open a door, either a people door or a big cargo door; I don’t care which, ’cause when they do, I go out of here like a frightened cat, running roughshod over anything or anybody in my way…and I don’t stop until I’m a long way from the ship. I don’t want to hurt anybody but I hope nobody tries too hard to stop me…for I won’t be stopped.”

“That’s a good plan.”

“You think so? It’s not really a plan at all. Just a determination. A door opens, I crash out.”

“It’s a good plan because it doesn’t have any fancies to go wrong. And you have one big advantage. They don’t dare hurt you.”

“I wish I could be sure of that.”

“If you are hurt, it will be by accident, and the man who does it will be strung up by his thumbs. At least. After hearing the rest of your story I now know why the instructions to me were so emphatic. Friday, they don’t want you dead-or-alive; they want you in perfect health. They’ll let you escape before they will hurt you.”

“Then it’s going to be easy.”

“Don’t be too sure of it. Wildcat that you are, it has already been proved that enough men can grab you and hold you; we both know that. If they know you are gone—and I think they do; this boat was over an hour late in leaving orbit—”

“Oh!” I glanced at my finger. “Yes, we should have grounded by now. Pete, they are searching for me!”

“I think so. But there was no point in waking you until the lights came on. By now they have had about four hours to make certain that you are not on the deck above with the first-class excursionists. They will have mustered the migrants as well. So, if you are here—and not simply hiding out in the ship proper—you have to be in this cargo hold. That’s an oversimplification as there are all sorts of ways to play hide-and-seek in a space as big as this boat. But they’ll watch the two bottlenecks, the cargo door on this level and the passenger door on the level above. Friday, if they use enough people—and they will—and if those jimmylegs are equipped with nets and sticky ropes and tanglefoot—and they will be—they will catch you without hurting you as you come out of this boat.”

“Oh.” I thought about it. “Pete…if it comes to that, there will be some dead and wounded first. I may wind up dead myself—but they’ll pay a high price for my carcass. Thanks for alerting me.”

“They may not do it quite that way. They may make it very obvious that the doors are being watched in order to cause you to hang back. So they get the migrants out—I suppose you know that they go out the cargo door?”

“I didn’t.”

“They do. Get them out and checked off—then close the big door and shoot this place full of sleepy gas. Or tear gas and force you to come out wiping your eyes and tossing your cookies.”

“Brrr! Pete, are they really equipped in the ship with those gases? I wondered.”

“Those and worse. Look, the skipper of this ship operates many light-years from law and order and he has only a handful of people he can depend on in a crunch. In fourth class this ship carries, almost every trip, a gang of desperate criminals. Of course he is equipped to gas every compartment, selectively. But, Friday, you won’t be here when they use the gas.”

“Huh? Keep talking.”

“The migrants walk down the center aisle of this hold. Almost three hundred of them this trip; they’ll be packed into their compartment tighter than is safe. So many of them this trip that I am assuming that they can’t possibly all know each other in the short time they’ve had to get acquainted. We’ll use that. Plus a very, very old method, Friday; the one Ulysses used on Polyphemus…”

Pete and I were hanging back in an almost dark corner formed by the high end of the generator and a something in a big crate. The light changed, and we heard a murmur of many voices. “They’re coming,” Pete whispered. “Remember, your best bet is someone who has too much to carry. There’ll be plenty of those. Our clothes are okay—we don’t
look
first class. But we must have something to carry. Migrants are always loaded down; I got the straight word on that.”

“I’m going to try to carry some woman’s baby,” I told him.

“Perfect, if you can swing it. Hush, here they come.”

They were indeed loaded down—because of what seems to me a rather chinchy company policy: A migrant can take on his ticket anything he can stuff into those broom closets they call staterooms in third class—as long as he can carry it off the ship unassisted; that’s the company’s definition of “hand luggage.” But anything he has to have placed in the hold he pays freight charges on. I know that the company has to show a profit—but I don’t have to like this policy. However, today we were going to try to turn it to our advantage.

As they passed us most of them never glanced our way and the rest seemed uninterested. They looked tired and preoccupied and I suppose they were, both. There were lots of babies and most of them were crying. The first couple of dozen in the column were strung out with those in front hurrying. Then the line moved more slowly—more babies, more luggage—and clumped together. It was coming time to pretend to be a “sheep.”

Then suddenly, in that medley of human odors, of sweat and dirt and worry and fear and musk and soiled diapers, one odor cut through as crystal clear as the theme of the Golden Cockerel in Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Hymn to the Sun
or a Wagnerian leitmotif in the Ring Cycle—and I yelped:

“
Janet!
”

A heavyset woman on the other side of the queue turned and looked at me, and dropped two suitcases and grabbed me. “
Marjie!
” And a man in a beard was saying, “I
told
you she was in the ship! I told you!” And Ian said accusingly, “You’re dead!” and I pulled my mouth away from Janet’s long enough to say, “No, I’m not. Junior Piloting Officer Pamela Heresford sends you her warmest regards.”

Janet said, “
That
slitch!” Ian said, “Now, Jan” and Betty looked at me carefully and said, “It
is
she. Hello, luv! Good on you! My word!” and Georges was being incoherent in French around the edges while trying gently to take me away from Janet.

Of course we had fouled up the progress of the queue. Other people, burdened down and some of them complaining, pushed past us, through us, around us. I said, “Let’s get moving again. We can talk later.” I glanced back at the spot where Pete and I had lurked; he was gone. So I quit worrying about him; Pete is smart.

Janet wasn’t really heavyset, not corpulent—she was simply several months gone. I tried to take one of her suitcases; she wouldn’t let me. “Better with two; they balance.”

So I wound up carrying a cat’s travel cage—Mama Cat. And a large brown-paper parcel Ian had carried under one arm. “Janet, what did you do with the kittens?”

“They,” Freddie answered for her, “have, through my influence, gained excellent positions with fine prospects for advancement as rodent-control engineers on a large sheep station in Queensland. And now, Helen, pray tell me how it chances that you, who, only yesterday it seems, were seen on the right hand of the lord and master of a great superliner, today find yourself consorting with the peasantry in the bowels of this bucket?”