Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (27 page)

He slept, cradled against her warm, ample resilience—and he dreamed. The noise of
Bronson Star’s
engines—the subdued, arrhythmic beat of the inertial drive, the thin, high whine of the ever-precessing Mannschenn rotors—wove itself into his dream. (Most dreams are based on memories and he had spent so much of his life aboard ships.)

He was back on board his first command, the little Survey Service courier
Adder
. He was entertaining a guest in his cabin, the humanoid but nonhuman envoy from Joognaan. Joognaan was not an important world, either commercially or strategically; had it been, the envoy would have traveled in far greater style than he was doing now, aboard a ship that had been referred to slightingly, more than once, as an interstellar mail van.

Balaarsulimaam—that was the envoy’s name—had made his way to Earth in a variety of carriers. First there had been the star tramp that had dropped down to Joognaan for a small shipment of artifacts and a few casks of
talaagra
—a somewhat bitter wine that was prized, although not excessively so, by gourmets on one or two planets. His voyage—from world to world, in ship after ship—had been a sort of three-dimensional zigzag. On Earth he had seen the Minister for Galactic Trade but had been unable to interest that gentleman in his wares. The Federation government had not—by its own rights—been ungenerous, however. It had given Balaarsulimaam passage to Lindisfarne in the Survey Service transport
Jules Verne
and from Lindisfarne on in the courier
Adder
, Lieutenant John Grimes commanding.

He had been a lonely little being, this Balaarsulimaam. In spite of indoctrination Survey Service officers did not like having aliens aboard their ships. In
Adder
there was a further complication—with the exception of Grimes none of the courier’s people liked cats. The Joognaanards are cat-like—or kangaroo-like. Just as the mythical Centaur was half man and half horse, so the inhabitants of Joognaan are half cat and half kangaroo. They have only four limbs, however.

Grimes was less xenophobic than most and was something of a cat lover. He made Balaarsulimaan welcome in his quarters. He enjoyed talking with him over drinks and felt no repugnance when his guest lapped rather than sipped from his glass.

It was one such social occasion that he was reliving now in his dream.

He was saying, “I’m rather surprised, Balaarsulimaam, that you couldn’t interest any of the importers back on Earth in your wine. After all—the major restaurants pride themselves on being able to serve foods and drinks from every world known to man . . .”

The Joognaanard’s pink tongue dipped into the wide-rimmed drinking vessel that Grimes had provided for him, worked busily. He slurped, then sighed.

“Captain,” he said, “the business with our wine is like the business of Scottish whisky. What I am drinking now—and I thank you for your hospitality—does not come from Scotland. It comes from Rob Roy, a planet of the Empire of Waverley. I have enjoyed the real Scottish whisky on Earth. I am enjoying this. I am not a Scottishman and I cannot tell the difference. Can you?”

“I am not a Scotsman,” said Grimes. “I can’t.”

“And Rob Roy is much closer to your Lindisfarne than is Scotland. The freight, therefore, is much less. The whisky, therefore, is much less costly. So it is with our
talaagra
. There is a wine that they make on Austral, which is close to Earth. Even I can hardly detect the difference between it and our wine. And it must come only a short way and so is charged little freight.”

“I see,” said Grimes.

“But it was not only wine that I was trying to sell. It was a service—a service that people would have to come to Joognaan to avail themselves of. Our doctors—I have learned from captains of starships who have come in with injured crew members—are very clever. They have the—how do you say?—the technical—no, technique to regrow, in a short time, injured members that have had to be removed.”

“So do ours,” said Grimes. “But regrowing is a long process. Most people prefer to shop around for replacements in a body bank.”

“There was a young lady . . .” went on Balaarsulimaam. “She was, I think, a purser in one of the ships. Unwisely she had not gone to her cabin when the ship was landing. She was concerned about the safety of certain heavy cases in one of the storeplaces. A case fell on her, crushing her face and the upper part of her body. We remade her.”

“But that could have been done on Earth,” said Grimes. “On almost any of our worlds.”

“But we—our doctors—remodeled her. Aboard the ship was a representation of some female entertainer, a thin woman. The girl had been fat, like Susie . . .”

(With that last sentence Grimes, even in his sleep, realized that fantasy was mingling with actual memory.)

“We remade her so that she looked almost the twin of the entertainer.”

“Body sculpture is practiced on most worlds,” said Grimes.

“But it is a long process and very expensive. With our doctors it is not long, and it is not expensive. All that I asked your government was that a proper spaceport be constructed on Joognaan and that we be allowed to advertise on Earth and other planets. We have credits, from the sale of our pottery and our wine—enough for the advertising but not enough for a spaceport. I think that, at first, your Minister showed sympathy—but his advisers, the representatives of the Terran doctors, did persuade him that our way was not safe. It was all, somebody said to me in confidence, a matter of invested interests.”

Grimes refrained from correcting the alien. His meaning was clear enough. Members of any profession are jealous of their mystiques.

“But I will show to you, Captain, what can be done . . .”

Balaarsulimaam waved his three-fingered hand. The door to the day cabin opened. A woman stood there. She was quite naked. Her slender body was familiar, as it should have been, even to the mole over the small, firm left breast. But, incongruous above Maggie Lazenby’s slim, smooth shoulders was the plump face of Susie.

Grimes woke up with a start.

He slid out of the wide bunk without waking the girl and made his way to Control, ordered the computer to start doing its sums.

A call at Joognaan wouldn’t be too great a detour.

Chapter 19

“IT’S A GOOD SOLUTION
to your problems,” said Grimes with as much conviction as he could muster. “Balaarsulimaam will help. He assured me, before he left
Adder
, that he would be at my service if ever I returned to his world.”

“Shipboard friendships,” said Susie, “are woven from even flimsier threads than shipboard love affairs.”

Grimes didn’t like the way that she was looking at him as she said this and didn’t like the way that Hodge chuckled.

He went on, “In any case, you can pay . . .”

“As long as it’s not too much,” said Hodge grudgingly. “But just what do you have in mind?”

“A complete change of physical characteristics for Susie and yourself—even, to be on the safe side, to fingerprints and retinal patterns. One beauty of the Joognaan technique is that it doesn’t take anything like as long as the body sculpture on human planets—so I’ll stay around until I’m sure that the two of you will be all right, hoping that no odd star tramp blows in to find
Bronson Star
sitting there. An All Ships broadcast must have gone out, asking everybody to keep their eyes skinned for us, as soon as we vanished from Bronsonia.

“When I’m happy—and when you’re happy, of course—I lift off, leaving you on Joognaan. You stay there—you’ll have no option—until the next tramp drops in. Then you buy passage in her to wherever she’s going next. Your story will be that you’re clones, that the Joognaanards, after they’d performed regenerative surgery on one or two spacepersons, retained cell cultures for their own experimental purposes. Balaarsulimaam will fix you up with the necessary papers.”

“Nobody likes clones,” stated Hodge dogmatically.

“Not when they know that they’re clones,” said Grimes. “Come to that, clones with money are no more unpopular than anybody else.”

“A complete making over . . .” said Susie thoughtfully. “Tell me, John, is the process painful?”

“I’ve been told that it’s not.”

She kneaded the flesh of her right thigh, below the hem of her shorts, with pudgy fingers. “Of course, it could be worth a little discomfort. I am just a bit overweight . . .”

“I like you the way that you are,” said Grimes gallantly—then wondered why he should remember that slim woman in his dream.

“And Hodge,” she went on, “is no Adonis . . .”

“I like me the way that I am,” growled the engineer. “But I’m willing to sacrifice my beauty in return for safety.”

“So it’s decided, agreed upon,” said Grimes.

“I don’t altogether like it,” muttered Susie. “And you haven’t told us about your end of it. What story will you have to account for the long time it took you between Dunlevin and Bronsonia? How will you account for your being alone in
Bronson Star?
Everybody in Dunlevin will know by now that you weren’t alone when you lifted off. Apart from anything else
I
handled the conversations with the Air Force and with the orbital fort.”

“My story will be,” said Grimes, “that the pair of you decided to take your chances in one of the ship’s boats—and one of the boats will, of course, be missing from its bay by the time that I make planetfall at Bronsonia. After your escape the Mannschenn Drive broke down. It took me—all by myself, with no engineer to do the work—a long time to fix it . . .”

“
You
couldn’t fix a Mannschenn Drive,” said Hodge.

“I have done so,” Grimes told him. “Once. In
Little Sister
. I admit that she has only a glorified mini-Mannschenn, but even so . . . Anyhow, I’d like you to fill me in on what sort of breakdown could be fixed by one man, not overly skilled.”

“All right,” said Hodge. “Your Mannschenn Drive breaks down. You bust a gut repairing it. Why, as a typical, bone-idle, spaceman branch officer don’t you yell for help on the Carlotti?”

“Because,” said Grimes, “I’m a money-hungry bastard. I don’t want to have to split—or even lose entirely—the salvage money.”

“And what about the auto-log?” asked Hodge. “That will carry a complete record of all use of main and auxiliary engines from Bronsonia on. It will show one set-down and lift-off too many.”

“It won’t,” said Grimes, “after you’ve wiped it for me. A short circuit or whatever. I leave the sordid, technical details to you.”

“You’re a cunning bugger, Grimes,” said Hodge with reluctant admiration.

“I try to be,” said Grimes smugly.

Chapter 20

AT THAT TIME
there was no spaceport on Joognaan; nor was there Aerospace Control. Some ships—those that maintained the pretense of a service, albeit an extremely irregular one—announced their arrival with a display of pyrotechnics, even if such fireworks were only sounding rockets fired from superstratospheric levels to the surface to give some indication of wind directions and velocities. But there would be warning enough for the natives as soon as
Bronson Star
was well within the atmosphere; the clangor of her inertial drive would give ample notice of her coming.

Grimes was obliged to rely heavily on his memories of his one previous visit to the planet; there was very little data concerning Joognaan in
Bronson Star’s
memory banks. But he was sure that he would be able to manage after making a rough visual survey from orbit. All that he had to identify was the one city of any size situated on a coastal plain, on the southern shore of a wide estuary and with a high mountain range to the eastward. The usual landing place for visiting starships was to the south of the city in a wide clearing, an obviously artificial field set in a forest. From this a broad road ran to the big town.

The old ship dropped through the morning air, through the sparse scattering of high-altitude clouds that had not been thick enough to obscure her objective. Susie sat with Grimes in the control room. There was little that she could do to help as it was not necessary to man the NST radio. She spent most of the time staring out through the wide viewports, exclaiming now and again as something caught her attention.

“Those must be ships down there . . . The sort of ships that sail on the sea, I mean . . . And there’s a railway . . .”

“Early industrial culture,” said Grimes. “They’re still a long way behind us in engineering . . . But not in the medical sciences.”

The clearing in the dark forest was showing up well in the stern vision screen. Grimes stepped up the magnification. There were no other spaceships in, which was all to the good. He reduced the scale again so that he could see something of the white road between city and clearing. There were a few moving black dots on it. So somebody was coming out to meet the ship. There would certainly be at least one linguist in the party, possibly Balaarsulimaam himself.

He concentrated on his pilotage, keeping the black circle that had been painted at the center of the landing field coincident with the bull’s eye of the stern vision screen. He was having to make frequent applications of lateral thrust and the ship lurched as she fell through clear air turbulence. But at least, he thought, this time he wasn’t bringing
Bronson Star
in with the evil, black eyes of at least three pistol muzzles looking at him.

He watched the presentation of radar altimeter readings, gradually slowed the rate of descent. At the finish the big ship was almost hovering, drifting down like a feather. Her vanes kissed the apron with the slightest of tremors rather than a jar.

She was down.

“We’re here,” said Grimes unnecessarily. He rang off the engines. He released himself from the command chair, went to the auxiliary control board and opened both inner and outer doors of the after airlock, extruded the ramp. He set the fans to work to flush out the ship with the fresh, forest air of Joognaan.

“Tell Hodge to join me at the airlock,” he told Susie. “And you come along too.”

He looked out from a viewport at the white road that ran between the somber trees like a parting in dark hair. The steam-driven cars of the Joognaanards did not have far to come. There would have been time for him, however, to change into a decent uniform if he had had a decent uniform to change into—but most of his possessions were still aboard
Little Sister
, back on Bronsonia. The hapless Paul had left finery in the captain’s cabin wardrobe but Grimes would sooner have gone naked than worn it.