Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (47 page)

Grimes called Aerospace Control.

“Camperfly Able Zulu Steven Four Eight, pilot John Grimes, passenger Prunella Fenn, requesting permission to land.”

“Vulcan Control to Able Zulu Seven Four Eight. I have you in my screen. You’ll not be in time for today’s tour of the dolly factory. You should have come in last night.”

“Are there any entertainments that we can take in?” asked Grimes.

“Not until tomorrow. But come in if you want to. There’ll be a berth for you at the airport.”

Grimes looked at the Vulcan Island chart. Airport and spaceport were well away from each other. He measured off the distance—four kilometers. If there were no transport available the distance would not be too far to walk. But there might be, he thought, another problem. Very often ports frequented only by non-passenger-carrying vessels were sealed areas, with gates and guards and all the rest of it. But he had made plans for such a contingency. Aboard the camperfly were two suits of uniform-like coveralls, two hard hats (the design of this plastic safety head wear seemed to be standardized throughout the Galaxy) and, most important of all, two clipboards. Also there was a pair of wirecutters.

He homed on the airport radio beacon.

He came in low, flying over the low, sprawling factory buildings, only one of which exhibited a splash of incongruous colour, a huge, pinkly naked, yellow-haired woman-shaped balloon floating above it. Perhaps it was not so incongruous after all. This must be the dolly factory mentioned by Vulcan Control.

The airport was an almost featureless square of grey concrete. There were three big passenger carriers in, inertial drive jobs. Tucked away in a corner were the camperflies, a half dozen of them. As instructed Grimes made his landing close by these hybrid aircraft.

A bored official sauntered out from the administration tower, waited for Grimes and Fenella Pruin to step down from the camperfly to the apron. He was mainly interested in collecting dues and charges.

Fenella Pruin asked, “What can we
do
here?”

“There’s the conducted tour of the dolly factory, of course.” The man leered. “Most of the fun is testing the dollies; they come in two sexes, you know. Apart from that there’s Vulcan City. The shopping’s not bad, they tell me. You save a few cents by buying your souvenirs here instead of at the mainland clipjoint shops.”

“Could we just sort of wander around?” asked the girl.

“Sure. But outside Vulcan City there’s little to see. The spaceport and the factories are out of bounds unless you have a pass.”

“Shopping, darling?” suggested Miss Pruin, aiming a too bright smile at Grimes.

“I guess so,” he grumbled.

“Don’t spend all your money in the same shop,” advised the official. “And if it’s dollies you want remember that you can have them made exactly to your specifications, while you wait, in the factory . . .”

He sauntered away.

Back in the camperfly Fenella got out a large shopping bag. Into it Grimes put the coveralls, the hard hats, the clipboards and the wire cutters. There was also a Vulcan Island street map which he folded and tucked into his pocket. They left their aircraft with Grimes carrying the bag, trying to make it appear that it was empty. There was transport from the airport to Vulcan City, a subway system. After the all-pervading drabness at ground level the brightly coloured advertisements lining the escalator were a pleasant relief.

There was colour, too, in Vulcan City but it was shabby, tawdry by daylight. The main street was busy enough however, with off duty shift workers staggering, so it seemed, from bar to bar. Grimes and Fenella Pruin looked into one of these, an establishment calling itself The Pink Pussy Cat. To raucous music a girl was dancing on the bar. She was not a very good dancer and her figure should have been decently concealed. Obviously she was a reject from one of the mainland places of entertainment. Grimes briefly wondered how long it would be before—what was her name?—before Tanya finished up here.

There were shops, some of which had window displays of ingenious mechanical toys, little dolls that stripped in time to the tinkling melodies from the music boxes on the polished tops of which they danced, other dolls that fled before horrendous monsters that snatched their clothing from them as they ran round and around their circular tracks. The sort of toys, thought Grimes, that one would buy as presents for kinky parents, never for well-brought-up children . . .

Fenella Pruin looked at her watch. “I hate to interrupt your perverted windowshopping, Grimes, but isn’t it time that we were getting to the spaceport? It’s almost 1400 now and
Willy Willy’s
due in just over an hour.”

He put down the shopping bag, consulted the street map. It was not far from where they were now to the spaceport perimeter. The way was through a heavily industrialised area in which pedestrians, especially pedestrians dressed for leisure and pleasure, would be conspicuous. Fortunately there was a comfort station not far from where they were standing and even more fortunately it was not being used by anybody but themselves. Fenella took the shopping bag into one of the cubicles while Grimes studied the advertising matter decorating an aphrodisiac dispenser. After a minute or so she emerged, looking, in coveralls and hard hat, like a very ordinary female technician. Luckily she had thought to leave the camperfly wearing plain shoes rather than the golden sandals that she usually affected.

Grimes took the bag, retired to a cubicle. It did not take him long to change.

They walked briskly away from the city, along a wide street on either side of which were the drab grey walls of factories. Occasional heavy trucks, proceeding in both directions, passed them. The few people on foot were attired as they were. Nobody paid any attention to them although Grimes wished that the shopping bag, a somewhat gaudy affair, looked a little less like what it actually was and more like a tool bag.

At the end of the long, straight road they came to a high, wire mesh fence. Through it they could see the spaceport control tower and the lofty hulls of two big freighters. To their left a high wall made direct contact with the fence but to their right was a narrow alley. They walked into this. It was, so far as Grimes could determine, just a ribbon of waste space; there were no indications that it had ever been used for any purpose.

Somebody might look into it, however. Fenella Pruin stood so that her body shielded Grimes from view while he busied himself with the wire cutters. He had little trouble in clipping a square panel out of the mesh, freeing three sides only. He bent it inwards, stooped and passed through. Fenella followed him. He forced it back into place; unless somebody looked at the fence closely this evidence of a break-in would never be noticed.

Close by their entry point was a sort of minor junkyard. There was a battered looking wardroom bar unit, complete with counter, bottle racks, sink and refrigerator. There were autochefs, one large and one small, that obviously would never cook another meal. There was a playmaster with its screen smashed in. There were engine room bits and pieces, all showing signs of extreme wear, that Grimes could not identify. (But he was never an engineer.)

He put the wire cutters back into the shopping bag, took out the two clipboards. He satisfied himself that both he and the girl sported an array of styluses in the breast pockets of their coveralls. Then he hid the bag beneath the counter of the bar unit.

They walked slowly away from the dump, clipboards in hand, trying to look busy. Fenella Pruin was using a stylus to make marks on the topmost form on her board. They headed, but not too purposefully, towards the triangle of bright, scarlet beacons marking
Willy Willy’s
berth. They were joined briefly by a man dressed as they were, although his coveralls were yellow and not grey. He said cheerfully, “I suppose you’re hopin’ to get first look at Cap’n Dreeble’s cargo . . .”

“As a matter of fact,” Grimes told him, “we’re checking the arrangements for the next shipment of bulk Scotch.”

“No reason why you shouldn’t admire the scenery while you’re doing it.
I
never miss a
Willy Willy
landing. All those odd little bitches . . . But they’ve
got
something that our women haven’t.”

“Indeed?” asked Fenella Pruin coldly.

The man looked at her and grinned. “Jealous, huh?
You
haven’t got a pair of legs like
them . . .
”

Grimes and Fenella Pruin changed direction, heading towards one of the warehouses. The man continued on towards
Willy Willy’s
berth.

“You took a risk,” said Fenella to Grimes.

“How?”

“How do you know that
he’s
not involved in the import of bulk spirits?”

“Because stenciled on his back were the words PORT VULCAN ELECTRONIC MAINTENANCE DIVISION.

He looked up at the hazy sky.

He could hear
Willy Willy
now, the distant grumble of her inertia drive, but could not yet see her. The noise was growing louder. Yes, there she was . . . A high, gleaming speck in the soft, overhead blue. Aloysius Dreeble was coming in fast. When Grimes had last tangled with him, many years ago, he had been mate of Drongo Kane’s
Southerly Buster
and a good shiphandler. There was no reason to suppose that now, as master, he had lost any of his skill.

His landing technique was one that Grimes had employed himself, a controlled fall and then application of vertical thrust at almost the last moment. It was spectacular but safe enough—so long as the inertial drive did not decide to go on the blink when urgently required.

Grimes could see
Willy Willy
clearly now.

She was a typical Epsilon Class tramp, one of those sturdy workhorses of the Interstellar Transport Commission frequently disposed of, when obsolescent, to private owners. She dropped like the proverbial stone towards her berth, only a little clear of the two bulk carriers. Suddenly the mutter of her inertial drive rose to a cacophonous roar and she slowed, drifting down the last few meters more like a huge balloon than an enormously heavy spaceship. As she touched, in the exact centre of the triangle marked by the beacons, her drive was cut. She rocked a little in the tripedal landing gear formed by her vanes and then was quiet and still.

Vehicles were making towards her and a large number of spaceport workers. Grimes and Fenella Pruin joined these; had they not done so they would have formed a very conspicuous minority. The after airlock door opened and the ramp was extended. Up this walked the usual boarding party—Customs, Port Health, Immigration. At the foot of the ramp stood uniformed guards, tough-looking, khaki clad men and women, stunguns out and ready. Herded by crewmen the passengers disembarked.

They were women, naked women, with the same anatomical peculiarities as the girls who had been the quarries of the kangaroo hunt in Katy’s Kathouse. Most of them allowed themselves to be pushed into the waiting vans without any show of resistance. Two of them, however, broke away. They bounded over the spaceport apron, their hands held pawlike over their small breasts, not running anywhere in particular but just running . . . This was what the crowd had been waiting for. At least three dozen men took up the chase, yapping like dogs. It was all very funny—if you happened to be a sadist with simple tastes.

The port officials, with
Willy Willy’s
captain, had come ashore to watch the fun. Grimes looked at Dreeble. He thought, not for the first time, how well some people match their names—or how well their names match them. He was as weedy as ever, his features were strong on nose but deficient in chin. A few strands of black hair were plastered over the pallid baldness of his head.

Grimes looked at Dreeble—and, quite by chance, Dreeble looked at Grimes. He broke off his conversation with the Port Captain. He said, incredulously, “You!”

Grimes said nothing.

“You. Grimes. I’d recognise those ugly ears of yours anywhere. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Is there any law that says that I must be elsewhere?” countered Grimes.

The officer in charge of the guard was taking interest.

He asked, “Do you know this man, Captain Dreeble?”

“I did, once.”

“Well,
I
don’t. You! Do you have a spaceport pass?”

“I must have left it in my other clothes,” said Grimes, after making a show of searching his pockets.

“Yeah? Captain Dreeble, who is this man? Who is that with him?”

“Her I don’t know. He’s Grimes. When I tangled with him last he was a two and a half ringer in the Survey Service but I did hear that he’d been emptied out. But he’s up to no good.”

“I’ll take them in,” said the officer, raising his stungun. “Are you coming quietly?”

Grimes would have done but Fenella Pruin endeared herself to the authorities by throwing her clipboard at Aloysius Dreeble before making a break for it. Grimes, paralysed but not unconscious, heard the shout of joy, the chorus of yapping as the hunters were given another woman to chase.

They caught her at last.

Chapter 14

THEY WERE DRAGGED
into a small office in the spaceport’s administration block. Grimes was groggy, hardly able to stand, after the stungun blast. Fenella Pruin had been roughed up considerably by her initial captors. She had been stripped and would have been raped had the guards not intervened in time. Many women would have been cowed, humiliated, on the verge of collapse. She was not. She stood there in the ripped clothing that she had been allowed to resume, almost literally spitting with fury.

She screamed at the fat man in civilian clothes sitting behind the big desk, “I’ll sue! I’ll make this lousy spaceport pay and pay and pay for what was done to me!”

The fat man raised his eyebrows and smiled. “You will sue? But you are a trespasser. As such you have no rights.” He turned to the master of
Willy Willy.
“Captain Dreeble, do you know these people?”

“I know the man, Colonel Dietrich. He is John Grimes. The last time I met him he was captain of the Federation Survey Service’s
Seeker.
This woman I don’t know.”