Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (77 page)

“That will do nicely. I won’t be wearing uniform myself. And you, Magda?”

“I’ve an evening dress, Captain.”

“Good. The Duchess’s air car will be calling for us at 1800 hours.”

Magda Granadu appeared to be thinking deeply. She said at last, “I feel that this will be an
important
meeting . . .”

“Too right it is,” said Williams. “It’ll be the first time in my life that I’ve had dinner with a Duchess!”

“More important than that, Billy,” the woman told him. “Important for all of us. I think that we should consult the
I Ching
, Captain.”

“We can wait until we get to Her Grace’s mansion,” said Grimes, “and she can read the Tarot pack.”

“Does this Duchess have the gift?” asked Magda.

“I . . . I think so. When I was here before she came up with a rather uncanny prediction.”

“And was she working for you—or for herself?”

“For El Dorado, I suppose,” said Grimes.

“And my
Book of Changes
will be working for you, Captain. For us. Would you mind if I went down for the book and the coins?”

“Go ahead,” said Grimes.

“She really believes it,” said Williams when she was gone. “Do you, Skipper?”

“Do you, Mr. Williams?”

Magda came back, holding the black silk-covered book. She handed the three silvery coins to Grimes. He shook them in his cupped hands, let them fall to the deck. Two heads and a tail. The second throw produced the same result, as did the third. Two tails and a head, then two heads and a tail again. The last throw was a head and two tails.

“Upper trigram,
K’an
,” said the woman. “Lower trigram,
Ch’ien
. The hexagram is
Hsu . . .
” She read from the book. “Biding one’s time . . . Sincerity will lead to brilliant success. Firmness will bring good fortune. It will be advantageous to cross the great water . . .”

“That’s our job, isn’t it?” asked Grimes.

“I suppose so,” she said. “But the Image is . . . interesting and possibly apposite. ‘Clouds drift across the sky as if biding their time. The superior man, in accordance with this, eats and drinks, feasts and enjoys himself.’”

“There’s no reason,” said Grimes, “why we should not enjoy a free meal.”

***

After they had left his cabin he called Ken Mayhew.

“Mr. Mayhew,” he said, “I suppose you know that I’ve been invited to dinner with the Duchess of Leckhampton. I’m taking Mr. Williams and Ms. Granadu with me. I’d have liked to have taken you—for obvious reasons—but the old bat said that I could bring two of my officers with me. And unless we break your cover you’re not one of my officers. You’re a passenger, and only a senior clerk on holiday. They’re a snobbish bunch here.”

“I have already gained that impression, Captain. I have been . . . eavesdropping, receiving unguarded thoughts from all over, trying to pick up something concerning
you
. There was a woman who came through quite strongly. She was vocalizing her thinking.
Should I see him again? But if I invite him here he will be almost certain to meet Ferdinand—and Ferdinand could notice the facial resemblance, even though I had his ears fixed while he was still only a baby. He believes that Henri was his father and I want him to go on believing that. Better a dead aristocrat than an impossibly bourgeois spaceman . . .
”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes indignantly. “Am I impossibly bourgeois, Mr. Mayhew?”

“I don’t think so, sir,” said the telepath diplomatically. “Then there was a man, a spaceman I would say, like yourself. Would it have been this Drongo Kane?
So Grimes, of all people, is here. In a real ship. I could use him. After all, he held command in the Survey Service. He’s been in a few naval actions. The only laws for which he has any respect are those he makes himself. But he’s a prickly bastard. I’ll have to handle him carefully. But, first of all, I’ll have to see to it that there’s a shortage of cargoes for his
Sister Sue
—what a name for a ship!
—
in this sector of the galaxy. I’ll have to get old Takada on to it. He’s our financial wizard . . .
”

“The Baron Takada,” said Grimes, “is El Dorado’s financial wizard. And am I a prickly bastard?”

“You are at times, sir. But to continue . . . There was a woman, elderly.
Just imagine that young Grimes turning up here after all this time . . . I wish that I were a few years younger. Marlene’s a fool; she should have kept him once she’d got her claws into him. She’s enough money for two and she could afford genealogical research to turn up some sort of patent of nobility for a commoner husband. Michelle wasn’t so absurdly fussy—although you could hardly say that Kane married her for her money. He’s plenty of his own. And he’ll have plenty more—as we all shall!—if that private navy of mercenaries does as well as he says it will . . .
”

“I always rather liked the Duchess,” said Grimes, “although she’s a ruthless old bat. So she’s an investor in Kane’s Honorable Company of Interstellar Mercenaries. Probably everybody is on this world. I’ve noticed that the very rich never miss any opportunity to become even richer. And Baron Takada will be pulling his strings and exporters and importers will be dancing to his tune, and I’ll be sitting here on the bones of my arse, flat broke and getting broker . . . And then Drongo Kane will bob up like a pantomime Good Fairy and offer me, and the ship, a job . . .”

“You have some peculiar friends, sir,” said Mayhew dryly.

“Don’t I just. Can you sort of tune in to the dinner party tonight? Let me know, when I get back, if you heard anything interesting.”

“I think I can manage that, sir.”

“Good.” He looked at the bulkhead clock. “It’s time I was getting changed.”

Chapter 24

GRIMES AND WILLIAMS,
dressed in what the mate referred to as their penguin suits, stood at the foot of the ramp watching the Duchess’s air car coming in. With them was Magda Granadu, also wearing a black outfit, high-necked, long-sleeved and with an ankle-length skirt. Its severity was offset by a necklace of opals, by a blazing, fire opal brooch over her left breast and by what was almost a coronet of opals in her piled-high auburn hair.

You can put an inertial drive unit into any sort of body, of any shape at all, and it will fly. If you want speed through the atmosphere streamlining is desirable. If speed is not the main consideration the streamlining may be dispensed with.

The Duchess’s car was not streamlined. It was an airborne replica of one of the more prestigious road vehicles developed during the twentieth century, Old Reckoning, on Earth, even to the silver nymph decorating the square bonnet. It drifted down through the evening air, touched, then rolled the last few meters on its fat-tired wheels. The chauffeur—a grey-faced robot clad in black, high-collared, silver-buttoned livery—got down from the forward compartment, marched stiffly to the three humans and saluted smartly.

“Your transport, gentlemen and lady,” he announced in a metallic voice.

He turned, walked back to the car and opened the rear door. Grimes held back to let Magda enter first but she said, “After you, Captain.”

She followed him in, so as to sit between him and Williams. Williams entered. The robot chauffeur shut the door, returned to his own seat. There was a sheet of glass or some other transparency between him and his passengers. His voice came to him through a concealed speaker. “Gentlepersons, you will find a small bar in the panel before you. There is a single button in the padding, which you may press.”

The car lifted. Grimes, whose mind was a repository of all manner of useless facts, recalled the proud boast of Rolls Royce on one of whose later cars this vehicle had been modeled.
The only mechanical sound you can hear is the ticking of the clock on the dashboard.
So it was here. The inertial drive is inevitably noisy, yet Grimes and his companions had heard only the faintest mutter as the car came in for its landing. Inside the passenger compartment there was not so much as a whisper to indicate that machinery was in operation.

“A drink, Skipper?” asked Williams.

“Just one,” said Grimes. “We don’t want to arrive doing an impersonation of drunken and dissolute spacemen.”

When the button was pushed a section of panel fell back to form a shelf and to expose a compartment containing a rack of bottles, another one of glasses and a tiny refrigerator with an ice cube tray. There was a box of cigarettes and one of cigarillos. There was even a jar of pipe tobacco. (Grimes had smoked the local weed when on El Dorado, years ago, and enjoyed it.)

Magda dispensed drinks—whisky, genuine Scotch, for herself and Williams, gin and bitters for Grimes. She and Williams lit up cigarillos. Grimes scraped out his pipe and refilled it with the fragrant mixture. The three of them sipped and smoked, watching, through the wide windows, the landscape over which they were flying.

Here, between the spaceport and the city, it was well tamed, given over to agriculture. There were orchards, with orderly rows of fruit trees. There were green fields, and other fields that were seas of golden grain. In these the harvesters were working, great machines whose bodies of polished metal reflected the rays of the setting sun.

Ahead was the city, a small one, a very small one compared to the sprawling warrens found on the majority of the worlds of man. There were towers, only one of which was really tall, and great houses, oddly old-fashioned in appearance, few of which were higher than four stories. Every building stood in what was, in effect, its own private park. Lights were coming on as the sun went down, in windows and along the wide, straight avenues.

The air car was losing altitude. It dropped to the road about a kilometer from the city limits, continued its journey as a wheeled vehicle. The landing was so smooth that had the passengers been sitting with their eyes shut they would never have noticed it. The vehicle sped on with neither noise nor vibration, a great orchard with golden-fruit-laden trees on either side of it. Then it was running along one of the avenues. There was other road traffic, ground cars which, like their own transport, were probably capable of functioning as flying machines.

Williams was enthusiastic. “Look, Skipper! A Mercedes! And isn’t that a Sunbeam?”

That
was an open car, with wire wheels and a profusion of highly polished brass. (Or gold, thought Grimes. On this world it could well be the precious metal.) A man in an archaic costume—belted jacket, high, stiff collar with cravat, peaked cap—was at the wheel. By his side sat a woman with a dust coat over her dress, with her hat secured to her head by a filmy scarf tied over it and beneath her chin. Both these persons wore heavy goggles.

The pseudo Rolls Royce slowed, turned off the avenue on to a graveled drive, made its way to a brilliantly illuminated portico beyond which loomed Leckhampton House, grey and solid, a façade in which windows glowed softly like the ranked ports of a great surface ship, a cruise liner perhaps, sliding by in the dusk. The car stopped. The robot chauffeur got out to open the door for his passengers, saluting smartly as they dismounted. In the doorway of the house stood a very proper English butler, pewter-faced, who bowed as he ushered them in. Another robot servitor, slimmer and younger looking than the first, led them to the drawing room, a large apartment illumined by the soft light from gasoliers, that was all gilt and red plush, the walls of which were covered with crimson silk upon which floral designs had been worked in gold.

It was all rather oppressive.

Following the servant Grimes and his companions walked slowly toward the elderly lady seated on a high-backed chair that was almost a throne.

“Your Grace,” said the robot, “may I present Captain John Grimes, of the spaceship
Sister Sue
, and . . .”

“Cut the cackle, Jenkins,” said the Duchess. “I’ve known Captain Grimes for years. Shove off, will you?”

“Very good, Your Grace.”

The servitor bowed and left.

“And now, John Grimes, let me have a look at you. You’ve changed hardly at all . . .”

“And neither have you, Your Grace,” said Grimes truthfully. He looked at her with admiration. She was dressed formally—and what she was wearing would not have looked out of place at the court of the first Queen Elizabeth, richly brocaded silk over a farthingale (Grimes wondered how she could manage to sit down while wearing such a contraption), ruff and rebato. A diamond choker was about her neck. There were more diamonds, a not so small coronet, decorating the obvious auburn wig that she was wearing over her own hair.

“Introduce me to the young lady and the young gentleman, John.”

“Your Grace,” said Grimes formally, remembering the style used by the rudely dismissed under butler or whatever he was, “may I present Miss Magda Granadu, my Catering Officer and Purser? And Mr. William Williams, my Chief Officer?”

“So you’re the commissioned cook, Magda,” cackled the old lady. “By the looks of John you ain’t starving him. And you’re his mate, Billy, somebody to hold his hand when he gets into a scrape. Do you still get into scrapes, John boy?”

“Now and again,” admitted Grimes.

Then there were the others to meet—in Grimes’ case to meet again. There was the Baron Takada, his obesity covered with antique evening finery, white tie and tails, the scarlet ribbon of some order diagonally across his snowy shirtfront with its black pearl studs. There was the Hereditary Chief Lobenga, tall and muscular, darkly handsome, in a high-collared, gold-braided, white uniform. There was his wife, the Lady Eulalia, her glistening black hair elaborately coiled above her face with its creamy skin, the nose too aquiline for mere prettiness, the mouth a wide, scarlet slash. Through the pale translucence of her simple gown her body gleamed rosily.

An under butler circulated with a tray of drinks. Grimes did not have to state his preference for pink gin; it was served to him automatically.

“You remember my tastes, Your Grace,” he said.

“Indeed I do, John-boy. For drinks and for . . .”

The butler made a stately entrance into the room.

“The Princess Marlene von Stolzberg,” he announced. “Commodore the Baron Kane, El Doradan Navy. The Baroness Michelle d’Estang . . .”