Ride the Star Winds (4 page)

“And he didn’t think much of it.”

“But something could, just could, have made him change his mind. He could have fallen madly in love with a beautiful Aboriginal girl. Perhaps she could have saved his life, just as the Princess Pocahontas saved the life of Captain John Smith in Virginia . . .”

Grimes entertained a fleeting vision of a naked black girl getting in the way of a boomerang flung at the piratical Captain Dampier by her irate father.

“Mphm,” he grunted around the stem of his pipe.

“You see, John, I want to make Dampier a
real
character. I can’t go back in time to meet him. But there’s one real life character, aboard this very ship, who could serve as a model. You. Dampier wasn’t only a pirate and privateer, he was also an officer, a captain, in the Royal Navy. You’ve been a privateer and a pirate—and also an officer, commanding ships, in the Survey Service . . . If I could only get
inside
you . . .”

I
don’t want to get inside you,
thought Grimes unkindly.
You’re too skinny, for a start. And you gush.

“Perhaps some evening, or evenings, after dinner . . . We could get away by ourselves somewhere and you could tell me all about yourself . . .”

“It would be very boring for you,” said Grimes.

“It would not, John. It couldn’t possibly be.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her, “but all my evenings are fully taken up. I’ve all the spools on Liberia to study. After all, I’m being paid to be governor of the damn place so I’d better know something about it before I get there. . . .”

* * *

“Do you mind if I join you, Your Excellency? Joe’s gotten himself involved in a non-stop poker game and I’m just a bit lonesome.”

“Please do, Mrs. Levy. What are you drinking? A Black Angel?” Then, to the bar stewardess, “Another pink gin, please, and a B.A.”

“I
like
this little bar. . . . Your very good health, Excellency.”

“And yours, Mrs. Levy.”

“That sounds dreadfully formal.”

“Vee, then.”

“Only Joe calls me that. I prefer Vera.”

“Your very good health, Vera.”

“I only found this little bar a couple of days ago, John. (Do you mind?) It’s so . . . private. Not like the main bars, always crowded and always that so-called music so that you can’t hear yourself think. I guess that there’re still parts of this big ship that I haven’t seen. We—the Dog Star Line, that is—don’t have anything in this class.”

“But you are getting into the passenger trades.”

“Glorified cattle boats,” she sneered. “Nothing like
this.
But I don’t suppose that Joe will ever be important enough to qualify for the VIP suite. I would so like to see how the VIPs live. . . .”

“I must throw an official cocktail party before we get to Liberia,” said Grimes. “You’re invited, of course. . . .”

After all,
he thought,
I
might want a job in the Dog Star Line some day. Mr. Levy, for all his apparent inattention to his wife, looked as though he might prove to be a very jealous husband. . . .

“Never mind,” she said with sudden coldness. “I’ll just take my place in the queue. Goodnight, Your Excellency.”

She finished her drink and left—and Grimes knew that he would never be employed by the Dog Star Line as long as she was the wife of one of that company’s managers.

“Satisfied?” he asked sleepily.

“Yes . . . and no, darling. But we’ve several hours before Jane brings in your morning tea.”

“You’d better be out of here before then, Liz.”

“It’s not important really. We tabbies stick together, even though some of us have gold braid on our shoulders and some haven’t. Jane would never run screaming to old Herring.”

“Herring?”

“Captain Harringby. Haven’t you ever noticed the fishlike look he has sometimes?”

“What if he did find out? What would he do?”

“Nothing, darling. Nothing. He’s all show and no blow. Like practically every other passenger ship master he’s scared shitless of the Space Catering Officers and Stewardesses’ Guild. We have the power to make any voyage a hell for all concerned.”

“Mphm.”

No matter how successful I am,
he thought,
I
shall never be fool enough to buy a big passenger ship.

He persisted, “But you didn’t answer my question properly . . .”

“About being satisfied? Well, you aren’t exactly bad in bed, although you could be better. But I’ll educate you, darling. What satisfies me is that I’ve won the sweep.”

“The sweep?”

“Yes. We all put in twenty credits and the prize goes to the first member of
Sobraon’s
female staff to go to bed with the notorious pirate. You. And I get the prize.”

“So that’s why the purser brought up my supper tray in person tonight instead of entrusting the task to one of her underlings! All right, Liz. You’ve won. But it’s been touch and go.” He laughed. “I wondered why my personal needs were being attended to by different stewardesses every day and night. A fair go for all, I suppose. I almost succumbed this morning when that little carroty cat . . .”

“Sue . . .”

“. . . intimated that she’d just love to wash my back while I was taking my shower.”

“And now I’ll rub your front and hope that you’ll rise to the occasion.”

Chapter 7

Sobraon
was in orbit about Liberia.

Alongside her was one of that planet’s meteorological satellite tenders, airlock to airlock and with the short gangway tube sealed in place, a means of transfer of personnel from spaceship to spaceship with which Grimes was unfamiliar. In the Survey Service spacesuits and lifelines were good enough for anybody, from admirals down. But now he was no longer a spaceman. He was a first-class passenger. And he was a governor.

He was dressed as such, in the archaic finery that must always have seemed absurd to any intelligent human being, a rig neither functional nor aesthetically pleasing. Starched white shirt, stiff collar and gray silk cravat . . . Black tailcoat over a gray waistcoat . . . Gray, sharply creased trousers . . . Highly polished black boots . . . And—horror of horrors!—a gray silk top hat.

He stood in the vestibule of the liner’s airlock; at least Harringby had put the inertial drive back into operation so that Grimes was spared the indignity of floundering about clumsily in his hampering clothing. Nonetheless he was sweating, his shirt damp on his chest, sides and back. He derived some small pleasure from the observation that Captain Harringby was far from comfortable in his own dress uniform; obviously it had been tailored for him before he started to put on weight. The Chief Officer’s black-and-gold finery fitted him well enough but his expression made it plain that he hated having to wear it. Liz, the Purser, carried her full dress far better than did the Captain and the Mate. She looked cool and elegant in her long, black skirt, her white blouse with the floppy black tie, her short, gold-trimmed jacket.

Also present were the Third Officer, who would be looking after the airlock, and two Cadets. The young men were comfortable in normal shirt-and-shorts rig. Grimes envied them.

Harringby saluted stiffly. Grimes raised his top hat. Harringby extended his hand. Grimes took it with deliberate and (he hoped) infuriating graciousness.

“Good-bye, Your Excellency,” said the shipmaster. “It’s been both an honor and a pleasure to have you aboard.”

Bloody liar,
thought Grimes. He said, “Thank you, Captain.”

The Chief Officer saluted, waited until Grimes extended his hand before offering his own.

“The best of luck, Your Excellency.”

Do you mean it?
wondered Grimes.

Liz brought her slim hand up to the brim of her tricorne hat, then held it out to Grimes who, gallantly, raised it to his lips while bowing slightly. Harringby scowled and the Chief Officer smirked dirtily. Grimes straightened up, still holding the girl’s hand, looking into her eyes. He would have liked to have kissed those full lips—and to hell with Harringby!—but he and Liz had said their proper (improper?) good-byes during the night and early morning ship’s time.

“Good-bye, Your Excellency,” she murmured. “And—look after yourself.”

“I’ll try to,” he promised.

Harringby coughed loudly to attract attention, then said, “Your Excellency, I shall be vastly obliged if you will board the tender. It is time that I was getting back to my control room.”

“Very well, Captain.”

Grimes gave one last squeeze to Liz’s hand, relinquished it reluctantly and turned to walk into the airlock chamber and then through the short connecting tube. The tender’s airlock door was smaller than that of the liner and had not been designed to admit anybody wearing a top hat. That ceremonial headgear was knocked off its insecure perch. As Grimes stooped to retrieve it he heard the Chief Officer laugh and an even louder guffaw from one of the tender’s crew. He carried his hat before him as he completed his journey to the small spacecraft’s cabin. His prominent ears were burning furiously.

The crew of the tender—Liberia possessed only orbital spacecraft—were young, reasonably efficient and (to Grimes’s great envy) sensibly uniformed in shorts and T-shirts and badges of rank pinned to the left breast. The Captain asked Grimes to join him in the control cab. He did so, after removing his tail coat and waistcoat, sat down in the copilot’s chair. He looked out from the viewport at the great bulk of the liner, already fast diminishing against the backdrop of abysmal night and stars, saw it flicker and fade and vanish as the Mannschenn Drive was actuated. He transferred his attention to the mottled sphere toward which the tender was dropping—pearly cloud systems and blue seas, brown and green continents and islands.

“It’s a good world, Your Excellency,” said the young pilot. He grinned wryly. “It
was
a good world. It could be one again.”

Grimes looked at him with some curiosity. The accent had been Standard English, overlaid with an oddly musical quality. The face was olive-skinned, hawklike. Native-born, he thought. The original colonists—those romantic Anarchists—had been largely of Latin-American stock.

“Could be?” he asked.

“That is the opinion of some of us, Your Excellency. And we’ve heard of you, of course. You’re something of an Anarchist yourself . . .”

“Mphm?”

“I mean. . . . You’re not the usual Survey Service stuffed shirt.”

“A stuffed shirt is just what I feel like at the moment.”

“But you’ve a reputation, sir, for doing things your own way.”

“And where has it got me?” asked Grimes, addressing the question to himself rather than to the tender’s pilot.

“You’ve commanded ships, sir. Real ships, deep space ships, not . . .
tenders.”

“Don’t speak ill of your own command,” Grimes admonished.

The young man grinned whitely. “Oh, I like her. She’ll do almost anything I ask of her—but if I asked her to make a deep space voyage I know what her answer would be!”

“Fit her out with Mannschenn Drive and a life support system,” said Grimes, “and you could take her anywhere.”

“If I were qualified—which I am not. Master Astronaut, Orbital Only—that’s me.”

“But you’re still a spaceman, Captain. I’d like to have a talk, spaceman to spaceman. But . . .”

“Don’t worry about Pedro and Miguel, sir. They’re like me, members of the OAP, the Original Anarchist Party. We’re allowed by our gracious President to blow off steam as long as we don’t
do
anything. . . .”

“What could we do, Raoul?” came a voice from behind Grimes.

He turned to see that the other two crew members had taken seats at the rear of the control cab.

He said softly, “What could you do? I don’t know. Yet. I spent the voyage from Earth running through all the official spools on Liberia . . .” (He remembered guiltily that there had been times when instead of watching and listening to the playmaster in his suite he had been doing other things.) “Before I left I was given a briefing of sorts. I still don’t know nearly as much as I should. You have the first-hand knowledge. I don’t.”

“All right, sir,” said Raoul. “I’ll start at the top. There’s our revered President, Estrelita O’Higgins. . . .”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes. He remembered how she had looked in the screen of the playmaster. Tall, splendidly bosomed, black-haired and with rather too much jaw to be pretty. But she was undeniably handsome. In the right circumstances she might be beautiful.

“Then there’s your boy, Colonel Bardon. . . .”

“Not
my
boy,” said Grimes.

“He’s Earth-appointed, isn’t he? Just as you are, sir. Most people say that he’s got Estrelita eating out of his hand—but it could well be the other way around.”

“Or mutual,” said Grimes.

They made a good pair, Estrelita and the Colonel, he had thought when he saw them in one of the sequences presented by the data spools. The tall, handsome woman in a superbly tailored blue denim suit, the tall, handsome man in his glittering full dress. Like her, he had too much jaw. In his case it was framed by black, mutton chop whiskers.

“Whoever is eating out of whose hand,” Raoul went on, “it’s the Terran Garrison that really runs Liberia. They get first pick of everything. Then the Secret Police get their pickings. Then the ordinary police. The real Liberians don’t get picked on much. There’s some grumbling, of course, but we aren’t badly off. It’s the slaves who suffer. . . .”

“The indentured labor,” corrected Grimes.

“You’re hair-splitting, sir. When an indenture runs out the only way that a laborer can obtain further employment is to sign up again. All his wages, such as they are, have gone to the purchase of the little luxuries that make life bearable. And not only luxuries. There are habit-forming drugs, like Dassan dreamsticks. . . .”

“They’re illegal,” said Grimes, “on all federated worlds.”

The pilot laughed harshly. “Of course they are. But that doesn’t worry Bardon’s Bullies.” He returned his attention to his instruments and made minor adjustments; the beat of the tender’s inertial drive changed tempo. “I’ve time to tell you a story, sir, before we come in to Port Libertad. There was a girl, a refugee, from New Dallas. You must have heard about what happened there. An independent colony that thought that it could thumb its nose at the Federation and at everybody else. Then the Duchy of Waldegren wanted the planet—and took it. We took a few thousand refugees. A lot of the prettier girls finished up in the houses owned—not all that secretly—by Bardon. Mary Lou was one of them. That’s where I met her, in a dive called the Pink Pussy Cat. And—don’t laugh, please!—we . . . fell in love. I was going to buy her out of that place. But some bastard got her hooked on dreamsticks and. . . .”