Ride the Star Winds (50 page)

They bundled up the discarded clothing and carried it out to the car, stowing it in the baggage compartment, together with their belts and holstered pistols. The sun was up when they started off, with Brasidus sitting beside Cadmus, who was driving, and Grimes and the others in the rear cabin which was entirely enclosed, being intended for the occasional transport of arrested persons.

“Still,” said Fenella, sitting back on the bench and extending her long, elegant legs, “it’s better than walking. And now, Grimes, what’s the drill when we get to Cythera? And what’s the drill when we get back to Sparta City?”

“To begin with,” Grimes told her, “my name is not Grimes. It’s Smith. John Smith. And you’re not Fenella Pruin . . .”

“Oh, all right, all right. I’ve been Prunella Fenn before.”

“And I’m Angela Smith,” announced Maggie.

“
Must
we have second names?” asked Shirl plaintively.

“Yes,” Grimes told her. “Brown, for both of you. You’re sisters.”

“But we aren’t.”

“But you look alike. Shirley Brown and Dorothy Brown.”

“Such
ugly
names!”

“But yours for the time being.”

“I wish we could see some scenery,” complained Maggie.

“If you
will
ride in the Black Maria, dearie,” Fenella told her, “you can hardly expect a scenic drive. But go on, Grimes. Sorry. Smith. Tell us what world-shaking plots have merged from your tiny mind.”

“I’ve seen this sort of thing before,” said Grimes. “The handling and processing of refugees. The
real
processing won’t be until we get to Sparta City. We’ll tell the authorities at Cythera that we’re a party of tourists who were set upon and robbed. The bandits took everything—money and, more importantly, our papers . . .”

“And your obviously expensive wrist companion,” said Fenella, pointing at the device strapped to Grimes’ left wrist.

“It will be out of sight in my pocket when we front the authorities,” Grimes told her. “As will be Maggie’s.”

“I wish that my wristwatch had been in that bloody clip joint of an inn,” she complained.

“You enjoyed the meal it paid for,” Grimes told her.

“I noticed that
you
did,” she snarled.

Chapter 32

They arrived
at Cythera just before noon.

They saw little of the town itself—not that they much wished to—as Cadmus delivered them to the airport on its outskirts. There was a low huddle of administrative buildings. There were mooring masts, at one of which rode a Trans-Spartan dirigible. She was a small ship and a shabby one, her ribs showing through her skin. Grimes, looking up at her, was not impressed and said as much.

Just inside the airport’s departure lounge was a desk at which was sitting a bored-looking police lieutenant. Cadmus saluted the officer and announced, “Six Terran tourists from Calmira, sir.”

“And just in time, Sergeant. The ship will be embarking passengers in about ten minutes.” He looked up at Grimes and his party. “Names? Identification papers?”

“They have no papers, sir,” Cadmus told him. “They were robbed.”

“You can say that again,” muttered Fenella, the loss of whose wristwatch was still rankling.

“I trust that you will apprehend the miscreants responsible, Sergeant,” said the officer, indicating by his manner that he could hardly care less.

“Investigations are being made, sir.”

“And now, your names.”

Grimes rattled these off, the Smiths and the Browns and the others. The lieutenant wrote them down on a form, said, “Thank you, Mr. Smith. And now just wait in the lounge with the other passengers. And that will do, Sergeant. You’d better be getting back to Calmira.”

“Sir.”

Grimes shook hands with Cadmus.

“Thank you for your help, Sergeant. I shall see to it that the Terran Ambassador knows about what you have done for us.”

“It was only my duty, sir.”

Brasidus shook hands with Cadmus.

Shirl and Darleen, while the lieutenant looked on disgustedly, flung their arms about him and planted noisy kisses on his cheeks. (They had aimed for his mouth but he managed to turn his head just in time.)

Grimes led the way into the lounge. He had spotted a refreshment stall. (“But they’ll feed us aboard the ship . . .” protested Maggie.) As he had hoped, there were smokes of various kinds on sale. He bought a tin of tobacco of an unknown brand, paying for it out of the money provided by Cadmus. Now he could afford to fill his pipe properly from what remained in his pouch. He lit up and surveyed those who were to be his fellow passengers on the flight to Sparta City. There were, he estimated, about sixty of them. There was a group of Waverley citizens, male and female, who had stubbornly refused to go native insofar as apparel was concerned and were clad in colorful kilts in a wide variety of tartans. There were fat ladies from Earth for whom chitons did nothing but to make a desperate attempt to hide their overly abundant nakedness and their skinny husbands, looking, in their skimpy tunics, like underdressed scarecrows. There were the inevitable young people with their rucksacks and short shorts and heavy hiking boots. There were, even, three Shaara, a princess and two drones, surveying the motley throng through their huge, faceted eyes with arthropodal arrogance.

“And how long will it take that gasbag to get us to Sparta City?” asked Fenella.

“Three days is my guess,” said Grimes.

“Ugh! In this company!”

The public address system came to life. “All offworlders will now leave the lounge by departure gate three. All offworlders will now leave the lounge by departure gate three. Small hand baggage only.”

People began to straggle out from the lounge, along the paved path to the mooring mast, escorted by policemen who tried to hurry things up.

“I’ll never come here again for a holiday!” Grimes overheard. “They take our money, then treat us like criminals!”

“But you must make allowances, dear. They’re in the middle of the revolution.”

“Then why the hell couldn’t they have waited to have it when we were safely back home?”

By groups the tourists took the short elevator ride up to the top of the mooring mast, passed through the tubular gangway into the body of the ship. Flight attendants, surly men in shabby uniforms, chivvied them aft into a large cabin. There were rows of seats, of the reclining variety. There was, Grimes realized with a sinking heart, no sleeping accommodation. Obviously this was normally a short-haul passenger carrier pressed into service for the transport of those who were, now, little better than refugees.

Grimes, Brasidus and Maggie shared a bank of three seats on the port side of the cabin. Fenella and Shirl and Darleen sat immediately behind them. The cabin filled up.

No announcement was made when the flight commenced. There was no friendly “This is your captain speaking.” There was just a faint vibration as the motors were started and, through the viewport in the ship’s skin, the sight of the ground below receding.

Shortly thereafter a meal was served—bowls of greasy stew, stale rolls and muddy coffee. It made a sordid beginning to what was to be a sordid voyage.

Grimes, who was something of an authority on the history of transport, was to say later that it was like a long trip must have been in the Bad Old Days on Earth, during that period when the fuel-guzzling giant airplanes reigned supreme in the skies, before the airship made its long-deferred comeback as a passenger carrier. There were the inadequate toilet facilities. There was the flavorless food, either too greasy or too dry, or even, both at once. There was the canned music. There were the annoying restrictions surely imposed by some fanatical non-smoker.

“It took absolute genius,” he would say, “to reproduce aboard a modern dirigible, the only civilized means of aerial transport, conditions approximating those in Economy Class aboard an intercontinental Jumbo Jet of the late Twentieth Century . . . .”

What made it even worse for him was that he was not used to traveling as a passenger, or as a passenger not accorded control room privileges. As Commodore Grimes he would have spent most of the flight in the ship’s nerve center, observing, asking intelligent questions, conversing with the captain and officers. As Mr. Smith he was just one of the herd, livestock to be carted from Point A to Point B and delivered in more or less good order and condition.

It was impossible for him to have proper conversations with his companions, to discuss the course of action once they had disembarked at the Sparta City airport. There were too many around them who could overhear, including the flight attendants. From one of these they managed to obtain some paper and a stylus—the man had to be tipped—on the pretext of playing word games. They passed notes between their two rows of seats, hidden between the sheets of airline stationery upon which there were a sort of crude variation of Scrabble.

They ate, forcing the food down. They slept as well as they could. They listened to the loud—and mostly fully justified—complaints of the other passengers. They made bets on the frequency with which a particularly annoying, tritely sweet melody would come up on the canned music program. And, with the others, they became steadily scruffier and scruffier. The acridity of stale perspiration became the most dominant odor in the cabin’s atmosphere. It needed, said Grimes loudly, a strong injection of good, healthy tobacco smoke to purify it.

Their communication by written messages did not produce any worthwhile results. As Grimes said in his final note, after arrival at Sparta City they would just have to play it by ear.

At last, at long, long last, the airship’s captain broke his voyage-long silence.

“Attention, all passengers. We are now approaching our mooring at Sparta City Airport. After mooring has been completed you will disembark in an orderly manner and put yourselves into the care of the authorities. That is all.”

Grimes stared out through the port. The airship was making a wide sweep over the city. Surely, he thought, it was not usually as dark as this. The winding streets were no more than feeble trickles of sparsely spaced lights. The Acropolis was no longer floodlit. But around the Palace there was glaring illumination. And what were those flashes? Gunfire?

He asked one of the surly flight attendants the local time. It was 0400 hours. When the man was out of sight he took his wrist companion from his pocket and set it. Even though he would not be keeping a written log of events he always liked to know just when whatever was happening was happening.

The city lights fell slowly astern.

The vibration of the motors became less intense, then ceased. Sundry clankings came from forward as the ship was shackled to her mast.

“We’re here,” said Grimes unnecessarily.

“Thank all the Odd Gods of the Galaxy for that,” said Maggie.

Chapter 33

At the foot
of the mooring mast there was a small detachment of bored-looking police, obviously resentful at having to be up at this ungodly hour. They herded the disembarking passengers into a lounge where a sullen lieutenant ticked their names off on a list. The only persons at whom he looked at all closely were the three Shaara. They stared him down.

Coffee and little sweet buns were available. It was not the sort of refreshment which Grimes would have ordered had he any choice in the matter, but it was far better than the meals aboard the airship.

Sipping and munching, he stood close to three of the policemen.

“All this extra duty . . .” one was complaining. “And then, on top of it all, we have to be at the bloody Acropolis at ten in the bloody morning for the bloody coronation. If
she
is as bloody popular as she says she is, why does she want
us
to guard her? What’s wrong with her own bloody Amazon Guard? Answer me that.”

“Politics, Orestes, politics. Wouldn’t do, this early, if she showed herself relying too heavily on her own pet tabbies. For all this Queen Hippolyte reincarnation crap she wants to be crowned ruler of all Sparta, not of just one sex. But once she’s firmly in the saddle, then we shall see what we shall see.”

“What d’ye suppose
did
happen to Brasidus?” asked the third man. “With all his faults, he wasn’t a bad bastard.”

“Done away with, of course,” said the expert on politics. “We’ll never see
him
again.”

“And more’s the pity,” muttered the first man.

Grimes drifted away to where the others were seated in a corner of the lounge, close to one of the big sliding windows. There was nobody else within earshot.

“Maggie, your bug detector,” he said in a low voice, “It could be safe to talk here, but I want to be sure . . .”

She took the instrument out of her pocket, pressed buttons, watched and listened.

She said, “All right. We can talk.”

“To begin with,” said Grimes, “Ellena’s going to be crowned this morning. Queen of all Sparta. At ten.”

“I can’t believe that!” growled Brasidus.

“I’m afraid that you have to, old friend. The question is—do you want to stop her?”

“Yes. Yes. After all, she is only a woman.”

Fenella’s indignant squawk must have been audible all over the airport—but there had already been so many loud complaints from other passengers that it went almost unnoticed.

“
I
am the Archon,” went on Brasidus. “Now I am back where I belong. I shall resume my high office without delay.”

“Go for broke . . .” muttered Grimes.

“What was that, John?”

“Just a Terran expression. It means . . .” He fumbled for the right words. “It means that you stake everything on a single throw of the dice.”

“I like that,” said Brasidus. “I like that. And are you with me, John? And you, Maggie?”

“What about asking me?” demanded Fenella.

“And us?” asked Shirl and Darleen.

“Very well. Are you with me? All of you.”

“Yes,” they all said.

“First of all,” said Grimes, “we have to get out of the airport. That shouldn’t be difficult. After all, we aren’t prisoners. Nobody regards a bunch of offplanet refugees as being potentially dangerous.”