Ride the Star Winds (85 page)

Jenkins looked hurt. “What was that in aid of?”

She said, “You were going to spoil the . . . mixture.”

“How? If it’s abrasive powder, a little ash might improve it.”

“Not this mixture,” she said.

“No,” I supported her. “No. It wouldn’t.”

“I’m not altogether a fool,” grumbled Jenkins.

“No?” asked Martha sweetly. “No?” She extended a slender leg, and with her slim foot gently shoved the can out of harm’s way. “No?”

“No!” he almost shouted. “I’ve lived on primitive worlds, Martha, planets where military science is in its infancy. And here’s Peter, lugging around a dirty great cannister of villainous saltpeter, and there’s Peggy, sweating and slaving over something that looks like a breech-loading cannon.” He snorted. “If it were a couple of dueling pieces it would make sense. Pistols for two and coffee for one. And then after the commissioned cook and the bold commander had settled their differences, you and Peggy could do battle, at twenty paces, for the favors of the survivor.

“But a cannon . . . it doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” agreed Martha. She got up and went to a locker. I thought that she was going to offer us drinks. There were racked bottles there, and glasses. And there was a drawer under the liquor compartment, which she pulled open. She took from it a nasty-looking Minetti automatic.

She said, “I’m sorry, Doc, but you know too much. We have to keep you quiet for the next few hours. And you, Peter, see about tying him up and gagging him, will you?” She motioned with the pistol. “Down, boy, down. I shan’t shoot to kill—but you wouldn’t like your kneecaps shattered, would you?”

Jenkins subsided. He looked scared—and, at the same time, oddly amused. “But I don’t know too much,” he expostulated. “I don’t know enough.”

Martha allowed a brief smile to flicker over her full mouth. She glanced at me fleetingly. “Shall we tell him, Peter?”

I said, “It wouldn’t do any harm. Now.”

Martha sat down again, the hand with the pistol resting on one slender thigh. It remained pointing directly at Jenkins. Her finger never strayed from the trigger.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll put you in the picture. As you are aware, there’s a considerable amount of ill-feeling aboard this vessel.”

“How right you are!” exclaimed Jenkins.

“We think that the captain is behaving in a manner prejudicial to good order and discipline.”

He chuckled softly. “Mutiny, is it? In all my years in space I’ve never seen one. But why that absurd, archaic cannon? After all, you’ve access to the ship’s firearms.” He added, “As you’ve just proved, Martha.”

“It’s not mutiny,” she snapped.

“Have I another guess?”

She told him, “You can guess all the way from here to Grollor, but you’ll never guess right.”

“No?” He made as though to rise from his chair, but her gun hand twitched suggestively. “No? Then why not tell me and get it over with.”

“If you must know,” she said tiredly, “it’s a way—it might work and it might not—to distract Sandra’s attention from Ralph. She’s more in love with her ship than with anybody in the ship but if Peter were to be able to say, ‘Look, darling, thanks to me you are now the captain of the first real FTL starwagon,’ she’d be eating out of his hand.”

He stared at me in mock admiration. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Peter.”

“He hasn’t,” said Sandra. “It was Peggy and I who cooked up the scheme. We don’t know if it will succeed or not—but
something
is bound to happen when Peggy’s solid fuel rocket gives the ship just that extra nudge.”

“And all these years,” whispered Jenkins, “I’ve regarded you as just a stuffed shirt—mind you, a well-stuffed shirt—and Peggy as a barely literate mechanic. But there’s a streak of wild poetry in you, in both of you. Mind you, I don’t think that Listowel is worth the trouble. But throwing your bonnet over the windmill is always worthwhile. This crazy scheme appeals to me. I’m with it, Martha, and I’m with you. I’ve been dreaming about something on those lines myself, but not so practically as you have done . . .”

His hand went to the side pocket of his shorts—and Martha’s hand, holding the pistol, lifted to cover him. But it was a folded sheet of paper that he pulled out.

“Martha,” he pleaded, “put the
Outer Reaches Suite
on your playmaster, will you? Or get Peter to put it on, if you don’t trust me. And, if you would be so good, something to wet my whistle . . .”

“Fix it, Peter,” ordered Martha.

I fixed it, first of all pouring a stiff whiskey on the rocks for each of us, then adjusting the controls of the gleaming instrument. The first notes of the Suite drifted into the cabin. It wasn’t music that I have ever cared for. There was too much of loneliness in it, too much of the blackness and the emptiness—the emptiness that, somehow, was not empty, that was peopled with the dim, flimsy ghosts of the might-have-been.

Jenkins drained his glass, then unfolded the piece of paper and blinked at it.

“Down the years

And the lightyears,

Wings widespread

To the silent gale . . .

Wide wings beating

The wall between

Our reality and our reality

And realities undreamed . . .

And realities undreamed . . .

Or dreamed?

Down the years

And the darkness—”

He broke off abruptly, and Martha stiffened, her Minetti swinging to cover the open door. Peggy was there, demanding irritably, “Aren’t you people going to lend a hand? Do I do all the work in this bloody ship?” She saw Doc, muttered, “Sorry. Didn’t know you had company.”

“
We
have company, Peggy,” corrected Martha.

“You mean he . . .”

“Yes. He knows.”

“Yes, indeed,” agreed Doc happily. “And I’ll help you to beat your wings against the wall.”

“What wall?” demanded Peggy disgustedly.

It was odd that we now trusted Doc without any question. Or was it so odd? There were those half-memories, there was the haunting feeling that we had done all this before. Anyhow, we poured Peggy a drink, had another one ourselves, and then made our way aft. In the workshop we picked up the thing that Peggy had been making. It did look like a cannon, and not a small one either. It was fortunate that our acceleration was now extremely gentle, otherwise it would have been impossible for us to handle that heavy steel tube without rigging tackles.

We got it down at last to the transom space and dropped it on the after bulkhead. Martha climbed back, with Peggy and myself, into the airscrew motor room; Doc stayed below. While Peggy and I climbed into spacesuits Martha passed the other equipment down to Jenkins—the welding and cutting tools, the can of powder. And then Doc came up, and Peggy and I, armored against cold and vacuum, took his place.

Over our heads the airtight door slid shut. I heard the faint whirr of the pump that Peggy had installed in the motor room, and realized that the atmosphere was being evacuated from our compartment. I saw the needle of the gauge on the wrist of my suit falling, and watched it continue to drop even when I could no longer hear anything.

Peggy’s voice in my helmet phones was surprisingly loud.

She said, “Let’s get moving.”

It was Peggy who did most of the work. A tool in her hands was an extension of her body—or even an extension of her personality. The blue-flaring torch cut a neat round hole in the bulkhead and then, after I had lifted the circle of still glowing steel away and clear, in the shell plating beyond. This section I kicked out, and watched fascinated as it diminished slowly, a tiny, twinkling star against the utter blackness. Peggy irritably pulled me back to the work in hand. Together we maneuvered the rocket tube into place. It was a tight fit, but not too tight. And then Peggy stitched metal to metal with the delicate precision that an ancestor might have displayed with needle, thread and fine fabric.

I watched her with something akin to envy—and it was more than her manual dexterity that I envied. She had something that occupied all her attention; I had not. I had time to doubt, and to wonder. At the back of my mind a nagging, insistent voice was saying,
No good will come of this.

I heard Peggy’s satisfied grunt in my helmet phones and saw that the job was finished. She unscrewed the breech of the tube, and flipped it back on its hinge. She picked up a wad of rags, shoved it down the barrel, but not too far down. I managed to get the lid off the powder cannister and handed it to her. She poured the black grains onto the wad. Her guess as to the positioning of it had been a good one; only a spoonful of gunpowder remained in the can. This she transferred to a tubular recess in the middle of the breech block, stoppering it with another scrap of rag. She replaced the block then, gasping slightly as she gave it that extra half-turn to ensure that it was well and tightly home.

“O.K., Martha,” she said. “You can let the air back in.”

“Valve open,” Martha’s voice said tinnily from the phones.

I watched the needle of my wrist gauge start to rise, and heard after a while the thin, high screaming of the inrushing atmosphere. And then the airtight door over our heads opened and I saw Martha and Doc framed in the opening, looking not at us but at what we had done. After a second’s hesitation they joined us in the transom space. Martha helped Peggy off with her helmet; Doc removed mine for me.

“A neat job,” said Martha.

“It will do,” said Peggy.

“I hope,” added Doc, but he did not seem unduly worried.

“You wire her up,” said Peggy to Martha. “I can’t do it in these damn gloves.”

“Anything to oblige,” murmured Martha. She handed the double cable that she had brought down with her to Jenkins and started to loosen the thumbscrews on the breech block.

“I know that I’m only the captain,” said a cold, a very cold voice, “but might I inquire what the hell you’re doing?”

“We’re going to make this bitch roll and go,” replied Jenkins happily.

I looked up from the makeshift rocket and saw that Sandra and Listowel were standing in the motor room, looking down at us through the doorway. Sandra was icily furious. Listowel looked mildly interested.

Sandra’s finger pointed first at Peggy, then at myself. “Spacesuits . . . have you been outside?” she demanded.

“No,” said Peggy.

“Don’t worry, skipper,” said Jenkins. “We didn’t lose any atmosphere. We sealed the transom space off before Peggy and Peter went to work, and put the pump on it . . .”

“
But you pierced the hull,”
she said with mounting anger.

“Only a small hole,” admitted Jenkins.

“This,” she grated, “is too much. Only a couple of weeks out and you’re already space-happy. Burning holes in the pressure plating and risking all our lives. Are you mad?”

“No,” stated Doc. “And when you find out what it’s about you’ll be pleased.”

“Pleased? I shall be pleased all right. I shall roll on the deck in uncontrollable ecstasy. And I’ll have your guts for a necktie, and then I’ll boot you out of the airlock without spacesuits. I’ll—”

“Be reasonable, Sandra,” admonished Listowel rashly.

“Reasonable? I am being reasonable. All these officers have work that they should be doing, instead of which I find them engaged in some fantastic act of sabotage . . .”

“Sandra,” I put in, “I can explain.”

“
You?
You ineffectual puppy!” I saw with shock that there was a pistol in her hand. “Come up out of there, all of you. That is an order.” She turned to her companion. “Commander Listowel, as captain of this vessel I request your aid in dealing with these mutineers.”

“But—” I began.

“Drop whatever you’re doing,” she snapped, “and come up.”

“Better do as she says,” grumbled Peggy. She picked up her welding torch.

“Just let us tell you what it’s all about, skipper,” pleaded Jenkins, edging towards the power point into which the torch was plugged.

“No,” said Sandra flatly.

“But . . .” murmured Peggy, her voice trailing off.

There was the sharp click of a switch and the torch flared blindingly. I realized Peggy’s intention, but too late. As I tried to wrest the tool from her hands (but why? but why?), the metal casing of the firing chamber was already cherry red.

I felt rather than heard the
whoomph
of the exploding powder . . .

Chapter 16

Her body against mine
was warm and resilient, yielding—and then, at the finish, almost violently possessive. There was the flaring intensity of sensation, prolonged to the limits of endurance, and the long, long fall down into the soft darkness of the sweetest sleep of all.

And yet . . .

“Sandra . . .” I started to say, before my eyes were properly focused on the face beside mine on the pillow.

She snapped back into full consciousness and stared at me coldly.

“What was that, Peter? I’ve suspected that . . .”

“I don’t know, Peggy,” I muttered. “I don’t know . . .”

I
don’t know,
I thought.
I
don’t know. But I remember . . . what do I remember? Some crazy dream about another ship, another lightjammer, with Sandra as the captain and myself as catering officer and Ralph as some sort of outsider. And I was married to Sandra in this dream, and I’d lost her, and I was trying to win her back with Peggy’s help. There was something about a solid fuel rocket . . .

“What is it, Peter?” she asked sharply.

“A dream,” I told her. “It must have been a dream . . .”

I unsnapped the elastic webbing that held us to the bunk and floated away from it and from Peggy to the center of the cabin. I looked around me, noting details in the dim light, trying to reassure myself of its reality, of our reality. It was all so familiar, and all so old. The ghosts of those who had lived here, who had loved here and hated here, generation after generation, seemed to whisper to me,
This is
Thermopylae
. This is all the world you have ever known, ever will know . . .

It was all so unfamiliar.