The Big Black Mark (7 page)

"I've seen the evidence of their passing, Mrs. Denny."

"But they're so sweet, and trusting."

"Mphm."

"She's playing our tune, dear," Denny put in hastily, ex tending his arms to his wife. He got them around her somehow, and the couple moved off to join the other dancers.

Grimes looked around for Davinas but the merchant captain had vanished, had probably made his escape as soon as the Denny couple showed up. He poured himself another glass of wine and looked at the swirling dancers. Some of them, most of them, were singing to the music of the synthesizer, which was achieving the effect of an orchestra of steel guitars.

 
Spaceman, the stars are calling,
Spaceman, you live to roam,
Spaceman, down light-years falling,
Remember I wait at home. . . .

Icky,
thought Grimes.
Icky.
But he had always liked the thing, in spite of (because of?) its sentimentality. He started to sing the words himself in a not very tuneful voice.

"I didn't think you had it in you, Captain."

Grimes cut himself off in mid-note, saw that Vinegar Nell had joined him. It was obvious that the tall, slim woman had taken a drink—or two, or three. Her cheeks were flushed and her face had lost its habitually sour expression. She went on, "I'd never have dreamed that you're a sentimentalist."

"I'm not, Miss Russell. Or am I? Never mind. There are just some really corny things I love, and that song is one of them." Then, surprising himself at least as much as he did her: "Shall we dance?"

"Why not?"

They moved out onto the floor. She danced well, which was more than could be said for him. Normally, on such occasions, he was all too aware of his deficiencies—but all that he was aware of now was the soft pressure of her breasts against his chest, the firmer pressure and the motion of her thighs against his own. And there was no need for them to dance so closely; in spite of the illusory multitude moving in the mirrors the floor was far from crowded.

Watch it, Grimes,
he admonished himself.
Watch it! And why the hell should I?
part of him demanded mutinously.

That's why!
he snarled mentally as one of his own officers, a junior engineer, swept past, holding a local lass at least as closely as Grimes was holding the paymaster. The young man leered and winked at his captain. Grimes tried to relax his grip on Vinegar Nell, but she wasn't having any. Her arms were surprisingly strong.

At last the music came to a wailing conclusion. "I enjoyed that," she said.

"So did I, Miss Russell," admitted Grimes. "Some refreshment?" he asked, steering her toward one of the buffet tables.

"But I should be looking after you." She laughed. It wasn't so much what she said, but the way that she said it. "Mphm," he grunted aloud.

Captain Davinas was already at the table with his partner, a tall, plain local woman. "Ah," he said, "we meet again, Commander."

Introductions were made, after which, to the disgust of the ladies, the men started to talk shop. The music began again and, with some reluctance, Vinegar Nell allowed herself to be led off by the Penobscot police commissioner, and the other lady by the first mate of
Sundowner.

"Thank all the odd gods of the galaxy for that!" Davinas laughed. "I have to dance with her some of the time—she's the wife of my Penobscot agent—but she'll settle for one of my senior officers. Talking of officers—I'll swap my purser for your paymaster any day, John!"

"You don't know her like I do, Bill," Grimes told him, feeling oddly disloyal as he said it. He allowed Davinas to refill his glass, tried to ignore the beseeching glances of three young ladies seated not far from them. "Oh, well, I suppose we'd better find ourselves partners, especially since there seems to be a shortage of men here. But I'd sooner talk. Frankly, I'm sniffing around for information on this sector of space—but I suppose that can wait until tomorrow."

"Not unless you want a job as fourth mate aboard
Sundowner.
I lift ship for Electra bright and early—well, early—tomorrow morning."

"A pity."

"It needn't be. I'm not much of a dancing man. I'd sooner earbash and be earbashed over a cold bottle or two than be dragged around the floor by the local talent. And I was intending to return to my ship very shortly, anyhow. Why not come with me? We can have a talk on board."

Davinas and Grimes slipped out of the ballroom almost unnoticed. A few cabs were waiting hopefully in the portico, so they had no difficulty in obtaining transport to the spaceport. It was a short drive only, and less than twenty minutes after they had left the palace Davinas was leading the way up the ramp to the after airlock of
Sundowner
.

It is impossible for a spaceman to visit somebody else's ship without making comparisons—and Grimes was busy making them. Here, of course, there was no uniformed Marine at the gangway, only a civilian night watchman supplied by the vessel's local agent, but the ramp itself was in better repair than
Discovery's,
and far cleaner. It was the same inboard. Everything was old, worn, but carefully—lovingly, almost—maintained. Somehow the merchant captain had been able to instill in his people a respect—at least—for their ship. Grimes envied him. But in all likelihood Davinas had never been cursed with a full crew of malcontents, and would have been able to extract and dump the occasional bad apple from this barrel without being obliged to fill in forms in quintuplicate to explain just why.

The elevator cage slid upward swiftly and silently, came to a smooth stop. Davinas showed Grimes into his comfortable quarters. "Park the carcass, John. Make yourself at home. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat . . ."

". . . and call the cat a bastard," finished Grimes.

"Then why don't you?"

Grimes felt something rubbing against his legs, looked down, saw a large tortoiseshell tom. The animal seemed to have taken a fancy to him. He felt flattered. In spite of the affair on Morrowvia he still liked cats.

"Coffee?"

"Thanks."

Davinas poured two mugs from a large thermos container, then went into the office adjoining his dayroom. Grimes, while he petted the cat, looked around. He was intrigued by the pictures on the bulkheads of the cabin, holograms of scenes on worlds that were strange to him. One was a mountainscape—jagged peaks, black but snowcapped, thrusting into a stormy sky, each summit with its spume of ice particles streaming down wind like white smoke. He could almost hear the shrieking of the icy gale. Then there was one that could have been a landscape in Hell—contorted rocks, gaudily colored, half veiled by an ocher sandstorm.

Davinas came back, carrying a large folder. "Admiring the art gallery? That one's the Desolation Range on Lorn, my home world. And
that
one is the Painted Badlands on Eblis. Beats me why some genius doesn't open a tourist resort there. Spectacular scenery, friendly indigenes, and quite a few valleys where the likes of us could live quite comfortably."

"The Rim Worlds," murmured Grimes. "I've heard quite a lot about them, off and on. Somehow the Survey Service never seems to show the flag in that sector of space. I don't suppose I'll ever see them."

Davinas laughed. "Don't be so sure. Rim Runners'll take anybody, as long as he has some sort of certificate of com patency and rigor mortis hasn't set in!"

"If they ever get me," declared Grimes, "that'll be the sunny Friday!"

"Or me," agreed Davinas. "When the
Sundowner
Line finally folds I'm putting my savings into a farm."

The two men sipped their good coffee. Davinas lit a long, slim cigar, Grimes his pipe. The cat purred noisily between them.

Then: "I hear that you're on a Lost Colony hunt, John."

"Yes, Bill. As a matter of fact, Commander Denny did mention that you might be able to give me a few leads."

"I might be. But, as a Rim Worlds citizen, I'm supposed to make any reports on anything I find to the Rim Worlds government. And to my owners, of course."

"But the Rim Worlds are members of the Federation."

"Not for much longer, they're not. Surely you've heard talk of secession lately." Davinas laughed rather unpleasantly. "But I'm not exactly in love with our local lords and masters. I've been in the
Sundowner
Line practically all my working life, and I haven't enjoyed seeing our fleet pushed off the trade routes by Rim Runners.
They
can afford to cut freights; they've the taxpayer's money behind them. And who's the taxpayer? Me."

"But what about your owners? Don't you report to them?"

"They just aren't interested anymore. The last time that I made a deviation, sniffing around for a possible new run for
Sundowner,
there was all hell let loose." He obviously quoted from a letter. " 'We would point out that you are a servant of a commercial shipping line, not a captain in the Federation Survey Service . . .' Ha!"

"Mphm. So you might be able to help me?"

"I might. If you ask me nicely enough, I will." He poured more coffee into the mugs. "You carry a PCO, of course?"

"Of course. And you?"

"No. Not officially. Our head office now and again—only now and again, mind you—realizes that there is such a force as progress. They found out that one of the early Carlotti sets was going cheap. So now I have Carlotti, and no PCO. But—"

"But what?"

"My NST operator didn't like it. He was too lazy to do the Carlotti course to qualify in FTL radio. He reckoned, too, that he'd be doing twice the work that he was doing before, and for the same pay. So he resigned, and joined Rim Runners. They're very old-fashioned, in some ways. They don't have Carlotti equipment in many of their ships yet. They still carry psionic communication officers and Normal Space-Time radio officers."

"Old-fashioned?" queried Grimes. "Perhaps they still carry PCOs for the same reason as we do. To sniff things out."

"That's what I tried to tell my owners when they took away Parley's amplifier, saying that its upkeep was a needless expense. A few spoonfuls of nutrient chemicals each trip, and a couple of little pumps! But I'm getting ahead of myself. This Parley
was
my PCO. He's getting on in years, and knows that he hasn't a hope in hell of finding a job anywhere else. Unlike the big majority of telepaths he has quite a good brain and, furthermore, doesn't shy away from machinery, up to and including electronic gadgetry. He actually took the Carlotti course and examination, and qualified, and also qualified as an NST operator. So now he's my radio officer, NST, and Cariotti. It breaks his heart at times to have to push signals over the light-years by electronic means, but he does it. If they'd let him keep his beagle's brain in aspic he'd still be doing it the good old way, and the Cariotti transceiver would be gathering dust. But with no psionic amplifier, he just hasn't the range."

"No. He wouldn't have."

"Even so, if one passes reasonably close to a planet, within a few light-years, a good telepath can pick up the psionic broadcast, provided that the world in question has a sizable population of sentient beings."

"Human beings?"

"Not necessarily. But our sort of people, more or less. I'm told that there's no mistaking the sort of broadcast you get from one of the Shaara worlds, for example. Arthropods, however intelligent, just don't think like mammals."

"And you have passed reasonably close to a planet with an intelligent, mammalian population? One that's not on any of the lists?"

"Two of them, as a matter of fact. In neighboring planetary systems."

"Where?"

"That'd be telling, John. Nothing for nothing, and precious little for a zack. That's the way that we do business in the
Sundowner
Line!"

"Then what's the
quid pro quo,
Bill?"

Davinas laughed. "I didn't think that you trade school boys were taught dead languages! All right. This is it. Just let me know what you find. As I've already told you, the
Sundowner
Line's on its last legs; I'd like to keep us running just a little longer. A new trade of our own could make all the difference."

"There are regulations, you know," said Grimes slowly. "I can't go blabbing the Survey Service's secrets to any Tom, Dick, or Harry. Or Bill."

"Not even when they were Bill's secrets to begin with? Come off it. And I do happen to know that those same regulations empower you, as captain of a Survey Service ship, to use your own discretion when buying information. Am I right?"

"Mphm." Grimes was tempted. Davinas could save him months of fruitless searching. On the one hand, a quick conclusion to his quest would be to his credit. On the other hand, for him to let loose a possibly unscrupulous tramp skipper on a hitherto undiscovered Lost Colony would be to acquire yet another big black mark on his record. But this man was no Drongo Kane. He said, "You know, of course, that I carry a scientific officer. He has the same rank as myself, but if I do find a Lost Colony he'll be wanting to take charge, and I may have to take a back seat."

"If he wants to set up any sort of Base," countered Davinas, "he'll be requiring regular shipments of stores and equipment and all the rest of it. Such jobs, as we both know, are usually contracted out. And if I'm Johnny-on-the-spot, with a reasonable tender in my hot little hand—"

It made sense, Grimes thought. He asked, "And will you want any sort of signed agreement, Bill?"

"You insult me, and you insult yourself. Your word's good enough, isn't it?"

"All right." Grimes had made up his mind. "Where are these possible Lost Colonies of yours?"

"Parley picked them up," said Davinas, "when I was right off my usual tramlines—
anybody's
usual tramlines, come to that—doing a run between Rob Roy and Caribbea." He pushed the coffee mugs and the thermos bottle to one side, opened the folder that he had brought from his office on the low table. He brought out a chart. "Modified Zimmerman Projection." His thin forefinger stabbed decisively. "The Rob Roy sun, here. And Sol, as the Caribbeans call their primary, here. Between them, two G type, stars, 1716 and 1717 in Ballchin's catalog, practically in line, and as near as damn it on the same plane as Rob Roy and Caribbea. Well clear of the track, actually—but not too well clear."