To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (70 page)

Suddenly Una laughed. “This
is
a genuine Stutz-Archer! Look!” She wheeled the machine toward him. The squeaking of its axles was audible even through his helmet. She pointed with a gloved forefinger at the mascot—a little, stylized bowman mounted on the front mudguard. “But what can it be doing here?”

He did not reply until he had looked at the thing more closely. It most certainly did not have the beautiful finish of the machines they had ridden in the Garden. Long exposure to a corrosive atmosphere hadn’t done it any good. The padding of the saddle was dry and cracked, the enamel on the frame was peeling. And it had not been—somehow—made all in one piece; there were screws, nuts, bolts and rivets a-plenty . . . It was no more malevolent than any normal bicycle.

He said, “Some of these Beacons were converted to fully automated status only recently. One of the original crew must have kept this bike for exercise.” He grinned. “I doubt that we shall be here long enough to get any use out of it!”

He set about manipulating the outer controls of the Dome’s airtight door. The Station’s machinery he was pleased to note, was functioning perfectly.

The station’s machinery functioned perfectly until Grimes really got his hands on to it. It is child’s play for a skilled technician to convert a Carlotti Beacon into a general purpose transmitter. But Grimes, insofar as electronic communications equipment was concerned, was not a skilled technician. It could have been worse, however. He suffered no injury but scorched hands and face and the loss of his eyebrows and most of his hair. The big Carlotti transmitter, though, would obviously be quite incapable of sending anything until a team of experts had made extensive repairs.

Una looked from him to the still acridly smoking tangle of ruined circuitry, then at him again.

She demanded coldly, “And what do we do
now?
”

Grimes tried to sound cheerful. “Just stick around, I guess. As soon as Trinity House learns that this Beacon is on the blink they’ll send the Beacon Tender.”

“And when will that be?”

“Well, it all depends . . . If this particular Beacon is on a busy trade route . . .”

“And if it’s not?”

The question was not unanswerable, but the answer was not one that Grimes cared to think about. If this Beacon were on a busy trade route it would be manned. It could be months before the Trinity House ship called in on its normal rounds.

“And while you were indulging your hatred for all machinery,” Una told him, her voice rising, “I was checking the alleged life-support facilities of this station. For your information, we shall fare as sumptuously here as ever we did in the boat. Correction. Even more sumptuously. Whoever laid in the stock of emergency provisions made sure that there were enough cans of beans in tomato sauce to keep an army marching on its stomach for the next years. And there’s damn all else—not even a sardine! And we don’t know when help is coming. We don’t even know
if
help is coming.” She went on bitterly, while Grimes kept a tight rein on his rising resentment. “Why did you have to antagonize Zephalon by your anti-robot attitude? Why couldn’t you have left well enough alone? We were much better off in the garden . . .”

“As Adam said to Eve,” remarked Grimes quietly, “you should have decided that before it was too late.”