Upon a Sea of Stars (76 page)

And this was the third time.

“John!” he heard Sonya’s distant voice.
“John!”

He tightened the grasp of his right hand, but the warmth of hers was no longer within it.

“John . . .”

It was no more than a fading whisper. “John . . .”

“Grmph . . .” He didn’t want to wake up. Full awareness would mean maximum appreciation of his nagging headache. His eyes were gummed shut, and he had the impression that small and noisome animals had fought and done other things inside his mouth.

“John!”

Blast the woman,
he thought.

“JOHN!”
She was shaking him now.

He flailed out blindly, felt one fist connect with something soft, heard a startled gasp of pain. “Never touch an officer,” he enunciated thickly. “ ’Gainst regulations.”

“You . . . You
hit
me. You brute.”

“Own fault.”

“Wake up, damn you!”

He got his eyes open somehow, stared blearily at the plump, faded woman in the shabby robe who was staring down at him with distaste.

Who are you?
he demanded silently.
Who are you?
The memory of someone slim, sleek and elegant persisted in his befuddled brain. Then—
Where am I? Who am I?

“You’ve got a job to do,” the woman told him in a voice that was an unpleasant whine. “You’d better get your stinking carcass out of that bed and start doing it. I like to go on eating, even if you don’t.”

A starvation diet would do you the world of good,
he thought. He said, “Coffee.”

“Coffee
what?
Where’s your manners?”

“Coffee, please.”

She left him then, and he rolled out of the rumpled bed. He looked down with distaste at his sagging drinker’s paunch, then got to his feet and walked unsteadily to the bathroom. He was surprised at the weakness he felt, the near nausea, the protests of a body allowed to degenerate into a state of general unfitness. It all seemed wrong. Surely he had always taken pride in maintaining himself in good condition.

He stood under the shower, and gradually the mists cleared from his brain. In a little while John Grimes, Officer Commanding the Zetland Base, passed over Commander, would be ready to begin his dreary day.

Nobody quite knew why the Federation maintained a base on Zetland. Once, a long time ago, the planet had been strategically important when it seemed possible that the Federation and the expanding Shaara Empire might clash, but the Treaty of Danzenorg, respected by both cultures, had neatly parceled up the entire galaxy into spheres of influence. True, there were other spacefaring races who belonged neither to the Federation nor the Empire, but their planets were many, many light years distant from Zetland and their trade routes passed nowhere near this world.

There was a base on Zetland. There always had been one; there always would be one. The taxpayer had bottomless pockets. There were spaceport facilities, of a sort. There were repair facilities, also of a sort. There was a Carlotti beacon, which was an absolutely inessential part of the navigational network in this sector of space, and relay station. The whole setup, such as it was, could have been run efficiently by a lieutenant junior grade, with a handful of petty officers and ratings. But a base commander must have scrambled egg on the peak of his cap. The Commander of a base like Zetland is almost invariably on the way up or the way down

Commander John Grimes was not on the way up.

Nonetheless, he did have that scrambled egg on the peak of his cap. There was also a smear of egg yolk at the corner of his mouth, and a spatter of it on the lapel of his jacket. His enlisted woman driver, waiting for him in the ground car outside the Base Commander’s bungalow, looked at him with some distaste—apart from anything else, she had been there for all of twenty minutes—clambered reluctantly out of the vehicle (her legs, noted Grimes, were too thick and more than a little hairy) and threw him a salute that almost, but not quite, qualified as “dumb insolence.” Grimes returned it contemptuously. She opened the rear door of the car for him. He got in, thanking her as an afterthought, sagged into the seat. She got back behind the controls, clumsily stirred and prodded the machine into reluctant motion.

It was only a short drive to the military spaceport. The Commander thought, as he had thought many times before, that he should walk to his office rather than ride; the exercise would do him good. But somehow he never felt up to it. He stared unseeingly through the dirty windows. The view was as it always was: flat fields with an occasional low farmhouse, uninteresting machines trudging through the dirt on their caterpillar treads sowing or reaping or fertilizing the proteinuts which were Zetland’s only export—and that only to worlds too poverty-stricken to send anything worthwhile in exchange. Ahead was the base—administration buildings, barracks, control tower and the lopsided ellipsoid that was the Carlotti beacon, slowly rotating.

The car rolled over the concrete apron, jerked to a halt outside the control tower. The girl driver got out clumsily, opened the Commander’s door. Grimes got out, muttered, “ ’K you.”

She replied sweetly, “It was a pleasure, sir.”

Saucy bitch,
thought Grimes sourly.

He did not take the elevator to his office on the top level of the tower. Thoughts about his lack of physical fitness had been nagging him all morning. He used the stairs, taking them two at a time at first. He soon had to abandon this practice. By the time that he reached the door with BASE COMMANDER on it in tarnished gilt lettering he was perspiring and out of breath and his heart was hammering uncomfortably.

Ensign Mavis Davis, his secretary, got up from her desk as he entered the office. She was a tall woman, and very plain, and old for her junior rank. She was also highly efficent, and was one of the few persons on this world whom Grimes liked.

“Good morning, Commander,” she greeted him, a little too brightly.

“What’s good about it?” He scaled his cap in the general direction of its peg, missed as usual. “Oh, well, it’s the only one we’ve got.”

She said, holding out a message flimsy, “This came in a few minutes ago . . .”

“Have we declared war on somebody?”

She frowned at him. She was too essentially good a person to regard war as a joking matter. “No. It’s from
Draconis
. She’s making an unscheduled call here . . .”

A Constellation Class cruiser,
thought Grimes.
Just what I need
. . . He asked, “When is she due?”

“Eleven hundred hours this morning.”

“What?”
Grimes managed a grin. “The fleet’s in port, or almost in port, and not a whore in the house washed . . .”

“That’s not funny, Commander,” she said reprovingly.

“Indeed it’s not, Mavis,” he agreed. Indeed it wasn’t. He thought of the huge cruiser, with all her spit and polish, and thought of his own, slovenly, planet-based command, with its cracked, peeling paint, with dusty surfaces everywhere, with equipment only just working after a fashion, with personnel looking as though they had slept in their uniforms—as many of them, all too probably, had. He groaned, went to the robot librarian’s console, switched on. “Fleet List,” he said. “
Draconis
. Name of commanding officer.”

“Yes, sir.” The mechanical voice was tinny, absolutely unhuman. “Captain Francis Delamere, O.G.C., D.C.O., F.M.H. . . .” Grimes switched off.

Franky Delamere,
he thought.
A lieutenant when I was a two and a half ringer. A real Space Scout, and without the brains to come in out of the rain, but a stickler for regulations. And now he’s a four ring captain . . .

“John . . .” There was sympathy in the Ensign’s voice.

“Yes, Mavis?”

She was abruptly businesslike. “We haven’t much time, but I issued orders in your name to get the place cleaned up a bit. And the Ground Control approach crew are at their stations, and the beacons should be in position by now . . .”

Grimes went to the wide window. “Yes,” he said, looking down at the triangle of intensely bright red lights that had been set out on the gray concrete of the apron, “they are. Thank you.”

“Do you wish to monitor G.C.A.?”

“Please.”

She touched a switch, and almost immediately there was the sound of a crisply efficient voice. “
Draconis
to Zetland Base. E.T.A., surface contact, still 1100 hours. Is all ready?”

“All ready,
Draconis
,” came the reply in accents that were crisp enough.

“Just one small thing, John,” said Mavis. She stood very close to him, and with a dampened tissue removed the flecks of egg yolk from the corner of his mouth, from his uniform. “Now, let ‘em all come,” she declared.

“Let ‘em all come,” he echoed.

He remembered a historical romance he had read recently. It was about a famous English regiment whose proud epitaph was,
They died with their boots clean.

Living with your boots clean can be harder.

Draconis
was heard long before she was seen, the irregular throb of her inertial drive beating down from beyond the overcast. And then, suddenly, she was below the cloud ceiling, a great, gleaming spindle, the flaring vanes of her landing gear at her stern. Grimes wondered if Francis Delamere were doing his own pilotage; very often the captains of these big ships let their navigating officers handle the controls during an approach. He thought smugly that this was probably the case now; when Delamere had served under Grimes he had been no great shakes as a ship handler.

Whoever was bringing the cruiser down, he was making a good job of it. Just a touch of lateral thrust to compensate for the wind, a steady increase of vertical thrust as altitude diminished, so that what at first had seemed an almost uncontrolled free fall was, at the moment of ground contact, a downward drift as gentle as that of a soap bubble.

She was tall, a shining metallic tower, the control room at her sharp stem well above the level of Grimes’s office. Abruptly her inertial drive was silent. “Eleven oh oh oh seven . . .” announced Mavis Davis.

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes.

He retrieved his cap from the floor, let the Ensign, who had found a clothes brush somewhere, brush its crown and peak. He put it on. He said to the girl, “Look after the shop. I have to go visiting.” He left his office, took the elevator down to ground level. He was joined by the Base Supply Officer, the Base Medical Officer and the Base Engineering Officer. All three of them, he noted, looked reasonably respectable. Grimes in the lead, they marched out to the ramp that was just being extended from
Draconis
’s after airlock.

It was good to be boarding a ship again,
thought Grimes,
even one commanded by a man who had once been his junior and who was now his senior.
As he climbed the ramp he threw his shoulders back and sucked in his belly. He returned the salute of the junior officer at the airlock smartly and then, followed by his own officers, strode into the elevator cage. The woman operator needed no instructions; in a very few seconds the party from the base was being ushered into the Captain’s day room.

“Ah,” said Delamere, “Commander Grimes, isn’t it?” He had changed little over the years; his close-cropped hair was touched with gray, but he was as boyishly slim and handsome as ever. The four gold rings gleamed bravely on each sleeve, and the left breast of his uniform was gaudy with ribbons. “Welcome aboard, Commander.”

“Thank you, Captain.” Grimes had no intention of addressing the other as “sir.”

“You’re putting on weight, John,” said the Specialist Commander who was one of the group of officers behind Delamere.

“Maggie!”

“Commander Lazenby,” said the Captain stiffly, “this touching reunion can be deferred until such time as the Base Commander and I have discussed business.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” snapped Margaret Lazenby, just a little too crisply.

Delamere glared at her, John Grimes looked at her wistfully.
She
hadn’t put on weight. She had hardly changed since they had been shipmates in the census ship
Seeker
. Her red hair gleamed under her cap, her figure was as slim and trim as ever. But . . .

But she was not the slender, auburn-haired woman who haunted his dreams.

“Commander Grimes,” said Delamere. Then, more loudly, “Commander Grimes!”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Perhaps we can get the introductions over with, and then you and I can get down to business.”

“Certainly, Captain. This is Lieutenant Commander Dufay, the Base Medical Officer. Lieutenant Danby, Supplies. Lieutenant Roscoe, Engineering.”

Delamere introduced his own people, and then the specialist officers went below, leaving the Captain to conduct business with Grimes.

“A drink, Commander?”

“Please, Captain. Gin, if I may.”

“You may. Sit down, Grimes.” Delamere poured the drinks, took a chair facing the other. “Down the hatch.”

“Down the hatch.”

The Captain grinned. “Well, Grimes, I don’t seem to have caught you with your pants down. Frankly, I was rather hoping I would . . .”

“What do you mean?”