First Command (67 page)

Grimes wandered away. The atmosphere around the stern of the yacht was becoming heavily charged with acrimony and he was, essentially, a peace-loving man. He was careful not to walk too close to the towering
Vega.
He had no reason to like that ship and, most certainly, her captain did not like him. He sensed that he was being watched. He looked up but could see nothing but the reflection of the morning sun from the control room viewports—yet he could imagine Delamere there, observing his every move through high-powered binoculars.

“Port Captain! Hey! Port Captain!”

Grimes sighed. There was a small crowd of pestilential cricketers under the destroyer’s quarter. What were the police doing? They were supposed to be keeping the field clear of demonstrators. But these men, he saw with some relief, were carrying neither flags nor placards although they were attired in the white uniform of their sport. He walked slowly to where they were standing.

“Wotcher doin’ about this, Port Captain?” asked their leader. It was the man whom Mavis had identified as a police sergeant.

This
was the too deep furrows that had been gouged in the turf by the stern vanes of the destroyer during the lifting operation.

Grimes looked at the ugly wounds in the skin of the planet. They were minor ravines rather than mere trenches. The sportsmen looked at him.

He said, “These will have to be filled . . .”

“Who by, Port Captain, who by? Tell us that.”

“The groundsmen, I suppose . . .”

“Not bloody likely. You Terries did it. You can bloody well undo it. An’ the sooner the bloody better.”

“The sooner they’re off our world the better,” growled one of the other men.

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes. He, too, was beginning to think that the sooner he was off this world the better. He was the outsider who, by his coming, had jolted Botany Bay out of its comfortable rut. He had friends, good friends, the Lady Mayor and those in her immediate entourage—and that was resented by many. This same resentment might easily cost Mavis the next election.

“Wotcher doin’ about it?” demanded again the bearded policeman.

“I’ll see Commander Delamere,” promised Grimes, “and ask him to put his crew to work filling these . . . holes.”

“Ask
him, Port Captain? You’ll bloody tell him.”

“All right,” said Grimes. “I’ll tell him.”

He walked away from the glowering men. He paused briefly at the foot of
Vega’s
ramp, looked up at the smartly uniformed Marine on gangway duty in the airlock. The man looked down at him. His expression was hostile.
I’d better not go aboard,
thought Grimes.
I’ll call
Vega
from my office.
He carried on to the grandstand, made his way up the steps to the shed that was grandiosely labelled SPACEPORT ADMINISTRATION.

He accepted the cup of tea that Shirley poured for him, went to the telephone and punched the number that had been alloted to
Vega.
The screen lit up and the face of a bored looking junior officer appeared. “FSS
Vega.”

“Port Captain here. Could I speak to Commander Delamere?”

“I’ll put you through to the control room, sir.”

The screen flickered, went blank, lit up again. Delamere’s face looked out from it. “Yes, Grimes? What do you want? Make it snappy; I’m busy.”

“The local cricket club is concerned about the damage to their field.”

“And what am
I
supposed to do about it?”

“Send some men down with shovels to fill the gashes your stern vanes cut in the turf.”

“My men are spacemen, not gardeners.”

“Even so, the damage has to be made good, Delamere.”

“Not by me it won’t be, Grimes. You’re supposed to be the Port Captain and this bloody Oval is supposed to be the spaceport. Its maintenance is
your
concern.”

“The maintenance of friendly relations with the natives of any world is the concern of any Survey Service commanding officer. Sending your crew to fill in the holes comes under that heading.”

“You
did that damage, Grimes, by your mishandling of the raising operation. If it’s beneath your dignity to take a shovel in your own hands I suggest that you ask your new girlfriend for the loan of a few of her GP robots.”

“My new girlfriend? I thought . . .”

Delamere scowled. “Then think again! You’re welcome to the bitch, Grimes!”

The screen went blank.

Grimes couldn’t help laughing. So here at last was a woman impervious to Handsome Frankie’s charms. And Delamere, being Delamere, would automatically blame Grimes for his lack of success. Meanwhile—just what was the legal situation regarding the damage to the turf?

Grimes stopped laughing. It looked very much as though he would be left holding the baby.

Chapter 8

So the day went,
a long succession of annoyances and frustrations. He succeeded in obtaining another audience with the Baroness—his new girlfriend, indeed!—and requested her assistance to fill the trenches. She refused. “My dear Port Captain, my robots are programmed to be personal servants and, to a limited degree, spacemen, not common laborers. Would you use your toothbrush to scrub a deck?”

If it were the only tool available, thought Grimes, he might have to do just that.

He returned to his office, called Mavis. She was short with him. She said, “I know I’m the Mayor, John, but the damage to the cricket pitch is your responsibility. You’ll just have to do the best you can.”

Finally he went back to
The Far Traveler.
The repair work had been completed but he thought that he had better go through the motions of being a Lloyd’s Surveyor, even though it was almost impossible to detect where the golden hull had been patched, even though Big Sister had expressed her grudging satisfaction. He told the engineer lieutenant not to dismantle the staging until he had made his inspection. He tapped all around the repairs with a borrowed hammer, not at all sure what he was looking or listening for. He told the engineer to send to the destroyer for a can of vactest and then to have the black, viscous paste smeared all over the skin where the plugs had been inserted. Big Sister complained (she would) that this was not necessary, adding that she was quite happy with the making good of the damage and that she objected to having this filthy muck spread over her shell plating. Grimes told her that
he
would be signing the certificate of spaceworthiness and that he would not do so until
he
was happy.

Sulkily Big Sister pressurized the after compartment. Not the smallest air bubble marred the gleaming surface of the vactest. The artificers cleaned the gummy mess off the golden skin, began to take down the scaffolding. Grimes went aboard the ship to endorse the Lloyd’s Certificate of Spaceworthiness. The Baroness was almost affable, inviting him to have a drink. Billinger was conspicuous by his absence.

The aristocrat said, looking at him over the rim of her goblet of Spumante, “This is a boring world, Captain Grimes. I know that Captain Billinger has not found it so, but there is nothing for me here.”

Grimes could not resist the temptation. “Not even Commander Delamere?” he asked.

Surprisingly she took no offense. She even laughed. “Commander Delamere may think that he is the gods’ own gift to womankind but I do not share that opinion. But you, Captain . . . You, with your background . . . Don’t you find Botany Bay just a little boring?”

“No,” said Grimes loyally. (The Baroness must surely know about Mavis and himself.) “No. . .” he repeated, after a pause. (And whom was he trying to convince?)

“Thank you, Port Captain,” said the Baroness. It was clearly a dismissal.

“Thank you, Your Excellency,” said Grimes.

He was escorted from the boudoir by the robot butler, taken down to the after airlock. It was already dusk, he noted. The sun was down and the sky was overcast but the breeze, what little there was of it, was pleasantly warm. He debated with himself whether or not to go up to his office to call a cab, then decided against it. It was a pleasant walk from the Oval to the Mayor’s Palace, most of it through the winding streets of Paddington City. These, especially by night, held a special glamour, a gaslit magic that was an evocation of that other Paddington, the deliberately archaic enclave in the heart of bustling, towering Sydney on distant Earth.

Somehow Grimes wanted to see it all once more, to savor it. Perhaps it was a premonition. There was a conviction that sooner or later, sooner rather than later, he would be moving on.

He walked across the short grass to the main gates of the Oval. He turned to look at the two ships, both of them now floodlit—the menacing metal tower that was the destroyer, a missile of dull steel aimed at the sky, the much smaller golden spire, slender, graceful, that was the yacht. They would be gone soon, both of them—Delamere’s engineers must, by now, have
Vega’s
main and auxiliary machinery back in full working order and the Baroness had intimated that she had found little to interest her on Botany Bay.

They would be gone soon—and Grimes found himself wishing that he were going with them. But that was out of the question. Aboard
Vega
he would be hauled back to Lindisfarne Base to face a court martial—and he could not visualize himself aboard
The Far Traveler
with her rich bitch owner and that obnoxious electronic intelligence which Billinger had so aptly named Big Sister.

He resumed his walk, pausing once to stare up at a big dirigible that sailed overhead on its stately way to the airport, its red and green navigation lights and its rows of illuminated cabin ports bright against the darkness.

He strolled along Jersey Road, admiring the terrace houses with their beautiful cast aluminum lacework ornamenting pillars and balconies, the verdant explosions of native shrubs, darkly gleaming behind intricate white metal railings, in the front gardens. He ignored the ground car—even though this was the only traffic he had seen since leaving the spaceport—that came slowly up from behind him, its headlights throwing his long shadow before him on to the stone-flagged footpath.

He heard a voice say, “There’s the bastard! Get him!”

He experienced excruciating but mercifully brief pain as the paralyzing beam of a stungun hit him and was unconscious before he had finished falling to the ground.

Chapter 9

He opened his eyes slowly,
shut them again hastily. He was lying on his back, he realized, on some hard surface, staring directly into a bright, harsh light.

He heard a vaguely familiar voice say, “He’s coming round now, sir.”

He heard a too familiar voice reply, “Just as well, Doctor. They’ll want him alive back at Base so they can crucify him.”

Delamere, and his ship’s surgeon . . .

He moved his head so that he would not be looking directly at the light, opened his eyes again. Delamere’s classically handsome face swam into view. The man was gloating.

“Welcome aboard, Grimes,” he said. “But this is not—for
you—
Liberty Hall. There’s no mat to spit on and if you call my ship’s cat a bastard I’ll have you on bread and water for the entire passage.”

Grimes eased himself to a sitting posture, looked around. He was in a small compartment which, obviously, was not the ship’s brig as it was utterly devoid of furniture. A storeroom? What did it matter? Delamere and the doctor stood there looking down at him. Ranking them were two Marines, their sidearms drawn and ready.

He demanded, “What the hell do you think you’re playing at? Kidnapping is a crime on any planet, and I’ll see that you pay the penalty!”

“Kidnapping, Grimes? You’re still a Terran citizen and this ship is Terran territory. Furthermore, your . . . arrest was carried out with the assistance of certain local police officers.” He smirked. “Mind you, I don’t think that Her Ladyship the Mayor would approve—but she’ll be told that you were last seen going down to the beach for a refreshing swim after a hard, hot day at the spaceport.” He laughed. “You might kid yourself that you’re a little friend to all the universe—but there’s plenty of people who hate your guts.”

“And you’re one of them,” said Grimes resignedly.

“However did you guess?” asked Delamere sardonically.

“I must be psychic,” Grimes said.

“Save your cheap humor for the court martial, Grimes.”

“If there is one, Delamere.
If
you get me back to Lindisfarne. The Mayor will know that I’m missing. She knows the sort of bastard that you are. She’ll have this ship searched . . .”

Delamere laughed. “Her policemen have already boarded, looking for you. They weren’t very interested but we showed them all through the accommodation, including the cells. Oh, and they did see a couple or three storerooms—but not this one. Even if they had gone as far as the outer door the radiation warning sign would have scared them off.”

“Is this place hot?” asked Grimes, suddenly apprehensive.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” said Delamere, “when your hair starts falling out.”

But Handsome Frankie, thought Grimes with relief, would never risk his own precious skin and gonads in a radioactive environment, however briefly.

Delamere looked at his watch. “I shall be lifting off in half an hour. It’s a pity that I’ve not been able to obtain clearance from the Acting Port Captain, but in the circumstances . . . .”

Grimes said nothing. There was nothing that he could say. He would never plead, not even if there was the remotest chance that Delamere would listen to him. He would save his breath for the court martial. He would need it then.

But was that muffled noise coming from the alleyway outside the storeroom? Shouting, a hoarse scream, the sound of heavy blows . . . Could it be . . . ? Could it be the police attempting a rescue after all? Or—and that would be a beautiful irony—another mutiny, this one aboard
Vega!

He remarked sweetly, “Sounds as though you’re having trouble, Frankie.”

Delamere snapped to his Marines, “You, Petty and Slim! Go out and tell those men to pipe down. Place them under arrest.”

“But the prisoner, sir,” objected one of them. Grimes watched indecision battling with half decisions on Delamere’s face. Handsome Frankie had no desire to walk out into the middle of a free fight but he had to find out what was happening. On the other hand, he had no desire to be left alone with Grimes, even though his old enemy was unarmed and not yet recovered from the stungun blast.