Ride the Star Winds (55 page)

And so it was that, an hour later, Grimes, Shirl and Darleen were speeding away from the low, rambling house, heading out over the almost featureless desert, the great plume of fine, red dust raised by the vehicle’s fans swirling in their wake.

Grimes gave Ayers Rock and Mount Olga a wide berth—the one squatting on the horizon like a huge, red toad, the other looking like some domed city erected on an airless planet. Over each hovered a sizeable fleet of tourist dirigibles. Grimes could imagine what conditions would be like on the ground—the souvenir stalls, the refreshment stands, the canned music, the milling crowds. Some time he would have to visit the Rock and the Olgas again, but not today.

He came to the Uluru Irrigation Canal. He did not cross it but followed its course south. The artificial waterway was poorly maintained; the agricultural project that it had been designed to service had been cancelled, largely due to pressure by the conservationists. But water still flowed sluggishly in the ditch and, here and there along its length, were billabongs, one of which Grimes had known very well in his youth. It would be good, he hoped, to visit it again.

And there were the tall ghost gums standing around and among the waterworn rocks that some civil engineer with the soul of a landscape gardener had brought in, probably at great expense, to make the artificial pool look natural. And there was the water, inviting, surprisingly clear, its surface dotted here and there with floating blossoms. These were not of Terran origin but were, as a matter of fact, Grimes’s own contribution to the amenities of this pleasant oasis, carnivorous plants, insectivores, from Caribbea. The billabong was free from mosquitoes and other such pests. (He recalled that some businessman had wanted to import these flowers in quantity but the conservationists had screamed about upsetting the balance of nature.)

He stopped the car just short of the ornamental bounders. He and the girls got out, walked to the steeply shelving beach of red sand. He said, “How about a swim?”

“Crocodiles?” asked Shirl dubiously.

“There weren’t any last time I was here.”

“When was that?” asked Darleen.

“Oh, about five Earth years ago.”

He got out of his shirt, shorts and underthings, kicked off his sandals. As one the girls peeled the white T-shirts from the upper parts of their tanned bodies, stepped out of their netherwear. Naked, long-legged and small-breasted, they seemed to belong to this landscape, more than did Grimes himself. They waded out into the deeper water. Grimes followed them. The temperature of the sun-warmed pool was pleasant. They played like overgrown children with a beach ball that some family party had left on the sand. (So other people had found his private billabong, thought Grimes. He hoped that they had enjoyed it as much as he was doing now.) They decorated each other’s bodies with the gaudy water lilies, the tendrils of which clung harmlessly to their wet skins. Finally they emerged from the water and stretched themselves to dry off on the surface of a large, flat rock which was partially shielded from the harsh sunlight by the ghost gums.

Then Grimes felt hungry. He got to his feet and walked to the hover-car, taking from it the hamper that had been packed by Seiko. The sandwiches were to his taste—ham with plenty of mustard, a variety of strong cheeses—and the girls enjoyed the sweet and savory pastries and the fresh fruits. The cans of beer, from their own special container, were nicely chilled.

Replete, Grimes got his pipe and tobacco from his clothing and indulged in a satisfying smoke. The New Alicians sat on either side of him in oddly prim postures, their legs tucked under them.

Grimes was feeling poetic.

“‘Give me a book of verses ’neath the bough,’” he quoted,

“‘A loaf of bread, a flask of wine, and thou,

“‘Beside me, singing in the wilderness . . .

“‘And wilderness were Paradise enow.’”

He laughed. “But I don’t have a book of verses. And, come to that, I’ve never heard either of you singing. . . .”

“There is a time to sing. . . .” murmured Shirl. “And this could be such a time. . . .”

And Darleen had found two large, smooth pebbles, about the size of golf balls, and was clicking them together with an odd, compelling rhythm. Both girls were crooning softly to the beat of the singing stones. There was melody, of a sort, soft and hypnotic. Grimes felt the goose pimples rising all over his skin.

They were not alone. He and the girls were not alone. Silently the kangaroos had come from what had seemed to be empty desert, were standing all around them, regarding them solemnly with their huge eyes. There were big reds and grays and smaller animals. It was as though every variety of kangaroo in all of Australia had answered the New Alicians’ summons.

Shirl and Darleen got to their feet. And then, suddenly, they were gone, bounding away over the desert at the head of the mob of kangaroos. It was hard to distinguish them from the animals despite their smooth skins.

What now?
wondered Grimes.
What now?
He was, he supposed, responsible for the girls. Should he get into the hover-car and give chase? Or would that make matters worse? He stood and watched the cloud of red dust, raised by the myriad bounding feet, diminishing in the distance.

But they were coming back, just the two of them, just Shirl and Darleen. They were running gracefully, not proceeding in a series of bounds. They flung themselves on Grimes, their sweaty, dusty bodies hot against his bare skin. It was rape, although the man was a willing enough victim. They had him, both of them, in turn, again and again.

Finally, exhausted, they rolled off him.

“After the kangaroos . . .” gasped Shirl.

“We had to prove to ourselves . . .” continued Darleen.

“ . . . and to you . . .”

“ . . . that we are really human . . .”

Grimes found his pipe, which, miraculously, had not been broken during the assault, and his pouch, the contents of which were unspilled. He lit up with a not very steady hand.

“Of course you’re human,” he said at last. “The Law says so.”

“But the heritage is strong, John.”

“You aren’t the only ones with a heritage—but you don’t see me swinging from the branches of trees, do you?”

They all laughed then, and shared the last can of beer, and had a last refreshing swim in the waters of the billabong. They resumed their clothing and got back into the hover-car, looking forward to an enjoyable evening of good food and conversation to add the finishing touches to what had been a very enjoyable day.

They were not expecting to find the Grimes home knee deep in acrimony.

Chapter 6

The garage door
slid open as the hover-car approached but the robomaid was not waiting to receive them and to take custody of the empty hamper. Grimes was not concerned about this; no doubt, he thought, Seiko was busy with some domestic task. He led the two girls into the house, toward the lounge. He heard the voices of his mother and father, although it was his mother who seemed to be doing most of the talking. She sounded as though she were in what her husband and son referred to as one of her flaring rages.
What’s the old man been up to now?
wondered Grimes.

“Either that
thing
goes or I go!” he heard his mother declare.

“But I find her more satisfactory . . .” his father said.

“You would. You’ve a warped mind, George Grimes, as I’ve known, to my cost, for years. But you’ll ship that toy of yours back to Tokyo and demand your money back . . .”

“Hi, folks,” said Grimes as he entered the room.

Matilda favored him with no more than a glance, his father looked toward him appealingly.

“John,” he said, “perhaps you can talk some sense into your mother. You, as a space captain of long experience, know far more about such matters than either of us . . . .”

“What matters?” asked Grimes.

“You may well ask,” Matilda told him. “Such matters as insubordination, mutiny. In my own home . . . .”

“Insubordination? Mutiny?” repeated Grimes in a puzzled voice.

“And unprovoked assault upon my guests. My guests.”

Grimes sat down, pulled his pipe from his pocket, filled and lit it. Shirl and Darleen did not take seats but looked questioningly at Matilda, who said, “Perhaps, dears, it might be better if you went to your rooms for a while. This is a family matter.”

The girls left, albeit with reluctance. Grimes settled down in his chair and assumed a magisterial pose. George Grimes was sitting on the edge of his seat, looking as uncomfortable as he almost certainly was feeling.

“I have had my suspicions for a long time . . .” began Matilda.

Surely not
. . . wondered Grimes.
The old man’s not that kinky . . .

“Quite a long time,” she went on. “But it was only after you and the girls had left this morning for your ride in the desert that I began to be sure. I hope that you had a pleasant day, by the way . . . .”

“Very pleasant,” said Grimes.

“Well, you remember what you had for breakfast. Kippers. You asked me if I’d told it to do them for you. I said that I had not. I was curious, so I asked it why it had served you kippers. It told me that you had asked it to surprise you. So I asked it how it had decided that kippers would be a nice surprise. It told me that normally there are never kippers in my larder but that I had ordered a supply after I’d gotten word that you were coming . . . .”

“And so?” asked Grimes.

“A domestic robot is supposed to do only what it’s been programmed to do. It’s not supposed to possess such qualities as initiative and imagination. Oh, I know that there are some truly intelligent robots—but such are very, very expensive and are not to be found doing menial jobs. But knowing George, I suspected that he had been doing some more tinkering with its programming. His idea of a joke.

“Well, as you already know, I was entertaining the local literary ladies to luncheon. The President of the Society is Dame Mabel Prendergast. Don’t ask me how she got made a dame, although she’s made an enormous pile of money writing slush. She could afford to buy a title. Anyhow, dear Mabel is just back from a galactic cruise. She was all tarted up in obviously expensive clothing in the very worst of taste that she had purchased on the various worlds that she had visited. Her hat, she told us, came from Carinthia, where glass-weaving is one of the esteemed arts and crafts. Oh, my dear, it was a most elaborate construction, perched on top of her head like a sort of glittering fairy castle. It was, in its way, beautiful—but not on her. Human hippopotami should not wear such things.

“We had lunch.
It
did the serving, just as a robomaid should, efficiently and without any gratuitous displays of initiative, imagination or whatever. The ladies admired
it
and Mabel remarked, rather jealously, that George’s thud-and-blunder books, as she referred to them, must be doing quite well. We retired to the lounge for coffee and brandy and then one or two of the old biddies started making inquiries about my famous son. You. And wasn’t it time that you settled down? And who were the two pretty girls you’d brought with you? They weren’t Terran, were they?

“I told them—all the more fool me, but I suppose that the brandy had loosened my tongue—that Shirl and Darleen were from a world called New Alice, with a very Australianoid culture. I told them, too, that they were now junior officers aboard your ship and that, until recently, they had been officers in the elite Amazon Guard on New Sparta. Mabel said that they didn’t look butch military types. I said that, as a matter of fact, they had been officer instructors, specializing in teaching the use of throwing weapons, such as boomerangs. And that they could make almost anything behave like a boomerang. Mabel said that she didn’t think that this was possible. I told her that Shirl—or was it Darleen?—had given a demonstration in this very room, using a round, shallow dish . . .

“Mabel said, quite flatly, that this would be quite impossible and started blathering about the laws of aerodynamics. She had, she assured us, made a thorough study of these before writing her latest book, about a handsome young professional hang glider racer and a lady trapeze artiste. . . .”

“Did they . . . er . . . mate in midair?” asked Grimes interestedly.

“Your mind is as low as your father’s,” Matilda told him crossly. “Anyhow, there was this argument. And
it
—may its clockwork heart rust solid!—decided, very kindly, to settle it for us. It asked, very politely, “May I demonstrate, madam?” and before I could say no it emptied the chocolate mints out of their dish, on to the table, turned the dish upside down and with a flick of its wrist sent it sailing around the room . . .

“Oh, it did actually come back—but just out of reach of that uppity robot’s outstretched hand. It crashed into Dame Mabel’s hat. That hat, it seems, was so constructed as to be proof against all normal stresses and strains but there must have been all sorts of tensions locked up in its strands. When the dish—it was one of those copper ones—hit it there was an explosion, with glass splinters and powder flying in all directions. By some miracle nobody was seriously hurt, although old Tanitha Evans got a rather bad cut and Lola Lee got powdered glass in her right eye. I had to send for Dr. Namatjira—and you know what he charges for house calls. And, of course, I shall have to pay for Dame Mabel’s hat. Anybody would think that the bloody thing was made of diamonds!”

“And where is Seiko now?” asked Grimes.

“Seiko?
It
, you mean. It is back in the crate that it came in, and there it stays. It’s too dangerous to be allowed to run around loose.”

“She was only trying to be helpful,” said Grimes.

“It’s not its job to try to be helpful. It’s its job to do as it’s told, just that and nothing more.”

“What do you know about the so-called wild robots, John?” asked his father suddenly.

“Not much. The roboticists are rather close-mouthed about such matters. Even the Survey Service does not have access to all the information it should. Oh, there are standing orders to deal with such cases. They boil down to Deactivate At Once And Return To Maker or, if deactivation is not practicable, Destroy By Any Means Possible.”