Ride the Star Winds (82 page)

“The flap seems to have died down on Lorn,” he told me. “We’re a
fait accompli
. Old Grimes got Livitski—he’s the new Port Forlorn Psionic Radio Officer—to push a message through to wish us well and to tell us that he has everything under control at his end.”

“Have you informed the master?” I asked.

“He’s in his quarters.” he said. “I don’t think that he wants to be disturbed.”

“Like that,” I said.

“Like that,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

We sat in silence—there was still enough acceleration to enable us to do so without using seat belts—smoking. I looked out of the transparency at the blackness, towards the faint, far spark that was the Grollor sun. Claude looked at nothing. I heard the sound of feet on the control room deck, turned and saw that the faint noise had been made by Peggy Simmons. She said, “I’m sorry. I . . . I thought that you were alone, Peter . . .”

“Don’t let me interfere with love’s young dream,” grinned Smethwick, getting to his feet.

“You’ve a dirty mind!” flared the girl.

“If it is dirty,” he told her nastily, “it’s from the overflow from other people’s minds. But I’ll go away and leave you to it.”

“I’m on watch,” I said virtuously. “And, in any case, Peggy has probably come here to report some mechanical malfunction. Or something.”

“Yes,” she said.

She dropped into the chair that had been vacated by the telepath, accepted a cigarette from my pack. I waited until Claude was gone and then asked, “What’s the trouble, Peggy?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing mechanical, that is. Although I should check some of the wiring where the shell splinters pierced the inner sheathing.”

“Then why don’t you?” I asked.

“Because,” she told me, “for the first few days in space one has more important things to worry about. There’s the file, and the auxiliary machinery, and . . .”

“Surely the wiring is part of the auxiliary machinery,” I pointed out.

“Not this wiring. It’s the power supply to the trimming and reefing gear—and we won’t be using that for a while, not until we make landfall.”

“Planetfall,” I corrected.

“Ralph says landfall,” she told me.

“He would,” I said. “He must have brought at least a couple of trunks full of books about windjammers—fact, fiction and poetry—away with him. Mind you, some of it is good.” I quoted:

“I must go down to the sea again,

To the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship

And a star to steer her by . . .”

I gestured widely towards the Grollor sun, the distant spark that, thanks to the Doppler effect, was shining with a steely glitter instead of its normal ruddiness. I said, “There’s his star to steer by.” I thumped the arm of my chair. “And here’s his tall ship.”

“And so he has everything he wants,” she said.

“Everything.” I decided to be blunt. “He’s got his tall ship, and he’s got his star to steer by, and he’s got his woman.”

“But,” she said, “I could give him so much more.”

“Peggy,” I admonished, “don’t kid yourself. You’re attractive, and you’re capable—but Sandra is rather more than attractive.
And
she’s a good cook. Take my advice: just forget any schoolgirlish ideas you may have of becoming the captain’s lady. Make this voyage—after all, you’ve no option now—and then get the hell out . . .”

“And marry and raise a family,” she concluded. “But I don’t want to, Peter. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be the wife of some grubby little clerk or mechanic and spend all my remaining days on Lorn.”

“All right,” I said, “if that’s the way you feel about it. But this is an order, Peggy. Lay off Ralph. We’re probably in enough trouble already without having triangles added to our worries.”

She took a cigarette from my pack, lit it and put it to her mouth. She stared at the eddying wisps of smoke. She said, “That poetry you quoted. Tall ships and stars. That’s what Ralph really wants, isn’t it?”

“Tall ships and stars and the trimmings,” I said.

“Never mind the trimmings,” she told me. “And when it comes to trimmings, I can outtrim Sandra.”

“Peggy,” I said, “you can’t. You’re not . . . experienced.”

Her face lit up briefly with a flash of humor. “And whose fault is that?” she asked. Then, soberly, “But I can give him
real
trimmings. Any woman can sprawl in bed, arms and legs wide open—but I’m the woman who can make Ralph, and his ship, go down in history.”

“Judging by the flap when we shoved off,” I said, “they already have.”

She said, “Correct me if I’m wrong—but the Erikson drive, as it stands, will never be a commercial success. It takes far too long for a cargo, even a non-perishable cargo for which there’s no mad rush, to be carted from point A to point B. And there’s the problem of manning, too. As far as this ship was concerned, Uncle Andy was able to assemble a bunch of misfits with no close ties for the job, people who wouldn’t give a damn if the round voyage lasted a couple of objective centuries. But it mightn’t be so easy to find another crew for another lightjammer. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” I said, after a pause.

She went on, “I’m new to space, but I’ve read plenty. I’m no physicist, but I have a rough idea of the
modus operandi
of the various interstellar drives. And, so far, there’s been no faster-than-light drive.”

“What!” I exclaimed.

“No, there hasn’t. I’m right, Peter. The basic idea of the Ehrenhaft drive was that of a magnetic particle trying to be in two places at the same time in a magnetic field or current, the ship being the particle. But, as far as I can gather, space was warped so that she could do just that. I couldn’t follow the math, but I got the general drift of it. And then, of course, there’s the Mannschenn Drive—but there the apparent FTL speeds are achieved by tinkering with time.”

“Hmm,” I grunted. “Hmm.”

“Getting away from machinery,” she said, “and back to personalities, Ralph loves his ship. I’m sure that if he had to make a choice between Sandra and
Flying Cloud
it wouldn’t be
Flying Cloud
left in the lurch. But . . . but what do you think he’d feel about a woman who made him the captain of the first
real
FTL starwagon?”

I said, “You’d better see Doc on your way aft. He stocks quite a good line in sedative mixtures.”

She said, “You’re laughing at me.”

“I’m not,” I assured her. “But, Peggy, even I, and I’m no physicist, can tell you that it’s quite impossible to exceed the speed of light. As you have already pointed out, we can cheat, but that’s all. And in this ship we can’t even cheat. We can no more outrun light than a windjammer could outrun the wind that was her motive power.” I pointed to a dial on the panel before me. “That’s our log. It works by Doppler effect. At the moment our speed is Lume 0.345 and a few odd decimals. It’s building up all the time, and fast. By the end of the watch it should be about Lume 0.6 . . .”

She said, “A fantastic acceleration.”

“Isn’t it? By rights we should be spread over the deck plates like strawberry jam. But, thanks to the anti-gravity, this is almost an inertialess drive. Anyhow, thanks to our utterly weightless condition, we may achieve Lume 0.9 recurring. But that’s as high as we can possibly get.”

“I see,” she said doubtfully. Then she added, “But . . .” She shrugged and said, “Oh, never mind.”

She got up to leave.

“Thanks for dropping in,” I said.

“And thanks for the fatherly advice,” she said.

“Think nothing of it,” I told her generously.

“I shan’t,” she said, with what I belatedly realized was deliberate ambiguity.

And then she was gone.

Chapter 13

It was a couple of mornings
later
as measured by our chronometer, and, after a not very good breakfast, I was making rounds. It’s odd how that unappetizing meal sticks in my memory. Sandra was acting third mate now, and Ralph had decreed that Martha Wayne take over as catering officer. And Martha, as the old saying goes, couldn’t boil water without burning it. Sandra’s scrambled eggs had always been a delight—fluffy but not watery, with the merest hint of garlic, prettied up with chopped parsley and paprika, piled high on crisp, lavishly buttered toast. The less said about Martha’s scrambled eggs the better.

Anyhow, I was not in a good mood as I made my way aft from the wardroom.
Flying Cloud
was still accelerating slightly, so “down” was aft. Rather to my disappointment I discovered nothing with which to find fault in the farm, the compartment housing the hydroponic tanks and the yeast and tissue-culture vats. I hurried through the anti-matter room—frankly, that huge, spherical casing surrounded by great horseshoe magnets always gave me the shivers. I knew what was inside it, and knew that should it ever make contact with normal matter we should all go up in a flare of uncontrolled and uncontrollable energy. In the auxiliary machinery space I did start finding fault. It was obvious that Peggy had done nothing as yet about removing the splinter-pierced panels of the internal sheathing to inspect the wiring.

But there was no sign of Peggy.

I continued aft, through the reactor room and then into the tunnel that led to the extreme stern. As I clambered down the ladder I heard the clinking of tools and the sound of a voice upraised in song. It was Doc Jenkins’s not unpleasant tenor.

“Sally Brown, she’s a bright mulatter—

Way, hey, roll and go!

She drinks rum and chews terbaccer—

Spend my money on Sally Brown!

“Sally Brown, she’s a proper lady—

Way, hey, roll and go!

Got a house right full o’ yaller babies—

Spend my money on Sally Brown!”

I dropped the last few feet into the transom space, landing with a faint thud. Doc Jenkins and Peggy looked up from what they were doing. Doc was wearing only a pair of shorts and his pudgy torso was streaked with grime and perspiration. Peggy was clad in disreputable overalls. She was holding a welding torch.

She said, rather guiltily, “Good morning, Peter.”

“Good morning,” I replied automatically. Then, “I know that I’m only the mate, but might I inquire what you two are up to?”

“We’re going to make this bitch roll and go,” replied Peggy happily.

“What do you mean?” I asked coldly.

I looked around the cramped compartment, saw two discarded space-suits that had been flung carelessly on to the deck. And I saw what looked like the breech of a gun protruding from the plating. Around its circumference the welding was still bright. I looked from it back to the spacesuits.

“Have you been outside?” I demanded.

“No,” said Peggy.

“Don’t worry, Peter,” said Jenkins. “We didn’t lose any atmosphere. We sealed the transom space off before we went to work, and put the pump on it . . .”

“Remote control,” said Peggy, “from inside.”

“And you pierced the hull?”
I asked with mounting anger.

“Only a small hole,” admitted the doctor.

“Damn it!” I flared. “This is too much. Only four days out and you’re already space-happy. Burning holes in the shell plating and risking all our lives. And I still don’t know what it’s all about. When Ralph hears of this . . .”

“He’ll be pleased,” said Peggy simply.

“He’ll be pleased, all right. He’ll roll on the deck in uncontrollable ecstasy. He’ll have your guts for a necktie, both of you, and then boot you out of the airlock without a spacesuit. He’ll . . .”

“Be reasonable, Peter,” admonished Jenkins.

“Be reasonable? I am being reasonable. Peggy here has work that she should be doing, instead of which I find her engaged in some fantastic act of sabotage with you, one of the ship’s executive officers, aiding and abetting.”

“Come off it, Peter,” said the Doc. “I’m second mate of this wagon, and I signed the articles as such, and one of the clauses says that deck and engine room departments should cooperate . . .”

“Never mind this second mate business,” I told him. “As ship’s surgeon, you’re still a member of the deck department, ranking with, but below, the mate. And as far as I’m concerned, the prime function of the engine room department is to do as it’s bloody well told.”

“Then why don’t you
tell
me something?” asked Peggy, sweetly reasonable.

“I will,” I promised. “I will. But, to begin with, you will tell
me
something. You will tell me just what the hell you two are playing at down here.”

“Is that a lawful command?” asked Peggy.

“I suppose so,” admitted Jenkins grudgingly.

“All right,” she said slowly. “I’ll tell you. What you see . . .” she kicked the breech of the cannon with a heavy shoe . . . “is the means whereby we shall exceed the speed of light.”

“But it’s impossible,” I said.

“How do you know?” she countered.

“It’s common knowledge,” I sneered.

“Way back in the Middle Ages,” she said, “it was common knowledge that the sun went around Earth . . .”

But I was giving her only half my attention. Out of the corner of my eyes I was watching Doc Jenkins. He was edging gradually towards the switch of the power point into which the welding tool was plugged. I shrugged. I didn’t see why he had to be so surreptitious about it. If Peggy wanted to finish whatever welding she had been doing when I had disturbed them, what did it matter?

Or perhaps it did matter.

I said, “I suppose this welded seam is tight?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Then we’ll get back amidships. You’ve plenty of work to do in the auxiliary motor room.”

“I have,” she admitted.

Then my curiosity got the better of me. “But just how,” I demanded, “did you ever hope to attain FTL?”

“This,” she said, gesturing with the torch towards the breech of the gun, “is an auxiliary rocket. There is already a charge of solid propellant—Doc mixed it for me—in the firing chamber. We were going to connect up the wiring to the detonator when you interrupted us.”

“It’s just as well that I did interrupt you,” I said. “But how was it supposed to work?”