Ride the Star Winds (83 page)

“I thought that it would be obvious. The ship is already proceeding at almost the speed of light. The rocket is just to give her the extra nudge . . .”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Peggy, Peggy, how naive can you be? And with homemade solid propellant yet!”

“Solid propellants have their advantages,” she said.

“Such as?” I asked scornfully.

“This!” she snapped.

The welding torch flared blindingly. I realized her intention, but too late. As I tried to wrest the tool from her hands the metal casing of the firing chamber was already cherry red.

I felt rather than heard the
whoomph
of the exploding powder . . .

III: THE WINDS OF IF

Chapter 14

Everything was different,
and yet the same.

“Even so,” Ralph was saying, “the chow in this wagon leaves much to be desired.”

I looked up irritably from the simmering pot of lamb curry on the stove top—and then, obeying an odd impulse, I looked down again, stared at the savory stew of meat and vegetables and hot spices, stared at my hand, still going through the stirring motions with the spoon.

I asked myself:
What am I doing here?

“You have about three pet dishes,” went on Ralph. “I admit that you do them well. But they’re all that you
do
do well . . .”

This time I did look up at him.
What was he doing in civilian shirt and shorts?
Then, pursuing the thought,
But why should the Federation Government’s observer, even though he is a full commander in the Survey Service, be wearing uniform?

“Sandra’s getting browned off with the lack of variety,” said Ralph.

“Mrs. Malcolm, you mean,” I corrected him coldly.

“
Captain
Malcolm, if you insist,” he corrected me, grinning.

I shrugged. “All right. I’m only the catering officer, and she’s the captain. At the same time, I
am
the catering officer, and she’s my wife.”

“Such a set up,” said Ralph, “would never be tolerated in a Federation ship. To be frank, I came out to the Rim as much to see how the Feminists managed as to investigate the potentialities of this fancy new drive of yours. And this ship, cut off from the Universe for objective years, is the ideal microcosm.”

“We get by, out here on the Rim,” I said shortly.

“Even so,” he said, “you’re not a Rim Worlder yourself. You’re none of you Rim Worlders, born and bred, except the engineer and that tame telepath of yours. I can understand the women coming out here, but not the men. It must rankle when you’re allowed to come into space only in a menial capacity.”

“Our boss, Commodore Grimes, is a man,” I said. “And most of the Rim Runners fleet is manned by the male sex. Anyhow, there’s nothing menial in being a cook. I’m far happier than I was as purser in the Waverly Royal Mail. Furthermore,” I said, warming up to the subject, “all the best chefs are men.”

Ralph wiped a splatter of curry from his shirt. (I had gestured dramatically with my spoon.) “But it doesn’t follow,” he said, “that all men are the best chefs.”

“Everybody likes my curry,” I told him.

“But not all the time. Not for every meal,” he said. “Well, Malcolm, I’ll leave you to it. And since we have to eat your curry, you might see that the rice isn’t so soggy this time.”

Interfering bastard,
I thought. I brought the spoon to my lips and tasted. It wasn’t a bad curry, I decided. It wasn’t a bad curry at all. Served with the sliced cucumber and the shredded coconut and the chopped banana, together with the imported mango chutney from Caribbea, it would be edible. Of course, there should be Bombay Duck. I wondered, as I had often wondered before, if it would be possible to convert the fish that flourished in our algae vats into that somewhat odorous delicacy.

Again I was interrupted.

“
More
curry?” complained Claude Smethwick.

“It’s good,” I told him. I scooped up a spoonful. “Taste.”

“Not bad,” he admitted. “If you like curry, that is. I don’t have to be telepath to know that you do.” He handed the spoon back to me. “But I didn’t come here to get a preview of dinner.”

“Then what did you come for?” I asked shortly.

“Peter, there’s something wrong about this ship. You’re the only one that I can talk to about it. Commander Listowel’s an outsider, and Doc has gone on one of his verse and vodka jags, and the others are . . . women.”

“They can’t help it,” I said.

“I know they can’t—but they look at things differently from the way that we do. Apart from anything else, every one of them is chasing after that Survey Service commander . . .”

“Every one?” I asked coldly.

“Not Sandra, of course,” he assured me hastily. (Too hastily?) “But Sandra’s got all the worries of the ship—after all, she is captain of the first interstellar lightjammer—on her shoulders, and Martha and Peggy are trying hard to get into Listowel’s good books—and bed?—and so there’s only you.”

“I’m flattered,” I said, stirring the curry.

“There’s something wrong,” he said.

“You said that before,” I told him.

“And I’ll say it again,” he said.

“Well, what
is
wrong?” I demanded.

“You know the
déjà vu
feeling that you get when the Mannschenn Drive starts up? Well, it’s something like that. But it’s not that . . . it’s more, somehow.”

“I think I know what you mean . . .” I said slowly.

He went on, “You’ll think that I’m crazy, I know. But that doesn’t matter—all you so-called normals think that psi people like me are at least halfway round the bend. But I’ve a theory: couldn’t it be that out here, on the Rim, on the very edge of this expanding Galaxy, there’s a tendency for alternative time tracks to merge? For example, just suppose that the feminist ships had never got out here . . .”

“But they did,” I said.

“But they could very easily not have done. After all, it was back in the days of the Ehrenhaft drive, the gaussjammers. And you’ve read your history, and you know how many of those cranky brutes got slung away to hell and gone off course by magnetic storms.”

“So in this alternative Universe of yours,” I said tolerantly, “the Rim Worlds never got colonized.”

“I didn’t say that. You’ve only to look at the personnel of this ship—all outsiders but Peggy and myself, and neither Peggy nor I can claim descent from the first families. My ancestors came out long after the feminist movement had fizzled on Earth, and so did Peggy’s . . .”

I stirred the curry thoughtfully. “So on another time track there’s another
Aeriel
, the first of her kind in space, and another Peter Malcolm in the throes of cooking up a really first-class curry for his unappreciative shipmates.”

“Could be,” he said. “Or the ship could have a different name, or we could be serving in her in different capacities—all but myself, of course.”

I burst into song.

“Oh, I am the Cook, and the Captain bold,

And the mate of the Nancy brig,

And the Bo’s’n tight, and the Midshipmite,

And the crew of the Captain’s gig!”

“But not,” I was interrupted, “the engineer.”

I turned away from the stove. “Oh, it’s you, Peggy.”

“Who else?” She took the spoon from my hand, raised it to her lips, blew on it. She sipped appreciatively. “Not bad, not bad . . .” A few drops of the sauce dribbled on to the breast of her once-white boiler suit, but she ignored them. They made quite a contrast, I decided, to the smears of black grease. She said, “You’ll do me for a rough working mate, Peter.”

“Thank you.”

She absentmindedly put the spoon into a side pocket that already held a wrench and a hammer. I snatched it back, carefully wiped it and returned it to the pot.

She asked, her voice deliberately casual, “Have you seen Ralph?”

“I think he’s gone up to the control room,” I told her.

She said sulkily, “He’s been promising to let me show him the auxiliary motor room for the last three days.”

“After all,” I consoled her, “he’s not an engineer commander.”

“But . . .”

“Curry again?” complained a fresh voice.

I resumed my stirring with an unnecessary clatter. I muttered mutinously, “If my galley is going to be turned into the ship’s social club there won’t be anything. But aren’t you supposed to be on watch, Miss Wayne?”

“The old woman relieved me,” she said. “She’s showing Ralph just how a lightjammer should be handled.” She leaned back against a bench, slimly elegant in her tailored shirt and shorts, nibbling a piece of celery she had picked up from the chopping board. “If the Federation Survey Service doesn’t build a fleet of improved Erikson drive wagons it won’t be Sandra’s fault.”

“Love me, love my ship,” muttered Peggy.

“What was that?” I asked sharply.

“Nothing,” she said.

Both women looked at me in silence, and I was suddenly afraid that what I could read in their eyes was pity.

Chapter 15

Everything
was different again.

I was relaxing in the easy chair in the captain’s day room, smoking a cigarette and listening to a recording of the old-time sea chanteys of distant Earth. I wondered what those ancient sailormen would have made of this fabrication of metal and plastic, with atomic fire in her belly, spreading her wings in the empty gulf between the stars, running free before the photon gale. Then I heard the door between bathroom and bedroom open, and I turned my head. Sandra, naked from her shower, walked slowly to the chair at her dressing table and sat down before the mirror. I had seen her naked many times before. (But had I?) But this was the first time. (But how could it be?) I felt the stirrings of desire.

I got up and walked through to the bedroom. I put my hands gently on her smooth shoulders, kissed her gently behind the ear.

“No,” she said.
“No.”

“But . . .”

“I’ve done my hair,” she said, “and I don’t want it messed up.”

“Damn it all,” I told her, “we
are
married.”

But are we?
I asked myself.

“Take your hands off me,” she ordered coldly.

I did so, and looked at her and at her reflection in the mirror. She was beautiful. But I tried to find fault. There was that mole just above her navel. And the feeble gravitational field was kind to her; her breasts were proud and outthrusting without artificial support, her stomach flat.
In a heavy gravitational field,
I told myself,
she would not be as lovely.

But I knew that she would be.

“Don’t maul me,” she said.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

I went to sit on the bed.

“Haven’t you anything better to do?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

She made a sound that can only be described as a snarl and then, ignoring me, went on with her toilet. There was a session with the whirring hair dryer, after which she affixed glittering clips to the lobes of her ears. She got up then and walked to the wardrobe, ignoring me. She took out a uniform shirt of thin black silk, a pair of black shorts and a pair of stiletto-heeled black sandals. Her back to me, she shrugged into the shirt and then pulled the shorts up over her long, slim legs. She sat on the bed (and I might as well not have been there) and buckled the sandals over her slender feet. She returned to the mirror and with a tiny brush applied lip rouge.

“Going ashore?” I asked sarcastically.

“If you must know,” she told me, “Commander Listowel has a fine collection of films made by the Survey Service on worlds with non-human cultures.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll brush my hair and wash behind the ears.”

“You,” she said, “were not invited.”

“But . . .”

Her manner softened—but briefly, very briefly. “I’m sorry, Peter, but when senior officers of different space services want to talk shop they don’t want juniors in their hair.”

“I see,” I said.

She got up from the chair. In the form-molding shirt, the abbreviated shorts, she looked more naked than she had when she had come through from the shower. I was acutely conscious that under the skimpy garments there was a woman.
My
woman. (Or was she? Had she ever been?)

“You needn’t wait up for me,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re rather sweet,” she said, “in your own way.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I watched her go, then lit another cigarette and stuck it in my mouth. I knew now what was happening. I’d seen it happen before, to other people, but that didn’t make it any better. Ashore it would have been bad enough—but here, in deep space, with Sandra the absolute monarch of this little, artificial world, there was nothing at all I could do. Ashore, even in a feminist culture, a man can take strong action against an erring wife and her paramour. But if I took action here I should be classed as a mutineer.

But there must be something that I could do about it.

There must be
something
.

How much did Martha know? How much did Peggy know?

Women know women as no man can ever know them. There is that freemasonry, the lodge into which no male may ever intrude. There is the freemasonry—but, too, there are the rivalries within the lodge. There is the bitchiness. And all is fair in love and war, and if I could turn the jealousy being felt by both Martha and Peggy to my own account, so much the better. (It would have been better still to have slugged it out with Listowel and then to have dragged Sandra by the hair, kicking and screaming, to bed—but, knowing Sandra, so far as any man can know any woman, I didn’t feel like taking the risk. She was still the captain, and I was the cook, and the extreme penalty for mutiny in space is death.)

Peggy, I thought, would be the best bet. As a woman Martha might hate Sandra’s guts, but as mate she would be loyal to the captain. Peggy, brought up in the workshop rather than the wardroom, would be less overawed by gold braid and Queen Mother’s regulations.

I still didn’t like it. It seemed more than somewhat gutless to go whining in search of outside help, but I was feeling desperate. I threw my cigarette in the general direction of the disposer, then got up and went into the alleyway. I looked towards the door of the guest room, in which Listowel was berthed, and wondered what was happening behind it. I almost strode towards it, my fists clenched ready to start hammering on the featureless panel. Almost.