Ride the Star Winds (79 page)

We had to take Grimes’s word for it that everything was working as it should. Grimes’s word, and the word of the Simmons girl, who assured us that she, personally, had checked every piece of machinery. We hoped that they were right, especially since there was some equipment, notably the spars and sails, that could not be actually tested inside an atmosphere in a heavy gravitational field.

Anyhow, that was the way of it. Ralph affixed his autograph to the handing-over form and I, as mate (acting, probably temporary, but not unpaid) witnessed it. And Martha Wayne, as representative of the
Port Forlorn Chronicle
, made a sound and vision recording of the historic moment. And Doc Jenkins suggested that the occasion called for a drink. Ralph frowned at this and said stiffly that we, who would shortly be taking an untested ship into space, would be well-advised to stay sober. Grimes told him not to be so bloody silly, adding that takeoff wasn’t due for all of twelve hours. So Sandra went to the little bar at one side of the wardroom and opened the refrigerator and brought out two bottles of champagne. Grimes opened them himself, laughing wryly as the violently expanding carbon dioxide shot the corks up to the deckhead. “And this,” he chuckled, “will be the only reaction drive as far as the ship’s concerned!” And then, when the glasses were filled, he raised his in a toast. “To
Flying Cloud
,” he said solemnly, “and to all who sail in her.” He emphasized the word
sail
. “To
Flying Cloud
,” we repeated.

The commodore drained his glass and set it down on the table. There was a sudden sadness in his manner. He said quietly, “Captain Listowel, I’m an outsider here. This is your ship. I’ll leave you with your officers to get the hang of her. If you want to know anything, I shall be in my office ashore . . .”

He got slowly to his feet.

“Even so, sir . . .” began Ralph.

“Even so be damned. This is
your
ship, Listowel. Your donkeyman knows as much about the auxiliary machinery as I do, probably more. And as far as the handling of the sails is concerned, you’ll have to make up the rules as you go along.” He paused, then said, “But I shall be aboard in the morning to see you off.”

He left us then.

“He should have sailed as her first master,” said Ralph.

“And returning, still a relatively young man, to find his wife an old woman and his son his senior,” said Jenkins. “I can see why we were the mugs. We have no ties.”

“Even so . . .” said Ralph doubtfully.

“Come off it, skipper. There’s nobody to miss us if this scow comes a gutser. We’re expendable, even more so than the average Rim Runner officer. And that’s saying plenty.”

Ralph grinned reluctantly and gestured to Sandra to refill the glasses. He admitted, “I do believe you’re right, Doc. I really do . . .” But the moment of relaxation didn’t last long. His manner stiffened again. “All right, all of you. Finish your drinks, and then we’ll get busy. I’d like you and Doc, Sandra, to make sure that all’s well as far as the farm’s concerned. I could be wrong, but I didn’t think that the yeasts looked too healthy. And you’re the mate, Peter; ballast and cargo are your worry. Just make sure that everything’s going as it should.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” I replied in what I hoped was a seamanlike manner.

He scowled at me, then turned to the donkeyman. “And you, Miss Simmons, can give me another run-through on the various auxiliaries.”

“And what can I do, Captain?” asked the journalist.

“Just keep out of the way, Miss Wayne,” he told her, not unkindly.

* * *

She attached herself to me. Not that I minded—I don’t suppose that any ship’s officer, in any class of ship in any period, has really objected to having an attractive woman getting in his hair. She followed me as I made my way to the supercargo’s office. It was already occupied; Trantor, one of the company’s wharf superintendents, was there, sitting well back in the swivel chair, his feet on the desk, watching a blonde disrobing on the tiny screen of the portable TV set that he had hung on the bulkhead.

He started to take his feet off the desk slowly when he saw me—and with more haste when he saw Martha Wayne. He reached out to switch off his TV.

“Don’t bother,” said Martha Wayne. “I’ve often wondered just who does watch that program. Nobody will admit it.”

Nevertheless, he switched off. He saved face by sneering at the new braid on my epaulettes. “Ah,” he said, “the chief officer. In person. From office boy to mate in one easy lesson.”

“There was more than one lesson, Trantor,” I told him. “And they weren’t all that easy.”

They hadn’t been easy at all, I remembered. There had been all the messing around in that cranky catamaran, and the messing around in that crankier blimp, and the long nights of study, and the training that we had undergone in mock-ups of the various control compartments of the ship. The model of the supercargo’s office, I realized, had been extremely accurate. Ignoring Trantor, I inspected the gauges. Numbers 1 and 7 ballast tanks were out; 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 were still in. There was no way of ascertaining the deadweight tonage of cargo loaded save by tally and draft—and the columns of mercury in the draft indicator told me that if steps were not taken, and soon,
Flying Cloud
would shortly look even more like a submarine than she already did.

I went to the control panel, opened the exhaust valves to Numbers 2 and 6 tanks, and pressed the button that started the pump. I heard the throbbing whine of it as it went into action, saw the mercury columns begin to fall in their graduated tubes.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Trantor.

“I’m the mate,” I told him. “You said so. Remember?”

“If you’re taking over,” he said huffily, “I might as well get ashore.”

“You might as well,” I agreed. “But, first of all, I want you to come with me to make sure that the cargo is properly stowed and secured.”

“Fussy, aren’t you?” he growled.

“That’s what I’m paid for,” I said.

“But what is all this about stowage?” asked Martha Wayne.

“We have to watch it here,” I told her. “Even more so than in a conventional ship. In the normal spaceship,
down
is always towards the stern, always—no matter if you’re sitting on your backside on a planetary surface or accelerating in deep space. But here, when you’re on the surface or navigating in a planetary atmosphere,
down
is vertically at right angles to the long axis. Once we’re up and out, however, accelerating,
down
will be towards the stern.”

“I see,” she said, in that tone of voice that conveys the impression that the speaker doesn’t.

“I suppose you know that your pump is still running,” said Trantor.

“Yes. I know. It should be. It’ll run till the tanks are out, and then it’ll shut itself off.”

“All right. It’s your worry,” he said.

“It’s my worry,” I agreed. “And now we’ll look at the stowage.”

With Trantor in the lead, we made our way along the alleyway to the hold. We went through the airtight door, and along the tunnel through the cargo bins. There was nothing to worry about—but that was due more to Grimes’s foresight than to Trantor’s efficiency. As each bin had been filled, the locking bars—stout metal rods padded with resilient plastic—had slid into place.

As we walked between the bins, the words of that ancient poem chased through my mind.
Argosies with magic sails, pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales . . .
But there weren’t any costly bales here. There were drab, prosaic ingots of lead and zinc and cadmium, cargo for which there was a steady demand but no mad rush. Oh, well, we still had the magic sails.

The stevedore foreman, who had been juggling another set of locking bars into position, looked up from his work. He said cheerfully, “She’ll be all right, mister.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Just another twenty tons of zinc,” he said, “an’ that’s it. You can have her then. An’ welcome to her. I’ve loaded some odd ships in my time, but this’n’s the oddest . . .”

“She’ll be all right.” I repeated his words.

“That’s your worry, mister,” he said. “Can’t say that I’d like to be away on a voyage for all of twenty years.” He gave Martha Wayne an appraising stare. “Although I allow that it might have its compensations.”

“Or complications,” I said.

Martha Wayne had her portable recorder out. She said to the foreman, “I take it that you’ve loaded this ship, Mr. . . .?”

“Kilmer’s the name, miss.”

“Mr. Kilmer. I wonder if I might ask you for your impressions of the vessel?”

“After the loading is finished, Miss Wayne,” I told her.

“From spacefaring office boy to mate in one easy lesson,” said Trantor, grinning nastily.

Chapter 9

We finally got to our bunks
that night, staggering to our cabins after a scratch meal of coffee and sandwiches in the wardroom. Ralph had driven us hard, and he had driven himself hard. He had insisted on testing everything that could be tested, had made his personal inspection of everything capable of being inspected. Ballast tanks had been flooded and then pumped out. The ingenious machinery that swiveled furniture and fittings through an arc of ninety degrees when transition was made from atmospheric to spatial flight was operated. The motors driving the airscrews were given a thorough trial.

At the finish of it all, Doc and Smethwick were on the verge of mutiny, Sandra was finding it imperative to do things in her galley by herself, and Martha Wayne was looking as though she were already regretting having accepted this assignment. Only Peggy Simmons seemed to be enjoying herself. As well as being obviously in love with her machinery, she appeared to have gotten a crush on Ralph. I overheard Doc mutter to Smethwick, “Following him round like a bitch in heat . . .” Oh, well, I thought to myself, Sandra will soon fix all that once she starts turning out the balanced diet.

Anyhow, with Ralph at last more or less happy about everything, we bolted our sandwiches, gulped our coffee and then retired. I was just about to switch off the light at the head of my bunk when there was a gentle tapping at my door. My first thought was that it was Ralph, that the master had thought of something else that might go wrong and had come to worry his mate about it. But Ralph would have knocked in a firm, authorative manner.

Sandra?
I wondered hopefully.

“Come in,” I called softly.

It was Peggy Simmons. She was dressed in a bulky, unglamorous robe. She looked like a little girl—and not one of the nymphette variety either. She looked like a fat little girl, although I was prepared to admit that it could have been the shapeless thing that she was wearing that conveyed this impression.

She said, “I hope you weren’t asleep, Peter.”

“I wasn’t,” I admitted grudgingly. “Not quite.”

She said, “I just had to talk to somebody.” She sat on the chair by my bunk, and helped herself to a cigarette from the box on the table. She went on, “This is all so strange. And tomorrow, after we get away, it will be even stranger.”

“What isn’t strange?” I countered. “Come to think of it, it’s the normal that’s really strange.”

“You’re too deep for me,” she laughed ruefully. “But I came to talk to you because you’re not clever . . .”

“Thank you,” I said coldly.

“No. That wasn’t quite what I meant, Peter. You
are
clever—you must be, to be chief officer of a ship like this. And I’m clever too—but with machinery. But the others—Sandra and Martha Wayne and Doc—are so . . . so . . .”

“Sophisticated,” I supplied.

“Yes. That’s the word. Sophisticated. And poor Claude Smethwick is the reverse. So unworldly. So weird, even . . .”

“And Ralph?” I prodded.

Her face seemed to light up and to cloud simultaneously, although there must have been a slight lag. “Oh, he’s . . . exceptional? Yes. Exceptional. But I could hardly expect a man like him to want to talk to a girl like me. Could I?”

And why the hell not?
I thought.
Put on some makeup, and throw something seductively translucent over the body beautiful instead of that padded tent, and you might get somewhere. But not with me, and not tonight, Josephine . . .

“I haven’t known many spacemen,” she went on. “Only the commodore, really, and he’s so much one of the family that he hardly counts. But there’s always been something about you all, those few of you whom I have met. I think I know what it is. You all have pasts . . .”

And how!
I thought.

“Like Ralph. Like the captain, I mean. You and he have been shipmates for a long time, Peter, haven’t you? But I can’t help wondering why such a capable man should come out to the Rim . . .”

And him old enough to be your father,
I thought. And then I remembered what we had learned of Peggy Simmons’s own story. It all added up. Ralph, by virtue of personality as well as rank, was the ideal father image.
Sticky,
I thought.
Definitely sticky.

“Women,” I said.

“Women?”

“Yeah. That’s the usual reason why we all come out to the Rim.”

“Men,” she said, “even the most brilliant men, are such fools where women of a certain class are concerned.”

Like your father,
I thought.

“With the
right
woman,” she went on, “they could go a long way . . .”

Too right,
I thought.
Too damn right. All the way to the next galaxy but three, under full sail, and with the right woman manning the pumps or whatever it is that the donkeyman does . . .

She said wistfully, “I wish . . .”

“You wish what, Peggy?”

“Oh, I . . . I don’t know, Peter . . .”

I
wish that you’d get the hell out of here,
I thought.
I wish that I could get some sleep.

“Have you a drink?” she asked. “A nightcap, to make me sleep . . .”

“In that locker,” I told her, “there’s a bottle of brandy. Medicinal. Get out two glasses and I’ll have a drink with you. I could use some sleep myself.”

She splashed brandy generously into the glasses and handed one to me.