To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (38 page)

“Cupboard love,” Grimes told him. “Cupboard love.”

There were official parties, and there were unofficial ones. Tarran may not have been a member of the planet’s snobocracy, but he knew people in all walks of life, in all trades and professions, and the gatherings to which, through him, Grimes was invited were far more entertaining affairs than the official functions which, now and again, Grimes was obliged to attend. It was at an informal supper given by Professor Tolliver, who held the Chair of Political Science at Duncannon University, that he met Selma Madigan.

With the exception of Tarran and Grimes and his officers all the guests were university people, students as well as instructors. Some were human and some were not. Much to his surprise Grimes found that he was getting along famously with a Shaara Princess, especially since he had cordially detested a Shaara Queen to whom he had been introduced at a reception in the Mayor’s Palace. (“And there I was,” he had complained afterwards to Beadle, “having to say nice things to a bedraggled old oversized bumblebee loaded down with more precious stones than this ship could lift . . . and with all that tonnage of diamonds and the like she couldn’t afford a decent voice box; it sounded like a scratched platter and a worn-out needle on one of those antique record players . . .”) This Shreen was—beautiful. It was an inhuman beauty (of course), that of a glittering, intricate mobile. By chance or design—design thought Grimes—her voice box produced a pleasant, almost seductive contralto, with faintly buzzing undertones. She was an arthroped, but there could be no doubt about the fact that she was an attractively female member of her race.

She was saying, “I find you humans so fascinating, Captain. There is so much similarity between yourselves and ourselves, and such great differences. But I have enjoyed my stay on this planet . . .”

“And will you be here much longer, Your Highness?”

“Call me Shreen, Captain,” she told him.

“Thank you, Shreen. My name is John. I shall feel honored if you call me that.” He laughed. “In any case, my real rank is only Lieutenant.”

“Very well, Lieutenant John. But to answer your question. I fear that I shall return to my own world as soon as I have gained my degree in Socio-Economics. Our Queen Mother decided that this will be a useful qualification for a future ruler. The winds of change blow through our hives, and we must trim our wings to them.”
And very pretty wings, too,
thought Grimes.

But Shreen was impossibly alien, and the girl who approached gracefully over the polished floor was indubitably human. She was slender, and tall for a woman, and her gleaming auburn hair was piled high in an intricate coronal. Her mouth was too wide for conventional prettiness, the planes of her thin face too well defined. Her eyes were definitely green. Her smile, as she spoke, made her beautiful.

“Another conquest, Shreen?” she asked.

“I wish it were, Selma,” replied the Princess. “I wish that Lieutenant John were an arthroped like myself.”

“In that case,” grinned Grimes, “I’d be a drone.”

“From what I can gather,” retorted the human girl, “that’s all that spaceship captains are anyhow.”

“Have you met Selma?” asked Shreen. Then she performed the introductions.

“And are you enjoying the party, Mr. Grimes?” inquired Selma Madigan.

“Yes, Miss Madigan. It’s a very pleasant change from the usual official function—but don’t tell anybody that I said so.”

“I’m glad you like us. We try to get away from that ghastly Outposts of Empire atmosphere. Quite a number of our students are like Shreen here, quote aliens unquote . . .”

“On
my
world
you
would be the aliens.”

“I know, my dear, and I’m sure that Mr. Grimes does too. But all intelligent beings can make valuable contributions to each other’s cultures. No one race has a sacred mission to civilize the Galaxy.”

“I wish you wouldn’t
preach,
Selma.” It was amazing how much expression the Princess could get out of her mechanical voice box. “But if you must, perhaps you can make a convert out of Lieutenant John.” She waved a thin, gracefully articulated forelimb and was away, gliding off to join a group composed of two human men, a young Hallichek and a gaudy pseudo-saurian from Dekkovar.

Selma Madigan looked directly at Grimes. “And what do you think of our policy of integration?” she asked.

“It has to come, I suppose.”

“It has to come,” she mimicked. “You brassbound types are all the same. You get along famously with somebody like Shreen, because she’s a real, live Princess. But the Shaara royalty isn’t royalty as we understand it. The Queens are females who’ve reached the egg-laying stage, the Princesses are females who are not yet sexually developed. Still—Shreen’s a Princess. You have far less in common with her, biologically speaking, than you have with Oona—but you gave Oona the brush-off and fawned all over Shreen.”

Grimes flushed. “Oona’s a rather smelly and scruffy little thing like a Terran chimpanzee. Shreen’s—beautiful.”

“Oona has a brilliant mind. Her one weakness is that she thinks that Terrans in pretty, gold-braided uniforms are wonderful. You snubbed her. Shreen noticed. I noticed.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Grimes, “Oona can be Her Imperial Highness on whatever world she comes from, but I don’t
have
to like her.”

Professor Tolliver, casually clad in a rather grubby toga, smoking a pipe even fouler than Grimes’s, joined the discussion. He remarked, “Young Grimes has a point . . . “

“Too right I have,” agreed Grimes. “As far as I’m concerned, people are people—it doesn’t matter a damn if they’re humanoid, arachnoid, saurian or purple octopi from the next galaxy but three. If they’re our sort of people, I like ‘em. If they ain’t—I don’t.”

“Oona’s our sort of people,” insisted Selma.

“She doesn’t smell like it.”

The girl laughed. “And how do you think
she
enjoys the stink of your pipe—and, come to that, Peter’s pipe?”

“Perhaps she does enjoy it,” suggested Grimes.

“As a matter of fact she does,” said Professor Tolliver.

“
Men . . .
” muttered Selma Madigan disgustedly.

Tolliver drifted off then, and Grimes walked with the girl to the table on which stood a huge punchbowl. He ladled out drinks for each of them. He raised his own glass in a toast. “Here’s to integration!”

“I wish that you really meant that.”

“Perhaps I do . . .” murmured Grimes, a little doubtfully. “Perhaps I do. After all, we’ve only one Universe, and we all have to live in it. It’s not so long ago that blacks and whites and yellows were at each other’s throats on the Home Planet—to say nothing of the various subdivisions within each color group. Von Tannenbaum—that’s him over there, the Blond Beast we call him. He’s an excellent officer, a first class shipmate, and a very good friend. But
his
ancestors were very unkind to mine, on my mother’s side. And mine had quite a long record of being unkind to other people. I could be wrong—but I think that much of Earth’s bloody history was no more—and no less—than xenophobia carried to extremes . . .”

“Quite a speech, John.” She sipped at her drink. “It’s a pity that the regulations of your Service forbid you to play any active part in politics.”

“Why?”

“You’d make a very good recruit for the new Party we’re starting. LL . . .”

“LL . . . ?”

“The obvious abbreviation. The League of Life. You were talking just now of Terran history. Even when Earth’s nations were at war there were organizations—religions, political parties, even fraternal orders—with pan-national and pan-racial memberships. The aim of the League of Life is to build up a membership of all intelligent species.”

“Quite an undertaking.”

“But a necessary one. Doncaster could be said to be either unfortunately situated, or otherwise, according to the viewpoint. Here we are, one Man-colonized planet on the borders of no less than two . . . yes, I’ll use that word, much as I dislike it . . . no less than two alien empires. The Hallichek Hegemony, the Shaara Super-Hive. We know that Imperial Earth is already thinking of establishing Fortress Doncaster, converting this world into the equivalent of a colossal, impregnably armored and fantastically armed dreadnought with its guns trained upon both avian and arthroped, holding the balance of power, playing one side off against the other and all the rest of it. But there are those of us who would sooner live in peace and friendship with our neighbors. That’s why Duncannon University has always tried to attract non-Terran students—and that’s why the League of Life was brought into being.” She smiled. “You could, I suppose call it enlightened self-interest.”

“Enlightened,” agreed Grimes.

He liked this girl. She was one of those women whose physical charm is vastly enhanced by enthusiasm. She did far more to him, for him, than the sort of female equally pretty or prettier, whom he usually met.

She said, “I’ve some literature at home, if you’d like to read it.”

“I should—Selma.”

She took the use of her given name for granted. Was that a good sign, or not?

“That’s splendid—John. We could pick it up now. The party can get along without us.”

“Don’t you . . . er . . . live on the premises?”

“No. But it’s only a short walk from here. I have an apartment in Heathcliff Street.”

When Grimes had collected his boat cloak and cap from the cloakroom she was waiting for him. She had wrapped herself in a green academic gown that went well with her hair, matched her eyes. Together they walked out into the misty night. There was just enough chill in the air to make them glad of their outer garments, to make them walk closer together than they would, otherwise—perhaps—have done. As they strode over the damp-gleaming cobblestones Grimes was conscious of the movements of her body against his.
Political literature,
he thought with an attempt at cynicism.
It makes a change from etchings.
But he could not remain cynical for long. He had already recognized in her qualities of leadership, had no doubt in his mind that she would achieve high political rank on the world of her birth. Nonetheless, this night things could happen between them, probably would happen between them, and he, most certainly, would not attempt to stem the course of Nature. Neither of them would be the poorer; both of them, in fact, would be the richer. Meanwhile, it was good to walk with her through the soft darkness, to let one’s mind dwell pleasurably on what lay ahead at the end of the walk.

“Here we are, John,” she said suddenly.

The door of the apartment house was a hazy, golden-glowing rectangle in the dimness. There was nobody in the hallway—not that it mattered. There was an elevator that bore them swiftly upwards, its door finally opening on a richly carpeted corridor. There was another door—one that, Grimes noted, was opened with an old-fashioned metal key. He remembered, then, that voice-actuated locks were not very common on Doncaster.

The furnishing of her living room was austere but comfortable. Grimes, at her invitation, removed his cloak and cap, gave them to her to hang up somewhere with her own gown, sat down on a well-sprung divan. He watched her walk to the window that ran all along one wall, press the switch that drew the heavy drapes aside, press another switch that caused the wide panes to sink into their housing.

She said, “The view of the city is good from here—especially on a misty night. And I like it when you can smell the clean tang of fog in the air . . .”

“You’re lucky to get a clean fog,” said Grimes, Earth-born and Earth-raised. He got up and went to stand with her. His arm went about her waist. She made no attempt to disengage it. Nonetheless, he could still appreciate the view. It was superb; it was like looking down at a star cluster enmeshed in a gaseous nebula . . .

“Smell the mist . . .” whispered Selma.

Dutifully, Grimes inhaled.
Where did that taint of garlic come from?
It was the first time that he had smelled it since Alberto ceased to officiate in the ship’s galley.
It must come from a source in the room with them . . .

Grimes could act fast when he had to. He sensed rather than saw that somebody was rushing at him and the girl from behind. He let go of her, pushed her violently to one side. Instinctively he fell into a crouch, felt a heavy body thud painfully into his back. He dropped still lower, his arms and the upper part of his torso hanging down over the windowsill. What followed was the result of luck rather than of any skill on the spaceman’s part—good luck for Grimes, the worst of bad luck for his assailant. The assassin slithered over Grimes’s back, head down, in an ungraceful dive. The heel of a shoe almost took one of the Lieutenant’s prominent ears with it. And then he was staring down, watching the dark figure that fell into the luminous mist with agonizing slowness, twisting and turning as it plunged, screaming. The scream was cut short by a horridly fluid
thud.

Frantically, Selma pulled Grimes back to safety.

He stood there, trembling uncontrollably. The reek of garlic was still strong in the air. He broke away from her, went back to the window and was violently sick.

“There are lessons,” said Commodore Damien drily, “that a junior officer must learn if he wishes to rise in the Service. One of them is that it is unwise to throw a monkey wrench into the machinations of our masters.”

“How was I to know, sir?” complained Grimes. He flushed. “In any case, I’d do it again!”

“I’m sure that you would, Mr. Grimes. No man in his right senses submits willingly to defenestration—and no gentleman stands by and does nothing while his companion of the evening is subjected to the same fate. Even so . . .” He drummed on his desk top with his skeletal fingers. “Even so, I propose to put you in the picture, albeit somewhat belatedly.

“To begin with, the late Mr. Alberto was criminally careless. Rather a neat play on words, don’t you think? Apparently he officiated as usual in the High Commissioner’s kitchen on the night in question, and Sir William had, earlier in the day, expressed a wish for
pasta
with one of the more redolent sauces. As a good chef should, Alberto tasted, and tasted, and tasted. As a member of his
real
profession he should have deodorized his breath before proceeding to Miss Madigan’s apartment—where, I understand, he concealed himself in the bathroom, waiting until she returned to go through her evening ritual of opening the window of her living room. He was not, I think, expecting her to have company—not that it would have worried him if he had . . .”