Upon a Sea of Stars (38 page)

“All right. Then go. You can let yourself out.”

For a tall girl she flounced well on her way from the little dining room to her bedroom.

Grimes sighed, cursing his retentive memory, his detailed recollection of the reports from all the planets with which Rim Runners traded. But he had to be sure, and he did not wish to make any inquiries regarding this matter on Mellise. He let himself out of the little dome-shaped cottage, was at once furiously assailed by the wind. Hurricane Lynn had not yet built up to its full intensity, but it was bad enough. There were great sheets of driving rain, and with them an explosion of spray whipped from the surface of the sea.

Luckily the spaceport was downwind from the village. Grimes ran most of the way. He didn’t want to, but it was easier to scud before the gale than to attempt to maintain a sedate pace. He let himself into the port captain’s large house. The Staceys were abed—he had told them that he would be late—but Captain Stacey called out from his bedroom, “Is that you, Commodore?”

“Who else, Captain? I shall be going out again shortly.”

“What the hell for?” testily.

“I have to send a message. An important one.”

“Telephone it through to the Carlotti Communications Office from here.”

“I want to make sure it goes.”

Grimes faintly overheard something about distrustful old bastards as he went to his own room, but ignored it.

There was a very cunning secret compartment built into his suitcase. The Commodore opened it, took from it a slim book. Then, with scratch pad and stylus, he worked rapidly and efficiently, finishing up with eleven gibberish groups. He put the book back in its hiding place, pocketed the pad. Then he had to face the stormy night again.

The duty operator in the Carlotti Office was awake, but only just. Had it not been for the growing uproar of the hurricane, penetrating even the insulated walls, he would not have been. He reluctantly put down his luridly covered book and, recognizing Grimes, said, “Sir?”

“I want this to go at once. To my office at Port Forlorn. Urgent.” He managed a grin. “That’s the worst of space travel. It’s so hard to keep track of dates. But my secretary will be able to lay on flowers for the occasion.”

The operator grinned back. Judging by the way that he was making a play for that snooty Lynn Davis the Commodore must be a gay old dog, he figured. He said, a little enviously, “Your message will be winging its way over the light-years in a jiffy, sir.” He handed the Commodore a signals pad.

Grimes put down the address, transcribed the groups from his own pad, filled in his name and the other details in the space provided. He said, “Let me know how much it is. It’s private.”

The young man winked. “Rim Runners’ll never know, sir.”

“Still, I prefer to pay,” said Grimes.

He watched the miniature Carlotti Beacon—it was like a Mobius Strip distorted to a long oval—turn on its mounting in the big star tank until it was pointing directly at the spark that represented the Lorn sun. He hoped that the big beacon on the roof of the building was turning, too. But it had to be. If it stopped, jammed, the little indicator would seize up in sympathy. In any case, it was shielded from the weather by its own dome.

The operator’s key rattled rapidly in staccato Morse, still the best method of transmitting messages over vast distances. From the wall speaker blurted the dots and dashes of acknowledgment. Then the message itself was sent, and acknowledged.

“Thank you,” said Grimes. “If there’s a reply phone it through to me, please. I shall be at Captain Stacey’s house.”

“Very good, sir.”

Grimes was relaxing under a hot shower when he heard the telephone buzz. Wrapping a towel around himself, he hurried out of the bathroom, colliding with Captain Stacey.

“It’s probably for me,” he said.

“It would be,” growled Stacey.

It was. It was in reply to Grimes’s signal which, when decoded, had read,
Urgently require information on solar flares Mellise sun last year local.
It said, after Grimes had used his little book,
No repeat no solar flares Mellise sun past ten years.

Somebody’s lying,
thought Grimes,
and I don’t think it’s my secretary.

Hurricane Lynn, while it lasted, put a stop to any further investigations by Grimes. Apart from anything else, the sea people were keeping to their underwater houses, each of which was well stocked with air bladders and the carbon dioxide absorbing plants. He managed, however, to get back on friendly terms with Lynn Davis—or she with him; he was never quite sure which was the case. He found her increasingly attractive; she possessed a maturity that was lacking in all the other young women in the tiny human community. He liked her, but he suspected her—but of what? It was rather more than a hunch: there had been, for example, that deliberate lie about the solar flares. Grimes, who was an omnivorous reader, was well aware that fictional detectives frequently solved their cases by sleeping with the suspects. He wasn’t quite ready to go that far; he had always considered such a
modus operandi
distinctly ungentlemanly.

Then Hurricane Lynn blew itself out and normally fine weather returned to the equatorial belt. Flying was once again possible, and Petersen came back to the spaceport from Mount Llayilla. Grimes didn’t like him. He was a tall, athletic young man, deeply tanned, with sun-bleached hair and startlingly pale blue eyes. His features were too regular, and his mouth too sensual. The filed stories of his past amatory indiscretions made sense. And he was jealously possessive insofar as Lynn Davis was concerned.
She’s nice, Commodore,
was the unspoken message that Grimes received, loud and clear.
She’s mine. Keep your dirty paws off her.

Grimes didn’t like it, and neither did the girl. But the Commodore, now that the storm was over, was busy again. At least once daily he argued with the Ambassador, trying to persuade that gentleman to request the services of a team of marine biologists and professional fishermen. He composed and sent his own report to Rim Runners’ head office. And, whenever conditions were suitable, he was out to the pearl beds with Wunnaara, at first in the little submarine and then in a skin diving outfit that the spaceport’s repair staff had improvised for him. It was a bastard sort of rig, to quote the chief mechanic, but it worked. There was a spacesuit helmet with compressed air tanks, suitably modified. There was a pair of flippers cut from a sheet of thick, tough plastic. There was a spear gun and a supply of especially made harpoons, each of which had an explosive warhead, fused for impact. As long as these were not used at close range the person firing them should be reasonably safe.

Lynn Davis came into the maintenance workshop while Grimes was examining one of the projectiles.

“What’s that, John?” she asked.

“Just a new kind of spear,” he replied shortly.

“New—an’ nasty,” volunteered the chief mechanic, ignoring Grimes’s glare. “Pack too much of a wallop for my taste. If you’re too close to the target when one o’ these goes off, you’ve had it.”

“Explosive?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

She turned back to Grimes. “Are these safe, John?”

“Safe enough, as long as they’re used carefully.”

“But against starfish! Like using an elephant gun against a gnat!”

“There are starfish and starfish,” he told her. “As everybody on this planet should know by this time.”

“You think this will kill them?”

“It’s worth giving it a go.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I suppose so. . . .” Then, more briskly, “And when are you giving your secret weapon a trial?”

“There are a few modifications to be made,” Grimes told her.

“They’ll all be ready for you tomorrow morning,” said the mechanic. “As promised.”

She turned on her dazzling smile. “Then you’d better dine with me tonight, John. If you insist on playing with these dangerous toys there mightn’t be another time.” She laughed, but that odd, underlying note of seriousness persisted. She went on. “And Jeff will be out of our hair, I promise you that. There’s a party on in the Carlotti Operations’ Mess, and he
never
misses those.”

“I’ve a pile of paper work, Lynn,” Grimes told her.

“That can wait.”

He made his decision. “All right, then. What time?”

“Whatever time suits you; 1800 hours, shall we say? For a few drinks first . . . ?” “Good. I’ll be there.”

He dressed carefully for the dinner party, paying even more attention to the contents of his pockets than to the clothes themselves. He had one of his hunches, and he knew he’d need the things that he was taking from the secret compartment of his suitcase. There was the Minetti automatic, with a spare clip, neither of which made more than a slight bulge in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. There was the pack of cigarillos. (Two of the slim, brown cylinders possessed very special properties, and were marked in such a way that only Grimes would be able to identify them.)
Marriage to an Intelligence officer,
he thought,
has its points. Something is bound to rub off.
There was the button on his suit that was a camera, and the other button that was a miniaturized recorder.

On the way from his room to the front door he passed through the lounge where Captain and Mrs. Stacey were watching a rather witless variety program on the screen of their playmaster. The Captain looked up and around, his fat, heavy face serious. He said, “I know that it’s none of my business, Commodore, and that you’re technically my superior, but we—Lucy and myself—think that you should be warned. Miss Davis is a dangerous woman. . . .”

“Indeed, Captain?”

“Yes, indeed. She leads men on, and then that Jeff Petersen is apt to turn nasty.”

“Oh?”

An ugly flush suffused Stacey’s face. “Frankly, sir, I don’t give a damn if you are beaten up for playing around with a girl young enough to be your granddaughter. But because you’re Astronautical Superintendent of Rim Runners there’d be a scandal, a very nasty scandal. And I don’t want one in
my
spaceport.”

“Very concisely put, Captain. But I can look after myself.”

“I hope that you can, Commodore. Good night to you.”

“Good night, Captain Stacey.”

Grimes let himself out. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fall into place; his suspicions were about to be confirmed. He smiled grimly as he walked along the narrow street toward the row of neat little bungalows where Lynn Davis lived. Night was falling fast, and already lights were coming on in the houses. From open windows drifted the sound of music. The scene was being set for a romantic—romantic?—assignation.

Lynn Davis met him at her door. She was dressed in something loose and, Grimes noted as she stood with the lamp behind her, almost transparent. She took his hand, led him into her living room, gently pushed him down into a deep chair. Close by it was a tray of drinks, and a dish upon which exotic delicacies were displayed. Real Terran olives—and a score of those would make a nasty hole in the weekly pay of an assistant met. officer. Sea dragon caviar from Atlantia . . . pickled rock frogs from Dunartil . . .

The playmaster was on, its volume turned well down. A woman was singing. It was an old song, dating back to the twentieth century, its lyrics modernized, its melody still sweet with lost archaic lilt.

Spaceman, the stars are calling,
Spaceman, you have to roam . . .
Spaceman, through light-years falling,
Turn back at last to home. . . .

“Sherry, John?” asked Lynn Davis. She was sitting on the arm of his chair. He could see the gleam of her smooth flesh through her sheer robe. “Amontillado?”

He said. “You’re doing me proud.”

“It’s not often I entertain such an important guest as you.”

He sipped the wine from the fragile glass she had filled for him. She had measured her own drink from the same decanter. He did not think that there was anything wrong with it—any connoisseur would have told him, indignantly that there was
nothing
wrong with it—but at the first hint of muzziness he would smoke a cigarillo. . . .

She was leaning closer to him, almost against him. Her robe was falling open in front. She was wearing nothing underneath it. She said, “Aren’t you hot? Why not take your jacket off?”

“Later, perhaps.” He managed a quite creditable leer, “after all, we’ve all night.”

“Why waste time?” Her mouth was slightly parted in frank invitation.
What the hell?
thought Grimes, and accepted. Her body was pliant in his arms, her lips on his warm and moist. But his mind, his cold, calculating mind, was still in full command of the situation. He heard the door open softly, heard feet sliding over the thick carpet. He pushed the girl away from him, from the corner of his eye saw her fall to the floor, a delectable sprawl of exposed, gleaming body and limbs.

“So,” snarled Jeff Petersen. “So this is what you get up to, Mr. Commodore Dirty Old Man Grimes! What did you promise her, you swine? Promotion and a transfer to a better station?”

Petersen, Grimes noted, was not a slave to this instincts any more than he, Grimes, had been. Superficially his voice was that of the wronged, jealous lover, but there was an artificial quality in his rage.

Grimes said equably, “I can explain. . . .”

“Yes.” Petersen was advancing slowly. “You can explain after I’ve torn off your right arm and beaten your brains out with it.”

Suddenly the tiny pistol was in Grimes’s right hand. It cracked once, and once only, a sound disproportionate to its dimensions. Petersen halted, staggered, staring stupidly. He swayed on his feet for long seconds and then crashed to the floor, overturning the low table, spilling wine over the sprawling body of the girl. She exploded up from the carpet like a tigress, all teeth and claws. Grimes was hampered by the chair in which he was confined but fought her off somehow. He did not want to use the gun again.

“You bastard!” She was sobbing. “You ruthless bastard! You killed him. And we were careful not to kill—not even the natives!”

“I didn’t kill him,” Grimes managed to say at last, after he had imprisoned her hands behind her back, after he had clasped her legs between his own. “I didn’t kill him. This pistol is loaded with anesthetic needles. He’ll be out for twelve hours—no more, no less.”