Upon a Sea of Stars (56 page)

Grimes and the Jailbirds

“HAVE YOU EVER,
in the course of your long and distinguished career, been in jail, Commodore?” asked Kitty Kelly after she had adjusted the lenses and microphones of her recording equipment to her satisfaction.

“As a matter of fact I have,” said Grimes. He made a major production of filling and lighting his pipe. “It was quite a few years ago, but I still remember the occasion vividly. It’s not among my more pleasant memories. . . .”

“I should imagine not,” she concurred sympathetically. “What were you in for? Piracy? Smuggling? Gunrunning?”

“I wasn’t in in the sense that you assume,” he told her. “After all, there are more people in a jail than the convicts. The governor, the warders, the innocent bystanders. . . .”

“Such as yourself?”

“Such as myself.”

It was (he said) when I was owner-master of
Little Sister
. She was the flagship and the only ship of Far Traveler Couriers, the business title under which I operated. She was a deep-space pinnace, and I ran her single-handed, carrying small parcels of special cargo hither and yon, the occasional passenger. Oh, it was a living of sorts, quite a good living at times, although, at other times, my bank balance would be at a perilously low ebb.

Well, I’d carried a consignment of express mail from Davinia to Helmskirk—none of the major lines had anything making a direct run between the two planets—and I was now berthed at Port Helms waiting for something to turn up. The worst of it all was that Helmskirk is not the sort of world upon which to spend an enforced vacation—or, come to that, any sort of vacation. There is a distinct shortage of bright lights. The first settlers had all been members of a wowserish religious sect misnamed the Children of Light—it was founded on Earth in the late twentieth century, Old Reckoning. Over the years their descendants had become more and more wowserish.

The manufacture, vending, and consumption of alcoholic beverages were strictly prohibited. So was smoking—and by “smoking” I mean smoking anything. There were laws regulating the standards of dress—and not only in the streets of the cities and towns. Can you imagine a public bathing beach where people of both sexes—even children—are compelled to wear neck-to-ankle, skirted swimming costumes?

There were theaters, showing both live and recorded entertainment, but the plays presented were all of the improving variety, with virtue triumphant and vice defeated at the end of the last act. I admit that some of the clumsily contrived situations were quite funny, although not intentionally so. I found this out when I laughed as a stern father turned his frail, blonde daughter, who had been discovered smoking a smuggled cigarette, out into a raging snowstorm. Immediately after my outbreak of unseemly mirth, I was turned out myself, by two burly ushers. Oh, well, it wasn’t snowing, and it was almost the end of the play, anyhow.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the local customs authorities had not done their best to make sure that visiting spacemen conformed to Helmskirkian standards whilst on the surface of their planet. They inspected my library of playmaster cassettes and seized anything that could be classed as pornographic—much of it the sort of entertainment that your maiden aunt, on most worlds, could watch without a blush. These tapes, they told me, would be kept under bond in the customs warehouse and returned to me just prior to my final lift-off from the Helmskirk System. They impounded the contents of my grog locker and even all my pipe tobacco. Fortunately, I can, when pushed to it, make an autochef do things never intended by its manufacturer, and so it didn’t take me long to replenish my stock of gin. And lettuce leaves from my hydroponics minifarm, dried and suitably treated, made a not-too-bad tobacco substitute.

Nonetheless, I’d have gotten the hell off Helmskirk as soon as the bags of express mail had been discharged if I’d had any definite place to go. But when you’re tramping around, as I was, you put your affairs into the hands of an agent and wait hopefully for news of an advantageous charter.

So Messrs. Muggeridge, Whitelaw, and Nile were supposed to be keeping their ears to the ground on my behalf, and I was getting more and more bored, and every day doing my sums—or having the ship’s computer do them for me—and trying to work out how long it would be before the profit made on my last voyage was completely eaten up by port charges and the like. For the lack of better entertainment I haunted the Port Helms municipal library—at least it was free—and embarked on a study course on the history of this dreary colony. Someday I shall write a book—The Galactic Guide to Places to Stay Away From. . . .

The fiction in the library was not of the variety that is written to inflame the passions. It was all what, during the Victorian era on Earth, would have been called “improving.” The factual works were of far greater interest. From them I learned that the incidence of crime—real crime, not such petty offenses as trying to grow your own tobacco or brew your own beer—on Helmskirk was surprisingly high. Cork a bottle of some fermenting mixture—and any human society is such a mixture—too tightly and the pressures will build up. There was an alarmingly high incidence of violent crime—armed robbery, assault, rape, murder.

I began to appreciate the necessity for Helmskirk’s penal satellite, a smallish natural moon in a just under twenty-four-hour orbit about its primary. Not only was it a place of
correction and/or punishment for the really bad bastards, but it also housed a large population of people who’d been caught playing cards for money, reading banned books, and similar heinous offenses. If I’d been so unfortunate as to have been born on Helmskirk, I thought, almost certainly I should have been acquainted with the maze of caverns and tunnels, artificial and natural, that honeycombed the ball of rock.

As the days wore on I’d settled into a regular routine. The morning I’d devote to minor maintenance jobs. Then I’d have lunch. Before leaving the ship after this meal, I’d make a telephone call to my agents to see if they’d anything for me. Then I’d stroll ashore to the library. It was a dreary walk through streets of drably functional buildings, but it was exercise. I’d try to keep myself amused until late afternoon, and then drop briefly into the agents’ office on the way back to
Little Sister
.

Then the routine was disrupted.

As I entered the premises, old Mr. Muggeridge looked up accusingly from his desk, saying, “We’ve been trying to get hold of you, Captain.”

I said, “I wasn’t far away. I was in the municipal library.”

“Hmph. I never took you for a studious type. Well, anyway, I’ve a time charter for you. A matter of six local weeks, minimum.”

“Where to?” I asked hopefully.

“It will not be taking you outside the Helmskirk System,” he told me rather spitefully. “The prison tender, the
Jerry Falwell
, has broken down. I am not acquainted with all the technical details, but I understand that the trouble is with its inertial drive unit. The authorities have offered you employment until such time as the tender is back in operation.”

I went through the charter party carefully, looking for any clauses that might be turned to my disadvantage. But Muggeridge, Whitelaw, and Nile had been looking after my interests. After all, why shouldn’t they? The more I got, the more their rake-off would be.

So I signed in the places indicated and learned that I was to load various items of stores for the prison the following morning, lifting off as soon as these were on board and stowed to my satisfaction. Oh, well, it was a job and would keep me solvent until something better turned up.

It was a job, but it wasn’t one that I much cared for. I classed it as being on a regular run from nowhere to nowhere. The atmosphere of Helmskirk I had found oppressive; that of the penal satellite was even more so. The voyage out took a little over two days, during which time I should have been able to enjoy my favorite playmaster cassettes if the customs officers had seen fit to release them. But rules were rules, and I was not leaving the Helmskirk System. And the moon, which was called Sheol, was very much part of it.

On my first visit I did not endear myself to the prison governor. I’d jockeyed
Little Sister
into a large air lock set into the satellite’s surface and then left my control room for the main cabin. I opened the air lock doors and then sat down to await whatever boarders there would be—somebody with the inevitable papers to sign, a working party to discharge my cargo, and so on and so forth. I was not expecting the ruler of this tiny world to pay a call in person.

He strode into the ship, a tall man in dark gray civilian clothes, long-nosed, sour-featured, followed by an entourage of black-uniformed warders. “Come in, come in!” I called. “This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!”

He said, “I do not see any cat. Where is the animal? The importation of any livestock into Sheol is strictly contrary to regulations.”

I said, “It was only a figure of speech.”

“And a remarkably foul-mouthed one.” He sat down uninvited. “I am the governor of this colony, Mr. Grimes. During each of your visits here you will observe the regulations, a copy of which will be provided you. You will be allowed, should time permit, to make the occasional conducted tour of Sheol so that you may become aware of the superiority of our penal system to that on other worlds. There will, however, be no fraternization between yourself and any of our inmates. There will be no attempt by you to smuggle in any small luxuries. One of the officers of the
Jerry Falwell
made such an attempt some months back. He is now among our . . . guests, serving a long sentence.”

“What did he try to smuggle in?” I asked.

“It is none of your business, Mr. Grimes. But I will tell you. It was cigarettes that he had illegally obtained from a visiting star tramp. And I will tell you what he hoped to receive in exchange. Mood opals. And the penalty for smuggling out mood opals is even greater than that for smuggling in cigarettes.”

“What are mood opals?” asked Kitty.

“Don’t you know? They were, for a
while, very popular and very expensive precious stones on Earth and other planets, especially the Shaara worlds. The Shaara loved them. They weren’t opals, although they looked rather like them. But they were much fierier, and the colors shifted, according, it was said, to the mood of the wearer, although probably it was due to no more than changes in temperature and atmospheric humidity. They were found only on—or in, rather—Sheol. They were actually coprolites, fossilized excrement, all that remained of some weird, rock-eating creatures that inhabited Sheol and became extinct ages before the colonization of Helmskirk. The mood opals became one of Helmskirk’s major moneymaking exports. They were never worn by anybody on Helmskirk itself, such frivolity as personal jewelry being illegal.”

“How come,” asked Kitty, “that we’ve never seen mood opals here? Most Terran fads drift out to this part of the Galaxy eventually.”

“There aren’t any mood opals anymore,” Grimes told her. “It seems that the polishing process, which removed the outer crust, exposed the jewels to the atmosphere and to radiation of all kinds. After a few years of such exposure, the once-precious stones would crumble into worthless dust.”