Grimes was a competent spaceman but he was no engineer.
During his Survey Service career he had subscribed to the belief commonly held by spacemen officers regarding routine overhauls of machinery in port by those of the engineering branch. "They're so surprised that their toys are working properly that they have to take them apart to find out why!" All Little Sister's machinery had been functioning well when Grimes and his late employer, the Baroness d'Estang, had been cast adrift from The Far Traveller. It had still been functioning well when the pinnace had been intercepted by Drongo Kane's Southerly Buster. After the Baroness had decided to embark on Kane's ship, leaving Little Sister to Grimes as a parting gift, all had functioned well on his lonely voyage to Tiralbin. Grimes had lifted from Port Muldoon without a worry in the universe—at least insofar as his ship and her equipment were concerned. He had set his initial trajectory for The Cat's Eye. From that starfall he would adjust course to head towards the Boggarty sun, homing on the Carlotti Beacon on Boggarty, obtaining fixes as required from that beacon and those on Jones-world and the uninhabited Z314U.
So—he thought in his innocence—there was nothing to do but enjoy the voyage. Tamara was a good shipmate. This was a holiday for her and she was making the most of it. She played & good game of chess. Her tastes and Grimes' coincided regarding the entertainment spools for the playmaster. She could coax the auto-chef into producing dishes that Grimes had never dreamed could be concocted from such unpromising raw material as sewage-fed algae. She improved on Grimes' homemade gin and persuaded the mechanized mini-galley to distill a brandy that Napoleon himself (after a hard battle and with nothing else to drink) would not have sneezed at, a liqueur that the Benedictine monks might have recognized as a distant cousin to their own famous after dinner drink, a Tia Maria that, topped with synthetic cream, was—in the absence of a potable yardstick—indistinguishable from the real thing.
And, he told himself with a certain smugness, he was getting paid for all this. No doubt he and Tamara would say goodbye without heartbreak when the time came, but meanwhile . . .
Little Sister fell steadily down the dark dimensions, through the warped continuum. Her inertial drive hammered away steadily and healthily. There was light, and there was warmth. Meals were cooked and served. Entertainment of high quality was available from the play-master at the touch of a finger. And it would be a long time before Grimes and Tamara tired of each other's company, before each fresh coupling of their bodies failed to engender some fresh refinement of sensation . . .
And yet it came to pass.
She moved under him sinuously, rotating her navel against him, contracting her vaginal muscles and, somehow, caused her erect nipples to titillate the skin of his chest while her eager tongue explored his mouth . . .
The orgasm was explosive.
She moved under him sinuously, rotating her navel against his, contracting her vaginal muscles and, somehow, caused her erect nipples to titillate the skin of his chest while her eager tongue explored his mouth . . .
The orgasm was . . .
Was . . .
Implosive.
She move under him . . .
But although his body responded his mind was suddenly cold, frightened.
The orgasm . . .
Exgasm . . .
Ingasm . . .
She moved . . .
He tried to roll off her, but it was as though some fantastic acceleration were holding him tight to the yielding cushions of her body.
Her erect nipples . . . her eager tongue . . .
The explosive/implosive orgasm . . .
She moved under him sinuously . . .
And, he realized, the thin, high whine of the mini-Mannschenn was no longer steady, was oscillating . . .
He tried to break free from the strong cage of her arms and legs—and with startling suddenness, at the very moment of implosion, did so. He fell from the wide bunk to the deck, looked dazedly about him, at the crazy perspective, at the colors sagging down the spectrum. He heard her cry out but the words were gibberish. He ignored her, got unsteadily to his feet. The doorway, aft, of the engine-room-cum-galley was incredibly distant, at the end of a long, convoluted tunnel, the walls of which throbbed and quivered as though this were a duct in the body of some living creature.
He took a step—it was though he were wading against the current through some viscous fluid—and then another. Somehow the entrance to the engineroom seemed more distant than it had at first. He took a third step, and a fourth—and he was looking down at the casing of the mini-Mannschenn and felt his brain being scrambled by the weird warbling of the machine, alternating from the ultrasonic to the subsonic. He dropped to his knees and began to loosen the butterfly nuts holding the casing in place. He put a hand on each of the grips, prepared to lift the cover.
In the very nick of time he realized what he was doing. To look directly at a normally functioning Mannschenn Drive unit, a complexity of spuming, ever-precessing gyro-scopes, is bad enough. To be in the near vicinity of one that is malfunctioning can be suicidal—and eversion is a far from pleasant way of suicide.
Luckily the master switch for the machine was within arm's length. Grimes reached for it, threw it. The crazy warbling subsided, died, stopped.
"Grimes! What's happening?"
He turned to look at her. She was a naked woman. He had seen naked women before. She was a beautiful naked woman. He had seen beautiful naked women before. And her skin was too pale and the hairless jointure of her thighs made her look absurdly childish. Somehow the magic was gone out of her.
She said, "That—what we had just now—was what I foresaw at the start of the voyage. But what has happened?"
He said, "The mini-Mannschenn's on the blink."
She asked, "What's wrong with it?"
He said, "I'm not an engineer . . ."
He remembered how one of the overhaul jobs done by a starship's engineroom staff is a complete check of the Mannschenn Drive, including examination of every hollow ball bearing. He had blandly assumed that the ball bearings in this mini-Mannschenn, presumably of the same super-gold as the rest of the pinnace and her fittings, would be immune to normal wear and tear.
"I'm not an engineer," he repeated. "No, that wasn't meant to be an excuse. It was self-accusation."
He lifted the cover from the machine, looked down at it. Even though he was no engineer he could see at a glance what was wrong. The spindle of one of the little rotors had slipped, at one end, from its mounting, was free to oscillate. He poked it with a tentative forefinger and it wobbled. Somehow this motion was just not quite enough for it to foul the other rotors. Had it done so the mini-Mannschenn could have been, probably would have been, irreparably wrecked.
There was a scattering of golden beads on the baseplate of the machine—the ball bearings. There was a scattering of gold beads and a little heap of curved, golden fragments. So he should have checked those bearings before lifting off from Port Muldoon, or hired one of the Port Captain's technicians to do so.
So he hadn't.
So what?
He hoped that there were spares, and tools.
There were.
There was no instruction manual.
There wouldn't be, of course. Big Sister, the electronic brain of The Far Traveller, had needed no such literature. But, he remembered, she had transferred much of her knowledge to the pinnace's computer.
He went back to the main cabin, switched on the play-master.
Tamara said, "This is no tune to watch some trashy operetta."
He ignored her, said to the instrument, "Information on mini-Mannschenn maintenance and repairs . . ."
The diagrams and pictures succeeded each other on the screen. He said, "Hold it!" Then, "Play that sequence again."
While he watched he filled and lit his pipe.
She said, "Did anybody ever tell you that a naked man smoking a pipe looks ludicrous?"
"No," he said. "And if they did, I shouldn't believe them."
She asked, "And how long shall we be stuck here? The consignee of the mail paid Special Delivery rate—which means that the Post Office, my Post Office, is liable to a penalty for every day's delay over the specified time."
He said, "Be quiet, please, and let me watch this sequence."
She shut up.
It should be quite simple, thought Grimes. Once the proper number of bearings was in the channel, the race, the end of the spindle would lock automatically into place. Until this was done Little Sister would, of course still be proceeding in the right direction—but she would be going a long way in a very long time. Once the mini-Mannschenn was fixed she would be going a very long way in a short time.
There was one snag, as Grimes realized after the passage of about three frustrating hours. The instructional film had shown the maintenance of a full-sized Mannschenn Drive unit—a job for a team of engineers. The maintenance of a mini-Mannschenn is a job for a watchmaker.
And Grimes was even less of a watchmaker than he was an engineer.
Somehow he had contrived to unseat four other spindles and the deck of the engineroom-cum-galley was littered with golden ball bearings.
But he worked on with dogged determination, wishing, now and again, that Tamara would get off her big, fat arse and do something to help. He was vaguely conscious of her pale form at the forward end of the pinnace, in the control cab, and supposed that she was either sulking or admiring the scenery.
Or both.