4
As far as Grimes knew there was no real urgency—nonetheless he pushed Seeker along at her maximum safe velocity. This entailed acceleration slightly in excess of 1.5 G, with a temporal precession rate that did not quite, as Maggie Lazenby tartly put it, have all hands and the cook living backward. But Maggie had been born and reared on Arcadia, a relatively low gravity planet and, furthermore, disliked and distrusted the time-twisting Mannschenn Drive even more than the average spaceman or—woman. However, Lieutenant Brian Connery was an extremely competent engineer and well able to maintain the delicate balance between the ship’s main drive units without remotely endangering either the vessel or her personnel.
Even so, Grimes suffered. Seeker had a mixed crew—and a ship, as Grimes was fond of saying, is not a Sunday School outing. On past voyages it had been tacitly assumed that Maggie was the captain’s lady. On this voyage it was so assumed too—by everybody except one of the two people most intimately concerned. Grimes tried to play along with the assumption, but it was hopeless.
“I suppose,” he said bitterly, after she had strongly resisted a quite determined pass, “that you’re still hankering after that beefy lout, Brasidus or whatever his name was, on Sparta . . . .”
“No,” she told him, not quite truthfully. “No. It’s just that I can’t possibly join in your fun and games when I feel as though I weigh about fourteen times normal.”
“Only one and a half times,” he corrected her.
“It feels fourteen times. And it’s the psychological effect that inhibits me.”
Grimes slumped back in his chair, extending an arm to his open liquor cabinet.
“Lay off it!” she told him sharply.
“So I can’t drink now.”
“You will not drink now.” Her manner softened. “Don’t forget, John, that you’re responsible for the ship and everybody aboard her . . . .”
“Nothing can happen in deep space.”
“Can’t it?” Her fine eyebrows lifted slightly. “Can’t it? After some of the stories I’ve heard, and after some of the stories you’ve told me yourself . . .
“Mphm.” He reached out again, but it was a half-hearted attempt.
“Things will work out, John,” she said earnestly. “They always do, one way or the other . . . .”
“Suppose it’s the wrong way?”
“You’ll survive. I’ll survive. We’ll survive.” She quoted, half seriously, “ ‘Men have died, and worms have eaten ‘em—but not for love . . .’ “
“Where’s that from?” he asked, interested.
“Shakespeare. You trade school boys—you’re quite impossible. You know nothing—nothing—outside your own field.”
“I resent that,” said Grimes. “At the Academy we had to do a course in Twentieth Century fiction . . .
Again the eyebrows lifted. “You surprise me.” And then she demanded incredulously, “What sort of fiction?”
“It was rather specialized. Science fiction, as a matter of fact. Some of those old buggers made very good guesses. Most of them, though, were way off the beam. Even so, it was fascinating.”
“And still trade-school-oriented.”
He shrugged. “Have it your way, Maggie. We’re just Yahoos. But we do get our ships around.” He paused, then delivered his own quotation. “ ‘Transportation is civilization.’ “
“All right,” she said at last. “Who wrote that?”
“Kipling.”
“Kipling—and science fiction?”
“You should catch up on your own reading some time . . . .” The telephone buzzed sharply. He got up and went rapidly to the handset.
She remarked sweetly, “Nothing can happen in deep space . . . .”
“Captain here,” said Grimes sharply.
Lieutenant Hayakawa’s reedy voice drifted into the day cabin. “Hayakawa, Captain sir . . . .”
“Yes, Mr. Hayakawa?”
“I . . . am not certain. But I think I have detected psionic radiation—not close, but not too far distant.
“It is extremely unlikely,” Grimes said, “that we are the only ship in this sector of space.”
“I . . . I know, Captain. But—it is all vague, and the other telepath is maintaining a block . . .I . . . I tried at first to push through, and he knew that I was trying . . . . Then, suddenly, I relaxed . . . .”
Psionic judo . . . thought Grimes.
“Yes . . . You could call it that . . . But there is somebody aboard that ship who is thinking all the time about . . . Morrowvia . . . .”
“Drongo Kane,” said Grimes.
“No, Captain. Not Drongo Kane. This is a . . . young mind. Immature . . . .”
“Mphm. Anything else?”
“Yes . . . . He is thinking, too, of somebody called Tabitha . . . .”
“And who’s she when she’s up and dressed?”
“She is not dressed . . . not as he remembers her.”
“This,” stated Maggie Lazenby, “is disgusting. I thought, in my innocence, that the Rhine Institute took a very dim view of any prying by its graduates into private thoughts. I was under the impression that telepathy was to be used only for instantaneous communications over astronomical distances.”
“If every Rhine Institute graduate who broke the Institute’s rules dropped dead right now,” Grimes told her, “there’d be one helluva shortage of trained telepaths. In any case, the Institute allows some latitude to those of its people who’re in the employ of a recognized law enforcement agency. The Federation’s Survey Service is one such. Conversely, the Institute recognizes the right of any telepath, no matter by whom employed, to put up a telepathic block.”
“I still don’t like it. Any of it.”
“Mr. Hayakawa,” said Grimes into the telephone, “you heard all that?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“And what are your views?”
In reply came a thin chuckle, then, “I try to be loyal, sir. To the Institute, to the Service, to my shipmates, to my captain. Sometimes it is hard to be loyal to everybody at once. But, also, I try to be loyal to myself.”
“Putting it briefly,” said Maggie Lazenby, “you know on which side your bread is buttered.”
“Butter is an animal-derived food, Miss Commander, which I never touch.”
“Mr. Hayakawa,” asked Grimes, “do you hear anything further from the strange ship?”
“No, Captain. The block has been reestablished.”
“Let me know when you do hear anything more.” He punched buttons, then spoke again into the instrument. “Captain here, Mr. Timmins. Mr. Hayakawa has reported a vessel in our vicinity, apparently heading for Morrowvia. Have you picked anything up?”
“Just the normal commercial traffic, sir. A Shaara freighter, Mmoorroomm, Rob Roy to ZZrreemm. Empress of Scotia, Dunedin to Darnstadt. Cutty Sark, Carinthia to Lorn. Schnauzer, Siluria toMacbeth. And, according to Sector Plot, the following ships not fitted with Carlotti equipment: Sundowner, Aquarius to Faraway, Rim Eland, Elsinore to Ultimo. . . .”
“Thank you.” Then, speaking more to himself than to anybody else, “Schnauzer . . . Dog Star Line . . . cleared for Macbeth. . . . She might finish up there eventually . . . .”
He ignored Maggie’s questioning look and went to his playmaster. As its name implied, the device provided entertainment, visual and audio—but this one, a standard fitting in the captain’s quarters in all FSS ships, was also hooked up to the vessel’s encyclopedia bank. “Get me Lloyd’s Register,” he ordered. “I want details on Schnauzer. Sirian ownership. Dog Star Line . . . .”
The screen lit up, displaying the facsimile of a printed page.
Schnauzer—a new ship, small, exceptionally fast for a merchantman, defensively armed. (The Dog Star Line had long insisted that its vessels were capable of conducting their own defense on some of the trade routes where piracy still persisted.)
“Mphm,” he grunted. Back at the telephone he ordered Timmins to send a coded message to the FSS agent at Port Llangowan, on Siluria, to ask the names of Schnauzer’s personnel when she cleared outward.
He strongly suspected that the master would be Captain Danzellan.