Chapter 1
GRIMES CAME TO TIRALBIN.
Little Sister, obedient to the slightest touch on her controls, dropped through the dark, soggy clouds of the great rain depression to Port Muldoon, finally touching down almost at the exact center of the triangle formed by the vividly scarlet beacon lights.
Aerospace Control commented, “A nice landing, Captain.”
Grimes grunted. It should have been a nice landing, he thought. He was used to handling ships, big ships, and setting them down gently on their vaned tails; the careful belly flop that he had just achieved would not have been beyond the competence of a first trip cadet. Little Sister, as he had decided to call her, wasn’t a real ship. She was only a pinnace. A deep-space-going pinnace with all the necessary equipment and instrumentation, and everything of very high quality, but a pinnace nonetheless.
“Is that some sort of bronze alloy you’re built of, Captain?” asked Aerospace Control.
“No,” replied Grimes. “Gold.”
“Gold?” came the incredulous query from the transceiver. “You must be a millionaire!”
“I’m not,” replied Grimes glumly.
“But you said, when you made your first contact, that you’re Owner-Master . . .”
“I did. I am. But the previous owner of this dreamboat wasn’t a millionaire either . . .”
“No?”
“No. She was—and still is—a trillionaire.”
“It figures,” said Aerospace Control enviously. “It figures.” Then, in a businesslike voice, “Please have your papers ready. Port Health and Customs are on their way out to you.”
***
Grimes stared out through the viewports to the low—apart from the control tower—spaceport administration buildings, gleaming palely and bleakly through the persistent downpour. There was nothing else to look at. There were no other ships in port and whatever scenery might be in the vicinity was blotted out by the heavy rain. A wheeled vehicle nosed out from a port in an otherwise blank wall, sped out to the pinnace in a cloud of self-generated spray.
Grimes got ready to receive the boarding officers. His papers—even to the gift deed making him owner of Little Sister—were in order but he was well aware that alcohol is the universe’s finest lubricant for the machinery of official business. Luckily the Baroness had been generous; the pinnace’s stores were even better stocked with luxuries than with necessities. Whether or not they continued to be so would depend to a great extent upon his business acumen.
***
The Chief of Customs—a fat, bald man bulging out of his gaudy uniform—was thirsty. So was the Port Health Officer, who would have passed for an ill-nourished mortician if members of that profession were in the habit of wearing enough gold braid for a Galactic Admiral. Both of them told Grimes, more than once, that they never got real Scotch on Tiralbin. After he opened the second bottle Grimes decided that real Scotch would soon be once again as scarce on this planet as it ever had been.
The officials were, naturally, curious.
“A gold pinnace . . .” murmured the Customs man. “Solid gold . . .”
“Modified,” said Grimes. “A most excellent structural material.”
“Most excellent indeed. I’m surprised, Captain, that you didn’t give her a more fitting name. Golden Girl. Golden Lady. Golden Princess. Golden anything . . .”
“Sentiment,” said Grimes. “The mother ship, The Far Traveller, had a pilot-computer. An intelligent one. Bossy. We called it—sorry, her—Big Sister. So . . .”
“And you were master of this Far Traveller,” went on the Customs officer. “Owned by Michelle, Baroness d’Estang, of El Dorado . . . That must be a world! Better than this dismal dump . . .”
“Better,” said Grimes, “if you happen to be a billionaire. But not for the likes of us.”
“You didn’t do too badly, Captain,” said the doctor. “This Baroness must have thought quite highly of you to give you a present like this pinnace.”
“In lieu of back pay and separation pay,” Grimes told him.
“And so you brought the pinnace here to sell her,” said the Chief of Customs. “Her value as scrap would be quite enormous. Remarkable how gold has remained the precious metal for millenia. So I’m afraid that you’ll have to make out a fresh set of papers. She’s classed as an import, not as a visiting spacecraft to be entered inwards.” He began to look really happy. “Her value will have to be assessed, of course. And then there’ll be the duty to pay.”
“I didn’t bring her here to sell her,” said Grimes. “I want, if I can, to earn a living with her.”
The two officials looked around the tiny cabin. Their eyebrows rose. Then the Port Health Officer said, “I’m no spaceman, although I did do a passage-working trip in Cluster Lines, years ago, just after I qualified. But I know how spacemen do earn their livings. They carry cargo. They carry passengers. And I just don’t see how you could carry either in this flying sardine—ha! ha! goldfish!—can . . .”
“There are mails,” said Grimes.
“What’s sex got to do with it?” asked the Customs Officer. “Oh. Mails, not males. Letters. Parcels. It’ll have to be bloody small parcels, though, and precious few of them.”
He drained his glass and held it out for a refill.