Chapter 4
GRIMES HAD A BUSY MORNING. He was able to arrange a hook-up between the pinnace’s NST transceiver and the local telephone exchange, so was able to carry out most of his business by telephone. This was just as well, as it was still raining heavily and he had no local currency with which to pay for cab hire. As he accumulated data he fed it into Little Sister’s computer. The insurance premium demanded by Lloyd’s was amazingly high, but not so amazing, he realized, bearing in mind the fact that his spacecraft was built of a precious metal. He was rather surprised that the figure should be quoted with so little delay, but, of course, Lloyd’s records would contain all details of The Far Traveller, including her pinnace.
Finally the estimated cost of the round voyage appeared on the screen. It was, inevitably, frightening. After he realized that his master’s salary was included in the total he decided to add only a modest 10%. He put through a call to the Superintending Postmistress. After a short delay her face appeared on the screen, as his would be appearing on the one at her end.
“Yes, Captain?” she asked.
“I’ve done my sums,” he replied. “I don’t think you’ll like the result.”
“Tell me.”
He told her.
Her fine eyebrows arched, but the rest of her face remained impassive.
She said, “I’m not buying your pinnace.”
He said, “If you were it would cost quite a bit more.”
She smiled. “I suppose so. And, after all, I’m not paying the bill. Neither is my government. The Boggartians want the shipment no later than yesterday, and if it’s sent through normal channels it could take a year to reach them. I’ll punch through a Carlottigram and find out if they’re willing to pay the charges. I’ll call you back.”
Grimes brewed coffee, filled and lit his pipe, settled down to watch what passed for entertainment on Tiralbin on his playmaster, which, in port, could function as a tridi receiver. He watched without much enthusiasm a local version of football being played in pouring rain. One team was male, the other female, but the players were so thickly coated with mud that it was impossible to determine their sex.
The transceiver chimed.
It was the Superintending Postmistress.
She said, “They must be in a hurry on Boggarty. They wasted no time in replying. They have agreed to pay your figure, half, before departure, to be placed to your credit in the Galactic Bank, the other half to be paid on delivery. There is only one slight snag . . .”
“And what is that?” asked Grimes.
“They demand that our Postal Service send one of its own officials to travel in charge of the parcels, to hand them over in person. You have passenger accommodation, don’t you?”
“Of a sort,” he said. “Not too uncomfortable, but no privacy.”
“As long as I don’t have to share a bunk . . .”
He doubted that he had heard her correctly. “As long as you don’t have to share a bunk?”
She laughed. “I’m overdue for a long leave. I want to travel, but travel is damned expensive—as you should know.”
He said, “I’m finding out.”
She told him, “I thought that I might temporarily demote myself to postwoman . . .”
He said, “I thought that I, as a courier, would be a sort of a postman.”
She said, “But you’re not an employee of our government. You’re a private individual, a hired carrier. You have still to build up a reputation for reliability.”
Grimes felt his prominent ears burning. He exclaimed, “They have only to check my Survey Service record!”
She laughed. “And what sort of marks will the FSS give you for reliability? Apart from the way in which you lost your last ship, you had quite a few enemies among the top brass, and not too many friends. You’re on the run from a court martial.”
The angry flush spread all over his face, then slowly subsided. He had to admit that she was right. As an officer of the Federation Survey Service he was finished. As a merchant officer, a shipmaster—or even a shipowner of a sort—he had yet to prove himself.
She demanded, “Well, Captain Grimes, do you want the job or not?” She grinned engagingly, “Would my company be so hard to put up with? Or would you rather have some hairy-arsed postman? I could arrange that, you know . . .”
He looked at her face in the screen. He decided that she would be preferable to a postman, but remembered the last time that he had been cooped up in a small spacecraft—a lifeboat—with an attractive woman. It had been great fun at first, but they had finished up hating each other. However, Little Sister was more, much more, than a mere lifeboat. There would be, with the erection of a plastic partition in the main cabin (and who was going to pay for that?) far more privacy. The food would be much better, even though it had its origin in the algae vats. And there would be a foreseeable conclusion to the voyage, as there had not been on that past occasion.
He smiled back at her. He said, “All right. It’s on. But you’d better come out to the spaceport to see what you’re letting yourself in for.”
“It’s a date,” she said. “Expect me half an hour from now.”
***
She was punctual.
A scarlet, post office car, with a uniformed driver, drew up in a cloud of spray by the pinnace’s airlock exactly twenty-nine minutes after the conclusion of the call. He had occupied the time with housekeeping—a hasty tidying up, the programing of the auto-chef with a lunch for two, one of the few remaining bottles of El Doradan Spumante put to cool in the refrigerator, gin of the ship’s own manufacture decanted from its plastic container into a much more attractive glass flagon.
Enveloped in hooded, transparent rainwear she walked from the car, which turned to return to the city, to the airlock. Grimes helped her off with the water-slick coverall, then ushered her into the little cabin. She seated herself at the small table. She looked at the flagon, the glasses, the little bottle of flav, the bowl of ice cubes.
“So,” she remarked, “this is how the poor live.”
He poured drinks, raised his glass, said, “Down the hatch.”
“Down the hatch,” she repeated. She sipped. “H’m. You don’t do yourself badly. One thing we can’t do here is make decent gin.”
The auto-chef chimed. Grimes got up to get disposable napkins and—a legacy from The Far Traveller—gold cutlery. Her eyes widened as he laid the table. He went through into the galley-workshop-engineroom, returned with the meal on gold-rimmed china. It was ‘steak’, with ‘mashed potato’ and a puree of ‘peas.’ Appearancewise and flavorwise it passed muster, although the texture of the ‘meat’ left much to be desired. (So, he realized, did his choice of a wine to accompany the meal; a still red would have been more suitable.)
His guest patted her lips with her napkin. “Congratulate the chef for me, Captain. Tissue culture beef?”
“Not in a ship this size,” he told her. “She’s too small to run to a farm. Just algae, from the vats, processed, colored and flavored.”
She said, “I’ll not ask what nutrients your algae subsist upon. I’m not altogether ignorant of spaceship ecology. I’m not squeamish either. After all, the sewage of every town and city on this planet is processed and fed back into the land. Do you have coffee, by the way?”
“Coming up,” said Grimes.
“You’ve got yourself a passenger,” she told him.