Chapter 6
It was a peculiar voyage, not altogether unpleasant, with its mixture of ostracism and adulation and downright pampering. Governor Grimes took his meals at the captain’s table—and Captain Harringby, presiding over this lavish board, accorded the governor the respect due to him while making it plain that he did not approve of Commodore Grimes, the pirate chief. Now and again he permitted himself a flash of unkind humor, such as when the wine stewardess was dispensing a vintage Burgundy to accompany the roast beef. “I suppose, Your Excellency, that you must, now and again, have acquired some very fine wines among your other . . . er . . . loot?”
“The Hallichecki,” Grimes had replied stiffly, “do not use alcohol.” He added, after sipping from his glass, “My privateering operations were against the shipping of the Hegemony.”
“But didn’t you seize a Terran ship? One of the Commission’s liners?”
“That happened after a mutiny. Captain. It all came out at the Court of Inquiry.” He added, “And, in any case, the attempted piracy was unsuccessful.”
The others at the table were looking at him, some with disapproval and contempt, others with what was almost admiration. There was the fat Joachim Levy, one of the Dog Star Line’s managers taking his Long Service Leave and bound for New Venusberg. He pursed his thick lips, then said, “Our ships are used to coping with piracy. When necessary they are armed—and their crews know how to use their weapons.”
“I know,” Grimes told him. “My Mate was ex-Dog Star Line. He was a very good gunnery officer.”
Levy scowled and the plump, artificially blonde Mrs. Levy laughed. “So all the drills that the Dog Star Line officers have to go through are some use after all!” She smiled quite prettily at Grimes. “But wasn’t it fun. Your Excellency? Sailing the seas of space with the Jolly Roger at the masthead and a cutlass clenched between your teeth?”
“Mphm,” grunted Grimes.
“In the good old days,” said Ivor Sandorsen, who was a Lloyd’s underwriter, “you would have been hanged from your own yardarm. Your Excellency.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Grimes, “one of my ancestors was.”
“Thus establishing a precedent.”
“Another, better known, pirate,” said Grimes, “established another precedent. Sir Henry Morgan. He became a governor.”
“Had Lloyd’s been in existence in those days, sir, he would have paid the just penalty for his crimes.”
“In any case,” said Harringby with a superior smile, “I think that His Excellency will admit that the governorship of Liberia is hardly a plum as such appointments go. More of a rotten apple, perhaps.”
“Have you been there, Captain?” asked Mrs. Levy, who seemed to have appointed herself Grimes’s champion.
“No, madam. Nor do I want to. I shall place my ship in orbit about that world and a tender will rendezvous to pick up His Excellency. Then I shall be on my way.”
“Rejoicing?” asked Grimes.
“I shall most certainly not be weeping.”
“And you. Your Excellency,” asked Dorothea Taine, tall, dark, intense, author of a best seller which Grimes’s father had scornfully dismissed as Womens’ Weekly rubbish, “will you be weeping or rejoicing?”
“That remains to be seen,” Grimes told her.
***
“Sir—Your Excellency, I mean—what’s it really like being a pirate? Sorry. A privateer. . . .” The young Fifth Officer made his diffident approach to Grimes as he was just dismounting from one of the exercise bicycles in the liner’s gymnasium.
“There are better and safer ways of earning a living,” Grimes said.
“Safer, perhaps, sir. But . . . Would you know if Commodore Kane is still trying to find volunteers for his privateer fleet?”
“Drongo Kane is better stayed away from. In any case, as you must have heard, the Survey Service is smacking down on all privateering operations.”
“Mr. Barray!” The Chief Officer had just come into the gymnasium for his own exercise session. “Here you are. I thought that you were supposed to be checking the equipment in your lifeboat.”
“I . . . I’ve finished that, sir. It’s all in order.”
“Then find Mr. McGurr and lend him a hand in hydroponics. This is his tank cleaning day.”
Crestfallen, the young man left the gym. Shedding his robe and, clad only in trunks, the Chief Officer mounted the bicycle that Grimes had vacated. As he started to pedal he said, “Even you. Your Excellency, must know that young men often evince enthusiasm for the most unworthy people and causes.”
“Are you implying that I’m unworthy, Mr. Kelner?”
“I never said so, Your Excellency.”
“I can use you, Your Excellency. Or may I call you John? After all, I know your father; I’ve met him at Australian Society of Authors meetings . . .”
Grimes looked at Dorothea Taine over his coffee cup. He was taking this midmorning refreshment in the lounge; he did not see why he should be confined to his quarters, luxurious though they were, even though he was something of a social leper.
“Use me?” he asked.
The writer smiled. Her teeth were too large for her small mouth. The heavy-rimmed spectacles that she affected made her big, black eyes look even bigger in her sallow face.
“I want to use you . . . John.”
“How, Ms. Taine?” asked Grimes dubiously.
“Dorothea, please. Or you may call me Dot. I’m starting a new novel. One of those If stories. If Dampier, the buccaneer and privateer, had established a settlement on the West Coast of Australia, long before the one was established at Botany Bay. After all, he was there. . . .”
“And he didn’t think much of it.”
“But something could, just could, have made him change his mind. He could have fallen madly in love with a beautiful Aboriginal girl. Perhaps she could have saved his life, just as the Princess Pocahontas saved the life of Captain John Smith in Virginia . . .”
Grimes entertained a fleeting vision of a naked black girl getting in the way of a boomerang flung at the piratical Captain Dampier by her irate father.
“Mphm,” he grunted around the stem of his pipe.
“You see, John, I want to make Dampier a real character. I can’t go back in time to meet him. But there’s one real life character, aboard this very ship, who could serve as a model. You. Dampier wasn’t only a pirate and privateer, he was also an officer, a captain, in the Royal Navy. You’ve been a privateer and a pirate—and also an officer, commanding ships, in the Survey Service . . . If I could only get inside you . . .”
I don’t want to get inside you, thought Grimes unkindly. You’re too skinny, for a start. And you gush.
“Perhaps some evening, or evenings, after dinner . . . We could get away by ourselves somewhere and you could tell me all about yourself . . .”
“It would be very boring for you,” said Grimes.
“It would not, John. It couldn’t possibly be.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her, “but all my evenings are fully taken up. I’ve all the spools on Liberia to study. After all, I’m being paid to be governor of the damn place so I’d better know something about it before I get there. . . .”
***
“Do you mind if I join you, Your Excellency? Joe’s gotten himself involved in a non-stop poker game and I’m just a bit lonesome.”
“Please do, Mrs. Levy. What are you drinking? A Black Angel?” Then, to the bar stewardess, “Another pink gin, please, and a B.A.”
“I like this little bar. . . . Your very good health, Excellency.”
“And yours, Mrs. Levy.”
“That sounds dreadfully formal.”
“Vee, then.”
“Only Joe calls me that. I prefer Vera.”
“Your very good health, Vera.”
“I only found this little bar a couple of days ago, John. (Do you mind?) It’s so . . . private. Not like the main bars, always crowded and always that so-called music so that you can’t hear yourself think. I guess that there’re still parts of this big ship that I haven’t seen. We—the Dog Star Line, that is—don’t have anything in this class.”
“But you are getting into the passenger trades.”
“Glorified cattle boats,” she sneered. “Nothing like this. But I don’t suppose that Joe will ever be important enough to qualify for the VIP suite. I would so like to see how the VIPs live. . . .”
“I must throw an official cocktail party before we get to Liberia,” said Grimes. “You’re invited, of course. . . .”
After all, he thought, I might want a job in the Dog Star Line some day. Mr. Levy, for all his apparent inattention to his wife, looked as though he might prove to be a very jealous husband. . . .
“Never mind,” she said with sudden coldness. “I’ll just take my place in the queue. Goodnight, Your Excellency.”
She finished her drink and left—and Grimes knew that he would never be employed by the Dog Star Line as long as she was the wife of one of that company’s managers.
“Satisfied?” he asked sleepily.
“Yes . . . and no, darling. But we’ve several hours before Jane brings in your morning tea.”
“You’d better be out of here before then, Liz.”
“It’s not important really. We tabbies stick together, even though some of us have gold braid on our shoulders and some haven’t. Jane would never run screaming to old Herring.”
“Herring?”
“Captain Harringby. Haven’t you ever noticed the fishlike look he has sometimes?”
“What if he did find out? What would he do?”
“Nothing, darling. Nothing. He’s all show and no blow. Like practically every other passenger ship master he’s scared shitless of the Space Catering Officers and Stewardesses’ Guild. We have the power to make any voyage a hell for all concerned.”
“Mphm.”
No matter how successful I am, he thought, I shall never be fool enough to buy a big passenger ship.
He persisted, “But you didn’t answer my question properly . . .”
“About being satisfied? Well, you aren’t exactly bad in bed, although you could be better. But I’ll educate you, darling. What satisfies me is that I’ve won the sweep.”
“The sweep?”
“Yes. We all put in twenty credits and the prize goes to the first member of Sobraon’s female staff to go to bed with the notorious pirate. You. And I get the prize.”
“So that’s why the purser brought up my supper tray in person tonight instead of entrusting the task to one of her underlings! All right, Liz. You’ve won. But it’s been touch and go.” He laughed. “I wondered why my personal needs were being attended to by different stewardesses every day and night. A fair go for all, I suppose. I almost succumbed this morning when that little carroty cat . . .”
“Sue . . .”
“. . . intimated that she’d just love to wash my back while I was taking my shower.”
“And now I’ll rub your front and hope that you’ll rise to the occasion.”