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Chapter 7




Sobraon was in orbit about Liberia.

Alongside her was one of that planet’s meteorological satellite tenders, airlock to airlock and with the short gangway tube sealed in place, a means of transfer of personnel from spaceship to spaceship with which Grimes was unfamiliar. In the Survey Service spacesuits and lifelines were good enough for anybody, from admirals down. But now he was no longer a spaceman. He was a first class passenger. And he was a governor.

He was dressed as such, in the archaic finery that must always have seemed absurd to any intelligent human being, a rig neither functional nor aesthetically pleasing. Starched white shirt, stiff collar and gray silk cravat . . . Black tail coat over a gray waistcoat . . . Gray, sharply creased trousers . . . Highly polished black boots . . . And—horror of horrors!—a gray silk top hat.

He stood in the vestibule of the liner’s airlock; at least Harringby had put the inertial drive back into operation so that Grimes was spared the indignity of floundering about clumsily in his hampering clothing. Nonetheless he was sweating, his shirt damp on his chest, sides and back. He derived some small pleasure from the observation that Captain Harringby was far from comfortable in his own dress uniform; obviously it had been tailored for him before he started to put on weight. The Chief Officer’s black-and-gold finery fitted him well enough but his expression made it plain that he hated having to wear it. Liz, the Purser, carried her full dress far better than did the Captain and the Mate. She looked cool and elegant in her long, black skirt, her white blouse with the floppy black tie, her short, gold-trimmed jacket.

Also present were the Third Officer, who would be looking after the airlock, and two Cadets. The young men were comfortable in normal shirt-and-shorts rig. Grimes envied them.

Harringby saluted stiffly. Grimes raised his top hat. Harringby extended his hand. Grimes took it with deliberate and (he hoped) infuriating graciousness.

“Good-bye, Your Excellency,” said the shipmaster. “It’s been both an honor and a pleasure to have you aboard.”

Bloody liar, thought Grimes. He said, “Thank you. Captain.”

The Chief Officer saluted, waited until Grimes extended his hand before offering his own.

“The best of luck. Your Excellency.”

Do you mean it? wondered Grimes.

Liz brought her slim hand up to the brim of her tricorne hat, then held it out to Grimes who, gallantly, raised it to his lips while bowing slightly. Harringby scowled and the Chief Officer smirked dirtily. Grimes straightened up, still holding the girl’s hand, looking into her eyes. He would have liked to have kissed those full lips—and to hell with Harringby!—but he and Liz had said their proper (improper?) good-byes during the night and early morning ship’s time.

“Good-bye, Your Excellency,” she murmured. “And—look after yourself.”

“I’ll try to,” he promised.

Harringby coughed loudly to attract attention, then said, “Your Excellency, I shall be vastly obliged if you will board the tender. It is time that I was getting back to my control room.”

“Very well, Captain.”

Grimes gave one last squeeze to Liz’s hand, relinquished it reluctantly and turned to walk into the airlock chamber and then through the short connecting tube. The tender’s airlock door was smaller than that of the liner and had not been designed to admit anybody wearing a top hat. That ceremonial headgear was knocked off its insecure perch. As Grimes stooped to retrieve it he heard the Chief Officer laugh and an even louder guffaw from one of the tender’s crew. He carried his hat before him as he completed his journey to the small spacecraft’s cabin. His prominent ears were burning furiously.


The crew of the tender—Liberia possessed only orbital spacecraft—were young, reasonably efficient and (to Grimes’s great envy) sensibly uniformed in shorts and T-shirts and badges of rank pinned to the left breast. The Captain asked Grimes to join him in the control cab. He did so, after removing his tail coat and waistcoat, sat down in the copilot’s chair. He looked out from the viewport at the great bulk of the liner, already fast diminishing against the backdrop of abysmal night and stars, saw it flicker and fade and vanish as the Mannschenn Drive was actuated. He transferred his attention to the mottled sphere toward which the tender was dropping—pearly cloud systems and blue seas, brown and green continents and islands.

“It’s a good world. Your Excellency,” said the young pilot. He grinned wryly. “It was a good world. It could be one again.”

Grimes looked at him with some curiosity. The accent had been Standard English, overlaid with an oddly musical quality. The face was olive-skinned, hawklike. Native-born, he thought. The original colonists—those romantic Anarchists—had been largely of Latin-American stock.

“Could be?” he asked.

“That is the opinion of some of us, Your Excellency. And we’ve heard of you, of course. You’re something of an Anarchist yourself . . .”

“Mphm?”

“I mean. . . . You’re not the usual Survey Service stuffed shirt.”

“A stuffed shirt is just what I feel like at the moment.”

“But you’ve a reputation, sir, for doing things your own way.”

“And where has it got me?” asked Grimes, addressing the question to himself rather than to the tender’s pilot.

“You’ve commanded ships, sir. Real ships, deep space ships, not . . . tenders.”

“Don’t speak ill of your own command,” Grimes admonished.

The young man grinned whitely. “Oh, I like her. She’ll do almost anything I ask of her—but if I asked her to make a deep space voyage I know what her answer would be!”

“Fit her out with Mannschenn Drive and a life support system,” said Grimes, “and you could take her anywhere.”

“If I were qualified—which I am not. Master Astronaut, Orbital Only—that’s me.”

“But you’re still a spaceman, Captain. I’d like to have a talk, spaceman to spaceman. But . . .”

“Don’t worry about Pedro and Miguel, sir. They’re like me, members of the OAP, the Original Anarchist Party. We’re allowed by our gracious President to blow off steam as long as we don’t do anything. . . .”

“What could we do, Raoul?” came a voice from behind Grimes.

He turned to see that the other two crew members had taken seats at the rear of the control cab.

He said softly, “What could you do? I don’t know. Yet. I spent the voyage from Earth running through all the official spools on Liberia . . .” (He remembered guiltily that there had been times when instead of watching and listening to the playmaster in his suite he had been doing other things.) “Before I left I was given a briefing of sorts. I still don’t know nearly as much as I should. You have the first-hand knowledge. I don’t.”

“All right, sir,” said Raoul. “I’ll start at the top. There’s our revered President, Estrelita O’Higgins. . . .”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes. He remembered how she had looked in the screen of the playmaster. Tall, splendidly bosomed, black-haired and with rather too much jaw to be pretty. But she was undeniably handsome. In the right circumstances she might be beautiful.

“Then there’s your boy, Colonel Bardon. . . .”

“Not my boy,” said Grimes.

“He’s Earth-appointed, isn’t he? Just as you are, sir. Most people say that he’s got Estrelita mating out of his hand—but it could well be the other way around.”

“Or mutual,” said Grimes.

They made a good pair, Estrelita and the Colonel, he had thought when he saw them in one of the sequences presented by the data spools. The tall, handsome woman in a superbly tailored blue denim suit, the tall, handsome man in his glittering full dress. Like her, he had too much jaw. In his case it was framed by black, mutton chop whiskers.

“Whoever is eating out of whose hand,” Raoul went on, “it’s the Terran Garrison that really runs Liberia. They get first pick of everything. Then the Secret Police get their pickings. Then the ordinary police. The real Liberians don’t get picked on much. There’s some grumbling, of course, but we aren’t badly off. It’s the slaves who suffer. . . .”

“The indentured labor,” corrected Grimes.

“You’re hair-splitting, sir. When an indenture runs out the only way that a laborer can obtain further employment is to sign up again. All his wages, such as they are, have gone to the purchase of the little luxuries that make life bearable. And not only luxuries. There are habit-forming drugs, like Dassan dreamsticks. . . .”

“They’re illegal,” said Grimes, “on all federated worlds.”

The pilot laughed harshly. “Of course they are. But that doesn’t worry Bardon’s Bullies.” He returned his attention to his instruments and made minor adjustments; the beat of the tender’s inertial drive changed tempo. “I’ve time to tell you a story, sir, before we come in to Port Libertad. There was a girl, a refugee, from New Dallas. You must have heard about what happened there. An independent colony that thought that it could thumb its nose at the Federation and at everybody else. Then the Duchy of Waldegren wanted the planet—and took it. We took a few thousand refugees. A lot of the prettier girls finished up in the houses owned—not all that secretly—by Bardon. Mary Lou was one of them. That’s where I met her, in a dive called the Pink Pussy Cat. And—don’t laugh, please!—we . . . fell in love. I was going to buy her out of that place. But some bastard got her hooked on dreamsticks and. . . .”

“She withered away to nothing,” said Miguel.

Grimes said nothing. What could he say?

Raoul broke the silence, speaking in a deliberately brisk voice. “There’s Port Libertad, sir. That statue you can see, just to the north of the spaceport, is Lady Liberty. She was copied from the old Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, on Earth. Those two big ships are bulkies, here to load grain. Some worlds, though, prefer to import the flour that’s been milled here, on Liberia. Don’t ask me why; I’m a spaceman, not an economist. Do you see that smaller ship? She’s a fairly regular visitor. Willy Willy, owned by Able Enterprises. The master’s Captain Aloysius Dreeble. A nasty little bastard on a nasty trade. He comes here to recruit entertainers—so called—for the brothels on quite a few of the frontier worlds.”

“And New Venusberg,” said Grimes. “That’s where I last met him.”

“You know him, sir?”

“All right, all right. I don’t like him. And he doesn’t like me.”

Looking out and down Grimes could see the triangle of winking, bright, scarlet lights that marked the tender’s berth. He picked up a pair of binoculars and stared through them. He could make out a body of men drawn up in military formation, flags streaming from portable standards, the burnished metal of musical instruments from which the afternoon sun was brightly reflected. A guard of honor and a band. . . .

From the speaker of the transceiver, through which the tender had been in communication from Aerospace Control, came a sudden blast of music, the drums almost drowning out the trumpets.

“They’re warming up,” said Raoul sardonically. “Be prepared to be deafened by our glorious planetary anthem as soon as you set foot on Liberian soil.”

“And a twenty-gun salute?” Grimes asked, half seriously.

“No. I did hear some of the Terran Army officers discussing it before I boarded to lift off for the rendezvous with Sobraon. It seems that if you’d been landing in a Terran warship the Captain would have been able to accord the courtesy of a salute, in reply, to Madam President. But as you’ve no guns to fire you get none fired in your honor.”

“This protocol,” said Grimes, “is a complicated business.”

“Isn’t it, sir? We should never have strayed from the simple ways of our ancestors. They’d have given a gun salute to an Earth-appointed governor—and not with blanks, either!”

Looking at Raoul’s face Grimes saw that the words had been spoken only in jest—but Miguel, when he spoke, was serious enough.

“If all that we’ve heard of Governor Grimes is true, Raoul, Bardon’s Bullies would love to give him his twenty guns, each one loaded with H.E.!”

“There are more subtle ways of getting rid of unpopular governors than that,” Raoul Sanchez said with sudden bitterness. Then, to Grimes, “My brother was the late Governor Wibberley’s personal pilot.”

A man with motive, thought Grimes. A double motive. His girlfriend and his brother, both . . . murdered.

He asked, “Are you qualified for atmosphere flight, Captain?”

“Yes, sir. Both LTA and HTA.” He grinned. “Are you offering me a job. Your Excellency? I already have one, you know.”

“I’m offering you a job. I warn you that it mightn’t be good for your health.”

“It wasn’t good for my brother’s health, either. All right, I receive your signal, loud and clear. You think that I might be interested in . . . revenge?”

“That thought had flickered across my mind.”

“I am so interested. And now, sir, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll try to get this crate down in one piece.”

And had he fallen into a trap? Grimes wondered. Wasn’t it too much of a coincidence that these young men in the shuttle should all be OAP members, opposed to the present regime on Liberia? Were Raoul’s stories, about his girl and his brother, true? (That could be checked.)

But he would have to employ some personal staff and he would prefer, whenever possible, to make his own choices. Any made for him by Colonel Bardon would be suspect from the start. And, thought Grimes, if Captain Sanchez were Bardon’s man air travel, at least, would be safer for him than it had been for Governor Wibberley. Raoul didn’t look the type to commit suicide just to help somebody else commit murder.











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Framed