Chapter 18 
Chapter 18
LIKE MOST MEN who are or who have been in active command Grimes possessed a built-in alarm clock. This woke him promptly at 0500 hours Local, the time at which the domestic devil was supposed to be calling him, with coffee. Although Grimes had awakened he was in a rather confused state and it took him many seconds to work out where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. He was on Eblis. He was shut up in a pneumatic plastic igloo. He was supposed to be aboard Sobraon before she lifted off at 0600 hours. He wanted his coffee. Even when there had been no night before the morning after he wanted his coffee to start the day with. He thought about coffee the way that it should be—hot as hell, black as sin and strong as the devil. Talking about devils—where the hell was the lazy devil who should have called him?
Grimes found a bell push among the inflated padding that backed the bed. He pushed it. He pushed it again. He pushed it a third time. Eventually the pluglike door opened and the chambermaid, if you could call her that, came in. The white frilly cap looked utterly absurd perched on top of her horns. She asked in a well-modulated voice, with only the merest hint of croak or hiss, “You rang, sir?”
“No. My physiotherapist told me that I should exercise my right thumb more.”
“My apologies for the intrusion, sir.” She turned to go. The long claws of her kangaroolike feet indented the padded floor.
“Wait. I was joking. Word was left for me to be called at five, with coffee. It is now 0515.”
“Nobody told me, sir. Do you wish coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
“Black, sir, or white? With sugar or without? Or with mintsweet, or lemonsweet, or honey? And do you wish toast, sir, or a hot roll? With butter, or with one or more of our delicious preserves? Or with butter and preserves?”
“Just coffee. In a pot. A big one. Better bring a cup as well. Sugar. No milk. Nothing to eat.”
“Are you sure that you would not care for the full breakfast, sir? Fruit, a variety of cereals, eggs to order, ham or bacon or sausages. . . .”
“No!” He softened this to “No, thank you.” After all, the demon-girl was doing her best. “Just coffee. Oh, and you might look in the room next door to see if Commander Williams is up. He wanted tea, I think.”
Grimes showered hastily, depilated, then dressed. While he was doing this latter the coffee arrived. It was good coffee. After he had finished his first cup he thought he had better see how Williams was getting on.
The tray, with its teapot and accessories, was on the commander’s bedside table. The commander was still in the bed. He was snoring loudly and unmusically.
“Commander Williams!” said Grimes. “Commander Williams!” snapped Grimes. “Commander Williams!” roared Grimes.
In any Service it is an unwritten law that an officer must not be touched in any way to awaken him—even when the toucher is superior in rank to the touchee. Grimes knew this—but he wanted Williams on his feet, now. He took hold of the other man’s muscular shoulder, shook it. Williams interrupted his snoring briefly and that was all. Grimes hammered on the headboard of Williams’ bed—but it, like everything else except the refrigerator, was pneumatically resilient, emitted no more than a soft, slapping sound.
Grimes thought of hammering the refrigerator door with something hard and heavy and had his right shoe half off before he thought of a better idea. Presumably this cold box, like the one in his room, would contain a few bottles of mineral water.
It did. There were six bottles, and five of them were empty, put back after they were finished by Williams, who had a small ship man’s necessary tidiness. Grimes pulled the seal of the sixth bottle, inverted it over the commander’s head. The icy fluid gurgled out, splashed over hair and face and bare chest and shoulders.
Williams’ eyes opened. He said, slowly and distinctly, “Mr. Timmins, you will fix the thermostat at once. This is a ship, Mr. Timmins, a ship-not an orbital home for superannuated polar bears. I want her warm as a busty blonde’s bottom, not cold as the Commodore’s heart.”
“Williams, wake up, damn you!”
“Brragh.”
It was hopeless. And Williams’ sleep was far deeper than could be accounted for by the previous night’s drinking. He had taken nothing like as much as Captain Gillings—and, presumably, he was up. Those bottles of mineral water, only one of which Grimes had no more than tasted, five of which Williams had quaffed . . .
But who . . ?
And why. . . ?
Grimes looked at his watch. If he hurried he would get to the spaceport before Sobraon lifted. He tried to hurry, but considerable local knowledge was required to find a quick way out of the vast honeycomb that the Lucifer Arms resembled. At last he was clear of the building and running along the path of coarse red sand beside the Styx. It was dark still, it would be some time before Inferno Valley received the benefit of the rising sun. But there was light enough from the luminescent lichenous growths that grew, here and there, on the granite cliffs. Past the Purgatorial Pool he ran, past the Devil’s Stewpot, blundering through the white, acrid fog that, at this hour of the morning, shrouded its surface.
And there were the ships at last—Clavering’s Sally Ann in the background, dwarfed by the towering Devil’s Phallus, and Sobraon, hiding with her bulk the little Rim Malemute. The TG Clipper’s atmosphere running lights were on, and at the very tip of her needle-pointed stem an intensely bright red light was winking, the signal that she was ready for lift-off. Loud in the morning calm was the irritable warming-up mumble of her inertial drive. Well clear of her vaned landing gear the mooring gang—the unmooring gang—was standing in little groups. The last airlock door was shut, the boarding ramp in.
The note of the liner’s inertial drive deepened, became throbbingly insistent. A siren howled eerily. Then she was lifting, slowly, carefully. She was lifting, and her drive sounded like the hammers of hell as it dragged her massive tonnage up to the distant ribbon of yellow that was the sky.
She lifted—then suddenly checked, but there was no change in the beat of her engines, no diminution of the volume of noise. Yet she hung there, motionless, and those on the ground, human and native, started to run along the valley toward Grimes.
There was a sound like that of a breaking fiddle string—a fiddle string inches in diameter plucked to destruction by a giant, a ship-sized giant, a ship. . . . Sobraon, suddenly freed, surged upwards, and astern of her the broken ends of the mooring cable that had fouled one of her vanes lashed out like whips, striking sparks from the granite rocks.
And Rim Malemute, whose mooring wire it was that had been snagged, teetered for long seconds on two feet of her tripedal landing gear, teetered—and toppled.
“Cor!” muttered somebody. “They haven’t half made a mess of the poor little bitch.”
Grimes looked at him. It was Rim Malemute’s shipkeeping officer, who had turned out to watch the big TG Clipper’s lift-off.
The commodore said, “You’re a witness. Come with me to the control tower and we’ll slap a complaint on the duty controller’s desk before he has time to think of suing us for having our lines too close to Sobraon’s stern vanes.”
“But he can’t, sir. The port captain himself saw the moorings set up.”
“Port Captains,” Grimes told him, “are like the kings in olden days. They can do no wrong.”