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Chapter 3

WHEN GRIMES ARRIVED at Port Last, on Ultimo, he was not in a good temper. The matter calling him away from Port Forlorn had been too urgent for him to wait for a regular sailing, so he had pressed the deep space tug Rim Malemute into service. She was an enormously powerful little brute, designed to go a long way in a short time. She was an assemblage of highly specialized machinery packed into a tin can, with no waste space whatsoever.

Williams, her skipper, brought her in as spectacularly as usual, applying the thrust of her inertial drive only when it seemed inevitable that the Malemute and her people would be smeared over the landing apron. Grimes, who was a guest in the control room, remarked coldly, “I almost lost my last meal. Not that it would have been much loss.”

The tug skipper laughed cheerfully. He and Grimes were old friends and shipmates, and he had often served as the commodore’s second-in-command in Faraway Quest. He said, “You wanted to get here in a hurry, Skipper, and I got you here in a hurry. As for the tucker—this little bitch isn’t an Alpha Class liner.”

“Isn’t she? You surprise me, Williams.”

Grimes watched, through the viewport, the ground car that was coming out to the Malemute. Through the transparent canopy he could see two men. One was Giles, the port captain, the other was Dunbar, Rim Runners’ local astronautical superintendent. As the tug was in from another Rim Worlds port there were no customs, health, or immigration officials. He said, “I’d better go to start sorting things out. I’ll let you know where to send my baggage.”

“Aren’t you living aboard, Skipper?”

“If I’m a sardine in my next incarnation I’ll think about it—but not until then.”

Grimes went down to the airlock, the doors of which opened as he reached them, and walked down the ramp while it was still being extruded. As he was doing so the ground car came to a halt and Giles and Dunbar, both tall skinny men, got out. Giles was in uniform and saluted. Dunbar bowed stiffly. Grimes bowed in return.

“Glad to see you here, Commodore,” said Dunbar.

“Thank you, Captain.”

“Perhaps some refreshment before we get down to business. . . .”

“Thank you, but no. We adjusted our clocks to your local time for the last week of the voyage and I had breakfast before we landed.” He looked at his watch. “0930 I make it.”

“That is correct, sir.”

Grimes got into the front of the car with Dunbar. Giles said that he was going aboard Rim Malemute to see Williams to handle the arrival formalities. Dunbar drove off, wasting no time.

Grimes looked with interest at the berthed ships as they passed them—Rim Cougar, Rim Panther, the Shakespearean Line’s Othello, the Waverley Royal Mail’s freighter Countess of Ayrshire. It could have been Port Forlorn, but for the weather. The sky overhead was blue, with a very few white clouds, not a dismal gray overcast—mainly natural, but contributed to by the smoke from the towering stacks of Lorn’s heavy industry. Ahead, once they were through the main gates, was the city of Port Last, and beyond the white and red buildings towered the snowcapped pinnacles of the Ultimate Range. The road ran straight as an arrow through fields of wheat, some still green and some already golden. In these latter the harvesters, looking like huge mechanical insects, were busily working.

Ultimo, thought Grimes. The granary of the Rim Worlds. A planet of farmers. A world where anything, anything at all, is welcome as long as it breaks the deadly monotony. Like Elsinore, another farming world, but dairy products rather than grain, where compulsive gambling is the main social problem. . . .

He asked Dunbar, “Where have they got young Pleshoff?”

“In the central jail, Commodore. I could have got him out on bail, but thought that if I did he’d be getting into more trouble.”

“What are the charges, exactly?”

“As far as we’re concerned, mutiny. As far as the civil authorities are concerned, drug addiction. I should have liked to have held Captain Gaynes and his chief officer as witnesses—but, as you know, Rim Caribou was already behind schedule and it would have taken too much time to get reliefs for them. But they left affidavits.”

“Mphm. What do you think, Captain?”

“What can I think? The young fool was in the control room, testing gear an hour before lift-off, while Gaynes was in my office and the chief officer was seeing the ship buttoned up for space. The engineers had been doing last-minute maintenance on the inertial drive, had made a test run on one-twentieth power and then, with departure time so close, had left it on Stand-By. Pleshoff slammed it into maximum thrust and the old Caribou went up like a rocket. Gaynes and I saw it from my office window. It shook us, I can tell you. Then Pleshoff thought he’d try his hand at a few lateral maneuvers. He wiped the radio mast off the top of the spaceport control tower. He buzzed the market place in Port Last—and it was market day, too, just to improve matters. By this time the chief and second officers had managed to break into the control room. They overpowered him and got the ship back into her berth—just as the entire police force came screaming in through the spaceport gates.”

“And what does he say?”

“That it seemed a good idea at the time.”

“Mphm. I suppose that all of us, as junior officers, have wanted to become instant captains. This drug addiction charge . . . do you think it will stick?”

“It’ll stick, all right. Pleshoff was running around with a very unsavoury bunch of kids of his own age, bearded boys and shaven-headed girls. The Blossom People, they call themselves.”

“There are Blossom People on Francisco. I suppose they modeled themselves on these originals.”

“Probably. The gang that he was mixed up in seem to have a source of supply for—what do they call the muck?—dreamy weed. Ugh!”

“They smoke it?”

“Yes. In long, porcelain pipes. They claim that it’s not habit forming. They claim that it’s no worse than alcohol, that its effects are far less injurious. They even have a religion based on it.”

“Is this . . . this dreamy weed grown locally?”

Dunbar laughed. “On Ultimo? You must be joking, Commodore. Every square inch of soil on this planet has to nourish the sacred grain. It’s smuggled in, from somewhere. The police and the customs are running around in small circles trying to get their paws onto the runners. But even the pushers are too smart for them.”

The car had entered the city now, was running through a wide street on either side of which were low, graceful stone houses. The houses gave way to shops, to office buildings, taller and taller as the vehicle approached the centre. And then they were in the great square, with the fountains and the statue of some ancient Greek-looking lady proudly holding a sheaf of wheat. Surrounding the square were the official buildings—town hall, city library, state church, Aero-Space Authority, police headquarters, and prison. The jail was a cylindrical tower, windowless except at ground level. It was well proportioned, graceful even—but it looked grim.

Dunbar said, “I’ve warned them that we’re coming. They’ll let us in.”

“As long as they let us out,” said Grimes.


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Framed