First Command (50 page)

Botany Bay.

He rather hoped that this would be the name given by the colonists to this chance-found world circling Star 1716 in the Ballchin Catalog. It might well be; such colonies as had been founded by the crews and passengers of the gaussjammers of the New Australian Expansion tended to run to distinctively Australian names.

He left when the party began to get a little too rowdy. He did not retire at once, but sprawled in his easy chair, his mind still active. When people recovered from this letting off of steam, he thought, he would have to discuss his plan of campaign with the senior officers, the departmental heads. Then, suddenly but quietly, the outer door of his day cabin opened. He was somehow not surprised when Vinegar Nell came in. She was (as before) carrying a tray, with coffee things and a plate of sandwiches. But this time she was still in uniform.

Grimes gestured toward the supper as she set it down on the low table. “So you still think of me as Gutsy Grimes?” he asked, but he smiled as he spoke.

“Lucky Grimes,” she corrected, smiling back, a little lopsidedly. “And I hope, John, I really hope that your luck rubs off on the rest of us.”

“I do, too,” he told her.

She straightened up after she had put the supper things down, standing over him. Her legs were very long, and slightly apart, her skirt very short. One of her knees was exercising a gentle but definite pressure on Grimes’s outstretched thigh, but with a considerable effort he managed to keep his hands to himself. Then she stooped again as she poured him his coffee. The top two buttons of her shirt were undone and he glimpsed a nipple, erect, startlingly pink against the pale tan of the skin of her breast.

He whispered huskily, “Miss Russell, would you mind securing the door?”

She replied primly, “If you insist, Commander Grimes.”

She walked slowly away from the table, away from him, shrugging out of her upper garment, letting it float unheeded to the deck. He heard the sharp
click
of the lock as it engaged. She turned, stepping out of her brief skirt as she did so. The sheer black tights that were all she was wearing beneath it concealed nothing. She walked past him into the bedroom, not looking at him, a faint smile on her face, her small breasts jouncing slightly, her round buttocks smoothly working, gleaming under the translucent material. He got up, spilling his coffee and ignoring it, following her.

She must have been fast. She was already completely naked, stretched out on the bunk, waiting for him, warmly glowing on the dark blue bedspread. In the dim light her hair glinted like dusky gold against the almost black material of the coverlet, in aphrodisiac contrast to the pale, creamy tan of her upper thighs and lower abdomen. She was beautiful, as only a desirous and desirable woman, stripped of all artifice, can be.

Grimes looked down at her and she looked up at him, her eyes large and unwinking, her lips slightly parted. He undressed with deliberate slowness, savoring the moment, making it last. He even put his shirt on a hanger and neatly folded his shorts. And then he joined her on the couch, warm, naked skin to warm, naked skin, his mouth on hers. It was as though he had known her, in the Biblical sense of the word, for many, many years.

Chapter 23

She murmured,
as they shared a cigarillo, “Now you’re one of us.”

“Is that why . . . ?” he started, hurt.

“No,” she assured him. “No. That is not why I came to you. We should have done this a long time ago. A long, long time—”

He believed her.

The people of Botany Bay—this was, in fact, the name of the Lost Colony—did not, of course, run to such highly sophisticated communications equipment as the time-space-twisting Carlotti radio. Had they possessed it they would not have stayed lost for long. But it had yet to be invented in the days of the gaussjammers—as had, too, the time-space-twisting Mannschenn Drive. It had been making a voyage, as passenger, in one of the timejammers that had started Luigi Carlotti wondering why, when ships could exceed the speed of light (effectively if not actually) radio messages could not. So Botany Bay did not possess Carlotti radio. Neither was there, as on most other Man-colonized worlds, a corps of trained telepaths; Flannery spoke with some authority on that point, maintaining that somehow psionic talent had never developed on the planet. But there was, of course, Normal Space-Time radio, both audio and visual, used for intraplanetary communications and for the broadcasting of entertainment.

It did not take long for the ship’s radio officers to find this out once
Discovery
had reentered the normal continuum, shortly thereafter taking up a circumpolar orbit about the planet. It was no great trouble to them to ascertain the frequencies in use and then to begin monitoring the transmissions. Grimes went down to the main radio office—its sterile cleanliness made a welcome change from Flannery’s pig pen—to watch the technicians at work and to listen to the sounds issuing from the speakers. Barbham accompanied him.

There were what sounded like radio telephone conversations. At first these seemed to be in some quite familiar yet unknown language—and then, as soon as Grimes’s ear became accustomed to the peculiarly flat intonation of the voices—they suddenly made sense. The language, save for its accent, had survived almost unchanged, was still understandable Standard English. It became obvious that what was being picked up was an exchange of messages between a ship and some sort of traffic control authority.

“
Duchess of Paddington,
”
Grimes heard, “to Port Ballina. My ETA is now 0700 hours, What’s the weather doin’ at your end? Over.”

“Port Ballina to
Duchess.
Wind west at ten kph. No cloud. Visibility excellent. The moorin’ crowd’ll be waitin’ for yer, Skip. Over.”

“Sounds like a surface ship, Captain,” commented Brabham.

“Mphm?” grunted Grimes dubiously.

The voice came from the speaker again. “
Duchess of Paddington
to Port Ballina. Please have one ‘A’ helium bottle waitin’ for me. I’d a bastard of a slow leak in one o’ my for’ard cells. Over.”

“Wilco,
Duchess.
Will you be wantin’ the repair mob? Over.”

“Thanks muchly, but no. Got it patched me self, but I lost quite a bit o’ buoyancy an’ I’ve had to use the heaters to maintain altitude an’ attitude. See you. Over.”

“More ruddy airships!” growled Brabham. “I hope—” His voice trailed off into silence.

“You hope what?” asked Grimes coldly.

“Well, sir, there seems to be a sort of jinx on the things as far as we’re concerned.”

“There’d better not be
this
time,” Grimes told him.

“Sir!” called one of the radio officers. “I think I’m picking up a treevee transmission, but I just can’t seem to get any sort of picture.”

Grimes shuffled slowly to the receiver on which the young man was working; with the ship now in free fall it was necessary to wear magnetic-soled shoes and, after the long spell under acceleration, to move with caution. He stared into the screen. It was alive with swirling color, an intermingling of writhing, prismatic flames and subtle and everchanging shades of darkness, an eddying opalescence that seemed always about to coalesce into a picture, yet never did. The technician made more adjustments and suddenly there was music—from a synthesizer, thought Grimes—with the effect of ghost guitars, phantom violins, and distant drums. The ever-changing colors in the screen matched the complex rhythms drifting from the speaker.

“Damn it!” muttered the radio officer, still fiddling with the controls. “I still can’t get a picture.”

“Perhaps you aren’t supposed to,” murmured Grimes.

A final crash of guitars, scream of violins and rattle of drums, an explosive flare of light and color, fading into darkness . . . and then, at last, a picture. A young woman, attractive, with deeply tanned skin and almost white-blonde hair, stood with one slim hand resting on the surface of a table. She was simply clad in a long white robe, which somehow hid no smallest detail of her firm body. She said—and it was a pity that her voice, with its flat intonation, did not match her appearance—“An’ that was Damon’s
Firebird Symphony,
played to you by the composer himself. I hope y’all liked it. An’ that’s it from this station for today. We’ll be on the air again at the usual time termorrer with our brecker program, commencin’ at 0600 hours. Nighty-night all, an’ good sleepin’.”

She faded slowly from the screen and the picture of a flag replaced her—a familiar (to Grimes) ensign, horizontal and rippling in a stiff breeze, dark blue, with a design of red, white, and blue crosses superimposed upon each other in the upper canton, a five-starred, irregularly cruciform constellation in the fly. And there was music—also familiar.

“Once a jolly swagman,” sang Grimes, softly but untunefully, “camped by a billabong. . . .”

“Do you
know
it, sir?” asked one of the radio officers.

Grimes looked at the young man suspiciously, then remembered that he was from New Otago, and that the New Otagoans are a notoriously insular breed. He said, “Yes. ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ of course. Wherever Aussies have gone they’ve taken her with them.”

“Who was Waltzing Matilda?” persisted the officer. “Some old-time dancing girl?”

Brabham sniggered, and Grimes said, “Not exactly. But it’s a bit too complicated to explain right now.”

And whose ghosts, he wondered, would be haunting the billabongs (if there were billabongs) of this world upon which they would soon be landing? The phantom of some swagman, displaced in time and space, or—
Damn you, Flannery,
he thought,
stop putting ideas into my mind!—
or, even, of the mutiny-prone Bligh?

Chapter 24

“We have to let them know
we’re here,” said Grimes.

“The probe is in good working order, sir,” said Brabham.

“Not the probe,” Grimes told him. He did not want a repetition of all that had happened the last time a probe had been used. He went on, “These people are human. They have maintained a reasonably high standard of technology.”

“With
airships
, Sir?” asked Brabham.

“Yes. With airships. It has never ceased to amaze me that so many human cultures have not persisted with their use. Why waste power just to stay up before you even think about proceeding from Point A to Point B? But never mind the airships. They also have radio.” He turned to one of the technicians. “Did you note the time when the station closed down, Lieutenant? Good. And the blonde said that she’d be resuming transmission at 0600 hours tomorrow.”

“Local time, sir,” pointed out Brabham. “Not ship’s time.”

“When she whispered her sweet good nights,” said Grimes, “I managed to tear my eyes away from her face long enough to notice a clock on the wall behind her. A twenty-four-hour clock. It was registering midnight. And we already know, from our own observations, that Botany Bay has a period of rotation of just over twenty-five Standard Hours. I assume—but, of course, I could be wrong—that there are people in this ship, besides myself, capable of doing simple sums.”

Brabham scowled. The radio officers sniggered.

“So,” went on Grimes, “I want to make a broadcast myself on that station’s frequencies when it starts up again with the”—he made a grimace of distaste—“
brecker
program. I think we have the power from our jennies to override anything they may be sending. I shall want a visual transmission as well as sound. Their people will have as much trouble with our accent as we had with theirs. I’ll leave you to work out the details. I’m going to prepare a series of cards, from which I shall be speaking. Do you think you’ll be able to set up your end of it in the time?”

“Of course, sir,” the senior radioman assured him.

“Their spelling’s probably nothing at all like ours,” muttered Brabham.

“It shouldn’t have changed all that much,” said Grimes hopefully. “And luckily, the blonde bombshell wasn’t delivering her spiel in Hebrew or Chinese. Well, I’ll leave you to it, gentlemen. You know where to find me if anything fresh crops up.”

He went back to his quarters and set to work with sheets of stiff white paper and a broad-tipped stylus.

They were ready for him when he returned to the radio office. He stood where he was told, with the camera trained on him, watching the monitor screen, which was still blank. Suddenly he realized that he had omitted to change into his dress uniform and put on a cap—but, he told himself, it didn’t matter.

The screen came alive. Again there was the flag, bravely flying, and again there was music—but, this time, it was “Botany Bay.” When it was over the picture became that of an announcer. It was not—to the disappointment of Grimes and the others—the spectacular blonde. It was a young man, comfortably clad in colorful shirt, extremely short shorts, and sandals. Like the girl he was fair haired and deeply tanned. He was far more cheerful than he had a right to be at what must be, to him, an ungodly hour of the morning.

“Mornin’, all those of yer who’re up, that is. An’ you lucky bastards who’re still in yer scratchers can get stuffed. Anyhow, this is Station BBP, the Voice of Paddo, openin’ transmission on this bright an’ sunny mornin’ o’ December nineteenth, Thursday. I s’pose yer wantin’ the news. Now what have we to make yer day for yer?” He looked down at a sheet of paper in his right hand.

Grimes signaled with his own right hand to the senior radio officer. The lights in the radio office flickered and dimmed, except for the one trained on Grimes. The picture in the monitor screen faded—as must also have done the pictures in the screens of all the receivers tuned to that station. It was replaced by the image of Grimes himself, looking (he realized) very important, holding at chest level the first of his cards. He read from it, trying to imitate the local accent, “I am the captain of the Earth Survey Ship
Discovery.
”
He changed cards. “My ship is at present in orbit about your planet.” He changed cards again. “I am about to cease transmission. Please make your reply. Over.”

The picture of the announcer came back into the screen. The young man’s pallor under his tan gave his complexion a greenish tinge. At last he spoke. “Is this some bloody hoax?” And somebody not in the screen said, “I could see the bastard in the monitor plain enough. T’aint nobody
we
know—an’ we know everybody who is anybody in the radio trade!”