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Chapter 8




THE CAB BROUGHT them into the spaceport, to the foot of Sister Sue’s ramp.

Grimes was pleased to see that the loading ramps had been set up around his ship, that already streams of crates and cases were being whisked up from the apron to the yawning cargo ports. This was real freight, he thought, not the little parcels of luxury goods that he had been carrying in Little Sister. He could read the consignee’s title stenciled on each package: SURVEY SERVICE RECORDS, PORT WOOMERA. There had once been a major Survey Service Base on Austral, which had been degraded to a Sub-Base. Finally, only a short while ago, it had been closed down altogether. The transport Robert A. Heinlein had lifted off personnel and all the really important stores and equipment. There had been no great hurry for the rest of the stuff, mainly records going back almost to man’s first landing on Earth’s moon, until the warehouse accommodating the material was required for a factory site.

So perhaps, thought Grimes, this was not real freight after all, except in terms of tonnage. Anybody with any sense would have ordered all that junk destroyed—but the Survey Service, as well he knew, was a breeding ground for planet-based bureaucrats whose dusty files were the temples of whatever odd gods they worshipped.

Nonetheless he had been lucky to get this cargo.

Quite fantastically it had tied in with Magda Granadu’s reading of the I Ching. She had thrown the coins and constructed a hexagram on the afternoon of the day that Grimes had renamed the ship. Huan, it had been. Dispersion. There will be progress and success. The king visits his ancestral temple. It will be advantageous to cross the great water and to act with firm persistence. And in the first line there had been the reference to “a strong horse”—and the Epsilon Class tramps had long been known as the sturdy workhorses of the Interstellar Transport Commission.

Yet Grimes had been dubious, at first, about the wisdom of carrying that cargo to those consignees. He had left the Survey Service under a cloud, had resigned hastily before he could be brought to face a court-martial. But, apart from the obnoxious Delamere’s attempt to drag him back to Lindisfarne Base from Botany Bay, there had been no moves made to arrest him, although more than once, as a civilian shipmaster, he had been in contact with Survey Service vessels and personnel.

He had gone to Captain Taberner, Resident Secretary of the Astronauts’ Guild on Austral, for advice.

“Not to worry, Captain,” that gentleman had told him. “You’re one of ours now. We look after our own. You’ll get the finest legal defense if—and it’s a big ‘if’—the Admiralty takes any action against you. We fought an illegal arrest case a few years back—you may have heard about it—when some officious destroyer skipper seized a ship called Southerly Buster. Captain Kane’s ship. You must have heard about him. Anyhow, we won and Drongo Kane was awarded very heavy damages.”

So that was that, Grimes thought. If the Guild’s legal eagles could save the bacon of an unsavory character like Kane they should be able to do at least as well by him.

He let the Green Hornet board first while he walked around the ship. He told her to report as soon as possible to Mr. Williams.

***

Finally he climbed the ramp to the after airlock, took the elevator to the No. 3 cargo compartment. Williams was there with a human foreman stevedore who was directing the spidery stowbots. The mate was harassed looking and his slate grey uniform shirt was dark with perspiration. “Tell those bloody tin spiders of yours,” he was shouting, “that it’s the heavy cases bottom stow and those flimsy crates on top!” He turned to face Grimes. “I had to chase the Green Hornet out of here. Her idea of stowage was big packages under and little packages over, regardless of weight.” He switched to a falsetto voice. “ ‘That’s the way that we always did it in the Commission . . .’” He snorted. “It certainly ain’t the way we did it in the Dog Star Line!”

“Where is she now?”

“I told her to make a check of the navigational equipment.”

Grimes left the mate attending to the stowage, carried on up to Control. There he found Ms. Connellan sulkily tinkering with the mass proximity indicator. She was still dressed as she had been when released from jail.

“Why aren’t you in uniform?” he asked.

“What uniform am I supposed to wear?” she countered. “All my trappings are Interstellar Transport Commission.”

“Then find out,” he told her, “the name of a local uniform tailor. Mr. Williams should know. Get on the telephone and order full sets of uniform trappings for all hands.”

“Including you, Captain?”

“Not including me.”

Some time in the past Grimes had had his own Far Traveler Couriers insignia made up—the cap badge a stylized rider on a galloping horse, in silver, with two golden comets as the surround; the same horse and rider, but in gold, over the four gold stripes on his epaulets. When he could afford it he would put his people into Far Traveler Couriers uniform but it could wait.

“I suppose you know, sir,” said Ms. Connellan, the tone of her voice implying that he didn’t, “that the shipowner is responsible for supplying his personnel, at his expense, with uniform trappings.”

“I know,” said Grimes.

After she left him he began to reassemble the MPI. Luckily she had done no more than to remove the hemispherical cover.

A spacelawyer . . . he thought.

In any astronautical service, naval or mercantile, such are crosses that their commanding officers have to bear.







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Framed