Chapter 27
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, just before sunset, Triton came up river. She was a smart little ship, gleaming white with a blue ribbon around her sleek hull. Her foredeck, abaft the raised fo’c’s’le, was one long hatch served by two cranes, one forward and one aft. Her high poop seemed to be mainly accommodation. Atop the wheel house were antennae and the radar scanner, also a stubby mast from which flew Captain Onslow’s houseflag, a golden trident on a sea-green ground. From the ensign staff fluttered the New Venusberg banner—the crux ansata, in gold, on crimson.
Grimes expected that she would be anchoring in the stream as Kangaroo Valley was devoid of wharfage. But she did not. With helm hard over she turned smartly through ninety degrees, ran up on to the beach. She moved smoothly over the sand until only the extremity of her stern was in the water. Then she stopped. From the port side of her poop a treaded ramp extended itself, the lower end of this resting on the ground.
There was movement in Triton’s wheelhouse as whoever was there left the control position. Shortly afterwards a short, solidly built man appeared at the head of the gangway, walked decisively down it. He was bare-footed and clad, somewhat incongruously, in a garishly patterned sarong and a uniform cap, the peak of which was lavishly gold-encrusted. He was brown-skinned, red-bearded.
He greeted Mal, who was standing there to meet him, “Hello, you old marsupial bastard! How yer goin’?”
“I am not a marsupial, Cap’n Onslow,” said Mal stiffly, obviously not for the first time.
“There’re marsupials in yer family tree, Mal . . .”
“Kangaroos don’t climb, Cap’n.”
Then what was an old-established ritual was broken. Onslow stared at Fenella who, with Grimes and Darleen and Shirl, was standing a little apart from the villagers. She was clothed, while all the other women were naked—but even if she had not been her differences from them would have been obvious.
“Hello, hello,” said Onslow slowly, “who’s this?” Then, “Don’t I know you, lady?”
“You may have seen my photograph, Captain,” Fenella told him.
“M’m. Yes. Could be. But where?”
Another Faithful Reader, thought Grimes.
“Star Scandals,” she said.
“And what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” asked Onslow with a leer.
“Getting a story,” she said.
“Ah!” exclaimed the seaman. “Got it! Fenella Pruin! I like your stuff. This is an honour, meeting you.”
Mal interrupted. “Cap’n, we have business . . .”
“You mean that you want some cold beer, you old bastard. All right, come on board.” He turned back to Fenella. “I’ll see you later, Miz Pruin.”
He led the chief to the gangway, then up into Triton’s accommodation block.
“Why did you have to tell him your name?” Grimes demanded.
“I could see that he recognised me. It cost me nothing to be nice to him, to get him on our side from the start.”
“Dreeble recognised you—and look where that got us!”
“He recognised you first, and that was the start of our troubles.”
Onslow had come back to the head of his gangway, was calling out, “Miz Pruin, will you come on board? And bring him with you.”
Grimes didn’t much like being referred to as “him” and, to judge from their expressions, Darleen and Shirl resented being excluded from the invitation. They looked after him reproachfully as he walked with Fenella across the firm sand, followed her up the ramp.
Onslow—he was still wearing his cap with the ornate badge and the huge helping of scrambled egg—threw the girl a flamboyant salute as she reached the deck. He took her elbow with a meaty hand to guide her through a doorway into the accommodation. He had to relinquish his grip when they came to the companion way; it was too narrow for two to walk abreast. He went up first. Fenella followed. Grimes followed her.
As they climbed to the captain’s quarters Grimes looked about curiously. They passed a little galley with an autochef that would not have looked out of place aboard a spaceship.
There was a deck which was occupied by what seemed to be passenger cabins. Finally, directly below the wheelhouse-chartroom, was Captain Onslow’s suite. There was a large sitting room with bedroom and bathroom opening off it. In the sitting room, sprawling in one of the pneumatic chairs, Mal was drinking beer from a can bedewed with condensation. Three empty cans were on the deck beside him.
Onslow ushered Fenella into another pneumatic chair, took a seat himself. Grimes sat down in another of the modified bladders; he had not been invited to do so but saw no reason to remain standing. The captain reached out to the low table for a can of beer, opened it and handed it to Fenella. He took one for himself. Mal helped himself to another one.
“May I?” asked Grimes, extending his hand to the table.
“Go ahead. This is Liberty Hall; you can piss out of the window and put my only sister in the family way.”
“Don’t you have a ship’s cat, Captain?” asked Grimes.
“No. But what’s it to you?”
“He’s just being awkward,” said Fenella Pruin. “He’s good at that.”
“He looks the type,” agreed Onslow. “Now, Miz Pruin, Mal tells me that you’re in some kind of trouble, that you want to get back to Port Aphrodite without using the more usual means of public transport. As you’ve noticed, I have passenger accommodation. I understand that you require passage for yourself, for the two New Alice girls who’re with you and for Mr. . . . Mr. . . . ?”
“Grimes,” said the owner of that name. “Captain Grimes.”
“Captain, eh? Spacer, aren’t you? Must be. I know all the seamen on this planet. There aren’t all that many of us.” His manner towards Grimes was now more affable. “What’s your ship?”
“Little Sister,” said Grimes.
“Little Sister . . . Captain Grimes . . . There was something about you in the news a while back . . . Now, what was it? Oh, yes. You and some wench called Prunella Fenn went missing on a flight from Vulcan Island to somewhere or other in a hired camperfly . . . Prunella Fenn” . . . He looked hard at Fenella and laughed. “I’ve read your stories in Scandals, Miz Pruin. How you’ve often had to sail under false colours to get them. But I never dreamed that I’d ever meet you while you were doing it—or meet you at all, come to that!
“And what will you be writing about New Venusberg? You don’t have to dig very deep to turn up muck here. Will it be about Big Mal and his people? About how they got to Kangaroo Valley? About the lottery rip-off?”
“Possibly,” she said. “You’ll read it in Star Scandals. I doubt very much if that issue will be on sale here. I’ll send you a copy.”
“And will you autograph it for me?”
“I just might,” she said.
“I’ll be looking forward to it. But shall we get down to business? The cargo should be down to the beach by now; I want to get it loaded so that we can start the party. Now—passage for four aboard Triton . . .” He looked at Fenella. She looked at him. “Make that passages for three. You, Captain, and your two popsies. Three times fifteen hundred comes to four thousand, five hundred credits. Food provided, drinks extra.”
“I thought,” said Grimes, staring at Mal, “that we’d already paid.”
“You paid,” said the chief, “just for the . . . arranging . . .”
You money-grubbing bastard, thought Grimes, but without overmuch bitterness. Agents, after all, are entitled to their fees, although a mere 10% is the usual rake-off. He did mental arithmetic. He could afford the fares and have something left over for booze and tobacco. Fenella’s drinks and smokes would be, he was quite certain, on the house.
“All right,” he said to Onslow.
“Cash on the nail, Captain Grimes.”
Grimes fumbled in his sporran, produced the money demanded.
He asked, as he handed it over, “Do we get tickets?”
“You don’t. The First Galactic Bank still owns a large hunk of this ship—according to my reckoning it’s from the fo’c’s’le head to about the middle of the main hatch—and the less they know about what I make on the side the better. Thank you, Captain.” He got up, put the money into a drawer in his desk. “Finish your beer, Mal. Let’s get up top and see about loading your precious prick stiffener.”
***
Grimes and Fenella accompanied Onslow and Mal up to the wheelhouse. Looking down on to the foredeck Grimes saw that a dozen Matilda’s Children were already on board, waiting for the hatch to be opened. They were all women, as were the other stevedores standing around the big heap of bulging plastic bags on the sand just off Triton’s port side.
Onslow threw the cover off a console below the port window of the wheelhouse. He touched a button and this opened, the glass panel sliding downwards. He fingered another control and the forward deck crane came to life, the jib lifting and slewing, coming to rest as soon as the captain was satisfied that everything was in working order. A small lever was flicked over and the hatch lids lifted, running almost noiselessly to their stowage just abaft the fo’c’s’le, leaving the forward end of the hatchway open. A vertical ladder was revealed just inside the coaming. Down this clambered the Matilda’s Children, looking like abnormally heavily rumped naked apes.
The weighted crane hook dropped into the aperture, rose after a short interval with a tray, on a double bridle, hanging from it. This swung outboard, was lowered to the sand. Working fast and efficiently the women on the beach loaded it with a dozen plastic bags. It was lifted, swung inboard and dropped swiftly into the hatch.
Grimes watched, fascinated by this combination of modern automation with methods of cargo handling almost as old as the sea-going ship. It seemed to be working all right. He said as much.
“And why the hell shouldn’t it?” demanded Onslow. “Human beings—or, as in this case, their facsimiles—are only machines. Non-specialised machines. On some worlds they cost a damn’ sight less than the sort o’ machines that are built out of metal and plastic. An’ who the hell is going to pay for roll-on-roll-off and containerisation facilities in little, used-once-in-a-blue-moon ports like Kangaroo Valley?”
The stack of bags on the beach was fast diminishing as Onslow played his crane with practised ease. The sun was well down but it was not yet properly dark when the last tray was brought on board. The stevedores came up the ladder, their bodies glistening in the glare of the floodlights shining down from the bridge superstructure, from the crane jib. The hatch lids, like a pack of cards toppling, piece by piece, from an on-edge position, ran back into their places, settled with an audible thunk.
“That’s that,” said Onslow smugly. “Loading completed. Now all I have to do is sail when I feel like it—which won’t be until not too bright and early tomorrow morning.”
“Aren’t you going to check the stowage, Captain?” asked Grimes.
“Why should I? All that those bitches had to do was make a single tier of bags over what was already there, cases of canned lemonfish from Port Poseidon . . .”
“Lemonfish is quite a delicacy, isn’t it. What about pilferage?”
Onslow laughed. “With the stevedores stark naked? And they’re big cans . . .”He lowered the jib of the crane into its crutch, switched off everything on the console, replaced the cover. He turned to Mal. “I’m ready for the party whether you are or not. Have some of your people come on board for the beer and all the rest of it. All this cargo handling has given me an appetite. And a thirst.”