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Chapter 27

After that near disaster with the Mannschenn Drive Grimes instituted a routine of daily inspections. There were so many things to go wrong in a ship that was long past her youth and with only himself, a not very good mechanic, to fix them. He spent much time on the farm deck; its flora did more than provide him with food. They purified and regenerated the atmosphere that he breathed, cycled and recycled the water that he drank and washed in.

He noticed that the population of aquatic worms in the algae vats was diminishing. This was no real cause for concern; their only function was to keep the inner surfaces of the observation ports clean. Still, he missed them. They were, like himself, motile organisms. They were company of a sort.

And then, one ship's day, he glimpsed through a now merely translucent inspection port something swimming. It looked too large to be one of the sluglike things and its color was wrong. Perhaps, thought Grimes, the aquatic worms had mutated; this was unlikely, however, they were exposed to a no greater level of radiation in the ship than in their natural environment. Or—this was more likely—the worms brought aboard on Porlock had been a larval form. What would the adults be like? There had been a suggestion of fins or other appendages about the creature that he had briefly seen.

He spent more and more time on the farm deck. Quite often now he was catching brief glimpses of these new swimmers. He wanted a better look at them. He knew that bio-chemists in really big ships, the ones, naval or mercantile, that carried a multiplicity of technicians on their books, had a technique for cleaning inspection ports from the inside and that this method was also used by catering officers in smaller vessels. The tank tops had little, removable hatches directly above the side inspection ports. There was a squeegee with a handle of just the right length that could be manipulated from the outside.

He finally found a squeegee. It didn't look as though it had been used for a long time. Then, from the engineroom stores, he brought up a small shifting spanner. The nuts holding down the hatch lid were very tight; finally, at the cost of barked knuckles, he removed them. He lifted the hinged cover. He realized then why biochemists and catering officers did not relish the port cleaning job, preferring to employ some lowly organism such as the aquatic worms to do it for them. The stench that gusted out from the opening was almost palpable.

Grimes retched, retreated with more haste than dignity. Before he carried on with the job he would have to find or improvise a breathing mask. He recalled having seen a facepiece with attached air bottle and piping in the engine-room stores.

He was about to go to fetch it when an alarm bell sounded so, instead of making his way aft, he hurried back up to Control.

* * *

It was not a real emergency.

The mass proximity indicator had picked up a target at a range of one thousand kilometers. A ship, thought Grimes, peering into the blackness of the three-dimensional screen at the tiny, bright spark. He watched it, set up extrapolated trajectories. The stranger would pass, he estimated, within fifty kilometers of Bronson Star. There was no danger of collision, not that two ships running under interstellar drive could ever collide unless their temporal precession rates were exactly synchronized.

Grimes switched on the Carlotti transceiver. Presumably Bronson Star was showing up in the other vessel's MPI screen. Almost immediately a voice came from the speaker.

"Doberman calling passing vessel, Doberman calling passing vessel. What ship, please? What ship? Come in, please. Come in."

He was tempted to talk to the Dog Star liner but refrained. He would adhere to his original intention, not to use the Carlotti for transmission until just prior to arrival at Bronsonia. His story would be that he had feared pursuit by units of the Dunlevin Navy and had been reluctant to betray his position. If he now exchanged greetings with Doberman it would be known that he was approaching Bronsonia from Joognaan, not from Dunlevin.

"Doberman calling passing vessel. . . ."

What if he replied, wondered Grimes, using a false name for his ship? It had been so long, too long, since he had talked with anybody. His vocal chords must be atrophying. . . . But the apparently harmless deceit could lead, just possibly, to too many complications.

"Doberman calling passing vessel. . . ." Then, in an obvious aside to some superior, "Probably some poverty-stricken tramp, sir. . . . Too poor or too lousy to afford MPI. . . ."

Then the reply in a much fainter voice, "Or somebody who doesn't want his whereabouts known."

"Not very likely, sir. There aren't any pirates around these days."

"Aren't there, Mr. Tibbs? What about Shaara rogue queens? I heard that the famous Commander Grimes had a set-to with one not long since."

"Grimes! As you know, sir, I've a commission in the Reserve. . . ."

"I know it all right, Tibbs! At times you seem to think that you're First Lieutenant of a Constellation Class cruiser rather than Second Mate of a star tramp!"

"Let me finish, sir. I did most of my last drill attached to Lindisfarne Base and people still talked about Grimes, even though it's some time since he resigned his commission. Some of the things he got away with. . . . He was little better than a pirate himself!"

"So, just as I've been telling you, there are pirates. . . . But our unknown friend's not attempting to close us. Can't be either a Shaara rogue queen or the notorious Grimes. . . ."

There is nothing more frustrating than listening to a conversation about oneself and being unable to speak up in self-defense. Bad-temperedly Grimes switched off the Carlotti. Then he became aware that the aroma from the farm deck was being distributed throughout the ship by the ventilation system. He thought wryly, It's not only my name that stinks.

He hurried down to the engine-room stores, found a breathing mask and returned to the farm deck. He used the squeegee to clean off the inspection port—a job rather more awkward than he had anticipated—and then replaced the little hatch. He peered intently through the now-transparent glass but saw nothing—neither the original aquatic worms nor their successors.

Perhaps, he thought, the adults could not adapt to life in a ship's algae vat as well as the larval form. Perhaps they had died. Perhaps their decomposition had contributed to that horrendous stink, much worse than could be expected from the normal processing of sewage and organic garbage.

He hoped that the air-conditioning system would not take too long about cleansing the foul taint from Bronson Star's atmosphere.

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Framed