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Chapter 38

He sat in his almost comfortable, definitely characterless hotel room. He was smoking his pipe, sipping a large pink gin, his second one. (The first he had gulped.) He looked at the solidograph of Maggie Lazenby standing on the chest of drawers. Maggie had wished him luck. He needed it.

Of course, he admitted, the situation wasn't altogether desperate. Presumably he would be allowed to sell the ship piecemeal, her fittings before the vessel herself. The autochef, for example, should fetch quite a few credits. . . .

But. . . .

He looked at the naked figurine in its transparent cube. It would be as though, he thought, he were starving and were carving hunks off Maggie to sustain his own life. A breast one day, an arm the next. . . . Then a buttock. . . . So it would be with Little Sister. She was a masterpiece of interior design and the subtraction of any fitting would ruin her internal symmetry.

The telephone chimed.

Grimes looked at the screen, saw the face of the hotel's receptionist. He got up, switched the instrument to reception from his end.

"Captain Grimes," said the girl, "there is a lady here to see you. May I send her up?"

A lady? he wondered. Susie's mother, perhaps. . . . What could he tell her? Dare he risk telling her that her daughter was, so far as he knew, alive, well and rich?

The almost pretty face of the receptionist was replaced by that of the unattractive fat girl who had tried to interview him at the spaceport.

"Captain Grimes—this is Wendy Wayne here. Of the Bronson Star." She laughed, displaying teeth that would have been better hidden. "No. Not your Bronson Star. The weekly paper."

"I don't feel like an interview," said Grimes.

She said, "It's not an interview I want. I've a proposition."

Grimes refrained from saying something ill-mannered.

She laughed again. "Don't worry, Captain, I've no designs on your body beautiful. I already have a lover—and she wouldn't approve. . . ."

"Mphm."

"Strictly business, Captain. Can I come up?"

"Yes," said Grimes.

* * *

"You've seen the Bronson Star, of course," she said.

"I have," admitted Grimes. (There had been a tattered copy of that scurrilous weekly aboard the other Bronson Star, the ship.)

"As you know, we like sensational stories, preferably told in the first person. Ghosted, of course. . . ."

I Was a Sex Slave on Waldegren, remembered Grimes.

"Our readers like them too."

They would, thought Grimes.

"Your story will be sensational. There must have been some sex. That Lania, for example. . . . She had quite a reputation, you know. And that other girl, Susie. . . . With those two aboard a ship anything might happen!"

"It did," conceded Grimes.

"And your own name's not entirely unknown, even on this back of beyond planet. Even our media carried the news of that mutiny aboard Discovery. And now you're news—NEWS!—again. Unluckily we're not allowed to publish anything about the Dunlevin affair before the full inquiry's been held; too many interplanetary ramifications. That's why the wolf pack didn't really tear you apart when you landed at the spaceport today."

"But. . . ."

"There are other tales you could tell. The full story of the Discovery mutiny. What you did when you were captain of the Baroness d'Estang's spaceyacht. How you came to set up shop as a shipowner in that fantastic Little Sister. And weren't you captured by a Shaara rogue queen on one voyage?"

"So. . . ."

"So?" asked Grimes.

"As I've said, we can't publish your story of the Dunlevin adventure until we get a clearance. But well titillate the appetites of our readers with your earlier adventures. On The Planet Of The Cat Women. . . . Space Chauffeur To the Baroness. . . . How My Crew Stabbed Me In The Back. . . . I was a Shaara Slave. . .."

"Mphm."

"We're willing to pay, of course."

"How much?" he asked sharply.

She told him.

He borrowed her notebook and stylus from her. He did his sums. There were the damages claimed and won by the New Syrtis Zoo, the court costs. To add to them there were the accumulated port dues and other charges. Then there was the estimated expense of putting Little Sister back in commission. The total came to considerably more than Wendy Wayne's offer. But there was his ship-keeping pay, which had been garnisheed. The subtraction of this did improve the situation but not enough.

He said, "I shall want more than that."

She said, "You're a greedy bastard."

"I want to keep my ship," he told her. "I don't want her sold from under me."

"My nose fair bleeds for you," she said.

He was tempted to throw this fat, insolent wench out of his room but restrained himself. After all, she represented the only chance he had to get himself off the financial rocks.

He asked, "Do you want my story—or stories—or don't you?"

"I do," she said. "My paper does. But we aren't prepared to give our right arms and a couple of legs for them. There are other stories, you know, that we can get for a damn sight less." She took the notebook back from him, squinted at the figures that he had written down. "No," she said. "Repeat, underscore and capitalize NO."

"Your paper could put me on contract," he said. "As a sort of roving correspondent. . . ."

"Ha!" she snorted. "Ha, bloody ha! And what hold would we have on you once you lifted off this mudball?"

He said, "There's the salvage award, you know. That could be a security."

"If and when you get it. If being the operative word. Marston's got legal eagles who'll tear that fat slob McCrimmon to shreds. But. . . . Pour me another gin, will you?"

He did so.

"Roving correspondent . . ." she muttered thoughtfully after the first noisy gulp. "Yes. But not you, buster. You'll just be the chauffeur, working off the good money we've paid to get your precious ship out of hock. . . ."

"And would you be the Bronson Star's roving correspondent?" asked Grimes, his heart sinking. There are some prices too high to pay.

"Not with you in the same spacegoing sardine can I wouldn't!" she said. "Not for all the folding money in El Dorado. Apart from anything else, you're the wrong sex. But we've been thinking of doing an exposé on the state of affairs on New Venusberg and our Fenella Pruin is the girl to do it. And when Fenella does an exposé she often has to get out in one helluva hurry—and the schedules of passenger liners don't always fit in with her hasty departures. It cost the paper a packet to get her out of jail on Waldegren."

"The Bronson Star must be rich," commented Grimes.

"We're not short of a credit," she said. "Of course, most of our dirt, the really dirty dirt, is syndicated throughout the galaxy."

She finished her gin, got to her feet.

"You'll be hearing from us, Grimes. I think we can use you."

She left him with the empty gin bottle for company but he decided that he neither wanted nor needed another drink. The renewal of hope was heady wine enough. He raised his glass, in Which only a few drops remained, in a toast to the solidograph of Maggie. She had wished him luck and it looked as though her wish were coming true.

But what would this Fenella Pruin be like?

He shrugged. He would cross that bridge when he came to it.

Meanwhile—and this was all that really mattered—he was keeping his ship.

THE END

 

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Framed