The Big Black Mark - A. Bertram Chandler [54]
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