The Big Black Mark - A. Bertram Chandler [85]
Chapter 40
There were times during the voyage to Botany Bay when Grimes toyed with the idea of becoming the ringleader of a mutiny himself. Delamere was insufferable. The only members of his crew who took him seriously, however, were among that too sizable minority who have a slavish respect for rank, no matter how earned. The others—officers and ratings alike—paid lip service to their captain's oft iterated determination to run a taut ship, then did pretty well as they pleased. None of them, however, was foolish enough not to attend the drills that Delamere delighted in springing at odd times, although at every one of these there was much yawning and shuffling of feet.
Grimes did not succeed in making friends with any of Vega's people. They were, he decided, afraid of him. His run of good luck had been followed by one spectacularly bad piece of luck—and the fear was there that his bad luck would rub off on them. After a subjective week or so he no longer bothered to try to be sociable. He spoke when he was spoken to, he took his place at table at mealtimes, he had an occasional drink with the frigate's senior officers. Delamere never invited him to have a drink, and plainly resented the fact that Service protocol required him to have Grimes seated at his right hand at table.
At last he was obliged to make use of Grimes's advisory services. It was when the voyage was almost over, when Vega, her Mannschenn Drive shut down, proceeding under inertial drive only, was approaching Botany Bay. He called Grimes up to the control room. "You're the expert," he sneered. "What am I supposed to do now, Commander?"
"To begin with, Commander, you can make a start by monitoring the local radio stations. They have newscasts every hour, on the hour."
"On what frequencies?"
"I don't know. I left all such sordid details to my radio officers." There was an unsuccessfully suppressed snigger from the Senior Sparks, who was in the control room. Grimes went on. "It will be advisable, too, to make a check to see if there's anything in orbit about the planet. There weren't any artificial satellites when I was here—but it's possible that Brabham may have put up an armed pinnace as a guard ship."
"I'd already thought of that, Commander," said Delamere. (It was obvious that he hadn't.) He turned to his navigator. "Mr. Prokieff, will you make the necessary observations? We should be close enough to the planet by now."
Grimes looked at the gleaming instrumentation in the control room, all far more up to date than what he had been obliged to make do with in Discovery. With that gear, he thought, the satellite search could have been initiated days ago, as soon as we reemerged into normal space-time.
A voice came through the intercom speaker. "Radio office here, control room. We are monitoring a news broadcast. Shall we put it through to your NST transceiver?"
Delamere turned to his senior radio officer. "That was quick work, Mr. Tamworthy."
"We've been trying for some time, sir. Commander Grimes suggested it."
"Commander Grimes—" Delamere made it sound like a particularly foul oath. Nonetheless, he walked to the NST set, the screen of which was now alive with a picture. Grimes followed him. It seemed to be the coverage of a wedding. There was the bride, tall and slim in white, on the arm of a man in the uniform of an airship captain, smiling directly at the camera. In the background were faces that Grimes recognized—Mavis, and Brabham, and Tangye, and the Paddington City Constable, and the president of the Air Pilots' Guild, and Brandt. But he knew none of them as well as he did the bride.
". . . the wedding of Miss Ellen Russell," the news reader was saying, in that accent that Grimes, now, had no trouble in understanding, "to Skipper Benny Jones, of the airliner Flying Cloud. As you all know, Miss Russell—sorry, Mrs. Jones!—was paymaster o' the Terry spaceship Discovery, but Commander