The Broken Cycle - A. Bertram Chandler [10]
"All right, if you want to be a space lawyer!" Delamere went off in a huff—not that he could go very far—and slumped down in one of the acceleration chairs.
Ballantyre extrapolated. From the center of the screen a very fine gleaming filament extended, and another one from the target. It was obvious that the two ships would pass each other many kilometers distant.
"Mphm." Grimes produced his pipe, filled and lit it.
"I don't allow smoking in my control room," growled Delamere.
"I'm in charge now, as you, yourself, have admitted. And I always wear a pipe when I'm engaged in shiphandling."
"Let the baby have his dummy!" sneered the other.
Grimes ignored this. He said to Ballantyre, "You know this ship better than I do. Adjust our trajectory so that we're on a converging course, and overtaking . . . ."
The navigator looked inquiringly at his captain, who growled, "Do as the man says."
The Mannschenn Drive was shut down, but the inertial drive remained in operation. There were the brief seconds of temporal disorientation, with distorted outlines and all colors sagging down the spectrum, with all the shipboard sounds echoing oddly and eerily. Grimes, looking at Una, realized that he was—or would be, sometime in the not too distant future—seeing her naked. This made sense of a sort. Flashes of precognition are not uncommon when the interstellar drive is started up or shut down. But she was not only completely unclothed, but riding a bicycle. That made no sense at all.
Gyroscopes rumbled, hummed as the ship was turned about her short axes, as the adjustment to trajectory was made. In the screen the extrapolated courses looked as Grimes desired them to look. "Mphm. Very good, Mr. Ballantyre. Now—chase and board!"
"I'm afraid I can't lend you any cutlasses, Grimes," said Delamere sardonically. "Or did you bring your own with you?"
"Might I suggest, Lieutenant Commander, that we not waste time with airy persiflage? After all, you were the one who was saying how precious his time is . . . ."
Again there was temporal disorientation as the Mannschenn Drive was restarted. Grimes hoped for another glimpse of the future Una, but was disappointed. The only impression was of an intensely bright white light, too bright, almost, to be seen.
Grimes left things very much in the hands of Delamere's navigator. The young man obviously knew just what he was doing. With a minimum of fuss he got Skink running parallel with Delta Geminorum, with both actual speed and temporal precession rates exactly synchronized. With the synchronization the derelict was visible now, both visually and in the radar screen. At a range of five kilometers she could be examined in detail through the big, mounted binoculars, their lenses sensitive to all radiation, in the courier's control room. She looked innocent enough, a typical Delta Class liner of the Interstellar Transport Commission, floating against a background of blackness and the shimmering nebulosities that were the stars. She seemed to be undamaged, but an after airlock door was open. The pirates, thought Grimes, hadn't been very well brought up; nobody had taught them to shut doors after them . . . .
"I'll take over now," said Delamere. "After all, this is my ship, Lieutenant Commander."
"Oh, yes, I'd almost forgotten," said Grimes. "And what are your intentions, Lieutenant Commander?"
"I'm going to make things easy for you, Grimes. I'm going to lay Skink right alongside Delta Geminorum."
Just the sort of flashy spacemanship that would appeal to you, thought Grimes.
"Are you mad?" asked Una Freeman coldly.
Delamere flushed. "I'm not mad. And you, Miss Freeman, are hardly qualified to say your piece regarding matters of spacemanship."
"Perhaps not, Commander Delamere. But I am qualified to say my piece regarding bomb disposal."
"Bomb disposal?"
"Yes. Bomb disposal. If you'd bothered to run through the report I gave you to read—and that Commander Grimes did read—you would know that there is a fully armed thermonuclear device