The Broken Cycle - A. Bertram Chandler [20]
"What was all that about?" asked Una in a subdued voice.
"I wish I knew," he said at last. "I wish I knew . . . ."
Chapter 11
They had a drink, helping themselves generously from one of the bottles of medicinal brandy. They felt that they needed it, even if they didn't deserve it. They had another drink after they had helped each other off with their spacesuits. After the third one they decided that they might as well make a celebration of it and wriggled out of their longjohns.
Then Una had to spoil everything.
She said, "All right, lover boy. Let us eat, drink and make merry while we can. But this is one right royal mess that you've gotten us into!"
If anybody had told Grimes in the not-too-distant past that he would ever be able to look at an attractive, naked woman with acute dislike Grimes would have told him, in more or less these words, Don't be funny. But now it was happening. It was the injustice of what she was saying that rankled.
He growled, at last, "You were there too!"
"Yes, Buster. But you're the expert. You're the commissioned officer in the Federation's vastly over-ballyhooed Survey Service."
"You're an expert too, in your own way. You should have warned me about using the Carlotti transceiver."
"Don't let's go over all that again, please. Well, apart from what's on your mind . . ." She looked down at him and permitted herself a sneer. "Apart from what was on your mind, what do you intend doing next?"
"Business before pleasure, then," said Grimes. "All that we can do is find some other likely transmission and home on that."
"What about those skeleton spheres, like the one that attacked us on the devastated planet? Was it after us actually—or was it, too, homing on the signal from the alien spaceship?"
"Alien spaceship?" queried Grimes. "I don't know when or where we are—but we could be the aliens."
"Regular little space lawyer, aren't you, with all this hair-splitting . . . . Alien, schmalien . . . . As it says in the Good Book, one man's Mede is another man's Persian . . . . Don't be so lousy with the drinks, lover boy. Fill 'er up."
"This has to last," Grimes told her. "For emergenshies . . ."
"This is so an emergency."
"You can shay—say—that again," he admitted.
She was beginning to look attractive once more. In vino veritas, he thought. He put out a hand to touch her. She did not draw back. He grabbed her and pulled her to him. Her skin, on his, was silkily smooth, and her mouth, as he kissed her, was warm and fragrant with brandy. And then, quite suddenly, it was like an implosion, with Grimes in the middle of it. After he, himself, had exploded they both drifted into a deep sleep.
* * *
When they awoke, strapped together in one of the narrow bunks, she was in a much better mood than she had been for quite a long time. And Grimes, in spite of his slight hangover, was happy. Their escape from—at the very least—danger had brought them together again. Whatever this strange universe threw at them from now on they, working in partnership, would be able to cope—he hoped, and believed.
She got up and made breakfast, such as it was—although the food seemed actually to taste better. After they had finished the meal Grimes went to play with the Carlotti transceiver. He picked up what seemed to be a conversation between two stations and not, as had been the other signal upon which they had homes, a distress call automatically repeated at regular intervals. He said, "This seems to be distant, but not too distant. What about it?"
She replied, "We've no place else to go. Get her lined up, lover boy, and head that way."
He shut down the mini-Mannschenn briefly, turned the boat until its stem was pointed toward the source of the transmissions, then opened both the inertial drive and the interstellar drive full out. It was good to be going somewhere, he thought. Hope springs eternal . . . he added mentally. But without hope the human race would have died out