The Hard Way Up - A. Bertram Chandler [11]
"Mr. von Tannenbaum and Mr. Slovotny are waiting for you there, sir, and Mr. McCloud is standing by in the engine room."
"Good. And Mr. Deane is tucked safely away with his poodle's brain in aspic?"
"He is, sir."
"Good. Then give Mr. Alberto my compliments, and ask him if he would like to join us in Control during lift off."
Grimes negotiated the ladder in the axial shaft rapidly, without losing breath. (The Serpent Class couriers were too small to run to an elevator.) He did not make a stop at his own quarters. (A courier captain was supposed to be able to proceed anywhere in the Galaxy, known or unknown, at a second's notice.) In the control room he found Ensign von Tannenbaum ("The blond beast") and Lieutenant Slovotny (just "Sparks") at their stations. He buckled himself into his own chair. He had just finished doing so when the plump, lugubrious Beadle pulled himself up through the hatch. He addressed Grimes. "I asked Mr. Alberto if he'd like to come up to the office, Captain . . ."
"And is he coming up, Number One,?" Grimes looked pointedly at the clock on the bulkhead.
"No, Captain. He said . . ."
"Out with it man. It's time we were getting up them stairs."
"He said, "You people look after your job, and I'll look after mine.' "
Grimes shrugged. As a courier captain he had learned to take V.I.P.s as they came. Some—a very few of them—he would have preferred to have left. He asked, "Are Mr. Alberto and Mr. Deane secured for lift off?"
"Yes, Captain, although Spooky's not happy about the shockproof mount for his amplifier . . ."
"He never is. Clearance, Sparks . . ."
"Clearance, Captain." The wiry little radio officer spoke quietly into his microphone. "Mission 7DKY to Tower. Request clearance."
"Tower to Mission 7DKY. You have clearance. Bon voyage."
"Thank him," said Grimes. He glanced rapidly around the little control room. All officers were strapped in their acceleration chairs. All tell-tale lights were green. "All systems Go . . ." he muttered, relishing the archaic expression.
He pushed the right buttons, and went.
It was a normal enough courier lift off. The inertial drive developed maximum thrust within microseconds of its being started. Once his radar told him that the ship was the minimum safe altitude above the port, Grimes cut in his auxiliary rockets. The craft was built to take stresses that, in larger vessels, would have been dangerous. Her personnel prided themselves on their toughness. And the one outsider, the passenger. Grimes would have grinned had it not been for the acceleration flattening his features. Commodore Damien had said that Mr. Alberto was tough—so Mr. Alberto would just have to take the G's and like it.
The ship drove up through the last, high wisps of cirrus, into the darkling, purple sky, towards the sharply bright, unwinking stars. She plunged outward through the last, tenuous shreds of atmosphere, and the needles of instruments flickered briefly as she passed through the van Allens. She was out and clear now, out and clear, and Grimes cut both inertial and reaction drives, used his gyroscopes to swing the sharp prow of the ship on to the target star, the Doncaster sun, brought that far distant speck of luminosity into the exact center of his spiderweb sights. Von Tannenbaum, who was Navigator, gave him the corrections necessitated by Galactic Drift; it was essential to aim the vessel at where the star was now, not where it was some seventy-three years ago.
The Inertial Drive was restarted, and the ever-precessing rotors of the Mannschenn Drive were set in motion. There was the usual brief queasiness induced by the temporal precession field, the usual visual shock as colors sagged down the spectrum, as the hard, bright stars outside the viewports became iridescent nebulosities. Grimes remained in his chair a few minutes,