A. Bertram Chandler- Grimes and the Odd Gods

VIP免费

2024-11-25 0 0 44.65KB 15 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

A. Bertram Chandler, an Australian writer and former naval officer, has been writing stories about the

Rim Worlds and featuring the well known character John Grimes, for at least thirty years. Here is a real

treat, a new story in which Commodore Grimes recounts his adventures with the odd Gods of a planet

called Stagatha.

Grimes and the Odd Gods

A. BERTRAM CHANDLER

Faraway Quest, the Rim Worlds Confederacy survey ship, was still berthed at Port Fortinbras, on

Elsinore. She was still awaiting replacements for the rotors of her outmoded inertial drive unit. More than

once, in strongly worded Carlottigrams, Commodore Grimes had requested, demanded almost, that he

be allowed to put the repairs in the hands of one of the several local shipyards. Each time he received a

terse reply from the Rim Worlds Admiralty's Bureau of Engineering which, translated from Officialese to

English, boiled down to Father knows best. He unburdened his soul to the Rim Worlds ambassador on

Elsinore.

"Can't you do something, Your Excellency?" he asked. "There's my ship been sitting here for weeks

now. My crew's becoming more and more demoralized...."

"As well I know, Commodore," the ambassador agreed. "You've some hearty drinkers aboard your

vessel, and when they drink they brawl. Perhaps you could stop the shore leave of the worst

offenders...."

"And have them drinking and brawling aboard the Quest? Or, if I really put my foot down, slouching

around in a state of sullen sobriety? There's only one thing to do. Get them off this bloody planet and

back where they belong, back to their wives and families or, in the case of the tabbies, to their

boyfriends."

"Some of your female personnel are even greater nuisances than the men," said the ambassador.

"You're telling me. But as an ambassador, Your Excellency, you pile on far mores Gs than a mere

commodore, a commodore on the reserve list at that. Can't you do something?"

"I've tried, Grimes. I've tried. But it's all a matter of economics. The Confederacy just does not have

the funds in any bank in the Shakespearean Sector to pay for a major repair and replacement job. Those

rotors will have to be manufactured on Lorn, and then carried out here in whatever ship of the Rim

Runners fleet is due to make a scheduled call to Elsinore...."

"And meanwhile," the commodore said, "there are mounting port dues. And the wages that

everybody aboard Faraway Quest is getting for doing nothing. And the three square meals a day, plus

snacks, that all hands expect as their right. And...."

"I'm a diplomat, Grimes, not an economist."

"And I'm just a spaceman. Oh, well. Theirs not to reason why, and all that. And now I'll be getting

back to my ship, Your Excellency."

"What's the hurry, Commodore? I was hoping that you would stay for a few drinks and, possibly,

dinner."

"I have an appointment," said Grimes.

The ambassador laughed. "Another interview for Kitty's Korner? I always watch that program

myself. And I've heard that Station Yorick's ratings have improved enormously since Miss Kelly

persuaded you to treat her viewers and listeners to your never-ending series of tall tales."

"Not so tall," growled Grimes.

"Perhaps not. You have had an interesting life, haven't you?"

An hour or so later, in his sitting room aboard the old ship, Grimes and Kitty Kelly were enjoying the

simple yet satisfying meal that had been brought to them by one of the stewardesses. There were

sandwiches constructed from crisply crusty new bread, straight from Faraway Quest's own bakery, and

thick slices of juicy Waldegren ham, the flavor of which derived from the smoldering sugar pine sawdust

over which the meat had been smoked. (Almost alone among the ship's personnel, Grimes liked this

delicacy; that was a good supply of it in the ship's cool stores. He was pleased that Kitty, hitherto

inclined to be an unadventurous eater, enjoyed it, too.) There was a variety of cheeses — Ultimo Blue,

Aquarian Sea Cream, and Caribbean Pineapple and Pepper —altogether with assorted pickles and the

especially hot radishes that Grimes had insisted be cultivated in the ship's hydroponic farm. There was

Australian beer — some while ago Grimes had done a private deal with the master of a Federation star

tramp not long out from Earth — served in condensation-bedewed pewter pots.

Nibbling a last radish with her strong while teeth, Kitty slumped back in her chair. Grimes regarded

her appreciatively. As she always did, she was wearing green, this time a long, filmy, flowing dress with

long, loose sleeves. Above it, the food and the drink had brought a slight flush to the normal creamy

pallor of her face, a healthy pallor, set off by the wide scarlet slash of her lips. Below her black glossy

hair, this evening braided into a sort of coronet, her startlingly blue eyes looked back at Grimes.

She murmured, "Thank you for the meal, Commodore. It was very good."

He asked, "And will you sing for your supper?"

She said, "You're the one who's going to do the singing." She looked at the bulkhead clock. "It's

almost time that we got the show on the road again. And what are you going to talk about tonight? Your

adventures as a pirate?"

"Not a pirate," he corrected her stiffly. "A privateer."

"Who knows the difference? And who cares? Or what about when you were governor general of

that anarchist planet?"

"Too long a story, Kitty," he said. "And too complicated. By All the Odd Gods of the Galaxy, there

never were, before or since, such complications!"

She said thoughtfully, "That ... that oath you often use ... By All the Odd Gods of the Galaxy ... Did

you ever get tangled with any of these Odd Gods?"

He told her, "I'm an agnostic. But ... there have been experiences."

She got up from her chair, went to the case containing her audio-visual recorder, opened it, pulled

out the extensions with their lenses and microphones.

She said, peering into the monitor screen. "Yes, that's it. Pipe in one hand, tankard in the other ...

And now, talk."

"What about?"

"The Odd Gods, of course. Or, at the very least, One Odd God."

He said, "Oh, all right. But I must get my pipe going first."

As you know (he started at last), I left the Federation Survey Service under something of a cloud

after the Discovery mutiny. For a while I was yachtmaster to the Baroness Michelle d'Estang, an El

Doradan aristocrat, and on the termination of this employment she gave me the yacht's pinnance, which

was practically a deep-space ship in miniature, as a parting gift. I called her — the pinnance, not the

baroness — Little Sister and set up shop as Far Traveler Courier Services. I'd carry anything or anybody

anywhere, as long 'as I got paid. There would be small parcels of special cargo. There would be people

waiting to get to planets well off the normal interstellar trade routes.

It was a living.

I didn't make a fortune, but there was usually enough in the bank to pay ports dues and such and to

keep me in life's little luxuries. It was lonely for quite a lot of the time but, now and again, there were

passengers who were pleasant enough company ... Yes, female ones sometimes, if you must know. But it

was the female ones who usually got me into all kinds of trouble. Mphm.

Well, I'd carried a small parcel of urgently needed medical supplies to a world called Warrenhome

— no, the inhabitants weren't descended from rabbits but the name of the captain who made the first

landing was Warren — where they were having some sort of plague. A mutated virus. After I'd made

delivery and received the balance of the payment due to me, I lost no time in placing the usual

advertisements in the usual media. I decided that I'd wait around for a week and then, if nothing came up,

get off the planet. There was talk that that virus, a nasty one, might mutate again.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

A. Bertram Chandler- Grimes and the Odd Gods.pdf

共15页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

A. Bertram Chandler- Grimes and the Odd Gods

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: