Ride the Star Winds Read Online Free PDF Page B

stiffly. Grimes raised his top hat. Harringby extended his hand. Grimes took it with deliberate and (he hoped) infuriating graciousness.
    “Good-bye, Your Excellency,” said the shipmaster. “It’s been both an honor and a pleasure to have you aboard.”
    Bloody liar, thought Grimes. He said, “Thank you, Captain.”
    The Chief Officer saluted, waited until Grimes extended his hand before offering his own.
    “The best of luck, Your Excellency.”
    Do you mean it? wondered Grimes.
    Liz brought her slim hand up to the brim of her tricorne hat, then held it out to Grimes who, gallantly, raised it to his lips while bowing slightly. Harringby scowled and the Chief Officer smirked dirtily. Grimes straightened up, still holding the girl’s hand, looking into her eyes. He would have liked to have kissed those full lips—and to hell with Harringby!—but he and Liz had said their proper (improper?) good-byes during the night and early morning ship’s time.
    “Good-bye, Your Excellency,” she murmured. “And—look after yourself.”
    “I’ll try to,” he promised.
    Harringby coughed loudly to attract attention, then said, “Your Excellency, I shall be vastly obliged if you will board the tender. It is time that I was getting back to my control room.”
    “Very well, Captain.”
    Grimes gave one last squeeze to Liz’s hand, relinquished it reluctantly and turned to walk into the airlock chamber and then through the short connecting tube. The tender’s airlock door was smaller than that of the liner and had not been designed to admit anybody wearing a top hat. That ceremonial headgear was knocked off its insecure perch. As Grimes stooped to retrieve it he heard the Chief Officer laugh and an even louder guffaw from one of the tender’s crew. He carried his hat before him as he completed his journey to the small spacecraft’s cabin. His prominent ears were burning furiously.

    The crew of the tender—Liberia possessed only orbital spacecraft—were young, reasonably efficient and (to Grimes’s great envy) sensibly uniformed in shorts and T-shirts and badges of rank pinned to the left breast. The Captain asked Grimes to join him in the control cab. He did so, after removing his tail coat and waistcoat, sat down in the copilot’s chair. He looked out from the viewport at the great bulk of the liner, already fast diminishing against the backdrop of abysmal night and stars, saw it flicker and fade and vanish as the Mannschenn Drive was actuated. He transferred his attention to the mottled sphere toward which the tender was dropping—pearly cloud systems and blue seas, brown and green continents and islands.
    “It’s a good world, Your Excellency,” said the young pilot. He grinned wryly. “It was a good world. It could be one again.”
    Grimes looked at him with some curiosity. The accent had been Standard English, overlaid with an oddly musical quality. The face was olive-skinned, hawklike. Native-born, he thought. The original colonists—those romantic Anarchists—had been largely of Latin-American stock.
    “Could be?” he asked.
    “That is the opinion of some of us, Your Excellency. And we’ve heard of you, of course. You’re something of an Anarchist yourself . . .”
    “Mphm?”
    “I mean. . . . You’re not the usual Survey Service stuffed shirt.”
    “A stuffed shirt is just what I feel like at the moment.”
    “But you’ve a reputation, sir, for doing things your own way.”
    “And where has it got me?” asked Grimes, addressing the question to himself rather than to the tender’s pilot.
    “You’ve commanded ships, sir. Real ships, deep space ships, not . . . tenders.”
    “Don’t speak ill of your own command,” Grimes admonished.
    The young man grinned whitely. “Oh, I like her. She’ll do almost anything I ask of her—but if I asked her to make a deep space voyage I know what her answer would be!”
    “Fit her out with Mannschenn Drive and a life support system,” said Grimes,