By the Time I Get to Pellax Read online

  - 18 -

  Having enjoyed the delights of Krayko, the tourists had returned to the ship by taxi, and many of them were determined to prolong the spirit of play for the rest of the evening. Captain Cutter was expecting this, it always happened when people got back from Dalhedra, and it was great for letting off some steam. From experience though, the Captain thought it was best to pass through the Dorms in the passenger section as if on a whim, and show himself and maybe his red-haired First Officer, Billy Flax. These get-togethers in the Dorms could get out of hand, probably due in part to the change of atmosphere from the heady brew which made up Dalhedra's oxygen-rich atmosphere. Along with Billy Flax, Cutter wandered through the corridors and out into the communal area that was so convenient as a meeting place for those who had their cabins in that part of the ship. Oh yes, there was a party. The Top Hats, in their Pascoe/Venner incarnation, were very much the showmen. Venner had his guitar, and Lonnie had programmed his Tunesmith for a fuller sound. There were Beatle tunes such as 'In My Life' and 'She's Leaving Home', interspersed with intergalactic hits such as Ichabar's 'Our Chaotic Romance'. There was also some schlock, such as Tyro of Tursa's 'Freaks of Paradise' and 'Low in the Saddle'. All the songs were appreciated to the hilt in the uninhibited mood of the occasion. Billy Flax nodded his head to the beat. 'That friggin' Tyro stuff, it's a load of crap but if you're in the mood it gets you here,' he said pointing to the row of medals above his heart. Then Lonnie switched to an older Earth favourite, in fact that vignette of the nightlife of London, England, 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square'. After Venner had played the notes Big Ben strikes prior to tolling the hour and then 1-2-3, Lonnie began to sing, 'That certain night,' as only he knew how. It was obvious that he was from Earth, and he seemed to get an extra vibration into his voice, and when he spoke a couple of the lines in a cut-glass accent instead of singing them, that went down well too. Some nudged each other, others shed a tear for an England they had perhaps never known, that England that belongs to the culture of the galaxy. In the front row of their audience, who were sitting on rugs or cushions or the bare floor, was Helen, Latonia's new friend. She had eyes for Lupo Venner, and the guitar player was encouraged by her beaming face and nods. Afterwards Lonnie said to Venner, 'I don't think Vince Crotchett can match you, in fact several people have come up to me and said it was great we had reformed.' 'Everybody wipes a tear now and then,' said Venner. Lonnie had to laugh at his flippant tone of voice. The fact was, Venner knew that, unlike Lonnie, he wasn't really born to sing, or play guitar. He didn't know what he was born to do. It was true though that the Top Hats had probably come the closest yet to fulfilling something in his life. He also knew that his relatives, the Kleissenbergs and the even more exalted Ralladars, had always stayed aware, at least, of his career such as it was. They had ordered his holodiscs which had not exactly set the air waves on fire. For now, he revelled in the emotion which they could whip up as the Top Hats. For now, that looked like the pinnacle. He was glad that his relatives followed his career still, though he couldn't really see himself ever going back to Pellax to wince under the notorious régime of the Galerians. Another fan in the audience was of course Hollis Pierpoint, one of the heroes of Krayko City earlier that day. The thickset retiree was in his shirtsleeves and his greying hair was getting long, droopily revealing his bald spot. His face was sweaty as he joked and laughed and tossed back many a swallow of lager. 'Drax is here, but not his girlfriend,' said Billy Flax. The Captain gave him an inquisitive look. 'For that matter,' said Flax, colouring up slightly, 'she didn't visit Krayko with him either.' Flax was interested, because it could be that the couple were on the outs. He had marked out Rosalind as soon as she boarded as the type of beauty that appealed to him. Each voyage hatched a number of romances, and on several occasions Billy Flax, First Officer, had been lucky. He would keep his eyes open and if he found there was a chance for him with this dusky, sulky Jezebel, he would take it. Captain Cutter stretched and yawned, smiling complacently at his First Officer. 'A decent lot, compared with some of the crowds we've had on here,' said Billy Flax. 'There hasn't been too much trouble this trip, except for those two Jyconan students.' Flax always referred to them as students, for some reason. The two men continued on their way back towards the Captain's quarters via the brig. Here they paused to look in on the two Jyconan demonstrators. 'Blake was telling me that he's radioed all over,' said Cutter, 'and these two guys don't seem to be known to the police on Jycona or any part of this galaxy. Their little episode could just be a fluke., I suppose. They don't actually strike me as dangerous, but of course you never know.' 'The worst thing about the buggers is their air of superiority,' said Flax. 'That's right. It's either that they consider they're above it all, or they know something we don't,' said the Captain. 'Exactly.' 'And it's that part that worries me.'

  - 19 -

  The Fish Eagle, the second ship to bear this name under the captaincy of Erloch Spurgo, and formerly the Class-5 Darter Fieldspar, was shadowing the Tortuga. The brigands were monitoring the starliner's calls and also receiving messages from agents on board. Captain Erloch Spurgo, known to the Federation as a brigand, an epithet he gloried in, had, thanks to some excellent intelligence reports, fastened onto the intergalactic cruiser when it was stationed in orbit around Phaleron II. He had got some anthropomorphs who were on his payroll into cleaning or stewarding jobs in the rest rooms and bars of the starliner. The reports he got from them confirmed in mouth-watering detail that the hulk would prove a rich source of plunder: gold, platinum, jewels, goods such as designer clothes, weapons, explosives, and women. Women for enjoyment or for trade in the slave markets of off-map worlds. It was well known that the security on board the starliner, under the guidance of Thorason Blake, was far from negligible. Spurgo had accepted money from the Jyconan Liberation Army. As soon as the Tortuga had been taken, the Jyconans would be allowed to have their say, their publicity coup, while Spurgo and his brigands wold take whatever was going. He had been flabbergasted when he was informed that two of the young revolutionaries aboard had tried some half-baked demonstration which had been interpreted by the crew as terrorism. What gave colour to this reading of their stupid intervention was the fact that one of the guys had got his hands on a grenade from the secret store laid in by Spurgo's agents and supposedly kept in lead boxes. The Jyconan would probably not even have known how to detonate the grenade. What worried Spurgo was the fact that two revolutionary hotheads were now in custody. They did not know much, but they were acquainted with a couple of the agents on board, and under pressure might give them away.

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  It was a fact that ever since Venner had been dropped off Riley's roster, the Top Hats had found their muse was blessing them more than ever before. They were simply INTO it and devil take the hindmost, itching to sing and play all day and all night. The songs were going down a storm. For the hell of it, and in a spirit of self-indulgence, they booked a Holodream suite just for the two of them and programmed a gig in a football stadium filled with hundreds of thousands of long-haired fans and hosted by MCs from the great Rock and Roll periods of all space and time. 'This is not practice any more, Lonnie,' said Venner, keeping a straight face, 'it's the real thing, man. And now that it's shit or bust, I've also gone and dug out some of my old songs, you know, the ones I was working on when I came aboard.' 'Ah, the prospective hits of that band you were in , eh? What were they called?' 'The Obsessives!' 'Ha ha ha! Well, we can use some of that material, just the two of us. And you get working on more, right?' 'Right.' 'Some of them are really catchy, man.' Seeing Venner absorbed like this gave Lonnie a buzz. They tried introducing a couple of Venner's songs later on, when the Top Hats provided the entertainment at a drinks party in some big wig's quarters. The boys had already decided not to mention that this material was new, or written by Lupo Venner. They would just slip it in, somewhere in the middle, and see how it panned out. And pan it did. The song, 'Take Me to the Stratosphere', was received wit
h silence and embarrassment. People were looking into their drinks or watching the indifferent constellations from the panascope bay window that made up forty per cent of the room's wall space.. 'Fug it,' said the composer of this gem, 'it went down better than this in the "Dream Suite".' 'That's all right,' said Lonnie, clearly taken aback himself, 'let's move on to "This Nearly Was Mine". The stuff from South Pacific is a great leveller, what?'

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  Cutter was on the bridge and it was a day like any other on the great milk run that the luxurious starliner made twice a year. He never got bored with it. He didn't allow himself to get bored, though other officers said they could never do it, they would go out of their mind with the routine and there would be no challenge to it. They said the cruises lacked the spirit of exploration and adventure. 'Exploration and adventure?' he would say. 'They've got plenty of ships that specialise in that. Not that the Tortuga doesn't see some way-out sights and meet some far-out races. My passengers are interested in a new experience and at the same time incorporating a number of their old experiences. Nostalgia, see. And what's wrong with that? Many have had enough stress and hardship for one lifetime, so they come to us for something else. We provide it.' Not that anyone should think they've got a soft target here in the Tortuga, thought Cutter to himself. By no means. We've made preparations against any kind of aggression. He adjusted the straps of the comfortable lightweight armour that he had been measured for by a genius of the tailoring trade. Boredom? A rut? Poppycock! Ted Cutter didn't go along with that. He knew where he was well off, and in a year or two he would hang up his sextant. He was happy to contemplate the glamorous twilight time that lay ahead of him and his lady wife of some twenty-two years. He was looking at the massive view screen through half-closed eyes as the starliner powered through a field of asteroid fragments. He glanced at the helmswoman, who was sitting straight and attentive. Right here there's enough excitement for one day, he thought. In space you could never really go into glide mode. The girl was steering superbly, staying well between two chunks of rock ahead which could easily crush the Tortuga. Cutter paced the walkway, towards a console attended by a keen young midshipman. As for himself, someone could easily have concluded he was dozing, but no, he was aware of things. Peripherally, at least. He was alive to everything that went on, no worry about that. That's how he picked up on the sudden jerking-back of the midshipman's head. The lad jumped to his feet, still staring at the monitor in front of him. Then he appeared to shrug to himself before sitting back down. After a minute or so however, Cutter saw the lad get up and approach Commander Flax. Flax listened to the youth, stared at his own monitor, touched a few buttons, flipped a switch, and said something to the boy, who nodded and returned to his station. 'What was with the boy, Billy?' he asked Flax as the burly redheaded officer came by the command console a few minutes later. 'He thought he saw something on his monitor, a vessel alongside. It showed for a second on his screen then blinked off.' 'What was it, do you think? An anomaly?' 'Yes, I checked the bearing on my console and everything was clear. These glitches happen, as you know.' 'Yes, they do,' said Cutter. 'Just an anomaly, but that's why we have these young security helpers up here, it's another pair of eyes. Tell the boy from me well done for spotting it, and we'd better keep a sweep on that frequency just in case.' 'Aye, sir.'

  - 20 -

  The Top Hats got a big hand for 'This Nearly Was Mine' and when they followed that up with 'Time After Time' and a couple of Tyro of Tursa's numbers, it seemed that they had carried the day. 'Well, we got it back all right, Lonnie,' said Venner. 'We lost it for a while, but we got it back, and now we're gonna keep it.' 'We certainly are.' 'And if I start to get delusions of being another Irving Berlin, just kick me in the slats.' 'Ah, you're OK, Ven, you keep up your projects, man, you've got a real talent there.' People were leaving the big wig's suite now. Some of them paused to thank the Top Hats and offer congratulations or get autographs. One fan, an elderly lady, was about to go out of the door, cradling her autograph book and handbag, when she happened to look out of the palatial cabin's steelglass window and saw a slim grey-green craft streaking alongside the Tortuga. For two full seconds she stood there, running her eye along the vessel's side, on which she could see a couple of patches skilfully riveted. Then the craft disappeared. 'Margot, did you see that?' she asked her friend. 'There was a ship out there a minute ago, unless I'm imagining it!' 'I didn't see anything,' said Margot, who had been watching Lupo Venner putting his guitar in its case. But she went up to the window and put her hand on it. The steelglass vibrated a little, but wasn't that just the normal effect of the ship's reactors? Then her hair stood up as a vague outline of a ship or a massive creature almost touching the window appeared and then vanished instantly. 'We've got to inform somebody about this, Carla,' she told her friend. She took her arm and they hurried into the corridor to find an officer.

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