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organized to let them know how dinner was going at the other table if the
dance floor had been full of dancers.
At any rate, after a hit. Mary sat back from her plate, said a few words to
the major across from her and got up. She came across and got Jim, and
together they walked down the lit streets of the Base and over a few blocks
into its older section.
She stopped at one of the older office buildings, a four-story structure of
wood, rowed with tall windows, with only a few of them lighted, and one
equally tall wooden door, which Mary now unlocked.
Here, they were away from most of the street lights, and it was possible for
Jim, when he looked up for a moment before going in, to see the stars over the
mountain peaks on this cloudless night. For a second the thought of space
tugged at him with a poignancy that was a stabbing pain. Then he followed Mary
into the lighted interior, and the door closed behind them.
The room they stepped into was tiny and brilliantly lit. No, it was two
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rooms; for even its small space was divided, front to back, from beside the
entrance to beside a door in the back wall by a floor-to-ceihng transparency
behind which was a single desk, a single chair and a single sergeant with
holstered sidearm. The feeling of closeness was increased by the bright light,
the lowness of the ceiling and a faint smell of varnish.
"Credentials, ma'am? Sir?"
The voice of the sergeant came at them through some speaker system in the
roof overhead. Mary fished in the large tan handbag slung by a strap from her
left shoulder and produced two silver-colored identification-type cards
complete with pictures.
"Thank you, ma'am. Sir."
The door in the farther wall swung open. Mary handed one of the cards to Jim
before leading the way farther into the building.
"Here, you'd probably better keep that with you from now on."
Jim took it. The picture on it was the same as that on his regular Base ID.
He tucked it in his wallet as he went after her through the door, which closed
behind them.
They stepped into an area which to Jim, at first glance, seemed enormous. To
his surprise, the wooden front wall of the building, and presumably the side
walls also, had been backed by a four-feet thickness of concrete blocks
solidly cemented together, so that the effect was like being in some enormous
cavern. Lights at some distance from each other were burning thee stories
overhead, reinforcing the illusion of vast, empty space.
To Jim's left was a chunk of the building still divided into rooms and
offices, so that it looked like a tower built inside the cave and going up the
full four stories of the original structure. Inside here, all of these
enclosed spaces had lights on within them but no sign of people. Mary reached
out to the wall beside her and touched it. The existing illumination was
suddenly reinforced by a blaze of lights in the open cavern area, not only at
the third story level of those now burinng, but also now at ceiling level, a
story higher up.
The increase in brightness was so intense that for a mornent Jim's eyes were
dazzled and he saw nothing. Then, looking up, he became aware that in the
fourth story of space of the open area hung all sorts of cranes and heavy
slings; and the reason for reinforcing the walls became obvious. Support would
be needed if instruments like these were going to lift the sort of loads they
had been designed to lift.
But it was when he looked down again, at the vast open space of the floor,
that he rtacted. Because there sat not only La Chasse Gallerie, the ship that
literally now was Raoul Penard, but beside it another ship that he recognized
at first glance.
"You've got AndFriend here!"
It came out of him as an exclamation that was magnified by the echoes of the
large open space into a shout.
"Of course," said Mary. "Your ship's also part of everything that's
concerned with our rescue of Raoul. In a situation where we don't know
anything, we work with anything that could possibly help give us a key."
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Jim went unthinkingly toward AndFnend and laid a hand flat on the polished
curve of her nose.
"Is she taking good care of you, baby?" he whispered, too low for even the
echoes here to make it audible to Mary Gallegher's ears. He thought he felt
reassurance from the metal he touched.
He turned to look at La Chasse Gallerie. In contrast with her interior,
nothing had been done to repair or even clean her up, outside.
"I suppose," he said over his shoulder to Mary, his voice sounding loud in
the stillness in spite of his conversational tones, "you didn't want to risk
touching Penard's ship any more than you had to. It looks the way it looked
when we first saw it, out beyond the Frontier."
"Yes," said Mary. She had drawn close until she stood only a step from him
and his ship and only half a dozen steps from Raoul's. "We had to take some
very small lab samples so we'd have something to work on. Otherwise it hasn't
been touched."
An intense longing suddenly gripped him to sit once more in AndFriend's
command chair. He had not seen his ship from the moment of landing with
Penard's vessel alongside here at Base. He had tried to get to her half a
dozen times, and been turned back with the excuse that AndFriend, like La
Chasse Galierie, was off-limits until it had been thoroughly checked out by
all those departments from Intelligence on down who felt they might have
something there to check.
In the same moment he thought he caught a glimpse of something, there and
almost instantly gone again, in Mary's eyes as she watched him. What it could
have been, if in fact it had not been something he had imagined, he could not
tell. It might almost have been a look of pity, except that there was no
reason for Mary to look at him that way, and in fact he was not sure she was
capable of feeling that particular emotion. But the longing to sit in the
pilot's com-chair again had put hin in movement even as he was noticing this.
He swung about, walked three steps down AndFriend's side and laid his hand on
the operating button of her entry port.
"I'll have a look inside while I'm here-"
"No!" said Mary, so sharply that he stopped in spite of himself.
He swung around to face her.
"It's my ship."
"I'm sorry," said Mary. "But it's part of the red tape-you know how these
things are. It hasn't been released for entry by anyone but me and my staff."
She smiled a little sadly at him.
"I'm sorry," she said-and she really sounded as if she meant it. "You know.
Orders." But the Frontier pilots were not book people. if they had been, most
of those who had lived would have died before this.
"Orders may be orders," he said lightly, turning back to the button,
"still-"
"Still, you'll obey them!" said the voioe of Mollen harshly, and Jim swung
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around again to see that not only the general, but also either the sergeant at
the entrance or his double, had together come around the nose of La Chasse
Gallerie.
Jim's hand fell helplessly at his side.
"I came by to see if you could use a ride back to the BOQ," Mollen went on
to him. "You'll be moving into the resident wing in this building tomorrow,
but tonight you might as well be in a bed you're used to."
"Thank you, sir," said Jim. He looked at Mary. "If Mary's finished showing
me around...? We'd just got in here...."
"I'm afraid there's not much more I can show you, anyway," Mary said. "All
the labs are locked and most of the people out of them at this hour. I just
thought you'd like to see where your own ship and Raoul's are being kept."
"I appreciate it," said Jim to her. He turned to the general.
"Thank you again, sir. I'll come right along."
"Good," said Mollen.
He turned and led the way to the entrance and into the street outside. It [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]