Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III Read Free Page A

First Expansion vessels—the so-called Deep Freeze Ships—had proceeded to their destinations at sub-light speeds. Boggarty was even further removed from the main trade routes than Tiralbin. Its exports consisted of very occasional shipments of native artifacts, consigned mainly to museums, art galleries and private collectors. As a result of these infrequent but lucrative sales, Boggarty had built up a large credit balance in the Galactic Bank, which maintained its headquarters on Earth. There was ample money for the human colonists to pay for any of the goods they ordered, by the practically instantaneous Carlotti radio, from anywhere at all in the known universe. The main trouble, apparently, lay in persuading any of the major shipping lines or even a tramp operator to deviate from the well-established tram-lines to make a special call. The only company to make regular visits was the Dog Star Line which, every three standard years, sent a ship to pick up a worthwhile consignment of objets d’art.
    The planet, Grimes learned, was named after the indigenes, whom the first colonists had dubbed boggarts. Looking at the pictures that flickered across the little screen he could understand why. These creatures could have been gnomes or trolls from Terran children’s fairy stories. Humanoid but grossly misshapen, potbellied, hunchbacked, the males with grotesquely huge sex organs, the females with pendulous dugs . . . Curved, yellow tusks protruding from wide, lipless mouths . . . Ragged, spiny crests in lieu of hair . . .
    If the boggarts were horrendous, what they manufactured was beautiful. They worked with wire, with gleaming filaments of gold. Their gnarled, three-fingered, horny-nailed hands moved with lightning dexterity as they wove their metal sculptures, complex intricacies that seemed to be (that were?) at least four dimensional. And these, Grimes learned with some amazement, were no more than adaptions from the traps—in which they caught large, edible, flying insects—that the boggarts had been weaving at the time of the First Landing. (But some spiders’ webs are works of art, he thought.)
    He wondered what the boggarts got paid for their work. There was no explicit information, but in one shot of a cave workshop he saw, in a corner, bottles and plastic food containers, and some of the females were wearing necklaces of cheap and gaudy glass beads.
    He was wasting time, he knew, viewing what was, in actuality, no more than a travelogue—but he liked to have some idea of what any world to which he was bound was like. He looked at mountainous landscapes, at long, silver beaches with black, jagged reefs offshore, at mighty rivers rushing through spectacular canyons, flowing majestically across vast, forested plains. He saw the towns and the cities, pleasant enough but utterly lacking in architectural inspiration, too-regular cubes and domes of metal and plastic. He saw the cave villages of the boggarts.
    He had seen enough to be going on with and turned his attention to navigational details. The voyage from Tiralbin to Boggarty would, he (or the computer) calculated have a duration of thirty-seven subjective days, well within the pinnace’s capacity. Food would be no problem—although he would, in effect, be getting his own back. The algae tanks, as well as removing carbon dioxide from the spacecraft’s atmosphere and enriching it with oxygen, would convert other body wastes into food. The little autochef, he had learned from experience, could use the algae paste as the raw material for quite palatable meals. That same autochef, he had discovered, was capable of distilling a flavorless spirit that, with the addition of various flavorings, was a fair substitute for gin. Tobacco? Luckily Tiralbin was one of the worlds on which smoking was a widespread habit. He would have to make sure that he had an ample stock of fuel for his battered pipe before he lifted off. Fuel? No worries there. The small hydrogen fusion