Ride the Star Winds Read Free

deal, lethally and expeditiously, with flying insect pests. (They would sell well enough, Grimes thought, while the craze lasted.) Her discharge completed she would go on Time Charter to the Interstellar Transport Commission, carrying anything and everything anywhere and everywhere.
    At least, thought Grimes, Williams had a good crew. Magda Granadu was still Catering Officer/Purser and the two old-timers, Crumley and Stewart, were still Reaction Drive Chief and Radio Officer respectively. The other engineers, Reaction Drive and Mannschenn Drive, were real space engineers, not refugees from universities and bicycle shops. (Their predecessors, together with their false memories, had been given passage back to Austral.) The Chief, Second and Third Officers were all young, properly qualified and actually employees of the Commission which, by the terms of the charter party, was required to supply necessary personnel.
    So that was that.
    Ex-Captain Grimes, ex-Company Commodore Grimes, soon-to-be-Governor Grimes climbed into the ground car that had been waiting to take him to the airport from where he would fly to Alice Springs to spend a few days with his parents before leaving for Liberia.

    They met him in the waiting room at the base of the mooring mast.
    Grimes senior, a tall, white-haired old man, greeted his son with enthusiasm. “I envy you, John,” he said. “I really do. I just write about adventures; you have them!”
    Matilda Grimes—also tall, red-haired and pleasantly horse-faced—frowned disapprovingly. “Don’t encourage him, George. Ever since he left the Survey Service he’s been doing nothing but getting into trouble, I hoped to see him become an admiral one day. I never dreamed that he’d become a pirate.” She turned on her son. “And what do you intend to do now, John? You’ve had your Certificate taken from you . . .”
    “Only suspended,” said her husband.
    She ignored this. “You’ll never command a ship again, not even a merchant vessel. And after that trial. . . .”
    “Court of Inquiry, my dear.”
    “. . . nobody will ever employ you.”
    “As a matter of fact, Matilda,” Grimes said, “I shall shortly be going out to take up a new appointment.”
    “What as?” asked Grimes’s father.
    “Governor, as a matter of fact. Of Liberia.”
    “I’ve always thought,” said his mother, “that the standard of intelligence in the World Assembly is appallingly low. Now I am sure of it. And I’ve never trusted Bendeen. Any man who would give up a career in the Survey Service for one in politics must have something wrong with him. Appointing a pirate as governor. . . .”
    “There are precedents,” said George Whitley Grimes. “Sir Henry Morgan, for example.” He realized that the other people in the lounge were looking curiously at the small family party and said, “I suggest that we continue this discussion at home.”

    The robutler brought in drinks. The Old Man must be doing well, thought Grimes. The machine was one of the very latest models, a beautifully proportioned and softly gleaming cylinder moving on silent treads rather than something unconvincingly humanoid. From a circular port midway up the thing’s body a sinuous tentacle produced the drinks ordered—dry sherry, chilled, for Matilda Grimes, a pink gin for Grimes and beer for his father. A dish of assorted nuts, placed on the coffee table, followed.
    “Here’s to crime,” toasted George Whitley Grimes, raising his glass.
    “I’ll not drink to that!” snapped his wife. Nonetheless she gulped rather than sipped from hers.
    Grimes sampled his pink gin. He could not have mixed a better one himself.
    He said, “You seem very prosperous, George.”
    “Yes. It was that If Of History novel.”
    “The Ned Kelly idea that you were telling me about the last time that I was here?”
    “No. The one after that, based on the Australian Constitutional Crisis. If Gough Whitlam, the Prime Minister, had refused to relinquish