My mood was considerably different as I returned to the Deimos to check out. My tub would need five days for the journey between Mars and Ganymede. Now, conditions aboard my ship allow for a certain amount of passenger privacy, but not a devil of a lot. Log cabin or no log cabin, I was going to enjoy the proximity of Miss Erna Vanderweghe. I could think of worse troubles than having to spend five days in the same small ferry with her, and only a log cabin and a cannon for chaperones.
I was grinning as I walked over to the desk to let them know I was pulling out. Nat, the desk clerk, interpreted the grin logically enough, but wrongly.
“You talked them out of giving you the job, eh, Sam? How’d you work it?”
“Huh? Oh—no, I took the job. I’m checking out of here at 1800 hours.”
“You took it? But you look happy!”
“I am,” I said with a mysterious expression. I started to saunter away, but Nat called me back.
“You had a visitor a little while ago, Mr. Cooper. He wanted me to let him into your room to wait for you, but naturally I wouldn’t do it.”
“Visitor? Did he leave his name?”
“He’s still here. Sitting right over there, next to the potted palm tree.”
Frowning, I walked toward him. He was a thin, hunched-up little man with the sallow look of a Venusian colonist. He was busily reading some cheap dime-novel sort of magazine as I approached.
“Hello,” I said affably. “I’m Sam Diamond. You wanted to see me?”
“You’re ferrying Erna Vanderweghe to Ganymede tonight, aren’t you?” His voice was thinly whining, nasty sounding, mean.
“I make a practice of keeping my business to myself,” I told him. “If you’re interested in hiring a ferry, you’d better go to the Transport Registry. I’m booked.”
“I know you are. And I know who you’re carrying. And I know what you’re carrying.”
“Look here, friend, I—”
“You’re carrying General Macintyre’s cabin, and other priceless relics of the Venusian Republic—and all stolen goods!” His eyes had a fanatic gleam about them. I realized who he was as soon as he used the expression “Venusian Republic.” Only an insurrectionist-sympathizer would refer to the rebel group that way.
“I’m not going to discuss business affairs with you,” I said. “My cargo has been officially cleared.”
“It was stolen by that woman! Purchased with filthy dollars and taken from Venus by stealth!”
I started to walk away. I hate having some loudmouthed fanatic rant at me. But he followed, clutching at my elbows, and said in his best conspiratorial tone, “I warn you, Diamond—cancel that contract or you’ll suffer! Those relics must return to Venus!”
Whirling around, I disengaged his hands from my arm and snapped, “I couldn’t cancel a contract if I wanted to—and I don’t want to. Get out of here or I’ll have you jugged, whoever you are.”
“Remember the warning—”
“Go on! Shoo! Scat!”
He slinked out of the lobby. Shaking my head, I went upstairs to pack. Damned idiotic cloak-and-dagger morons, I thought. Creeping around hissing warnings and leaving threatening notes, and in general trying to keep alive an underground movement that never had any real reason for existing from the start. It wasn’t as if Earth had oppressed the Venusian colonists. The benefits flowed all in one direction, from Earth to Venus, and everyone on Venus knew it except for Macintyre’s little bunch of ultranationalistic glory-hounds. Nobody on Venus wanted independence less than the colonists themselves, who had dandy tax exemptions and benefits from the mother world.
I forgot all about the threats by the time I was through packing my meager belongings and had grabbed a meal at the hotel restaurant. Around 1800 hours I went down to the spaceport to see what was happening there. The mechanics had already wheeled my ferry out of the storage hangars; she was out on the field getting checked over for blastoff. Erna Vanderweghe and her cargo had arrived, too. She was standing at the edge of the field, supervising the unloading of her stuff from the van of a local carrier.
The log cabin had been taken apart. It consisted of a stack of stout logs, the longest of them some sixteen feet long and the rest tapering down.
“You think you’re going to be able to put that cabin back the way it was?” I asked.
“Oh, certainly. I’ve got each log numbered to correspond with a diagram I’ve made. The reassembling shouldn’t be any trouble at all,” she said, smiling sweetly.
I eyed the other stuff—several crates, a few smaller packages, and a cannon, not very big. “Where’d you get all these things?” I asked.
She shrugged prettily. “I bought them on Venus. Most of them were the property of descendants of the insurrectionists; they were quite happy to sell. There weren’t any ferries available on Venus, so I took a commercial liner on the shuttle from Venus to Mars. They said I’d be able to get a ferry here.”
“And you did,” I said. “In five days we’ll be landing on Ganymede.”
“I can’t wait to get there—to set up my exhibit!”
I frowned. “Tell me something, Miss Vanderweghe. Just how did you manage to—ah—make such an early start in the museum business?”
She grinned. “My father and grandfather were museum curators. I just come by it naturally, I suppose. And I was just about the only colonist on Ganymede who was halfway interested in having the job!”
I chuckled softly and said, “When Cooper told me I was ferrying a museum curator, I pictured a dried-up old spinster who’d nag me all the way to Ganymede. I couldn’t have been wronger.”
“Disappointed?”
“Not very much,” I said.
We had the ship loaded inside of an hour, everything stowed neatly away in the hold and Miss Vanderweghe’s personal luggage strapped down in the passenger compartment. Since there wasn’t any reason for hanging around longer, I recomputed my takeoff orbit and called the control center for authorization to blast off at 2000 hours, an hour ahead of schedule.
They were agreeable, and at 1955 hours the field sirens started to scream, warning people of an impending blast. Miss Vanderweghe—Erna—was aft, in her acceleration cradle, as I jabbed the keys that would activate the autopilot and take us up.
I started to punch the keys. The computer board started to click. There was nothing left for me to do but strap myself in and wait for brennschluss. A blastoff from Mars is no great problem in astronautics.
As the automatic took over, I flipped my seat back, converting it into an acceleration cradle, and relaxed. It seemed to me that the takeoff was a little on the bumpy side, as if I’d figured the ship’s mass wrong by one or two hundred pounds. But I didn’t worry about the discrepancy. I just shut my eyes and waited while the extra gees bore down on me. The sanest thing for a man to do during blastoff is to go to sleep, and that’s what I did.
I woke up half an hour or so later to discover that the engines had cut out, the ship was safely in flight, and that a bloody and battered figure was bent over my controls, energetically ruining them with crowbar and shears.
I blinked. Then the fog in my head cleared and I got out of my cradle. The stowaway turned around. He was quite a mess. The capillaries of his face had popped during the brief moments of top acceleration, and fine purplish lines now wriggled over his cheeks and nose, giving him a grade-A rum blossom, and bloodshot eyes to go with it. He had some choice bruises that he must have acquired while rattling around during blastoff, and his nose had been bleeding all over his shirt. It was the little Venusian fanatic who had threatened me at the hotel.
“How the hell did you get aboard?” I demanded.
“Slipped through the security checkers…but the ship took off ahead of schedule. I did not expect to be on board when blastoff came.”