Read Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III for Free Online

lack of body hair was the result of some minor local mutation.
    He had always preferred his women with sun-darkened skins and with luxuriant rather than otherwise pubic growths, but . . . Why look a gift horse in the pussy? he asked himself.
    She moved lithely around the table and—it was the only possible word for her action—pounced, enveloping him in warm, naked femininity. As gently as possible he broke away. She stared at him incredulously. She almost snarled, “You’re not . . .”
    He said, “Don’t worry. I’m heterosexual. But there’s just something I have to do in the control cab first . . .”
    He made his way forward. He switched on the internal recorder. He had remembered Paragraph 118(c) of the Space Shipping Act. It was extremely unlikely that it would ever be evoked, that there would be need to prove that there had been no rape, but a videotape of this occasion would be a pleasant souvenir of the voyage, a felicitous parting gift when the time came for farewells.
    When he returned to the main cabin he saw that she had found out how to lower his folding bunk from the ship’s side and, stretched out on the pneumatic mattress, was waiting for him.
    He shed his clothing and joined her.

Chapter 8

    GRIMES WAS A COMPETENT spaceman but he was no engineer.
    During his Survey Service career he had subscribed to the belief commonly held by spacemen officers regarding routine overhauls of machinery in port by those of the engineering branch. “They’re so surprised that their toys are working properly that they have to take them apart to find out why!” All Little Sister’s machinery had been functioning well when Grimes and his late employer, the Baroness d’Estang, had been cast adrift from The Far Traveller. It had still been functioning well when the pinnace had been intercepted by Drongo Kane’s Southerly Buster. After the Baroness had decided to embark on Kane’s ship, leaving Little Sister to Grimes as a parting gift, all had functioned well on his lonely voyage to Tiralbin. Grimes had lifted from Port Muldoon without a worry in the universe—at least insofar as his ship and her equipment were concerned. He had set his initial trajectory for The Cat’s Eye. From that starfall he would adjust course to head towards the Boggarty sun, homing on the Carlotti Beacon on Boggarty, obtaining fixes as required from that beacon and those on Jones-world and the uninhabited Z314U.
    So—he thought in his innocence—there was nothing to do but enjoy the voyage. Tamara was a good shipmate. This was a holiday for her and she was making the most of it. She played agood game of chess. Her tastes and Grimes’ coincided regarding the entertainment spools for the playmaster. She could coax the autochef into producing dishes that Grimes had never dreamed could be concocted from such unpromising raw material as sewage-fed algae. She improved on Grimes’ homemade gin and persuaded the mechanized mini-galley to distill a brandy that Napoleon himself (after a hard battle and with nothing else to drink) would not have sneezed at, a liqueur that the Benedictine monks might have recognized as a distant cousin to their own famous after dinner drink, a Tia Maria that, topped with synthetic cream, was—in the absence of a potable yardstick—indistinguishable from the real thing.
    And, he told himself with a certain smugness, he was getting paid for all this. No doubt he and Tamara would say good bye without heartbreak when the time came, but meanwhile . . .
    Little Sister fell steadily down the dark dimensions, through the warped continuum. Her inertial drive hammered away steadily and healthily. There was light, and there was warmth. Meals were cooked and served. Entertainment of high quality was available from the play-master at the touch of a finger. And it would be a long time before Grimes and Tamara tired of each other’s company, before each fresh coupling of their bodies failed to engender some fresh refinement