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

of sensation . . .
    And yet it came to pass.
    She moved under him sinuously, rotating her navel against him, contracting her vaginal muscles and, somehow, caused her erect nipples to titillate the skin of his chest while her eager tongue explored his mouth . . .
    The orgasm was explosive.
    She moved under him sinuously, rotating her navel against his, contracting her vaginal muscles and, somehow, caused her erect nipples to titillate the skin of his chest while her eager tongue explored his mouth . . .
    The orgasm was . . .
    Was . . .
    Implosive.
    She move under him . . .
    But although his body responded his mind was suddenly cold, frightened.
    The orgasm . . .
    Exgasm . . .
    Ingasm . . .
    She moved . . .
    He tried to roll off her, but it was as though some fantastic acceleration were holding him tight to the yielding cushions of her body.
    Her erect nipples . . . her eager tongue . . .
    The explosive/implosive orgasm . . .
    She moved under him sinuously . . .
    And, he realized, the thin, high whine of the mini-Mannschenn was no longer steady, was oscillating . . .
    He tried to break free from the strong cage of her arms and legs—and with startling suddenness, at the very moment of implosion, did so. He fell from the wide bunk to the deck, looked dazedly about him, at the crazy perspective, at the colors sagging down the spectrum. He heard her cry out but the words were gibberish. He ignored her, got unsteadily to his feet. The doorway, aft, of the engine room-cum-galley was incredibly distant, at the end of a long, convoluted tunnel, the walls of which throbbed and quivered as though this were a duct in the body of some living creature.
    He took a step—it was though he were wading against the current through some viscous fluid—and then another. Somehow the entrance to the engine room seemed more distant than it had at first. He took a third step, and a fourth—and he was looking down at the casing of the mini-Mannschenn and felt his brain being scrambled by the weird warbling of the machine, alternating from the ultrasonic to the subsonic. He dropped to his knees and began to loosen the butterfly nuts holding the casing in place. He put a hand on each of the grips, prepared to lift the cover.
    In the very nick of time he realized what he was doing. To look directly at a normally functioning Mannschenn Drive unit, a complexity of spuming, ever-precessing gyro-scopes, is bad enough. To be in the near vicinity of one that is malfunctioning can be suicidal—and eversion is a far from pleasant way of suicide.
    Luckily the master switch for the machine was within arm’s length. Grimes reached for it, threw it. The crazy warbling subsided, died, stopped.
    “Grimes! What’s happening?”
    He turned to look at her. She was a naked woman. He had seen naked women before. She was a beautiful naked woman. He had seen beautiful naked women before. And her skin was too pale and the hairless jointure of her thighs made her look absurdly childish. Somehow the magic was gone out of her.
    She said, “That—what we had just now—was what I foresaw at the start of the voyage. But what has happened?”
    He said, “The mini-Mannschenn’s on the blink.”
    She asked, “What’s wrong with it?”
    He said, “I’m not an engineer . . .”
    He remembered how one of the overhaul jobs done by a starship’s engine room staff is a complete check of the Mannschenn Drive, including examination of every hollow ball bearing. He had blandly assumed that the ball bearings in this mini-Mannschenn, presumably of the same super-gold as the rest of the pinnace and her fittings, would be immune to normal wear and tear.
    “I’m not an engineer,” he repeated. “No, that wasn’t meant to be an excuse. It was self-accusation.”
    He lifted the cover from the machine, looked down at it. Even though he was no engineer he could see at a glance what was wrong. The spindle of one of the little rotors had slipped, at one end, from its mounting, was