_To love a saint is hard. To be one, that is harder.
But rejoice, now in the search of Capt. Nathaniel
Drake for Saint Annabelle Leigh. For you will read
this story many times in the future, as it assumes
what will be its rightful reputation as a classic._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories July 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They called him "The Jet-propelled Dutchman", but he was neither
Dutch nor jet-propelled. He was neo-Terran. In common with all
interplanetary spaceships of his day, his ship employed the Lamarre
displacement-drive. His name was Nathaniel Drake.
Legend has it that whenever he put into port he searched for a certain
woman in the hope of redeeming himself through love, but the makers
of legends are prone to draw parallels where no true parallels exist.
Nathaniel Drake searched for a certain woman--yes; but the woman for
whom he searched was even more of a ghost than he was, and it was not
love through which he hoped to redeem himself, but hate.
His story begins in a region of space off the orbital shores of Iago
Iago, not long after the "Suez Canal" sprang its first "leak." In those
days, the Sirian Satrapy was at the height of her industrial career.
Her globular merchant ships busily plied her interplanetary seas, and
her Suez Canal freighters left Wayout almost daily for the ravenous
marts of Earth. Her planets prospered and her peoples dwelled in
peace and plenty and her politicians lived high on the hog. Only one
of her ten eco-sphere worlds knew not the blessings of civilization.
This one--Iago Iago--had been set aside for displaced indigenes in
accordance with section 5, paragraph B-81, of the Interstellar Code,
and was out of bounds to poet and pillager alike.
Nathaniel Drake was transporting a cargo of pastelsilk from Forget Me
Not to Dior. Forget Me Not and Dior, as any schoolboy will tell you,
are Sirius VIII and X respectively. Between their orbits lies the orbit
of Sirius IX, or Iago Iago. Now at the time of Drake's run, these three
planets were in conjunction, and consequently, in order to avoid the
gravitic pull of Iago Iago, he had programmed the automatic pilot to
swing the one-man ship into a wide detour. Although he did not know it
at the time, this detour had already brought the _Fly by Night_ into an
area of space seldom "trodden by the foot of man."
When the "Suez Canal warp-process" proved impracticable for
interplanetary runs, interplanetary spacemen accepted their lot once
and for all and adopted three standard measures to combat solitude.
In the order of their importance, these measures were (1) girlie
reali-tapes, (2) girlie stereo-comics, and (3) hangoverless gin.
Nathaniel Drake had nothing against watered-down voyeurism, but he
believed in slaking a thirst, not in tantalizing it; hence during most
of his runs he concentrated on measure number three--i.e., hangoverless
gin. The present run was no exception, and he was in the middle of his
fifth fifth when the knock sounded on his cabin door.
* * * * *
He was not a man who took fright easily, and he never panicked. He
finished filling the glass he had just emptied, and set the bottle back
down on the chart table. He could hear the faint creaking of the hull
re-enforcing beams and the subdued murmuring of the grav generator in
the power room below him. For a while, there were no other sounds. Then
the knock came again.
Deliberately Drake got up, removed his ion gun from the rack above his
bunk, and laid it on the table. He sat back down again. "Come in," he
said.
The door opened, and a girl entered.
She was quite tall. Her hair was light-brown, and her brown eyes were
set wide-apart in a thin, rather high-cheekboned face. They were
strange eyes. They seemed to be looking both outward and inward at the
same time. Atop her head sat a small kepi, its hue strictly in keeping
with the blue-grayness of her coatblouse and skirt. Army of the Church
of the Emancipation uniforms were noted for their severity, and hers
was no exception. In her case, however, the severity seemed to have
been lost in the shuffle, and catching the sweep of her thighs as she
moved into the room, Drake guessed why. She was stacked, this girl
was--stacked so stunningly that the fact would have been self-evident
even if she had been wearing a blanket.
The thoroughness of his scrutiny neither escaped nor disconcerted her.
She did seem somewhat taken aback by his appearance, however. Small
wonder: he needed a haircut, and the side-burns and chin whiskers that
symbolized his captaincy had spread out into an unkempt beard that made
him look fifty years of age instead of the thirty-two he actually was.
"I--I imagine you're surprised to see me," she said.
Her voice was husky, but rich and full, and lent her words a resonance
that words seldom get to know. Drake dug up another glass, poured it
half full of gin, and offered it to her. She declined it, as he had
known she would. "No thank you," she said.
He drank the gin himself, then sat back in his chair and waited.
While waiting, he pondered the why and the whereby of her presence.
The whereby gave him no trouble: the starboard storeroom provided
sufficient space for a penurious passenger to stow away, and venality
was certainly a common enough ailment among port officials. The why,
however, was a horse of a different dimension.
She tethered it herself. "I want you to put me down on Iago Iago," she
said. "I'll pay you--pay you well. It would have been impractical for
me to take a passenger ship--with so many witnesses, the pilot wouldn't
have dared to land me. I--I gambled that a loner like yourself might.
Iago Iago's in conjunction now, and you won't lose more than a few
hours, and no one will ever know."
He was staring at her. "Iago Iago! Why should you want me to put you
down in Iago Iago?"
"The Polysirians are expecting the resurrection of their supreme saint.
I--I want to be on hand to witness it."
"Nonsense!" Drake said. "When you're dead, you're dead, and that goes
for saints and sinners alike."
Golden flecks danced briefly in her brown eyes. "Does it, Mr. Drake?
Then how do you explain the Potomac Peregrination?"
"I don't have to explain it because I don't believe in it. But to get
back to specifics: even assuming that there _is_ a resurrection about
to take place on Iago Iago, there would be no way for the news to have
reached you."
"We have ways. Call it an interplanetary grapevine, if you like....
The supreme saint prophesied that he would rise from the dead before
the passing of a single year and appear in the heavens for all to see,
and then descend among the people."
* * * * *
To gain time for reflection, Drake dropped the subject and asked her
name. "Annabelle," she said. "Saint Annabelle Leigh."
"And how old are you?"
"Twenty-three. Please put me down on Iago Iago, Mr. Drake."
"You said you were prepared to pay. How much?"
She turned her back on him, did something to her coatblouse, and swung
around a moment later with a money belt in her hands. She held it out
to him. "It contains two thousand credits. Count them, if you like."
He shook his head. "Put it back on. I wouldn't risk losing my pilot's
license for ten times that amount."
"But there _isn't_ any risk. I'm certainly not going to tell anyone
that you violated the code."
He regarded her speculatively. "Credits aren't the only form of
negotiable cash," he said.