“I would not ask you that either, my friend . . .” Pavlakis was startled by Mrs. Wycherly, silently materializing at his elbow with a saucer. On it was balanced a cup filled with something brown. He looked up at her and smiled uncertainly. “You are very gracious, dear lady.” He took it and sipped the liquid cautiously; normally he took Turkish coffee with double sugar, but this was coffee in the American style, plain and bitter. He smiled, hiding his chagrin.
“Mmm.”
His polite charade was wasted on Mrs. Wycherly, who was looking at her husband. “Please don’t let yourself become exhausted, Larry.” Wycherly shook his head impatiently.
When Pavlakis looked up from his cup, he discovered that she had gone. He set the coffee carefully aside. “What I had hoped was that you could help insure that Star Queen would not fail recertification by the board, Larry.”
“How would I do that?” Wycherly muttered.
“I would be happy to put you on flight pay immediately, with bonuses, if you would consent to go up to Falaron and live there for the next month—as soon as you feel fit, of course—to act as my personal agent. To inspect the work daily, until the ship is ready.”
Wycherly’s dull eyes brightened. He hummed and sput- tered a moment. “You’re a clever fellow, Nick. Hiring a man to see to his own safety . . .” His gravelly voice broke into grinding coughs, and Pavlakis was aware that Mrs.
Wycherly was nervously regaining solidity in the shadows.
Wycherly’s spasms subsided, and he glared at his wife with eyes full of pain. “An offer I can hardly refuse”—his eyes fell back to Pavlakis—”unless I’m unable.”
“You’ll do it?”
“I’ll do it if I can.”
Pavlakis stood up with unseemly haste, his dark bulk looming in the nebulous room. “Thank you, Larry. I’ll let you be by yourself, now. I hope your recovery is swift.”
As he hurried to the waiting autocab his amber beads were swirling and clicking. He muttered a prayer to Saint George for Wycherly’s health, while voices were raised in anger in the house behind him.
Fifteen minutes on the swift magneplane brought Pavlakis back to the Heathrow Shuttleport and the local freight office of Pavlakis Lines. It was a cramped shed tacked onto the end of a spaceplane hangar, an enormous steel barn full of discarded, egglike fuel tanks and scavenged sections of booster fuselages. A smell of odorized methane and Gunk had worked its way into the paneling.
When neither of the Pavlakises, Senior or Junior, was in England, the place was deserted except for the underemployed mechanics who hung around trying to make time with the secretary-receptionist, one of Nikos’s cousins’ sisters-in-law. Her name was Sofia, she was a wiry-yellow blond from the Peloponnese, heavier than her years, and she brooded. When Pavlakis walked into the office she had an open carton of yogurt on her desk, which she appeared to be ignoring in favor of the noonday news on her desktop videoplate.
“For those of you who may have needed an excuse, here’s a good reason to plan a trip to Port Hesperus,” the announcer was simpering. “Early this morning it was revealed that the buyer of that first-edition Seven Pillars of Wisdom . . .”
Sofia lifted smoldering eyes to Pavlakis when he came in, but no other part of her body moved. “A woman has been calling you.”
“What woman?”
“I could not say what woman. She says you were to write her a letter. Or send her a wire. I forget.” The smoldering eyes strayed back to the flatscreen.
“Mrs. Sylvester?”
Sofia’s eyes stayed fixed on the screen, but her palms opened: maybe.
Cursing the very concept of cousins and in-laws, Pavlakis went past a paste-board divider into the inner sanctum.
The desk that everybody used whenever they felt like it was piled high with greasy flimsies. A pink slip sat on top, scratched out in Sofia’s degraded demotic, conveying the gist of Sondra Sylvester’s last communication: “Imperative you reaffirm contract in writing this date. If Pavlakis Lines cannot guarantee launch window, Ishtar Mining Corporation must immediately terminate proposed contract.”
Proposed contract . . . ?
The worry beads clicked. “Sofia,” Pavlakis shouted.
“Reach Mrs. Sylvester immediately.”
“Where to reach the lady?” came the delayed reply.
“At the Battenberg.” Idiot. By what folly did her father name her Sofia, Wisdom? Pavlakis scuffled through the flimsies, searching for anything new and hopeful. His hand fell on yesterday’s query from Sotheby’s. “Can you guarantee shipment of one book, four kilograms gross mass in case, to arrive Port Hesperus . . . ?”
“I’ve reached the woman,” Sofia announced.
“Mr. Pavlakis? Are you there?”
Pavlakis snatched at the phonelink. “Yes, dear lady, I hope you will accept my personal apologies. Many unexpected matters . . .”
Sylvester’s image coalesced on the little videoplate. “I don’t need an apology. I need a confirmation. My business in England was to have been finished yesterday. Before I can leave London I must be persuaded that my equipment will arrive at Venus on time.”
“Just at this very moment I have been sitting down to write a letter.” Pavlakis resisted the urge to twist his beads in view of the videoplate.
“I’m not talking about a recording or a piece of paper, Mr. Pavlakis,” said the cool, beautiful face on the screen.
How was her face so alluring? Something disarranged about the hair, the heightened color around the cheeks, the lips—Pavlakis forced himself to concentrate on her words. “Frankly, your behavior has not been reassuring. I sense that I should look for another carrier.”
Her words galvanized him. “You may have faith, dear lady! Indeed, you must. Even the Hesperian Museum has honored us to carry its recent and most valuable acquisition . . .” He hesitated, confused. Why had he said such a thing? To be . . . to be friendly, of course, to reassure her.
“In which you yourself have had much interest, if I am correct?”
Great Christ, the woman had turned to metal. Her eyes flashed like spinning drillpoints, her mouth was steel shutters, slammed shut. Pavlakis turned away, desperately swiped away the sweat that was pouring from his hairline.
“Mrs. Sylvester, please, you must forgive me, I have been . . . under much strain lately.”
“Don’t trouble yourself so much, Mr. Pavlakis.” To his surprise, her tone was as smooth and warm as her words . . . warmer, even. He half turned, looked at the screen. She was smiling! “Write me that letter you promised. And I will talk to you again when I return to London.”
“You will trust in Pavlakis Lines? Oh, we will not fail you, dear lady!”
“Let us trust in one another.”
Sylvester cut the phonelink and leaned back in the bed.
Nancybeth was sprawled face down on top of the sheets, eyeing her from the slit of a heavy-lidded eye. “Will you be awfully unhappy if we delay the island for a day or two, sweet?” Sylvester whispered.
“Oh, God, Syl.” Nancybeth rolled onto her back. “You mean I’m stuck in this soot pile for two more days?”
“I have unexpected work to do. If you want to go ahead without me . . .”
Nancybeth writhed in indecision, her round knees falling open. “I suppose I can find something . . .”
Suddenly Sylvester felt a touch of nausea. “Never mind. Once you’re settled I may have to come back for a day or two.”
Nancybeth smiled. “Just get me to the beach.”
Sylvester picked up the phonelink and tapped out a code. Hermione Scrutton’s ruddy face came on the screen with surprising quickness. “You, Syl?”
“Hermione, I find that my vacation plans have changed. I require your advice. And possibly your assistance.”
“Mm, ah,” the bookseller replied, her eyes sparkling.
“And what will that be worth to you?”
“More than lunch, I assure you.”
VIII
Captain Lawrence Wycherly made a remarkably rapid recovery from his chest ailment and took up residence at the Falaron Shipyards, where he ably represented the Pavlakis Lines as clerk of the works. The gaunt, determined Englishman bore down hard on the frustrated Peloponnesian, inspecting the ship daily without warning and hectoring the workers, and despite Dimitrios’s surliness and frequent tantrums the job was finished on time. It was with a certain grim satisfaction that Nikos Pavlakis watched spacesuited workers electrobonding the name Star Queen across the equator of the crew module. He praised Wycherly lavishly and added a bonus to his already handsome pay before leaving to make the final arrangements at Pavlakis Lines headquarters in Athens.
Star Queen, though of a standard freighter design, was a spacecraft quite unlike anything that had been imagined at the dawn of modern rocketry—which is to say it looked nothing like an artillery shell with fins or the hood or- nament of a gasoline-burning automobile. The basic con- figuration was two clusters of spheres and cylinders separated from each other by a cylindrical strut a hundred meters long. The whole thing somewhat resembled a Tinkertoy model of a simple molecule.