And you too, Wilf. You have all been so kind." Then she looked resolutely at her timepiece and grimaced. "And now, gentlemen," she said, "I'm afraid that I do have a business engagement I must attend to immediately—and I know the three of you must be off for the terminal." She took Brim's hand.
"Wilf, I can never tell you how much I enjoyed my starship ride this evening."
He looked her in the eye. "You already have," he said.
Romanoff frowned. "Wilf Brim," she said, smiling with a lovely blush, "you are absolutely impossible."
Then she turned and hurried along the aisle toward an inner exit and presently disappeared into the administrative wing.
"Our Miss Romanoff looked enormously pleased with her ride," Ursis observed.
"Not half so pleased-looking as friend Wilf Ansor," Borodov seconded.
Brim looked at the old Bear and felt his cheeks burn. "There's considerably more truth to that than I'd like to admit," he said.
"And is there something wrong with savoring the company of an attractive woman?" Ursis asked.
"Especially one who clearly likes to be with you?"
Brim thought of Margot and closed his eyes somberly. "At this point in my life," he asserted, "that's hard to tell."
"Perhaps, then," Borodov suggested, clearly divining Brim's true concern, "it would be better to let nature take its own course."
"Perhaps it would," Brim answered. "Perhaps it would..." A few metacycles later, he was on his way to Rhodor and the Sherrington Works aboard the Valeikya Krusnetsky, another superlative liner of Sodeskayan registry. And once more, someone had upgraded his travel arrangements to first-class.
The Sherrington Works, like most heavy industries on Rhodor itself, was located outside Bromwich, one of the oldest cities on the capital planet. But Sherrington's research facility had relocated some years earlier to a small, up-galaxy Rhodorian planet known as Lys, in orbit around a sixth-order star simply named Tenniel. There, in the hamlet of Woolston, on Hampton Water (a lake in the rural Borealands district), they'd constructed a small development laboratory just prior to the Great War. Until now, however, the facility had managed to produce only a few starships. (One, a rather promising prewar racing machine, had briefly captured the galactic speed record.) However, these were noted more for their originality than the length of their production runs. The company's main work was at Bromwich with repair of starships for the Imperial Admiralty.
Brim arrived at Woolston aboard a Type 224 sent to the Bromwich terminal to fetch him. It was high summer in the Borealands; sunlight and fluffy summer clouds ruled the cool, blue skies as the Sherrington pilot turned onto final and lined up on the lake. When they landed, Mark Valerian was waiting at the gravity pool, looking slimmer than ever in his tweed coat, flannel trousers, and high Rhodorian boots with their pointed toes and thick, elevated heels. "Good to see you, Wilf," he said, shaking Brim's hand as the latter strode off the brow. "How does this compare with Sodeskaya?"
While a company porter in blue livery led his traveling case away, Brim savored the damp, summertime odors of flourishing grasses and forests. "Well," he said, with a grin, "it certainly is a lot warmer." He chuckled. "Voot's beard, Mark, I'll bet you don't even have a Becton tube with all that liquid water out there in the lake."
"Don't make that bet," Valerian contended. "In winter, Hampton Water freezes up just as solid as anything in Sodeskaya. We've got a number of Becton tubes that we use, in fact."
"Hmm," Brim ruminated. He had quickly become spoiled by Atalanta's temperate winter. "In that case, I'll be sure to schedule my trips on days just like this."
"Good idea," Valerian agreed. "But any time we catch you 'round these laboratories, we'll put you directly to work—as we intend to do as soon as you've had time to freshen up."
"Sounds like a plan to me," Brim declared. "How is the racecraft business these days?"
Valerian frowned. "Good and bad, I suppose," he answered. "The good news is that I'll definitely have a racing machine for you next year—without the new K-P Drive, of course. The bad news is that it won't be the one I'd planned."
Brim raised an eyebrow, but Valerian quickly ushered him through the back door of a limousine skimmer.
"Probably best that I show you, Wilf," he promised. "The driver will bring you 'round to the development hangar once you've had a chance to unpack, and I'll meet you there."
Brim nodded affably as he slid into the comfortable seat. There was little he could do about the situation, however things might turn out. Nevertheless, as the car whispered along a tree-shaded, lakeside road, the beginnings of apprehension began to form in the back of his mind. Valerian might be the greatest designer in the Empire—perhaps in the galaxy—but even he was subject to Voot's Immutable Law of Adversity. And when things went awry concerning highspeed starships with prototype StarDrives, doors were opened to all sorts of difficulties, including the worst kinds of bad luck.
Within the metacycle, Brim found himself inside a large building whose curvilinear roof gave more the appearance of a storage shed than a laboratory. The entire rear of the structure —or was it the front?—was composed of huge, sliding door panels that opened directly onto the lakefront. Five small starships, none more than 150 irals in length, were in various stages of construction on the floor, resting on blocks with access panels open, and sizable assemblies missing here and there from their hulls. Cables and hoses connected the ships to outlandish devices that hovered near the floor while technicians studied color patterns that flowed across their surfaces. Here and there, spark showers from collapsium welders cascaded to the floor, and the shriek of hullmetal cutters tore the air. The room was heavy with the scent of scorched metal, fresh sealants, and hot electronic logics. Off in a rear corner of the room beside a large object covered by a tarpaulin, another starship was under construction—much smaller and completely unlike the others. It was to this machine that Valerian was leading him.
"I'm almost certain you'll be flying our M-four next time in Tarrott," the designer confided to Brim as he pointed to the diminutive starship. No more than eighty irals overall, she comprised three separate torpedo-shaped hulls, the bottom two closely joined by streamlined fairings to a smaller, topmost body with a cramped-looking flight bridge faired into its forward end. Hullmetal skin on both lower hulls had been removed, and sturdy mounting rails were being attached inside the ringlike formers that comprised the skeleton.
"Not much chance we could have cobbled up a new M-five in time for the Tarrott race," Valerian said, looking up at the graceful little ship. "But, I don't suppose that matters much anymore now that the Bears have to rethink their control systems." He stroked the ends of his moustache thoughtfully. "At any rate, about a month ago, I assigned a team to start uprating this old bucket of bolts—just in case. And now I'm glad I did. We won't have two entries like most of the other dominions, but at least we'll race. There's not another shipyard in the Empire that's building racers this year, you know." Peering over his horn-rimmed glasses at the little ship, he nodded, as if he had just resolved a controversy. "The M-four isn't a bad little ship, considering her age," he said. "She was remarkably fast for the Drive systems we had before the war—set a galactic speed record just before Anak's first raids." He impulsively kicked aside a small raveling of hullmetal from an otherwise spotless floor. "So I got to thinking what she'd be like with some up-to-date propulsion equipment. Lyon Interstellar, for instance—over in the Avalon Group—built a couple of first-rate Drives for small ships just before Triannic threw in the towel. It made sense that she ought to give those new Gantheissers a run for their money with those on board."