"I don't like it, John," said Mavis.
The Lady Mayor of Paddington, President of the Council of Mayors of Botany Bay, was sprawled in an easy chair in Grimes' sitting room, regarding him solemnly over the rim of her beer mug. She was a big woman, although too firm-bodied to be considered obese, older than him but still sexually attractive. She was wearing a gaudy sarong that displayed her deeply tanned, sturdy legs almost to the crotch, that left bare her strong but smooth arms and shoulders. Her lustrous, almost white hair made a startling contrast to the warm bronze of her face, as did the pale gray eyes, the very serious eyes. Of late she had been too much the mother and too little the lover for Grimes' taste.
He said, "We have to get that bloody Vega off your cricket pitch some time."
She said, "That's as may be—but I wouldn't trust your cobber Delamere as far as I could throw him."
"No cobber of mine," Grimes assured her. "He never was and never will be." He laughed. "Anyhow, you could throw him quite a fair way."
She chuckled. "An' wouldn't I like to! Right into one o' those stinkin' tanks out at the sewage farm!"
Grimes said, "But he'd never dare to use his guns to threaten you, to demand that you turn me over to him. He knows damn well that if he sparked off an incident he'd be as much in the shit with the Survey Service as I am."
She did not need to be a telepath to sense his mood. She said softly, "That Service of yours has been more a mistress—and a mother—to you than I have ever been, ever could be."
"No," he said, after too long a pause. "Not so."
"Don't lie to me, John. Don't worry about hurtin' my feelings. I'm just an old bag who's been around for so long that emotionally I'm mostly scar tissue. . ." She lit one of the cigars rolled from the leaves of the mutated tobacco of Botany Bay, deeply inhaled the fragrant, aphrodisiac smoke, exhaled. Grimes, whether he wanted to or not, got his share of the potent fumes. In his eyes she became more and more attractive, Junoesque. The sarong slipped to reveal her big, firm, brown-gleaming breasts with their erect, startlingly pink nipples. He got up from his own chair, took a step toward her.
But she hadn't finished talking. Raising a hand to fend him off she said, "An' it's not only the Service. It's space itself. I've been through this sorta tiling before. My late husband was a seaman—an' he thought more o' the sea an' his blasted ships than he ever did o' me. An' the airship skippers are just as bad, their wives tell me. Sea, Air—an' Space . . . The great mistresses with whom we mere human women can never compete . . .
"You don't haveter tell me, Johnnie boy, but you're pinin'. It's a space-goin' command you really want, not the captaincy of a cricket field that just happens to be cluttered up with spaceships. I wish I could help—but it'll be years before we have any spaceships of Our own. An' I wish I could get you off Botany Bay—for your sake, not mine! I hear things an' I hear of things. That Delamere was sayin'—never mind who to—"The Survey Service has a long arm—an' if that bastard Grimes thinks he's safe here, he's got another thing comin'.
"Delamere!" sneered Grimes.
"He's a weak man," said Mavis, "but he's vain. An' cunning as a shit-house rat An' dangerous."
"He couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag," said Grimes.
"He has men—an' hell soon have a ship—to do his fightin' for him," Mavis said.
"It's up to me whether he has a ship or not," said Grimes. "And now let's forget about him, shall we?"
He dropped the last of his clothing to the floor. She was ready for him, enveloped him in her ample, warm embrace. For a time—if only for a short time—he forgot space and ships and, even, that nagging premonition of disasters yet to come.