Project Pope Read Online Free

steak.”
    â€œYou’ll get no steaks on this tub,” said Jill, “but there’s guck to fill the gut. How about it, Captain?”
    â€œSurely,” the captain agreed. “Almost immediately. I’m sure something’s left.”
    Jill rose and tucked the bottle underneath her arm. “Send the food to my cabin,” she told the captain, then turned to Tennyson. “Come along, you. We’ll get you washed up and your hair combed and see what you really look like.”

Chapter Three
    â€œNow for some ground rules,” said Jill. “On such short acquaintance, I’m not about to crawl into bed with you, but I will share the bed—or, I suppose, the bunk, for it’s really not a bed. Like the captain and the mate, we’ll take turns in it. You can use the can—on board such a ship as this, I think it’s termed a head. We’ll eat our meals together and we can sit and talk and play my music crystals. I’ll ignore a pass or two, being naturally good-natured and more kindly than is good for me, but if you get too heavy, I’ll heave you out.”
    â€œI shall not get too heavy,” said Tennyson, “however much I may be tempted. I feel something like a stray dog someone picked up.”
    He used half a slice of bread to mop up his plate, sopping up the gravy left over from the stew.
    â€œIn my ravenous hunger,” he told her, “this meal was tasty, but it had a strange tang to it. Stew, of course, but a stew of what?”
    â€œDon’t ask,” she said. “Just shut your eyes and eat. Holding your nose helps, too, if you can do that without strangling. There is a deep, dark suspicion that when one of the pilgrims die—and some of them do, of course, packed into steerage as they are.…”
    He waved a helpless hand at her. “Please, Jill, desist. My body needs the food and I’d like to keep it down.”
    â€œI would not have thought a doctor would have a queasy stomach.”
    â€œDoctors, my dear,” he said, “are not total brutes.”
    â€œPut the plate away,” she told him. “You’ve mopped it shining clean. I still have the captain’s bottle—”
    â€œI noticed. You just marched off with it.”
    â€œIt’s not the captain’s bottle. He simply pilfers it and the consignee looks the other way. He hauls in several cases on every trip, I understand. Special-order shipments for the gnomes at Project Pope.”
    â€œGnomes at Project Pope? What in hell have gnomes to do with it, and what is Project Pope?”
    â€œYou mean you don’t know?”
    â€œNot at all,” he said.
    â€œWell, I guess they’re not really gnomes, although it’s a term that is often used for them. Some of them are humans, but the most of them are robots.”
    â€œThat’s no real answer,” said Tennyson. “Tell me what you’re talking about. It sounds mysterious and—”
    â€œWhat about you, my friend?” she asked. “What’s all your mystery? The captain said you stowed away and then you paid your passage. And if you don’t know about Project Pope, why are you heading out for End of Nothing? There’s no reason to go there except for Project Pope.”
    â€œSo help me,” said Tennyson, “before I set foot on this ship, I had never heard of End of Nothing or of Project Pope. What is this End of Nothing?”
    â€œIn due time,” she said, “I shall be glad to give you all the details that I have. But you give first. I took you in, remember. I am sharing with you. Now, let’s each have a drink, then you start.”
    They each had a drink. He wrested the bottle from her and took another one, then handed it back.
    â€œYou know,” he said, “that stuff has authority.”
    â€œGive,” she said.
    â€œWell, first of all, I really am a doctor.”
    â€œI never doubted that. I