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This book was
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AUTHOR: Aldiss, Brian
VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
Somewhere in the fabled region called Forwards lay the answers to
a 400-year-old secret: Who were they? Where did they come from? Where were they
going?
But Forwards was far away, through lands of unimaginable horror.
And the answers they sought were the jealously guarded secret of the mysterious
Unknowns— a secret so hideous that even those superior beings dared not reveal
it...
Other SIGNET Science Fiction
the long afternoon of earth by Brian Aldiss The nightmarish story of
a handful of people trying to survive the death throes of an Earth which has
stopped rotating.
(#D2018—50{)
journey beyond tomorrow by Robert Sheckley
Barbed and brilliant science fiction about
a South Sea Islander who finds himself in an insane 21st century
(#D2223—50{)
the black cloud by Fred Hoyle
Man fights for survival against a strange black substance which invades
the earth's atmosphere.
(#D2202—50f)
methuselah's children by Robert A. Heinlein
A group of Earth men are driven into a daring space-journey by the
jealousy of others who envy their long life spans.
(#D2191—500)
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BRIAN ALDISS
A SIGNET BOOK PUBLISHED BY THE NEW
AMERICAN LIBRARY
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive . . .
—R. L. Stevenson
It is safer for a novelist to choose as
his
subject something he feels about than
something he knows about.
—L. P. Hartley
Prologue
A community that cannot or will not realize how insignificant a part of
the universe it occupies is not truly civilized. That is to say, it contains a
fatal ingredient which renders it, to whatever extent, unbalanced. This is a
story of one such community.
An idea, which is man-conceived, unlike most of the myriad effects which
comprise our universe, is seldom perfectly balanced. Inevitably, it bears the
imprint of man's own frailty; it may fluctuate from the meager to the
grandiose. This is the story of a grandiose idea.
To the community it was more than an idea: it had become existence
itself. For the idea, as ideas will, had gone wrong and gobbled up their real
lives.
PART ONE
Quarters
I
LIKE an echo bounding from a distant object and returning to its source,
the sound of Roy Complain's beating heart seemed to him to fill the clearing.
He stood with one foot on the threshold of his compartment, listening to the
rage hammering through his arteries.
"Well, go on out then if you're going! You said you were
going!"
The shrill sarcasm of the voice behind him, Gwenny's voice, propelled
him into the clearing. He slammed the door without looking back, a low growl
rasping the back of his throat, and then rubbed his hands together painfully in
an attempt to regain control of himself. This was what living with Gwenny
meant, the quarrels arising out of nothing and these insane bursts of anger
tearing like illness through his being. Nor could it ever be clean anger; it
was muddy stuff, and even at its full flood the knowledge was not hidden from
him that he would soon be back again, apologizing to her, humiliating himself.
Complain needed his woman.
This early in the waking period, several men were up; later, they would
be dispersed about their business. A group of them sat playing Travel-Up.
Complain walked over to them, hands in pockets, and stared moodily down between
their ragged heads. The board stretched twice as far as the span of a man's
outstretched arms. It was scattered with counters and symbols. One of the
players leaned forward and moved a pair of his blocks.
"An outflank on Five," he said, with
grim triumph, looking up and winking at Complain conspiratorially.
Complain turned away indifferently. For long periods of his life, this
game had exerted an almost uncanny attraction on him. He had played it till his
adolescent limbs cracked from squatting and his eyes could hardly focus on the
silver tokens.
On others, too, nearly all the Greene tribe, Travel-Up cast its spell;
it gave them a sense of spaciousness and power lacking in their lives. Now
Complain was free of the spell, and missed its touch. To be absorbed in
anything again would be good.
He ambled moodily down the clearing, hardly noticing the doors on either
hand. Instead, he darted his eyes about among the passers-by, as if seeking a
signal. He saw Wantage hurrying along to the barricades, instinctively keeping
the deformed left side of his face away from others' eyes. Wantage never played
at the long board: he could not tolerate people on both sides of him. Why had
the council spared him as a child? Many deformities were born in the Greene
tribe, and only the knife awaited them. As boys, they had called Wantage
"Slotface," and tormented him; but he had grown up strong and
ferocious, which had decided them to adopt a more tolerant attitude toward him.
Their jibes now were veiled.
Hardly realizing the change from aimlessness to intent, Complain also headed
in the direction of the barricades, following Wantage. The best of the
compartments, naturally appropriated for council use, were down here. One of
the doors was flung open and Lieutenant Greene himself came out, followed by
two of his officers. Although Greene was now an old man, he was still an
irritable one, and his jerky gait held something yet of the impetuous stride of
his youth. His officers, Patch and Zilliac, walked beside him, dazers prominent
in their belts.
To Complain's great pleasure, Wantage was
panicked by their sudden appearance into saluting his chief. It was a shameful
gesture, almost a bringing of the head to the hand rather than the reverse,
which was acknowledged by a grin from Zilliac. Subservience was the general
lot, although pride did not admit the fact.
When Complain's turn came to pass the trio he did it in the customary
manner, turning his head away and scowling. Nobody should think he, a
hunter, was not the equal of any other man. It was in the Teaching: "No
man is inferior until he feels the need to show respect for another."
His spirits now restored, he caught up with Wantage, clapping
his hand on the latter's left shoulder. Spinning in the other direction,
Wantage presented a short fencing stick to Complain's stomach. He had an
economical way of moving, like a man closely surrounded by naked blades. His
point lodged neatly against Complain's navel.
"Easy now, my pretty one. Is that how you always greet a friend?" Complain asked, turning
the point of the stick away.
"I thought— Expansion,
hunter. Why are you not out after meat?" Wantage asked, sliding his eyes
away from Complain.
"Because I am walking down to the
barricades with you. Besides, my pot is full
and my dues paid: I have no need of meat."
They walked in silence, Complain attempting to
get on the other's left side, the other eluding his efforts. Complain was
careful not to try him too far, in case Wantage fell on him. Violence and death
were pandemic in Quarters, forming a natural balance to the high birth rate, but
nobody cheerfully dies for the sake of symmetry.
Near the barricades, the corridor was crowded; Wantage, muttering that
he had cleaning work to do, slipped away. He walked close to the wall, narrowly
upright, with a sort of bitter dignity in his step.
The leading barricade was a wooden partition with a gate in it which
entirely blocked the corridor. Two guards were posted there continually. There,
Quarters ended and the mazes of ponic tangle began. But the barrier was a
temporary structure, for the position itself was subject to change.
The Greene tribe was semi-nomadic, forced by its inability to maintain
adequate crops or live food to move along on to new ground frequently. This was
accomplished by thrusting forward the leading barricade and moving up the rear
one, at the other end of Quarters, a corresponding distance. Such a move was
now in progress. The ponic tangle, attacked and demolished ahead, would be
allowed to spring up again behind them: the tribe slowly worked its way through
the endless corridors like a maggot through a mushy apple.
Beyond the barricade, men worked vigorously, hacking down the tall ponic
stalks, the edible sap, miltex, spurting out above their blades. As they were
felled, the stalks were inverted to preserve as much sap as possible. This
would be drained off and the hollow poles dried, cut to standard lengths and
used eventually for a multitude of purposes. Almost on top of the busy blades,
other sections of the plants were also being harvested: the leaves for
medicinal use, the young shoots for table delicacies, the seed for various
uses, as food, as buttons, as loose ballast in the Quarters' version of
tambourines, as counters for the Travel-Up boards, as toys for babies (into
whose all-sampling mouths they were too large to cram).
The hardest job in the task of clearing ponics was breaking up the
interlacing root structure, which lay like a steel mesh under the grit, its
lower tendrils biting deep. As it was chopped out, other men with spades
cleared the humus into sacks; here the humus was particularly deep, almost two
feet of it: evidence that these were unexplored parts, across which no other
tribe had ever worked. The filled sacks were carted back to Quarters, where
they would be emptied to provide new fields in new rooms.
Another body of men was also at work before the barricade, and these
Complain watched with especial interest. They were of a more exalted rank than
the others present; they were guards, recruited only from the hunters, and the
possibility existed that one day, through fortune or favor, Complain might rise
to that enviable class.
As the almost solid wall of tangle was bitten back, doors were revealed,
presenting black faces to the onlookers. The rooms behind these doors would yield
mysteries: a thousand strange articles, useful, useless, or meaningless, which
had once been the property of the vanished race of Giants. The duty of the
guards was to break open these ancient tombs and appropriate whatever lay
within for the good of the tribe, meaning themselves. In due
time the loot would be distributed or destroyed, depending on the whim of the
council. Much that emerged was declared to be dangerous, and was burned.
The business of opening these doors was not without its hazards, imaginary
if not real. Rumor had it that other small tribes,
also struggling for existence in the tangle warrens, had silently vanished away
after opening such doors.
Complain by now was not the only one caught by the perennial fascination
of watching people work. Several women, each with an ample quota of children,
stood by the barricade, getting in the way of the procession of humus and ponic
bearers. To the constant small whine of flies, from which Quarters was never
free, was added the chatter of small tongues: and to this chorus the guards
broke down the next door. A moment's silence fell, in which even the workers
paused to stare half in fear at the opening.
The new room was a disappointment. It did not even contain the skeleton
of a Giant to horrify and fascinate. It was a small store merely, lined with
shelves loaded with little bags. The little bags were full of variously colored
powders. A bright yellow and a scarlet one fell and broke, forming two fans on
the deck, and in the air two intermingling clouds. Shouts of delight from the
children, who rarely saw much color, caused the guards to bark orders brusquely
and begin to carry their discoveries away.
Aware of a vague sense of anticlimax, Complain drifted on. Perhaps,
after all, he would go hunting.
"But why is there light in the tangles when nobody is there to need
it?"
The question came to Complain above the general bustle. He turned and
saw the questioner was one of several small boys who clustered around a big man
squatting in the midst. One or two mothers stood by, smiling indulgently, their
hands idly fanning away the flies.
"There has to be light for the ponics to grow, just as you could
not live in the dark," came the answer to the
boy. Complain saw the man who spoke was Bob Fermour, a slow fellow fit only for
laboring in the fieldrooms. He was genial —rather more so than the Teaching
entirely countenanced— and consequently popular with the children. Complain
recalled that Fermour was reputed to be a storyteller, and felt suddenly eager
to be diverted. Without his anger he was empty.
"What was there before the ponics were there?" a little girl
demanded. In their unpracticed way, the children were trying to start Fermour
on a story.
"Tell 'em the tale about the world, Bob!" one of the mothers
advised.
Fermour glanced quizzically up at Complain.
"Don't mind me," Complain said. "Theories are less than
flies to me." The powers of the tribe discouraged theorizing, or any sort
of thought not on severely practical lines; hence Fermour's hesitation.
"Well, this is all guesswork, because we don't have any records of
what happened in the world before the Greene tribe began," Fermour said.
"Or if we do find records, they don't make much sense." He glanced
sharply at the adults in his audience before adding quickly, "Because
there are more important things to do than puzzle over old legends."
"What is the tale about the world, Bob? Is it exciting?" a boy
asked impatiently.
Fermour smoothed the boy's hair back from his eyes and said earnestly,
"It is the most exciting tale that could possibly be, because it concerns
all of us, and how we live. Now the world is a wonderful place. It is
constructed of layers and layers, like this one, and these layers do not end,
because they eventually turn a circle on to themselves. So you could walk on
and on for ever and never reach the end of the world. And all those layers are
filled with mysterious places, some good, some evil; and all those corridors
are blocked with ponics."
"What about the Forwards people?" the boy asked. "Do they
have green faces?"
"We are coming to them," Fermour said, lowering his voice so
that the youthful audience crowded nearer. "I have told you what happens
if you keep to the lateral corridors of the world. But if you can get on to the
main corridor you get on to a highway that takes you straight to distant parts
of the world. And then you may arrive in the
"Have they really all got two heads?" a little girl asked.
"Of course not," Fermour said. "They are more civilized
than our small tribe" —again the scanning of his adult listeners— "but we know little about them because
there are many obstacles between their lands and ours. It must be the duty of
all of you, as you grow up, to try and find out more about our world. Remember there
is much we do not know, and outside our world may be other worlds of which we
cannot at present guess."
The children seemed impressed, but one of the women laughed and said,
"Fat lot of good it'll do them, guessing about something nobody knows
exists."
Mentally, Complain agreed with her as he walked away. There were a lot
of these theories circulating now, all differing, all unsettling, none
encouraged by authority. He wondered if it would improve his standing to
denounce Fermour; but unfortunately everybody ignored Fermour: he was too slow.
Only last wake, he had been publicly stroked for sloth in the fieldrooms.
Complain's more immediate problem was, should he go hunting? A memory of
how often recently he had walked restlessly like this, to the barricade and
back, caught him unawares. He clenched his fists. Time
passing, opportunities lacking, and always something missing, missing.
Again —as he had done since a child— Complain whirled furiously around his
brain, searching for a factor which promised to be there and was not, ever.
Dimly, he felt he was preparing himself —but quite involuntarily— for a crisis.
It was like a fever brewing, but this would be worse than a fever.
He broke into a run. His hair, long and richly black, flopped over his wide
eyes. His expression became disturbed. Usually his young face showed strong and
agreeable lines under a slight plumpness. The line of jaw was true, the mouth
in repose heroic. Yet over the countenance as a whole worked a wasting
bitterness; and this desolation was a look common to almost the whole tribe. It
was a wise part of the Teaching which said that one man's eyes should not meet
another's directly.
Complain ran almost blindly, sweat bursting out
on his forehead. Sleep or wake, it was perpetually warm in Quarters, and sweat
started easily. Nobody he passed regarded him with interest: much senseless
running took place in the tribe, many men fled from inner phantoms. Complain
only knew he had to get back to Gwenny. Women held the magic salve of forgetfulness.
She was standing motionless, a cup of tea in her hand, when he broke
into their compartment. She pretended not to notice him, but her whole attitude
changed, the narrow planes of her face going tense. She was sturdily built, her
stocky body contrasting with the thinness of her face. This firmness seemed to
emphasize itself now, as though she braced herself against a physical attack.
"Don't look like that, Gwenny. I'm not your mortal enemy." It
was not what he had meant to say, nor was its tone placating enough, but the
sight of her brought some of his anger back.
"Yes, you are my mortal enemy!" she said distinctly, still
looking away. "No one I hate like you."
"Give me a sip of your tea then, and we'll both hope it poisons
me."
"I wish it would," she said venomously, passing the cup.
He knew her well enough. Her rages were not like his; his had to subside
slowly; hers were there, then gone.
"Gwenny . . . Gwenny, come on," he coaxed.
Her manner changed abruptly. The haggard watchfulness of her face was
submerged in dreaminess.
"Will you take me hunting with you?"
"Yes," he said. "Anything you say."
What Gwenny said or did not say, however, had small effect on the
irresistible roll of events. Two girls, Ansa and Daise, remote relations by
marriage of Gwenny's, arrived breathless to say that her father, Ozbert
Bergass, had taken a turn for the worse and was asking for her. He had fallen
ill with the trailing rot a sleep-wake ago. It was thought he would not last:
people who fell ill in Quarters seldom lasted long.
"I must go to him," Gwenny said. The independence children had
to maintain of their parents was relaxed at times of crisis; the law permitted
visiting of sick beds.
"He was a great man in the tribe," Complain said solemnly.
Ozbert Bergass had been senior guide for many sleep-wakes, and his loss would
be felt. All the same, Complain did not offer to go and see his father-in-law;
sentiment was one of the weaknesses the Greene tribe strove to eradicate.
Instead, when Gwenny had gone, he went down to the market to see Ern Roffery
the Valuer, to ask the current price of meat.
On his way, he passed the pens. They were fuller of animals than ever
before, domesticated animals fitter and more tender
than the wild ones the hunters caught. Roy Complain was no thinker, and there
seemed to him a paradox here he could not explain to himself. Never before had the tribe been so prosperous or its farms so
thriving; the lowest laborer tasted meat once in a cycle of four sleep-wakes.
Yet Complain himself was less prosperous than formerly. He hunted more, but
found less and received less for it. Several of the other hunters, experiencing
the same thing, had already thrown up the hunt and turned to other work.
This deteriorating state of affairs Complain simply attributed to a
grudge the Valuer held against the hunter clan, being unable to integrate the
lower prices Roffery allowed for wild meat with the abundance of domestic fare.
Consequently, he pushed through the market crowd and greeted the Valuer
in surly fashion.
" 'spansion to your ego," he said grudgingly.
"Your expense," the Valuer replied genially, looking up from
an immense list he was painfully compiling. "Running-meat's down today,
hunter. It'll take a good sized carcass to earn six loaves."
"Hem's guts! And you told me wheat was down the last time I saw you, you twisting
rogue."
"Keep a civil turn of phrase, Complain: your own carcass isn't
worth a crust to me. So I did tell you wheat was down. It is down— but running-meat's down more."
The Valuer preened his great moustaches and burst out laughing. Several
other men idling nearby laughed too. One of them, a burly, stinking fellow
called Cheap, bore a pile of round cans he was hoping to exchange in the
market. With a savage kick, Complain sent the cans flying. Roaring with rage,
Cheap scrambled to retrieve them, fighting to get them back from others already
snatching them up. At this Roffery laughed the louder, but the tide of his
humor had changed, and was no longer against Complain.
"You'd be worse off living in Forwards," he said consolingly.
"They are a people of miracles there. Create beasts for eating from their
breath, catching them in the air, they do. They don't need hunters at
all." He slammed violently at a fly settling on his neck. "And they
have vanquished the curse of flying insects."
"Rubbish!" said an old man standing nearby.
"Don't contradict me, Eff," the Valuer said. "Not if you
value your dotage higher than droppings."
"So it is rubbish," Complain said. "Who would be fool
enough to imagine a place without flies?"
"I can imagine a place without Complains," roared Cheap, who
had now recovered his cans and stood ferociously by Complain's shoulder. They
faced each other now, poised for trouble.
"Give it to him," the Valuer called to Cheap. "Show him I
want no hunters interrupting my business."
"Since when was a scavenger of tins of more merit in Quarters than
a hunter?" the old man called Eff asked generally. "I warn you, a bad
time's coming to this tribe. I'm only thankful I won't be here to see it."
Growls of derision for the old man and dislike for his sentiments arose
on all sides. Suddenly tired of the company, Complain edged away. He found the
old man following and nodded cautiously to him.
"I can see it all," Eff said, evidently anxious to continue
his tidings of gloom. "We're growing soft. Soon nobody will bother to
leave Quarters or clear the ponics. There won't
be any incentives. No brave men will be left— only eaters and players. Disease
and death and attacks by other tribes will come; I see it as sure as I see you.
Soon only tangles will exist where the Greene tribe was."
"I have heard that Forwards folk are good," Complain said,
cutting into this tirade. 'That they have sense and not magic."
"You've been listening to that fellow Fermour then," Eff
replied grumpily, "or one of his ilk. Some men
are trying to blind us to who are our real enemies. I call them men but they
aren't men, they're— Outsiders. That's what they are, hunter, Outsiders: supernatural
entities. I'd have 'em killed if I had my way. I'd have a witch-hunt. Yes, I
would. But we don't have witch-hunts here any more. When I was a kid we always
used to be having them. I tell you, the whole tribe's going soft, soft. If I
had my way. . . ."
His breathless voice broke off, drying up perhaps before some old
megalomaniac vision of massacre. Complain moved away from him almost unnoticed:
he saw Gwenny approaching across the clearing.
"Your father?" he inquired.
She made a faint gesture with one hand, indicative of nothing.
"You know the trailing rot," she said tonelessly. "He
will be making the Long Journey before another sleep-wake is spent."
"In the midst of life we are in death," he said solemnly:
Bergass was a man of honor.
"And the Long Journey has always begun," she replied,
finishing the quotation from the Litany for him. "There is no more to be
done. Meanwhile, I have my father's heart and your promise of a hunting. Let us go now,
"Running-meat's down to six loaves a carcass," he told her.
"It's not worth going, Gwenny."
"You can buy a lot with a loaf. A pot for my father's skull, for
instance."
"That's the duty of your step-mother."
"I want to come with you hunting."
He knew that note in her voice. Turning angrily on his heel, he made for
the leading barricade without another word. Gwenny followed demurely.
II
Hunting had become Gwenny's great passion. It gave her freedom from
Quarters, for no woman was allowed to leave the tribal area alone, and it gave
her excitement. She took no part in the killing, but she crept like Complain's
shadow after the beasts that inhabited the tangles.
Despite its growing stock of domesticated animals and the consequent
slump in the value of wild stock, Quarters had not enough meat for its
increasing needs. The tribe was always in a state of unbalance; it had been
formed only two generations before, by Grandfather Greene, and would not be
self-sufficient for some while. Indeed, a serious accident or setback might
still shatter it, sending its component families to seek what reception they
could find with other tribes.
Complain and Gwenny followed a tangle trail for some way beyond the
leading Quarters barricade and then branched into the thicket. The one or two
hunters and catchers they had been passing gave way to solitude, the crackling
solitude of the tangles. Complain led them up a small companionway, pushing
through the crowded stalks rather than cutting them, so that their trail should
be less obvious. At the top he halted, Gwenny peering eagerly, anxiously over
his shoulder.
The individual ponics pressed up toward the light in bursts of
short-lived energy, clustering overhead. The general illumination was
consequently of a sickly kind, rather better for imagining things than actually
seeing them. Added to this were the flies and clouds of tiny midges that
drifted among the foliage like smoke: vision was limited and hallucinatory. But
there was no doubt a man
stood watching them, a man with beady eyes and chalk-white forehead.
He was three paces ahead of them. He stood alertly. His great torso was
bare and he wore only shorts. He seemed to be looking at a point a little to
their left. Yet so uncertain was the light that the harder one peered the harder
it was to be sure of anything, except that the man was there. And then he was
not there.
"Was it a ghost?" Gwenny hissed.
Slipping his dazer into his hand, Complain pressed forward. He could
almost persuade himself he had been tricked by a pattern of shadow, so silently
had the watcher vanished. Now there remained no sign of him but trampled
seedlings where he had stood.
"Don't let's go on," Gwenny whispered nervously. "Suppose
it was a Forwards man— or an Outsider."
"Don't be silly," he said. "You know there are wild men
who have run amok and live solitary in the tangles. He will not harm us. If he
had wanted to shoot us, he would have done so then."
All the same, his skin crawled uneasily to think that even now this
stray might be planning their deaths as surely and invisibly as if he had been
a disease.
"But his face was so white," Gwenny protested.
He took her arm firmly, and led her forward. The sooner they were away
from the spot, the better.
They moved fairly swiftly, once crossing a pig run, and passed into a
side corridor. Here Complain squatted with his back to the wall and made Gwenny
do the same.
"Listen, and see if we are being followed," he said.
The ponics slithered and rustled, and countless small insects gnawed into
the silence. Together, they formed a din which seemed to Complain
to grow until it would split his head. And in the middle of the din was a note
which should not be there.
Gwenny had heard it too.
"We are getting near another tribe," she whispered. "There's
one down this alley."
The sound they could hear was the inevitable one of babies crying and
calling, which announced a tribe long before its barricades
were reached. Only a few wakes ago, this area had been pig territory,
which meant that a tribe had come up from another level and was slowly
approaching the Greene hunting preserves.
"We'll report this when we get back," Complain said, and led
her the other way.
He worked easily along, counting the turns as they went, so as not to
get lost. When a low archway appeared to their left, they moved through it,
picking up a pig trail. This was the area known as Sternstairs, where a great
hill led down to lower levels. A crashing sounded from over the brink of the
slope, followed by an unmistakable squealing. Pig!
Motioning Gwenny to stay where she was at the top of the hill, Complain,
dexterously sliding his bow from his shoulder and fitting an arrow to it, began the descent. His hunter's blood was up, all
worries forgotten, and he moved like a wraith. Gwenny's eye sped him an
unnoticed message of encouragement.
With room for once to reach something like their full stature, the
ponics on the lower level had grown up into thin trees, arching overhead.
Complain slipped to the brink of the drop, peering down through the tall
ponics. An animal moved down there, rooting contentedly; he could see no
litter, although the squealing had sounded like the cries of small creatures.
As he worked cautiously down the slope, also overwhelmed with the
ubiquitous tangle, he felt a momentary pang for the life he was about to take.
A pig's life! He squashed the pang at once; the Teaching did not approve of
softness.
There were three piglets besides the sow. Two were black and one brown;
shaggy, long-legged creatures like wolves, with prehensile noses and scoop
jaws. The sow obligingly turned a broad flank for the readying arrow. She
raised her head suspiciously and probed
with her little eye through the poles around her.
"
The cry came from above: Gwenny's voice raised to the striking pitch of
fear.
The pig family took fright instantly, disappearing through the stalks,
the young determinedly keeping up their mother's pace. Their noise did not
quite cover the sounds of a scuffle above the hunter's head.
Complain did not hesitate. At Gwenny's first cry, he dropped his arrow,
whipped the bow over his shoulder, pulled out his dazer and dashed back up the
slope of Sternstairs. But a stretch of uphill tangle is not good running ground.
When he got to the top, Gwenny was gone.
A crashing sounded to his left. He ran doubled up, making himself as
small a target as possible, and was rewarded by the sight of two bearded men
bearing Gwenny off. She was not struggling; they must have knocked her
unconscious.
It was the third man Complain did not see who nearly finished him. This
man had dropped behind his two companions, stepping back into the stalks to
cover their retreat. Now he set an arrow whipping back along the corridor. It
twanged past Complain's ear. He dropped instantly, avoiding a second arrow, and
groveled quickly back along the trail. Being dead helped nobody.
Silence now, the usual crumbling noise of insane plant growth. Being alive helped nobody either. The facts hit him
one by one and then all together. He had lost the pigs; he had lost Gwenny; he
would have to face the council and explain why they were now a woman short.
Shock for a moment obscured the salient fact: he had lost Gwenny. Complain did
not love her, often he hated her; but she was his, necessary.
Comfortingly, anger boiled up in his mind, drowning the other emotions.
Anger! This was the salve the Teaching taught. Wrenching up handfuls of
root-bound soil, he pelted them from him, distorting his face, working up the anger,
creaming it up like batter in a bowl. Mad, mad, mad . . . he flung himself
flat, beating the ground, cursing and writhing. But always
quietly.
At last the fit worked itself off, and he was left empty. For a long
time he just sat there, head in hand, his brain washed as bare as tidal mud.
Now he must get up and go back to Quarters. He had to report. In his head his
weary thoughts ran.
I could sit here forever. The breeze so slight,
never changing its temperature, the light only seldom dark. The ponics
rearing up and failing, decaying around me. I should come to no harm but death. . . ,
Only if I stay alive can I find the something missed,
the big something. Perhaps now I'll never find it, or Gwenny could have found
it for me— no she couldn't: she was a substitute
for it, admit it. Perhaps it does not exist. But when something so big has non-existence, that in itself is existence. A
hole. A wall. As the priest says, there's been
a calamity.
Get up, you weak fool.
He got himself up. If there were no reason for returning to Quarters,
there was equally no reason for sitting here. Possibly what most delayed his
return was the foreknowledge of all the practiced indifference there: the
guarded look, the smirk at Gwenny's probable fate, the punishment for her loss.
He headed slowly back through the tangle.
Complain whistled before coming into view of the clearing in front of
the barricade, was identified, and entered Quarters. During the short period of
his absence a startling change had taken place; even in his dull state, he did
not fail to notice it.
That clothing was a problem in the Greene tribe, the great variety of
dress clearly demonstrated. No two people dressed alike, from necessity rather
than choice, individuality not being a trait fostered among them. The function
of dress in the tribe was less to warm the body than to serve as guard of
modesty and agent of display; and to be a rough and ready guide to social
standing. Only the élite, the guards, the hunters, and people like the
Valuer, could usually manage something like a uniform. The rest wore a variety
of fabrics and skins.
But now the drab and the old in costume were as bright as the newest.
The lowliest laborer sported flaring green rags!
"What's happening here?" Complain asked a passing man.
"Expansion to your ego, friend. The guards found a cache of dye earlier. Get yourself a soak! There's
going to be a celebration."
Further on, a crowd was gathered, chattering excitedly. A series of
stoves were ranged along the deck; over them, like so many witches' cauldrons,
boiled the largest utensils available. Yellow, scarlet, pink, mauve, black,
blue, green, and copper, the separate liquids boiled, bubbled, and steamed, and
around them churned the people, dipping one garment here, another
there. Through the thick steam their unusual animation sounded shrilly.
This was not the only use to which the dye was being put. Once it had
been decreed that the dye was no use to the council, the guards had thrown the
bags out for anyone to have. Many bags had been slit open and their contents
thrown against walls or floors. Now the whole village was decorated with round
bursts or slashes of bright color.
Dancing had started. In still wet clothes, trailing rainbows which merged into brown puddles, women and men joined hands
and began to whirl about the open spaces. A hunter jumped on to a box,
beginning to sing. A woman in a yellow robe leaped up with him, clapping her
hands. Another rattled a tambourine. More and more joined in the throng,
singing, stamping around the cauldrons, breathlessly but gladly. They were
drunk on color; most of them had hardly known it before.
Some of the guards, aloof at first, joined
in too, unable to resist the excitement in the humid air. The men were pouring in from the fieldrooms, sneaking back from the
various barricades, eager for their share of pleasure.
Complain eyed it all dourly, turned on his heel and went to report.
An officer heard his story in silence and curtly ordered him before
Lieutenant Greene himself.
Losing a woman could be a serious matter. The Greene tribe comprised
some nine hundred souls, of which nearly half were under age and only about 130
were women. Mating duels were the commonest form of trouble in Quarters.
He was marched in front of the lieutenant. Guard-flanked, the old man
sat at an ancient desk, eyes carefully guarded under grizzled eyebrows. Without
a movement or sign he conveyed displeasure.
"Expansion to your ego, sir," Complain offered humbly.
"At your expense," came the stock
response. And then, growled, "How did you manage to lose your woman,
Hunter Roy Complain?"
Haltingly, he explained how she had been seized at the top of
Sternstairs. "It may have been the work of Forwards," he suggested.
"Don't raise that bogery here," Zilliac, one of Greene's
attendants, barked. "We've heard those tales of super-races before, and
don't believe them. The Greene tribe is master of everything this side of
Deadways."
As Complain gave his story, the lieutenant grew gradually more angry. His limbs began to shake; his eyes filled with
tears; his mouth distorted till his chin was glistening with saliva. The desk
began to rock in unison with his fury. As he rocked, he growled, and under the
shaggy white hair his skin turned a pale maroon. Despite his fear, Complain had
to admit it was a brilliant performance.
Its climax came when the lieutenant, vibrating like a top with the wrath
pouring from him, fell suddenly to the ground and lay still. At once Zilliac
and his fellow, Patcht, stood over the body, dazers at the ready, faces twitching
with reciprocal anger.
Slowly, very slowly and tremblingly, the lieutenant climbed back on to
his chair, exhausted by the necessary ritual. "He'll kill himself some
day, doing that," Complain told himself. The thought warmed him a little.
"Now to decide your punishments under the law," the old man
said, in a husk of a voice. He glanced around the room in a helpless fashion.
"You know the laws, young man. My grandfather formed them when he formed
the tribe. They are next to the Teaching in importance in our ... in our lives.
What is all that row outside? Yes, he was a great man,
my grandfather. I remember on the day he died he sent for me."
Fear glands were working copiously in Complain, but in a sudden moment
of detachment he saw the four of them, each pursuing an elusive thread in his
own being, conscious of the others only as interpretations or manifestations of
his own fears. They were isolated, and every man's hand was against his
neighbor.
"What shall the sentence be?" Zilliac growled, cutting into
the lieutenant's reminiscences.
"Oh, ah, let me see. You are already punished by losing your woman,
Complain. There is no other available woman for you at present. What is all
that noise outside?"
"He must be punished or it may be thought you are losing your
grip," Patcht suggested craftily.
"Your suggestion was unnecessary, Patcht. Hunter— er, Complain, for
the next six sleep-wakes you will suffer six strokes, to be administered by the
guard captain before each sleep, starting now. Good. You can go. And, Zilliac,
for Hem sake go and see what all that row is
outside."
So Complain found himself outside again. A wall of noise and color met
him. Everyone seemed to be here, dancing senselessly in an orgy of enjoyment.
Normally he would have flung himself in too, eager as anyone to throw off the
oppressive routines of life; but in his present mood he merely slunk around the
outside of the crowd, avoiding their eyes.
Nevertheless, he delayed the return to his compartment. He would be
turned out of there now: single men did not have their own rooms. He loitered
on the fringes of the merriment, his stomach heavy with expectation of the
coming punishment, while the bright dance whirled by. Several groups jigged
rapturously to the sound of stringed instruments. The noise was incessant, and
in the frenetic movements of the dancers —heads jerking, fingers twitching— an
onlooker might have found cause for alarm. But there were few non-participants.
The tall, saturnine doctor, Lindsey, was one; Fermour was another, too slow for
this whirl; Wantage was another, pressing his maimed face away from the throng;
the public stroker was another. The latter had his appointments to keep, and at
the proper time appeared before Complain with a guard escort. The clothes were stripped
from his back and the first installment of
his punishment was administered.
A crowd of eyes usually watched these events. For once there was
something better happening; Complain suffered almost privately. Tomorrow he
might expect more attention.
Pulling his shirt down over his wounds, he went back to his compartment.
He entered, and found Marapper, the priest, awaiting him.
III
Henry Marapper was a bulky man. He squatted patiently on his haunches, his
big belly dangling. The posture was not an unconventional one for him, but his
time of calling was. Stiffly, Complain stood before the crouching figure,
awaiting greeting or explanation; neither came and he was forced to say
something first. Pride stifled everything but a grunt. At this Marapper raised
a hand.
"Expansion to your ego, son."
"At your expense, father."
"And turmoil in my id," capped the priest piously, making the
customary genuflection of rage without troubling to rise.
"I have been stroked, father," Complain said heavily, taking a
mug of yellowish water from a pitcher; he drank some and used some to smooth
down his hair.
"So I heard,
"At considerable cost to my spine, yes."
He began to haul his shirt over his shoulders, taking his time,
flinching a little. The pain, as the fibers of the garment tugged out of the
wounds, was almost pleasant. It would be worse next sleep-wake. Finally he
flung the garment to the floor and spat at it. Irritation stirred within him to
see how indifferently the priest had watched his struggle.
"Not dancing, Marapper?" he asked tartly.
"My duties are with the mind, not the senses," the other said
piously. "Besides, I know better ways to oblivion."
"Such as being snatched away into the tangles, I suppose?"
"It pleases me to hear you taking your own part so sharply, my
friend; that is how the Teaching would have it. I feared to find you in the
doldrums: but happily it seems my comfort is not needed."
Complain looked down at the face of the priest, avoiding the bland eyes.
It was not a handsome face. Indeed, at this moment it hardly seemed a face at
all, but a totem roughly molded in lard, a monument perhaps to the virtues by
which man survived: cunning, greed, self-seeking. Unable to help himself,
Complain warmed to the man; here was someone he knew and could consequently
deal with.
"May my neuroses not offend, father," he said. "You know
I have lost my woman, and my life feels wasted.
"Whatever I have laid claim to —and that's little enough— has gone
from me, or what remains will be forcibly taken. The guards will come, the
guards who have already whipped and will whip me again tomorrow, and turn me
out of here to live with the single men and boys. No rewards for my hunting, or
comfort for my distress! The laws of this tribe are too harsh, priest —the
Teaching itself is cruel cant— the whole stifling world nothing but a seed of
suffering. Why should it be so? Why should there not be a chance of happiness? Ah,
I will run amok as my brother did before me; I'll tear through that fool crowd
outside and cut the memory of my discontent into every one of them!"
"Spare me more," the priest interrupted. "I have a large
parish to get around; your confessions I will hear, but your rages must be kept
to entertain yourself." He rose to his feet, stretching, and adjusted the
greasy cloak around his shoulders. "But what do we get out of life
here?" Complain asked, fighting down an impulse to clamp his hands around
that fat neck. "Why are we here? What is the object of the world?
You're a priest— tell me."
Marapper sighed windily, and raised his palms in a gesture of rejection.
"My children, your ignorance staggers me: what determination it has; 'The
world,' you say, meaning this petty, uncomfortable tribe. The world is more
than that. We —everything: ponics, Deadways, the Forwards people, the whole
shoot— are in a sort of container called a ship, moving from one bit of the
world to another. I've told you this time and time again, but you won't grasp
it."
"That theory again!" Complain said sullenly. "What if the world is called ship,
or ship the world, it makes no difference to us."
For some reason, the ship theory, known though generally disregarded in
Quarters, upset and frightened him. He tightened his mouth and said, "I
wish to sleep now, father. Sleep at least brings comfort. You bring only
riddles. Sometimes I see you in my sleep, you know; you are always telling me
something I ought to understand, but somehow I never hear a word."
"And not only in your dreams," said the priest pleasantly,
turning away. "I had something important to ask you, but it must wait. I
shall return tomorrow, and hope to find you less at the mercy of your
adrenalin," he added, and with that was gone.
For a long while Complain stared at the closed door, not hearing the
sounds of revelry outside. Then, wearily, he climbed up on the empty bed.
Sleep did not come. His mind ran over the endless quarrels he and Gwenny
had suffered in this room— the search for a more cruel
and crushing remark, the futility of their armistices. Suddenly, tracing over
the events which led to Gwenny's abduction, he recalled the ghostly figure that
had faded into the ponics at their approach. He sat up in bed, uneasy at something
more than the uncanny expertise with which the figure had vanished. Outside his
door, all was now quiet. The race of his thoughts must have gone on for longer
than he had imagined; the dance was done, the dancers overcome by sleep. Only
he with his consciousness pierced the tomblike veil that hung over the
corridors of Quarters. If he opened his door now, he might hear the distant,
never-ending rustle of ponic growth.
But nervousness made the thought of opening his door dreadful to him.
Complain recalled in a rush the legends of strange beings which were frequently
told in Quarters.
There were, first, the mysterious peoples of Forwards. Forwards was a
distant area; the men there had alien ways and weapons, and powers unknown. They
were slowly advancing through the tangle and would eventually wipe out all the
small tribes; or so the legends ran. But however formidable they might be, it
was acknowledged they were at least human.
The mutants were subhuman. They lived as hermits, or in small bands amid
the tangles, driven there from the tribes. They had too many teeth, or too many
arms, or too few brains. They could sometimes only hobble, or creep, or
scuttle, owing to a deformity in the joints. They were shy; and because of this
a number of weird attributes had been wished on them.
And then there were the Outsiders. The Outsiders were inhuman. Dreams of
old men like Eff were troubled perpetually by the Outsiders. They had been
created super-naturally out of the hot muck of the tangles. Where nobody
penetrated, they had stirred into being. They had no hearts or lungs,
but externally resembled other men, so that they could live undetected among
mortals, gathering power, and siphoning off the powers of men, like vampires
drawing blood. Periodically among the tribes witch-hunts were held; but the
suspects, when carved up for examination, always had hearts and lungs. The
Outsiders invariably escaped detection— but everyone knew they were there: the
very fact that witch-hunts took place proved it.
They might be gathering outside the door now, as menacingly as that
silent figure had faded into the ponics.
This was the simple mythology of the Greene tribe, and it did not vary radically
from the hierarchy of hobgoblins sustained by the other tribes moving slowly
through that region known as Deadways. Part of it, yet
entirely a separate species, were the Giants. The Forwarders, the
mutants, and the Outsiders were all known to exist; occasionally a mutant would be dragged in living from the tangles and made to
dance before the people until, tiring of him, they despatched him on the Long
Journey; and many warriors would swear they had fought solitary duels with
Forwarders and Outsiders; but there was in these three orders of beings an
elusive quality. During wakes, in company, it was easy to discount them.
The Giants could not be discounted. They were real. Once everything had
belonged to them, the world had been theirs, some even
claimed that men were descended from them. Their trophies lay everywhere and
their greatness was plain. If ever they returned,
there would be no resisting.
In the midst of his anxiety, Complain recalled something else: the sound
of crying he and Gwenny had heard. The two separate
facts slipped smoothly together. The man— the approaching
tribe. The man had not been an Outsider, or anything so mysterious. He
had merely been a flesh and blood hunter from the other tribe. As simple, as
obvious as that. . . .
Complain lay back, relaxing. His stupidity had been gently nuzzled out
of the way by a little deduction. Although slightly appalled to think how the
obvious had eluded him, he was nevertheless proud to consider this new
lucidity. He never ratiocinated enough. Everything he did was too
automatic, governed by the local laws, or the universal Teaching, or his own
private moods; this should not be from now on. From now on, he would be more
like— well, Marapper, for instance, valuing things— but immaterial things, as
Roffery valued the material ones.
Experimentally, he cast around for other facts. Perhaps if you could
collect enough facts, even the ship theory might be turned into sense.
He should have reported the approaching tribe to Lieutenant Greene. That
was an error. If the tribes met, there would be hard fighting; the Greenes must
be prepared. Well, that report must go in later.
Almost surreptitiously, he dropped asleep.
No aroma of cooking greeted Complain when he woke. He sat up stiffly,
groaned, scratched his head, and climbed out of bed. For a time he thought that
nothing but wretchedness, filled him; then he felt, underneath the
wretchedness, a resilience stirring. He was going to act, was going to be
driven to act: how, would resolve itself later. Hauling on his slacks, he
paddled over to the door and pulled it open. Outside, a strange silence
beckoned. Complain followed it into the Clearing.
The revels were now over. The actors, not bothering to return to their
apartments, lay where sleep had found them, among the bright ruins of their
gaiety. Only children called as usual, prodding somnolent mothers into action.
Quarters looked like a broad battlefield; but the slain had not bled, and
suffering was not yet finished for them.
A figure was approaching. Not without misgiving, Complain recognized his
mother. The law in Quarters, not rigorously enforced, was that a child should
cease to communicate with his brothers and sisters when he was hip high, and with his mother when he was waist high. But
"Greetings, Mother," Complain grunted. "Expansion
to your ego."
"At your expense,
"Look, my back hurts: I don't feel like talking."
"Of course it hurts,
"Things are always bad, Mother, what's there to live for?"
"You shouldn't talk like that. I know what the Teaching says about
not hiding any bitterness within you, but you don't look at things the way I
do. Life is a mystery. The mere fact of being alive------"
"I know all that."
"When I want to comfort myself," she said, "I think of a
great stretch of blackness, sweeping off forever in all directions. And in this
blackness, a host of little lanterns begin to burn. Those lanterns are our
lives, burning bravely. They show us our surroundings. But what the
surroundings mean, who lit the lamps, why they were lit. ..." She
sighed. "When we make the Long Journey, when our lamp goes out, perhaps we
shall know more."
"And you say that comforts you?"
"Yes. Yes, it comforts me. You see, our lanterns are burning
together here." She indicated a spot between them with a small
finger. "I'm thankful mine isn't burning alone here, out in the
unknown." She indicated a spot an arm's length away.
Shaking his head, Complain stood up.
"I don't see it," he confessed. "It might very well be
better out over there."
"Oh, yes, it might. But it would be different. That's what I'm
afraid of. It would all be different: everything would be different."
"You're probably right. I just wish it were different here. By the
way, Mother, my brother Gregg who left the tribe and went alone into the
tangles------"
"You still think of him?" the old lady asked eagerly.
"Gregg was a good one, Roy; he'd have made a guard if he had stayed."
"Do you think he might still be alive?"
She shook her head decisively. "In the tangles?
You may be certain the Outsiders got him. A great pity . . . Gregg would have
made a good guard. I've always said so."
Complain was about to go when she said sharply, "Old Ozbert Bergass
still breathes. They tell me he calls for his daughter Gwenny. It is your duty
to go to him."
She spoke, for once, undeniable truth. And for once duty was colored
with pleasure; Bergass was a tribal hero.
The rooms in which Bergass had his household were now far in the rear of
Quarters. Once, these rooms had been at the leading barricade. As the tribe
inched its way forward, they had gradually slipped back; when they had been in
the midst of the tribe, Ozbert Bergass had been at the height of his power.
Now, in his old age, his rooms lay far to the rear of anyone else's. The last
barrier, the barricade between humanity and Deadways, stood just beyond his
door.
In contrast with the temporary cheerfulness of the rest of Quarters,
Bergass's passage looked sinister and chill. Long ago, probably in the time of
the Giants, some sort of an explosion had taken place. The walls were blackened
for some distance, and overhead a hole bigger than a man's length gaped. Here,
outside the old guide's doors, no lights burned.
The continued advance of the tribe had added to this neglect, for a few
ponics, seeding themselves determinedly across the rear barrier,
grew in shaggy, stunted procession along the dirty deck, thigh high only.
Uncomfortably, Complain banged on Bergass's door. It opened, and a babel of sound and steam emerged, wreathing like a cloud
of insects around Complain's face.
"Your ego, mother," Complain said politely to the old witch
who peered out at him.
"Your expense, warrior. Oh, it's you, Roy Complain, is it? What do you want? I thought every
fool young man was drunk. You'd better come in. Don't make a noise."
A smell of broth filled the place, emanating from a great steaming
caldron in one corner. A young girl stirred this stew. Other women, Complain
saw through the steam, stood about the room. Ozbert Bergass himself,
surprisingly enough, sat on a rug in the middle of the room. He was delivering
a speech which nobody heeded, all being busy talking to each other. Complain
wondered how his knock had ever been heard.
He knelt down beside the old man. The trailing rot was far advanced.
Starting, as always, from his stomach, it was working its short way up to the
heart. Soft brown rods as long as a man's hand trailed out of his flesh, giving
the withered body the aspect of a corpse pierced by decaying sticks.
". . . and so the ship was lost, and man was lost, and the very
losing was lost," the old man said huskily, fixing blank eyes on Complain.
"And I have climbed all among the wreckage and I know, and I say that the
longer time goes on the less chance we have of finding ourselves again. Yon
fool women do not understand, you do not care, but I've told Gwenny many a time
he does wrong by his tribe. 'You're doing wrong,' I've told him, 'destroying
everything you come across just because it is not necessary to you. These books
you burn, these rolls of film,' I said, 'you destroy them because you think
someone might use them against you. But they hold secrets we ought to know,' I
said, 'and you're a fool; we ought to be piecing things together, not
destroying them. I tell you I've traveled more decks than you know exist,' I
said . . . what do you want, sir?"
Since this interruption in the monologue seemed to be addressed to him,
Complain answered that he came to be of service if possible.
"Service?" Bergass asked. "I've always fended for myself. And
my father before me. My father was the greatest guide of them all. Do
you know what has made us the tribe we are? I'll tell you. My father was out
searching with me when I was a youngster and he found what the Giants used to
call an armory. Yes, chambers full of dazers— full of 'em! But for that
discovery the Greenes would not be what we are; we would have died out by now.
Yes, I could take you to the armory now; if you dare to come. Away beyond the
center of Deadways, where feet turn into hands and the floor moves away from
you and you swim in the air like an insect------"
"He's babbling now," Complain thought. Pointless
to tell him about Gwenny while he was jabbering about feet turning into hands.
But the old guide stopped suddenly and said, "How did you get here, Roy
Complain? Give me some more broth, my stomach's dry as wood."
Beckoning to one of the women for a bowl, Complain said, "I came to
see how you were faring. You are a great man: I am sorry to find you like
this."
"A great man," the other muttered stupidly, then, with a burst
of fire, "Where's my broth?"
A young woman hastily passed over a bowl of broth.
Bergass was too feeble to help himself, and Complain spooned the fatty
stuff into his mouth. The guide's eyes, Complain observed, were seeking his, as
if with a secret to impart; it was said that the dying always tried to look
into someone else's eyes, but habit made Complain reluctant to meet that bright
gaze. Turning away, he was suddenly conscious of the filth everywhere. There
was enough dirt on the deck for ponics to seed in; even the dead ponic poles
were caked.
"Why is not the lieutenant here? Where is Lindsey, the doctor?
Should not Marapper, the priest, be attending you?" he burst out angrily.
"You should have better attendance here."
"Steady with that spoon. The doctor— I had my women send the doctor
away. Old Greene, he won't come, he's afraid of the rot. Besides, he's getting
as old as I am; Zilliac'll knock him off one of these fine sleep-wakes and take
control himself. . . . Now there's a man . . ."
Seeing Bergass was wandering again, Complain said desperately, "Can
I get you the priest?"
"The priest? Who, Henry Marapper? Come nearer, and I'll tell something, just between
us two. A secret. Never told anyone
else. Easy. . . Henry Marapper's a son of mine.
Yes! I don't believe in his bag of lies any more than I believe------"
He interrupted himself with a fit of croaking which for a moment
Complain took for gasps of pain; then he realized it was laughter, punctuated
by the words, "My son!" There was no point in staying. With a curt
word to one of the women, he got up, suddenly disgusted, leaving Bergass
shaking so violently that his stomach growths clapped together. The other women
stood about disinterestedly, hands on hips or making the perpetual fanning
gesture against the flies.
Back in the dark corridor, he leaned for a time against a wall, sighing
with relief. He had done nothing, had not even broken the news of Gwenny's
death that he had come to tell Bergass, yet something had happened inside him.
It was as if a great weight were rolling forward in
his brain; it brought pain, but it enabled him to see more clearly. From it, he
instinctively knew, some sort of climax would crystallize.
It had been overpoweringly hot in Bergass's room; Complain was dripping.
From the corridor he could hear voices. Suddenly a vision of Quarters as it
really was came into his mind. It was a great cavern, filled exhaustingly with
the twitter of many voices. Nowhere any real action, only
voices, dying voices.
IV
The wake wore slowly on and, as the sleep-period drew nearer, Complain's stomach,
in anticipation of the next dose of
his punishment, grew more uneasy. One sleep-wake in four, in all the known
territories, was dark. Not an absolute dark, for here and there in the
corridors square pilot lights burned like moons; in the apartments it was
entirely dark and moonless. This was an accepted law of nature. There were old
people to say that their parents recalled how in their youth the darks had not
lasted so long; but old people notoriously remember wrongly, spinning out
strange tales from the stuff of their vanished childhoods.
In the dark, the ponics crumpled up like sacking. Their slender rods
cracked, and all but the lustiest shoots turned black. This was their brief
winter. When the light returned, fresh shoots and seedlings climbed
energetically up, sweeping away the sacking in a new wave of green. And they in
turn would be nipped in four more sleep-wakes. Only the toughest or most
favored survived this cycle.
Throughout this wake, most of the few hundred Quarterers remained inert,
the greater part supine. Their barbaric outbreaks of festivity were always
succeeded by this mass quiescence. They were expended but, more than that, they
were unable to plunge once more into the rigors of routine. Inertia overcame
the whole tribe. Despondence lay over them like sheets, and outside the
barricades the ponic tangle made inroads on the clearings. Only hunger would
get them to their feet again.
"You could murder the whole tribe without a hand being raised
against you," Wantage said, something like inspiration showing on the
right side of his face.
"Why don't you then?" Complain said jeeringly. "It's in
the Litany, you know: an evil desire suppressed multiplies itself and devours
the mind it feeds in."
Instantly, he was seized by the wrist and a sharp blade whisked
horizontally to within an inch of his throat. Glaring into his face was a
terrible visage, one half creased in fury, the other creased permanently into a
meaningless smile; a large gray eye stared detachedly beyond them, absorbed in
its own private vision.
Wantage snarled. Then he twitched his face away, dropping his knife
hand, turning his back, anger fading to mortification as he recalled his
deformity.
"I'm sorry." Complain regretted the remark as he uttered it,
but the other did not turn around again.
Slowly, Complain also moved on, nerves jangled by the encounter. He had
run into Wantage on his return from the tangles, where he had been
investigating the approaching tribe. If they made contact with the Greene
tribe, which was by no means certain, it would not be for some while; the first
trouble would be clashes between rival hunters. That might mean death;
certainly it would mean release from monotony. Meanwhile, he would keep the
knowledge to himself. Let someone with a fondness for authority break the news
to the lieutenant.
On his way to the guards' quarter for punishment he encountered nobody
but Wantage. Inertia still ruled; even the public stroker refused to be drawn
forth to perform.
"There'll be other sleep-wakes," he said. "What are you
in such a hurry for? Clear off and let me lie."
So Complain went back to his compartment, stomach slowly unknotting.
Somewhere in a narrow side corridor, someone played a stringed instrument; he
caught the words, sung in a tenor voice:
". . . this continuum . . . far
too long . . . Gloria."
An old song, poorly remembered; he shut it off sharply with his closing
door. Once again Marapper waited for him, face cupped in his hands, rings
glittering on his fat fingers.
Complain was suddenly undermined by the sensation that he knew what the
priest was going to say; he seemed to have lived this scene before. He tried to
break through the weblike illusion, but could not.
"Expansion, son," said the priest, languidly making the rage
sign. "You look bitter; are you?"
"Very bitter, father. Only killing could ease it." Through his
words, try as he would to say something unexpected, Complain's sense of
re-enacting a scene persisted.
"There are more things than killing. Things you do not dream
of."
"Don't hand me that. You'll be telling me next that life is a
mystery and rambling on like my mother. I feel I need to kill
someone."
"You shall, you shall," the priest soothed. "And it is
good you should feel so. Never grow resigned, my son; that way is death for us all.
We are being punished here for some wrong our forefathers committed. We are all
maimed! We are all blind—we thrust out in wrong directions . . ."
Complain had climbed wearily on to his bunk. The illusion of reliving
the scene had gone. Now he wanted only to sleep. Tomorrow he would be evicted
from his single room and stroked; now he wanted only to sleep. But the priest
had stopped talking. Complain glanced up and found Marapper leaning on his
bunk, gazing at him. Their eyes met for a moment, before Complain pulled his
hurriedly away.
One of the strongest taboos in their society was directed against one
man's looking at another straight in the eyes; honest, well-intentioned men
gave each other only side glances. Complain stuck out his lower lip truculently.
"What the hem do you want with me, Marapper?" he exploded.
"You didn't get your six strokes, did you?"
"What's that to you, priest?"
"A priest knows no self-seeking. I ask for your good; besides, I
have a personal interest in your answer."
"No, I wasn't beaten. They're all flat asleep, as you know —even
the public stroker."
The priest's eyes were after his again. Complain heaved over
uncomfortably and faced the wall; but the priest's next question brought him
round again.
"Do you ever feel like running amok,
Despite himself, Complain had a vision: he was running through Quarters
with his dazer burning, everyone scattering, fearing him, respecting him, leaving him master of the situation. His heart beat
uncomfortably. Several of the best and most savage men of the tribe—even Gregg,
one of his own brothers—had run amok, bursting through the settlement, some
escaping to live afterwards in unexplored areas of tangle, or joining other
communities, afraid to return and face their punishment. He knew it was a manly, even an honorable thing to do; but it was not a
priest's business to incite it. A doctor might recommend it if a man were
mortally sick; a priest should unite, not disrupt, his tribe by bringing the
frustration in human minds up to the surface, where it might flow freely
without curdling into neurosis.
For the first time, he realized Marapper was wrestling with a crisis in
his own life, and wondered momentarily if it had any connection with the fact
of Bergass's illness.
"Look at me, Roy. Answer me."
"Why are you speaking to me like this?" He was sitting up now,
struck by the urgency in the priest's voice.
"I must know what you are made of."
"You know what the Litany tells us: we are the sons of cowards, our
days are passed in fear."
"This you believe?" the priest asked.
"Naturally. It is the Teaching."
"I need your aid,
All this was spoken low and fast. And low and fast beat the indecision
in Complain's blood. He made no effort to come to a consciously debated
decision; the nerves must be arbiter: mind was not trustworthy—it knew too
much.
"That would require courage," he said at length.
The priest slapped his great thighs, yawning in nervous enthusiasm.
"No,
Some meaning beyond the words themselves hardened a decision in
Complain. He would go! Always there had been that cloud just beyond his comprehension,
from which he must escape. He slid off the bunk, trying to hide this decision
from Marapper's wily eyes until he had learned more of the venture.
"What would we two do alone in the tangles of Deadways,
priest?"
The priest thrust a great thumb searchingly up one nostril and spoke
with his gaze steady over his fist. "We shall not go alone. Four others
come with us, picked men. I have been preparing for this for some while, and
all is now ready. You are discontented, your woman is taken: what have you to
lose? I strongly advise you to come—for your own sake, of course—although it
will suit me to have someone about with a weak will and a hunter's eye."
"Who are the four others, Marapper?"
"I will tell you that when you say you are coming. If I were
betrayed to the guards, they would slit all our throats —mine especially!—in
twenty places."
"What are we going to do? Where are we going?"
Marapper rose slowly to his feet and stretched. With long fingers he
raked through his hair, making at the same time the most hideous sneer he could
devise.
"Go by yourself, Roy, if you so distrust my leadership! Why, you're
like a woman, all bellyache and questioning. I'll tell you no more, except that
my scheme is something too grand for your comprehension. Domination of the
ship! That's it! Nothing less! Complete domination of the ship— you don't
even know what the phrase means."
Cowed by the priest's ferocious visage, Complain merely said, "I
was not going to refuse to come."
"You mean you will come?"
"Yes."
Marapper gripped his arm fervently, without a word. His cheeks gleamed.
"Now tell me who the other four are who come
with us," Complain said, alarmed the moment he had committed himself.
Marapper released his arm.
"You know the old saying,
Half out of the door, he paused. Thrusting a hand into his tunic, he
pulled something out and waved it triumphantly. Complain recognized it as a
book, the collection of reading matter used by the extinct Giants.
"This is our key to power!" Marapper said dramatically,
thrusting it back into its place of concealment. Then he closed the door behind
him.
Idle as statuary, Complain stood in the center of the floor, only his
head working. And in his head there was only a circle of thought, leading
nowhere. But Marapper was the priest, Marapper had knowledge most others could
not share, Marapper must lead. Belatedly, Complain went to the door, opened it
and peered out.
The priest had already gone from sight. Nobody was near except Meller,
the bearded artist. He was painting a bright fresco on the corridor wall
outside his room, dabbing on with shrewdly engrossed face the various dyes he
had collected the sleep-wake before. Beneath his hand, a great cat launched
itself up the wall. He did not notice Complain.
It was growing late. Complain went to eat in the almost deserted Mess.
He fed in a trance. He returned, and Meller was still painting in a trance. He
shut his door and prepared slowly for bed. Gwenny's gray dress still hung on a
hook by the bed; he snatched it down suddenly and flung it out of sight behind
a cupboard. Then he lay down and let silence prolong
itself.
Suddenly into the room burst Marapper, bulbously, monumentally out of
breath. He slammed the door behind him, gasping and tugging the corner of his
cloak which had caught in the jamb.
"Hide me, Roy—quick! Quickly, don't stare,
you fool. Get up, get your knife out. The guards'll be here, Zilliac'll be
here. They're after me. They'd massacre poor old priests as soon as look at
them."
As he spoke, he ran to Complain's bunk, swung it out from the wall, and
began to crouch behind it.
"What have you done?" Complain demanded. "Why are they
after you? Why hide here? Why drag me into it?"
"It's no compliment. You just happened to be near and my legs were
never constructed for running. My life's in danger."
While he was talking, Marapper stared wildly about, as if for a better
hiding place, and then evidently decided to stay where he was. By adjusting a
blanket over the far side of the bed he was screened from the doorway.
"They must have seen me come in here," he said. "It's not
that I care for my own skin, but I've got plans. I let one of the guards in on
this scheme of ours and he went straight in and told it to Zilliac."
"Why should I—" Complain began hotly. A scuffle outside gave
them the briefest warning and then the door was hurled open, rebounding on its
hinges. It missed Complain by inches only, for he stood half behind it.
The crisis powered his inspiration. Flinging both hands over his face,
he bent forward, groaning loudly and staggering, making believe the edge of the
door had struck him. Through his fingers he saw Zilliac, the lieutenant's
right-hand man, next in line for the lieutenancy, burst into the room and kick
the door shut behind him. He glared contemptuously at Complain.
"Where's the priest? I saw him come in here."
As he turned, dazer ready, to survey the room, Complain
whipped up Gwenny's wooden stool by one leg and brought it down at the base of
Zilliac's skull, square across the tense neck. A splintering sound of wood and
bone, and Zilliac toppled full length. Marapper stood up. With a heave, all
teeth showing, he tipped the heavy bunk over sideways, sending it falling
across the fallen man.
"I've got him!" the priest exclaimed. "Hem's guts, I've
got him!" He gathered up Zilliac's dazer, moving with agility for a heavy
man, and faced the door.
"Open up,
But the door swung open at that moment without Complain's aid. Meller
the artist stood there, sheathing a knife.
"Here's an offering for you, priest," he said. "I'd
better bring him in before someone comes along."
He grabbed the ankles of a guard who lay crumpled in the corridor.
Complain went to his aid, and together they dragged the limp body in and closed
the door. Meller leaned against the wall mopping his forehead.
"I don't know what you're up to, priest," he said, "but
when this fellow heard the rumpus in here, he was off to get his friends. I
thought it better to dispatch him before you had a party."
"May he make the Long Journey in peace," Marapper said weakly.
"It was well done, Meller. Indeed we've all done well for amateurs."
Death was as common as cockroaches in the small tribes.
"Death is the longest part of a man," said a folk poem. This stretched-out
spectacle, so frequently met with, was the subject of much of the Teaching:
there had to be a formal way of dealing with it. It was fearful, and fear must
not be allowed to lodge in a man. The automatic man in Complain, confronted
with death now, fell straight into the first gesture of postration, as he had
been brought up to do.
Seeing their cue, Marapper and Meller instantly joined
him,
Marapper crying softly aloud. Only when their intricate business was over and
the last Long Journey said did they lapse back into something like normality.
"I've yet to hear what they were after you for, priest,"
Meller said.
"The greater credit to the speed of your assistance," said
Marapper smoothly, making toward the door. Meller put his arm across it and answered,
"I want to hear what you are involved in. It seems to me I am now involved
in it too."
When Marapper drew up but did not speak, Complain said impetuously.
"Why not let him come with us, Marapper?"
"So . . . ," the artist said reflectively. "You're both
leaving Quarters! Good luck to you, friends—I hope you will find whatever you
are going looking for. Myself, I'd rather stay here safely and paint; thanks
for the invitation."
"Brushing aside the minor point that no invitation was offered, I
agree with all you say," Marapper said. "You showed up well just now,
friend, but I need only men of action with me: and at that I want a handful,
not an army."
As Meller stepped aside and Marapper took hold of the door handle, the
latter's attitude softened and he said, "Our lives are of microscopically
small moment, but I believe that we now owe them to you, painter. Back to your dyes now with our thanks, and not a word to
anyone."
Turning sharply down a side corridor, Marapper led the way to his own
quarters. Glancing about him furtively, he produced a magnetic key and opened
the door, pushing Complain in ahead of him. It was a large room, but crowded
with the acquisitions of a lifetime, a thousand articles bribed or begged, things meaningless since the extinction of the Giants, and
now merely fascinating relics of a more varied and advanced civilization than
theirs.
"Stay here while I get the other three rebels," Marapper said,
making to go. "Then we'll be on the move."
"Supposing they betray you as the guard did?"
"They won't—as you'll know when you see them," Marapper said
shortly. "I only let the guard in on it because he saw this going in
here." He thumped the book inside his tunic.
After he had gone, Complain heard the magnetic lock click into place. If
something did go awry with the priest's plans, he would be trapped here with
much awkward explaining to do on his release, and would probably die for
Zilliac's death. He waited tensely, picking nervously at an irritation in one
hand. He glanced down at length, and saw a minute splinter embedded in the
flesh of his palm. The legs of Gwenny's stool had been rough.
PART TWO
Deadways
I
IN Quarters, a well-worn precept said "Leap before you look";
rashness was proverbially the path of wisdom, and the cunning acted always on
the spur of the moment. Other courses of conduct could hardly be entertained
when, with little reason for any action, a brooding state of inaction
threatened to overwhelm every member of the tribe. Marapper, who was adept at
twisting any counsels to his own advantage, used these arguments of expediency
to rouse the last three members of his expedition.
They followed him grudgingly, snatching up packs, jackets, and dazers, moving
behind him through the corridors of their village. Marapper stopped before the
door of his compartment and felt for his key.
"What are we halting here for? We'll be caught if we hang around,
and chopped into little pieces. Let's get into the ponics if we're going."
Marapper swung toward the questioner. Then he turned away, not deigning
to reply. Instead, he pushed open the door and called, "Come out,
Wary, a good hunter avoiding a possible trap, Complain appeared with his
dazer in his hand. Quietly, he surveyed the three who stood by Marapper; he
knew them all well: Bob Fermour, elbows resting placidly on the two bulging
pouches strapped to his belt; Wantage, rotating his fending stick endlessly in
his hands; and Ern Roffery the Valuer, face challenging and unpleasant. For
long seconds, Complain stared at them as they stood waiting.
"I'm not leaving Quarters with them, Marapper," he said
definitely. "If they are the best you can find, count me out I thought
this was going to be an expedition."
"So it is an expedition," the priest roared, spitting in his
rage. "It is an expedition, and by hem you'll all come into Deadways with
me if I have to carry your corpses there one by one."
"What are you making such a fuss about anyway, Complain?"
Wantage shouted. "Why are you coming? I'm sure I don't want your
company!"
The priest's short sword was suddenly between them. They could see his
knuckles white from his grip on the handle.
"As I am a holy man," he growled, "I swear by every drop
of rancid blood in Quarters, I'll Long Journey the next man that speaks."
They stood there stiff with hostility, not speaking.
"Sweet, peace-making blade," Marapper whispered, and then, in
ordinary tones, unhitching a pack from his shoulder, "Strap this harness
on your back,
He locked the door of his compartment, glanced thoughtfully at the key
and then slipped it into a pocket. Without another sign to the others, he
started to walk down the corridor. They hesitated only momentarily, and then
fell obediently in beside him. Marapper's iron stare remained firmly fixed
ahead, relegating them all to another, inferior universe.
At the next corridor junction, he turned left and, at the next but one,
left again. This led them into a short cul-de-sac with a mesh gate filling all the far end; a guard stood before it, for his was one of
the side barriers.
The guard was relaxed but alert. He sat on a box, resting, until the
five came in view around the corner. He jumped up and leveled a dazer at them.
"I should be happy to shoot," he cried, giving the standard
challenge. Eyes hard, legs braced, he made it sound more than a cliché.
"And I to die," responded Marapper amiably. "Tuck your
weapon away; we are no Outsiders."
"Stop or I fire!" the guard called. "What do you want? Halt, all five of you!"
Marapper never paused in his stride, and the others came slowly on with
him. For Complain, there was a certain fascination about it that he could not
explain.
"You are getting too short-sighted for that job, my friend,"
the priest called. "I'll see Zilliac and get you taken off it. It is I,
Marapper your priest, the agent of your doubtful sanity, with some
well-wishers. No blood for you tonight, man. I have something important here
for you."
During this interchange, Marapper's advance had not faltered. The guard hesitated uncertainly; other guards
were within hail, but a false alarm could mean lashes for him, and he was
anxious to preserve his present state of misery intact.
Drawing the short sword swiftly from under his cloak, Marapper with a
grunt dug it deep into the guard's stomach, twisted it, and caught the body
neatly over his shoulder as it doubled forward.
"That was neatly done, father," Wantage said, impressed. "Couldn't have improved on it myself!"
"Masterly!" Roffery exclaimed, respect in his voice. It was
good to see a priest who so ably practiced what he preached.
"Pleasure," grunted Marapper, "but keep your voices low.
Fermour, take this, will you?"
The body was transferred to Bob Fermour's shoulder; he, being five foot
eight, and nearly a head taller than the others, could manage it most easily.
Marapper wiped his blade on Complain's jacket, holstered it, and turned his
attention to the mesh gate.
From one of his voluminous pockets, he produced a pair of wire cutters,
and with these snicked a connection on the gate. He tugged at the handle; it
gave about an inch and then stuck. He heaved and growled, but it moved no
further.
"Let me," Complain said.
He set his weight against the gate and tugged. It flew suddenly open with
a piercing squeal, running on rusted bearings. A well was now revealed, a
black, gaping hole, seemingly bottomless. They shrank back from it in some
dismay.
"That noise should attract most of the guards in Quarters,"
Fermour said, inspecting with interest a notice, ring for elevator, by the side of the shaft. "Now what, priest?"
"Pitch the guard down there, for a start," Marapper said.
The body was hurled into the blackness.
"Still warm," Marapper whispered. "No need for death
rites— just as well if we are to continue to claim our life rights. Now then,
don't be afraid, children, this dark place is man-made; once, I believe, a sort
of carriage ran up and down it. We've got to follow the guard's example,
although less speedily."
Cables hung in the middle of the opening. The priest leaned forward and
seized them, then lowered himself gingerly hand over hand down fifteen feet to
the next level. The elevator shaft yawning below him, he swung himself on to
the narrow ledge, clung to the mesh with one hand and applied his cutters with
the other. Tugging carefully, levering with his foot against an upright, he
worked the gate open wide enough to squeeze through.
One at a time, the others followed. Complain was the last to leave the
upper level. He climbed down the cable, silently bidding Quarters an uncordial
farewell, and emerged with the others. The five of them stood silently in
rustling twilight, peering about them.
They were on strange territory, but one stretch of ponic warren is much
like another.
Marapper shut the gate behind them and then faced forward, squaring his
shoulders and adjusting his cloak.
"That's quite enough action for one wake, for an old priest like
me," he said, "unless any of you care to start a dispute about
leadership?"
"That was never under dispute," Complain said.
"There'll be enough trouble," Wantage prophesied, swinging the
bad side of his face toward the walls of growth around them. "It would
make sense if we saved our swords for other stomachs."
Reluctantly, they agreed with him.
Marapper brushed at his short cloak, scowling thoughtfully; it was
bloodied at the hem.
"We shall sleep now," he said. "We will break into the
first convenient room and use that for camp. This must be our routine every
sleep: we cannot remain in the corridors— the position is too exposed. In a
compartment, we can post guards and sleep safe."
"Would we not be better advised to move further from Quarters
before we sleep?" Complain asked.
"Whatever I advise is the best advice," Marapper said.
"Do you think any one of those supine mothers' sons back there is going to
risk his scabby neck by entering an unknown stretch of ponics, with all its
possibilities for ambush? Just to save my breath answering these inane
suggestions, you'd better all get one thing perfectly clear— you are doing what
I tell you to do. That's what being united means, and if we aren't united we
aren't anything. Hold firm to that idea and we'll survive. Clear enough?
The priest looked into their set faces as if he were holding an
identification parade. They hooded their eyes from his gaze, like a quartet of
drowsy vultures.
"We've agreed to all that once already," Fermour said
impatiently. "What more do you want us to do?"
Although all were in some measure in agreement with him, the other three
growled angrily at Fermour, he being a somewhat safer target for growls than
the priest.
"Yes, there is something else I want you to do. I want you to obey
me implicitly, but I also require you to swear you will not turn on one
another. I'm not asking you to trust each other, or anything stupid like that.
I'm not asking for any breaches of the canons
of the Teaching— if we're to make the Long Journey, we're making it Orthodox.
But we cannot afford constant quarreling and fighting; your easy times in
Quarters are over.
"Some of the dangers we may meet we know about— mutants, Outsiders,
other tribes, and finally the people of Forwards themselves. But have no doubt
that there will be dangers of which we know nothing. When you feel spite for
one of your fellows, nurse that bright spark for the unknown; it will be
needed."
He looked searchingly at them again.
"Swear to it," he commanded.
They agreed to forego the privilege of private quarrels, and pressed
slowly into the ponic fringes, the priest leading, fishing out an enormous
bundle of magnetic keys. Some yards on, they came to the first door. They
halted, and the priest began to try his keys one by one on the shallow
impression of the lock.
Complain, meanwhile, pushed on a little further and called back to them
after a minute.
"There's a door here which has been broken into," he said.
"Another tribe has evidently passed this way at some time. It would save
us trouble if we went in here."
They moved up to him, passing back the rattling canes. The door stood
open only a finger's breadth, and they eyed it with
some apprehension. Every door presented a challenge, an entry to the unknown;
all knew of tales of death leaping from behind these silent doors, and the fear
had been ingrained in them since childhood.
Drawing his dazer, Roffery lifted his foot and kicked out. The door
swung open. Within, the briefest of scuttles was heard, and then dead silence.
The room was evidently large, but dark, its sources of illumination having been
broken— how long ago? Had there been light within, the ponics would have forced
the door in their own remorseless way, satisfying their unending thirst for
light, but they had even less use than man for the corners of darkness.
"Only rats in there," Complain said, a little breathlessly. "Go on in, Roffery. What are you waiting for?"
For answer, Roffery took a flashlight from his pack and shone it ahead.
He moved forward, the others crowding after him.
It was a big room as rooms went, eight paces by
five; it was empty. The nervous eye of Roffery's light flicked sharply over the
usual grille in the ceiling, blank walls and a floor piled with wreckage.
Chairs, and desks, their drawers flung aside, their paraphernalia scattered,
had been savagely attacked with a hatchet. Light-weight steel cabinets were
dented, and lay face down in the dust. The five men stood suspiciously on the threshold, wondering dimly how long ago
the havoc had been wrought, feeling perhaps a memory of that savagery still in
the air, for savagery —unlike virtue— endures long
after its originators have perished.
"We can sleep here," Marapper said shortly. "We will eat
and then you will draw lots for guard duty."
They ate frugally from the supplies in their packs, wrangling over the
meal as to whether or not a guard was necessary. Since Complain and Fermour
held it was necessary and Roffery and Wantage held it was not, the sides were
equally balanced, and the priest did not find himself bound to join the disagreement.
He ate in silence, wiped his hands delicately on a rag, and then said, from a
still full mouth, "Roffery, you will guard first, then Wantage, so that
you two will have the earliest opportunity of proving yourselves right. Next
sleep, Fermour and Complain will guard."
"You said we should draw lots," Wantage said angrily.
"I changed my mind."
He said it so bluntly that Roffery instinctively abandoned that line of
attack and remarked, "You, I suppose, father, never guard?"
Marapper spread his hands and edged a look of childlike innocence on to
his face. "My dear friends, your priest guards you all the time, awake or
asleep."
Rapidly, he pulled a round object from under his cloak and continued,
changing the subject, "With this instrument, which I had the forethought
to relieve Zilliac of, we can scientifically regulate our spells of guard so
that no man does more than another. You see that it has on this side a circle
of numbers and three hands or pointers. It is called a watch, so called after a
period of guard, which is —as you know— also a watch. The Giants made it for
this purpose, which shows that they too had Outsiders and madmen to deal
with."
Complain, Fermour, and Wantage inspected the watch with interest;
Roffery, who had handled such things in his job as Valuer, sat back
superciliously. The priest retrieved his possession and began to turn a small
stud on its side.
"I do this to make it work," he explained grandly. "Of
the three pointers, the little one goes very rapidly; that we can disregard.
The two big ones go at different speeds, but we need bother only with the
slower one. You see it is now touching the figure eight. Ern, you will stay
awake until it touches the figure nine; then you will rouse Wantage. Wantage, when the pointer points to ten, you will rouse us all, and
we will begin our journey. Clear?"
"Where are we
going?" Wantage inquired sullenly.
"We will go into all that when we have slept," Marapper said,
in a tone of finality. "Sleep comes first. Wake me if you hear anything moving outside— and don't wake me for
false alarms. I am apt to be irritable if my dreams are disturbed."
He rolled over into a corner, kicked a shattered stool away, and
composed himself for sleep. Without much hesitation, the others did likewise,
except Roffery, who watched them unlovingly.
They were all lying on the floor when Wantage spoke hesitantly.
"Father," he called, with a note of pleading in his voice. "Will
you not give us a prayer for the safety of our skins?"
"I'm too tired to intercede for anyone's skin," Marapper
replied.
"A short prayer, father."
"As you wish. Children, expansion to our egos, let us pray." He began to pray as
he lay hunched on the dirty floor, his words coming indifferently at first, and
then gaining power as he drew interest from this train of thought.
"O Consciousness, we gathered here are doubly unworthy to be thy
vessels, for we know we have imperfections and do not seek to purge them as we
ought to do. We are a poor lot, in a poor way of life; yet as we contain thee
there is hope for us. O Consciousness, direct particularly these five poor
vessels, for there is more hope for us than for those we left behind, and
therefore there is more room for thee in us. We know that when thou art not
here there is only the adversary, Subconscious, in us; make our-thoughts to
swim solely in thee. Make our hands quicker, our arms stronger, our eyes
sharper, and our tempers fiercer: that we may overcome and kill all who oppose
us. May we smite and sunder them! May we scatter their entrails! So that we come in the end to a position of power, in full
possession of thee, and in thy full possession. And may thy spark
breathe in us until that last dread moment when the adversary claims us, and we
too take the Long Journey."
As he had intoned, the priest had risen to his knees and stretched his
hands above his head. Now he, with all the others copying the movement, drew
his outstretched right index finger symbolically, ritualistically, across his
throat.
"Now shut up, all of you," he said, in his normal tone, and
settled again in his corner.
Complain lay with his back to a wall and his head on his pack; he slept
usually like an animal, lightly, and with no dozing stages between sleep and
waking. But in these strange surroundings he lay for some while with his eyes
half-shut, trying to think. He thought only in generalized pictures: they
concerned only what had passed. For what was to come he could find no pictures;
he was moving into the other darkness his mother had spoken of and feared.
He drew no conclusions, wasted no time in worry; indeed, he felt a kind
of hope, for as a village saying had it, the devil you don't know may conquer
the one you do.
He could see, before he slept, the desolate room lit by the light
percolating from the corridor and, through the outer door, a section of the
everlasting tangle. In the changeless, draftless heat, the ponics rustled
ceaselessly; occasionally, a click sounded near at hand as a seed was flicked
into the room. The plants grew so rapidly that, when Complain woke, the younger
ones would be inches taller and the older ones wilting against the restriction
of the bulkheads; then, choking and choked would alike be nipped by the next
dark. But he failed to see in this ceaseless jostling a parallel with the human
lives about him.
II
"You snore, priest," Roffery said pleasantly, as they ate together at
the beginning of the next wake.
The relationship between them had subtly changed, as if some occult power
had been active during the sleep. The feeling that they were five rivals
snatched almost casually from Quarters had vanished; they were still rivals, in
the sense that all men were rivals, but now there was a mute acknowledgment of
union against the forces about them. The period of watch had undoubtedly been
good for Roffery's soul, and he seemed almost submissive. Of the five of them,
Wantage alone appeared to be in no way altered. His character had been eroded
by constant loneliness and mortification, as the flow of water wears away a
wooden post, and he no longer had anything in him amenable to change; he could
only be broken or killed.
"We must move as far as possible this wake," Marapper said.
"The coming sleep-wake is a dark, as you know, and it may not be advisable
to travel then, when our flashlights will give us away to any watchers. Before
we go, however, I will tell you something of our plans; and for that it is
necessary to say something about the ship."
He looked around at them, eating extravagantly as he spoke.
"And the first point is, that we are in a
ship. All agreed there?"
His gaze forced some sort of a reply from each of them; an "Of
course" from Fermour; an impatient grunt from Wantage, as if he found the
question irrelevant; an airy wave of the hand, meaningless, from Roffery; and
from Complain, "No."
To the latter, Marapper immediately turned his full attention.
"Then you'd better understand quickly,
He walked around the shattered furniture as he spoke, very emphatic and
solid, his face heavy with seriousness.
"Now,
"I've heard this argument in Quarters," Complain said
unhappily. "Suppose I believe all you say, Marapper. What then? Ship or world, what's the difference?"
"You don't see. Look!"
Savagely, the priest leaned forward and snatched a handful of ponic leaves,
waving them before Complain's face.
"These are natural, something grown," he said.
He burst into the rear room, giving a broken china bowl a resounding
kick.
"That is made, artificial," he said. "Now do you
see? The ship is an artificial thing. The world is natural. We are natural
beings, and our rightful home is not here. The whole ship is made by the
Giants."
"But even if it is so—" Complain began.
"It is so! It is so! The proof is around you all the
time —corridors, walls, rooms, all artificial— but you are so used to it, you
can't see it as proof."
"Never mind if he can't see it," Fermour told the priest.
"What does it matter?"
"I can see it," Complain said angrily. "I just can't
accept it."
"Well, sit there and be quiet and chew it over,
and meanwhile we'll go on," Marapper said. "I have read books, and I
know the truth. The Giants built the ship for a purpose; somewhere, that
purpose has been lost, and the Giants themselves have died. Only the ship is
left."
He stopped pacing and leaned against a wall, resting his forehead
against it. When he spoke again, it was almost to himself.
"Only the ship is left. Only the ship and, trapped in it, all the
tribes of man. There was a catastrophe: something went terribly wrong
somewhere, and we have been left to an unknown fate. It is a judgment passed on
us for some awful, unguessable sin committed by our forefathers."
"To the hull with all this talk," Wantage said angrily.
"Why don't you try and forget you're a priest, Marapper? How has
this any bearing on what we are going to do?"
"It has every bearing," Marapper said, sticking his hands into
his pockets, and then withdrawing one to pick at a tooth. "Of course, I'm
only really interested in the theological aspects of the question. But the
point as far as you are concerned is that the ship, by definition, has come from
somewhere and is going to somewhere. These somewheres are more
important than the ship; they are where we should be. They are natural places.
"All that is no mystery, except to fools; the mystery is, why is there this conspiracy to keep us from knowing
where we are? What is going on here behind our backs?"
"Something's gone wrong somewhere," Wantage answered eagerly.
"It's what I've always said: something's gone wrong."
"Well, cease to say it in my presence," the priest snapped. It
seemed to him that his position of authority was weakened by allowing others to
agree with him. "There is a conspiracy. We have been plotted against. The
driver or captain of this ship is concealed somewhere, and we are forging on
under his direction, knowing neither the journey nor the destination. He is a
madman who keeps himself shut away while we are all punished for this sin our
forefathers committed."
This sounded to Complain both horrifying and unlikely, although no more
unlikely than the whole idea of being in a moving vessel. Presumably accepting
one premise meant accepting the other, so he said nothing. A vast feeling of
insecurity engulfed him. Looking around unobtrusively at the others present, he
detected no particular signs that they agreed with the priest: Fermour was
smiling rather derisively, Wantage's face presented its usual meaningless glare
of disagreement, and Roffery was tugging impatiently at his mustache.
"Now here is my plan," said the priest, "and
unfortunately I need your co-operation to help carry it out. We are going to
find this captain, hunt him down wherever he may be hiding. He is well concealed,
but no locked doors shall save him from us. When we reach him, we kill him— and
we shall be in control of the ship!"
"And what do we do with it when we've got it?" Fermour asked,
in a tone carefully designed to counteract Marapper's runaway enthusiasm.
The priest looked blank only for a moment.
"We will find a destination for it," he said. "You leave
that sort of detail to me."
"Where exactly do we discover this captain?" Roffery inquired.
For answer, the priest flung back his cloak and felt inside his tunic;
with a flourish, he produced the book Complain had already seen. He waved the
title under their eyes, but this meant little except to Roffery, the only
fluent reader among them. To the others, the syllables were intelligible, but
they were unable to master unfamiliar words without long effort. Pulling the
book out of their reach again, Marapper explained condescendingly that it was
called Manual of Electrical Circuits of Starship. He also explained —for
this explanation gave him an opportunity for boasting— how the book had come
into his possession. It had been lying in the store in which Zilliac's guards
had found the cache of dyes, and had been confiscated and added to a pile of
goods awaiting inspection in the lieutenancy. There Marapper had seen it and,
recognizing its value instantly, had pocketed it for his own use.
Unfortunately, one of the guards had caught him, and the silence of this loyal
man could only be bought by the promise that he should go with Marapper and
find power for himself.
"That being the guard Meller dispatched outside my room?"
Complain asked.
"The same," said the priest, automatically making the token of
mourning. "When he had thought over the scheme he very likely decided he
could get most profit from it by revealing it all to Zilliac."
"Who knows he was wrong about that?" Roffery commented
sardonically.
Ignoring this thrust, the priest spread his book open and thumped a
diagram.
"Here is the whole key to my campaign," he said impressively.
"This is a plan of the entire ship."
To his annoyance, he had to interrupt his speech at once to explain what
a plan was, the concept being entirely new to them. This was Complain's turn to
be superior to Wantage, for while he quickly grasped the idea, the latter could
not be made to comprehend the two-dimensional representation of a
three-dimensional object as large as the ship; analogies with Meller's
sublife-size paintings did not help him, and eventually they had to leave the
matter as assumed, just as Complain now had to "assume" they were in
a ship without anything he could regard as rational evidence.
"Nobody has ever had a plan of the complete ship before,"
Marapper told them. "It was fortunate it fell into my hands. Ozbert
Bergass knew as much about the layout as anyone, but he was only really
familiar with the Sternstairs region and a part of Deadways."
The plan showed the ship to be shaped somewhat like an egg, elongated so
that the middle was cylindrical, both ends coming to a blunted point. The whole
was composed of eighty-four decks, which showed a circular cross-section when
the ship was opened through its width, each being proportioned like a coin.
Most of the decks (all but a few at each end) consisted of three concentric
levels, upper, middle, and lower; these had corridors in them, connected by
elevators and companionways; around these corridors were ranged the
compartments. Sometimes the compartments were just a nest of offices,
sometimes they were so big they filled a whole level. All decks were connected
together by one large corridor running right through the longitudinal axis of
the ship: the Main Corridor. But there were also subsidiary connections between
the circular corridors of one deck and those of the decks on either side.
One end of the ship was clearly labeled stern. At the other end was a small blister labeled control; Marapper planted his finger on
it.
"This is where we shall find the captain," he said.
"Whoever is here has power over the ship. We are going there."
"This plan makes it as easy as signing off a log," Roffery
declared, rubbing his hands. "All we've got to do is strike along the Main
Corridor. Perhaps we weren't such fools to join you after all."
"It won't be as easy as that," Complain said. "You've
spent all your wakes comfortably in Quarters, you
don't know what conditions are like. Main Corridor is fairly well known to
hunters, but it does not go anywhere, as a good corridor should."
"Despite your naive way of putting things, you are correct,
He flipped through pages of complex diagrams.
"Even I cannot pretend to understand all this, but it is clear that
there was an emergency, a fire or something, and the doors of the Main Corridor
have remained closed ever since."
"That's why —aside from the ponics— it's so difficult to get
anywhere," Fermour added. "All you can do is go
around in circles. What we have to do is find the subsidiary connections which
are still open, and advance through them. It means constant detouring."
"I'll give you the instructions," said the priest, shortly.
"Since you all seem to be so clever, we'll be on our way. Get that pack on
your back, Fermour, and get moving!"
They shuffled obediently to their feet. Outside the compartment,
Deadways waited; it was not inviting.
"We'll have to get through Forwards area to reach control,"
Complain said.
"Frightened?" Wantage sneered.
"Yes, Slotface, I am."
They moved through the tangles in silence. Progress was slow and exhausting.
A solitary hunter on his own ground might creep among ponics without cutting
them, by keeping close to the wall. Moving in file, they found this method less
attractive, since branches were apt to whip back and catch the man behind. This
could be avoided by spacing themselves out, but by common consent they kept as
close together as possible, it being uncomfortable on the nerves to be exposed
either at the front or the rear of the little party. There was, too, another
objection to walking by the walls: here the chitinous ponic seeds lay thickest,
where they had dropped after being shot against this barrier, and they crunched
noisily as they were stepped on. To Complain's
experienced hunter's eye, their plenitude was a sign that there were few wild
animals in the area, the seeds being delicacies to dog and pig alike.
No diminution in the plague of flies was noticeable. They whined
endlessly about the travelers' ears. As Roffery in the lead swung his hatchet
at the ponics, he wielded it frequently around his head, in a dangerous attempt
to rid himself of this irritation.
When they came to the first subsidiary connection between decks, it was
clearly enough marked. It stood in a short side corridor and consisted of two
single metal doors a yard apart, each capable of closing off the corridor,
although now blocked open with the ubiquitous green growth. Before one, the
words deck 61 were stenciled and,
after the other, deck 60.
Marapper grunted in satisfaction at this, but was too hot to make further comment.
Complain had come across such connections before, and seen similar
inscriptions, but they had meant nothing; now he tried to integrate the
previous knowledge into the conception of a moving ship: but as yet the idea
was too new to be acceptable.
On Deck 60 they met other men.
Fermour was now in the lead, hacking his way stoically ahead, when they
came level with an open door. Open doors always signified danger, but since
they had to pass the thresholds, they grouped together and passed en bloc. So
far, these distractions had been uneventful. This time, they were confronted by
an old woman.
She was looking away from them, so that they had a view of her left ear.
This, by the humor of some strange disease, had swollen up like a sponge,
standing out from her skull and pushing back a mat of gray hair.
Slowly she swung her head around, fixing them with two owl eyes. Without
changing her expression, she began to scream hollowly. Even as she did so,
Complain noticed that her right ear was normal.
Before the party of five could move away, the noise had summoned two men
from a rear compartment. They came and stood defensively behind the screaming
woman.
"They'll do us no harm!" said Fermour with relief.
That was immediately obvious. Both men were old, one bent almost double
with the promise of the Long Journey he would shortly take, the other painfully
thin and lacking an arm, which had evidently been parted from him in some
ancient knife fight.
"We ought to kill them," Wantage said, one half of his face
suddenly agleam. "Especially that hag there."
At these words, the woman stopped screaming and said rapidly,
"Expansion to your separate egos, plague on your eyes, touch us, and the
curse that is on us will be on you."
"Expansion to your ear, madam," said Marapper sulkily.
"Come on, heroes, we don't need to linger here. Let's move before somebody
rougher comes to investigate her crazy screaming."
They turned back into the tangles. The three in the room watched them go
without stirring. They might have been the last remnants of a Deadways tribe;
more likely, they were fugitives, eking out a slender existence in the wilds.
From then on, the travelers found signs of other mutants and hermits.
The ponics were frequently trampled, progress being consequently easier; but
the mental strain of keeping watch on all sides was greater, although they were
never actually challenged.
The next subsidiary connection between decks that they came to was
closed, and the steel door, fitting closely into its sockets, resisted their
united attempt at opening it.
"There must obviously be a way to open it," Roffery
said angrily.
"Tell the priest to look it up in his book," Wantage replied.
"For me, I'm sitting down here and having something to eat."
Marapper was all for pressing on, but the others agreed with Wantage,
and they made a meal in silence.
"What happens if we come on a deck where all the doors are like
that?" Complain wanted to know.
"That won't happen," Marapper said firmly. "Otherwise we
would never have heard of Forwards at all. There obviously is a route —probably
more than one— left open to those parts. We just have to move to another level
and try there."
Finally they found their way into Deck 59 and then, with encouraging rapidity, into 58. By that time, it was growing
late: a dark sleep-wake was almost upon them. Again they grew uneasy.
"Have any of you noticed anything?" Complain asked abruptly.
He was now leading the procession again, and liberally
splashed with sweat and miltex. "The ponics are changing type."
It was true. The springy stems grew more fleshy
and less resilient. The leafage seemed reduced, and there were more of the waxy
green flowers in evidence. Underfoot there was a change too. Generally, the
grit was firm, intersected by a highly organized root system which drained
every available drop of moisture. Now the walking was softer, the soil dark and
moist.
The further they went, the more pronounced these tendencies became.
Soon, they were splashing through mud. They passed a tomato plant, and another fruit-bearer
they could not identify, and several other types of growth straggling among the
evidently weakened ponics. This change, being unfamiliar, worried them. Just
the same, Marapper called a halt, since if they did not shortly find a place to
rest they would be overtaken by darkness.
They pushed into a side room which someone had already broken into. It
was piled high with rolls of heavy material, which seemed to be covered by an
intricate pattern. The probing beam of Fermour's flashlight dislodged a swarm
of moths. With a thick, buttery sound, they rose from the fabric, leaving it
patternless, but sagging with deep-chewed holes. Around their room they
whirled, or past the men into the corridor. It was like walking into a dust
storm.
Complain dodged as a large moth bore toward his face. For the softest
moment he had an odd sensation that he was to recall later: although the moth
flew by his ear, he had an hallucinatory idea it had
plunged straight on into his head; he seemed to feel it big in his very mind;
then it was gone.
"We won't get much sleep here," he said distastefully, and led
on down the marshy corridor.
Through the next door that opened to them, they found an ideal place to
pitch camp. This was a machine shop of some kind, a large chamber filled with
benches and lathes and other gadgets in which they had no interest. A faucet
supplied them with an unsteady flow of water which, once turned on, they could
not turn off; it trickled steadily down the sink, to the vast reclamation
processes functioning somewhere below the deck on which they stood. Wearily,
they washed and drank and ate some of their provisions. As they were finishing, the dark came on, the natural dark which arrived one sleep-wake in four.
No prayers were requested, and the priest volunteered none. He was tired
and, too, he was occupied with a thought which dogged the others. They had
traveled only three decks: a long spell of walking lay
between them and Control. For the first time, Marapper realized that, whatever
assistance his chart gave them, it did not show the
true magnitude of the ship.
The precious watch was handed to Complain, who would wake Fermour when
the large hand had made its full circuit. Enviously, the hunter watched the
others sprawl under benches and drift to sleep. He remained doggedly standing for some while, but eventually fatigue forced him
to sit. His mind ranged actively over a hundred questions and then it, too,
grew weary. He sat propped with his back to a bench, staring at the closed
door; through a circle of frosted glass inset in the door, a dim pilot light
glowed in the corridor outside. The circle apparently grew larger and larger
before him, swimming, rotating, and Complain closed
his eyes to it.
He woke again with a start, full of apprehension. The door now stood
wide open. In the corridor, the ponics, most of their light source gone, were
dying rapidly. Their tops had buckled, and they huddled against each other like
a file of broken-backed old men kneeling beneath a blanket. Ern Roffery was not
in the room.
Pulling out his dazer, Complain got up and went to listen at the
doorway. It seemed highly unlikely that anything could have abducted Roffery:
there would have been a scuffle which would have aroused the others. Therefore
he had gone voluntarily. But why? Had he heard
something in the corridor?
Certainly there was a distant sound, as throaty as the noise of running
water. The longer Complain listened, the louder it seemed. With a glance back
at his three sleeping companions, Complain slipped out to trace the sound. This
course seemed to him preferable to having to wake the priest and explain that
he had dozed.
Once in the corridor, he cautiously flashed a light and picked up
Roffery's footprints in the sludge, pointing toward the unexplored end of this
level. Walking was easier now that the tangle was sagging into the center, away
from the walls. Complain moved slowly, not showing light and keeping his dazer
ready for action.
At a corridor junction he paused, pressing on again with the liquid
sound to guide him. The ponics petered out and were replaced by deck, washed
bare of soil by a stream of water. Complain allowed it to flow against his
boots, walking carefully so as not to splash. This was new in his experience. A
light burned ahead. As he neared it, he saw it was shining in a vast chamber
beyond two plate-glass doors. When he got to the doors, he stopped; on them was
painted a notice, swimming pool, which
he pronounced to himself without understanding. Peering through the doors, he saw
a shallow flight of steps going up, with pillars at the top of them; behind one
pillar stood the shadowy figure of a man.
Complain ducked instantly away. When the man did not move, Complain
concluded he had not been seen and looked again, to observe that the figure was
staring away from him. It looked like Roffery. Cautiously, Complain opened one
of the glass doors; a wave washed against his legs. Water was pouring down the
steps, converting them into a waterfall.
"Roffery!" Complain called, keeping his dazer on the figure. The three syllables
he uttered were seized and blown to an enormous booming, which moaned several
times around the cavern of darkness before dying. They washed away with them
everything but a hollow stillness, which now sounded loud in its own right.
"Who's there?" challenged the figure, in a whisper.
Through his fright, Complain managed to whisper his name back. The man
beckoned him. Complain stood motionless where he was and then, at another
summons, slowly climbed the steps. As he came level with the other he saw with
certainty that it was the Valuer.
Roffery grabbed his arm.
"You were sleeping, you fool!" he hissed in Complain's ear.
Complain nodded mutely, afraid to rouse the echoes again.
Roffery dismissed that subject. Without speaking, he pointed ahead.
Complain looked where he was bid, puzzled by the expression on the other's
face.
Neither of them had ever been in such a large space. Lit only by one
bulb which burned to their left, it seemed to stretch forever into the
darkness. The floor was a sheet of water on which ripples slid slowly outward.
Under the light, the water shone like metal. Breaking this smooth expanse at
the far end, an erection of tubes suspended planks over the water at various
heights, and to either side were rows of huts, barely distinguishable for
shadow.
"It's beautiful!" Roffery breathed. "Isn't it
beautiful?"
Complain stared at him in astonishment. The word "beautiful"
had an erotic meaning, and was applied only to particularly desirable women.
Yet he saw that there was a sight here which needed a special choice of
vocabulary. His eyes switched back to the water: it was entirely outside their
experience. Previously, water had meant only a dribble from a tap, a spurt from
a hose, or the puddle at the bottom of a utensil. He wondered vaguely what this
amount could be for. Sinister, uncanny, the view had another quality also, and
it was this Roffery was trying to describe.
"I know what it is," Roffery murmured. He was staring at the
water as if hypnotized, the lines of his face so relaxed that his appearance
was changed. "I've read about this in old books brought to me for
valuing." He paused, and then quoted, ‘Then dead
men rise up never, and even the longest river winds somewhere safe to sea.'
Complain, we've stumbled on the sea. I've often read
about it. For me, it proves Marapper's wrong about our being in a ship; we're
in an underground city."
This meant little to Complain; he was not interested in labels of
things. What struck him was to perceive something he had worried over till now:
why Roffery had left his important office to come on the priest's hazardous
expedition. He saw that the other had a reason akin to Complain's own: a
longing for what he had never known and could put no name to. Instead of feeling
any bond with Roffery about this, Complain decided he must more than ever
beware of the man, for if they had similar objectives, they were the more
likely to clash.
"Why did you come up here?" he asked, still keeping his voice
low to avoid the echoes.
"While you were snoring, I woke and heard voices in the
corridor," Roffery said. "Through the frosted glass I saw two men
pass— only they were too big for men. They were Giants!"
"Giants! The Giants are dead, Roffery."
"These were Giants, I tell you, fully seven feet high. I saw their
heads go by the window." In his eyes, Complain read the uneasy, fascinated
memory of them.
"And you followed them?" Complain asked.
"Yes, I followed them here."
At this Complain scanned the shadows anew.
"Are you trying to frighten me?" he asked.
"I didn't ask you to come after me. Why be afraid of the Giants?
Dazers'll dispatch a man however long he measures."
"We'd better be getting back, Roffery. There's no point in standing
here; besides, I'm on watch."
"You might have thought of that before," Roffery said.
"We'll bring Marapper here later to see what he makes of the sea. Before
we go, I'm just going to look at something over there. That was where the
Giants disappeared."
He indicated a point near at hand, beside the huts, where a square of
curb was raised some four inches above the water-line. The solitary light which
overhung it looked almost as if it had been temporarily erected by the Giants
to cast a glow there.
"There's a trapdoor inside that curb," Roffery whispered.
"The Giants went down there and closed it after them. Come on, we'll go
and look."
He seemed strangely excited, like a child, with a child's innocent
disregard of danger. They paddled one behind the other on the fringes of the
sea, weapons ready, and so came to the trapdoor, dry behind its protecting
curb.
Roffery stooped down and slowly lifted the hatch. Gentle light flowed
out from the opening. They saw an iron ladder leading down into a pit full of
piping. Two overalled figures were working silently at the bottom of the pit.
As soon as the hatch was opened, they must have heard the magnified hiss of
running water in the chamber above them, for they looked up and fixed Roffery
and Complain with an astonished gaze. Undoubtedly they were Giants: they were
monstrously tall and thick, and their faces were dark.
Roffery's nerve deserted him at once. He dropped the hatch down with a
slam, and turned and ran. Complain splashed close behind. Next second, Roffery
disappeared, swallowed by the water. Complain stopped abruptly. He could see at
his feet, below the surface of the sea, the lip of a dark well. Roffery bobbed
up again, a yard from him, in the well, striking the water and hollering. In
the darkness, his face was apoplectic. Complain stretched out a hand to him,
leaning forward as far as he dared. The other struggled to grasp it, floundered, and sank again in a welter of
bubbles. The hubbub in the vast cavern was deafening.
When he appeared again, Roffery had found a footing, and stood
chest-deep in the water. Panting and cursing, he pushed forward to seize
Complain's hand. At the same time, the trapdoor was flung open. The Giants were
coming out. As Complain whirled around, he
was aware of Roffery pausing to grab at his dazer, which would not be affected by damp, and of a pattern of
crazy light rippling on the ceiling high above them. Without aiming, he fired
his own dazer at a head emerging from the vault. The daze went wide. The Giant
launched himself at them, and Complain dropped his weapon in panic. As he bent
to scrabble for it in the shallow water, Roffery fired over his stooped back.
His aim was better than Complain's.
The Giant staggered and fell with a splash which roused the echoes. As
far as Complain could remember afterward, the monster had been unarmed.
The second Giant was armed. Seeing the fate of his companion, he
crouched on the ladder, shielded by the curb, and fired twice. The first shot
got Roffery in the face. Without a sound, he slipped beneath the water.
Complain dived flat, kicking up spray, but he was an easy target for the
marksman. His temple stopped the second shot. Limply, he slumped into the
water, face down.
The Giant climbed out of the pit and came toward him.
III
At the center of the human mechanism is the will to live. So delicate is
this mechanism that some untoward experience early in life can implant within
it the opposite impulse, the will to die. The two drives lie quietly side by
side, and a man may pass his days unaware of their existence; then some violent
crisis faces him and, stripped momentarily of his superficial characteristics,
his fatal duality is bare before him; and he must stop to wrestle with the flaw
within before he, can fight the external foe.
It was so with Complain. After oblivion came only the frantic desire to
retreat back into unconsciousness. But unconsciousness had rejected him, and
the prompting soon came that he must struggle to escape whatever predicament he
was in. Then again, he felt no urge to escape, only the desire to submit and
fade back into nothing. Insistently, however, life returned.
He opened his eyes for a moment. He was lying on his back in
semidarkness. A gray roof of some kind was only a few inches above his head. It
was flowing backward, or he was moving forward: he could not tell which, and
closed his eyes again. A steady increase in bodily sensation told him his
ankles and wrists were lashed together.
His head ached, and a foul smell pervaded his lungs, making breathing an
agony. He realized the Giant had shot him with some kind of gas pellet,
instantly effective but ultimately, perhaps, innocuous.
Again he opened his eyes. The roof still seemed to be traveling
backward, but he felt a steady tremor through his body, telling him he was on
some kind of moving vehicle. Even as he looked, the movement stopped. He saw a
Giant loom beside him, presumably the one who had shot and captured him.
Through half-closed eyes, Complain saw the immense creature was on hands and
knees in this low place. Feeling on the roof, he now knuckled some kind of
switch, and a section of the roof swung upward.
From above came light and the sound of deep voices. Complain was later
to recognize this slow, heavy tone as the typical manner of speech of the
Giants. Before he had time to prepare for it, he was seized and dragged off the
conveyance and passed effortlessly up through the opening. Large hands took
hold of him and dumped him not ungently against the wall of a room.
"He's coming around," a voice commented, in a curious accent
Complain hardly understood.
This observation worried him a great deal; partly because he thought he
had given no indication he was recovering, partly because the remark suggested they
might now gas him again.
Another body was handed up through the opening, the original Giant climbing up after it. A muttered conversation took
place. From the little Complain could hear, he gathered that the body was that
of the Giant Roffery had killed. The other Giant was explaining what had
happened. It soon became apparent he was talking to two others, although
Complain, from where he lay, could see only wall.
Another Giant entered from a side room and began talking in a peremptory
tone suggestive of command. Complain's captor began to explain the situation
over again, but was cut short.
"Did you deal with the flooding?" the newcomer asked.
"Yes, Mr. Curtis. We fitted a new stopcock in place of the rusted
one and switched the water off. We also unblocked the drainage and fitted a
length of new piping there. We were just finishing when the
dizzies turned up. The pool should be empty by now."
"All right, Randall," the peremptory voice addressed as Curtis
said. "Now tell me why you started chasing the two dizzies."
There was a pause, then the other said
apologetically, "We didn't know how many of them there were. For all we
knew, we might have been ambushed in the inspection pit. We had to get out and
see. I suppose that if we had realized to begin with that there were only two
of them, we would have let them go without interfering."
The Giants spoke so sluggishly that Complain had no difficulty in
understanding, despite the strange accent. Of its general intention he could
make nothing. He was almost beginning to lose interest when he became the topic
of conversation, and his interest abruptly revived.
"You realize you are in trouble, Randall," the stern voice
said. "You know the rules: it means a court-martial. You will have
difficulty in proving self-defense, to my mind. Especially as the other dizzy
was drowned."
"He wasn't drowned. I fished him out of the water and put him on
the closed inspection hatch to recover in his own time." Randall sounded
surly.
"Leaving that question aside— what do you propose doing with this
specimen you've brought here?" Curtis demanded.
"He'd have drowned if I had left him there."
"Why bring him here?"
"Couldn't we just kill him, Mr. Curtis?" One of the Giants
spoke for the first time.
"Out of the question. Criminal breach of the rules. Besides, could
you kill a man in cold blood?"
"He's only a dizzy, Mr. Curtis," spoken defensively.
"Could he go for rehabilitation?" Randall suggested.
"He's too old, man! You know they only take children. You'll have
to take him back, that's all." The voice was curt and decisive. Complain
took heart from it; nothing would suit him better than to be taken back. Not,
he realized, that he had much fear of the Giants; now
he was among them, they seemed too slow and gentle for malice. Curtis's was not
an attitude he understood, but it was certainly convenient.
There was some argument between the Giants as to how Complain's return
should be effected. Randall's friends sided with him
against the one in command, Curtis; the latter lost his temper.
"All right," he snapped, "come into the office, we'll
contact Little Dog and get an authoritative ruling."
"Losing your nerve, Curtis?" one of the others asked, as they
followed him through —with that crazy, slow-motion walk the Giants had— into
the other room, slamming the door on Complain without a glance at him.
Complain's immediate thought was that they were fools to leave him unguarded;
he could now escape back through the hole in the floor by which he had come.
This illusion burst the moment he tried to roll over. As soon as he attempted
to move a muscle, it filled with a brittle ache. He groaned and lay back, his head against the curve of wall.
Complain was alone only for a second after the Giants had gone. A
grating noise sounded from the region of his knees. Craning his neck slightly,
Complain saw a small section of the wall, a jagged patch roughly six niches
square, slide out. From this hole, nightmare figures emerged.
There were five of them, bursting out at an immense rate, circling Complain,
jumping him, and then reporting back like lightning to the hole. They evidently
carried some sort of reassurance, for three more figures promptly whisked into
view, beckoning to others behind them. They were all rats.
The five scouts wore spiked collars around their necks; they were small
and lean of body; one had lost an eye, in the vacant socket of which gristle
twitched sympathetically with the glances of the surviving pupil. Of the next
three to appear, one was jet black and obviously the leader. He stood upright,
pawing the air with little mauve hands. He squeaked furiously and the five
scouts circuited Complain again, flashing along his leg, grinning momentarily
into his eye, scrapping over his
neck, slithering down his blouse.
During this activity, Complain did an amount of involuntary flinching.
He was used to rats, but there was an organized quality to these that disturbed
him; also, he fancied that he could manage little by way of defense, should
they decide it suited their cause to gnaw his eyes out.
But the rats were on something other than a delicacy hunt. The rear
guard now appeared. Panting from a hole in the wall came four more buck rats.
They dragged a small cage which, under the whistled orders of the rat-leader,
was pulled rapidly to a position before Complain's face, where he had every
opportunity of inspecting it and inhaling the odor from it.
The animal in the cage was larger than the rats. From
the fur at the top of its oval skull sprouted two long ears; its tail merely a
white scut of fluff. Complain had not seen a creature of this species
before, but he recognized it from the descriptions of old hunters back in
Quarters. It was a rabbit, scarce because natural prey for the rat. He looked
at it with interest, and it stared nervously back at him.
As the rabbit was drawn up, the five original scout rats spread out by
the inner door, keeping watch for the Giants' return. Obviously, the rabbit
understood what was intended. Complain stared puzzledly at it. The pupils of its
eyes appeared to swell, and he flinched in his mind from a feeling of tentative
discomfort. The feel remained. It soaked about his brain with the cautious
advance of a puddle around cobbles. He tried to shake his head, but the eerie
sensation maintained itself and strengthened. It was seeking something,
witlessly, like a dying man blundering around darkened rooms, feeling for the
light switch. Complain broke into a sweat, grinding his teeth as he tried
mentally to repel the beastly contact. Then it found its correct port of entry.
His mind blossomed into an immense shout of interrogation.
WHY ARE––
WHO
IS––
WHAT
DO––
HOW
CAN––
DO
YOU––
CAN
YOU––
WILL YOU––
Complain screamed with anguish.
Instantly, the desolating gibberish ceased, the formless inquiry died.
The scout rats leaped from their posts, and they and the four driver rats spun
the imprisoned rabbit around and shot the cage
back into the wall. Spurring them savagely, the rat-leader followed with his
guard. Next moment, the square of wall banged down behind them— only just in
time, for a Giant burst into the room to find what the screaming was about.
He rolled Complain over with his foot. The latter stared up hopelessly
at him, trying to speak.
Reassured, the Giant lumbered back to the other room, this time leaving
open the connecting door.
"The dizzy's got a headache," he announced.
Complain could hear their voices. They seemed to be talking to some kind
of machine. But he was almost totally absorbed by the ordeal with the rats. A
madman had lived for a moment within his skull! The Teaching warned him that
his mind was a foul place. The holy trinity, Froyd, Yung, and Bassit, had gone
alone through the terrible barriers of sleep, death's brother; there they found
—not nothing, as man had formerly believed— but grottoes and subterranean
labyrinths full of ghouls and evil treasure, leeches, and the lusts that burn
like acid. Man stood revealed to himself: a creature of infinite complexity and
horror. It was the aim of the Teaching to let as much of this miasmic stuff out
to the surface as possible. But supposing the Teaching had never gone far
enough?
It spoke, allegorically, of conscious and subconscious. Supposing there
was a real Subconscious, a being capable of taking over the mind of a man? Had
the trinity been down all the slimy corridors? Was this Subconscious the madman
who screamed inside him?
Then he had the answer, simple yet unbelievable. The caged creature had
brought its mind into contact with his. Reviewing that fizzing questionnaire,
Complain knew it had come from the animal and not some dreadful creature inside
his own head. The ordeal was at once made tolerable. One can shoot rabbits.
Ignoring the how of it with true Quarters's philosophy, Complain
dismissed the matter.
He lay still, resting, trying to breathe the clinging smell from his
lungs, and in a short while the Giants returned.
Complain's captor, Randall, picked him up without further ado and opened
the trapdoor in the floor. Their argument had evidently been settled in
Curtis's favor. Randall eased himself and his burden back into the low tunnel.
He put Complain on to the conveyance, and, by the sound of things, climbed on
himself behind his captive's head.
With a quiet word to the Giants above, he started the motor. Again the
gray roof flowed overhead, punctuated by criss-crossing pipe, wire, and tube.
At length they stopped. Fumbling on the roof, the Giant pressed his fingers to it, and a square opened above them.
Complain was hauled out of the hole, carried a few yards, bundled through a
door, and dropped. He was back in Deadways: its smell to a hunter was
unmistakable. The Giant hovered over him wordlessly, a shadow in shadows, and
then vanished.
Shielding his flashlight till it gave the barest whisper of illumination, Complain moved to the door and looked out at
blackness. As far as he could see, a gulf stretched infinitely before him. He
slid out, feeling along to the right, and found a row of doors. Using the light
again, he found damp, bare tile underfoot. Then he knew where he was; a hollowness in his ear reinforced the certainty. The Giant
had brought him back to what Roffery had called the sea.
Complain turned and walked from the chamber, careful not to wake the
echoes. He headed back to Marapper's camp. The ground still squelched lightly
underfoot, holding its moisture. He brushed gently by the sagging muck of last
season's ponics, and came to the camp door. He whistled eagerly, wondering who
would be on guard: Marapper? Wantage?
Fermour?
His signal went unanswered. Holding himself tense, he pushed into the
room. It was empty. They had moved on. Complain was alone in Deadways.
Self-control snapped then; he had gone through too much. Giants, rats,
rabbits, he could bear— but not the scabrous solitudes of Deadways. He rioted
around the room, flinging up the splintered wood, kicking, cursing, out into
the corridor, roaring, swearing, tearing a way through the vegetable mash,
howling, blaspheming.
A body cannoned into him from behind. Complain sprawled in the tangle,
fighting insanely to turn and tackle his assailant. A hand clamped itself
unshakably over his mouth.
"Shut up!" a voice snarled in his ear.
He ceased struggling. A light was turned on him and three figures
hunched over him.
"I— I thought I'd lost you!" he said. Suddenly, he began to
cry. Reaction turned him into a child again. His shoulders heaved, the tears
poured down his cheeks.
Marapper smacked him efficiently across the face.
IV
They traveled. Cutting, pushing, they worked through the ponics;
circumspectly, they moved through dark regions where no lights burned and no
ponics grew. They passed through badly plundered areas, whose doors were broken,
whose corridors were piled high with wreckage. Such life as they met was timid,
eluding them where possible; but few creatures lived here— a rogue goat, a
crazed hermit, a pathetic band of submen who fled when Wantage clapped his
hands. This was Deadways, and the emptiness held unrecorded eras of silence.
Quarters was left far behind the travelers, and forgotten. Even their nebulous
destination was forgotten, for the present, with its ceaseless call upon their
physical reserves, required all their attention.
Finding the subsidiary connections between decks was not always easy,
even with the help of Marapper's plan. Shafts were often blocked, levels
frequently proved dead ends. But they gradually moved forward; the fifties
decks were passed, then the forties, and so they came, on the eighth wake after
leaving Quarters, to Deck 29.
By now, Roy Complain had begun to believe in the ship theory. The
reorientation had been insensible but thorough. To this, the intelligent rats
had greatly contributed. When Complain had told his companions of his capture
by the Giants, he had omitted the rat incident; something fantastic about it,
he knew instinctively, would have defied his powers of description and wakened
Marapper's and Wantage's derision. But now he found his thoughts turning
frequently to those fearsome creatures. He saw a parallel between the lives of
the rats and humans in their manlike conduct of ill-treating a fellow creature,
the rabbit. The rats survived where they could, giving
no thought to the nature of their surroundings; Complain could only say the
same of himself until now.
Marapper had listened to the tale of the Giants intently, commenting
little. Once he said, "Then do they know where the Captain is?"
He was particularly pressing for full details of what the Giants had
said to each other. He repeated the names "Curtis" and
"Randall" several times, as if muttering a spell.
"Who was this little dog they went to speak to?" he asked.
"I think it was a name," Complain said. "Not a real
dog."
"A name of what?"
"I don't know. I tell you I was half-conscious." Indeed the
more he thought, the less clear he was as to what exactly had been said. Even
at the time, the episode had been sufficiently outside his normal experience to
render it half-incredible.
"Was it another Giant's name, do you think, or a thing's
name?" the priest pressed, tugging at the lobe of his ear, as if to
extract the facts that way.
"I don't know, Marapper. I can't remember. They just said
they were going to talk to 'little dog'— I think."
At Marapper's insistence, the party of four had inspected the hall
marked swimming pool where the
sea had been.
It had completely dried up. There was no sign of Roffery, which was
baffling, considering that one of the Giants had said that the Valuer would
recover from the gas pellet as Complain had done. They had searched and called,
but Roffery had not appeared. They could find no hatch which might have led to
the Giants' room. The steel lid covering the inspection pit where Complain and
Roffery had first seen the two Giants was as secure as if it had never opened.
The priest shot Complain a skeptical glance, and there
the matter was left. Taking Wantage's advice, they moved on.
The whole incident lowered Complain's stock considerably. Wantage, quick
to seize advantage, became undisputed second-in-command. He followed Marapper,
and Fermour and Complain followed him. At least it made for peace in the ranks,
and outward accord.
If, during the periods of intent silence when they pushed along the everlasting
rings of deck, Complain changed into someone more thoughtful and
self-sufficient, the priest's nature also changed. His volubility had gone, and
the vitality from which it sprang. At last he realized the true magnitude of
the task he had set himself, and was forced to put his whole will toward
enduring.
"Been trouble here— old trouble," he said at one place in
their trek, leaning against the wall and looking ahead into the middle level of
Deck 29. The others paused with him. The tangles stretched for only a few yards
in front of them, then began the darkness in which they could not grow. The
cause of the light failure was obvious: ancient weapons, such as Quarters did
not possess, had blasted holes in the roof and walls of the corridor. A heavy cabinet
of some kind protruded through the roof, and the nearby doors had been buckled
out of their sockets. For yards around, everything was curiously pockmarked and
pitted from the force of the explosion.
"At least we'll be free of the cursed tangle for a while,"
Wantage remarked, drawing his flashlight. "Come on, Marapper."
The priest continued to lean where he was, pulling at his nose between
first finger and thumb.
"We must be getting close to Forwards' territory," he said.
"I'm afraid our lights may give us away."
"You walk in the dark if you feel like it," Wantage retorted.
He moved forward, and Fermour did the same. Without a word, pushing past
Marapper, Complain followed suit. Grumbling, the priest tagged on; nobody suffered
indignity with more dignity than he.
Getting near the edge of shadow, Wantage flicked his light on, probing
ahead. Then the strangeness began to take them. The first thing that Complain
observed which went against natural law was the
lie of the ponics. As always, they tailed off and grew stunted toward the
lightless passage, but here they were peculiarly wispy, their stalks flaccid,
as if unable to support their weight; they ventured further from the overhead
glow than usual.
Then his footsteps failed to bite on ground.
Already, Wantage was floundering ahead of him. Fermour had gone into an
odd, high-stepping walk. Complain felt strangely helpless; the intricate gears
of his body had been thrown out of kilter— it was as if he was trying to march
through water, yet he had an unaccountable sensation of lightness. His head
swam. Blood roared in his ears. He heard Marapper exclaim in astonishment, and
then the priest blundered into his back. Next moment, Complain was sailing on a
long trajectory past Fermour's right shoulder. He doubled up as he went,
striking the wall with his hip. The ground rose slowly to meet him and,
spreading both arms, he landed on his chest and went sprawling. When he looked
into the darkness, he saw Wantage, still gripping his flashlight, descending
even more slowly.
On the other side of him, Marapper was floundering, his eyes bulging,
his mouth speechlessly opening and shutting. Taking the priest's arm, Fermour
spun him around and pushed him back into the safe area. Then Fermour bunched
his stocky form and dived out into the dark for Wantage, who was blaspheming
quietly near the floor; glissading off the wall, Fermour seized him, braked
himself with an out-thrust heel, and floated softly back on the rebound. He
steadied Wantage, who staggered like a drunken man.
Thrilled by this display, Complain saw at once that here was an ideal
way of travel. Whatever had happened in the corridor —he dimly supposed that
the air had changed in some way, although it was still breathable— they could
proceed quickly along it in a series of leaps. Getting cautiously to his feet
and snapping on his light, he took a tentative jump forward.
His cry of surprise echoed loudly down the empty corridor. Only by
putting up his hand did Complain save himself a knock
on the head. The gesture sent him into a spin, so that he eventually landed on
his back. He was dizzy: everything had been the wrong way up. Nevertheless, he
was ten yards down the corridor. The others, fixed in a drum of light with a
green backcloth, looked distant. Complain recalled the rambling memories of
Ozbert Bergass; what had he said, in the truth Complain had mistaken for
delirium? "The place where hands turn into feet and you fly through the
air like an insect." Then the old guide had roved this far! Complain
marveled to think of the miles of festering tunnel that lay between them and
Quarters.
"The ship's gone crazy!" Marapper was saying.
"Why doesn't it show this on your map?" Wantage asked angrily.
"I never did trust that thing."
"Obviously the weightlessness occurred after the map was
made. Use your brains if you've got any," Fermour snapped. This unusual
outburst was perhaps explained by the anxiety in his next remark. "I think
we've made enough racket to bring all Forwards on our trail; we'd better get
back quickly."
"Back!" Complain exclaimed. "We can't go back! The way to the next deck
lies up there. We'll have to get through one of these broken doors and work our
way through the rooms, keeping parallel to the corridor."
"How in the hull do we do that?" Wantage asked. "Have you
got something that bores through walls?"
"We can only try, and hope there will be connecting doors,"
Complain said. "Bob Fermour's right— it's madness to stay here. Come
on!"
"Yes, but look here ..." Marapper began.
"Oh, take a Journey!" Complain said angrily. He burst open the
buckled nearest door and pushed his way in; Fermour followed close behind. With
a glance at each other, Marapper and Wantage came too.
They were fortunate in that they had chosen a large room. The lights
still functioned, and the place was stacked with growth. Complain chopped at it
savagely, keeping near the wall next to the corridor. Again the lightness
enveloped them as they advanced, but the effect was less serious, and the
ponics afforded them some stability.
They came level with a rent in the wall. Wantage peered past the ragged
metal into the corridor. In the distance, a circular light winked out.
"Someone's following us," he said. They looked uneasily into
each other's faces, and with one accord pressed onward again.
A metal counter on which ponics now sprouted in profusion blocked their
way. They were forced to skirt it, going toward the center of the room to do
so. This —in the days of the Giants— had been some kind of mess hall; long
tables flanked with tubular steel chairs had covered the length and breadth of
it. Now, with slow, vegetable force, ponics had borne up the furniture,
entangling themselves in it, hoisting it waist high,
where it formed a barrier to progress. The further they went, the more they
were impeded. It proved impossible to get back to the wall.
As if in a nightmare, they cut their way past chairs and tables,
half-blinded by midges which rose like dust from the foliage and settled on
their faces. The thicket grew worse. Whole thickets of ponic had collapsed
under this self imposed strain and were rotting in slimy clumps, on top of
which more plants grew. A blight had settled in, a
blue blight sticky to the touch, which soon made the party's knives difficult
to handle.
Sweating and gasping, Complain glanced at Wantage, who labored beside
him. The good side of the man's face was so swollen that his eye hardly showed.
They moved through a stippled wall of disease. The going was slow, but
finally they broke through to the end of the room. Which end? They had lost all
sense of direction. Marapper promptly sat down with his back to the smooth
wall, settling heavily among the ponic seeds. He swabbed his brow exhaustedly.
"I've gone far enough," he gasped.
"Well, you can't go any further," Complain snapped.
"Don't forget I didn't suggest all this,
Complain drew a deep breath. The air was foul; he had the illusion that
his lungs were coated with midges.
"We've only got to work our way along the wall till we come to a
door. It's easier going here," he said. Then, despite his determination,
he sank down beside the priest.
Wantage began to sneeze.
Each onslaught bent him double. The ruined side of his face was as
swollen as the good one; his present distress completely hid his deformity. On
his seventh' sneeze, all the lights went out.
Instantly, Complain was on his feet, flashing his light into Wantage's
face.
"Stop that sneezing!" he growled. "We must keep
quiet."
"Turn your light off!" Fermour snapped.
They stood in indecisive silence, their hearts choking them. Standing in
that heat was like standing in a jelly.
"It could be just a coincidence," Marapper said uneasily.
"I can remember sections of lights failing before."
"It's Forwards— they're after us!" Complain whispered.
"All we've got to do is work our way quietly along the wall to the
nearest door," Fermour said, repeating Complain's earlier words almost
verbatim.
"Quietly?" Complain sneered. "They'd hear us at once. Best
to stand still. Keep your dazers ready— they're probably trying to creep
up on us."
So they stood there, sweating. Night was a hot breath around them.
"Give us the Litany, priest," Wantage begged. His voice was
shaking.
"Not now, for gods ache," Fermour groaned.
They heard the priest flop to his knees. Wantage followed suit, wheezing
in the thick gloom.
Marapper began monotonously on the General Belief. With an overpowering
sense of futility, Complain thought: Here we finish up in this dead end, and
the priest prays; I don't know why I ever mistook him for a man of action. He
nursed the dazer, cocking an ear into the night, half-heartedly joining in the
responses. Their voices rose and fell; by the end of it they all felt slightly
better.
". . . and by so discharging our morbid
impulses we may be freed from inner conflict," the priest intoned.
"And live in psychosomatic purity," they repeated.
"So that this unnatural life may be
delivered down to Journey's End."
"And sanity propagated," they replied.
"And the ship brought home." The priest had the last word.
He crept around to each of them in the dark, his confidence restored by
his performance, shaking their hands, wishing expansion to their egos. Complain
pushed him roughly away.
"Save that till we're out of this predicament," he said.
"We've got to work our way out of here. If we go quietly, we can hear
anyone who approaches us."
"It's no good,
"Remember the power you were after?"
"Let's sit it out here!" the priest begged. "The ponic's
too thick."
"What do you say, Fermour?" Complain asked.
"Listen!"
They listened, ears strained. The ponics creaked, relaxing without
light, preparing to die. Midges pinged around their heads. Although vibrant
with tiny noises, the air was almost unbreathable; the wall of diseased plants
cut off the oxygen released by the healthy ones beyond.
With frightening suddenness, Wantage went mad. He flung himself on to
Fermour, who cried out as he was bowled over. They were rolling about in the
muck, struggling desperately. Soundlessly, Complain threw himself on to them.
He felt Wantage's wiry frame writhing on top of Fermour's thick body; the
latter was fighting to shake off the hands around his throat.
Complain wrenched Wantage away by the shoulders. Wantage threw a wild
punch, missed, grabbed for his dazer. He brought it up, but Complain had his
wrist. Twisting savagely, he forced Wantage slowly back and then hit out at his
jaw. In the dark, the blow missed its target, striking Wantage's chest instead.
Wantage yelped and broke free, flailing his arms wildly around his body.
Again Complain had him. This time, his blow connected. Wantage went
limp, tottered back into the ponics and fell heavily.
"Thanks," Fermour said; it was all he could manage to say.
They had all been shouting. Now they were silent, again listening. Only
the creak of the ponics, the noise that went with them all their lives, and
would continue, some said, when they made the Long
Journey.
"I've seen a good many go like this," Marapper whispered.
"But the division between sanity and insanity was always narrow with poor
Wantage. This is a case of what we priests term hyper-claustrophobia; I suppose
we all have it in some degree. It causes a lot of deaths in the Greene tribe,
although they aren't all violent like this. Most of them just snap out like a
light." He clicked his fingers to demonstrate.
"Never mind the case history, priest," Fermour said.
"What are we going to do with him?"
"Leave him and clear out," Complain suggested.
"You don't see how interesting a case this is for me," said
the priest reprovingly. "I've known Wantage since he was a small boy. Now
he's going to die, here in the darkness. It's a wonderful, a humbling thing to
look on a man's life as a whole: the work of art's completed, the composition's
rounded off. A man takes the Long Journey, but he leaves his history behind in the minds of other men.
"When Wantage was born, his mother lived in the tangles of
Deadways, an outcast from her own tribe. She had committed a double unfaith,
and one of the men concerned went with her and hunted for her. She was a bad
woman. He was killed hunting: she could not live in the tangle alone, so she
sought refuge with us in Quarters."
"Whose nerves do you think this recitation steadies?" Fermour
asked.
"In fear lies no expansion; our lives are only lent us,"
Marapper said. "See the shape of our poor Comrade's life. As so often
happens, his end echoes his beginning; the wheel turns one full revolution,
then breaks off. When he was a child, Wantage endured nothing but torment from
the other boys— taunts because his mother had been an outcast, taunts because
of his face. He came to identify the two as one woe. So he walked with his bad
side to the wall, and deliberately submerged the memory of his mother. But
being back in the tangle brought back his infant recollections. He was swamped
by the shame of her, his mother. He was overwhelmed by infantile fears of
darkness and insecurity."
"Now that our lesson in the benefits of self-confession is
over," Complain said heavily, "perhaps you will recollect, Marapper,
that Wantage is not dead. He still lives to be a danger to us."
"I'm just going to finish him," Marapper said. "Your flashlight a
moment, dimly. We don't want him squealing like a pig."
Bending down gingerly, Complain fought a splitting headache as the blood
flow into his skull increased. The impulse came to do just what Wantage had
done: hurl away the discomforts of reason, and charge blindly into the ambushed
thickets, screaming. It was only later that he questioned his blind obedience
to the priest at this dangerous hour; for it was obvious on reflection that
Marapper had found some sort of mental refuge from this crisis by turning to
the routines of priesthood; his exhumation of Wantage's childhood had been a
camouflaged seeking for his own.
"I think I'm going to sneeze again," Wantage remarked, in a
reasonable voice, from the ground. He had regained consciousness without their
knowing it.
His face, in the pencil of light squeezed between Complain's fingers,
was scarcely recognizable. Normally pale and thin, the countenance was now
swollen and suffused with blood; it might have been a gorged vampire's mask,
had the eyes not been hot, rather than chill with death. And as the light of
Complain's torch fell upon him, Wantage jumped.
Unprepared, Complain went down under a frontal attack. But, arms and
legs flailing, Wantage paused only to knock his previous assailant out of the
way. Then he was off through the tangles, crashing away from the little party.
Marapper's light came on, picking at the greenery, settling dimly on
Wantage's retreating back.
"Put it out, you fool!" Fermour bellowed.
"I'm going to get him with my dazer," Marapper shouted.
But he did not. Wantage had burst only a short way into the tangle when
he paused and swung around. Complain heard distinctly the curious whistling
noise he made. For a second, everything was still. Then Wantage made the
whistling noise again and staggered back into range of Marapper's light. He
tripped, collapsed, tried to make his way to them on hands and knees. Two yards
from Marapper, he rolled over, twitched, and lay still. His blank eye stared
incredulously at the arrow sticking out of his solar plexus.
They were still peering stupidly at the body when the armed guards of
Forwards slid from the shadows and confronted them.
PART THREE
Forwards
I
FORWARDS was a region like none Roy Complain had seen before. The sweep
of Sternstairs, the squalor of Quarters, the wilderness of Deadways, even the
spectacle of that macabre sea where the Giants had captured him— none of them
prepared him for the differentness of Forwards. Although his hands, like
Fermour's and Marapper's, were tied behind his back, his hunter's eye was
active as their small party marched into the camp.
One radical distinction between Forwards and the villages lost in the
festering continent of Deadways soon became obvious. Whereas the Greene tribe
and others like it were always slowly on the move, Forwards was firmly
established, its boundaries fixed and unchanging. It looked like the result of
organization rather than accident. Complain's conception of it had always been
vague; in his mind it had featured as a place of dread, the more dreadful for
being vague. Now he saw it was immensely larger than a village. It was almost a
region in its own right.
Its very barriers differed from Quarters's make-shift affairs. The
skirmishing party, as they pushed unceremoniously through the ponics, came first
of all to a heavy curtain which, loaded with small bells, rang as they drew it
aside. Beyond the curtain was a section of corridor, dirty and scarred but
devoid of ponics, terminating in a barricade formed of desks and bunks, behind
which Forwards guards stood ready with bows and arrows.
After an amount of hailing and calling, the skirmishing party —which
numbered four men and two women— was allowed up to and past this last
barricade. Beyond it was another curtain, this time of fine net, through which
the hitherto ubiquitous midges, one of the scourges of Deadways, could not get.
And beyond that lay Forwards proper.
For Complain, the incredible feature was the disappearance of ponic
plants. Inside Quarters, of course, the thickets had been hacked or trampled
down, but with indifferent enthusiasm and in the knowledge that the clearance
was only temporary; often enough the old root system was allowed to remain
covering the deck. And always there had been tokens of them about, from the
sour-sweet miltex smell pervading the air to the dried staves used by men and
the chitinous seeds played with by children.
Here the ponics had been swept away as if they had never existed. The
detritus and soil that attended them had been completely removed; even the
scoured pattern the roots made on the hard deck had been erased. The lighting,
no longer filtered through a welter of greedy foliage, shone out boldly.
Everywhere wore such a strange aspect —so hard, bare and, above all, so
geometrical— that some while was to elapse before Complain realized fully that
these doors, corridors and decks were not an independent kingdom but, in fact,
only an extension of their counterparts elsewhere; the external appearance was
so novel that it blinded him to its real conformity with the layout of
Quarters.
The three prisoners were prodded into a small cell. All their equipment
was removed and their hands freed. The door was slammed on them.
"O Consciousness!" Marapper groaned. "Here's a pretty
state for a poor, innocent old priest to be in. Froyd rot their souls for a
pack of dirty miltex-suckers!"
"At least they let you do the death rites for Wantage," said
Fermour, trying to pick the filth out of his hair.
They looked at him curiously.
"What else would you expect?" Marapper asked. "The brutes
are at least human. But that doesn't mean to say that they won't be wearing our
intestines around their necks before they eat again."
"If only they hadn't taken my dazer . . ." Complain said. Not
only their dazers, but their packs and all their possessions had been taken. He
prowled helplessly around the little room. Like many apartments in Quarters, it
was all but featureless. By the door, two broken dials were set into a wall, a
bunk was fixed into another wall, a grille in the
ceiling provided a slight current of air. Nothing offered itself as a weapon.
Marapper tried to remove some clotted filth from his cloak. Working
half-heartedly, he looked up with eagerness when the door was opened and two
men appeared in the open doorway; pushing roughly past Fermour, the priest
strode over to them.
"Take me to your lieutenant and expansion to your egos," he
said. "It is important I see him as soon as possible. I am not a man to be
kept waiting."
"You will all come with us," one of the men said firmly.
"We have our orders."
Marapper saw fit to obey at once, although he kept up a flow of indignant protest as they were ushered into the
corridor. They were led deeper into Forwards, passing several curious
bystanders on their way.
His senses stimulated by a scent of danger, Complain took in every
detail of their route. Here, as throughout Deadways, what Marapper had called
the Main Corridor was blocked at each deck, and they followed a circuitous
detour around the curving corridors and through the inter-deck doors.
By this method they traversed two decks. Complain saw with mild surprise
the notice deck 22 stenciled
against the interdeck door; it was a link with all the seemingly unending deck
numbers which had punctuated their trek; and it implied, unless Deadways began
again on the other side of Forwards, that Forwards itself covered twenty-four
decks.
This was too much for Complain to believe. He had to remind himself
forcibly how much he was incapable of crediting what had actually proved to be.
But— what lay beyond Deck 1? He could picture only a wilderness of
super-ponics, growing out into what his mother had called the great stretch of
other darkness, where strange lanterns burned. Even the priest's theory of the
ship, backed as it was by printed evidence, had little power to thrust out that
image he had known since childhood. With a certain pleasure, he balanced the
two theories against each other; never before in his life had he felt anything
but discomfort at the contemplation of intangibles.
Complain's interior monologue was interrupted by their guards, who now
pushed him with Fermour and the priest into a large compartment, entering
themselves and shutting the door. Two other guards were in the room.
Unusual features distinguished the room from any other Complain had been
in. One was a plant bearing bright flowers which stood in a tub, as if for some
purpose— though what purpose, the hunter could not guess. The other unusual
feature was a girl; she stood regarding them from behind a desk, dressed in a
neat gray uniform and with her hands restfully down at her sides. Her hair fell
straight and neat about her neck. The hair was black, and her eyes were gray;
her face was thin, pale, and intense, the exact curve of her cheek down to her
mouth holding, Complain felt compulsively, a message he longed to understand.
Although she was young and her brow magnificent, the impression she gave was
not so much of beauty as of gentleness— until one's gaze dropped to her jaw.
There lay delicate but unmistakable warning that it might be uncomfortable to
know this girl too well.
She surveyed each of the prisoners in turn.
Complain experienced a strange shiver as her eyes engaged his; and
something tense in Fermour's attitude revealed that he, too, felt an attraction
to her. That her direct gaze defied a strict Quarters's taboo only made it the
more disturbing.
"So you're Gregg's followers," she said finally, but the three
men were too distracted by her presence to hear her first words. Now that she
had seen them, she was obviously inclined to look at them no more; she tilted
her neat head up and studied a patch of wall. "It is good that we have
caught some of you at last. You have caused us much unnecessary irritation. Now
you will be handed over to the torturers; we have to extract information from
you. Or do you wish to surrender it voluntarily?"
Her voice had been cold and detached, using the tone the proud employ to
the criminal. Torture, it implied, was natural.
"My name is Inspector Vyann; I investigate all captives brought
into Forwards, and those who are coy about talking go on the presses. You in
particular deserve nothing better. We need to know how to get to the leader of
your band himself."
Marapper spread his hands wide.
"You may take it from me we know nothing," he said. "We
three are completely independent; our tribe lies many
decks away. As I am a humble priest, I would not lie to you."
"Humble, are you?" she asked, thrusting the little chin out.
"What were you doing so near Forwards? Do you not know our perimeters are
dangerous?"
"We did not realize we were so near Forwards," said the
priest. "The ponics were thick. We have come a long way."
"Where exactly have you come from?"
This was the first question of a series that Inspector Vyann thrust at
them. The direction of her interrogation soon made it obvious that she began by
believing them to be members of a marauding gang, and ended by doubting it. The
gang, it became apparent, had been carrying out raids on Forwards from a nearby
base at a time when other —as yet unspecified— problems pressed.
Vyann's natural disappointment at finding the trio less exciting than
hoped for chilled her manner still further. The thicker grew the ice, the more
voluble grew Marapper. His violent imagination, easily stimulated, pictured for
him the ease with which this impervious young woman might snap her fingers and
launch him on his Long Journey. At last he stepped forward, placing one hand
gently on her desk.
"What you have failed to realize," he said impressively,
"is this: that we are no ordinary captives. When your skirmishers waylaid
us, we were on our way to Forwards with important news."
"Is that so?" Her raised eyebrows were a triumph. "You
were telling me a moment ago you were only a humble priest from an obscure
village. These contradictions bore us."
"Knowledge!" Marapper said. "Why question where it comes from? I warn you
seriously, I am valuable."
Vyann permitted herself a small, frosty smile.
"So your lives should be spared because you hold some vital
information among you. Is that it, priest?"
"I said I had the
knowledge," Marapper pointed out. "If you also deign to spare the
breath of my poor, ignorant friends here, I should, of course, be everlastingly
delighted."
"So?" For the first time, she sat down behind the desk, a hint
of humor lurking around her mouth, softening it. She pointed to Complain.
"You," she said. "If you have no knowledge to pour into
our ears, what can you offer?"
"I am a hunter," Complain said. "My friend Fermour here
is a farmer. If we have no knowledge, we can serve you with our strength."
Vyann folded her quiet hands on the desk, not really bothering to look
at him. "Your priest has the right idea, I think: intelligence could bribe
us, muscle could not. There is plenty of muscle in Forwards already."
She turned her eyes to Fermour, saying, "And you, you've hardly had
a word to say for yourself. What gift do you offer?"
Fermour looked steadily at her before dropping his gaze.
"My silence only covered my disturbed thoughts," he said
gently. "In our small tribe we had no ladies who rivaled you in any
way."
"That sort of thing is not acceptable as a bribe, either,"
Vyann said levelly. "Well, priest, I hope your information is interesting.
Suppose you tell me what it is?"
It was a small moment of triumph for Marapper. He stuck his hands
beneath his tattered cloak and shook his head firmly.
"I will keep it for someone in authority," he said. "I
regret that I cannot trust you with it."
She seemed not to be offended. It was a measure, possibly, of her
self-assurance that her hands never moved on the desk top.
"I will have my superior brought here at once," she said. One
of the guards was sent out; he was away only a short while, returning with a
brisk, middle-aged man.
The newcomer was impressive. Deep lines ran down his face, and this
eroded appearance was increased by the inroads of gray into his still yellow
hair. His eyes were wide-awake, his mouth autocratic. He relaxed his expression
to smile at Vyann, and conferred quietly with her in one corner, thrusting
occasional glances at Marapper as he listened to what she was saying.
"How about making a dash for it?" Fermour whispered to
Complain in a choked voice.
"Don't be a fool," Complain whispered back. "We'd never
get out of this room, much less past the barrier guards."
Fermour muttered something inaudible, looking almost as if he might
attempt a break on his own. But at that moment the man conferring with Vyann
stepped forward and spoke.
"We have certain tests we wish to carry out on the three of
you," he said mildly. "You will shortly be called back here, priest.
Meanwhile— guards, remove these prisoners to Cell Three, will you?"
The guards were prompt to obey. Despite protests from Fermour, he and
Complain and Marapper were hustled out of the room and into another only a few
yards down the corridor, where the door was shut on them. Marapper looked
embarrassed, realizing that his recent attempt to extricate himself at their
expense might have cost him a little goodwill; he began to try to retain his
position by cheering them up.
"Well, well, my children," he said, extending his arms to
them, "the Long Journey has always begun, as the scripture puts it. These
people of Forwards are more civilized than we, and will certainly have a
horrible fate awaiting us. Let me intone some last rite for you."
Complain turned away and sat down in a far corner of the room. Fermour
did likewise. The priest followed them, squatting on his massive haunches and
resting his arms on his knees.
"Keep away from me, priest!" Complain said. "Leave me in
peace!"
"Have you no reverence?" the priest asked him. "Do you
think the Teaching allows you peace in your last hours? You must be
stirred into Consciousness for the final time. Why should you slump here,
despairing? What is your wretched, sordid life to worry over? Where in your
mind is anything so precious that it should not be carelessly extinguished? You
are sick,
The door opened and a hand followed it, beckoning to the priest.
Marapper rose, smoothing his clothes self-consciously.
"I'll put in a word for you, children," he said, and stalked
with dignity into the passage behind the guard. A minute later, he was facing
the inspector and her superior again. The latter, perched on a corner of the
desk, began to speak at once.
"Expansions to you. You are Henry Marapper, a priest, I believe? My name is Scoyt, Master
Scoyt, and I am in charge of alien
investigation. Anybody brought into Forwards comes before me and Inspector
Vyann. If you are what you claim, you will not be harmed— but some strange
things emerge from Deadways, and must be guarded against. I understand you came
here especially to bring us some information?"
"I have come a long way, through many decks," Marapper said,
"and do not appreciate my reception now that I am here."
Master Scoyt inclined his head.
"What is this information you have?" he asked.
"I can divulge it only to the captain."
"Captain? What captain? The captain of the guard? There
is no other captain."
This put Marapper in an awkward position, since he did not wish to use
the word "ship" before the moment was ripe.
"Who is your superior?" he asked.
"Inspector Vyann and I answer only to the Council of Five,"
Scoyt said, with anger in his tone. "It is impossible for you to see the
Council until we have assessed the importance of your information. Come,
priest— other matters are on hand! Patience is an old-fashioned virtue I don't
possess. What is this intelligence you set so much store
by?"
Marapper hesitated. The moment was not ripe. Scoyt had risen almost as
if to go, Vyann looked restless. All the same, he could hedge no more.
"This world," he began impressively, "all Forwards and
Deadways to the far regions of Sternstairs is one body, the ship. And the ship
is man-made, and moves in a medium called space. Of this I have proof." He
paused to take in their expressions. Scoyt's was one of ambiguity. Marapper
continued, explaining the ramifications of his theory with eloquence. He
finished by saying, "If you will trust me, trust me and give me power, I
will set this ship —for such you may be assured it is— at its destination, and
we will all be free of it and its oppression forever."
He faltered to a stop. Their faces were full of harsh amusement. They
looked at each other and laughed briefly, almost without humor. Marapper rubbed
his jowls uneasily.
"You have no faith in me because I come from a small tribe,"
he muttered.
"No, priest," the girl said. She came and stood before him.
"You see— in Forwards we have known of the ship and its journey through
space for a long while."
Marapper's jaw dropped.
"Then —the captain of the ship— you have found him?" he managed
to say.
"The captain does not exist. He must have made the Long Journey
generations ago."
"Then —the Control Room— you have found that?"
"It does not exist either," the girl said. "We have a
legend of it, no more."
"Oh?" said Marapper, suddenly wary and excited. "In our
tribe even the legend of it had faded— presumably because we were further from
its supposed position than you. But it must exist! You have looked for
it?"
Again Scoyt and Vyann looked at each other; Scoyt nodded in answer to an
unspoken question.
"Since you appear to have stumbled on part of the secret,"
Vyann told Marapper, "we may as well tell you the whole of it. Understand
this is not general knowledge even among the people of Forwards— we keep it to
ourselves in case it causes madness and unrest. As the proverb has it, the
truth never set anyone free. The ship is a ship, as you rightly say. There is
no captain. The ship is plunging on, unguided through space, nonstop. We can
only presume it is lost. We presume it will travel forever, till all aboard
have made the Long Journey. It cannot be stopped— for though we have searched
all Forwards for the Control Room, it does not exist!"
She was silent, looking at Marapper with sympathy as he digested this
unpalatable information; it was too horrendous to accept.
". . . some terrible wrong of our
forefathers," he murmured, drawing his right index finger superstitiously
across his throat. Then he pulled himself together. "But at least the
Control Room exists," he said. "Look, I have proof!"
From under his dirty tunic, he drew the book of circuit diagrams and
waved it at them.
Now he spread the small book on the inspector's desk; the little bubble
of the Control Room was clearly indicated at the front of the ship. As the
other two stared, he explained how he had come by the book.
"This book was made by the Giants," he said. "They
undoubtedly owned the ship."
"We know that much," Scoyt said. "But this book is
valuable. Now we have a definite location to check for the Control Room. Come
on, Vyann, my dear, let's go and look at once."
She pulled open a deep drawer in her desk, picked out a dazer and belt,
and strapped them around her waist. It was the first dazer Marapper had seen
here: they were evidently in short supply. He recalled that the Greene tribe
was so well armed only because old Bergass's father had stumbled on a supply of
them in Deadways, many decks from Forwards.
They were about to leave when the door opened and a tall man entered. He
was dressed in a good robe and his hair was worn long and neat. As if respect
were due to him, Scoyt and Vyann drew themselves up deferentially.
"Word has come to me that you have prisoners, Master Scoyt,"
the newcomer said slowly. "Have we caught some of the outlaws at
last?"
"I fear not, Councillor Deight," Scoyt said. "They are
only three wanderers from Deadways. This is one of them."
The councillor looked hard at Marapper, who looked away.
"The other two?" the councillor prompted.
'They are in Cell Three, Councillor," Scoyt said. "We shall
question them later. Inspector Vyann and I are testing this prisoner now."
For a moment, the councillor seemed to hesitate. Then he nodded and
quietly withdrew. The priest, impressed, stared after him— and it was rarely the
priest was impressed.
"That," Scoyt said for Marapper's benefit, "was
Councillor Zac Deight, one of our Council of Five. Watch your manners in front
of any of them, and particularly in front of Deight."
Vyann pocketed the priest's circuit book. They left the room in time to
see the old councillor disappear around the curve of the corridor. Then began a
long march toward the extremity of Forwards, where the diagram indicated the
controls to be; it would have taken them several sleep-wakes to make the distance
had it been uncharted and overgrown with ponics.
Marapper, engrossed though he was with future plans —for the discovery
of the ship's controls would undoubtedly put him in a strong position— kept an
interested eye on his surroundings. He soon realized that Forwards was far from
being the wonderful place that Deadways' rumor painted, or that he had supposed
at first sight. They passed many people, of whom a good
proportion were children. Everyone wore less than in Quarters; the few
clothes they had looked washed and neat, and the general standard of
cleanliness was good, but bodies were lean, running to bone. Food was obviously
short. Marapper surmised shrewdly that being less in contact with the tangles, Forwards could count on fewer hunters than Quarters,
and those perhaps of inferior quality. He found also, as they progressed, that
though all Forwards, from the barriers at Deck 24 to the dead end at Deck 1,
was under Forwards' sway, only Decks 22 to 11 were occupied, and they but
partially.
As they passed beyond Deck 11, the priest saw part of the explanation
for this. For three entire decks, the lighting circuits had failed. Master
Scoyt switched on a light at his belt, and the three proceeded in semidarkness.
If darkness had been oppressive in Deadways, it was doubly so here, where
footsteps rang hollow and nothing stirred. When they circled into Deck 7, and
light shone falteringly again, the prospect was no more cheerful. The echo
still followed them and devastation lay on all sides.
"Look!" Scoyt exclaimed, pointing to where a section of wall
had been cut entirely away and curled back against the bulkheads. "There
were once weapons on the ship which could do that! I wish we had something that
would cut through a wall. We would soon find our way into space then."
"If only windows had been built somewhere, the original purpose of
the ship might not have been forgotten," Vyann said.
"According to the plan," Marapper remarked, "there are
large enough windows in the Control Room."
They fell silent. The surroundings were dreary enough to annihilate all
conversation. Most doors stood open; the rooms they revealed became
increasingly full of machines, silent, broken, smothered under the dust of
generations.
"Many strange things of which we have no knowledge happen in this
ship," Scoyt said gloomily. "Ghosts are among us, working against
us."
"Ghosts?" Marapper asked. "You believe in them, Master Scoyt?"
"What Roger means," Vyann said, "is that we are
confronted with two problems here. There is the problem of the ship, where it
is going, how it is to be stopped; that is the background problem, always with
us. The other problem grows; it did not face our great-grandfathers: there is a
strange race on this ship that was not here before."
The priest stared at her. She was glancing carefully into each doorway
as they went by; Scoyt was being as cautious. He felt the hair on his neck
bristle uncomfortably,
"You mean— the Outsiders?" he asked.
She nodded. "A supernatural race masquerading as men . . . ,"
she said. "You know, better than we, that three quarters of the ship is
jungle. In the hot muck of the tangles, somewhere, somehow, a new race has been
born, masquerading as men. They are not men; they are enemies; they come in
from their secret places to spy on us and kill us."
"We have to be always on the lookout," Scoyt said.
From then on, Marapper also looked in every doorway.
Now the layout changed. The three concentric corridors on each deck
became two, their curvature sharpened. Deck 2 consisted of one corridor only
with one ring of rooms around it, and in the middle the great hatch at the
beginning of Main Corridor, sealed forever. Scoyt tapped it lightly.
"If this corridor, the only straight one in the ship, were opened
up," he said, "we could walk to Stemstairs at the other end of the
ship in less than a wake!"
A closed spiral staircase was now the sole way forward. Heart beating
heavily, Marapper led them up it; the Control Room should be at the top if his
diagram spoke truth.
At the top, a dim light showed them a small circular room, completely
unfurnished, floor bare, walls also bare. Nothing else.
Marapper flung himself at the walls, searching for a door. Nothing.
He burst into furious tears.
"They lied!" he shouted. "They lied! We're all victims of
a monstrous ... a monstrous . . ."
But he could think of no word big enough.
II
Roy Complain yawned and changed his position on the cell floor for the
twentieth time. Bob Fermour sat with his back to the wall, rotating a heavy ring
endlessly around a finger of his right hand. They had nothing to say to each
other; there was nothing to say, nothing to think. It was a relief when the
guard outside thrust his head around the door and summoned Complain with a few
well-chosen words of abuse.
"See you on the Journey," Fermour said cheeringly as the other
got up to go.
Complain waved to him and followed the guard, his heart beginning to
beat more rapidly. He was led, not to the room where Inspector Vyann had
interviewed them, but back along the way he had first been brought, into an
office on Deck 24, near the barricades. The guard stayed outside and slammed
the door on him.
Complain was alone with Master Scoyt. The alien investigator, under the
increasing pressure of the trouble piling up about them, looked more eroded
than ever. As if his cheeks ached, he supported them with long fingers; they
were not reassuring fingers; they could be cruel with artistry, although at
present, resting against that haggard countenance, they seemed more the hands
of a self-torturer.
"Expansion to you," he said heavily.
"Expansion," Complain replied. He knew he was to be tested,
but most of his concern went on the fact that the girl Vyann was absent.
"I have some questions to ask you," Scoyt said. "It is
advisable to answer them properly, for various reasons. First, where were you
born?"
"In Quarters."
"That is what you call your village? Have you any brothers and
sisters?"
"In Quarters we obeyed the Teaching," said Complain defiantly. "We do not recognize brothers and sisters
after we are waist high to our mothers."
Without looking up, Scoyt said tiredly, "How many brothers and
sisters would you have to recognize now if you did recognize them?"
"Only three sisters."
"No brothers?"
"There was one. He ran amok long ago."
"What proof have you you were born in
Quarters?"
"Proof!" Complain echoed. "If you
want proof, go and catch my mother. She still lives. She'd tell you all about
it."
Scoyt stood up.
"Understand this," he said. "I haven't time to get civil
answers out of you. Everyone on shipboard is in danger. It's a ship, you see,
and it's headed nobody-knows-where, and it's old and creaking, and it's thick
with phantoms and mysteries and riddles and pain . . ." He paused. More
calmly, he continued. "What you've got to get into your head is that we're
all expendable, and if you can't make yourself out to be any use, you're
up for the Long Journey."
"I'm sorry," Complain said. "I might be more cooperative
if I knew which side I was on."
"You're on your own side. Didn't the Teaching teach you that much?
'The proper study of mankind is self'; you'll be serving yourself best by
answering my questions."
Earlier, Complain might have submitted; now, more conscious of himself,
he asked one more question: "Didn't Henry Marapper answer all you wanted
to know?"
"The priest misled us," Scoyt said. "He has made the
Journey. It's the usual penalty for trying my patience too far."
When his first stunned reaction was over, Complain began to wonder; he
did not doubt the ruthlessness of Scoyt —the man who kills for a cause kills
almost unthinkingly— but he could hardly bring himself to believe he would see
the garrulous priest no more. His mind preoccupied, he answered Scoyt's
questions. These mainly concerned their trek through Deadways; when Complain
began to explain about his capture by the Giants, the investigator,
noncommittal till now, pounced.
"The Giants do not exist!" he said. "They were extinct
long ago. We inherited the ship from them."
Although openly skeptical, he then pressed as hard for details as
Marapper once had, and it was obvious he slowly began to accept Complain's
narrative for truth. His face clouded in thought, he tapped his long fingers on
the desk.
"The Outsiders we have known for enemies," he said, "but
the Giants we always regarded as our old allies, whose kingdom we took over
with their approval. If they do still live somewhere in Deadways, why do they
not show themselves— unless for a sinister reason? We already have quite enough
trouble piled up against us."
As Complain pointed out, the Giants had not killed him when they might
conveniently have done so; nor had they killed Ern Roffery, although what had
become of the Valuer remained a mystery. In all, their role in affairs was ambiguous.
"I'm inclined to believe your tale, Complain," Scoyt said
finally, "because from time to time we receive rumors— people swear
they've seen Giants. Rumors! Rumors! We get our hands on nothing tangible. But
at least the Giants seem to be no threat to Forwards— and best of all, they don't seem to be in alliance with the Outsiders.
If we can tackle them separately, that'll be something."
He lapsed into silence, then asked, "How
far is it to this sea where the Giants caught you?"
"Many decks away— perhaps forty."
Master Scoyt threw up his hands in disgust.
"Too far!" he said. "I thought we might go there . . .
but Forwards men do not love the ponics."
The door burst open. A panting guard stood on the threshold and spoke
without ceremony.
"An attack at the barriers, Master Scoyt!" he cried.
Scoyt was up immediately, his face grim. Halfway to the door, he paused,
turning back to Complain.
"Stay there," he commanded. "I'll be back when I
can."
The door slammed. Complain was alone. As if unable to believe it, he
looked slowly around. In the far wall, behind Scoyt's seat, was another door.
Cautiously, he went over and tried it. It opened. Beyond was another room, a
small antechamber, with another door on the far side of it. The antechamber
boasted only a battered panel containing broken instruments on one wall, and on
the floor, four packs. Complain recognized them at once as his, Marapper's, Bob
Fermour's, and Wantage's. All their meager belongings seemed to be still there, although it was evident their belongings had been
searched. Complain crossed the room and opened the other door.
It led on to a side corridor. From one direction came the sound of
voices; in the opposite direction, not many paces away, were— ponics. The way
to them looked unguarded. His heart beating rapidly, Complain shut the door
again, leaning against it to decide. Should he try to escape
or not?
Marapper had been killed; there was no evidence he also would not be as
coolly disposed of. It might well be wise to leave— but for where? Quarters was too far away for a solitary man to reach. But
nearer tribes would welcome a hunter. Complain recalled that Vyann had mistaken
his group for members of some tribe that was raiding Forwards; in his preoccupation
with their capture, Complain had scarcely taker note of what she said, but it
might well be the same band that was besieging the barricades now. They should
appreciate a hunter with
a slight knowledge of Forwards.
He swung his pack up on to his shoulder, opened the door, looked left
and right, and dashed for the tangle.
All the other doors in the side corridor were shut, bar one.
Instinctively, Complain glanced in as he passed— and stopped. He stood on the
threshold, transfixed.
Lying on a couch just inside the room, relaxed as if sleeping, lay a
body. It sprawled untidily, its legs crossed, it shabby cloak rolled up to
serve as a pillow; its face won the melancholy expression of an overfed
bulldog.
"Henry Marapper!" Complain exclaimed, eyes fixed on that
familiar profile. The hair and temple were matted with blood. He leaned forward
and gently touched the priest's arm. It was stone
cold.
Instantly, the old mental atmosphere of Quarters clicked into place
around Complain. The Teaching was almost as instinctive as a reflex. He snapped
without thought into the first gesture of prostration, going through the ritual
of fear. Fear must not be allowed to penetrate to the subconscious, says the
Teaching; it must be acted out of the system at once, in a complex ritual of
expressions of terror. Between bow, moan, obeisance,
Complain forgot all zest for escape.
"I'm afraid we must interrupt this efficient demonstration," a
chilly female voice said behind him. Startled, Complain straightened and looked
around. Dazer leveled, two guards at her side, there stood Vyann. Her lips were
beautiful, but her smile was not inviting.
So ended Complain's test.
It was Fermour's turn to be ushered into the room or Deck 24. Master
Scoyt sat there as he had done with Complain, but his manner was openly more
abrupt now. He began, as he had with Complain, by asking where Fermour was
born.
"Somewhere in the tangles," Fermour said, in his usual
unhurried way. "I never knew where exactly."
"Why weren't you born in a tribe?"
"My parents were fugitives from their tribe. It was one of the
little Midway tribes— smaller than Quarters."
"When did you join the Greene tribe?"
"After my parents died," Fermour said. "They had the
trailing rot. By then I was full grown."
Scoyt's mouth, naturally heavy, had now elongated itself into a slit. A
weapon had appeared, and was lightly balanced between Scoyt's hands. He began
to pace up and down in front of Fermour, watching him closely.
"Have you any proof of all this stuff you tell me?" he asked.
Fermour was pale, tensed, incessantly twisting the heavy ring on his
finger.
"What sort of proof?" he asked, dry-mouthed.
"Any sort. Anything about your origins we can check on. We aren't
just a rag-taggle village in Deadways, Fermour. When you drift in from the
tangles, we have to know who or what are you . . . Well?"
"Marapper the priest will vouch for me."
"Marapper's dead. Besides, I'm interested in someone who knew you
as a child; anyone." He swung around so that they were face to face.
"In short, Fermour, we want something you seem unable to give— proof that
you're human!
"How long have you been with the Greene tribe?" Scoyt
continued.
"Oh, I lose track of time. Twice a hundred dozen
sleep-wakes."
"We do not use your primitive method of calculating time in
Forwards, Fermour. We call four sleep-wakes one day. That would make your stay
with the tribe ... six hundred days. A long time in a man's
life."
He stood looking at Fermour as if waiting for something. The door was
pushed roughly open and a guard appeared on the threshold, panting.
"There's an attack at the barriers, Master Scoyt," he cried.
On his way to the door, Scoyt paused and turned back toward Fermour,
grim-faced.
"Stay there!" he ordered. "I'll be back as soon as
possible."
In the next room, Complain turned slowly to Vyann. Her dazer had gone
back in its holster at her waist.
"So that tale about the attack at the barriers is just a trick to
get Master Scoyt out of the room, is it?" he said.
"That's right," she said steadily. "See what Fermour does
now."
For a long moment, Complain stood looking into her eyes, caught by them.
Then, pulling himself away in case his heart might be read in his face,
Complain turned and fixed his gaze through the peephole again.
He was in time to see Fermour grab a small stool from the side of the
room, drag it into the middle, stand on it, and reach up toward the grille that
here, as in most apartments, was a feature of the ceiling. His fingers curled
helplessly a few inches below the grille. After a few fruitless attempts to
jump and stand on tiptoe, Fermour looked around the room in desperation and
noticed the other door beyond which lay his pack. Kicking the stool away, he
hurried through it, so vanishing from Complain's sight.
"He has gone, just as I went," Complain said, turning to brave
the gray eyes again.
"My men will pick him up before he gets to the ponics," Vyann
said carelessly. "I have little doubt your friend Fermour is an Outsider,
but we shall be certain in a few minutes."
"Bob Fermour! He couldn't be!"
"We'll argue about that later." she said. "In the
meantime, Roy Complain, you are a free man— as far as any of us are free. Since
you have knowledge and experience, I hope you will help us attack some of our
troubles."
His voice betraying his nervous excitement, Complain said, "I will
help you in any way I can."
"Master Scoyt will be grateful," she said, moving away with a
sudden sharpness in her voice. It brought him back to realities, and he asked
with an equal sharpness what the Outsiders did that made them so feared; for
though they had been dreaded by the Greene tribe, it was only because they were
strange, and not like men.
"Isn't that enough?" she said. And then she told him of the
powers of Outsiders. A few had been caught by Master Scoyt's various testing
methods— and all but one had escaped. They had been thrown into cells bound
hand and foot, and sometimes unconscious as well— there
to vanish completely; if guards had been in the cells with them, they had been
found unconscious without a mark on their bodies.
"And the Outsider who did not
escape?" Complain asked.
"He died under torture on the presses. We got nothing from him,
except that he came from the ponics."
She led him from the room. No longer did she appear as friendly as she
had a moment ago; her moods seemed capricious, and he hardened himself against
her, trying to recall the old Quarters's attitude to women— but Quarters seemed
a thousand sleep-wakes out of date.
On Deck 21, Vyann paused.
"There is an apartment for you here," she said. "My
apartment is three doors further along, and Roger Scoyt's is opposite mine. He
or I will collect you for a meal shortly."
Opening the door, Complain looked in.
"I've never seen a room like this before," he said, impressed.
"You've had all the disadvantages, haven't you?" she said
ironically, and left him. Complain watched that retreating figure, and went
into the room.
It held little luxury, beyond a basin with a tap which actually yielded
a slight flow of water and a bed made of coarse fabric rather than leaves. What
impressed him was a picture on the wall, a bright swirl of color, non-representational,
but with a meaning of its own. There was also a mirror, in which Complain found
another picture; this one was of a rough creature
smirched with dirt, its hair festooned with dried miltex, its clothes torn.
He set, to work to change all that, grimly wondering what Vyann must
have thought of such a barbarous figure. He scrubbed himself, put on clean
clothes from his pack, and collapsed exhausted on the bed— exhausted, but
unable to sleep; for at once his brain started racing.
Gwenny had gone, Roffery had gone, Wantage, Marapper, now Fermour, had
gone; Complain was on his own. The prospect of a new start offered itself— and
the prospect was thrilling. Only the thought of Marapper's face, gleaming with
unction and bonhomie, brought regret.
His mind was still churning when Master Scoyt arrived.
"Come and eat," he said simply.
Complain went with him, watching carefully to gauge the other's attitude
toward him, but the investigator seemed too preoccupied to register any
attitude at all. Then, looking up and catching Complain's eye on him, he said,
"Well, your friend Fermour is proved an Outsider. When he was making for
the ponics, he saw the body of your priest and kept straight on. Our sentries
had an ambush for him and caught him easily."
Shaking his head impatiently at Complain's puzzled look, Scoyt
explained, "He is not an ordinary human, bred in an ordinary part of the
ship, otherwise he would have stopped automatically and made the genuflections
of fear before the body of a friend; that ceremony is drummed into every human
child from birth. It was that which finally convinced us you were human."
He sank back into silence until they reached the dining-hall, scarcely
greeting the several men and women who spoke to him on the way. In the hall, a
few officers were seated, eating. At a table of her own sat Vyann. Seeing her,
Scoyt instantly brightened, went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder.
"Laur, my dear," he said. "How
refreshing to find you waiting for us. I must get some ale —we have to
celebrate the capture of another Outsider— and this one won't get away."
Smiling at him, she said, "I hope you're also going to eat, Roger."
"You know my foolish stomach," he said, beckoning an orderly
and beginning to tell her at once the details of Fermour's capture. Not very
happily, Complain took a seat by them; he could not help feeling jealous of
Scoyt's easy way with Vyann, although the investigator was twice her age. Ale
was set before them, and food, a strange white meat that tasted excellent; it
was wonderful, too, to eat without being surrounded with midges, which in
Deadways formed an unwanted sauce to many a mouthful; but Complain picked at
his plate with little more enthusiasm than Scoyt showed.
"You look dejected," Vyann remarked, interrupting Scoyt,
"when you should be feeling cheerful. It is better here, isn't it, than
locked up in a cell with Fermour?"
"Fermour was a friend," Complain said, using the first excuse
for his unhappiness that entered his head.
"He was also an Outsider," Scoyt said heavily. "He
exhibited all their characteristics. He was slow, rather on the weighty side,
saying little— I'm beginning to be able to detect them as soon as I look at
them."
"You're brilliant, Roger," Vyann said, laughing, and she put a
hand over his affectionately.
Perhaps it was that which sparked Complain off. He flung his fork down.
"What about Marapper?— he was no alien and
you killed him! Do you think I can forget that? Why should you expect any help
from me after killing him?"
Waiting tensely for trouble to start, Complain could see other people
turning from their meal to look at him. Scoyt opened his mouth and then shut it
again, staring beyond Complain as a heavy hand fell on the latter's shoulder.
"Mourning for me is not only foolish but premature," a
familiar voice said. "Still taking on the world singlehanded, eh,
Complain turned, amazed, and there stood the priest, beaming, scowling,
rubbing his hands. He clutched Marapper's arm incredulously.
"Yes, I, Roy, and no other: the great subconscious rejected me— and
left me confoundedly cold. I hope your scheme worked, Master Scoyt?"
"Excellently, priest," Scoyt said. "Eat some of this
indigestible food and explain yourself to your friend, so that he will look at
us less angrily."
"You were dead!" Complain said.
"Only a short Journey," Marapper said, seating himself and
stretching out for the ale jug. "This witch doctor, Master Scoyt here,
thought up an uncomfortable way of testing you and Fermour. He painted my head
with rat's blood and laid me out with some drug to stage a death scene for your
benefit."
"Just a slight overdose of chloral hydrate," said Scoyt, with
a secretive smile.
"But I touched you— you were cold," Complain protested.
"I still am," Marapper said. "It's the effects of the
drug. And what would be that antidote your men shot into me?"
"Strychnine, I believe it's called," Scoyt said.
"Very unpleasant. I'm a hero, no less,
His eyes met Complain's still dazed ones over the rim of the mug. He
winked, and belched with deliberation.
"I'm no ghost, Roy," he said. "Ghosts don't drink."
Before they had finished the meal, Master Scoyt was looking fretful.
With a muttered apology, he left them.
"He works too hard," Vyann said, her eyes following him out of
the hall. "We must all work hard. Before we sleep, you must be told our
plans, for we shall be busy next wake."
"Ah," Marapper said eagerly, cleaning his bowl, "that is
what I want to hear. You understand my interest in this whole matter is purely
theological, but what I'd like to know is, what do I get out of it?"
"First we are going to exorcise the Outsiders," she smiled.
"Suitably questioned, Fermour should yield up their secret hiding place. We
go there and kill them, and then we are free to concentrate on unraveling the
riddles of the ship."
This she said quickly, as if anxious to avoid questioning, and went on
at once to usher them out of the dining-room and along several corridors.
Marapper, now fully himself again, took the chance to
tell Complain of their abortive search for the Control Room.
"So much has changed," Vyann complained. They were passing
through a steel companionway whose double doors, now open, allowed egress from
deck to deck. She indicated them lightly, saying: "These doors, for
instance— in some places they are open, in some closed. And all the ones along
Main Corridor are closed— which is fortunate, otherwise every marauder aboard
ship would make straight for Forwards. But we cannot open or shut the doors at
will, as the Giants must have been able to do when they owned the ship. As they
stand now, so they have stood for generations; but somewhere must be a
lever which controls them all. We are so helpless. We control nothing."
"Are you and Master Scoyt the only ones working on this
problem?" Complain asked.
"For Hem's sake, no!" she said. "We're only subordinates.
A group calling itself the Survival Team has recently been constituted, and it
and all other Forwards officers apart from guard officers are also devoting
attention to the problem. In addition, two of the Council of Five are in charge
of it; one of them you met, priest— Councillor Zac Deight, the tall, longhaired
man. The other of them I'm taking you to see now— Councillor Tregonnin. He is
the librarian. He must explain the world to you."
So it was that Roy Complain and the priest came to their first astronomy
lesson. Tregonnin, as he talked to them, hopped about the room from object to
object; he was almost ludicrously small and nervous. The room he ruled over was
heaped with books and miscellaneous bric-a-brac in disorderly fashion.
Confusion had here been brought to a fine art. Tregonnin explained first that
until very recently in Forwards —as was the rule still in Quarters— anything
like a book or a printed page had been destroyed, either from superstition or
from a desire to preserve the power of the rulers by maintaining the ignorance
of the ruled.
"That, no doubt, was how the idea of the ship became lost to begin
with," Tregonnin said. "And that is why what you see assembled around
you represents almost all the records intact in the area of Forwards. The rest
has perished. What remains allows us only a fragment of the truth."
As the councillor began his narrative, Complain forgot the odd gestures
with which he accompanied it. He forgot everything but the wonder of the tale
as it had been pieced together, the mighty history patched up in this little
room.
Through the space in which their world moved, other worlds also moved— two
other sorts of worlds, one called "sun," from which sprang heat and
light, one called "planet." The planets depended on the suns for heat
and light. At one planet attached to a sun called "Sol" lived men;
this planet was called "Earth" and the men lived all over the outside
of it, because the inside was solid and had no light.
"The men did not fall off it, even when they lived on the bottom of
it," Tregonnin explained. "For they had discovered a force called
gravity. It is gravity which enables us to walk all the way around a circular
deck without falling off."
Many other secrets the men discovered. They found a way to leave their
planet and visit the other planets attached to their sun. This must have been a
difficult secret, for it took them a long while. The other planets were
different from theirs, and had either too little light and
heat or too much. Because of this, there were no men living on them. This
distressed the men of Earth.
Eventually they decided they would visit the planets of other suns, to
see what they could find there, as their Earth was becoming exceptionally
crowded. Here the scanty records in Tregonnin's possession became confusing,
because while some said that space was very empty, others said it contained thousands
of suns— stars, they were sometimes called.
For some lost reason, men found it hard to decide which sun to go to,
but eventually, with the aid of instruments in
which they were cunning, they picked on a bright sun called "Procyon"
to which planets were attached, and which was only a distance called
"eleven light-years" away. To cross this distance was a considerable
undertaking even for the ingenious men, since space had neither heat nor air,
and the journey would be very long: so long that several generations of men
would live and die before it was completed. Accordingly, men built this ship in
which they now were, built it of inexhaustible metal in eighty-four decks,
filled it with everything needful, stocked it with their knowledge, powered it
with charged particles called "ions." Tregonnin crossed rapidly to a
corner. "See!" he exclaimed. "Here is a model of the planet our
ancestors left long ago— Earth!"
He held up a globe above his head. Chipped by careless
handlers, worn by the steep passage of time, it still retained on its surface
the imprint of seas and continents.
Moved, he hardly knew why, Complain turned to look at Marapper. Tears
were pouring down the old priest's cheeks.
"What . . . what a beautiful story," Marapper sobbed. "You
are a wise man, Councillor, and I believe it all, every word of it. What power
those men had, what power! I am only a poor old
provincial priest, I know nothing, but . . ."
"Stop dramatizing yourself, man,"
Tregonnin said with unexpected severity. "Take your mind off your ego and
concentrate on what I am telling you. Facts are the thing— facts, and not
emotions!'
"You're used to the magnificence of the tale, I'm not,"
Marapper sobbed, unabashed. "To think of all that power . . ."
Tregonnin put the globe carefully down and said in a petulant tone to Vyann,
"Inspector, if this objectionable fellow doesn't stop sniffing, you will
have to take him away. I cannot stand sniffing. You know I cannot."
"When do we get to this Procyon's planets?" asked Complain
quickly. He could not bear the thought of leaving here till everything had been
told him.
"A sound question, young man," Tregonnin said, looking at him
for what was practically the first time. "And I'll try to give you a sound
answer. It seems that the flight to Procyon's planets had two main objectives.
The ship was made to carry a number of people called 'colonists.' These
colonists were to land on the new planet and live there, increasing and
multiplying; the ship transported machines for them —we have found inventories
of some of the things— tractors, concrete mixers, pile-drivers— those are some
of the names I recall.
"The second objective was to collect information on the new planet
and samples from it, and bring it all back for the men of Earth to study."
In his jerky fashion, Councillor Tregonnin moved to a cupboard and
fumbled about inside it. He brought out a metal rack containing a dozen round
tins small enough to fit in a man's hand. He opened one. Crisp broken flakes
like transparent nail parings fell out.
"Microfilm!" Tregonnin said, sweeping the flakes under , a
table with his foot. "It was brought in to me from a far corner of
Forwards. Damp has ruined it, but even if it were intact it would be of no use
to us: it needs a machine to make it readable."
"Then I don't see—" Complain began puzzledly, but the
councillor held up a hand.
"I'll read you the labels on the tins," he said. "Then
you'll understand. Only the labels survive. This one says, 'film: Survey New Earth, Aerial,
Stratospheric, Orbital. Midsummer, N. Hemisphere.' This
one says, 'film: Flora and
Fauna Continent A, New Earth.' And so on."
He put the cans down, paused impressively, and added, "So there,
young man, is the answer to your question; on the evidence of these tins, it is
obvious the ship reached Procyon's planets successfully. We are now traveling
back to Earth."
In the untidy room deep silence fell, as
each struggled alone to the very limits of his imagination. At last Vyann rose, shaking herself out of a spell, and said they
should be going.
"Wait!" Complain said. "You've told us so much, yet
you've told us so little. If we are traveling back to Earth, when do we get
there? How can we know?"
"My dear fellow," Tregonnin began, then sighed and changed his
mind about what he was going to say. "My dear fellow, don't you see, so
much has been destroyed . . . The answers aren't always clear. Sometimes even
the questions have been lost, if you follow my meaning. Let me answer
you like this: we know the distance from New Earth, as the colonists called it,
to Earth; it is eleven light-years, as I have said. But we have not been able
to find out how fast the ship is traveling."
"But one thing at least we do know," Vyann interposed.
"Tell
"Yes, I was just about to," Tregonnin said, with a touch of
asperity. "Until we of the Council of Five took over command of Forwards,
it was ruled by a succession of men calling themselves Governors. Under them,
Forwards grew from a pitiful tribe to the powerful state it now is. Those
Governors took care to hand down to each other a Roll or Testament, and this
Roll or Testament the last Governor handed over to my keeping before he died.
It is little more than a list of Governors' names. But under the first Governor's
name it says," he shut his eyes and waved a delicate hand to help him
recite, " 'I am the fourth homeward-bound captain of this ship, but since
the title is only an irony now, I prefer to call myself Governor, if even that
is not too grand a name.' "
The councillor opened his eyes and said, "So you see, although the
names of the first three men are lost, we have in the Roll a record of how many
generations have lived aboard this ship since it started back for Earth. The number
is twenty-three."
Marapper had not spoken for a while. Now he asked, "Then that is a
long time. When do we reach Earth?"
"That is the question your friend asked," Tregonnin said.
"I can only answer that I know how many generations we have been traveling.
But no man knows when or how we stop. In the days before the first Governor,
came the catastrophe —whatever that was— and since then the ship goes on and on
nonstop through space, without captain, without control. One might almost say:
without hope."
For most of that sleep, tired though he was, Complain could not rest.
His mind seethed and churned with fearful images, and fretted itself with
conjecture. Over and over, he ran through what the councillor had said, trying
to digest it.
It was all disquieting enough. Yet, in the midst of it, one tiny,
irrelevant detail of their visit to the library kept recurring to him like
toothache. At the time, it had seemed so unimportant that Complain, who was the
only one who noticed it, had said nothing; now, its significance grew till it
eclipsed even the thought of stars.
While Tregonnin was delivering his lecture, Complain had chanced to
glance up at the library ceiling. Through the grille there, alert as if
listening and understanding, peered a tiny rat's face.
III
"Contraction take your ego,
Complain shook his head. He and the priest were eating alone early the
next wake. Officers crowded the dining-hall, but Vyann and Scoyt had not yet
appeared. Now Marapper was making his old appeal, that
they should try for power together.
"You're out of date, Marapper," he said shortly. "And you can leave Inspector Vyann out of it. These Forwards
people have a cause beyond any petty seeking for power. Besides, what if you
killed the lot of them? What good would it do? Would it help the ship?"
"To the hull with the ship. Look,
"You're forgetting something," Complain said. "The Litany
ends 'And the ship brought home'; it's one of the main tenets of the Teaching.
You were always a shockingly bad priest, Marapper."
They were interrupted by the appearance of Vyann, looking fresh and
attractive. She said she had already taken breakfast. With more irritation than
he usually showed, Marapper excused himself. Something in Vyann's manner told
Complain she was happy enough to let him go; it suited him well also.
"Has Fermour been questioned yet?" he asked.
"No. One of the Council of Five, Zac Deight, has seen him, but
that's all. Roger —that is, Master Scoyt— will question him later, but at
present he is involved with some other, unexpected business."
He did not ask what this business might be. Seeing her so close again
overpowered him, so that he could hardly think of anything to say. Mainly, he
longed to tell her that nothing less than a miracle could have arranged her
dark hair as it was. Instead, and with an effort, he asked what he was required
to do.
"You are going to relax," she said brightly. "I have come
to show you around Forwards."
It proved an impressive tour. Many rooms, here as in Quarters, were
barren and empty; Vyann explained that this must be because their contents had
been left on Procyon's planet, New Earth. Others had been turned into farms far
surpassing Quarters's in scale. There were varieties of animals Complain had
never seen before. He saw fish for the first time, swimming in tanks— here
Vyann told him that they yielded the white meat he had enjoyed. There were
amazing varieties of crops, some grown under special lighting. Cultivated
ponics grew also, and brightly flowering shrubs. In one long room fruit grew,
trees against the walls, bushes and plants in raised trenches in the middle.
Many men and women worked on these agricultural decks, at humble tasks
and complicated ones. Essentially a peaceful community, Forwards regarded
agriculture as its chief occupation. Yet, despite all the trouble lavished on them, Vyann said, harvests mysteriously failed, animals
died without apparent cause. Starvation remained a constant threat.
They moved on to other decks. Sometimes the way was dark, the walls
scarred with tokens of unguessable and forgotten weapons: souvenirs of the
catastrophe. They came, feeling lonely now, to the Drive Floors, which Vyann
said were strictly forbidden to all but a few officers. Here nobody lived; all
was left to the silence and the dust.
"Sometimes I imagine this as it must once have been," Vyann
whispered, sweeping her flashlight to left and right. "It must have been
so busy . . . This was the part of the ship where the actual force that made
the ship go was produced. Many men must have worked here."
The doors which stood open along their way were doors with heavy wheels
set in them, quite unlike the ordinary metal ship's doors. They passed through
a last archway and were in a colossal chamber several floors high. The cone of
the flashlight's beam picked out massed banks of strange shapes to either side,
and in between, cumbrous structures on wheels, with grapnels and scoops and
metal hands.
"Once it was alive: now it's all dead!" Vyann whispered. There
was no echo here; the brutal undulations of metal sucked up every sound.
"This is what the Control Room would control if we could find it."
They retreated, and Vyann led the way into another chamber much like the
first, but smaller, though it too was enormous by ordinary standards. Here,
though the dust was as thick, a deep and constant note filled the air.
"You see—the force is not dead!" the girl said. "It still
lives behind these steel walls. Come and look here!"
She led into an adjoining room, almost filled with the gigantic bulk of
a machine. The machine, completely paneled over, was shaped like three immense
wheels set hub to hub, with a pipe many feet in diameter emerging from either
side and curving up into bulkheads. At Vyann's behest, Complain set his hand on
the pipe. It vibrated. In the side of one of the great wheels was an inspection
panel; Vyann unlatched and opened it, and at once the organ note increased.
The girl shone her light into the aperture.
Complain stared, fascinated. Within the darkness, flickering and illusory,
something spun and reflected the light, droning deeply as it did so. At the
heart of it, a small pipe dripped liquid continually on to a whirling hub.
"Is this space?" he asked Vyann breathlessly.
"No," she said, as she closed the panel again. "This is one
of three tremendous fans. The little pipe in the middle lubricates it. Those
fans never stop; they circulate air to the whole ship."
"How do you know?"
"Because Roger brought me down here and explained it to me."
Immediately, Complain's present surroundings meant nothing to him.
Before he could think of stopping, he said, "What is Roger Scoyt to you,
Vyann?"
"I love him very much," she said tensely. "I am an
orphan— my mother and father both made the Journey when I was very young. They
caught the trailing rot. Roger Scoyt and his wife, who was barren, adopted me;
and since she was killed in a raid on Forwards many watches ago, he has trained
me and looked after me constantly."
In the upsurge of relief that buoyed Complain, he seized Vyann's hand.
At once, she clicked off her flashlight and pulled away from him, laughing
mockingly in the dark.
"You must prove yourself before trying that sort of thing with
me."
He tried to grab her, but in the darkness banged his head, whereupon she
at once switched on the light. At his lack of success he was angry and sulky,
turning away from her, rubbing his sore skull.
"Why did you bring me down here?" he asked. "Why be
friendly to me at all?"
"You take the Teaching too seriously— it's what I might expect from
someone out of a provincial tribe!" she said pettishly. Then, relenting a
little, she said, "But come, don't look so cross. You need not think
because someone shows friendliness they mean you harm. That old-fashioned idea
is more worthy of your friend Priest Marapper."
Complain was not so easily teased out of his mood, especially as mention
of Marapper's name recalled the priest's warning. He lapsed into a gloomy
silence which Vyann was too haughty to break, and they made their way back
rather dejectedly. Once or twice, Complain looked half-imploringly at her
profile, willing her to speak. Finally she did— without looking at him.
"There was something I had to ask you," she said in a
reluctant voice. "The lair of the Outsiders must be found; and a tribe of
raiders has to be destroyed. Because our people are mainly agriculturalists, we
have no hunters. Even our trained guards will not venture far into the tangles—
certainly they could not cover the vast areas you did on your way here.
Now she was regarding Complain. She smiled kindly, plaintively.
"When you look at me like that, I could get out and walk to
Earth!" he exclaimed.
"We shall not ask that of you," she said, still smiling, and
for once the reserve completely left her. "Now we must go and see how
Roger's business is coming along. I'm sure he has been taking the work of the
entire ship on his shoulders. I told you about the Outsiders; he can explain
about Gregg's band of raiders."
Pressing on, she missed the expression of surprise on Complain's face.
Master Scoyt had been more than busy: he had been successful. For once,
feeling he was achieving something, his brow was clear; he greeted Complain
like an old friend.
The interrogation of Fermour, who was still under surveillance in a
nearby cell, had been postponed because of a rumpus in Deadways. Forwards
scouts, hearing a commotion among the tangles, had ventured as far as Deck 29,
the deck on which Complain and Marapper had been caught. This deck, only two
beyond the frontiers of Forwards, was badly damaged, and the scouts never dared
to go beyond it. They had returned empty-handed, reporting a fight of some
sort, punctuated by the shrill screams of men and women, taking place on Deck
30.
There the whole matter might have ended. But shortly after this episode,
one of Gregg's raiders had approached the barriers, calling for truce and
begging to see someone in authority.
"I've got him in the next cell," Scoyt told Vyann and
Complain. "He's a queer creature called Hawl, but beyond referring to his
boss as 'the captain,' he seems sane enough."
"What does he want?" Vyann asked. "Is he a
deserter?"
"Better even than that, Laur," Scoyt said. "This fight
our scouts reported in Deadways was between Gregg's and another gang. Hawl
won't say why, but the episode has seriously upset them. So much so that Gregg
is suing for peace through this fellow Hawl, and wants to bring his tribe to
live in Forwards for protection."
"It's a ruse!" Vyann exclaimed, "a
trick to get in here!"
"No, I don't think so," Scoyt said. "Hawl is quite
sincere. The only snag is that Gregg, knowing the sort of reputation he has
with us, wants a Forwards official to go to him as a token of good faith to
arrange terms. Whoever is chosen goes back with Hawl."
Two Forwards officers were with Hawl, supposedly guarding him. They had
plainly been beating him with knotted ropes. Scoyt dismissed them sharply, but
for some while could get no sense out of Hawl, who lay
face down, groaning, until the offer of another thrashing made him sit up. He
was a startling creature, as near a mutant as made no difference. Madarosis had
left him completely hairless, so that neither beard nor eyebrows sprouted from
his flesh; he was also toothless. Congenital deformity had given his face a
crazed top-heaviness, for while he was so undershot that his upper gum hung in
air, his forehead was so distended by exostosis that it all but hid his eyes. Yet
Hawl's chief peculiarity was that these minor oddities were set above a
normal-sized body on a skull no bigger than a man's two fists clenched one atop
the other.
As far as could be judged, he was of middle age. Taking in Vyann's and
Complain's awed gaze, he muttered a fragment of scripture.
"May my neuroses not offend------"
"Now, Shameface," Master Scoyt said genially. "What
guarantee does your master offer our representative —If we send him one— of getting back here in safety?"
"If I get back safely to the captain," Hawl mumbled,
"your man shall get back safely to you. This we swear."
"How far is it to this brigand you call the 'captain'?"
"That your man will know when he comes with me," Hawl replied.
"Very true. Or we could drag it out of you here."
"You couldn't!" There was something in the strange creature's
tone which compelled respect. Scoyt evidently felt it, for he told the man to
get up and dust himself off and take a drink of water. While he did so, Scoyt
asked, "How many men in Gregg's gang?"
Hawl put the drinking utensil down and stood defiantly with hands on
hips.
"That your man will be told when he comes with me to arrange
terms," he said. "Now I've said all I'm going to say, and you'll have
to make up your minds whether you agree or not. But remember this— if we come
here, we shall be no trouble. And we shall fight for you rather than against.
This also we swear."
Scoyt and Vyann looked at each other.
"It's worth trying if we can get a foolhardy volunteer," he
said.
"It'll have to go to the Council," she said.
Complain had not spoken yet, awaiting his opportunity. Now he addressed
Hawl.
"This man you call captain," he said. "Has he another
name than Gregg?"
"You can ask him that when you're arranging terms," Hawl
repeated.
"Look at me carefully, fellow. Do I resemble your captain in any
way? Answer."
The captain has a beard," Hawl said evasively.
"He should give it to you to cover your head with!" Complain
snapped. "What do you say to this then?— I had a
brother who ran amok into Deadways long ago. His name was Gregg— Gregg
Complain. Is that your captain, man?'
'To think the captain has a brother here in Forwards!" answered
Hawl.
Complain turned excitedly to Master Scoyt, whose heavy face creased with
surprise. "I volunteer to go with this man to Gregg," he said.
The suggestion suited Master Scoyt well. The full force of his
persuasiveness, genial but relentless, was applied to the Council of Five, who
convened at once under his direction; Tregonnin was urged reluctantly from the
library, Zac Deight disentangled from a theological argument with Marapper, and
Billyoe, Dupont, and Ruskin, the other three of the Council, lured from their
various interests. After a private discussion, they had Complain brought before
them, instructed him on the terms to lay down before
Gregg, and dismissed him with their expansions. He would have to hurry to be
back before the next dark sleep-wake descended upon them.
Though the disadvantages of having Gregg's band in Forward were obvious,
the Council was keen to welcome them in; it would mean an end to most of the
skirmishing on Forwards' perimeter and the acquiring of an experienced ally to
fight against the Outsiders.
An orderly returned Complain's dazer and flashlight to him. He was in
his room strapping them on when Vyann entered, closing the door behind her. On
her face was a comically defiant expression.
"I'm coming with you," she said, without preamble.
Complain crossed to her, protesting. She was not used to the ponics,
danger might be lurking there, Gregg might well play them false, she was a woman . . .
She cut him short. "It's no use arguing," she said. "This
is Council's orders."
"You got around them! You arranged it!" he said. He could see
he guessed rightly, and was suddenly deliriously glad. Seizing her wrist, he
asked, "What made you wish to come?"
The answer was not as flattering as he might have wished. Vyann had
always wanted to hunt in the ponics, she said; this was the next best thing.
And suddenly Complain was reminded —without pleasure— of Gwenny and her passion
for the hunt.
"You'll have to behave yourself," he said severely, wishing
her reason for joining him could have been more personal.
Marapper appeared before they left, seeking a word alone with Complain. He
had found a mission in life: the people needed to be reconverted to the
Teaching; since the more lenient rule of the Council had begun, the Teaching
had lost its grip. Zac Deight in particular was against it— hence Marapper's
argument with him.
"I don't like that man," the priest grumbled. "There's
something horribly sincere about him."
"Don't stir up trouble here, please," Complain begged,
"just when these people have come around to accepting us. Relax, Marapper.
Stop being yourself!"
Marapper shook his head so sadly his cheeks wobbled.
"You also are falling among the unbelievers, Roy," he said.
"I must stir up trouble: turmoil in the id— it must out! There lies our
salvation, and of course if the people rally round me at the same time, so much
the better. Ah, my friend, we have come so far together, only to find a girl to
corrupt you."
"If you mean Vyann, priest," Complain said, "leave her
out of this. I've warned you before, she's nothing to
do with you."
His voice was challenging, but Marapper was as bland as butter in
return.
"Don't think I object to her,
He looked forlorn as Complain and Vyann made for the barriers, where
Hawl awaited them. His old boisterousness had been muted by Forwards, where
everyone was a stranger to him; undoubtedly, for Marapper, to be a big fish in
a small pool was better than being a small fish in a big pool. Where Complain
had found himself, the priest was beginning to lose himself.
Hawl, his incredibly tiny head cocked, looked only too glad to get back
into the ponics; the reception Forwards had given him had not been notably
cordial. Once the little party of three were seen through the barricades, he
loped ahead professionally, Vyann behind him. Complain bringing up the rear. No
longer a mere freak, Hawl moved with an agility the hunter in Complain could
only admire; the fellow hardly seemed to stir a leaf. Complain wondered what
could have alarmed a man of his stamp so much that he was willing to forsake
his natural element for the unfamiliar disciplines of Forwards.
Having only two decks to cover, they were not long in the ponics. This,
in Vyann's view at least, was all to the good; the tangles, she found, were not
romantic; merely drab, irritating, and full of tiny black midges. She stopped
gratefully when Hawl did, and peered ahead through the thinning stalks,
"I recognize this stretch!" Complain exclaimed. "It's
near where Marapper and I were captured."
A black and ruinous length of corridor lay ahead, the walls pockmarked
and scarred, the roof ripped wide with the force of some bygone explosion. It
was here the explorers from Quarters had run into the eerie weightlessness.
Hawl shone a light ahead and let out a fluttering whistle. Almost at once, a
rope floated out of the hole in the roof.
"If you go and grab hold of that, they'll pull you up," Hawl
said. "Just walk slowly to it and catch hold. It's simple enough."
It could, despite this reassurance, have been simpler. Vyann gave a gasp
of alarm as the lightness seized her, but Complain, more prepared, took her
waist and steadied her. Without too much loss of dignity, they got to the rope
and were at once hauled up. They were hauled through the roof,
and through the roof of the level above that— the damage had been extensive.
Hawl, scorning the aid of ropes, dived up head first and landed nonchalantly
before they did.
Four ragged men greeted them, crouched over a desultory game of
Travel-Up. Vyann and Complain stood in a shattered room, still almost
weightless. A miscellany of furniture was ranged around the hole from which
they emerged, obviously acting as a shelter for anyone needing to guard the
hole in the event of an attack. Complain expected to be relieved of his dazer,
but instead, Hawl, having exchanged a few words with his tattered friends, led
them out to another corridor. Here their weight immediately returned.
The corridor was filled with wounded men and women lying on piles of
dead ponics, most of them with face or legs bandaged; they were presumably the
victims of the recent battle. Hawl hurried past them clucking sympathetically,
and pushed into another apartment filled with stores and men, most of them
patched, bandaged, or torn. Among them was Gregg Complain.
It was unmistakably Gregg. The old look of dissatisfaction, manifesting
itself around the eyes and the thin lips, was not altered by his heavy beard,
or by an angry scar on his temple. He stood up as Complain and Vyann
approached.
"This is the captain," Hawl announced. "I brought your
brother and his lady to parley with you, Captain."
Gregg moved over to them, eyes searching them as if his life depended on
it. He had lost the old Quarters's habit of not looking anyone in the eye. As
he scanned them, his expression never changed. They might have been blocks of
wood; he might have been a block of wood; the blood relationship meant nothing
to him.
"You've come officially from Forwards?" he finally asked his
younger brother.
"Yes," Complain said.
"You didn't take long to get yourself into their favor, did
you?"
"What do you know of that?" Complain challenged. The surly
independence of his brother had, from all appearances, grown stronger since his
violent withdrawal from Quarters long ago.
"I know a lot of what goes on in Deadways," Gregg said.
"I'm captain of Deadways, if nowhere else. I knew you were heading for
Forwards. How I knew, never mind— let's get down to business. What did you
bring a woman with you for?"
"As you said, let's get down to business," Complain said
sharply.
"I suppose she's come to keep an eye on you to see that you behave
yourself," Gregg muttered. "That seems a likely Forwards arrangement.
You'd better follow me; there's too much moaning going on in here . . . Hawl,
you come too. Davies, you're in charge here now— keep 'em quiet if you
can."
Following Gregg's burly back, Complain and Vyann were led into a room of
indescribable chaos. All over its scanty furnishings, rags and clothes had been
tossed; red-soaked bandages lay over the floor. A remnant of manners still
lurked in Gregg; seeing the look of distaste on Vyann's face, he apologized for
the confusion.
"My woman was killed in the fight last night," he said.
"She was torn to bits— I couldn't get to her. I just couldn't get to her.
She'd have cleaned this up by now. Perhaps you'd like to do it for me?"
"We will discuss your proposals and then leave as soon as
possible," Vyann said tightly.
"What was it about this fight that scared you so, Gregg?"
Complain asked.
" 'Captain' to you," his brother said. "Nobody calls me Gregg to my face.
And understand, I'm not scared: nothing's ever scared
me yet. I'm only thinking of my tribe. If we stay here we'll be killed, sure as
shame. We've got to move, and Forwards is as safe a place as any to move to. So
. . ." He sat wearily on the bed and waved to his brother to do the same.
"It's not safe here any more. Men we can fight, but not rats."
"Rats?" Vyann echoed.
"Rats, yes," Gregg said, baring his fangs for emphasis.
"Great big rats, that can think and plan and
organize like men. Do you know what I'm talking about,
Complain was pale.
"Yes," he said. "I've had them running over me. They
signal to each other, and dress in rags, and capture other animals."
"Oh, you know them, do you? Surprising .
. . You know more than I credited you with. They're the menace, the
rat packs, the biggest menace on the ship. They've
learned to cooperate and attack in formation —that's what they did last sleep
when they fought us— that's why we're getting out. We wouldn't be able to beat
them off again if they came in strength."
"This is extraordinary!" Vyann exclaimed. "We've had no
such attacks in Forwards."
"Maybe not. Forwards is not the world," Gregg said grimly. He told them his theory:
that the rat packs kept to Deadways because there they found the solitary
humans whom they could attack and destroy without interference. Their latest
raid was partly evidence of increasing organization, partly an accident because
they had not at the outset realized the strength of Gregg's band. Deciding he
had said enough, Gregg changed the subject abruptly.
His plans for coming into Forwards were simple, he said. He would retain
his group, numbering about fifty, as an autonomous unit which would not mix
with the people of Forwards; they would spend their wakes as they spent them
now, skirmishing through Deadways, returning only for sleeps. They would be
responsible for the guarding of Forwards from Outsiders, Giants, rats, and
other raiders.
"And in return?" Complain asked.
"In return, I must keep the right to punish my own folk,"
Gregg said. "And everyone must address me as Captain."
"Surely a rather childish
stipulation?"
"You think so? You never knew what was good for you. I've got here
in my possession an old diary which proves that I —and you, of course— are
descended from a captain of this ship. His name was Captain Complain— Captain
Gregory Complain. He owned the whole ship. Imagine that if you can . . ."
Gregg's face was suddenly lit with wonder, then
the curtain of surliness fell again. Behind it was a glimpse of a human trying
to come to terms with the world. Then he was once more a brute, sitting on
bandages. When Vyann asked him how old the diary was, he shrugged his
shoulders, said he did not know, said he had never read more than the title
page of the thing— and that, Complain guessed, would
have taken him some while.
"The diary's in the locker behind you," Gregg said. "I'll
show it to you some time— if we come to terms. Have you decided about
that?"
"You really offer us little to make the bargain attractive,
brother," Complain replied. "This rat menace, for instance— for your
own motives you are overestimating it."
"You think so?" Gregg stood up. "Then come and have a look. Hawl, you stay and keep an eye on the lady— what
we're going to see is no sight for her."
He led Complain along a desolate muddle of corridor, saying as they went
how sorry he was to have to leave this hideout. The ancient explosion and a
chance arrangement of closed interdeck doors had given his band a fortress only
approachable through the gashed roof by which Complain and Vyann had entered.
Still talking —and now beyond his habitual surliness were tokens that he felt
some pleasure at the sight of his brother— Gregg burst into a cupboard-like
room.
"Here's an old pal for you," he said, with a sweeping gesture
of introduction.
The announcement left Complain unprepared for what he saw. On a rough
and dirty couch lay Ern Roffery the Valuer. He was barely recognizable. Three
fingers were missing, and half the flesh of his face; one eye was gone. Most of
the superb mustache had been chewed away. It needed nobody to tell Complain
that this was the work of the rats— he could see their teeth marks on a
protruding cheekbone. The Valuer did not move.
"Shouldn't be surprised he's made the Journey," Gregg said
carelessly.
He shook Roffery's shoulder roughly, raised his head, and let it drop
back on to the pillow.
"Still warm— probably unconscious," he said. "But this'll
show you what we're up against. We picked this hero up last wake, several decks
away. He said the rats had finished him. It was from him I heard about you— he
recognized me. Not a bad fellow."
"One of the best," Complain said. In a daze he stood there
while his brother kept talking. The rats had picked Roffery up in the swimming
pool; while he was still helpless from the effects of the Giants' gassing, they
had loaded him on a sort of stretcher and dragged him to their warrens. And
there he had been questioned, under torture.
The warren was between broken decks, out of a man's reach. It was packed
with rats, and with an extraordinary variety of bric-a-brac they had scavenged
and built into dens and caves. Roffery saw their captive animals, existing
under appalling conditions. Many of these helpless beasts were deformed, like
human mutations, and some of them had the ability to probe with their minds
into other minds. These mutated creatures were sent by the rats to question
Roffery.
Complain shuddered. He recalled his disgust when the rabbit had bubbled its insane interrogations into his mind. Roffery's
experience, long protracted, had been infinitely worse. Whatever they learned
from him —and they must have acquired much knowledge
of the ways of men— Roffery learned something from them: the rats knew the ship
as no man ever had, at least since the catastrophe; the tangles were no
obstacle to them, for they traveled by the low roads between decks, which was
why men saw them rarely, traveled by the ten thousand pipes and sewers and tubes
that were the great ship's arteries.
"Now you see why I'm not happy here," Gregg said. "I
don't want my flesh chewed off my skull. Let's get back to your woman."
Vyann seemed content when they returned to her; she was drinking a hot
liquid. Only Hawl looked guilty and saw fit to explain that the bloody bandages
had made her ill, so he had gone to get her a drink.
"There's a drop left for you, Captain," he added.
As Gregg drank, Complain started to go, still shaken by the sight of
Roffery.
"We'll put your proposition to the Council," he said.
"They should accept it when they hear about the rats. I'll come back and
report to you what they say. Now we must get back; the next sleep-wake is a
dark, and there is much to be done before that."
Gregg looked hard at his brother. Beneath the morose indifference of his
expression, uneasiness stirred; undoubtedly he was anxious to get his band to
Forwards as soon as possible. Perhaps he realized for the first time that his
younger brother was a force to reckon with.
"Here's a present for you to take with you," he said clumsily,
picking up something from the bed and thrusting it at Complain. "It's a
sort of dazer I took off a Giant we speared two wakes back. It kills by heat.
It's awkward to handle, and you'll burn yourself if you aren't careful, but it
was a useful enough weapon against the rats."
The "sort of dazer" was a stubby metal object, as cumbrous as
Gregg had said; he pressed the button, and a fan of almost invisible heat
spread from the front. Even standing away from it, Complain could feel its
heat, but its range was obviously short. Nevertheless, Complain accepted it
gratefully, and he parted from his brother on an unexpectedly cordial note. It
felt funny, he thought, to be pleased by a personal relationship like that.
Vyann and Complain made their way back to Forwards unescorted, the
latter with more anxiety than when they had set out, keeping his senses alert
for rats. They arrived safely, only to find Forwards in an uproar.
IV
A Giant had entered Forwards. He had not come through any of the
barriers, which of course were guarded continually, but had suddenly appeared
before a homeward bound laboring girl on Deck 14. Before she could cry out, the
unfortunate girl had been seized, gagged, and bound; she was in no way
molested, and as soon as the Giant had finished tying her up, he disappeared.
Without much delay, the girl managed to bite off the gag and call for help.
Police and guards had started a search for the invader at once. Their
alarm at this confirmation of the existence of Giants, if confirmation still
was needed in Forwards, was increased by the apparent pointlessness of his
action; obviously some sinister move was afoot. General consensus was that the
Giants were returning from their long sleep to take back the ship. In the
pursuit that followed, Master Scoyt and most of his staff joined, and were at
present scouring all levels near the scene of the incident.
This Vyann and Complain learned from an excited sentry at the barriers.
As they made for their own apartments, distant whistles could be heard; the
corridors were almost empty— evidently most people had joined in the chase. A
diversion was always as welcome in Forwards as it had been in Quarters.
Vyann breathed a sigh of relief.
"This gives us a lull," she said. "I didn't want to face
the Council before I had talked to you. I don't know how you feel, but I'm sure
of one thing; we can't have your brother's mob here— they'd be
unmanageable."
Complain had known instinctively how she felt. Inclined to agree, he
nevertheless said, "Do you feel happy about leaving them to the
rats?"
"Gregg's deliberately overestimating the abilities of the rats, as
a lever to get himself in here. If he's really so anxious about them he can
move further into Deadways. He certainly can't come here: our organization
would collapse."
Vyann had the stubborn look about her mouth again. She was so
self-possessed that a wave of rebellion ran through Complain. Catching the
defiance in his eyes, Vyann smiled slightly and said, "Come into my room
and talk,
It was an apartment much like Complain's, rather bare, except for a
bright rug on the floor. Vyann shut the door behind them and said, "I
shall have to recommend to Roger and the Council that we keep Gregg out at all
costs. You may have noticed that half his men had some sort of deformity; I
suppose he has to pick what recruits he can from the freaks of Deadways, but we can't possibly allow them
here."
"He has more knowledge of that area of the ship than anyone
here," Complain said, stung by the contempt in her voice. "For any
forays into the ponics he'd be invaluable."
She waved a hand gently, bringing it to rest on his arm.
"Let us not quarrel. The Council can decide the matter. Anyhow I
have something to show you––“
"Before we change the subject," Complain interrupted,
"Gregg made a remark that worried me. He thought you came with me to keep
an eye on me— was that true?"
She looked at Complain searchingly and said, her seriousness dissolving,
"Supposing I like keeping an eye on you?"
He had reached one of those points there could be no retreat from;
already his blood hammered with a mysterious foreknowledge of what he was bound
to do. He dropped the cumbrous weapon Gregg had given him on the bed. Any
rebuff was worth pulling her toward him, and kissing her on the lips. There was
no rebuff; when she opened her eyes again they were full of an excitement as
wild as his.
"You'll stay in Forwards, now, won't you,
"Do you need to ask?" he exclaimed, putting his hand up to
touch the hair that had always so compelled him. They stood together for a long
while, just looking at each other, until at last Vyann said, "This will
not do. Come and see what I've got to show you— something thrilling! With any
luck it will tell us a great deal we need to know about the ship."
Vyann was back to business; it took Complain somewhat longer to recover.
She sat down on the bed. As Complain sat beside her, she unbuttoned her tunic
and pulled out a narrow black book, handing it to him.
"It was written by an ancestor of yours. I stole it from Gregg's
locker when I had sent Hawl out to get me a drink. It's the diary of Gregory
Complain, sometime captain of this ship."
The instinct which prompted Vyann to steal the diary was a sure one;
although the entries were comparatively few, the vistas they opened up came
like a revelation. Because Vyann read more quickly than he, Complain soon gave
up, lying with his head in her lap as she read aloud.
At first the account was difficult to follow, by virtue of its reference
to things of which Vyann and Complain had no knowledge; but they soon grew to
understand the alarming predicament in which the writer of the diary and his
contemporaries had found themselves. That ancient crisis seemed suddenly very
near, although it had happened so long ago; for Captain Gregory —as Vyann soon
discovered— had been the first captain on the ship's journey home from Procyon
V.
An illuminating entry occurred only a few pages
after the diary began:
28.xi.2521. More trouble. Watkins, I/C Floriculture was up to see me after morning watch. He
reports that the chlorosis afflicting many species of plants is no better,
despite constant iron treatments. Advance spectrum output has been increased
two degrees. Lt. Stover —I understand the ratings call him "Noah"— was
up shortly afterwards. He is I/C Animal Insemination, and is no happier about
his lower animals than Watkins is about his higher plants. Apparently the mice
are breeding at a significantly faster rate, but bearing undeveloped fetuses;
guinea pigs show similar tendencies. This is hardly a major worry. Most of
these creatures went off-board at New Earth (Procyon V's new name) as planned;
the few we have are concessions to Noah's sentimentality— though his argument
that they may be useful for laboratory experiments has something to commend it.
30.xi.2521. Last night was our monthly ball. My dear wife, Yvonne, who always
organizes these things, had gone to great pains over it; she looked lovely —but
of course the years tell on us both— it's hard to realize Frank is eighteen!
Unfortunately the dance was a complete failure. This was our first since
leaving Orbit X, and the absence of the colonists made itself
felt. So few people seem left aboard. We are now ten
days out from New Earth. The monotonous years stretch like dead weight before
us.
Went amidships this
morning to see Floriculture. Watkins and
Montgomery, the hydroponics specialist, look more cheerful. Though many of the crops
appear worse than before, those essential plants, the five cultures which
provide us with our air, are picking up again; the iron dosages evidently did
the trick. Less cheer from Noah Stover— they have a lot of sick animals on
their hands.
2.xii.2521. We are now on full acceleration. The long
journey home may be said to have begun in earnest: as if anyone felt excited.
Morale is low ... Yvonne and Frank are being splendid, partly, I suppose, to
try and forget that Joy —so recently our baby girl!— is
now several a.u.'s behind. A No-More-Procreation Club has been formed in crew's
quarters, I am told by Internal Relations; the basic human drives can cope with
that one, I think. More difficult to deal with is poor Bassitt.
. . He was an Aviarist 2d Class, but now that all birds except a handful
of sparrows have been released on the
Amazing thing is,
people seem inclined to listen. Sign of the times, I suppose. These are minor
matters. I was about to deal with a more serious one —the animals— when I was
called. More later.
5.xii.2521. A curse has fallen upon us! Hardly an
animal aboard ship is now on its feet, many are dead. The rest lie stiffly with eyes glazed, occasional muscular spasms
providing their only sign of life. The head of Fauniculture, Distaff —who went
to school with me— is sick, but his underlings and Noah are doing good work.
Drugs, however, seem ineffective on the suffering creatures. If only they could
talk! Agritechnics are cooperating full blast with the Laboratory Deck, trying
to find what plague has descended on us. Curse of God, I say! . . . All this is
grist for Bassitt's mill, of course.
10.xii.2521. Among the stack of routine reports on my desk every morning is the sick
report. On the 8th there were 9 sick, yesterday 19, today 41— and a request,
which I hardly needed, from Senior M. O. Toynbee, to see me. I went straight
down to sick bay to see him. He says the trouble is a food poisoning of some
still unidentified kind. Toynbee, as usual, was rather pompous and learned, but
without definite knowledge; obviously, as he explains, whatever got into the
animals has got into his patients. They were a pathetic lot, a high percentage
of them children. Like the animals, they lie rigidly,
occasionally undergoing muscular twitch; high temperatures, vocal cords
apparently paralyzed. Sick bay out of bounds to visitors.
14.xii.2521. Every child and adolescent aboard now lies in pain in sick bay. Adults
also affected. Total sick: 109. This is nearly a quarter of our company;
fortunately —at least as far as manning the ship is concerned— the older people
seem more immune. Distaff died yesterday, but he was sick anyway. No deaths
from the strange paralysis reported. Anxious faces everywhere. I can hardly
bear to look at them.
17.xii.2521. Oh Lord, if You did not from its launching turn
Your face from this ship, look upon us now. It is nine days since the first 9
sicknesses were reported. Eight of them died today. We had thought, and Toynbee
assured me, they were recovering. The stiffness lasted a week; for the last two
days, the patients were relaxed, although still running temperatures; 3 spoke
up intelligently and said they felt better, the other 6 seemed delirious. The
deaths occurred quietly, without struggle. Laboratory Deck has post-mortems on
hand, Sheila Simpson is the only survivor of this first batch, a girl of
thirteen; her temperature is lower, she may live.
The nine-day cycle will be up for 10 more
cases tomorrow. Infinite foreboding fills me.
One hundred and eighty-eight people are now
in bed, many lying in their respective rooms, the sick bay being full. Power staff are being drafted as orderlies. Bassitt in demand! A
deputation of twenty officers, all very respectful, and headed by Watkins, came
to see me after lunch; they requested that we turn back to New Earth before it
is too late. Of course I had to dissuade them; poor Cruikshank of Ship's Press
was among them— his son was one of the 8 who died this morning.
18.xii.2521. Could not sleep. Frank was taken early this morning, dear lad. He lies as rigid as a
corpse, staring at— what? Yet he was only 1 of 20 new cases; the older people
are getting it now. Have been forced to modify the ship's
routine: another few days and it must be abandoned altogether. Thank
heaven most devices are automatic and self-servicing.
Of the 10 patients whose nine-day cycle
finished today, 7 have died. The other 3 remain on the threshold of
consciousness. No change in young Sheila. All anyone talks about now is what is
called the "Nine Day Ague." Had Bassitt put in the cells on a charge
of spreading depression.
I am tired after a prolonged inspection of
Agriculture with, among others, Watkins, who was rather stiff after the failure
of his deputation yesterday. Ninety-five per cent of all livestock took the
Ague, Noah tells me. About 45 per cent of those recovered— wish human figures
looked as good! Unfortunately, the bigger animals came off worst; no horses
survived and, more serious, no cows. Sheep fared badly, pigs and dogs
comparatively well. The mice and rats are fully recovered, their reproductive
capacities unimpaired.
Ordinarily earth-grown plants have shown
roughly similar percentages of survival.
In the adjacent chambers,
Phoned laboratories. Research promises (as it has before) to produce a cure for our plague
tomorrow; unfortunately most of the scientists are down with the Ague, and a
woman called Payne is trying to run things.
21.xii.2521. I have left the Control Room— perhaps for good. The shutters have been
closed against the stars.
Gloom lies thick over the ship. Over half
our population has the Nine Day Ague; out of 66 who have completed the full
cycle, 46 have died. The percentage of deaths is dropping daily, but the
survivors seem comatose. Sheila Simpson, for instance, hardly stirs.
Managing any sort of organization becomes
increasingly hard. Contact with further parts of the ship is virtually lost,
since all the switchboard team has the Ague. Everywhere, groups of men and
women huddle together, waiting. Licentiousness vies with apathy for upper hand.
I have visions of us all dying, this dreadful tomb speeding on perhaps for
millennia until it is captured by a sun.
Research now knows the cause of the Ague;
somehow it seems of small importance. The knowledge comes too late. For what it
is worth, here are their findings: Before leaving the new planet, we completely
re-watered. All stocks of water aboard were evacuated into orbit, and fresh
supplies ferried up. The automatic processes which claim moisture from the air
and feed it back into the hull tanks have always been efficient; but naturally
such water, used over and over, had become insipid.
The fresh water, ferried up from the
streams of New Earth, tasted good. It had, of course, been tested for
microscopic life and filtered; but perhaps we were not as thorough as we should
have been— scientific method has naturally stagnated over the generations.
However, apportioning blame is irrelevant in our present extremity. In simple
terms, proteins were suspended in the water in molecular solutions, and so slipped
through our filters.
June Payne explained the whole chain of
events to me. Proteins are complex condensation forms of amino acids; amino
acids are the basics, and link together to form proteins in peptic chains.
Though the known amino acids number only twenty-five, the combinations of
proteins they can form is infinite; unfortunately a twenty-sixth amino acid had
turned up.
In the tanks, the proteins soon hydrolyzed
back into their constituents, as doubtless they would have done on the planet.
Meanwhile, the ship's quota of human beings, livestock, and plants absorb many
gallons of water per day; their systems build up the amino acids back into
proteins, which are transferred to the body cells, where they are used as fuel
and, in the combustive processes of metabolism, dissolved back into aminos
again. That's the usual way it happens.
The twenty-sixth amino acid disrupts this
sequence. It combines into too complex a protein for any system —vegetable or
animal— to handle. This is the point at which rigidity of the limbs sets in. As
Payne explained, the denser peptic linkage may partially be due to the heavier
gravity of New Earth; we know very little
about the sustained effects of gravity on free-building molecules.
By now, the settlement must be in as bad a
state as we. At least they have the privilege of dying in the open air.
22.xii.2521. I had no time to finish yesterday. Today there seems to be all the time
in the world. Fourteen more deaths reported this morning. The Nine Day Ague is
undisputed master of the ship: my dear Yvonne is its latest victim. I have
tucked her in bed but cannot look at her— too terrible. I have ceased to pray.
Let me finish what young Payne told me. She
was guardedly optimistic about the ultimate survival of a percentage of our
population. The bodies of Ague victims are inactive while their internal forces
cope with the over-complex proteins; they will eventually break them down if
the constitution concerned is elastic enough: "Another little protein
won't do us any harm," Miss Payne quotes. Proteins are present already in
all living cells and, after a danger period, another protein, differing but
slightly, may be tolerated. The new amino, christened paynine (this
young creature smoothly informs me!) has been isolated; like leucine and
lysine, which are already known, it has an effect on growth— what effect, only
long-term research will establish, and I doubt that we have that much time.
The short-term results are before us. The
plants have mainly adapted and, once adapted, seem to thrive. The animals,
varying with their species, have adapted, though only the pig colony actually
seems exuberant. All survivals, Payne says, may be regarded as mutations— what
she calls "low-level mutations." It seems the heat in Agriculture may
have helped them; so I have ordered a 10-degree temperature increase from
Inboard Power for the whole ship. That is literally the only step we have been
able to take. . . .
24.xii.2521. Toynbee has the Ague. So has
Little Sheila Simpson has recovered! Hers
was one of the first cases, sixteen long days ago. I went down and saw her; she
seems perfectly all right, although quick and nervous in her actions. Temperature still high. Still, she is our first cure.
Feel absurdly
optimistic about this. If only 100 men and women came through, they might multiply, and their descendants get
the ship home. Is there not a lower limit to the number who can avoid
extinction? No doubt the answer lurks somewhere in the library, perhaps among
those tomes written and printed by past occupants of this ship...
There was a mutiny today, a stupid affair,
led by a Sergeant Tugsten of Ship's Police and "Spud" Murphy, the
surviving armorer. They ran amok with the few hand-atomic weapons not landed,
killing six of their companions and causing severe damage amidships. Strangely
enough, they weren't after me! I had them disarmed and thrown into the brig— it
will give Bassitt someone to preach at. And all weapons apart from the
neurolethea, or "dazers" as they are popularly called, have been
collected and destroyed to prevent further menace to the ship; the dazers,
acting only on living nervous systems, have no effect on inorganic material.
25.xii.2521. Another attempt at mutiny. I was down in Agriculture when it all blew up. As one of the essential
ship's services, the farm must be kept running at all costs. The oxygenators in
Hydroponics have been left, as they can manage themselves; one of them, the dry
variety mentioned before, has proliferated over the floor and seems almost as
if it could sustain itself. While I was looking at it, Noah Stover came in with
a dazer, a lot of worried young women with him. He fired a mild charge at me.
When I revived, they had carried me up into
the Control Room, there threatening me with death if I did not turn the ship
around and head back for New Earth! It took some time to make them understand
that the maneuver of deflecting the ship through 180 degrees when it is traveling
at its present speed of roughly 1328.5 times EV (Earth Velocity) would take
about five years. Finally, by demonstrating stream factors on paper, I made
them understand; then they were so frustrated they were going to kill me
anyhow.
Who saved me? Not my other officers, I
regret to tell, but June Payne, single-handed— my little heroine from Research!
So furiously did she rant at them that they finally slunk off, Noah in the
lead. I can hear them now, rampaging around the low-number decks. They've got
at the liquor supplies.
26.xii.2521. We have now what may be termed 6 complete recoveries, including little
Sheila. They all have temperatures and act with nervous speed, but claim to
feel fit; mercifully, they have no memory of any pain they underwent. Meanwhile,
the Ague still claims its victims. Reports from sick bay have ceased to come
in, but I estimate that under fifty people are still
in action. Fifty! Their —my— time of immunity is fast running out. Ultimately,
there can be no avoiding the
protein pile-up, but since the freak linkages are random factors, some of us
dodge a critical congestion in our tissues longer than others.
So at least June Payne. She has been with me again; of course I am grateful for her help. And I
suppose I am lonely. She said —oh, the old argument needs no repeating— she was
alone, frightened, we had so little time. I dismissed her, my sudden anger an
indication of how she tempted me; now I'm sorry I was so abrupt— it was just
that I kept thinking of Yvonne, stretched out in dumb suffering a few yards
away in the next room.
Must arm myself and make some sort of
inspection of the ship tomorrow.
27.xii.2521. Found two junior officers,
Someone has let Bassitt loose. He is raving
mad— and yet compelling. I could almost believe his teaching myself. In this
morgue, it is easier to put faith in psychoanalysis than God.
We went down to Agriculture. It's a
shambles, the livestock loose among the crops. And the hydroponics! The dry
oxygenator mentioned here before has wildly mutated under the paynine
influence. It has invaded the corridors near the Hydroponics section, its root
system sweeping a supply of soil before it, almost as if the plant had
developed an intelligence of its own. With somewhat absurd visions of the thing
growing and choking the whole ship, I went up to the Control Room and flung the
lever which closes the interdeck doors all along Main Corridor. That should
cramp the plant's style.
Frank broke out of his stiffness today. He
did not recognize me; I will see him again tomorrow.
June was taken with the Ague today. Bright
and living June! Prestellan showed her to me— motionless in suffering even as
she had predicted. Somehow, treacherously, the sight of her hurt me more than
the sight of Yvonne had done. I wish— but what does it matter what I wish? my TURN NEXT.
28.xii.2521. Prestellan reminded me that Christmas has come and gone; I had
forgotten. That was what the drunken mutineers were celebrating, poor devils!
Frank recognized me today; I could tell by
his eyes, although he could not speak. If he ever becomes captain, it will be
of a very different ship.
Twenty recoveries to
date. An improvement— room for
hope.
Adversity makes thinkers of us all. Only
now, when the long journey means no more
than a retreat into darkness, do I begin to question the sanity behind the
whole conception of interstellar travel. How many hapless men and women must
have questioned it on the way out to Procyon, imprisoned in these eternal
walls! For the sake of that grandiose idea, their lives guttered uselessly, as
many more must do before our descendants step on Earth again. Earth! I pray that there men's hearts have changed, grown less like the
hard metals they have loved and served so long. Nothing but the full flowering
of a technological age, such as the Twenty-fourth Century knew, could have
launched this miraculous ship; yet the miracle is sterile, cruel. Only a
technological age could condemn unborn generations to exist in it, as if man
were mere protoplasm, without emotion or aspiration.
There the diary ended.
During the reading, Vyann had been forced to pause several times and
master her voice. Her usual bearing had deserted her, leaving her a girl close
to tears. And when she had finished, she forced herself to turn back and reread
a sentence on the first page which had escaped Complain's notice. In the spiky
writing of Captain Gregory Complain were the words: "We head for Earth in
the knowledge that the men who will see those skies will not be born until six
generations have died." Vyann read it aloud in a shaky voice before
finally breaking into a storm of tears.
"Don't you see!" she cried. "Oh,
Hopelessly, wordlessly, Complain tried to console her, but human love
had no power to soften the inhumanity of the trap they were in. At last, when
Vyann's sobbing had partly subsided, Complain began to talk. He could hear his
voice creaking with numbness, forced out in an attempt to distract her —to
distract both of them— from the basic plight.
"This diary explains so much, Laur," he said. "We must
try and be grateful for knowing. Above all, it explains the catastrophe; it's
not a frightening legend any more, it's something we might be able to deal
with. Perhaps we shall never know if Captain Gregory survived, but his son must
have, to carry on the name. Perhaps June Payne survived— somehow she reminds me
of you. ... At least it's obvious enough people survived— little groups,
forming tribes. . . . And by then the hydroponics had almost filled the
ship."
"Who would have thought," she whispered, "that the ponics
weren't really meant to be there. They're— they're part of the natural order of
things! It seems so––"
"Laur! Laur!" he exclaimed, suddenly interrupting. He sat up and seized the strange weapon his brother had given
him. "This weapon! The diary said all weapons
except dazers had been destroyed. This thing must be something other than a
weapon!"
"Perhaps they missed one," she said wearily.
"Perhaps. Or perhaps not. It's a heat device. It must
have a special use. It must be able to do something we don't know about. Let me
try it. . ."
"
"I'll try it on something that doesn't burn. We're on to something,
Laur, I swear it!"
He picked up the gun carefully, training the nozzle toward the wall; it
had an indicator and a button on the smooth top surface. He pressed the button,
as Gregg had earlier. A narrow fan of intense heat, almost invisible, splayed
out and touched the wall. On the matte metal of the wall, a bright line
appeared. It loosened, widened. Two cherry-red lips grew, parting in a smile.
Hastily, Complain pressed the button again. The heat died, the lips lost their
color, turned maroon, hardened into a gaping black mouth; through it, they could see the corridor.
"We must tell the Council," Complain said finally, in an awed
voice.
"Wait!" she said. "
They found, with some surprise, when they got into the corridors, that
the hunt for the Giant was still on. It was fast approaching the time when the
darkness that would cover the next sleep-wake would fall; everyone not engaged
in the hunt was preparing for sleep, behind closed doors. The ship seemed
deserted, looking as it must have long ago, when half its occupants lay dying
under the rule of the Nine Day Ague. Vyann and Complain hurried along
unnoticed. When the dark came down, the girl flashed on the light at her belt
without comment.
Complain could only admire her refusal to admit defeat; he was not
enough of a self-analyst to see it was a quality he had a fair measure of
himself. The uneasy notion that they might meet rats or Giants or Outsiders
obsessed him, and he kept the heat gun ready in one hand and his dazer in the
other. But their progress was uneventful, and they came safely to Deck 1 and
the closed spiral staircase.
"According to your friend Marapper's plan," Vyann said,
"the Control Room should be at the top of these stairs. On the plan, the
Control Room is shown large; yet at the top there is only a small room with
featureless circular walls. Supposing those walls have
been put up to keep people out of the Control Room?"
"You mean— by Captain Gregory?"
"Not necessarily. Probably by someone later," she said.
"Come and aim your gun at the walls. . ."
They climbed the enclosed stairs and faced the circle of metal walls,
with a hushed sensation of confronting a mystery. Vyann's grip on his arm was
painfully tight.
"Try there!" she whispered, pointing at random.
She switched her light off as he switched the gun on.
In the dark, beyond the leveled nozzle, a ruddy glow was born, woke to
brightness, moved under Complain's control until it formed a radiant square.
Rapidly, the sides of square sagged; the metal within it peeled back like a
piece of skin, leaving them room to climb through. An acrid smell in their
nostrils, the two waited impatiently for the heat to subside. Beyond it, in a
great chamber dimly revealed, they could see a narrow outline of something,
something indefinable, beyond their experience.
When the square was cool enough to climb through, they made by common
consent for that beckoning line.
The great shutters which, when closed, covered the magnificent
270-degree sweep of the observation blister, were exactly as Captain Gregory
Complain had left them long before, even down to a carelessly abandoned wrench
whose positioning on a sill prevented one panel of shutter from closing
properly. It was the gap between this panel and its neighbor which drew
Complain and the girl, as surely as ponics seek light.
Through the narrow chink, which continued almost from ground level to
far above their heads, they could glimpse a ribbon of space. How many pointless
years had passed since the last inhabitant of the ship had looked out at that
mighty void? Heads together, Complain and the girl
stared through the impervious hyaline tungsten of the window, trying to take in
what they saw. Little, of course, could be seen, just a tiny wedge of universe
with its due proportion of stars— not enough to dizzy them, only enough to fill
them with courage and hope.
"What does it matter if the ship is past Earth?" Vyann
breathed. "We have found the controls! When we have learned how to use
them, we can steer the ship to the first planets we come to— Tregonnin told us
most suns have planets. Oh, we can do it! I know we can! After this, the
rest will be easy!"
In the faint light, she saw a far-off gleam in Complain's eyes, a look
of dumb-struck speculation. She put her arms around him, suddenly anxious to
protect him as she had always protected Scoyt; for the independence so
unremittingly fostered in Quarters had momentarily left Complain.
"For the first time," he said, "I've realized —fully
realized— that we are on a ship." His legs were like water.
It was as if she interpreted the words as a personal challenge.
"Your ancestor brought the ship from New Earth," she said.
"You shall land it on a Newer Earth!"
And she flicked on her light and swung its beam eagerly around the great
array of controls, which up till now had remained in darkness. The phalanx on
phalanx of dials which had once made this chamber the nerve center of the ship,
the soldier-like parade of indicators, levers, knobs, and screens, which
together provided the outward signs of the power still throbbing through the
ship, had coagulated into a lava-like mess. Nothing had been left unmolested;
though the flashlight beam flitted here and there with increasing pace, it
picked out not a switch intact. The controls were utterly destroyed.
PART FOUR
The Big Something
I
ONLY the occasional stale glow of a pilot light illuminated the coiled
miles of corridor. At one end of the ship, the ponics were beginning to
collapse in the death each dark sleep-wake inevitably brought; at the other end
of the ship, Master Scoyt still drove his men in a torchlight search for the
Giant. Scoyt's party, working along the lower levels of the Drive Floors, had
drained the "20" decks of Forwards almost clear of life.
As the dark came down, it caught Henry Marapper, the priest, going from
Councillor Tregonnin's room to his own without a flashlight. Marapper had been
carefully ingratiating himself into the librarian's favor, against the time
when the Council of Five should be reconstituted as the Council of Six— Marapper,
of course, visualizing himself as the sixth councillor. He walked now through
the dimness warily, half-afraid a Giant might pop up
in front of him.
Which was almost exactly what happened.
A door ahead of him was flung open, a wash of illumination pouring into
the corridor. Startled, Marapper shrank back. The light flapped and churned,
transforming shadows into frightened bats as the bearer of the light hustled
about his nocturnal business in the room. Next moment, two great figures
emerged, bearing between them a smaller figure, who slumped as if ill.
Undoubtedly, these were Giants: they were over six feet high.
The light, of exceptional brilliance, was worn as a fitting on one
Giant's head; it sent the uneasy shadows scattering as its wearer bent and
half-carried the small figure. They went only half a dozen paces down the
corridor before stopping in the middle of it, kneeling there with their faces
away from Marapper. And now the light fell upon the face of the smaller man. It
was Fermour!
With a word to the Giants, Fermour, leaning forward, put his knuckles to
the deck in a curious gesture. His hand, fingertips upward, was for a moment
caught alone in the cone of light; then a section of deck, responding to his
pressure, rose and seized by the Giants, lifted to reveal a large manhole. The Giants
helped Fermour into it, climbed down themselves, and closed the hatch over
their heads. The glow from a square pilot light on the wall was again the only
illumination in a deserted corridor.
Then Marapper found his tongue.
"Help!" he bellowed. "Help!
They're after me!"
He pounded on the nearest doors, flinging them open when no reply came.
These were workers' apartments, mainly deserted by their owners, who were away
following Scoyt and the Survival Team. In one room, Marapper discovered a
mother suckling her babe by a dim light. She and the baby began to howl with
fear.
The rumpus soon brought running feet and flashing lights. Marapper was
surrounded by people and reduced to a state of coherence. These were mainly men
who had been on the Giant-hunt, men with blood roused by the unaccustomed
excitement; they let out wilder cries than Marapper to hear that Giants had
been here, right in their midst. The crowd swelled, the noise increased.
Marapper found himself crushed against the wall, repeating his tale endlessly
to a succession of officers, until an icy man, co-captain of the Survival Team,
pushed his way through the group.
"Show me this hole you say the Giants disappeared down," he
ordered. "Point to it."
"This would have terrified a less brave man than I," Marapper
said, still shaking. He pointed: a rectangular line in the deck outlined the
Giants' exit. It was a hair-fine crack, hardly noticeable. Inside the rectangle
at one end was a curious octagonal indentation, not half an inch across; apart
from that, there was nothing to distinguish the trapdoor from the rest of the
deck.
Two men tried to lever open the trapdoor, but the crack was so fine they
could do no more than poke their fingernails down it.
"It won't come up, sir," one of the men said.
"Thank Hem for that!" Marapper exclaimed, visualizing a stream
of Giants emerging upon them.
By this time, somebody had brought Scoyt. The Master's face was hard
set; his long fingers restlessly caressed the runnels of his cheek as he
listened to Marapper. Though he looked tired, he revealed that his brain was
the widest awake of those present.
"You see what this means," he said. "These traps are set
in the floor about a hundred paces apart throughout the ship; we've never
recognized them as such because we could never open them, but the Giants can
open them easily enough. We no longer need doubt, whatever we once thought to
the contrary, that the Giants still exist. For reasons of their own they're
coming back— and for what other purpose than to take over the ship again?"
"But this trap . . ." Marapper said.
"This trap," Scoyt interrupted, "is the key to the whole
matter. Do you remember when your friend Complain was captured by Giants he
said he was spirited into a hole and traveled in a low, confined space that
sounded like no part of the ship we knew? Obviously, it was a space between
decks, and he was taken down a trap just like this one. All traps must
intercommunicate— and if the Giants can open one, they can open them all!"
An uneasy babble of comment rose from the crowd in the corridor. Their
eyes were bright, their flashlights dim; they seemed to press more closely
together, as if for comfort. Marapper cleared his throat, inserting the tip of
his little finger helplessly into his ear, as if that were the only thing in
the world he could get clear.
"This means— this means our world is entirely surrounded by a sort
of thin world the Giants can get to and we can't," he said. "Is that
so?"
Scoyt nodded curtly.
"Not a nice thought, priest, eh?" he said.
Scoyt turned impatiently to find that three of the Council of Five,
Billyoe, Dupont, and Ruskin, had arrived behind him. They looked both unhappy
and annoyed.
"Please say no more, Master Scoyt," Billyoe said. "We've
heard most of this, and it hardly sounds like the sort of thing which should be
discussed in public. You'd better bring this— er, this priest along with you to
the council room; we'll talk there."
Scoyt hardly hesitated.
"On the contrary, Councillor Billyoe," he said distinctly,
"this matter affects every man on board. Everyone must know about it as
quickly as possible. I'm afraid we are being swept to a time of crisis,"
Although he was contradicting the Council, Scoyt's face bore such a
heavy look of pain that Billyoe avoided making an issue of the matter. Instead
he asked, "Why do you say a crisis?"
Scoyt spread his hands.
"Look at it this way," he said. "A Giant suddenly appears
on Deck 14 and ties up the first girl he finds in such a way that she escapes
in no time. Why? So that an alarm could be given.
Later he appears again down on the Drive Floors— at little risk to himself, let
me add, because he can duck down one
of these traps whenever he feels like
it! Now; from time to time, we've had reports of sightings of
Giants, but obviously in those cases the meeting was completely accidental; in
this case, it looks as if it was not. For the first time, a Giant wanted himself
to be seen; you can't explain the pointless tying-up of the girl
otherwise."
"But why should he want to be seen and hunted?"
Councillor Ruskin asked plaintively.
"I can see why, Councillor," said Marapper. "The Giant
wanted to create a diversion while these other Giants rescued Fermour from his
cell."
"Exactly," agreed Scoyt, without pleasure. "This all
happened just as we began to question Fermour; we had scarcely started to
soften him up. It was a ruse to get everyone out of the way while the Giants
helped Fermour to escape. Now that the Giants know we know they are
about, they'll be forced to do something— unless we do something first! Priest
Marapper, get down on your hands and knees and show me exactly what you think
it was that Fermour did to make the trapdoor open."
Puffing, Marapper got down as directed. Every light present centered on
him. He scuffled to one corner of the trap, looking up dubiously.
"I think Fermour was about here," he said. "And then he
leaned forward like this . . . and put his fist down on the deck like this— with
his knuckles along the floor like this. And then— no, by Hem, I know what he
did! Scoyt, look!"
Marapper moved his clenched hand. A faint click sounded. The trapdoor
rose, and the way of the Giants lay open.
❖ ❖ ❖
Laur Vyann and Roy Complain came slowly back to the inhabited part of
Forwards. The shock of finding the controls ruined had been almost too much for
both of them. Once again, but now more insistently than ever before, the desire
to die had come over Complain; a realization of the total bleakness of his life
swept through him like a poison. The brief respite in Forwards, the happiness
Vyann afforded him, were absolutely nothing beside the overriding frustration
he had endured since birth.
One thing rescued him: the old Teaching of Quarters, which a little
while ago he had told himself proudly he had eschewed.
Back to him echoed the voice of the priest: "We are the sons of cowards, our days are passed in fear. . . . The Long Journey
has always begun: let us rage while we can, and by so discharging our morbid
impulses we may be freed from inner conflict. . . ." Instinctively,
Complain made the formal gesture of rage. He let the anger steam up from the recesses of his misery and warm
him in the withering darkness. Vyann had begun to weep on his shoulder; that
she should suffer too added fuel to his fury.
He foamed it all up inside him with increasing excitement, distorting
his face, calling up all the injuries he and everyone else had ever undergone,
churning them together like batter in a bowl. Muddy, bloody
anger, keeping his heart a-beat.
After that, feeling much saner, he was able to comfort Vyann and lead
her back to the regions of her own people.
As they approached the inhabited part, a curious clanging grew louder in
their ears. It was an odd noise without rhythm, an ominous noise, at the sound
of which they increased their pace, glancing at each other anxiously.
Almost the first person they met, a man of the farmer class, came up
quickly to them.
"Inspector Vyann," he said, "Master Scoyt is looking for
you; he's been shouting everywhere!"
"It sounds as if he's pulling the ship apart for us," Vyann
said wryly. "We're on our way, thank you."
They quickened their step, and so came upon Scoyt at Deck 20, from which
Fermour had been rescued. A squad of men was pacing along the corridor, bending
every so often and opening a series of traps in the deck. The heavy covers,
flung aside, accounted for the strange clanging Vyann and Complain had heard.
As each hole was revealed, a man was left to guard it while other men hurried
on to the next trap.
Directing operations, Scoyt saw Vyann. For once, no welcoming smile
softened his mouth.
"Come in here," he said, opening the door nearest to him.
Scoyt shut the door when they were all three inside and confronted them
angrily.
"I've a mind to have you both flung into cells," he said.
"How long have you been back from Gregg's stronghold? Why did you not
report straight back to me or the Council, as you were instructed to do?
Where've you been together, I want to know?"
"But, Roger," Vyann protested, "we haven't been back
long! Besides, you were all out on a chase when we arrived. We didn't know the
thing was so urgent, or we would have––"
"Just a minute, Laur," Scoyt interrupted. "You'd better
save the excuses: we've a crisis on hand. Never mind all
that, I'm not interested in the frills; just tell me about Gregg."
Seeing the hurt and angry look on Vyann's face, Complain stepped in and
gave a brief account of their interview with his brother. Scoyt nodded,
relaxing slightly.
"Better than I dared hope," he said. "We will send scouts
to get Gregg's party here as soon as possible. It is expedient that they move
in here at once."
"No, Roger," Vyann said quickly. "They can't come here.
With all respects to
"That," Scoyt said grimly,
"is just what we want them for. You'd better get abreast of events,
Laur." Rapidly, he told her what Marapper had seen and what was now going
on.
"Had you hurt Fermour?" Complain asked.
"No— just a preliminary flogging to
soften him up."
"He was used to that sort of thing in Quarters, poor devil,"
Complain said. His own back tingled in sympathetic memory.
"Why should all this make it so urgent to get Gregg here?"
Vyann said.
Master Scoyt sighed heavily and answered with emphasis.
"Because," he said, "here we have for the first time
incontestable proof that the Outsiders and the Giants are in alliance— against
us!"
He looked at them hard as this soaked in. "Nice position we're in,
eh?" he said ironically. "That's why I'm going to have up every trap
in the ship, and a man posted by it. Eventually we'll hunt the enemy out; I
swear I won't rest till we do."
Complain whistled. "You'll certainly need Gregg's ruffians;
manpower will be the crucial problem," he said. "But just how did
Marapper manage to open that trapdoor?"
"Simply because that fat priest is the man he is, I'd say,"
Scoyt remarked with a short laugh. "Back in your tribe, I suppose he was
pretty much of a pack-rat?"
"Picked up anything he could get," Complain agreed, recalling
the lumber in Marapper's room.
"One thing he picked up was a ring: a ring with an eight-sided
stone, which someone must at some time have removed from a corpse. It's not a
stone actually, it's some little mechanical device, and it fits exactly into a
kind of keyhole in each trapdoor: press it in and the trap opens at once.
Originally —way back before the catastrophe— everybody whose duty it was to go
down into these traps must have had one of these ring-keys. Councillor
Tregonnin, by the way, says these between-deck places are called
inspection-ways; he found a reference to them; and that's just what we're going
to do— inspect them! We're going to comb every inch of them. My men have
Marapper's ring now and are opening up every trap aboard."
"And Bob Fermour had a similar ring to Marapper's!" Complain
exclaimed. "I remember often seeing it on his finger."
"We think all Outsiders may wear them," Scoyt said. "If
so, it explains how easily they elude us. It explains a lot— although it doesn't
explain how in the past they've managed to spirit themselves
out of cells carefully guarded on the outside. On the assumption that all who
wear these rings are our enemies, I've got some of the Survival Team working
through the entire population, looking for the giveaway. Anyone caught wearing
that ring makes the Journey! Now I must go. Expansions!"
He ushered them back into the clanging corridor. At once he was
surrounded by underlings wanting orders; he became gradually separated from
Complain and Vyann. They heard him delegating a junior officer to bear the news
to Gregg, then he turned away and his voice was lost.
"
"You're going to bed," Complain said. "You look
exhausted."
"You don't think I could sleep with all this noise going on, do
you?" she asked, smiling rather tiredly.
"I think you could try."
He was surprised with what submissiveness she let him lead her away,
although she stiffened suddenly as they met Marapper loitering in a side
corridor.
"You are the hero of the hour, priest, I understand," she
said.
Marapper's face was ponderous with gloom; he wore injury around him like
a cloak.
"Inspector," he said with a bitter dignity. "You are
taunting me. For half my wretched lifetime I go around with a priceless secret
on my finger without realizing it. And then when I do realize it— behold, in a
moment of quite uncharacteristic panic, I give it away to your friend Scoyt for
nothing!"
II
"We've got to get out of the ship somehow," Vyann murmured. Her eyes
were shut as she spoke, her dark head on the pillow. Softly, Complain crept
from the dark room; she would be asleep before he closed the door, despite the
chaos of sound two decks away. He stood outside Vyann's door, half-afraid to go
away, wondering it this was a good time to bother the Council or Scoyt with
news of the ruined controls. Indecisively, he fingered at the heat gun tucked in his belt, as gradually his thoughts wandered back
to more personal considerations.
Complain could not help asking himself what part he was playing in the
world about him; because he was undecided what he wanted from life, he seemed
to drift on a tide of events. The people nearest to him appeared to have clear-cut
objectives. Marapper cared for nothing but power; Scoyt seemed content to
grapple with the endless problems of the ship; and Complain's beloved Laur
wanted only to be free of the restraints of life aboard. And
he? He desired her, but there was something else, the something he had
promised himself as a kid without finding it, the something he could never put
into words, the something too big to visualize...
"Who's that?" he asked, roused suddenly by a close footstep.
A square pilot light near at hand revealed a tall man robed in white, a
distinctive figure whose voice, when he spoke, was powerful and slow.
"I am Councillor Zac Deight," he said. "Don't be
startled. You are Roy Complain, the hunter from Deadways, are you not?"
Complain took in his melancholy face and white hair, and liked the man
instinctively. Instinct is not always the ally of intelligence.
"I am, sir," he answered.
"Your priest, Henry Marapper, spoke highly of you."
"Did he, by Hem?" Marapper often did good
by stealth, but it was invariably to himself.
"He did," Zac Deight said. Then his tone changed. "I
believe you might know something about that hole I see in the corridor
wall."
He pointed at the gap Complain and Vyann had made earlier in the wall of
her room.
"Yes I do. It was made with this weapon here," Complain said,
showing the weapon to the old councillor and wondering what was coming next.
"Have you told anyone else you have this?" Zac Deight asked,
turning the heat gun over with interest.
"No. Only Laur— Inspector Vyann knows; she's asleep at
present."
"It should have been handed to the Council for us to make the best
use of we could," Zac Deight said gently. "You ought to have realized
that. Will you come to my room and tell me all about it?"
"Well, there's not much to tell, sir. . . ." Complain began.
"You can surely see how dangerous this weapon could be in the wrong
hands . . ." There was something commanding in the old councillor's tone.
When he turned and started down the corridor, Complain followed— not happily,
but without protest.
They took an elevator down to the lower level, then
walked five decks forward to the councillor's apartment. It was deserted here,
silent and dark. Bringing out an ordinary magnetic key, Zac Deight unlocked a
door and stood aside for Complain to enter. As soon as the latter had done so,
the door slammed behind him. It was a trap!
Whirling around, Complain charged the door with all the fury of a wild
animal— uselessly. He was too late, and Deight had the heat gun with which he
might have burned his way to freedom. Savagely, Complain flashed on his light
and surveyed the room. It was a bedroom, unused for some while, to judge by the
dust everywhere; like most such rooms throughout the length of the ship, it was
spartan, anonymous.
Complain picked up a chair and battered it to bits against the locked
door, after which he felt better able to think. An image swam up to him of the
time when he had first stood close to Vyann, watching through a spyhole when
Scoyt left Fermour alone in the interrogation room; Fermour had jumped on to a
stool and tried to reach the ceiling that way. Now supposing. . . .
He swung the bed into the center of the room, tossed a locker on top of
it and climbed rapidly up to examine the grille. It was similar to every other
grille in every other room of the ship; three feet square, latticed with thin
bars widely enough spaced to allow a finger to be poked between them. The
exploring flashlight revealed these spaces to be silted up with dust; such
breeze as drained through into the room was faint indeed.
Complain heaved tentatively at the grille. It did not budge.
It had to budge. Here, if the grilles opened, would be an explanation of
the way some of Scoyt's previously captured Outsiders had escaped from guarded
cells. Complain stuck his fingers through the grille and felt along its inner
edge, hope and fear scampering coldly through his veins.
His index finger soon met with a simple, tongued catch. Complain flipped
it over. Similar catches lay on the upper surface of the other three sides of
the grille. One by one, he flicked them over. The grille lifted up easily;
Complain angled it sideways, brought it down, and put it quietly on the bed.
His heart beat rapidly.
Catching hold of the aperture, he drew himself up.
There was hardly space to stir. He had expected to find himself in the
inspection-ways; instead he was in the ventilation system. He guessed
immediately that this pipe ran through the strange interdeck world of the
inspection-ways. Clicking his light off, he strained his eyes down the low duct, ignoring the breeze that sighed continuously in his
face.
One light only lit the tunnel, filtering up from the next grating along.
Struck with the idea that he must look much like a cork in a bottle, Complain
dragged himself forward and peered through the grille.
He was staring down into the councillor's room. Zac Deight was there,
alone, talking into an instrument. A tall cupboard, standing now in the middle
of the room, showed how the niche in the wall which housed the instrument was
normally concealed. So fascinated was Complain with his novel viewpoint that
for a moment he failed to hear what Zac Deight was speaking about. Then it
registered with a rush.
". . . fellow Complain causing a lot of trouble," the
councillor said into the phone. "You remember when your man Andrews lost
his welder a few weeks back? Somehow it got into Complain's hands. I found out
because I happened to come across a gaping hole in the wall of one of the
compartments on Deck 22, Inspector Laur Vyann's room . . . Yes, Curtis, can you
hear me? This line is worse than ever. . . ."
For a moment, Deight was silent, as the man at the other end of the line
spoke. Curtis! Curtis! Complain exclaimed to himself— that was the name of the
Giant in charge of the ones who had captured him. Looking down on the
councillor, Complain suddenly noticed the telltale ring with the octagonal
stone on Zac Deight's finger, and began to wonder what ghastly web of intrigue
he had blundered into.
Deight was speaking again. "I had the chance of slipping into
Vyann's room," he said, "while your diversion down on the Drive
Floors was in full swing. And there I found something else the
dizzies have got hold of: a diary we never knew existed, written by the
first man to captain the ship on the way back from Procyon V. It contains far
more than the dizzies should know; it'll set them
questioning all sorts of things. By a stroke of luck, I have managed to get
both diary and welder into my possession . . . Thanks. Even more luckily,
nobody but Complain and this girl Vyann yet knows anything about —or realizes
the significance of— either diary or welder. Now then, I know all about Little
Dog's ideas on the sanctity of dizzy lives, but they're not up here coping with
this problem, and it's getting more difficult hour by hour— if they want their
precious secret kept, there is one easy way to do it. I've got Complain locked
in next door to me now ... Of course not, no force; he just walked into the
trap. Vyann is asleep in her room. What I'm asking you is this, Curtis: I want
your sanction to kill Complain and Vyann ... I don't like it either, but it's
the only way we can possibly retain the status
quo, and I'm prepared to do it now before it's too late. . . ."
Zac Deight was silent, listening, an expression of impatience creeping
over his long face.
"There isn't time to radio Little Dog," he said, evidently
interrupting the speaker. "They'd procrastinate too long. You're in charge
up here, Curtis, and all I need is your permission. . . . That's better. . . .
Yes, I do consider it imperative. You don't think I enjoy the task? I shall gas
them both through the air vents of their rooms. At least we know it's
painless."
He hung up. He pushed the cupboard back into place. He stood for a while
hesitating, gnawing his knuckles, his face seamed with distaste. He opened the
cupboard and removed a long cylinder. He looked speculatively up at the ceiling
grille. He took the blast of Complain's dazer right into his face.
The color fled from Zac Deight's brow. His head flopped on to his chest
and he collapsed, sprawling, on the floor.
For a minute, Complain lay still, his mind
attempting to adjust to events. He was brought back to the immediacy of the
present by a horrible sensation. An alien thought had somehow drifted among his
thoughts; it was as if somebody's thickly furred tongue had licked his brain.
Flipping on his light, he found a tremendous moth hovering before his eyes. Its
wing span was about five inches; the tapetum lucidum in its eyes
reflected the light like two cerise pinpoints.
Sickened, he struck at it but missed. The moth fluttered rapidly away
down the air duct. Complain recalled another moth in Deadways which had left a
similar delicately dirty fingerprint on his mind. Now he thought, This power the rabbits have— the moths must
have it in lesser degree. And the rats seem to be able to understand them. ...
Perhaps these moths are sort of airborne scouts for the rat-hordes!
This notion scared him a great deal more than hearing Deight pronounce
his death sentence had done.
In a sweat of panic, he flicked back the four tongues which kept Zac
Deight's grille in place, slithered the grille along the duct and dropped down
into the councillor's room. Pulling up a table, he climbed on to it and moved
the grille back into its proper position. Then he felt safer.
Zac Deight was not dead: Complain's dazer had been turned only to
half-power; but he had been at close enough range to receive a shock of
sufficient strength to keep him senseless for some while. He looked harmless,
even benevolent, huddled on the deck with hair fallen over his ashen forehead.
Complain took the councillor's keys, collected his heat gun, unlocked the door,
and let himself out into the silent corridor.
At the last moment he paused, turning back into the room to flash his
light up at the grille. Sharp little pink hands grasped the bars, a dozen sharp
faces hated down at him. Hair prickling up his neck, Complain gave them the
daze. The little burning eyes lost their brilliance at once,
the pink hands relaxed their grip.
Squeals following him down the corridor told Complain he had also
concealed winged reinforcements.
His ideas flowed fast as he walked. One thing he stubbornly determined:
Councillor Deight's role in this affair, and all that he had said on the
strange instrument to Curtis (where was Curtis?) should be mentioned to
nobody until he had discussed it with Vyann. They could no longer tell who was
on their side and who was not.
A practical item worried Complain, but he could not quite formulate it.
It had something to do with the rescue of Fermour . . . No, it would have to
wait. He was too anxious to reason coolly; he would consider it later.
Meanwhile, he wanted to give the heat gun, the welder, as Deight had called it,
over to somebody who could make best use of it: Master Scoyt.
The excitement around Scoyt had increased; he had transferred himself
into the center of a whirlpool of activity.
The barriers between Forwards and Deadways had been broken down.
Sweating men busily tore down the barricades, relishing the work of
destruction.
"Take them away!" Scoyt shouted. "We thought they guarded
our frontiers, but now that our frontiers are all around us, they are
useless."
Through the broken barriers, the tribe of Gregg came. Ragged and filthy,
well or wounded, on foot or on rough stretchers, they flocked excitedly among
the watching Forwarders. They bore bundles and bedding rolls and boxes and
panniers; some pulled crude sledges they had dragged through the ponics; one
woman drove her belongings before her on the back of an emaciated sheep. With
them flew the black midges of Deadways. Such was the fever of excitement which
simmered over Forwards, that this animated gaggle of squalor was greeted with
welcoming smiles and an occasional cheer. The tattered legion waved back.
Roffery had been left behind; he was considered near enough dead to make any
trouble expended on his account worthless.
One thing at least was clear: the outcasts, wounded though many of them
were from their encounter with the rats, were prepared to fight. Every man was
loaded down with dazers, knives, and improvised pikes.
Gregg himself, accompanied by his weird henchman, Hawl, was conferring with Scoyt and Councillor Ruskin
behind a closed door when Complain arrived on the scene. Without ceremony, he
thrust his way into the room. He savored an unprecedented confidence which even
their shouts at his intrusion did not sap.
"I've come to help you," he said, facing Scoyt as the natural
leader there. "I've two things for you, and the first is a bit of
information. We've discovered that there are trapdoors on every level of every
deck; that is only one way the Giants and Outsiders can escape. They also have
a handy exit in every single room!"
He jumped up on to the table and demonstrated to them how a grille
opened. Climbing down again without comment, he enjoyed the surprised look in
their faces.
"That's something else for you to watch, Master Scoyt," he
said. And then the point about Fermour's escape that had been troubling him
slid into his mind without effort; instantly, a slice more of the puzzle became
clear.
"Somewhere in the ship, the Giants have a headquarters," he
said. "They took me to it when they caught me, but I don't know where it
is— I was gassed. But obviously it's in a part of a deck or level cut off from
us, deliberately or by its design. There are many such places in the ship— those're
where we have to look."
"We've already decided that," said Gregg impatiently. 'The
trouble is, things are in such confusion, on most
decks we don't know when a part's cut off and when it isn't. An army could be
hiding behind any bulkhead."
"I'll tell you one such place near at hand," Complain said
tensely. "Above the cell Fermour was kept in, on Deck 21."
"What makes you think that, Complain?" Scoyt asked curiously.
"Deduction. The Giants, as we have realized, went to an enormous amount of trouble
to lure everyone away from the corridors so that they could get to Fermour and
rescue him via the trapdoors. They could have spared themselves all that bother
if they had simply pulled him up through the grille in his cell. It would not
have taken them a minute, and they could have remained unseen. Why didn't they?
My guess is, because they couldn't. Because something on the
level above has collapsed, blocking that grille. In other words, there
may be chambers up there we have no access to. We ought to see what's in
them."
"I tell you there are a hundred such places––" Gregg began.
"It certainly sounds worth investigating——" Councillor Ruskin
said.
"Suppose you're right, Complain," Scoyt interrupted. "If
the grille's blocked, how do we get through?"
"Like this!" Complain leveled the heat gun at the nearest
wall, fanning it horizontally. The wall began to drip away. He switched off
power when a ragged archway had formed and looked challengingly at them. For a
moment all were silent.
"And that's how you use it. It's not a real weapon— it's a flame
projector."
Scoyt stood up. His face was flushed.
"Let's get down to Deck 21," he said. "Complain,
you've done well. We'll try that gadget out at once."
They moved out in a body, Scoyt leading. He gripped Complain's arm
gratefully.
"Given time, we can pull the ship apart with that weapon," he
said. It was a remark
that did not fully register on Complain until much later.
Chaos reigned on the middle level of Deck 21. All the manholes were
exposed, each now guarded by a sentry; their covers were flung aside in untidy
piles. The few people who lived here —mostly men of the barriers and their
families— were evacuating before further trouble came, straggling among the
sentries, getting in everyone's way. Scoyt elbowed his way roughly through
them, pushing squeaking children to right and left.
As they flung open Fermour's cell door, Complain felt a hand on his arm.
He turned, and there was Vyann, fresh and bright of eye.
"I thought you were asleep!" he exclaimed, smiling with the
delight of seeing her again.
"Do you realize it's within a watch of waking?" she said.
"Besides, I'm told things are about to happen. I had to come and see that
you didn't get into trouble."
Complain pressed her hand.
"I've been in and out of it while you were sleeping," he said
cheerfully.
Gregg was already in the middle of the cell, standing on the battered
crate which served here as a chair, peering up at the grille above his head.
"
"Stand from under!" Complain warned him. "Or you'll
shower yourself with melted metal."
Nodding, Gregg aimed the weapon as Scoyt handed it up, and depressed the
button. The glassy arc of heat bit into the ceiling, drawing a red weal on it.
The weal broadened; the ceiling sagged. Through the widening hole, other metal
showed; it too, began to glow. Noise filled the room, smoke cascaded around them and out into the corridor, bitter
smoke which rasped their eyeballs. Above the uproar came a crackling explosion,
and just for a second the lights flashed on with unexpected brilliance, then
died away to nothing.
"That should do it!" Gregg exclaimed with immense
satisfaction, climbing down from his perch and eyeing the gaping ruin above
him. His beard twitched with excitement
"I really think we ought to hold a full Council meeting before we
do anything as drastic as this, Master Scoyt!" Councillor Ruskin said
plaintively, surveying the ruin of the cell.
"We've done nothing but hold Council meetings for years,"
Scoyt said. "Now we're going to act."
He ran into the corridor and bellowed furiously, producing in very short
time a dozen armed men and a ladder.
Complain, who felt he had more experience of this kind of thing than the
others, brought a bucket of water from the nearby guards' quarters, flinging it
up over the tortured metal. In the ensuing cloud of steam, Scoyt thrust the
ladder into place and climbed up with his dazer ready. One by one, as quickly
as possible, the others followed, Vyann keeping close to Complain. Soon the
whole party stood in the strange room above the cell.
It was overwhelmingly hot; the air was hard to breathe. Their
flashlights soon picked out the reason for the blocked grille and the collapsed
inspection-way below their feet: the floor of this chamber had undergone a
terrific denting in some long-past explosion. A machine —perhaps left untended
in the time of the Nine Day Ague, Complain thought— had blown up, ruining every
article and wall in the place. A staggering quantity of splintered glass and
wood was scattered all over the floor. The walls were pitted with shrapnel. But
there was not a trace of a Giant.
"Come on!" Scoyt said, trampling ankle deep through the
wreckage toward one of two doors. "Let's not waste time here."
The explosion had wedged the door tightly. They melted it with the heat
gun and passed through. Night loomed menacingly at the end of their flashlight
beam. The silence sang like a thrown knife.
"No sign of life . . ." Scoyt said. His voice held an echo of
unease.
They stood in a side corridor, sealed off the rest of the ship,
entombed, scattering their light around convulsively. It was achingly hot.
One end of the brief corridor finished in double doors on which a notice
was stenciled. Crowding together, they read what it said:
dutymen only
cargo hatch—air lock
danger!
A locking wheel stood on either door with a notice printed beside it: do not attempt to open until you get the
signal. They all stood there staring stupidly at the notices.
"What are you doing— waiting to get a signal?" Hawl grated at
them. "Melt the door down, Captain!"
"Wait!" Scoyt said. "We ought to be careful here. What's
an air lock, I'd like to know? We know magnetic locks and octagonal ring locks,
but what's an air lock?"
"Never mind what it is. Melt it down!" Hawl repeated, Waggling his grotesque head. "It's your lousy ship,
Captain— make yourself at home!"
Gregg turned the heat on. The metal blushed a
sad, dull rose, but did not run. Nor did an amount of cursing make any
difference, and in the end Gregg put the weapon bewilderedly away.
"Must be special metal,"
he said.
One of the armed men pushed forward and spun the wheel on one of the
doors, whereupon the door slid easily back into a slot in the wall. Someone
laughed sharply at the slackening of tension; Gregg had the grace to look abashed.
They were free to move into the cargo air lock.
The air lock, although only a medium-sized chamber, had, set in its
opposite wall, something none of them had ever seen before, something which to
their awed eyes extended the length of the lock to infinity: a window: a window
looking into space.
This was not the pinch of space Vyann and Complain had seen in the
Control Room; this was a broad square. But their previous experience had
prepared them for this in some measure. They were the first to be drawn across
the deep dust floor to the glory itself; the others of the party remained
rooted in the entrance.
Beyond the window, with stars tossed prodigiously into it like jewels
into an emperor's sack, roared the unending stillness of space. It was
something beyond comprehension to gaze upon, the mightiest paradox of all, for
although it gave an impression of unyielding blackness, every last pocket of it
glistened with multicolored pangs of light.
Nobody spoke, swallowing the spectacle as if dumb.
Though all of them were fit to weep before the serenity of space, it was
what floated in space that commanded their eyes, that
ultimately held them: a sweet crescent of a planet, as bright, blind blue as a
newborn kitten's eyes, looking larger than a sickle held at arm's length. It
scintillated into dazzling white at its
center, where a sun seemed to rise out of it. And the sun, wreathed in its
terrible corona, eclipsed everything else in grandeur.
Still nobody spoke. They were silent as the crescent crept wider and the
splendid sun broke free from behind it. They could not speak one word for the
miracle of it.
At last it was Vyann who spoke.
"Oh,
Complain turned to look at her then, to force his choked throat to
answer. And then he could not answer. He suddenly knew what the big something
was he had wanted all his life.
It was nothing big at all. It was a small thing. It was to see Laur's
face— by sunlight.
III
Within a watch, distorted versions of the great news had circulated to
every man, woman, and child in Forwards. Everyone wanted to discuss it with
everyone else; everyone, that is, except Master Scoyt. For him, the incident
was a mere irrelevance, almost a setback in the priority task of hunting down
the Giants and their allies, the Outsiders. He had found no Giants; now he
returned full of a new scheme which, after snatching a catnap and some food, he
proceeded to put into action.
The scheme was simple; that it involved a terrifying amount of damage to
the ship did not deter Scoyt in the least. He was going to dismantle Deck 25
entirely.
Deck 25 was the first deck of Deadways beyond Forwards. Remove it and
you would have a perfect no-man's-land nothing could cross unseen. Once this
giant equivalent of a ditch had been created, and a strong guard set over it, a
hunt could be started down all the inspection-ways and the Giants would be
unable to escape.
Work on the job commenced at once. Volunteers flocked to Scoyt's aid,
willing to do anything to help. Human chains worked feverishly, passing back
every movable item on the doomed deck to others who smashed it or, if smashing
were not possible, flung it into other vacant rooms. Ahead of the chain
sweating warriors, many of them Gregg's men experienced in such tasks, attacked
the ponics, hacking them down, rooting them up; just behind them came the
clearance men, looting and gutting.
As soon as a room was cleared, Master Scoyt himself came with the heat
gun, blazing the sides of the walls till the wall came tumbling down; they were
carted off as soon as they were cool enough to
touch. The heat gun did not melt the metal which divided deck from deck —that
metal was the same, evidently, as the metal of which the air-lock doors were
built, something extra tough— but everything else fell away before it.
Soon after the work began, a rat hideout was discovered in a big room
marked laundry. Splitting open a
boiler, two of Gregg's men revealed a crazy maze of rat buildings, a rodent
village. Different levels and nights of a bewildering complexity of design had
been constructed inside the boiler from bones and rubble and cans and filth.
There were tiny cages here containing starving creatures, mice, hamsters,
rabbits, even a bird; there were moths living here, rising up in a storm; and
there were the rats, in nurseries and armories and slaughterhouses. As Scoyt
thrust the heat gun into the miniature city and it crackled up in flames, the
rodents poured out savagely, leaping to the attack.
Scoyt saved himself with the gun, warding them off as he fell back.
Gregg's two men had their throats bitten through before reinforcements could
dash up with dazers and beat off the little furies. The bodies went back along
the human chain, and demolition continued.
By now, the corridors of Decks 24 to 13 had been completely stripped of
trapdoors on all three levels. Each hole was guarded.
"The ship is rapidly becoming uninhabitable," Councillor
Tregonnin protested. "This is destroying for destroying's sake."
He was presiding over a meeting to which everyone of importance had been
called. Councillors Billyoe, Dupont, and Ruskin were present. Officers of the
Security Team were present. Gregg and Hawl were present. So were Complain and
Vyann. Even Marapper had managed to wangle his way in. Only Scoyt and Zac
Deight were missing.
By messengers who had been dispatched to bring him to the meeting, Scoyt
had sent back word that he was too busy. Marapper, going down at Tregonnin's
request to bring up Zac Deight, had returned to say simply that the councillor
was not in his rooms; at that, Complain and Vyann, who now knew of Deight's
sinister part in affairs, exchanged glances but said nothing. It would have
been a relief to burst out with the news that Deight was a traitor— but might
there not be other traitors here whom it would be wiser not to warn?
'The ship must be pulled apart before the Giants pull us apart,"
Hawl shouted. "That's obvious enough; why make an issue of it?"
"You do not understand. We shall die if the ship is pulled
apart!" Councillor Dupont protested.
"It would get rid of the rats, anyway," Hawl said, and cackled
with laughter.
Right from the start, he and Gregg were quietly at loggerheads with the
members of the council; neither side liked the other's manners. The meeting was
disorganized for another reason, nobody could decide
whether to discuss the steps Scoyt was taking or the discovery of the strange
planet.
At last, Tregonnin himself tried to integrate these two facets of the
situation.
"What it amounts to," he said, "is this. Scoyt's policy
can be approved if it succeeds. To succeed, not only must the Giants be
captured, but, when captured, they must be able to tell us how to get the ship
down to the surface of this planet."
There was a general murmur of agreement at this.
"Obviously, the Giants must have such knowledge," Billyoe
said, "since they built the ship in the first place."
"Then, let's get on with it, and go and give Scoyt some
support," Gregg said, standing up.
"There is just one other thing before you go," Tregonnin said.
"Our discussion has been on purely material lines. But I think we have
also moral justification for our action. The ship is a sacred object for us; we
may destroy it only under one condition: that the Long Journey be done. That condition, happily, is fulfilled. I am
confident that the planet some of you have seen beyond the ship is Earth."
The pious tone of this speech brought derision from Gregg and some of
the Survival Team. It brought applause and excitement from others. Marapper was
heard to exclaim that Tregonnin should have been a priest.
Complain's voice cut through the uproar.
"The planet is not Earth!" he said. "I'm sorry to
disappoint you, but I have certain information the rest of you do not know. We
must be far away from Earth— twenty-three generations have passed on this ship.
Earth should have been reached in seven!"
He was besieged by voices, angry, pitiful, and demanding.
He had decided that everyone ought to know and face the situation
exactly as it was; they must be told everything— about the ruined controls,
about Captain Gregory Complain's journal, about Zac Deight. They must be told
everything— the problem had grown far too urgent. But before he could utter
another word, the door of the council chamber was flung open. Two men stood
there, faces distorted with fear.
"The Giants are attacking!" they shouted.
Stinking, blinding smoke coiled through the decks of Forwards. The piled
rubbish evacuated from Deck 25 to Decks 24 and 23 had been set on fire. Nobody
cared; everyone was suddenly a pyromaniac. Automatic devices throughout most of
the ship had a simple way of coping with outbreaks of fire: they closed off the
room in which the fire began and exhausted the air from it. Unluckily, this
fire was started in a room where the devices had failed, and in the open
corridors.
Scoyt and his fellow destroyers worked on in the smoke. An impartial
observer, seeing these men, would have known that an inner fury possessed them;
that a life-long hatred of the ship which imprisoned them had at last found
expression and was working itself out with uncheckable force.
The Giants struck cleverly.
Scoyt had just burned one wall of a small washroom and was resting while
three of his men removed the wall, so that it shielded him momentarily from the
view of the others. At that instant, the grille overhead was whipped away, and
a Giant fired a gas pellet at Scoyt. It caught the Master in the face. He
collapsed without a sound.
A cord ladder snaked down from the grille. One of the Giants skipped
down it and seized the heat gun from Scoyt's limp grasp. As he did so, the
severed wall toppled over on top of him and stunned him: the three handlers had
been careless and did not mean to let it go. They stared in utter surprise at
the Giant. As they did so, three more Giants dropped down the ladder, fired at
them, picked up the other and the heat gun, and attempted to get back to
safety.
Despite the smoke, other people had seen this foray. One of Gregg's
ablest assassins, a fellow called Black, sprang forward. The hindmost Giant,
who had just reached the grille, came crashing down again with a knife stuck in
his back; the heat gun rolled from his grasp. Shouting for assistance, Black
retrieved his knife and bounded up the ladder. He, too, fell back to the floor
with a face full of gas. Others were behind him. Jumping him, they pressed on,
swarming up the ladder and through the grille.
Then began a terrific running fight in the
cramped space of the inspection-ways. The Giants
had cut through the actual air duct to get into the inspection-way proper, but
were hampered in their retreat by their companion. Reinforcements arrived for
them on one of the low inspection trucks which had once carried Complain.
Meanwhile, around pipes and stanchions, the Forwarders harried them in
increasing numbers.
It was a strange world to fight in. The inspection-ways ran around every
level and between each deck. They were unlit; the flashlights which now
erratically lit them produced a weird web of shadows among the girders. For a
solitary sniper, the place was ideal; for a pack of them, it was impossible:
friend could no longer be told from foe.
At this stage in affairs, Gregg arrived from the council room to take
control. He soon produced order out of the random give and take. Even the
Forwarders obeyed him now that Scoyt was temporarily out of action.
"Somebody bring me that heat gun," he
bellowed. "Everyone else follow me back to Deck 20. If we get down the
inspection hatches there, we can take the Giants from the rear."
It was an excellent idea. The only drawback —and it explained how the
Giants still managed to move unseen from deck to deck, despite the removal of
all trapdoors— was that the inspection-ways extended around the circumference
of the ship, just inside the hull, thus surrounding the rooms of all upper
levels. Until this was realized, the Giants' movements could never be blocked.
The ship was more complex than Gregg had bargained for. His men, streaming
wildly down the trapdoors, could not find the enemy.
Gregg did as his wild nature dictated. He blazed a way ahead with the
heat gun, turning molten every obstacle in his path.
Never before had the inspection-ways been open to the inhabitants of the
ship; never before had a madly brandished welder played among all those
delicate capillaries of the vessel.
Within three minutes of switching on power, Gregg ruptured a sewer
sluice and a main water pipe. The water jetted out and knocked a crawling man
flat, playing wildly over him, drowning him, streaming and cascading over
everything, seething between the metal sandwich of decks.
"Switch that thing off, you fool!" one of the Forwards men,
sensing danger, yelled at Gregg.
For answer, Gregg turned the heat on him.
A power cable went next. Sizzling, rearing like a cobra, live wire
flashed across the rails the inspection trucks ran on; two men died instantly.
The gravity blew. Over that entire deck, free fall suddenly snapped into
being. The stampede which followed in that constricted area only made matters
worse. Gregg himself, though he had had experience of zero gravity, lost his
head and dropped the gun. It rebounded gently up at him. Screaming, his beard
flaming, he punched away the blazing muzzle with his fist. . . .
During this pandemonium, Complain and Vyann stood by Master Scoyt, who
had just been brought up on a stretcher to his own room. Having had a taste of
the gas himself, Complain could sympathize with the still unconscious Master.
He could smell the gas lingering in Scoyt's hair: he could also smell
burning. A glance upward showed him a tendril of smoke probing through the
overhead grilles.
"That fire the fools started two decks down— the air-duct system is
going to carry the smoke everywhere!" he exclaimed to Vyann. "It
ought to be stopped."
"If we could only close the interdeck doors . . ." she said.
"Shouldn't we get Roger out of here?"
Even as she spoke, Scoyt stirred and groaned. Plunging water over his
face, massaging his arms, they were too busy to notice the shouts in the
corridor; there had been so much shouting that a little more went unremarked
until, the door suddenly crashing open, Councillor Tregonnin entered.
"Mutiny!" he said. "Mutiny! I
feared as much. Oh Hem, what will happen to us all? I said from the start that
those Deadways ruffians should never have been allowed in here. Can't you rouse
Scoyt? He'd know what to do! I'm not supposed to be a man of
action."
"Keep working on Master Scoyt, Councillor," Complain told
Tregonnin. "He'll soon be lively enough to solve all your problems for
you. We'll be back."
He hustled a surprised Vyann out into the corridor. A thin dribble of
water crept along the deck, dripping into the manholes.
"Now what?" she asked him.
"I was a fool not to think of this before," he said.
"We've got to risk pulling the place down around our heads to get to the
Giants— unless there is another way. And there is another way. Zac
Deight has an instrument in his room by which he spoke to Curtis, the Giants'
leader."
"Don't you remember,
"We may be able to find the way to work the instrument without
him," Complain replied. "Or we may find something else there that
will be useful to us. We are doing no good here, that's sure."
He spoke as six Forwards men, pelting silently along, brushed past him.
Everyone seemed to be on the run, splashing down the corridors; no doubt the
spiked stench of burning hustled them on. Taking Vyann's soft hand, Complain
led her rapidly along to Deck 17 and down to the lower level. The trapdoor
covers lay about like discarded gravestones, but already the guards over them
had deserted their posts to seek excitement elsewhere.
Halting before the room in which he had left the dazed councillor, Complain leveled his flashlight and flung open the door.
Zac Deight was there, sitting on a metal stool. So was Marapper, his
bulky body eased into a chair; he had a dazer clamped in his hand.
"Expansions to your ego, children," he said. "Come in
IV
"What do you think you're doing here, Marapper, you old villain?"
Complain asked in surprise.
The priest was as usual only too ready to explain. He was here, he said,
with the express purpose of torturing the last secret of the ship out of Zac
Deight, but had hardly begun to do so since, although he had been here some
while, he had only just managed to pull the councillor back to consciousness.
"But you told the Council meeting he was not here when you came to
look for him," Vyann said.
"I didn't want them pulling Deight to bits for being an Outsider
before I got at him," Marapper said.
"How long have you known he was an Outsider?" Complain asked
suspiciously.
"Since I came in and found him on the ground— with an octagonal
ring on his finger," Marapper said, with a certain amount of smugness in
his tone. "And I've so far elicited one thing from him, with the help of a
knife under his fingernails. The Outsiders and Giants come from the planet you
saw outside; but they can't get back there till a ship comes up to get them.
This ship can't go down there."
"Of course it can't, it's out of control," Vyann said.
"Priest Marapper, you are wasting your time. I also cannot allow you to
torture this Councillor, whom I have known since I was a girl."
"Don't forget he was going to kill us!" Complain reminded her.
She made no answer beyond looking stubbornly at him, knowing, woman-like, that
she had an argument superior to reason.
"I had no alternative but to try and remove you both," Zac
Deight said huskily. "If you will save me from this horrible creature I
will do anything— within reason."
They were interrupted by a noise nearby, a curious noise, a scraping
rustle, frightening because it was unidentifiable. It grew louder. Suddenly, it
was overhead.
Rats were on the move! They drummed along the air duct; across the
grille Complain had recently climbed through pattering pink feet came and went,
as the tribe thundered by. Dust showered down into the room, and with the dust
came smoke.
"That sort of thing'll be happening all over the ship,"
Complain told Zac Deight gravely, when the stampede had gone by. "The fire
is driving the rats out of their holes. Given time, the men will gut the place
absolutely. They'll find your secret hideout in the end, if they kill us all
doing it. If you know what's good for you, Deight, you'll get on that
instrument and tell Curtis to come out with his hands up."
"If I did, they would never obey," Zac Deight said. His hands,
paper-thin, rustled together on his lap.
"That's my worry," Complain said. "Where is this Little
Dog?— Down on the outside of the planet?"
Zac Deight nodded confirmation miserably. He kept clearing his throat, a
nervous trick which betrayed the strain he was undergoing.
"Get up and tell Curtis to speak to Little Dog, double-quick, and
make them send a ship up here for us," Complain said. He drew his dazer,
aiming it steadily at Deight.
"I'm the only one who flashes dazers here!" Marapper shouted.
"Deight's my captive." Jumping up, he came toward Complain with his
own weapon raised. Savagely, Complain booted it out of his hand.
"We can't afford to have three sides in this argument,
priest," he said. "If you're going to stay in on this, stay quiet.
Otherwise, get out. Now then, Deight, have you made up your mind?"
Zac Deight stood up helplessly, twisting his face with indecision.
"I don't know what to do. You don't understand the position at
all," he said. "I really would help you if I could. You seem a
reasonable man, Complain, at heart; if only you and I––"
"I'm not reasonable!" Complain shouted. "I'm anything but
reasonable! Get on to Curtis! Go on, you old fox, move! Get a ship up
here!"
"Inspector Vyann, can't you––" Zac Deight said.
"Yes,
"No!" Complain roared. "These beggars are responsible for
all our miseries. Now they're going to get us out of trouble or else."
Seizing one end of the bookcase, he pulled it angrily away from the
wall. The phone stood there on its niche, neutral and silent, ready to convey
any message spoken into it.
"This time my dazer's at Lethal, Deight," Complain said.
"You have the count of three to begin talking. One . . . two . . ."
Tears stood in Zac Deight's eyes as he lifted the receiver. It shook in
his grasp.
"Get me Crane Curtis, will you?" he said, when a voice spoke
at the other end. Possessed as he was, Complain could not restrain a thrill
shooting through him, to think that this instrument was now connected with the
secret stronghold in the ship.
When Curtis came on, all four in the room could hear his voice
distinctly. It was pitched high with anxiety; he talked so rapidly he hardly
sounded like a Giant. He began speaking at once, before the old councillor
could get a word in.
"Deight? You've slipped up somewhere," he said. "I always said you
were too old for this job! The damned dizzies have got that welder in action. I
thought you told me you had it? They're running amok with it— absolutely
berserk. Some of the boys tried to get it back but failed, and now the ship's on fire near us. This is your doing! You're going to
take the responsibility for this . . ."
During this flow of words, Zac Deight subtly changed, slipping back into
something like his old dignity. The receiver steadied in his hand.
"Curtis!" he said. The command in his tone brought a sudden
pause on the line. "Curtis, pull yourself
together. This is no time for recriminations. Bigger matters are at stake.
You'll have to get Little Dog and tell them––"
"Little Dog!" Curtis cried. He went back into full spate
again. "I can't get Little Dog. Why don't you listen to what I've
got to say? Some crazy dizzy, monkeying with the welder, has severed a power
cable on the middle level of Deck 20, just below us here. The structure's live all around us. Four of our men are out cold
with shock. It's blown our radio and our lighting. We're stuck. We can't raise
Little Dog and we can't get out..."
Zac Deight groaned. He turned hopelessly away from the phone, gesturing
at Complain.
"We're finished," he said. "You heard that."
Complain poked the dazer into his thin ribs. "Keep quiet," he
muttered. "Curtis hasn't finished speaking yet."
The phone was still barking.
"Are you there, Deight? Why don't you answer?"
"I'm here," Deight replied wearily.
"Then answer. Do you think I'm talking for fun?" Curtis
snapped. "There's just one chance for us all. Up in the personnel hatch on
Deck 10, there's an emergency transmitter. Got that? We're all bottled up here.
We can't get out. You're out. You've got to get to that transmitter and
radio Little Dog for help. Can you do that?"
The dazer was eager at Zac Deight's ribs now.
"I'll try," he said.
"You'd better try! It's our only hope. And, Deight . . ."
"Yes?"
"For God's sake tell 'em to come armed— and quick."
"All right."
"And hurry, man. For heaven's sake hurry."
A long, meaningful silence followed Zac Deight's switching off.
"Are you going to let me get to that radio?" Deight asked.
Complain nodded.
"I'm coming with you," he said. "We've got to get a ship
to us." He turned to Vyann. She had brought the old councillor a beaker of
water which he accepted gratefully.
"Laur," Complain said, "will you please go back and tell
Roger Scoyt, who should be revived by now, that the Giants' hideout is
somewhere on the upper level of Deck 20. Tell him to wipe them all out as soon
as possible. Tell him to go carefully: there's danger of some sort there. Tell
him— tell him there's one particular Giant called Curtis who ought to be
launched very slowly on the Long Journey. Take care of yourself, Laur, I'll be back as soon as I can."
Vyann said, "Couldn't Marapper go instead of––"
"I'd like the message to arrive straight," Complain said
bluntly.
"Do be careful," she begged him.
"He'll be all right," Marapper said roughly. "Despite the
insults, I'm going with him. Something very nasty is brewing."
In the corridor, the square pilot lights greeted them. Their
intermittent blue patches did little to make the darkness less threatening, and
Complain watched Laur Vyann go off with some misgivings. Reluctantly, he turned
to splash after Marapper and Zac Deight; the latter was already lowering himself down an open trap while the priest hovered unhappily
over him.
"Wait!" Marapper said. "What about the rats down
there?"
"You and Complain have dazers," Zac Deight said mildly.
The remark did not seem entirely to remove Marapper's uneasiness.
"Alas, I fear that trapdoor is too small for me to squeeze
down!" he exclaimed. "I am a large man, Roy."
"You're a bigger liar," Complain said. "Go on, get down.
We'll have to keep our eyes open for the rats. With luck, they'll be too busy
to worry about us now."
They bundled down into the inspection-ways, crawling on hands and knees
over to the double rail which carried the low trucks belonging to this level
from one end of the ship to the other. No truck was there. They crawled along
the track, through the narrow opening in the interdeck metal which, even here, stood between one deck and another, and
on into a third deck until they found a truck. Under Zac Deight's direction,
they climbed on to its platform and lay flat.
With a touch at the controls, they were off, gathering speed quickly.
The deck intersections flicked by only a few inches above their heads. Marapper
groaned as he attempted to draw in his stomach, but in a short time they
slowed, arriving at Deck 10. The councillor stopped the truck and they got off
again.
In this far end of the ship, evidence of rats abounded. Marapper kept
his light constantly swinging from side to side.
Having stopped the truck just inside the deck, they could stand up. Above
and around them, four feet wide, the inspection-ways here became a washer
between two wheels of deck, its width crossed by a veritable entanglement of
girders, braces, pipes, and ducts, and by the immense tubes which carried the
ship's corridors. A steel ladder ran up into the darkness over their heads.
"The personnel lock, of course, is on the upper level," Zac
Deight said. Taking hold of the rungs of the ladder, he began to climb.
As he followed, Complain noted many signs of damage on either side of
them, as if, in the rooms between which they now ascended, ancient detonations
had occurred. Even as he thought the thought-picture "detonation," a
bellow of sound vibrated through the inspection-ways, setting up resonances and
groans in a variety of pipes until the place sang like an orchestra.
"Your people are still wrecking the ship," Zac Deight said
coldly.
"Let's hope they kill off a few squadrons of Giants at the same
time." Marapper said.
"Squadrons!" Deight exclaimed. "Just how many 'Giants,' as you call them, do
you reckon are aboard ship?"
When the priest did not reply, Deight answered himself. "There are
exactly twelve of them, poor devils," he said. "Thirteen
including Curtis."
For an instant. Complain nearly succeeded in viewing the situation through the eyes of
a man he had never seen, through Curtis's eyes. He saw that worried official
boxed up somewhere in mined rooms, in darkness, while everyone else in the ship
hunted savagely for his place of concealment. It was not an attractive picture.
No time was left for further thought. They reached the upper level,
crawling horizontally once more to the nearest trapdoor. Zac Deight inserted
his octagonal ring and it opened above their heads. As they climbed out, a
spray of tiny moths burst around their shoulders, hovered, then fluttered off
down the dark corridor. Quickly Complain whipped up his dazer and fired at
them; by the beam of Marapper's flashlight, he had the satisfaction of seeing
most of them drop to the deck.
"I just hope none got away," he said. “I’ll swear those things
act as scouts for the rats."
The damage in this region was as bad as any Complain and Marapper had
seen so far. Hardly a wall stood straight in any direction. Glass and debris
lay everywhere, except where brushed away to make a narrow path, Down this path
they walked, every sense alert.
"What was this
place?" Complain asked curiously. "I mean, when it was a place."
Zac Deight continued to walk forward without replying, his face bleak
and absorbed.
"What was this place, Deight?" Complain repeated.
"Oh. . . . Most of the deck was Medical Research," Deight
said, in a preoccupied fashion. "In the end, I believe, a neglected computer
blew itself to bits. You can't reach this part by the ordinary elevators and
corridors of the ship; it's completely sealed off. A tomb
within a tomb."
Complain felt a thrill inside him. Medical Research! This was where,
twenty-three generations ago, June Payne, the discoverer of paynine, had
worked. He tried to visualize her bent over a bench, but could only think of
Laur.
So they came to the personnel air lock. It looked much like a smaller
edition of the cargo lock, with similar-looking wheels and danger notices. Zac
Deight crossed to one of the wheels, still with his abstracted look.
"Wait!" Marapper said urgently. "
"If there's anyone waiting in here, Deight," Complain said,
"they and you make the Journey without delay. I'm warning you."
Deight turned to face them. The look of unbearable strain clenched over
his countenance might have won him pity in a quieter moment, from other
company.
"There's nobody there," he said, clearing his throat.
"You need not be afraid."
"The . . . radio thing is in here?" Complain asked.
"Yes."
Marapper seized Complain's arm, keeping his flashlight burning in
Deight's face.
"You're not really going to let him talk to this Little Dog place,
are you, and tell them to come up here armed?"
"You needn't think me a fool, priest," Complain said,
"just because I happened to be born in your parish. Deight will give the
message we tell him to. Open up, Councillor!"
The door swung open, and there was the lock, about five paces square,
with six metal space suits standing like suits of armor against one wall.
Except for the suits, there was only one other object in the room: the radio, a
small, portable one with carrying straps and telescopic aerial.
Like the cargo lock, this lock had a window. The four personnel and two
cargo locks distributed down the length of the ship carried, apart from the
now-shuttered blister of the Control Room, the only ports in the ship. Having a
different coefficient of expansion from the rest of the great outer envelope,
they naturally represented a weakness, and as such had been constructed only
where it might be strictly necessary to see out. For Marapper, it was the first
time he had had such a view.
He was as overwhelmed with awe as the others had been. Breathlessly he
gazed out at the mighty void, for once completely robbed of words.
The planet now showed a wider crescent than the last time Complain had
seen it. Mixed with the blinding blue of it were whites and greens, glistening
under its casing of atmosphere as no colors had ever glistened before. Some
distance from this compelling crescent, tiny by comparison, the sun burned
brighter than life itself.
Marapper pointed at it in fascination.
"What's that? A sun?" he asked.
Complain nodded.
Zac Deight had gone over to the radio. As he picked it up, trembling, he
turned to the others.
"You may as well know now," he said. "Whatever happens. I may as well tell you. That planet— it's
Earth!"
"What?" Complain said. A rush of questions assailed him.
"You're lying, Deight! You must be. It can't be Earth! We know it can't be
Earth!"
The old man was suddenly weeping, the long salt tears raining down his
cheeks. He hardly tried to check them.
"You ought to be told," he said. "You've all suffered so
much . . . too much. That's Earth out there— but you can't go to it. The Long
Journey ... the Long Journey has got to go on forever."
Complain grabbed him by his scrawny throat.
"Listen to me, Deight," he snarled. "If
that's Earth, why aren't we down there, and who are you —and the Outsiders— and
the Giants? Who are you all, eh? Who are you?"
"We're— we're from Earth," Zac Deight husked. He waved his
hands fruitlessly before Complain's contorted face; he was being shaken like an
uprooted ponic stalk. Marapper was shouting in Complain's ear and wrenching at
his shoulder. They were all shouting together, Deight's face growing crimson
under Complain's tightening grasp. They barged into the space suits and sent
two crashing to the floor, sprawling on top of them. Then finally the priest
managed to pry Complain's fingers away from the councillor's throat.
"You're crazy,
"Didn't you hear what he said?" Complain shouted. "We're
victims of some dreadful conspiracy . . ."
"Make him speak to Little Dog first —make him speak first— he's the
only one who can work this radio thing! Make him speak,
Gradually the words filtered into Complain's comprehension. The blinding
anger and frustration ebbed like a crimson tide from his mind. Marapper, as
always canny where his own safety was concerned, had spoken wisely. With an
effort, Complain gained control of himself again. He stood up and dragged
Deight roughly to his feet.
"What is Little Dog?" he asked.
"It's . . . it's the code name for an institute on the planet, set
up to study the inmates of this ship," Zac Deight said, rubbing his
throat.
"To study! . . . Well, get them quick and say— say some of your men are ill and
they've got to send a ship. And don't say anything else or we'll tear you apart
and feed you to the rats. Go on!"
"Ah!" Marapper rubbed his hands in appreciation and gave his
cloak a tug down at the back. "That's spoken like a true believer, Roy.
You're my favorite sinner. And when the ship gets here, we overpower the crew
and go back to Earth in it. Everyone goes! Everyone! Every
man, woman, and mutant from here to Sternstairs!"
Zac Deight cradled the set in his arms, switching on power. Then,
braving their anger, he mustered his courage and turned to face them.
"Let me just say this to you both," he said with dignity.
"Whatever happens —and I greatly fear the outcome of all
this terrible affair— I'd like you to remember what I am telling you.
You feel cheated, rightly. Your lives are enclosed in suffering by the walls of
this ship. But wherever you lived, in whatsoever place or time, your lives
would not be free of pain. For everyone in the universe, life is a long, hard
journey. If you––"
"That'll do, Deight," Complain said. "We're not asking
for paradise: we're demanding to choose where we suffer. Start talking to
Little Dog."
Resignedly, his face pale, Zac Deight started to call, all too aware of
the dazer a yard from his face. In a moment, a
clear voice from the metal box said: "Hullo, Big Dog. Little
Dog here, receiving you loud and clear. Over."
"Hullo, Little Dog," Zac Deight said, then stopped. He
painfully cleared his throat. The sweat coursed down his forehead. As he
paused, Complain's weapon jerked under his nose, and he began again, staring
momentarily out at the sun in anguish. "Hullo, Little Dog," he said.
"Will you please send up a ship to us at once— the
dizzies are loose! Come armed! The dizzies––"
He took Complain's blast in the teeth, Marapper's in the small of his
back. He crumpled over, the radio chattering as it fell with him. He did not
even twitch. He was dead before he hit the deck. Marapper seized the instrument
up from the floor.
"All right!" he bawled into it. "Come and get us! Come
and get us!"
With a heave of his arm, the priest sent the set shattering against the
bulkhead. Then with characteristic change of mood, he fell on his knees before
Zac Deight's body, in the first gesture of prostration, and began the last
obsequies over it.
Fists clenched, Complain stared numbly out at the planet. He could not
join the priest. The compulsion to perform ritual gestures over the dead had
left him; he seemed to have grown beyond superstition. But what transfixed him
was a realization which evidently had not occurred to Marapper, a realization
which canceled all their hopes.
After a thousand delays, they had found Earth was near. Earth was their
true home. And Earth, on Zac Deight's admission, had been taken over by Giants
and Outsiders. It was against that revelation Complain had burned his anger in
vain.
Laur Vyann stood silent and helpless, watching the furious activity on
Deck 20. She managed to stand by wedging herself in a broken doorway: the
gravity lines on this deck had been severed in the assaults. Directions in the
three concentric levels had gone crazy; ups and downs existed that had never
existed before, and for the first time Vyann realized just how ingeniously the
engineers who designed the ship had worked. Half the deck, under these
conditions, would be impossible to live in: the rooms were built on the
ceilings.
Near Vyann, equally silent, were a cluster of Forwards women, some of
them clutching children. They watched, many of them,
the destruction of their homes.
Scoyt, clad only in a pair of shorts, had fully recovered from his gassing and was now dismantling the entire deck,
as earlier he had begun to dismantle Deck 25. On receiving Complain's message
from Vyann, he had flung himself into the work with ferocity terrible to watch.
His first move had been to have executed without further ado the two
women and four men some of the Survival Team had found wearing the octagonal
ring of the Outsiders. Under his insensate direction, as Complain had
predicted, the turbulence of Hawl and his fellow brigands had been curbed— or,
rather, canalized into less destructive paths. With Gregg, his face and arm
stump bandaged, out of the way, Hawl readily took his place; his shrunken face
gleamed with pleasure as he worked the heat gun. The rest of Gregg's mob worked
willingly with him, unhampered by the lack of gravity. It was not that they
obeyed Hawl, but that his demoniac will was theirs.
What had once been a neat honeycomb of corridor and living
accommodation, now, in the light of many torches, looked like a scene from some
fantastic everglades, cast in bronze. Throughout the cleared space —cleared
though much of the metal was live with runaway voltage— girders of tough hull
metal, the very skeleton of the ship, jutted solidly in all directions. From
them projected icicles of lighter metals which had melted, dripped, and then
again solidified. And through all this chaos ran the water from burst mains.
Perhaps of the whole wild scene the sight of the water was the strangest.
Although its momentum carried it forward, bursting out into non-gravity, it
showed an inclination to go nowhere and form into globules. But the
conflagration started on Decks 23 and 24 was now an
inferno, which set up on either side of it waves of air within whose eddies the
globules whirled and elongated like crazy glass fish.
"I think we got 'em Giants cornered!" Hawl shouted. With
practiced aim he sliced down one more partition. Shouts of excitement went up
from the men around him.
Vyann could not stay watching Scoyt. The lines on his face, rendered
terrible by firelight, had not softened under the breakdown of gravity. They
looked now deeper than ever; for Scoyt, this dissection of the body in which he
lived was a traumatic experience. This was what his relentless pursuit of a foe
had crumbled to, and in the frenzied Hawl it found external incarnation.
Profoundly saddened, the girl turned away. She glanced about for
Tregonnin; he was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was fluttering alone in his
apartments, a little man who knew truth without being able to convey it. She
had to go to Roy Complain; the way she felt at the moment, only his face still
wore the mask of humanity. Amid the clamor of demolition, she saw why she loved
Complain; it was because (and this was something both were aware of, though
neither spoke of it) Complain had changed, Vyann being both a witness of and a
factor in the change. In this hour, many people —Scoyt for one— were changing,
sloughing off the ancient molds of repression even as had Complain; but whereas
they were changing into lower beings, Roy Complain's metamorphosis lifted him
to a higher sphere.
Decks 19 and 18 were packed with people, all ominously waiting for a
climax they could but dimly sense. Beyond them, Vyann found the upper levels
deserted as she made her way forward. Although the dark sleep-wake was over,
the lights of the ship —hitherto dependable— had failed; Vyann switched on the
flashlight at her belt and carried her dazer in her hand. On Deck 15, she
paused.
A dim, rosy light filled the corridor, very subtle and soft. It emanated
from one of the open trapdoors in the deck. As Vyann looked at the trap, a
creature emerged slowly and painfully: a rat. At some time past, its back had been
broken; now, a kind of rough sledge, on which its hind legs rested, was lashed
across its rump. It pulled itself along with its forelegs, the sledge easing
its progress.
Vyann thought, surprising herself: How long
before they discover the wheel?
Just after the rat emerged from the trap, the glow burst into
brightness. A pillar of fire leaped out of the hole,
fell, and then rose more steadily. Frightened, Vyann skirted it, hurrying on, keeping pace with the rat who, after one glance at her,
pressed on without interest. A poignant illusion of mutual torment relieved
Vyann's customary revulsion for the creatures.
Naked fire was not a thing the ship's company much concerned themselves with. Now, for the first time, Vyann realized it
could destroy them utterly— and nobody was doing a thing about it. It was
spreading between levels, like a cancerous finger; when they realized its
danger, it would be too late. She walked more rapidly, gnawing her lower lip, feeling
the deck hot beneath her feet.
Suddenly, the crippled rat, not two yards ahead of her, coughed and lay
still.
"Vyann!" a voice said behind her. She wheeled like a startled
deer.
Gregg stood there, putting away his dazer. Following her silently down the
corridor, he had been unable to resist killing the rat. With his head swathed
in bandages, he was hardly recognizable; the remnant of his left arm was also
bandaged and strapped across his shirt. In the dark, he did not make a
companionable figure. Vyann could not repress a shiver of fright at the stealth of his appearance. If she,
for any reason, should wish to cry for help, nobody would hear her in this lost
corner of the ship.
He came up and touched her arm. She could see his lips among the swathes
of bandage.
"I want to come with you," he said. "I followed you
through the crowd— I was no use back there like this."
"Why did you follow me?" she asked, withdrawing her arm.
She thought he smiled beneath his lint visor.
"Something's gone wrong," he said, very quietly. When he saw
she did not understand, he added, "In the ship, I mean. We're finished
now. You can feel it down in your bones . . . Let me come with you, Laur;
you're so ... Oh, come on, it's getting hot."
She moved ahead without speaking. For some reason, her eyes stung with
tears; they were, after all, all in the same boat.
While Marapper was making his prostrations over the burned-out body of
Zac Deight, Complain studied the air lock, gauging its possibilities. If the
Giants were coming up from Earth in force, this place had to be defended, and
that must be the first thing to worry about. A flush-fitting door, leading to
an anteroom in the lock, stood in one wall; Complain pulled it open. It was a
mere cubicle from which control could be kept over what came and went in the
lock itself. Now, a man lay in it on a rough bunk.
It was Bob Fermour!
Fermour greeted his ex-companion with terror, having heard through an
open air valve all that had transpired on the other side of the door. The
interrogations of Scoyt and his friends, interrupted though they had been by
the Giants, had removed most of the skin from Fermour's back, as well as a
percentage of his moral fiber. He had been left, while his rescuers returned to
Curtis, to wait for a relief ship to come and take him home; now he was
convinced he was about to make the Long Journey.
"Don't hurt me, Roy!" he begged. “I’ll tell you everything you
need to know— things you never guessed. Then you won't want to kill me!"
"I can't wait to hear," Complain said grimly. "But you're
coming straight back to the Council to tell them: I find it dangerous to
be the only one who receives these confidences."
"Not back into the ship,
"Get up!" Complain said. Seizing Fermour by the wrist, he
swung him up and pushed him into the air lock. Then he kicked Marapper gently
in his ample buttocks.
"You ought to have grown out of that mumbo-jumbo, priest," he
said. "Besides, we've no time to waste. We shall have to get Scoyt and
Gregg and everyone here to this deck for a mass attack when the Giants arrive.
Our only hope, that I can see, is to seize their ship when it comes."
Red-faced, the priest rose, dusting off his knees. He maneuvered so that
Complain stood between him and Fermour, avoiding the latter as if he had been a
ghost.
"I suppose you're right," he said to Complain. "Although
as a man of peace, I greatly regret all this bloodshed. We must pray to
Consciousness that the blood may be theirs, rather than ours."
Leaving the old councillor to lie where he had fallen, they prodded
Fermour out of the lock and back toward the trapdoor in the littered corridor.
As they went, a strange noise haunted their ears. At the trap, halting in
apprehension, they found the origin of the sound. Beneath their feet, swarming
along the inspection-way, was a host of rats. Some of
them glanced pinkly up at Marapper's light; none faltered in their rapid
advance toward the bow of the ship. Brown rats, small rats, gray rats, tawny
rats, hurried to the pipe of fear.
"We can't get down there!" Complain said. His stomach twisted
at the idea.
The ominous thing was the determined way the swarm moved as if nothing
could divert it. It looked as if it might pour on beneath their feet forever.
"Something devastating must be happening in the ship!" Fermour
exclaimed. In that ghastly river, he drowned his last fear of those who had
once been his friends. This united them again.
"There's a tool kit in the air-lock cubicle," he said.
"I'll go and get it. There should be a saw in it. With that, we can cut
our way back to the main part of the ship."
He ran back the way they had come, returning with a clanking bag.
Fumbling it open, he produced an atomic handsaw with a circular blade field; it
crumbled away the molecular structure of a wall before their eyes. With a
shrill grinding sound, the instrument bit out a shaky circle in the metal. They
ducked through it, working their way almost by instinct to a known part of the
deck. The air as they walked grew staler, the dark was hazed with smoke— and a
familiar voice was calling for Complain.
In another moment, they rounded a bend at a trot, and there were Vyann
and Gregg. The girl threw herself into Complain's arms.
Hurriedly, he gave her his news. She told him of the devastation being
wrought on the twenties decks. Even as she
spoke, the lights around them glowed suddenly to great brilliance, then died, even the pilot lights fading out completely. At
the same time, the gravity blew; they sprawled uncomfortably in mid-air.
A groan rattled down the confines of the ship. For the very first time,
they perceived the vessel to give a lurch.
"The ship's doomed!" Fermour shouted.
"Those fools are destroying it! You've got nothing to fear from the Giants
now— by the time they get here, they'll be a rescue party, picking bodies out
of a wreck."
"The human predicament apart," Marapper said, "nothing is
hopeless. As I see it, we'd be safest in the Control Room. If I can only
control my feet, that's where I'm going."
"Good idea, priest," Gregg said. "I've had enough of
burning. It would be the safest place for Vyann, too."
"The Control Room!" Fermour said. "Yes, of course . . ."
Complain said nothing, silently abandoning his plan to take Fermour
before the Council; the hour was too late. Nor did there
seem, in the circumstances, any hope of repelling the Giants.
Clumsily, with agonizing slowness, the party covered the nine decks
which lay between them and the blister housing the ruined controls. At last
they hauled themselves up the spiral stairs and through the hole Vyann and
Complain had made earlier.
"That's funny," Marapper said. "Five of us started out
from Quarters to reach this place: finally, three of us have done it
together!"
"Much good may it do us," Complain said. "I never knew
why I followed you, priest."
"Born leaders need give no reasons," Marapper said modestly.
"No, this is where we should be," Fermour said with
excitement. He swung a flashlight around the vast chamber, taking in the fused
mass of panels. "Behind this wrecked facade, the controls are still sound.
Somewhere here is a device for closing off all interdeck doors; they're made of
hull metal, and it would be a long while before they'd burn. If I can find that
device . . ."
He waved the atomic saw to finish his meaning, searching already for the
board he wanted.
"The ship must be saved!" he said, "and there is a chance
we can do it, if we can only separate the decks."
"All we want it to do now is hold together until we can get off
it."
"You can't get off it," Fermour said. "You'd better
realize the fact. You must none of you reach Earth. The ship is where you
belong and stay. This is a nonstop trip: there is no Journey's End."
Complain whirled around on him.
"Why do you say that?" he asked. His voice was so charged with
emotion that it sounded flat.
"It's not my doing," Fermour said hastily, scenting trouble.
"It's just that this situation is too formidable for any of you. The ship
was the edict of the World Government which set up the Little Dog authority to
control this ship."
Complain's gesture was angry, but Vyann's was supplicatory.
"Why?" she said. "Why must the ship stay here? It's so
cruel . . . We are Earth people. This terrible double journey to Procyon and
back— it's been made, and somehow it now seems we've survived it. Shouldn't— oh,
I don't know what happens on Earth, but shouldn't people have been glad to have
us back, happy, excited . . . ?”
"When this ship, 'Big Dog' —so christened in jocular allusion to
the constellation Little Dog for which it set out— was detected in Earth's
telescopes, finally returning from its long journey, everyone on Earth was, as
you say— happy, excited, marveling." Fermour paused. This event had taken
place before he was born, but the epic had often been retold to him.
"Signals were sent out to the ship," he continued; "they were
never answered. Yet the ship kept speeding on toward Earth. It seemed inexplicable.
We have passed the technological phase of our civilization, but nevertheless
factories were speedily built and a fleet of little ships launched toward 'Big
Dog.' They had to find out what was happening aboard.
"They matched velocities with this giant vessel, they boarded her.
They found— well, they found out about everything; they found that a new Dark
Ages had settled over the whole ship, as the result of an ancient
catastrophe."
"The Nine Day Ague!" Vyann breathed.
Fermour nodded, surprised she should know.
"The ship could not be allowed to go on," he said. "It
would have sped on forever through the galactic night. These controls were
discovered as you now see them: ruined— the work, presumably, of some poor
madman generations ago. So the Drive was switched off at source, and the ship
dragged into an orbit by the little ships which, using gravity for towlines,
acted as tugs."
"But— why leave us aboard?" Complain said. "Why did you
not take us down after the ship was in orbit? As Laur says, it was cruel— inhuman!"
Reluctantly, Fermour shook his head.
"The inhumanity was in the ship," he said. "You see, the crew who survived this Ague you seem to know about
had undergone a slight physiological modification; the new proteins permeating
every living cell in the ship increased their
metabolic rate. This increase, undetectable at first, has grown with every
generation, so that now you are all living at four times the speed you should
be."
He quailed with pity as he told them— but their looks held only
disbelief.
"You're lying to scare us," Gregg said, his eyes glittering
amid the wrappings of his face.
"I'm not," Fermour said. "Instead of a life expectation
for an average human of eighty years, yours is only twenty. The factor does not
spread itself evenly over your life: you tend to grow more quickly as children,
have a fairly normal adulthood, and then crumble suddenly in old age."
"We'd have noticed if this scoundrel scheme were so!" Marapper
howled.
"No," Fermour said. "You wouldn't. Though the signs were
all around you, you could not see them, because you have no standards of
comparison. For instance, you accepted the fact that one sleep-wake in four was
dark. Living at four times the normal rate, naturally four of your days or
sleep-wakes only made one ordinary one. When the ship was a going concern —on
the voyage out to Procyon— the lights automatically dimmed all over the vessel
from midnight to six, partly to give a friendly illusion of night, partly to
allow the servicers to work behind the scenes, making any necessary repairs.
That brief six-hour shift is a whole day to you."
Now the comprehension was growing on them. It seemed, oddly enough, to
soak from the inside to the outside, as if, in some mystical way, the truth had
been trapped in them all along. The awful pleasure of making them know the
worst —they who had tortured him— filled Fermour. He went on, suddenly keen to
make them see how damned they were.
"That's why Earthmen call you 'dizzies'; you live so fast, it makes
us dizzy. But that isn't all that is wrong! Imagine this great ship, still
automatically functioning despite the lack of anyone to control it. It supplied
everything: except the things which, by its nature, it could not supply, fresh
vitamins, fresh air, fresh sunlight. Each of your
succeeding generations becomes smaller; Nature survives how she may, and that
was her way of doing it, by cutting down on the required materials. Other
factors, such as inbreeding, have changed you until— well, it was decided you
were virtually a separate race. In fact, you had adapted so well to your
environment, it was doubtful if you would be able to survive if transferred
down on Earth!"
Now they had it, knowing it right down to the pits of their stomachs.
Fermour turned from their sealed faces, ashamed of himself for feeling triumph.
Methodically, he resumed prodding around for the particular panel he wanted. He
found it, and they were still all standing in choked silence. Using the saw, he began to work away the seared
casing.
"So we're not human beings at all . . ." Complain exclaimed,
as if speaking to himself. "That's what you're
saying. All that we've suffered, hoped, done . .
."
As his voice fell, they all heard the noise. It was the noise they had
heard by the personnel lock, the noise of a million rats, flowing irresistibly
through the hard honeycomb of the ship.
"They're heading here!" Fermour yelled. "They're coming
this way! It's a dead end. They'll swamp us! We'll be torn to pieces!"
Now he had the casing off, tearing it away with his hands, flinging it
behind him. Beneath it, severed from their toggles,
lay eighty-four double strands of wire. Using the side of his saw, Fermour
frantically bashed the pairs together.
Gasping, Fermour rocked back against the paneling. He had worked the
trick just in time. The thought of the horrible death he had so narrowly
avoided overcame him, and he was sick on the floor.
"Look at him, Roy!" Gregg shouted, pointing his sound hand in
scorn. "You were wrong about us, Roy! We're as good as he is, or better.
He's scared green . . ."
He advanced to Fermour, clenching his one good fist; Marapper followed,
dragging out a knife.
"Someone's got to be sacrificed for all this deadly wrong,"
the priest said, through clenched teeth, "and it's going to be you, Fermour—
you're going to make the Long Journey on behalf of twenty-three generations of
suffering! It would be a nice gesture."
Dropping the saw helplessly, Fermour stood there without defense. He did
not move or speak; it was almost as if he saw the priest's point of view.
Marapper and Gregg came on. Complain and Vyann stood unmoving behind them.
As Marapper's blade came up, an unexpected clangor filled the dome
beneath which they were grouped. Mysteriously, the shutters, closed since the
days of Captain Gregory Complain, sprang back to reveal the long windows. Three
quarters of a great sphere all around the five of them was turned in a
twinkling into space. Through the hyaline tungsten, the universe breathed in at
them; on one side of the ship, the sun burned tall and strong; on the other,
Earth and moon were radiant globes.
"How did that happen?" Vyann asked, as the clattering echoes
died.
They looked around uneasily. Nothing stirred.
Rather sheepishly, Marapper tucked his knife away. The view was too
mighty to be stained with blood. Gregg, too, turned away from Fermour. Sunlight
washed over them, seeming to deafen them. Fermour at last managed to speak.
"It'll be all right," he said quietly. "None of us needs
to be worried. The ship will come up from Little Dog and put the fire out and
kill the rats and tidy things up, and then we'll open up the decks again and
you'll be able to go on living as before."
"Never!" Vyann said. "Some of us have devoted our lives to getting out of
this tomb. We'll die sooner than stay!"
"That's what I was afraid of," Fermour said, almost to
himself. "We've always thought this day might come. It's not entirely
unprepared for— others before you have found out vital secrets, but we've
always managed to silence them in time. Now . . . well, you might be all right
on Earth: we have taken some of your babies down there, and they've survived,
but we've always––"
"We!" Vyann exclaimed. "You keep saying 'we'! But you are an Outsider,
an ally of the Giants. What relation are you to true Earthmen?"
Fermour laughed without humor.
"Outsiders and Giants are true Earthmen," he said. "When
Big Dog was towed into orbit, we —Earth— fully realized our grave
responsibility to you all. Doctors and teachers were your especial need. Holy
men were required, to counter the irreligion of the Teaching— which, vile
though it was, undoubtedly assisted your survival in some measure. But there
were snags: people could not just creep into the air locks and mingle with you,
easy though that was, with the inspection-way system and the hydroponic tangles
to shelter them. They had to be trained at Little Dog Institute to move and
speak as quickly as possible, to sleep in cat naps, to— oh, in short to act
like dizzies. And to bear the horrible stench in the ship.
And, of course, they had to be abnormally small men, since none of you is above
five feet high.
"Some of these men, performing a dangerous mission, you knew and
liked. Lindsey and Meller, the artist, were both Earthmen stationed in
Quarters— Outsiders, but your friends."
". . . and you," Complain said. He made a sweeping gesture
before his face; a moth circled there, eluding his hand.
"I'm an anthropologist," Fermour said, "although I also
tried to help spread the light. There are several of us aboard. This is a
unique chance to discover the effects of a closed environment on man; it has
taught us more about man and society than we have been able to learn on Earth
for centuries.
"Zac Deight was head of everyone on board whom you would call
Outsiders. Our usual term of field work aboard is two years— my time is nearly
up. The field work has its personal rewards: it's arduous, yet not particularly
dangerous, unless one runs against efficient people like Scoyt. Zac Deight
loved dizzies— loved you. He stayed in the ship long beyond his term, to try
and soften conditions and lead Forwards's thought back into more normal
channels— in which he was very successful, as you can see if you compare
conditions in Forwards with conditions in a Deadways tribe like Quarters."
Discomfort rose in Complain at this, to recall how he and Marapper had
shot down the old councillor without compunction.
"I suppose, then, that Giants are just big humans?" he said,
deflecting the subject of conversation.
"They're just normal-size humans," Fermour said. "Six-footers and such. They did not have to be picked
for small stature, since they were never meant to be seen by you, unlike
Outsiders; they were the maintenance crew who came aboard when the ship was in
orbit and began, secretly, to make the place more suitable for you to live in.
They sealed off these controls, in case anybody finding them should start
wondering about things; for although we always tried to foster in you the
knowledge that you are in a ship —in case a day ever came when you might be
able to leave it— the maintenance crews were always careful to destroy any
direct evidence which might, by inducing you to investigate on your own
account, make their job more dangerous.
"The rings we and what you call the 'Giants' wear are replicas of
the same ring-key the original maintenance crews wore when the ship was a going
concern. They, and the inspection-ways to which they give access, have made
life aboard with you possible. It means we can have —and occasionally slip away
to— a secret H.Q. on the ship, with food and baths,"
"So you were all just taking care of us! You didn't any of you want
to scare us, eh?" Gregg asked.
"Of course not," Fermour replied. "Our orders are
strictly not to kill a dizzy; none of us ever carries a lethal weapon. The
legend that Outsiders were spontaneously generated in the muck of the ponics
was purely a dizzy superstition. We did nothing to alarm, everything to
help."
Gregg laughed curtly.
"I see," he said. "Just a bunch of wet nurses for us poor
dolts, eh? It never occurred to you that while you studied us we might be going
through hell? Look at me! Look at my
mate Hawl! Look at half the poor devils I had under me! And look at the ones so
deformed we put 'em out of their misery when we came across them in Deadways!
Let's see, seven off twenty-three . . . Yes, you let sixteen generations live
and die here, as near as this to earth, suffering the tortures we suffered, and
you think you deserve a medal for it! Give me that knife, Marapper."
"You've got it wrong!" Fermour shouted. "Complain, you
tell him! I've explained about the speed-up of your lives. Your generations are
so brief that twenty of them had passed before Big Dog was first boarded and
dragged into orbit. They're studying the main problem down in the laboratories
of Little Dog all the while, that I swear to you. At
any time now, they may find a chemical agent which can be injected into you to
break down the alien peptic chains in your cells. Then you'd be free. Even now
. . ."
He broke off suddenly, staring.
They followed his gaze. Even Gregg looked around. Something like smoke,
filtering out into the blinding sunshine, rose from a gash in one of the
wrecked panels. It was composed of moths, thousands of them. They flew high
into the dome, circling toward the unexpected sun. Behind the first phalanx of
small ones came larger ones, struggling to get out of the hole in the panel.
Their endless squadrons, droning ahead of their rodent allies, had managed to
reach the spaces behind the control board before the rats gained this deck.
They poured forth in increasing numbers. Marapper pulled out his dazer and
downed them as they emerged. High voltage crackled behind the panels, where
other hordes of moths jammed naked connections, causing short circuits.
"Can they do any real damage?" Vyann asked Complain.
He shook his head uneasily, to show he did not know, fighting away the
feeling of having a skull stuffed with muslin.
"Here comes the ship!" Fermour said, pointing into the
gleaming dark. Tiny beside the bulk of the mother planet, a chip of light
seemed hardly to move toward them.
Head swimming, Vyann stared out at the bulk of their own ship, Big Dog.
Here, in this blister, they had a splendid view over its arching back. On
impulse, she kicked herself up to the top of the dome where the outlook was
still clearer; Complain swam up alongside, and they clung to one of the narrow
tubes into which the shutters had rolled themselves.
Vyann stared longingly out. The sight of the planet was like a
toothache; she had to look away.
"To think they'll come all the way up here from Earth and lock us
back away from the sun . . . ." she said.
"They won't— they can't." Complain said. "Fermour's only a fool: he doesn't know. When these others come, Laur,
they'll understand we've earned freedom, a right to try life on Earth.
Obviously they're not cruel or they'd never have taken so much trouble over us.
They'll see we'd rather die there than live here."
A startling explosion came from below them. Shards of metal paneling
blew out into the room, mingling with dead moths and smoke. Vyann and Complain
looked down to see Gregg and Fermour floating away to a far corner, away from
danger; the priest followed them more slowly— his cloak had been blown over his
head. Another explosion sounded, tossing out more dead moths, among which live
ones fluttered. Before too long, the Control Room would be packed with moths.
With this second explosion, a rumbling began far away in the middle bowels of the
ship, audible even through all the intervening doors, a rumble which, growing, seemed to express all the agony of the years. It
grew louder and louder until Complain felt his body tremble
with it.
Wordlessly, Vyann pointed to the outside of the ship. Fissures were
appearing like stripes all across its hull. After four and a half centuries,
Big Dog was breaking up; the rumbling was its death-cry, something at once
mighty and pathetic.
"It's the Emergency Stop!" Fermour shouted. His voice seemed
far away. "The moths have activated the Ultimate Emergency Stop! The
ship's splitting into its component decks!"
They could see it all. The fissures on that noble arch of back were
swelling into canyons. Then the canyons were gulfs of space. Then there was no
longer a ship: only eighty-four great coins, becoming smaller, spinning away
from one another, falling forever along an invisible pathway. And each coin was
a deck, and each deck was now a world of its own, and each deck, with its
random burden of men, animals, or ponics sailed away serenely around Earth,
buoyant as a cork in a fathomless sea.
"Now they'll have no alternative but to take us back to
Earth," Vyann said in a tiny voice. She looked at Complain; she tried,
woman-like, to guess at all the new interests that awaited them. She tried to
guess at the exquisite pressures which would attend the adjustment of every
ship-dweller to the sublimities of Earth. It was as if everyone was about to be
born, she thought, smiling into Complain's awakened face. He was her sort;
neither of them had ever been really sure of what it was they wanted: so they,
after all, had been the ones most likely to find it.
END OF STARSHIP
MICROCOSM
They
were humans —or so they believed— the grotesque result of a grandiose
experiment which had gone appallingly awry.
Trapped on a world that
was hurtling through space at a fantastic speed, they sought the riddle of
their heritage among the only companions they knew— ghosts, mutants, giants and
regimented rats.
This is one of the most
extraordinary novels ever written, the spine-tingling story of lost beings who
try to find themselves in a world gone mad.
❖ ❖
❖
BRIAN
ALDISS, one of the exciting new science fiction writers, was born and educated
in