Starship Page 20

  "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, interrup
ted 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, Roy, please, I beg you. I've had enough of it all. I can't face it again."

  "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!"