All Judgment Fled (17 page)

 

 

For reasons which were both selfish and altruistic, McCullough did not
want that to happen. He wanted his own skin and the Ship to suffer the
minimum of damage. He realized suddenly that although he was terribly
afraid for his own immediate safety, he was furiously angry about the
things they had done and were doing on the Ship. From the very beginning
they had had no control of the situation. It had been a stupid, if
well-intentioned muddle, and while they had changed their minds several
times when new data became available, they had not really used their
brains. They had been panicked into doing things, they had not allowed
themselves time to think and when threatened with danger they had thought
only of their own survival. All things considered, as a sampling of the
species Homo so-called Sapiens, they had not made a good showing.

 

 

Suddenly McCullough was in position, looking across at Hollis who was
making slow, pushing motions with one hand. The physicist was reminding
him that they did not have to throw the weapons, merely launch them slowly
and accurately. While he watched, Hollis held up three fingers. The silence
was incredible. McCullough was holding his breath, but his pulse was
thunderous and he could almost hear himself sweating. Hollis showed two
fingers, one finger, then a balled fist. McCullough gently launched his
spear at the target that had been assigned to him.

 

 

The weapon which had once served as part of P-Two's launcher tube was
just long enough to make contact with both the figure-of-eight grid and
a nearby metal bulkhead, and for the first few seconds of its travel it
looked as if it would do so. But then it wobbled suddenly as one of the
magnetic eddies caught it, swinging it off course. One end touched the
grid and the other swung toward a fat, coppery spiral with a bright-blue
halo flickering around it. McCullough gripped the catwalk tightly and
managed to get his eyes closed just in time.

 

 

Even with the filtering effects of his tightly closed eyelids the flash
was blinding. Every nerve in his body received a jolt that was neither
pleasure, pain, pressure, heat nor cold but was much worse than anything
he had ever felt before in all his life. He stiffened so violently that
he bounced away from the catwalk. He felt something tugging at one boot
and the fear of being drawn in and electrocuted overcame his shocked
paralysis. He pulled both knees up and made frantic swimming motions in
an attempt to get away. But the tugging persisted. McCullough blinked
furiously to dissolve the blotches covering his field of vision and saw
that Hollis was gripping his boot and was towing him toward the safety
of the airlock.

 

 

By the time he was through, his eyes were almost back to normal. He could
see that the interior of the generator blister was again dull and lifeless.
There were no chimes reverberating along the corridors and the alien
voices were silent. With the interference gone, Walters was trying
to contact them, saying that he had seen a flash or an explosion and
were any of them alive. As soon as he had his visor open. Drew began
advising him strongly to establish a base in the adjacent lock chamber
with a view to discouraging any alien repair crew sent to rebuild the
sabotaged generator.

 

 

But McCullough's mind was still on an earlier train of thought. Bitterly
he said, "We're nothing but a bunch of stupid, well intentioned
bunglers! Surely, as intelligent beings, we could have evaluated and
entered a strange situation -- even an alien stress situation -- without
making it so much worse that -- that . . ."

 

 

He left the sentence dangling, then went on furiously, "We
know
there are intelligent aliens on this ship -- dammit, we've heard them
talking
! To them we must look like a race of juvenile delinquents
or worse. We must get out, leave the Ship at once. I'll request the
next supply rocket to carry spacesuits and food only. With the water
supply we've discovered, this will mean that we can leave shortly after
it arrives."

 

 

"And our intelligent, extraterrestrial crew, what about them?" Hollis
broke in scathingly. "They haven't shown themselves up to now -- at least,
we're fairly sure they haven't. Why not? Are they in some kind of trouble,
or are there too few of them to risk it? Are we going to leave them to
do the best they can with a Two-infested, crippled Ship?"

 

 

"We aren't delinquents and we're not stupid!" Berryman said angrily.
"If your e-t's are as intelligent as you say, Doctor, they will realize
that everything we did came about as a result of the local situation and
scientific curiosity allied to normal survival instincts! If they can't
understand anything as simple as that, then they're stupid, too stupid
to have built this Ship! But they did build it and so . . ."

 

 

"Kill every bloody one of them!" yelled Drew. "Wipe the buggers out!"

 

 

It was Walters who had the last word. Deafeningly, apologetically, with
the volume of his transmitter turned right up he said,
"I was set up
to rebroadcast your last words as the Ship carried you out of the solar
system to some dire, extraterrestrial fate. This spirited exchange of
ideas is being overheard by all the world.

 

 

"I don't think the general will approve of some of the
language
. . ."

 

 

 

 

chapter sixteen

 

 

On Earth there was only one subject which, day by day and hour by hour,
merited serious discussion, and that was the War on the Ship.

 

 

In this war there were no neutrals and no unaligned powers, even though
the people who made up the nations and even the individual families were
aligned several different ways at the same time. Everyone knew about the war,
of course. There were very few who did not find it interesting, at least,
while others found it so all-absorbing and exciting that they were quite
willing to argue and demonstrate and burn embassy buildings over it. But
the majority of people were simply worried about the safety of the men on
the Ship and concerned over the many things they seemed to be doing wrong.

 

 

Everything the men said or did was, from someone's point of view, wrong.

 

 

Those scientists who thought of their specialties as being 'hard' insisted
that more Ship time be devoted to gathering detailed information on
structural methods and design philosophy, the operating principles and
distribution of the vessel's power sources, and more, much more, data
on what everyone so loosely referred to as the hyperdrive generators
and the Ship's central control system. Then the scientists who were
less hard -- although not quite as soft as the Psychology crowd --
wanted more time spent in gathering information on extraterrestrial
biology and metabolism, environmental factors and e-t life-support
systems.
They
wanted autopsies performed on specimens other than
the Two. But it was the psychologists and their equally 'soft' relatives
in sociology and anthropology who seemed to be the least demanding and
at the same time the most positive in their recommendations.

 

 

For the psychologists were having a long succession of field days.
Not only were minor and major Ship incidents studied and evaluated and
discussed at great lenth, every single recorded word and inflection was
subjected to a most rigorous analysis. So much so that on one occasion a
short, odd-sounding laugh from Walters threw one group of space medics
into a near-panic for three days until they discovered that the high,
uneven pitch of the pilot's voice, so suggestive of hysteria and imminent
crack-up, was due to natural distortion in the incoming signal.

 

 

Despite the dropping of an occasional brick, the psychologists' picture
of conditions on the Ship, the interaction of the characters involved,
the general emotional and moral climate and the unique environmental
pressures to which the men were being subjected, was reasonably complete
and accurate and their recommendations sound.

 

 

At least, the psychologists considered them so . . .

 

 

The majority of these psychological discussions were broadcast on radio
and TV, of course, as was practically everything pertaining to the Ship.
But there was one group whose recommendations, by their very nature,
could not be made public -- even, and especially, if their recommendations
were to be adopted.

 

 

This group suggested that since the emotional situation arising out of
the environmental conditions on the Ship was known in broad outline and
the psychological makeup of the men currently inhabiting it was available
in great detail, it should be possible to devise certain stimuli which
would return a large measure of control to the Prometheus authorities
instead of allowing it to remain in the hands and ethically confused
minds of men who were too close to their problem to have a balanced
appreciation of it. They insisted that the problem was basically one of
psychological maladjustment and was solely their responsibility, and as
they were the people who would have to solve it, they did not think it
fair that they should have this responsibility without also being given
a measure of control over the situation.

 

 

They also mentioned the fact that the position of the sun with respect
to Earth and the P-ships would very shortly make direct communication
impossible. Outgoing messages, which hitherto had been receivable only
by the P-ships, as well as incoming signals, would have to be relayed
through the Russian circum-Venus station. The Russians were being very
generous with their facilities, but they would know every word that passed
in each direction and would undoubtedly use the information gained to
their own advantage to complicate an already overcomplicated political
situation. For this reason alone a decision on their recommendations
should be taken as soon as possible.

 

 

For the less emotionally mature, the Ship had replaced all the variations
of Cowboys and Indians. Day after day all over the world, Walters had his
suit slashed by the first Two, Colonel Morrison met his grisly death, and
McCullough, who was a difficult and unsatisfactory character for children
to portray, moved around doing nothing, apparently, but change his mind.

 

 

Between the children and the eggheads lay the tremendous multitude who
were only moderately adult and whose intelligence was average. These were
the people who listened avidly to what they referred to as the War News
and who greedily absorbed every fact and speculation that came from the
more informed commentators on the radio and TV, even though many of them
must have been aware that the commentators could not possibly be more
informed than their listeners.

 

 

They watched closely while the latest photographs and sketches -- tidied up
and dramatized a little for TV presentation -- were discussed by panels of
scientists from every field of knowledge and every degree of eminence.
They listened to so many analyses, theories, and predictions, they were
exposed to so many different opinions and viewpoints and ethical yardsticks
in so short a space of time that they were forced either to choose sides,
or to make up their own minds as to what was right or wrong or politically
expedient.

 

 

Some of them reacted by breaking windows and overturning cars, or agitated
for the Twos to be brought under the protection of the UN or the USPCA,
or started funds for sending comforts for the troops, well aware of the
utterly fantastic cost of sending even an ounce of comfort to those
fifty-million-mile-distant warriors. But there were others, not a great
number to begin with, who went through the intensely uncomfortable
business of thinking for themselves until the realization came that
their world had changed, that it was no longer
the
world but just
a world with all that that implied.

 

 

This small but rapidly growing faction was only one of the many pressure
groups who felt they had a say in the control of Prometheus.

 

 

The original idea in making every phase of the project open to the public
had been to arouse interest in space flight generally and to gain the
support of the voters for the enormous cost of the hardware -- in short,
a large-scale P.R. job. It was a noble project which had, unfortunately,
to be paid for by people who were not all noble. But now Prometheus had
gone sour, its Ship-side personnel seemed to be devolving into vicious
and sadistic killers while back at home nobility was breaking out in
some of the most unlikely places.

 

 

On Earth as well as on the Ship, Prometheus was getting out of control . . .

 

 

". . . While you were hunting for Ship water and hamstringing that
generator,"
General Brady's voice rattled at them,
"you had to be
rough on the aliens and their equipment. We aren't entirely blaming you
for this, but we think you are exercising far too much initiative. Public
opinion is hardening against you and against Prometheus as a whole,
even though the majority are still being thrilled by the 'war' and the
exploits of their scientist heroes. But this is a temporary, unstable,
even sick reaction. There is a steadily growing body of opinion which is
openly critical of your behavior. It accuses you, and through you us,
of behaving like barbarians! It insists that you are doing little more
than looting the Ship of its scientific booty.
"This has got to stop!"

 

 

A radio from one of the damaged suits floated near the outer wall of the
lock chamber, attached to the plating by its antenna lead. The natural
distortion caused by the helmet phones being overloaded so as to act
as loudspeakers was increased by the anger in General Brady's voice,
which carried clearly over fifty million miles.