Non-Stop (22 page)

‘These are minor matters. I was about to deal with a more serious one – the animals – when I was called. More later.

‘5.xii.2221. No time for diary logging. 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 university with me – is sick, but his underlings and Noah are doing good work. Drugs, however, seem ineffective on the suffering creatures. They have all been closed down now. If only they could talk! Agritechnics are co-operating 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.2221. Among the stack of routine reports on my monitor every morning is the sick report. On the 8th there were nine sick, yesterday nineteen, today forty-one – 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 virus which knocks out genetic material. Toynbee, as usual, was rather pompous and learned, but without definite knowledge; obviously, as he explains, whatever got into the animals has transferred to 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 paralysed. Sick Bay out of bounds to visitors.

‘14.xii.2221. Every child and adolescent aboard now lies locked 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.2221. Oh Lord, if You did not from its launching turn Your face from this ship, look upon us all now. It is nine days since the first nine sicknesses were reported. Eight of the afflicted 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. Three spoke up intelligently and said they felt better, the other six seemed delirious. The deaths occurred quietly, without struggle. Laboratory Deck has post-mortems on hand, Sheila Pesoli 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 ten more cases tomorrow. Infinite foreboding fills me.

‘One hundred and eighty-eight people are now prostrate, 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 Glasser, 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 eight who died this morning.

‘18.xii.2221. 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 one of twenty fresh 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 ten patients whose nine day cycle finished today, seven have died. The other three 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, Glasser, who was rather cold 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.

‘Ordinary earth-grown plants have shown roughly similar percentages of survival. Back-breaking work has gone on here;
the depleted staffs have coped nobly with the job of cleaning the acres of beds.

‘In the adjacent chambers, Montgomery showed me his hydroponics with pride. Completely recovered from chlorosis – if it was chlorosis – they are more vigorous than ever, and seem almost to have benefited from their version of the Nine Day Ague. Five types of oxygenator are grown: two “wet,” one “semi-wet” and two “dry” varieties. One of these dry varieties in particular, an edible variety modified centuries ago from ground elder, is growing luxuriantly and shows a tendency to flow out from its gravel beds over the deck. Temperatures in Floriculture are being kept high; Montgomery thinks it helps.

‘Phoned Laboratories. Research promise (as they have before) to produce a cure for our plague tomorrow; unfortunately most of the scientists there are down with the Ague, and a woman called Besti is trying to run things.

‘21.xii.2221. I have left the Control Room – perhaps for good. The shutters have been closed against the ghastly stars. Gloom lies thick over the ship. Over half our population has the Nine Day Ague; out of sixty-six who have completed the full cycle, forty-six have died. The percentage of deaths is dropping daily, but the survivors seem comatose. Sheila Pesoli, for instance, hardly stirs.

‘Managing any sort of organization becomes increasingly hard. Contact with further parts of the ship is virtually lost, vital cable complexes having been destroyed. 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’s gravity.

‘This pessimism is weakness: even Yvonne cannot cheer me.

‘Research has now identified the causal virus; somehow that
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 rewatered. 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 – to use a mild word – insipid.

‘The new water, ferried up from the streams of Procyon V, 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 irrelevent in our present extremity. In simple terms, viral proteins were suspended in the water in molecular solutions, and so slipped through our filters.

‘June Besti, in Research, a bright and conceited young thing whose hyper-agoraphobia rendered her unable to join her husband on Procyon V, explained the whole chain of events to me in words of one syllable. 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 turned up in the water from Procyon V. It served as a vector for the fatal virus.

‘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 and the virus proliferates. 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 viral development or free-building molecules.

‘By now, the settlement on the new world must be in as sad a state as we. At least they have the privilege of dying in the open air.

‘22.xii.2221. I had no time to finish yesterday. Today there seems to be all the time in the world. Fourteen more deaths reported this morning by a tired Toynbee. 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 Besti 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 viral depredations; they will eventually break them down if the constitution concerned is elastic enough: “another little virus won’t do us any harm”, Miss Besti pertly 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 bestine (this bright 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 to bestine and, once adapted, seem to thrive. The animals, varying with their species, have adapted, though only the pig colony actually seems exhuberant. All survivals, Besti 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 ten degree temperature increase from Inboard Power for the whole ship. That is literally the only step we have been able to take to help . . .

‘It looks as if the more complex the organism, the more difficulty it has in rejecting to the new proteins and viruses. Bad luck on man: in particular, us.

‘24.xii.2221. Toynbee has the Ague. So has Montgomery. They are two of only five new victims this morning. The freak proteins seem to have done the worst of their work. Trying to analyse the reports Sick Bay still heroically send in, I find that the older the person, the better he holds out to begin with and the less chance he stands of surviving once the virus develops. I asked Besti about this when she came, quite voluntarily, to see me (she has made herself I/C Research, and I can only bless her efficiency); she thinks the figures are not significant – the young survive most things better than older people.

‘Little Sheila Pesoli 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 dreary disks compiled 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 armourer. They ran amok with the few hand-atomic weapons not landed on P.V., 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.2221. 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 round and head back for New Earth! It took some time to make them understand that the manoeuvre of deflecting the ship through 180 degrees when it is travelling at its present speed of roughly 1328.5 times EV (Earth) would take about five years. Finally, by demonstrating stream factors, 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 Besti, 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 round the low-number decks. They’ve got at the liquor supplies.

‘26.xii.2221. We have now what may be termed six complete recoveries, including 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.