Non-Stop (30 page)

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 ruddy 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, Inspector,’ 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 all for it now. This is Lights Out. 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 burnt-out body of Zac Deight, Complain roved round 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 ante-room 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!

He 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 gentle interrogations of Scoyt and his friends, rapidly interrupted though they had been by the Giants coming to his deliverance, had removed most of the skin from Fermour’s back, as well as a percentage of his moral fibre. He had been left cowering here, 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, episcopal 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 and banging dandruff from his shoulders. He manoeuvred 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 towards 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 torch; none faltered in their rapid advance towards the bow of the ship. Brown rats, small rats, grey rats, tawny rats, some with belongings strapped to their backs, 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 really devastating must be happening in the ship!’ Fermour exclaimed. In that ghastly fur 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 hand saw 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. As if the ship had come to life while they were in the air lock, a faint hammering filled everywhere like an irregular heartbeat; Scoyt’s wreckers were busily at work. 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 about them glowed suddenly to great brilliance, then died, even the pilot lights fading completely out. At the same time, the gravity blew; they sprawled uncomfortably in mid-air.

Welling, it seemed, from the lungs of a whale, 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 desiccated bodies out of a wreck.’

‘You’ll never drag Roger Scoyt from the job he’s doing,’ Vyann said grimly.

‘Holy smother!’ Complain said. ‘This whole situation is just hopeless!’

‘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 panting 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 torch round 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 inter-deck 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.’

‘Damn the ship!’ Marapper said. ‘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 non-stop trip: there is no Journey’s End.’

Complain whirled round 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 is in an orbit round Earth, and there it must stay. That 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, marvelling.’ 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 towards 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 towards “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 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 virus 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 round 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 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 we proper Earthmen call you “dizzies”: you live so fast, it makes us dizzy. But that isn’t all that is wrong with you! 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!’