Non-Stop (29 page)

‘Wait!’ Marapper said urgently. ‘Roy, as guile’s my guide, I swear this wretch has something tricky up his stinking sleeves for us. He’s leading us into danger.’

‘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 torch 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 armour against one wall. Except for the suits, there was only one other object in the room: the radio, a small, portable job 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 co-efficient 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 colours 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.

‘Holy smother!’ Marapper exclaimed, staggered. ‘It’s round! Somehow I’d always expected it would be square – like a big pilot light!’

Zac Deight had gone over to the radio. As he picked it up, tremblingly, 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. It’s just one of those cruel things.’

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, Roy!’ he gasped. ‘You’ve gone crazy! You were throttling him to death.’

‘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, Roy. You can kill him and ask questions after.’

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 on to them right quick and say – say some of your men are ill and they’ve got to send a ship straight away to fetch them down to Earth. 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 favourite 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 arm, 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 narrow 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 plastic box said: ‘Hullo, Big Dog. Little Dog here, receiving you loud and clear. Back.’

‘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
! Help! Help! The dizzies are loose! Come armed! The dizzies – aaargh! . . .’

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, you stinking scab-devourers! 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 cancelled 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 burnt 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 of Master Scoyt’s stormtroopers. Now 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 compartments 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, black as a pot, 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 a ferocity terrible to watch.

His first move had been to have executed without further ado the two women and four men whom Pagwam, with 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 randomly 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 enough with runaway voltage to make five dead men – girders of tough hull metal, the very skeleton of the ship, jutted solidly in all directions. From them projected icicles of lighter metals and plastics 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 there, my boys!’ Hawl shouted. ‘There’s blood to fill your supper bowls with this sleep.’ With practised aim he sliced down one more partition. Shouts of excitement went up from the men round him. They worked tirelessly, swooping among the iron carcass.

Vyann could not stay there watching Scoyt. The lines on his face, rendered terrible by torch- and fire-light, 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 little 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 clamour of demolition, quietly, 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 moulds of repression even as Complain had done: 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 as dependable as the sunrise – had failed to come on again; Vyann switched on the torch 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 trap-doors 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 leapt 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 ripe lower lip, feeling the deck hot beneath her feet.