Non-Stop (31 page)

Now they had it, knowing it right down to the pits of their stomachs. Fermour turned from their sealed faces, ashamed of himself for feeling triumph. Methodically, he resumed prodding about for the particular panel he wanted. He found it, and they were still all standing in choked silence. Using the saw, he began eagerly to work away the seared casing.

‘So we’re not human beings at all . . .’ Complain exclaimed, as if speaking to himself. ‘That’s what you’re saying. All that we’ve suffered, hoped, done, loved . . . it’s not been real. We’re just funny little mechanical things, twitching in a frenzy, dolls activated by chemicals . . . Oh, my God!’

As his voice fell, they all heard the noise. It was the noise they had heard by the personnel lock, the noise of a million rats, flowing irresistibly through the hard honeycomb of the ship.

‘They’re heading here!’ Fermour yelled. ‘They’re coming this way! It’s a dead end. They’ll swamp us! We’ll be torn to pieces!’

Now he had the casing off, tearing it away with his hands, flinging it behind him. Beneath it, severed from their toggles, lay eighty-four double ranks of transistors. Using the side of his saw, Fermour frantically bashed the pairs together. Sparks flew and – the terrible sound of the rodent army cut off abruptly. Every deck was closed from its neighbour; all the inter-deck doors, on every level, had clicked firmly shut, tombing off further communication.

Gasping, Fermour rocked back against the panelling. He
had worked the trick just in time. The thought of the horrible death he had so narrowly avoided overcame him, and he was sick on the floor.

‘Look at him, Roy!’ Gregg shouted, pointing his sound hand in scorn. ‘You were wrong about us, Roy! We’re as good as he, or better. He’s scared green . . .’

He advanced to Fermour, clenching his one good fist; Marapper followed, dragging out a knife.

‘Someone’s got to be sacrificed for all this deadly wrong,’ the priest said, through clenched teeth, ‘and it’s going to be
you
, Fermour – you’re going to make the Long Journey on behalf of twenty-three generations of suffering! It would be a
nice
gesture.’

Dropping the saw helplessly, Fermour just stood there without defence. He did not move or speak; it was almost as if he saw the priest’s point of view. Marapper and Gregg came on. Complain and Vyann stood unmoving behind them.

As Marapper’s blade came up, an unexpected clangour filled the dome beneath which they were grouped. Mysteriously, the shutters, closed since the days of Captain Gregory Complain, sprang back to reveal the long windows. Three-quarters of a great sphere all round the five of them was turned in a twinkling into space. Through the hyaline tungsten, the universe breathed in at them; on one side of the ship, the sun burned tall and strong; on the other, Earth and moon were radiant globes.

‘How did that happen?’ Vyann asked, as the clattering echoes died.

They looked round uneasily. Nothing stirred.

Rather sheepishly, Marapper tucked his knife away. The view was too mighty to be stained with blood. Gregg, too, turned away from Fermour. Sunlight washed over them, seeming to deafen them. Fermour at last managed to speak.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he said quietly. ‘None of us need to be worried. The ship will come up from Little Dog and put the
fire out and kill the rats and tidy things up, and then we’ll open up the decks again and you’ll be able to go on living as before.’

‘Never!’ Vyann said. ‘Some of us have devoted our lives to getting out of this tomb. We’ll die sooner than stay!’

‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ Fermour said, almost to himself. ‘We’ve always thought this day might come. It’s not entirely unprepared for – others before you have found out vital secrets, but we’ve always managed to silence them in time. Now . . . Well, you might be all right on Earth: we have taken some of your babies down there, and they’ve survived, but we’ve always –’

‘We!’ Vyann exclaimed. ‘You keep saying “we”! But you are an Outsider, an ally of the Giants. What relation are you to true Earthmen?’

Fermour laughed without humour.

‘Outsiders and Giants are true Earthmen,’ he said. ‘When “Big Dog” was towed into orbit, we – Earth – fully realized our grave responsibility to you all. Doctors and teachers were your especial need. Holy men were required, to counter the vile irreligion of the Teaching – which, vile though it was, undoubtedly assisted your survival in some measure. But there were snags: the doctors and people could not just creep into the air locks and mingle with you, easy though that was, with the inspection way system and the hydroponic tangles to shelter them. They had to be trained at Little Dog Institute to move and speak as quickly as possible, to sleep in catnaps, to – oh, in short to act like dizzies. And to bear the horrible stench in the ship. And, of course, they had to be abnormally small men, since none of you are above five feet high.

‘Some of these men, performing a dangerous mission, you knew and liked. Doctor Lindsey and Meller, the artist, were both Earthmen stationed in Quarters – Outsiders, but your friends.’

‘. . . And you,’ Complain said. He made a sweeping gesture before his face; a moth circled there, eluding his hand.

‘I’m an anthropologist,’ Fermour said, ‘although I also tried to help spread the light. There are several of us aboard. This is a unique chance to discover the effects of a closed environment on man; it has taught us more about man and society than we have been able to learn on Earth for centuries.

‘Zac Deight was head of everyone on board whom you would call Outsiders. Our usual term of field work aboard is two years – my time is nearly up, but I can’t stay here now; I shall go back home and write a thesis on being an Outsider. The field work has its personal rewards: it’s arduous, yet not particularly dangerous, unless one runs against efficient people like Scoyt. Zac Deight loved dizzies – loved you. He stayed in the ship long beyond his term, to try and soften conditions and lead Forwards’ thought back into more normal channels – in which he was very successful, as you can see if you compare conditions in Forwards with conditions in a Deadways tribe like Quarters.

‘He was a wonderful man, Zac Deight, a humanist like Schweitzer in the twentieth or Turnball in the twenty-first century. Perhaps I shall amass his biography when I’ve finished my thesis.’

Discomfort rose in Complain at this, to recall how he and Marapper had shot down the old councillor without compunction.

‘I suppose, then, that Giants are just big humans?’ he said, deflecting the subject of conversation.

‘They’re just normal-size humans,’ Fermour said. ‘Six-footers and up. They did not have to be picked for small stature, since they were never meant to be seen by you, unlike Outsiders; they were the maintenance crew who came aboard when the ship was in orbit and began, secretly, to make the place more suitable and comfortable for you to live in. They sealed off these controls, in case anybody finding them should start wondering about things; for although we always tried to foster in you the knowledge that you are in a ship – in case a day ever came when you might be able to leave it – the
maintenance crews were always careful to destroy any direct evidence which might, by inducing you to investigate on your own account, make their job more dangerous.

‘Mainly, however, their work was constructive. They repaired water and air ducts – you’ll remember, Roy, how you caught Jack Randall and Jock Andrews repairing a flood in the swimming bath. They killed off a lot of rats – but the rats were cunning; they and several other species of creature have changed since leaving Procyon V. Now we’ve got most of them trapped on Deck 2, we may be able to exterminate them
en masse
.

‘The rings we and what you call the “Giants” wear are replicas of the same ring-key the original maintenance crews wore when the ship was a going concern. They, and the inspection ways to which they give egress, have made life aboard with you possible. It means we can have – and occasionally slip away to – a secret H.Q. on the ship, with food and baths laid on there. That’s where Curtis is probably dying by now, unless closing the deck doors saved him.

‘Curtis is not the kind to make a success of his job; he’s too nervy. Under him, faults have crept in and discipline lapsed. The poor fellow Gregg speared – who had the laser which has caused so much damage – was working in Deadways alone, instead of being accompanied, as the rules stipulate. That was one of Curtis’s mistakes. All the same, I hope he’s safe.’

‘So you were all just taking care of us! You didn’t any of you want to scare us, eh?’ Gregg asked.

‘Of course not,’ Fermour replied. ‘Our orders are strictly not to kill a dizzy; none of us ever carry a lethal weapon. The legend that Outsiders were spontaneously generated in the muck of the ponics was purely a dizzy superstition. We did nothing to alarm, everything to help.’

Gregg laughed curtly.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Just a bunch of wet nurses for us poor dolts, eh? It never occurred to you, you big-hearted bastards, that while you cosseted and studied us we might be going through
hell? Look at me! Look at my mate Hawl! Look at half the poor devils I had under me! And look at the ones so deformed we put ’em out of their misery when we came across them in Deadways! Let’s see, seven off twenty-three . . . Yes, you let sixteen generations live and die here, as near as this to Earth, suffering the tortures we suffered, and you think you deserve a medal for it! Give me that knife, Marapper – I want a peep at the colour of this little bloody hero’s giblets.’

‘You’ve got it wrong!’ Fermour shouted. ‘Complain, you tell him! I’ve explained about the speed-up of your lives. Your generations are so brief that twenty of them had passed before “Big Dog” was first boarded and dragged into orbit. They’re studying the main problem down in the laboratories of Little Dog all the while, that I swear to you. At any time now, they may find a chemical agent which can be injected into you to break down the alien peptic chains in your cells. Then you’d be free. Even now –’

He broke off suddenly, staring.

They followed his gaze. Even Gregg looked round. Something like smoke, filtering out into the blinding sunshine, rose from a gash in one of the wrecked panels.

‘Fire!’ Fermour said.

‘Rubbish!’ Complain said. He pushed himself towards the growing cloud. It was composed of moths, thousands of them. They flew high into the dome, circling towards the unexpected sun. Behind the first phalanx of small ones came larger ones, struggling to get out of the hole in the panel. Their endless squadrons, droning ahead of their rodent allies, had managed to reach the spaces behind the control board before the rats gained this deck. They poured forth in increasing numbers. Marapper pulled out his dazer and downed them as they emerged.

A bemused sensation furred over all their brains, half sentient ghost thoughts emanating from the mutated swarm. Dazedly, Marapper ceased firing, and the moths poured out again. High voltage crackled behind the panels, where other
hordes of moths jammed naked connections, causing short circuits.

‘Can they do any real damage?’ Vyann asked Complain.

He shook his head uneasily, to show he did not know, fighting away the feeling of having a skull stuffed with muslin.

‘Here comes the ship!’ Fermour said relievedly, pointing into the gleaming dark. Tiny beside the bulk of the mother planet, a chip of light seemed hardly to move towards them.

Head swimming, Vyann stared out at the bulk of their own ship, ‘Big Dog’. Here, in this blister, they had a splendid view over its arching back. On impulse, she kicked herself up to the top of the dome where the outlook was still clearer; Complain swam up alongside, and they clung to one of the narrow tubes into which the shutters had rolled themselves. The moths, it suddenly occurred to her, must accidentally have activated the shutters in their struggle behind the controls. Now the moths whirred about them, uniformly radiating hope.

Vyann stared longingly out. The sight of the planet was like toothache; she had to look away.

‘To think they’ll come all the way up here from Earth and lock us back away from the sun . . .’ she said.

‘They won’t . . . they can’t,’ Complain said. ‘Fermour’s only a fool: he doesn’t know. When these others come, Laur, they’ll understand we’ve earned freedom, a right to try life on Earth. Obviously they’re not cruel or they’d never have taken so much trouble over us. They’ll see we’d rather die there than live here.’

A startling explosion came from below them. Shards of plastic panelling blew out into the room, mingling with dead moths and smoke. Vyann and Complain looked down to see Gregg and Fermour floating away to a far corner, away from danger; the priest followed them more slowly – his cloak had been blown over his head. Another explosion sounded, tossing out more dead moths, among which live ones fluttered. Before too long, the control room would be packed with moths. With this second explosion, a rumbling began far away in the
middle bowels of the ship, audible even through all the intervening doors, a rumble which, growing, seemed to express all the agony of the years. It grew louder and louder until Complain felt his body tremble with it.

Wordlessly, Vyann pointed to the outside of the ship. Fissures were appearing like stripes all across its hull. After four and a half centuries, ‘Big Dog’ was breaking up; the rumbling was its death-cry, something at once mighty and pathetic.

‘It’s the Emergency Stop!’ Fermour shouted. His voice seemed far away. ‘The moths have activated the Ultimate Emergency Stop! The ship’s splitting into its component decks!’