by Jerry eBooks
BOBO trotted away, closing the door behind him. JoeJim turned to the captive and prodded him with his foot. “Speak up,” said Jim. “Who the Huff are you?”
The young man shivered, put a hand to his head, then seemed suddenly to bring his surroundings into focus, for be scrambled to his feet, moving awkwardly. against the low weight conditions of this level, and reached for his knife.
It was not at his belt.
Joe-Jim had his own out and brandished it. “Be good and you won’t get hurt. What do they call you?” The young man wet his lips, and his eyes hurried about the room. “Speak up,” said Joe.
“Why bother with him?” inquired Jim. “I’d say he was only good for meat. Better call Bobo back.”
“No hurry about that,” Joe answered. “I want to talk to him. What’s your name?”
The prisoner looked again at the kife and muttered, “Hugh Hoyland.”
“That doesn’t tell us much,” Jim commented. “What d’you do? What village do you come from? And what were you doing in mutie country?” But this time Hoyland was sullen. Even the prick of the knife against his ribs caused him only to bite his lips. “Shucks,” said Joe, “he’s only a stupid peasant. Let’s drop it.”
“Shall we finish him off?”
“No. Not now. Shut him up.”
Joe-Jim opened the door of a small side compartment, and urged Hugh in with the knife. He then closed and fastened the door and went back to his game. “Your move, Jim.”
The compartment in which Hugh was locked was dark. He soon satisfied himself by touch that the smooth steel walls were entirely featureless save for the solid, securely fastened door. Presently he lay down on the deck and gave himself up to fruitless thinking.
He had plenty of time to think, time to fall asleep and awaken more than once. And time to grow very hungry and very, very thirsty.
When Joe-Jim next took sufficient interest in his prisoner to open the door of the cell, Hoyland was not immediately in evidence. He had planned many times what he would do when the door opened and his chance came, but when the event arrived, he was too weak, semi-comatose. Joe-Jim dragged him out. The disturbance roused him to partial comprehension. He sat up and stared around him. “Ready to talk?” asked Jim. Hoyland opened his mouth but no words came out.
“Can’t you see he’s too dry to talk?” Joe told his twin. Then to Hugh: “Will you talk if we give you some water?”
Hoyland looked puzzled, then nodded vigorously.
Joe-Jim returned in a moment with a mug of water. Hugh drank greedily, paused, and seemed about to faint.
Joe-Jim took the mug from him. “That’s enough for now,” said Joe. “Tell us about yourself.”
Hugh did so. In detail, being prompted from time to time by questions from one of the twins, or a kick against his shin.
HUGH ACCEPTED a de facto condition of slavery with no particular resistance and no great disturbance of soul. The word ‘slave’ was not in his vocabulary, but the condition was a commonplace in everything he had ever known. There had always been those who gave orders and those who carried them out; he could imagine no other condition, no other type of social organization. It was a fact of life.
Though naturally he thought of escape.
Thinking about it was as far as he got. Joe-Jim guessed his thoughts and brought the matter out into the open. Joe told him, “Don’t go getting ideas, youngster. Without a knife you wouldn’t get three levels away in this part of the Ship. If you managed to steal a knife from me, you still wouldn’t make it down to high-weight. Besides, there’s Bobo.”
Hugh waited a moment, as was fitting, then said, “Bobo?”
Jim grinned and replied, “We told Bobo that you were his to butcher, if he liked, if you ever stuck your head out of our compartments without us. Now he sleeps outside the door and spends a lot of his time there.”
“It was only fair,” put in Joe. “He was disappointed when we decided to keep you.”
“Say,” suggested Jim, turning his bead toward his brother’s, “how about some fun?” He turned back to Hugh. “Can you throw a knife?”
“Of course,” Hugh answered.
“Let’s see you. Here.” Joe-Jim handed him their own knife. Hugh accepted it, jiggling it in his band to try its balance. “Try my mark.”
Joe-Jim had a plastic target. set up at the far end of the room from his favorite chair, on which he was wont to practice his own skill. Hugh eyed it, and, with an arm motion too fast to follow, let fly. He used the economical underhand stroke, thumb on the blade, fingers together. The blade shivered in the target, well centered in the chewed-up area which marked Joe-Jim’s best efforts. “Good boy!” Joe approved. “What do you have in mind, Jim?”
“Let’s give him the knife and see how far he gets.”
“No,” said Joe, “I don’t agree.”
“Why not?”
“If Bobo wins, we’re out one servant. If Hugh wins, we lose both Bobo and him. It’s wasteful.”
“Oh, well, if you insist.”
“I do. Hugh, fetch the knife.”
Hugh did so. It had not occurred to him to turn the knife against Joe-Jim. The master was the master. For servant to attack master was not simply repugnant to good morals, it was an idea so wild that it did not occur to him at all.
HUGH had expected that Joe-Jim would be impressed by his learning as a scientist. It did not work out that way. Joe-Jim, especially Jim, loved to argue. They sucked Hugh dry in short order and figuratively cast him aside. Hoyland felt humiliated. After all, was he not a scientist? Could he not read and write?
“Shut up,” Jim told Hugh. “Reading is simple. I could do it before your father was born. D’you think you’re the first scientist that has served me? Scientists—bah! A pack of ignoramuses!” In an attempt to reestablish his own intellectual conceit, Hugh expounded the theories of the younger scientists, the strictly matter-of-fact, hard-boiled realism which rejected all religious interpretation and took the Ship as it was. He confidently expected Joe-Jim to approve such a point of view; it seemed to fit their temperaments. They laughed in his face.
“Honest,” Jim insisted, when be bad ceased snorting, “are you young punks so stupid as all that? Why you’re worse than your elders.”
“But you just got through saying,” Hugh protested in hurt tones, “that all our accepted religious notions are so much bunk. That is just what my friends think. They want to junk all that old nonsense.”
Joe started to speak; Jim cut in ahead of him. “Why bother with him, Joe? He’s hopeless.”
“No, he’s not. I’m enjoying this. He’s the first one I’ve talked with in I don’t know how long who stood any chance at all of seeing the truth. Let us be—I want to see whether that’s a head he has on his shoulders, or just a place to hang his ears.”
“O.K.,” Jim agreed, “but keep it quiet. I’m going to take a nap.” The lefthand head closed its eyes, soon it was snoring. Joe and Hugh continued their discussion in whispers.
“The trouble with you youngsters,” Joe said, “is that if you can’t understand a thing right off, you think it can’t be true. The trouble with your elders is, anything they didn’t understand they reinterpreted to mean something else and then thought they understood it. None of you has tried believing clear words the way they were written and then tried to understand them on that basis. Oh, no, you’re all too bloody smart for that! If you can’t see it right off, it ain’t so; it must mean something different.”
“What do you mean?” Hugh asked suspiciously.
“Well, take the Trip, for instance. What does it mean to you?
“Well, to my mind, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a piece of nonsense to impress the peasants.”
“And what is the accepted meaning?”
“Well, it’s where you go when you die, or rather what you do. You make the Trip to Centaurus.”
“And what is Centaurus?”
“It’s—mind you, I’m just tel
ling you the orthodox answers; I don’t really believe this stuff—it’s where you arrive when you’ve made the Trip, a place where everybody’s happy and there’s always good eating.” Joe snorted. Jim broke the rhythm of his snoring, opened one eye, and settled back again with a grunt.
“That’s just what I mean,” Joe went on in a lower whisper. “You don’t use your head. Did it over occur to you that the Trip was just what the old books said It was: the Ship and all the Crew actually going somewhere, moving?” Hoyland thought about it. “You don’t mean for me to take you seriously. Physically, it’s an impossibility. The Ship can’t go anywhere. It already is everywhere. We can make a trip through it, but the Trip, that has to have a spiritual meaning, if it has any.”
Joe called on Jordan to support him. “Now, listen,” he said, “get this through that thick head of yours. Imagine a place a lot bigger than the Ship, a lot bigger, with the Ship inside it, moving. D’you get it?”
Hugh tried. He tried very hard. He shook his bead. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “There can’t be anything bigger than the Ship. There wouldn’t be any place for it to be.”
“Oh, for Huff’s sake! Listen. Outside the Ship, get that? Straight down beyond the level in every direction. Emptiness out there. Understand me?”
“But there isn’t anything below the lowest level. That’s why it’s the lowest level.”
“Look. If you took a knife and started digging a hole in the floor of the lowest level, where would it get you?”
“But you can’t. It’s too hard.”
“But suppose you did and it made a hole. Where would that hole go? Imagine it.”
Hugh shut his eyes and tried to imagine digging a hole in the lowest level. Digging as if it were soft, soft as cheese. He began to get some glimmering of a possibility, a possibility that was unsettling, soul-shaking. He was falling, falling into a hole that he had dug which had no levels under it. He opened his eyes very quickly. “That’s awful!” he ejaculated. “I won’t believe it.”
Joe-Jim got up. “I’ll make you believe it,” he said grimly, “if I have to break your neck to do it.” He strode over to the outer door and opened it. “Bobo!” he shouted.
“Bobo!”
Jim’s head snapped erect. “Wassa matter? Wha’s going on?”
“We’re going to take Hugh to no-weight.”
“What for?”
“To pound some sense into his silly head.”
“Some other time.”
“No, I want to do it now.”
“All right, all right. No need to shake. I’m awake now anyhow.”
JOE-JIM GREGORY was almost as nearly unique in his—or their—mental ability as he was in his bodily construction. Under any circumstances he would have been a dominant personality; among the muties it was inevitable that he should bully them, order them about, and live on their services. Had he had the will-to-power, it is conceivable that he could have organized the muties to fight and overcome the Crew proper.
But he lacked that drive. He was by native temperament an intellectual, a bystander, an observer. He was interested in the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’ but his will to action was satisfied with comfort and convenience alone.
Had he been born two normal twins and among the Crew, it is likely that he would have drifted into scientisthood as the easiest and most satisfactory answer to the problem of living and as such would have entertained himself mildly with conversation and administration. As it was, he lacked mental companionship and had whiled away three generations reading and rereading books stolen for him by his stooges.
The two halves of his dual person had argued and discussed what they had read, and had almost inevitably arrived at a reasonably coherent theory of history and the physical world, except in one respect. The concept of fiction was entirely foreign to them; they treated the novels that had been provided for the Jordan expedition in exactly the same fashion that they did text and reference books.
This led to their one major difference of opinion. Jim regarded Allan Quartermain as the greatest man who had ever lived; Joe held out for John Henry.
They were both inordinately fond of poetry; they could recite page after page of Kipling, and were nearly as fond of Rhysling, the blind singer of the spaceways.
BOBO backed in. Joe-Jim hooked a thumb toward Hugh. “Look,” said Joe, “he’s going out.”
“Now?” said Bobo happily, and grinned, slavering.
“You and your stomach!” Joe answered, rapping Bobo’s pate with his knuckles. “No, you don’t eat him. You and him, blood brothers. Get it?”
“Not eat ‘im?”
“No. Fight for him. He fights for you.”
“O.K.” The pinhead shrugged his shoulders at the inevitable. “Blood brothers. Bobo know.”
“All right. Now we go up to the place-where-everybody-flies. You go ahead and make lookout.”
They climbed in single file, the dwarf running ahead to spot the lie of the land, Hoyland behind him, Joe-Jim bringing up the rear, Joe with eyes to the front, Jim watching their rear, head turned over his shoulder.
Higher and higher they went, weight slipping imperceptibly from them with each successive deck. They emerged finally into a level beyond which there was no further progress, no opening above them. The deck curved gently, suggesting that the true shape of the space was a giant cylinder, but overhead a metallic expanse which exhibited a similar curvature obstructed the view and prevented one from seeing whether or not the deck in truth curved back on itself.
There were no proper bulkheads; great stanchions, so huge and squat as to give an impression of excessive, unnecessary strength, grew thickly about them, spacing deck and overhead evenly apart.
Weight was imperceptible. If one remained quietly in one place, the undetectable residuum of weight would bring the body in a gentle drift down to the ‘floor,’ but ‘up’ and ‘down’ were terms largely lacking in meaning. Hugh did not like it; it made him gulp, but Bobo seemed delighted by it and not unused to it. He moved through the air like an uncouth fish, banking off stanchion, floor plate, and overhead as suited his convenience.
JOE-JIM set a course parallel to the common axis of the inner and outer cylinders, following a passageway formed by the orderly spacing of the stanchions. There were handrails set along the passage, one of which he followed like a spider on its thread. He made remarkable speed, which Hugh floundered to maintain. In time, be caught the trick of the easy, effortless, overhand pull, the long coast against nothing but air resistance, and the occasional flick of the toes or the hand against the floor. But he was much too busy to tell how far they went before they stopped. Miles, he guessed it to be, but he did not know.
When they did stop, it was because the passage, had terminated. A solid bulkhead, stretching away to right and left, barred their way. Joe-Jim moved along it to the right, searching.
He found what he sought, a man-sized door, closed, its presence distinguishable only by a faint crack which marked its outline and a cursive geometrical design on its surface. Joe-Jim studied this and scratched his righthand head. The two heads whispered to each other. Joe-Jim raised his hand in an awkward gesture.
“No, no!” said Jim. Joe-Jim checked himself. “How’s that?” Joe answered. They whispered together again, Joe nodded, and Joe-Jim again raised his hand.
He traced the design on the door without touching It, moving his forefinger through the air perhaps four inches from the surface of the door. The order of succession in which his finger moved over the lines of the design appeared simple but certainly not obvious.
Finished, he shoved a palm against the adjacent bulkhead, drifted back from the door, and waited.
A moment later there was a soft, almost inaudible insufflation; the door stirred and moved outward perhaps six inches, then stopped. Joe-Jim appeared puzzled. He ran his hands cautiously into the open crack and pulled. Nothing happened. He called to Bobo, “Open it.”
Bobo looked the situation
over, with a scowl on his forehead which wrinkled almost to his crown. He then placed his feet against the bulkhead, steadying himself by grasping the door with one hand. He took hold of the edge of the door with both hands, settled his feet firmly, bowed his body, and strained.
He held his breath, chest rigid, back bent, sweat breaking out from the effort. The great cords in his neck stood out, making of his head a misshapen pyramid. Hugh could hear the dwarf’s joints crack. It was easy to believe that he would kill himself with the attempt, too stupid to give up.
But the door gave suddenly, with a plaint of binding metal. As the door, in swinging out, slipped from Bobo’s fingers, the unexpectedly released tension in his legs shoved him heavily away from the bulkhead; he plunged down the passageway, floundering for a handhold. But he was back in a moment, drifting awkwardly through the air as he massaged a cramped calf.
Joe-Jim led the way inside, Hugh close behind him. “What is this place?” demanded Hugh, his curiosity overcoming his servant manners.
“The Main Control Room,” said Joe.
MAIN CONTROL ROOM! The most sacred and taboo place in the Ship, its very location a forgotten mystery. In the credo of the young men it was nonexistent. The older scientists varied in their attitude between fundamentalist acceptance and mystical belief. As enlightened as Hugh believed himself to be, the very words frightened him. The Control Room! Why, the very spirit of Jordan was said to reside there. He stopped.
Joe-Jim stopped and Joe looked around. “Come on,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“Why, uh—uh . . .”
“Speak up.”
“But—but this place is haunted—this is Jordan’s . . .”
“Oh, for Jordan’s sake!” protested Joe, with slow exasperation. “I thought you told me you young punks didn’t take any stock in Jordan.”
“Yes, but—but this is . . .”
“Stow it. Come along, or I’ll have Bobo drag you.” He turned away. Hugh followed, reluctantly, as a man climbs a scaffold.