by James White
Their fur was pleasant to touch and they seemed very friendly and demonstrative -- just like dogs, in fact. McCullough suspected that, like dogs, the scratching gave them pleasure because it helped dislodge parasites and he began to wonder about the habits of alien fleas. Also like dogs they were useful as well as friendly -- they could sense Twos at a distance and this early warning system saved lives many times over.
Despite the three successful operations in the enclosure and the subsequent strategy which had lured a large number of the beasts into lock chambers and the vacuum of space, their movements within the Ship were still being badly hampered by Twos.
Mean, vicious and very hungry Twos.
By following the supply ducting back from the food dispensers, they had found the compartment -- whose doors, fortunately, had remained Two-proof -- where the food was processed for distribution to the various cages. Their first act had been to shut off the food supply -- which had been accomplished with very little damage to processing equipment -- with the idea of forcing the remaining Twos to kill each other off for food. But this had turned out to be a very slow business and, while they occasionally came on an animal which had been killed and eaten by its own species, there were indications that the surviving Twos -- their numbers were estimated at not over twenty -- preferred human beings as food.
The investigation was proceeding, McCullough told himself, but an unbiased, hypothetical observer would have said that the humans were being hunted all over the Ship.
chapter nineteen
They investigated, or were forced to take cover near, the area of the Power Room. This was the compartment in which all the heavy power cables for the generators and the Ship lighting supplies had their origin, and they spent two days in the area without being able to find a way in. So far as they could see, the compartment was heavily shielded and sealed tightly against all intruders, including members of the Ship's crew.
As the work of charting the vessel's interior continued, other blank areas appeared, compartments which were completely sealed off against everyone and everything.
"Like it says in my car instruction booklet," said Hollis, trying manfully to hide his disappointment, "repair or maintenance should be handled only by a qualified mechanic or service station . . ."
One of the compartments which they entered easily contained large quantities of food and liquids other than water, in what was obviously weightless packaging. This time it was the Threes rather than the men who acted, quite happily, as guinea pigs -- McCullough wanted to dispel a lingering doubt which was troubling him that the containers might hold paint instead of soup. But it was the labeling system used to identify the containers which caused most of the discussion.
It was Hollis who tried finally to sum up.
"We agree that the line of characters overprinted on the label is some kind of service routing and identification code or serial number. We think it is a number rather than a word because of the repetition of certain characters and because similar combinations were found on Ship subassemblies and structural details. Markings incorporated in the label itself, which are similar to those found near airlock controls and service panels, are words identifying its contents with possibly the addition of some purely advertising material. The pictorial content of some of the labels is confusing, but then an illustration of a slice of bacon would not give an alien very much information about a pig. We must assume that the containers hold some kind of edible animal or vegetable tissue, although there is a faint possibility that . . ."
"The labels," Berryman said, grinning, "may carry a picture of the chef."
Hollis ignored him and continued, "The fact that the whole compartment is below average Ship temperature, and that many of the storage cabinets are additionally refrigerated, supports the food theory. But the part which puzzles me is the picture of the Three on the door of that big refrigerated cabinet, and the tools or eating utensils and assorted collection of small packages inside it which also carry pictures of a Three. Is the Three, or certain parts of it, perhaps, some kind of delicacy?"
Drew shook his head. He said, "In our house we didn't keep the caviar in the cutlery drawer."
McCullough had been thinking hard while the physicist had been talking. He said suddenly, "The delicacies are too small, some of them, and too carefully wrapped to be food, I think, and the utensils are very sharp and their packaging also bears the emblem of a somewhat stylized Three. To me this suggests -- well, what animal do you associate with medicine and errands of mercy?"
Hollis said, "A red -- but no, that isn't an animal. A snake! The staff and coiled serpents of Asclepius. Or -- or do you mean a St. Bernard?"
McCullough nodded and Berryman began stroking the Three which was wrapped around his hips and thighs like a great furry diaper.
"Nice doggie," he said happily.
But the great majority of the compartments they examined were puzzling without being informative. They were large compartments containing eight, twelve and sometimes sixteen big, hollow cylinders of some kind of plastic material supported along the center of the room by taut but flexible cables. The cylinders were just over three yards in length and were encircled at intervals of a foot or so by wide, flexible bands of rubbery materials which compressed the soft, hollow tube and made it look a little like a caterpillar. The material of the cylinder was thickly padded on the inside.
The compartments were fitted with lighting fixtures, cabinets, and various enigmatic items whose general design and coloring were less utilitarian than anything previously met with in the Ship. Invariably, one of the cabinets bore the picture of a stylized Three on its door and in some of them the contents showed signs of having been used. In some of the compartments there were pictures on the walls -- large, fuzzy pictures which seemed to show trees growing horizontally with branches doubling as extra roots, or things which looked like heaps of varicolored spaghetti, or illustrations, sometimes covering most of the wall, of something resembling marble or coarse-grained wood.
Sometimes a thorough search of these compartments brought to light mislaid or discarded books, diagrams and photographs. Some of the books were illustrated, the diagrams were purely technical, and the photographs were even more confusing since they pictured things or people or events which were completely alien.
"I wish," said Hollis bitterly as he turned one of the photographs, playing cards or beer mats over and over in a vain attempt to find a viewpoint which made sense, "that they had been a little more untidy. You can find out an awful lot about a person from the contents of his wastepaper basket."
"If these cylinders are some kind of tubular hammock," said Berryman to McCullough, "and I don't see what else they can be, the only e-t they will fit is that big caterpillar we found half eaten in the animal enclosure. But what really bothers me is the number of these dormitory compartments and the number of hammocks in each one. What was this Ship? A troop transport? Some kind of colonization project which went wrong?"
"Maybe a big ship needs a crew to match," Drew put in quickly. "But where the blazes are they?"
McCullough shook his head. He said, "My theory is that it was, and is, a very small crew. If there had been a large number of them when the Twos broke out, we would have found traces of them -- carcasses, bones, inedible remnants. How that particular caterpillar happened to be in that cage I don't know, but . . ."
"Suppose it wasn't intelligent," Hollis broke in, "but a species physically resembling the intelligent e-t life-form. Before we sent a man into space we tested apes and monkeys because their metabolism and . . ."
"For God's sake," said McCullough irritably, "the situation is complicated enough as it is! My idea is this. The dormitories were used by the people who built the Ship, who left when the job was finished. Possibly the compartments will be used for colonists or passengers on a later trip, but not this time. This trip the Ship was, is, on her maiden voyage."
"And since control seems to be largely automatic," Berryma
n added, "the crew could be very small indeed."
"I want you all to listen to this tape," McCullough said, then added apologetically, "again."
They listened again to the gobbling of Twos in the enclosure, the chiming and moaning and the two alien voices. Like the Twos, they could disregard one of the voices and its accompanying chimes since this was almost certainly some kind of recorded pre-takeoff warning sequence. The moaning could have been caused by machinery, perhaps malfunctioning equipment of some kind, except that no machine should ever make a noise like that. Hollis and Berryman suggested that it might be music of some kind being played in the second voice's quarters. The sound could have been made by a number of wind instruments, but the tonal range and scale were crazy.
So, in all probability, was the alien.
"I'm beginning to think there is only one intelligent e-t left on the Ship," McCullough said as they prepared to leave the compartment, "and that one is in very poor shape physically and mentally. But to help it, we need more information about its world and its society, its relations with its fellows or with members of the opposite sex, or sexes if there are more than two, and as much data as we can possibly obtain on its own personal background. Somewhere in the Ship there must be family photographs . . ."
"Psychotherapy is a chancy business," said Berryman quietly, "even with human beings. Trying it on an emotionally disturbed alien seems -- seems . . ."
"Foolhardy," said Hollis.
Drew did not say anything. Since the time McCullough had revived him with the Kiss of Life, he had never disagreed with the doctor. But occasionally, as now, his face became more than usually expressionless.
To make successful contact with it, McCullough told himself firmly, they would have to see that it was capable of rational behaviour and show that they themselves were friendly toward it. Clearing the Ship of the majority of its Twos should prove their good intentions, but only if the being was sane enough to appreciate and understand what they were doing. And it possessed, or had possessed, a weapon. Why then did it not come out of hiding and help them exterminate the Twos?
They needed more information. The trouble was they had to fight for every single datum and it could be only a matter of time before some perhaps unimportant scrap of information cost someone their life.
But the material they were sending back to Control was valuable. The reports and photographs of alien food labels with pictures and text would send language experts the world over into multilingual paroxysms of joy, not to mention the methods used to make friends with the Three life-form and their subsequent activities together. There was also a steady flow of information on Ship equipment and control systems which would be nonobjectionable so far as Brady was concerned.
They could not, of course, tell him everything. Some of their troubles they had to keep to themselves.
Hollis took to crying in his sleep, during the rare occasions when he was able to get any. Drew collected and trained more Three pets than was really necessary for self-protection. When he moved he was surrounded by a flapping phalanx of Threes and, prior to going to sleep, he stroked and patted them until they had him enclosed in a thick, furry cocoon. Berryman and McCullough watched each other covertly and talked about their physical and psychological problems both as individuals and as a group, the meanings behind the nightmares to which everyone was subject, and their past lives public and private -- all with a simulated objectivity which fooled neither of them. Each was waiting for the other one to break, and each gained strength because the break did not come.
The times they each woke up struggling and screaming did not count, of course, because they all did that.
Walters, too, was unhappy. Cut off from home except by voice contact with Prometheus Control, all of whom now sounded more nervous and insincere while talking to him than he felt while talking to them, it was obvious that the pilot was desperately concerned for the safety of his friends -- his only friends -- on the Ship. During their infrequent radio contacts -- it was just not possible these days for McCullough to visit him -- the strain in his voice was an almost tangible thing.
The general and Tokyo Rose were beginning to worry him again. They were suggesting that the facts supporting McCullough's theory about the Ship's builders using the dormitory compartments would also support his own, perhaps more logical theory, that the tubular hammocks were meant to contain a couple of Twos, and that it was the Twos who were the crew of the Ship all the time. Walters did not want to bother the doctor with this kind of talk, but sometimes the general made it sound very believable.
Walters was beginning to hate the general actively, and it showed in his voice.
chapter twenty
Then one day they were forced to take cover in a room which was more thoroughly furnished, in the esthetic as well as the structural sense, than any they had encountered before. The room contained just two tubular hammocks, its cabinets and fixtures were much less utilitarian than usual, and there were a great many pictures on the walls. And softly, in the background, there was the moaning, whistling sound which they had heard only once before but could never forget.
But in this compartment the structural skeleton did not show and the metal bones and circulatory system were too well concealed by paneling for them to hook up a suit radio antenna to a section of plumbing which would allow contact with Walters. As a result, McCullough could not tell the pilot of the tremendous discovery they had made or bring him into the discussion which followed it.
"Crew quarters, no doubt about it," Hollis said, waving his arms in excitement. "But I don't think this room is only for sleeping in -- its furniture is too diversified, there are too many pictures. Crowding a bedroom with pictures is in questionable taste . . ."
"So," said Berryman, "is having twin beds."
"Be serious a minute," said Hollis. "The point I'm trying to make is that there is more than enough space in the Ship for crew members to have different rooms for sleeping, eating, recreation and so on, while this compartment -- a surprisingly small room in a very large ship -- appears to combine the functions of all three. I may be jumping to conclusions here, but it suggests to me that they prefer small, confined, cozy living quarters. This place looks like -- like an illustrated nest or -- I give up."
Berryman said, "I am only an amateur psychologist -- a gifted amateur, naturally -- but I'm inclined to agree with that. The question is, if the crew prefers to live in cozy little rooms inside a great big ship -- and with wild Twos roaming the corridors, who could blame them? -- why aren't they at home?"
From the door's transparent panel Drew, who was keeping watch, said, "The Twos are beginning to leave. A Three just went by, one of the carpets we haven't made friends with yet, and they took off after it. Can I close the door?"
"Not yet," said McCullough.
He had been too busy with his camera to join in the discussion and his mind had been vainly trying to emulate the instrument by absorbing everything he could see at once. But he was not so wildly excited and curious as to forget caution, or his own fairly well supported theory of the e-t crew member being mentally disturbed and in possession of a projectile-firing weapon. They might be in much more danger from the intelligent alien than from the hungry Twos, and McCullough had ordered the sliding door to be kept partly open in case they should have to leave in a hurry.
McCullough cleared his throat and said, "At the risk of sounding like General Brady, I suggest that the mass of important new data which has been made available should be very carefully considered before we make a move toward communicating with one of the crew."
With the exception of Drew, they all returned to the study of the room's fittings. They reminded each other several times that they were examining what were almost certainly personal effects which should be treated with great care. Sometimes they laughed for no apparent reason, or shouted in excitement, or spoke in guilty whispers in case someone or something overheard them.
As well as the medicine cabin
et with its Three symbol, there were wall racks to which were clipped surprisingly Earthlike spools of tape or film. Another cabinet held books which were not illustrated, much to the men's disappointment, and yet another contained flexible plastic tubes full of liquid and semiliquid substances which smelled to high heaven.